chapter 38
NO MORE
Jessamyn’s tiny craft bobbed, a small cork in a giant ocean. She took a deep breath as her eyes fluttered open and then she
clawed at her helmet with one hand, punching at pod air-intake valves with the other. Several hairs were removed by the root in
Jessamyn’s eagerness to get her helmet off and breathe freely. She felt like one very large bruise, but she was alive!
Deeply, she inhaled her first breath. Her nose remembered the metal-tang of Earth’s oceans. The moisture, the salt, even the cold of
the air struck her as tiny miracles of delight.
She laughed aloud and then groaned, her abdominal muscles cramping into a charley horse. But what did pain matter? Pain meant
she was alive. She leaned back to ease her stomach muscles. The pod, already tossing on the waves, bobbed in response to the
shifting of her weight. It was a strange sensation, such motion when she knew she’d landed.
“I made it,” she shouted, cackling gleefully. “It was impossible, but I did it! I made it!”
She stood, abruptly curious to observe the ocean outside. Pressing her face against the pod’s porthole window, she saw kilometer
after kilometer of water. Water as far as the eye could see. She had a strong notion it wasn’t drinkable, but the wonder of it struck
her mute. So much, so much. How could there be so much water?
She felt her unnatural heaviness as another wave struck the tiny craft, and she sank back down to rest. Her craft tipped again and
she floundered forward into the wall before her. She ought to have adjusted the Galleon’s artificial gravity with more regularity.
The Galleon.
A wave of utter horror passed over her, more incapacitating, more powerful than the ocean swells. Her brave, beautiful ship was no
more. The Red Galleon lay in pieces, scattered over the waves, and Jessamyn felt her heart squeeze tight in anguish.
Why could she never save what she cared for most?
This, she thought, was why the captain always went down with her ship. Because it hurt too much to live on when your bonny ship
was no more. Tears welled up in her eyes.
She heard Harpreet’s gentle voice in her mind, telling her, “Tears are a gift from the Divine, child.” But these tears did not feel like a
gift. They felt like failure.
What did it matter that she’d survived her landing if she’d destroyed her ship? She’d stolen Mars’s last raiding ship and then
obliterated it. She could never make up for what she’d done, for what she’d taken from her world. She deserved to die, miserable
and alone on the waves.
And die alone, she would. She’d cut communication to Pavel and her brother before choosing to eject. They would never know she’
d left the Galleon. And the thought of her brother’s grief wove itself together with the thought that she would never, ever tell Pavel she
loved him, and Jessamyn felt as though the weight of her sorrow would surely press down upon her and destroy her, millibars of woe
to crush her heart.
She wept and wept, gulping for air as heaving sobs stole her breath away. And when at last she could cry no more, she did not open
her eyes to gaze upon the wondrous ocean. She did not see the shadow over the water growing closer and closer. She did not
register the ship as it approached at all.