Ama Kit Xmas Gift - 12_2020

of a man’s death. Normally, she would have taken full advantage of the moment, but terrified she
knew she had to see her husband. Almost up the stairs, she slowed - only in the slightest - unused
to the heavy pull of gravity, even after only a day. An astronauts’ daughter, even years on Earth
hadn’t normalized the heavy pull.
“Patrick?” She asked, reaching the bridge. He was nowhere in sight.
A tech looked up at her, and she noted the lines of fright on his face. “He’s by the library.”
Alkathet nodded, quickly turning to lug her heavy feet over to the bookcases. Usually, she
smiled at the term “library”. But not today.
Rounding a display, she caught sight of her husband knee deep in his old novels, staring at an
empty shelf. A book in his hands stood open, its pages crisp from disuse, and he rotated between
the frantic turning of them and a seemingly endless staring at the vacant shelves.
“Pat?” She ran up to him, flinching at the way her voice broke.
For a moment it seemed he had not heard her, despite how close she knew her voice had
gotten to a yell. She grabbed his shoulder to turn him, but he whirled around before she could
move him an inch.
“What is it?” He asked irritably.
Alkathet stared at him in shock. “What ​is it​? Someone just told me that one of your passengers
died​.”
“Oh,” Calaway responded, glancing down and reading a clause from the book, still open in his
hands. “Two men, actually - but I refuse to take responsibility for that Ratcliffe character, sounds
like a real ass.”
She gaped at him. “​Two?​ Wha- Pat what is going on here?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
She stared at him, clenching her jaw. “Patrick, what ​do​ you know?”
Again, he shrugged, though now with an edge of nervousness. “We’re on Earth, but not our
Earth. The atmosphere is toxic, filled with carbon dioxide, which we suppose is due to what
seems to be a complete loss of plant life. That’s how our first guy died. Without cameras, we
thought he would be stepping out into the landing, but that appears to be gone. He did get us
some camera shots though…” he chuckled. “And to think, I was planning on sending ​myself​ out
there.”
Again, she felt her jaw drop, shock but also cold fear overcoming her so that she stumbled
against her husband. “Yeah, I had about the same reaction,” he comforted her.
Shaking her head, she stepped away from him, started to rub her forehead. “I, I don’t
understand. Show me the pictures.”
Her husband frowned, but nodded, sighing sadly as he sent the pictures to her. Instantly,
pictures of a wasteland showed up in her gaze; vast landscapes of arid rocks, sand swept away
long ago from the pummeling of wind. An orange sky, cloudless, framed a sun glaring too
harshly for any human to glance up at, even with glasses. Not a sprig of grass grew, not a mouse
crept from hole to hole, not a plane zoomed off in the distance. Empty, lifeless the land stood.
What had once been rolling fields of grass was long gone, she assumed, as all the life it had