CANAISIS ∞ Chronicle One: The Last Living Ship ∞ 1: A New Mission

27 ∞ Not a Time for Words

Day 00005 Mission Nilex

"I was married once... long ago."

Ayla waited for the Captain to continue, knowing this was a time for patience. He reached for a berry, picked it up with thumb and finger, and examined it. "She loved trees, especially Oak trees. But in the end, how she handled the news of her disease, I don't know if she loved me. She died before I became Captain of the Canaisis, before I left Sol for the first time. She died of an incurable disease, and I had her cremated.

"I took some finances and bought a mausoleum and the neighboring land. A beautiful piece of land with a grove of Oak trees on it, next to a small lake. It was the kind of place she would have loved. I used my prestige as Captain of the Canaisis to get the government to declare the land a national treasure, dedicated to the brave who died in space. Even those who couldn't be recovered, they'd get a stone marker. I placed her urn there. In the mausoleum, surrounded by trees.

"I went into training shortly after, and three years later, set sail to explore the Alpha Centauri region. We even found a terraformable planet. Decades later, we returned with all we learned, and we were sent back again with equipment and biologicals. More decades passed as we seeded the planet and continued further than we had before. Upon return, we were sent back again with colonists for the planet.

"We made many trips back and forth, and the decades on Earth passed. A city grew up around the plot of land I'd bought, but the government kept its word and it remained untouched.

"Then we were sent on an exploration that meant a hundred years' round trip. The astrophysicists thought they'd found two new planets that fit the parameters for life. We found the planets were barely within the life zone, surviving on them without terraforming would have been a long shot.

"But when we returned, we knew immediately something was wrong. None of the bases on the outer planets answered our hails. No radio transmission detected, not even from Earth. When we got closer in-system, we saw Earth. It was just a black ball... and we could see nuclear blasts on the moon. Earth orbit was a riddled mess of destroyed satellites."

The Captain's voice never wavered. Ayla could feel no emotion coming from him, as if he was giving a report that had no connection to him.

"We observed Earth closely through its sky of black, but everything was gone. Nothing remained but charred ashes, rivers choked with it, the oceans brown and ugly. Radiation poisoned everything, and what used to be cities were glass craters.

"We were devastated... Humanity was gone, and we were too numb to feel. Eventually, after weeks, we found a few pockets of survivors. Some of the crew insisted we stay and do what we could. Others wanted to return to the first planet we'd found and rebuild there. After taking shuttles down and making contact with the survivors, this issue came to a head. Eventually, I decided to do both options and keep Canaisis as a lifeline between the two worlds.

"Those who decided to stay were given what we could spare, and those who chose to relocate were put into cold sleep. I was the only one left awake...

"I decided I had to do one thing before leaving. So I took a shuttle down to the city where my wife's remains were. I spent several days looking for it. The ash... it was sometimes as high as my waist. And the sky... black as night. I had to return to the shuttle twice to get fresh tanks and batteries for my suit, before I could find the mausoleum. Buried in ash... surrounded by destroyed buildings of a city... The wind howling, filled with ash, visibility next to nil... But I found it, and I broke into the crypt holding my wife's urn."

The Captain fell silent for a moment, his eyes focused on the berry.

"You see, I hadn't just placed her urn there. I'd also placed a handful of acorns there beside the urn. I don't know why, but I had a need to plant those acorns somewhere they could grow. I wanted to see a forest of trees again... It was when I returned to Canaisis that she informed me the seeds had been exposed to radiation when the city was first destroyed. The radiation count was low enough, but it was there."