Hilla crash-landed on an asteroid on the second lap of her first solar run. She wasn’t surprised, expected it even. But the taste of failure made her avoid the dining hall for the rest of the week.
She couldn’t face their disappointment. She’d heard their whispered bets on how long she would be here, how she’d outrun a fleet of Wasps; flown too close to the Tetran sun and burned up half her engine, and still made it home for the New Year fireworks; gone full throttle into a ravine lake and nearly been eaten by a whale.
She was Flight Lieutenant Hilla Quinn. Yes, Hilla Quinn, that’s her.
And first day out, she spiral-dived just past the rings of Saturn and their disappointment hung in the air like stale shoe leather.
Because she wasn’t really Hilla Quinn any more.
“Getting to know the route will take practice,” said the rescue ship. “If you would like to speak to a counsellor, I can book you an appointment. Would you like me to dispense some ice cream?”
Hilla didn’t like ice cream. It was too cold and too formless. The ship shuffled her playlist for the entire journey home and didn’t offer soothing words when she curled in a ball to cry.
“Please disembark,” said the rescue ship.
She awoke with her eyes crusted shut, collected her pack and swiped out.
The second time it happened was even more embarrassing. She took the corner wrong out on the very edge and nearly went down on Pluto. Even worse than an asteroid. At least asteroids were romantic, mysterious, the home of smugglers and secret bases. Pluto was just a failed planet everyone wanted to forget.
“Are you sure you don’t want to speak to a counsellor? You can use a private, anonymized channel if that is your preference.”
“No. Thank you.”
She’d worked out in her second week at the facility on Mars that the computers kept talking until they got a verbal response. They were a needy bunch. Dog-like. The computers back home were more like cats. They literally didn’t care if she set her bedroom on fire.
“Would you like me to dispense a bar of chocolate?”
Hilla was allergic to chocolate. The computer should have known that. What was the good of being rescued by a ship that didn’t know her medical history?
“Computer, do you have my file in your system?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Would you like me to dispense some cheese?”
Better. But unless it was also going to dispense some fresh crusty bread and some grapes, she didn’t care.
“Please disembark.”
This time, it had to say it twice. She was going over her run on her hand-held, working out exactly where she’d gone wrong, lost time, made stupid mistakes.
The third time was even worse than the first and the second, because by then she was beginning to realize how good she used to be. Not local race good but Spacecorps good.
So when she crashed on an asteroid and dragged herself out of the wreckage, she knew, for the first time, how far she’d fallen.
“You didn’t activate your homing beacon until nine minutes after your ship lost contact,” said the rescue ship.
Like it knew.
Bastard.
“Would you like me to dispense a cheese melt?”
Hilla didn’t want food. She didn’t want anything. She left her hand-held in her pack and stared up at the stars from the medi-bench.
“I used to be good,” she told them. The stars. Who already knew it because they had borne witness.
“Your memories are now sixty-five percent restored. Would you like me to book you a session with…”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
She recognized the dull throb of the engines as something familiar now. “Computer, have you always been registered to Mars?”
“I retired from the Fourth Fleet five years ago. I was posted to Barry Hospital.”
Her memories hadn’t returned enough to tell her which front that was on, nor where the Fourth Fleet was, and the thought of looking it up made her want to smash the screen beside her.
“Would you like to tell me what went wrong?” asked the ship. “It might help.”
It wouldn’t.
“My reaction times aren’t good enough. I keep forgetting where the controls are.”
“That is understandable. Your new body will be different to your old one.”
A sentiment she’d heard time and again.
“But it shouldn’t be.”
By the time she disembarked, she had created thirty new constellations from the childhood fairy-tales in her head.
The fourth time she didn’t even crash. A collision with a meteorite destroyed half of her engine and for two hours she drifted.
“I’m sorry you were waiting so long,” she ship said. “There have been a lot of crashes today.”
Did the ship think that would make her feel better? Everyone here was adapting to their new bodies and she wasn’t an exception. But every day, the people she’d seen in the dining hall when she arrived were getting fewer.
This time, she’d loaded a flight manual onto her hand-held to read on the way back.
“Would you like me to dispense some mint tea?” the ship asked.
“What?”
“Would you like me to dispense some mint tea?”
“How do you…?”
“I spoke to the computer at the facility. It told me you ordered mint tea in the evenings.”
To help calm her before trying to sleep.
“I didn’t know you spoke to each other.”
It felt intrusive, to be talked about like that. Anger flared in her like another crash.
“The vast majority of the students here talk to each other. The artificial systems are one of their favorite topics.”
Hilla took her mint tea and spent the rest of the journey buried in her flight manual, flicking the page every minute or so, in case the ship got the idea she wasn’t reading it. She didn’t want to talk to the nosy thing a moment longer.
Just like everybody else, with their nods and smiles and enthusiastic approach to rehabilitation. She’d cultivated her reticence, so they left her the hell alone. Her old body had friends. This one didn’t need them.
“Please disembark.”
“Ship? What’s your designation?”
“I am MT-89.”
The fifth time Hilla crashed, she was barely paying attention. Crashing was automatic and the details weren’t important. By the time the ship arrived, she was trying to repair the damaged shuttle. Perhaps this body was meant to be a technician, not the best pilot this side of Mercury like its predecessor.
Her lack of success after two hours suggested maybe not.
“You haven’t been attending maintenance classes,” the ship informed her without greeting.
“I passed all my technical exams before. It’s only this body that’s new, not my mind.”
The ship dispensed mint tea without asking.
“That was fourteen years ago. Designs have changed since then.”
Hilla sat down on the medi-bench and let it check her injuries. A few things hurt. Some more than last time and some less.
“You have broken your left foot.”
“Hmm.”
She sipped the tea.
“Ship,” she said. “Why were you reassigned to this facility?”
See how it felt about people prying into its records and its business.
The rest of the rescue ships here were commissioned directly from the shipyards. MT-89 was a battle-ready evacuation vessel, assigned to ferry a failure back and forth instead of doing what it had been built for.
“I malfunctioned. Due to a corrupted upgrade package, I failed to evacuate a battalion and every soul was lost.”
“But they repaired you?”
“Correct. But no one felt reassured when I arrived to save them after that. Would you like me to dispense a cheese sandwich? You seem in better spirits today.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“What?”
“That you’re seen as bad luck. That no one wants you to come and save them.”
A passing remark in the dining hall after her first rescue. Eventually everyone requested an alternative ship but after seven weeks of sitting alone, she had no one to ask why.
“You don’t seem that bothered by it. When I arrive next time, will you refuse to come?”
“Maybe.”
The ship, perhaps bored of waiting, dispensed the sandwich. Thick, sesame bread slices, extra mature cheddar, pickle, and four even slices of tomato. A favorite from before.
“I didn’t ask for a sandwich, ship.”
“You don’t want it?”
Her stomach complained to spite her. She picked up the plate and returned to the bench, awkwardly, now she knew her foot was broken.
Her foot.
Was it, though?
“You haven’t eaten this product since you arrived,” the ship told her.
She set the sandwich beside her.
“I don’t know if it’ll taste the same. In this body.”
Some people in the military went through so many bodies they spoke of it like she spoke of going home for a spa holiday. Coming back refreshed. Made new. Without the scars and flaws they’d carried with them before.
Hilla had brought earphones this time. She blocked out the ship’s voice with new sounds, like she blocked out everything else.
The sixth time she crashed, it wasn’t an accident. When the ship arrived, quicker than it had on any occasion before, Hilla didn’t move from where she lay.
She didn’t want to. Not yet. She wanted to stay right there on the barren moon around the world where she’d been born. She could see it, far above turning, and she thought if she waited, she might see the lights of the city where she’d grown up, learned to drive, learned to kiss, learned to be.
She didn’t come from there anymore. Her birthplace was a facility on Mars. No part of her had ever set foot on the orbital habitations of Neptune. These eyes had never seen it. These ears were not the ears of the person who had fallen asleep to the mining pumps of its helium mines.
“I must inform you that I have reported your actions to facility staff,” the ship informed her as its drones picked her up and carried her inside.
She didn’t fight them.
“You could’ve left me.”
“No. I couldn’t. It is not in my programming.”
“You’re programmed to help.”
The ship didn’t take-off as its medi-bench started its work. “If you truly believe your new body is faulty, there is a form you can fill in. Would you like me to send it to your hand-held?”
“My hand-held broke in the crash.”
“I will dispense you a new one. Do you believe your body to be faulty?”
Hilla sighed. The ship was, of course, right. “No.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
The accusation cut through the blurring haze of pain and Hilla tried to sit up. She didn’t like answering its questions lying down.
“I’m not waiting for anything.”
“Yes, you are. You’re not happy here. You want to go back. But you are making no effort to do so. Why?”
The ship didn’t sound like it didn’t already know, like it did so often. It sounded, to Hilla, who was unused to conversation of any kind outside her classes, curious.
And that was all that stopped her from throwing things at its circuits.
“I’m not making no effort.”
“Logs show that you have spent barely five per cent of your time last week practicing your piloting and only two per cent studying.”
“I shouldn’t have to practice. I shouldn’t have to learn. I’ve been piloting shuttles since before you were built.”
She’d said the same to the psych at the facility. She didn’t want to do any of this and she shouldn’t have to. They’d told her this new body was exactly like her old one. Better even. And she’d be damned if that was true.
“My internal sensors suggest you are not being entirely honest.”
So what? “Mind you own business and get flying.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No. We are not leaving this moon until you tell me why you’re so determined to crash.”
In another life, in another body, Hilla would have hotwired the thing and piloted herself back to the facility. Except she could barely sit up straight and her vision was still swimming, seeing double.
“I don’t want to crash. I want to fly. I want to feel the engines through my bones. My old bones, not these. I want to soar like I used to.”
She’d been the best in her division. She’d won almost every race at cadet camp when she was a teen. They’d raced through the trace rings of Neptune, the sapphire planet below, and the sun just visible, in the shadows of the solar system.
“So, why don’t you?”
“I don’t know. This body won’t work properly.”
The ship’s lights went out, throwing her into darkness, and the pinprick LEDs of the waiting drones. They watched her from eyeless faces. She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see them.
“Why is it that you think that?”
“My old body didn’t keep crashing.”
“It was the same. Your new body is an exact clone. You still enjoy peppermint tea, and cheese sandwiches. Your tastes haven’t changed. Your body is the same.”
Hilla sat up, slowly, and looked down at her new legs, in their flight uniform, her hands flat in front of her, familiar, bitten nails, a slight kink in her right little finger, terrible cuticles, a patch of slightly redder skin on one knuckle.
They were the same hands. She hadn’t felt any different since the day she awoke in the facility medi-station, after she hit a mine on a supply run.
They couldn’t save her body. It was too late by the time they got there.
White light, searing pain. A moment she should have died in. A pounding shock that went right through her, like a hundred lightning bolts at once.
She lived through her own death.
But there was no evidence of it on the hands that gripped the edge of the bench.
“I have dispensed a mug of peppermint tea and a cheese melt.”
“Thank you, ship.”
She shook as she stood and went to the table to get them. Eat. Drink. Build yourself back up. It was what her mother said when she was sick. Curled up in her bed and miserable. Try to eat. Try to drink.
She took a bite. It worked. She felt a little stronger, brighter. She sat down on the floor and cried.
“This is too hard,” she told the ship. “I hate it.”
The ship, bless its heart, didn’t say a word.
“I can’t do it.” A deep breath and then another. The edge of panic. “I can’t. I can’t go back there.”
Because that was it. She couldn’t prove to them that she was ready to fly, knowing that it might happen again. She might die. Again.
Her friends wanted to see her. She got messages off them nearly every day and saw odd sentences, bouncing out of nonsense paragraphs. Updates, news, gossip. The stuff of life that she’d been avoiding.
“Why did you become a pilot?” the ship asked.
It was a question no one had asked her in over a decade. She wasn’t new anymore. Looked to others like she’d been flying shuttles between the front lines forever. In a war that had been going on since before she was born, far, far away.
“I…” thinking made her breathe again. Why had she? “I’m a pilot,” she said. “I…was a pilot. The best.”
“You are still you.”
Hilla sank back on the medi-bench, looked up to the stars. “But what if I’m not? What if, next time, I’m not me?”
“Memory restoration is at one hundred percent. You are you.”
“I know.” That was the worst part. The part she didn’t want to admit. She felt exactly the same as she had before and that couldn’t be right. Not after all that pain. Not after the world exploded in so much, blinding light. It took her vision nine seconds before it took the rest of her. Her hearing, two seconds later. She knew, in the dark and silence, and the piercing scream of her nerves, burning, that she was going to die.
“I have dispensed a glass of orange juice and a bowl of maple porridge.”
She took it without thinking, as the engines rumbled back on and that familiar swoop in the pit of her stomach told her they were lifting off. It was the breakfast she had every day. Before. She hadn’t had it since arriving at the facility.
It was the breakfast she ate the day she died.
Hilla closed her eyes, sitting on the edge of the medi-bench with the bowl balanced in one hand and risked a spoonful. Despite her fears, it tasted the same, and more than that, she savored it. The sweetness and the richness and that growing warmth. The taste of early mornings with the system lights still dim and the air conditioning fans whirring. The smell of damp leaves from the plants in the air gardens.
The taste of starting out.
It was better than the toast and jam she’d been forcing down. This was how a day should start.
Except…fire. The moment her world ended.
Another bite. Another bite. A sip of juice that slid down chill into her stomach and made her smile inside.
“I died,” she said.
“Yes,” said the ship.
“But this is still me.”
“Yes, you are you.”
She felt full. For the first time in a long time, a tiny part of her was satisfied.
The ship sped up as it left the atmosphere and turned back towards Mars. For a while, they didn’t say anything. Hilla swallowed moments of panic with her hands around a cup of tea. The ship shuffled through her playlist. They both knew, finally, Hilla had arrived at the beginning. The bottom of the mountain with a long slow climb ahead.
An hour later, they slowed to begin docking with the facility.
“Would you like me to book you a session with a counsellor?” the ship asked.
Hilla stood up. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I think that would be a good idea.”
“I’ll set you up with Dr. Nerys. I think you’ll get along. The appointment time will be forwarded to your hand-held.”
“Thank you, ship.”
“You’re welcome. Please disembark.”
The seventh time she crashed, it was a silly mistake and she knew it. Only minor injuries. The ship served halloumi pizza and a great mug of spiced tea. They read a romance novel together and re-wrote the ending.
The eighth time, she was a lightyear out from Errol Base, with a shuttle full of new recruits. Two years had passed since the last time she made a stupid mistake and in the moments between conviction she was going to pull them out of the dive and realizing they were going down, she told herself she could do this. She could do it all again.
This time, she didn’t have to.
They patched the thing back up in four flat hours while Hilla watched the Fifth Fleet disarming mines in the starry sky above. Until now, she hadn’t known. She wasn’t sure she could go and face that terror.
Now she knew she could.
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Louise Hughes is a speculative fiction writer and time traveler from the north of England, with stories in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Interzone, and more. She can be found wandering the dales and fells with a flask of tea, or on Bluesky @trailofleaves.bsky.social. |