North Continent of Prism

Former Planetary Base for Sky Station Epsilon-065

He’d died with his eyes open. Crumpled on his back in the dirt, alone but for a scattering of broken crystal at his feet and a sky full of pastel mists above his head. A kilometer away, the remains of his base, Sky Station Epsilon-065, lay in jagged shards across the ground, its three thousand occupants as lifeless as the station that once housed them. As lifeless as their leader, now staring sightlessly up into a sky he would never see again.

The Admiral slowly crouched down beside the Doctor’s still form. In death, he was even frailer than she’d recalled, his slender body downright shrunken now that the blazing will inhabiting it had fled and gone away. Not at all like the furious Doctor who’d called her up only minutes before the end, spitting with fire and cursing her name with every last ounce of that blazing will. She’d watched his final message over and again until every word he’d spoken was engraved in her ears, every wrathful expression etched in her eyes.

I know it was you. I know it was you who sold us out.

Of all the words he’d said, none haunted her so much as those. Especially now, as she crouched by his body, staring down into eyes that could not stare back and yet seemed to accuse her all the same. Such accusation!—but she could not answer it. All she could do was stare into his sightless, accusing eyes and burn with the bitter knowledge that this was how it ended. This was how he’d gone to his grave, with his life’s work smashed at his feet and his daughter’s betrayal ripe in his heart.

I know it was you. I know it was you who sold us out.

Cold fury jerked her to her feet. The Admiral turned, unable to look at his face for another moment, and stared out at the crystalline wreckage that had once been R&D. So bright, so beautiful, like a diamond shimmering beneath the falling suns. They’d obtained the answers they sought—or at least the majority of them—from the survivors, the lucky few who’d been on one of the atmospheric platforms surrounding R&D rather than the station itself when it fell. If you could call it lucky to watch the people you’d lived and worked with for two years die before your eyes.

“T-there was some sort of e-explosion . . .” Tears had poured down the survivor’s face, one Dr. Inoue, as he’d haltingly told the tale. “An explosion in H-Habitat 8. It caused a massive chain reaction through the station, f-frying the power relays and burning out the propulsion units that held up the station. The shield was gone, blown out by the force of the explosion, so there was nothing left to stop the station when it . . . fell.”

And fall it had, dropping from the sky as though thrown from the gates of heaven itself.

Inoue hadn’t been able to tell them much else, but it hardly mattered. The feeds from the station, pieced together after hours of laborious work, had told the rest. Had shown in lifelike detail those final, awful moments when the station had hit the ground and everyone was lost. And with their loss, so too, had gone the Archangel, as the weapon meant to save humankind was destroyed along with the very people who had created it.

The Admiral’s jaw tightened as she imagined the Doctor’s end. Deficient man! He could have saved himself—the records showed that clearly enough. He could have lived if he’d chosen to, for a few more years, anyway. But his heart had belonged to R&D, and with its death, there was nobody—not even she—who could have saved him.

Kneeling by the Doctor’s side, she stared upon his face one final time. Ever since she was a child, he’d seemed invincible to her. A larger-than-life figure whose approbation she could never hope to achieve, and so all the better not to seek it. He’d never lost that mystique, not when she’d grown to adulthood, or even later, after she’d carved out her own place in the pantheon of history. It was only here, lying dead in the dirt of this alien planet while the wind chimed across the shattered crystal of his sky home, that it finally ended, his invincibility exchanged for a mere mortality that suited him no better in death than it had in life.

She had no tears to give him. No epitaph to wipe out those bitter years between them, when he was not her father and she was not his daughter. But he had given her life, and though he’d cursed her to his grave, to say his death meant nothing to her would be a lie.

Leaning down until she was only centimeters from his ear, she spoke, so softly that even the wind whipping across the plain couldn’t have overheard her words.

“Goodbye, Father.”

Then, extending her hand, she reached down and closed his eyes forever.

It was only as she rose to her feet that she caught sight of the footprints leading off in the opposite direction. The elements had largely dispersed them, but enough traces remained to identify their nature. Blinking on the magnification in her combat lenses, she slowly paced alongside the treads, noting their size, their shape, the distance between them. The prints were too large, too far apart, to be the Doctor’s, which meant—

Someone else had been with him at the end.

Something glittered up from the ground beside the prints. Multiple somethings, in fact, their polished facets reflecting Demeter’s light in a spray of color. The Admiral picked up the nearest piece and examined it. It was a sliver of crystal. The same crystal that had comprised the walls of R&D, now shattered across the land in a trail of glittering tears.

She glanced at the prints once again. A survivor from the fall of R&D, miraculously saved from the same catastrophe that had claimed the Doctor? The crystal would seem to say yes, but if that were the case, he or she could only have survived by the Doctor’s will.

For the Doctor’s purpose, whatever that might be.

Rising to her feet once again, the Admiral considered the line of footfalls for a long time. Then, clasping her hands behind her back, she began walking.