Ayaka was still standing on the bridge of the Khopesh when the last evacuation flight passed Proxima Centauri b’s Karman Line and rocketed toward the TFS Escapade, the heavy cruiser it was assigned to.She had—barely—been able to keep herself from pacing back and forth behind the drone wing commanders, but a thrill passed up and down her spine when she heard that the last lander had safely made it off the surface and she was unable to keep herself from practically vibrating in place. Only two decades of comportment and etiquette training, courtesy of her father’s expectations, kept her from showing how anxious she was.She turned to Captain Chang, who shot her an empathetic glance as he began, “Don’t worry, we’ve already prepared the rescue mission. Wing three, prepare to—”Before he could finish his sentence, the holotank in the center of the bridge turned red and an abort signal flashed, accompanied by a message: “All surface missions are suspended until further notice.”The message

Joon-ho felt a thrill pass through him at the question. It was a question he had been waiting for, seemingly for his entire life. He didn’t know many people from the task force, having spent the entire journey out either practicing his mana manipulation skills or in his private VR space, but he firmly believed that he was the leading expert in the Proxima Centauri system on all things fantasy, sci-fi, and anime.He began lecturing the trees on all things elven, all the way from the mythological alfar and dokkalfar to present, including the races’ representation in novels, video games, and movies. He provided every detail he could think of, and as he spoke, he saw them in his memories, including his emotions and thoughts as he first discovered the rich body of entertainment through humanity’s history. He recalled heroes and villains, epic tales of adventures, and the struggles and challenges that each individual went through in each story he recounted to the trees.As he spoke, the tre

Three months later.Ayaka and Captain Marinakis were in the captain’s ready room on the Farsight, attending a virtual meeting with the task force’s leadership. Things had settled into a routine, and the meetings had gone from daily, to weekly, and now this was the second monthly meeting they were holding. Nothing of any note had yet been accomplished; the situation remained unchanged.“We’re still functioning on skeleton crews to reduce resource consumption. Even though we have the replicators, our problem with the algae in the feedstock tanks remains unsolved, but we’re still working on it and should have a solution soon,” the fleet’s head of logistics reported.For the past six weeks, the crews of the ships had been rotating in and out of VR training simulations, with only skeleton crews maintaining the ships in reality. The initial mission planning had called for restocking their algae tanks and supplementing them with organic compounds from asteroids in Proxima Centauri and on the

Joon-ho had taken to sleep as a way of measuring time in the timeless meadow. Although he never knew how long he slept, or when he fell asleep or woke up, for that matter, at least he could count “days” by tracking his sleep schedule. Currently, his count was at seven hundred and sixty-three.He had no way of knowing how accurate it was, but at least the practice kept him sane. Time had proven a difficult concept to communicate to the trees, who seemingly lived forever and saw no point whatsoever in dividing days into hours, minutes, and seconds, or years into months and weeks. The only thing the trees cared about were seasons; there was a season to sleep and a season to grow. Everything else was superfluous to them.Currently, he was laying on the soft grass, trying and failing to fall asleep. Not only was he excited by his impending rebirth, but the role he had played in the creation of new life had his thoughts in a tizzy. Though the trees had done all of the work of birthing the n

TFS Proxima, mobile fleet hospital quarantine ward.Joon-ho was lying unconscious in a medical pod undergoing scan after scan at a blistering pace. In a side room, separated by a thick plate of armorglass, doctors were scurrying back and forth from screen to screen, tracking the real-time data coming from the medical pod.All of them were mystified at his miraculous survival. Sure, he had lost weight, but he’d survived for months on the surface of a planet with hostile life forms, yet showed no sign of the hypotrophy they expected from someone who hadn’t had a bite to eat in all that time. They weren’t alone in their surprise, either. Every single crew member aboard the Proxima, naval, marine, and scientific staff alike, were curious as to how Joon-ho had survived. Anyone who wasn’t currently standing watch was focused on the public security feed, tapping into it with their implants and staring at Joon-ho’s medical pod, searching for the slightest sign that he was about to be release