text: e.
  A moment later, you emerge from the lavatory to find Tello coming from the men's room across the hall.
  
  "Don't tell me we came all this way just to pee," you say.
  
  "We were hoping for information, remember? Even a remote outpost such as this must have been gathering information on the invasion of their homeworld. Anything could help us, if the goal is still to go to Chaandria."
  
  "Of course it is. I assume there must be a control room nearby."
  
  "It didn't look like a very big place from the air, so we shouldn't have to search for long."
  
  The question is where to begin, as there seems to be no way out of this foyer area except through the mess hall. The chairs are all pushed neatly against the tables, and the floors are spotlessly clean. There is a large serving area, but no food has been left out. If the post was abandoned, it didn't occur during the middle of a meal.
  
  A hollowness in your belly reminds you of the weeks of rationed synthetic food that has been the basis of your diet the last few months. How productive might it be to search the kitchen for something that might resemble an actual meal?
  
  "I swear I hear music," Tello says.
  
  "Music?"
  
  "Shhhhh."
  
  Indeed, he is right: the sound of a Naya Gyaan devotional is playing from a speaker somewhere deep in the kitchen area. Your companion walks as carefully as one can toward the kitchen, considering that even a gentle step could send you bounding forward in this gravity; the fact that you have been living in it for months at a time makes the adjustment no easier. Tello is heading to the left of the food service line, so you head to the right.
  
  You rejoin each other in the kitchen, which is itself almost half the size of the entire residential habitat back at the mine. No Reconstituters here: the Naya Gyaan don't go for synthetic food, nor do they force it on their immigrant conscripts. This place is a wonderland of stainless steel counters and sinks, with rows of ovens in which actual ingredients could be cooked into wondrous meals, in the ancient manner once common in old times. You haven't seen a place like this since a school field trip to a Naya Gyaan monastery years ago.
  
  The speaker is located in a small room located at the far end of the kitchen, in what must have been the cook's office. The song is dense and inaccessible, the words of no interest to someone not indoctrinated in the teachings of Bhagavaan ke Bachche. It is not a radio transmission, but a recording that must be stored on the speaker device itself.
  
  "This is the one place we've seen that isn't in precise military order," you say. The chair isn't pushed all the way against the desk, a uniform tunic is draped loosely over the back of the chair, and food crumbs lie scattered over the computer touchscreen.
  
  "I think someone is still here," Tello whispers. He reaches up to click off the speaker, and the room goes silent.
  
  "Hey, I was listening to that!"
  
  You both turn, startled. By some miracle, Tello doesn't reflexively fire the plasgun. A young man stands in the kitchen eating a sandwich. He wears military trousers but only a gray undershirt, and his hair is tousled. He can't possibly be older than nineteen.
  
  "What are you two doing here, anyway? I don't know either of you."
  
  His skin is a beautiful shade of bronze, and his face is round with eyes that are oddly close together. Around his neck hangs a pewter chain with an elephant-shaped pendant: the symbol of the Naya Gyaan. His demeanor is completely unthreatening, though. Clearly he is an off-duty member of the Sanrakshak, partially out of uniform, but more importantly you notice he is carrying no sidearm. His biggest cause for concern is not that two unauthorized civilians have penetrated a military post, but that Tello has turned off his prayer music.
  
  Your plant manager lowers the plasgun. "We apologize for the intrusion. We've been isolated on Chhota Chandrama for three months and we're looking to see who else is here."
  
  "You guys are miners, huh?" the young soldier says, taking another bite from his sandwich. "If you're looking for the Colonel, he and everybody else left three days ago, I think."
  
  "The Colonel...?" you ask.
  
  "Colonel Jebel Irhoud, my commanding officer."
  
  "I'm confused," you say. "The entire post left, but you stayed behind?"
  
  "I guess." The soldier gives a disinterested shrug, as if this weren't the biggest mystery in his life.
  
  You introduce yourselves, and he returns the favor. "Private Rint Radodal. I never was much of a soldier; my father made me enlist, hoping it would give me character and build his status, or something. It didn't agree with me. A buddy of mine found the battalion major's stash of hooch the other night, and we both partook rather generously. I passed out, he didn't. He heard the call to bug out, I was sleeping down in the basement. He left with the rest of the battalion, I'm still here." Once more he shrugs, as if he were a hapless victim of circumstance.
  
  "You said the battalion 'bugged out,'" Tello says. "Where did they go?"
  
  "Beats me," Private Radodal says. "They didn't wake me and tell me. But there had been talk of abandoning the base for weeks. There weren't enough provisions to stay, or something."
  
  "Would they have gone back to Chaandria?" you ask.
  
  "Why would anyone do that? Rumor has it the bugs wiped everybody out there. We were all that was left. And you guys too, I guess."
  
  This kid hardly seems like a fountain of hard, reliable information. Nevertheless, you came here hoping to learn what the military knew of the status of the people on Chaandria, holding out hope there were known survivors out there. But this mention of a "rumor" sends a chill through your body.
  
  "It doesn't bother you that everyone you ever knew might have been slaughtered?"
  
  "Hey, lady, all I can do is live my own life."
  
  This boy may be a Naya Gyaan by birth and custom, but if it weren't for the pendant and the music you'd dismiss him as a member of an immigrant culture, no more a central member of Chaandrian society than your own family had been. Once.
  
  You catch Tello looking at you, perhaps watching for a change in your emotional state. That may happen soon enough, when you have time to process the implications of Private Radodal's "rumor," but first there are more immediate concerns you need to address.
  
  "Are there still personnel transports at Satark Najaren?" you ask.
  
  "I don't know. Maybe. I haven't looked."
  
  "We'd need something with a Hoshino Drive," Tello says to you, "otherwise we'd never leave the system."
  
  "I take it you guys don't have a ship with a hyperdrive system?" the private asks.
  
  "Our plans are... complicated," Tello says. "Maybe there is a command center you can show us, where we can get more information."
  
  "There is, but I don't think you're allowed to see it."
  
  "Who says?" you say, deciding to lean into your charms to see if you can provoke this man-child into doing something useful. "You're the last person left at this post, right? That makes you the commandant. You can do what you want, Colonel Radodal."
  
  He smiles goofily at the thought. "I guess," he says.
  
  Indeed there is a command center, and indeed the "colonel" does take you to it. The information you seek is not immediately forthcoming, and you spend a day trying to interpret the data you find in the computers to piece together what happened. But then there is a major breakthrough when Tello discovers Colonel Irhoud's logs. This is what you learn:
  
  Satark Najaren had had front-row seats for the Iib Ch'iib invasion. From this post, Colonel Irhoud watched the alien fleet eradicate his people, but was unable to do anything about it. This was just an outpost, intended to maintain law and order on what was essentially a frontier of the human colonization of space. The total complement was no more than five hundred people — enough to patrol Little Chodry, but nowhere near enough to launch a counter force to try and take back the big planet.
  
  Like you, the colonel and his forces waited uneasily for signs of human survival on Chaandria. There were none. It was impossible to tell for sure from 300 thousand kilometers away, but when all transmissions ceased the colonel concluded all had been lost. But unlike you, he chose not to believe there were pockets of survivors here and there. He had to abide by facts, and the fact was there was no one on Big Chodry trying to make contact with him. The battalion here at Satark Najaren was all that was left, for all he knew.
  
  The post had enough provisions to last all five hundred men and women stationed here for about three months, but no more. They would wait, and collect whatever survivors straggled in. But there could be no recon trips, no transmissions, because if the invaders found out — and that was the only word the colonel ever used in his logs to describe what you have been calling the Iib Ch'iib — then that would likely be the end of the settlements on Chhota Chandrama.
  
  And so it would be up to each individual mining camp to figure out for themselves they could come to Satark Najaren.
  
  Colonel Irhoud kept a detailed list of each settlement, including Crident-Ureste Extraction. You tried not to take offense when you noticed it still identified your father as the owner-operator. Otherwise the employee listing was accurate. There was a note that your camp was the most distant from the base, and the least likely to be contacted.
  
  Some miners did find their way here, mostly from the camps nearest to the outpost. All of them were stunned by the invasion, and the implied evaporation of their wealth. Questions were many, answers were few, so speculation filled the vacuum: The invaders were an advanced intelligence that had been observing humanity for centuries; they were mindless automatons, inadvertently wiping out twelve million people. The invasion was a form of revenge for encroaching on their space. They saw Chaandria's prosperity, and they jealously wanted it for themselves. In reality, no one here knew much more than you did.
  
  Then the time came to leave. An overeager major started to shoot up the equipment that was to be left behind, which was a standard procedure when abandoning a military post during a time of war. But Colonel Irhoud intervened. Only a fraction of the mining settlements had reported in; others might yet come, and as the last human survivors they should be allowed to avail themselves of whatever supplies and equipment Satark Najaren had left to offer. The invaders knew everything they wanted to know about humans; there was nothing here they didn't already have down on Big Chodry.
  
  And so the battalion fired up one of the three troop transport ships housed in an underground hangar, and the 575 people who had assembled here boarded it for a journey to Tyuu. That's where the colonel's logs ended.
  
  > Next page.
  Tyuu, nine months later.
  
  The planetary government of Tyuu, a nine-person committee called the Board of Counselors, has dedicated an entire orbital station to process and house the survivors of the Chaandria Massacre. It is an older structure, cobbled from the repurposed pieces of the old Corporate sleeper ships that brought the original Tyuuan settlers here, but it is spacious enough to accommodate thousands of people.
  
  And indeed, there are more survivors than anyone would have thought. Some, like you and Rufus Tello, came from the mining settlements on Chhota Chandrama. Others came from the passengers and crews of space-faring vessels that had been far enough away at the time of the attack to keep their distance and avoid destruction. This group accounted for three times the number of the miners, most of them still stunned at the loss of their homes, their families, and their livelihoods nearly a year later.
  
  One of the biggest casualties of the invasion was Chaandria's global economy. All of the wealth that had been generated through its planetary success had been counted in Chaandrian currency and housed in Chaandrian banks. As the planet fell and its population was erased, so too was all evidence of its prosperity. Were you the director of a successful titanium operation with millions of rupees in your operating account? Guess again.
  
  And so you find yourself in a small room, with a tiny porthole and a view of the planet Tyuu, nine months after leaving your family's mine. There is a bed, a desk, a chair, a table. The photos of you and your Dad, and of you with Diden and Ihon as a baby, are your only decorations. The clothes you stuffed in your canvas bag that day are your only clothes. They are dirty and shabby at this point, but it's not often you have cause to leave this compartment.
  
  Tyuu is an interesting sight, and you are pleased to have the view. The planet is red — bright red, in the way that most human-occupied worlds would be bright green. You can't go there; the Tyuuans won't allow normal humans down to the surface, because the biochemical conditions that make the planet red also make it incompatible with traditional human physiology. The original Tyuuan settlers that arrived here long ago under corporate contract had to fiddle with their own genomes to make themselves fit in with their chosen new world, and now they are nearly as red as the salads they eat. It's a complicated history; you've never fully understood it.
  
  So why are you here? Well there never was much choice. It seems like a lifetime ago when you decided to take the cargo pod to Chaandria, and Rufus Tello talked you into letting him come along. Then the two of you agreed to stop at Satark Najaren first to see what there was to learn, and that's where you read the logs of Colonel Jebel Irhoud. The commander's pessimism about humanity's fate on the conquered planet affected you like a virus, putting you face-to-face with the concrete conclusion that Diden and Ihon were lost, gassed into oblivion by a race of beings that seemed to want nothing more of humans than their mass extinction.
  
  The realization had been devastating. For so long you had needed to be the leader, making the decisions that kept you and your employees from being discovered, keeping an eye on your dwindling provisions, finally making the call to abandon the mine. Never during those first three months had there been any time to submit to your anxieties. But when you read Irhoud's words, it was like your legs had been kicked out from underneath you. His reasoning was compelling: after weeks of observation there had been no signs of human activity on the big planet, no calls for help, no signs of resistance, no fleeing ships. Just the relentless growth of the invading force.
  
  Tello took over from that point: getting another of the troop transports ready, making sure both you and Private Radodal were on it. He remembered your advice and flew low over Chhota Chandrama until you were on the side that faced away from the Iib Ch'iib, and then you engaged the Hoshino Drive. For three days you traveled through hyperspace, emerging at a point where the Tyuu Guard were maintaining a periphery around their red planet. You were boarded by a trio of sympathetic counselors and directed to dock at the station.
  
  When you checked around not long after your arrival, you learned that Thyos Kokkinopole had indeed been here before you. He had made it to Tyuu, and he had set foot on this same station about two days prior. But he wasn't impressed with what he saw, and so he and everyone on board the Crident-Ureste ship continued on toward Usul. They came, they went. You never saw your former employees ever again, and can only imagine how things might have been different had you chosen to join them.
  
  On the other hand, Private Radodal got to rejoin his unit, with decidedly mixed results. His return was celebrated by his peers, but his absence and poor judgment was upbraided by his officers. All of this occurred within your first five minutes on the station, when Colonel Irhoud recognized the arrival of one of his troop ships. He stopped short of classifying Radodal as AWOL, but the private got drummed out of the service anyway, right before your eyes.
  
  It didn't matter. This one battalion was all that remained of the Sanrakshak, and it no longer served a viable military purpose. The unit disbanded, and many of its members joined up with some kind of new joint military force the representatives of the various colonies were cooking up. Turns out the Iib Ch'iib invasion of Chaandria had them all scared out of their minds, and they were now organizing something called a "United Army" and an "Astral Navy" as a form of mutual protection.
  
  Which brings to mind another humorous development: everyone now refers to the invaders as the "Iib Ch'iib." The bit of onomatopoeia coined by Rufus Tello that one day as you all listened in horror to the bizarre insectoid language has become an official term, the universal name applied to the menace that murdered twelve million people. The Tyuuan grief counselors who boarded your ship seized upon the name as they debriefed you, because as it turns out no one knew who the aliens were. There had been no communication with them, and the invaders never formally introduced themselves. Simply calling them "crickets" and "grasshoppers" undermined the grave threat they posed. "Iib Ch'iib" sounded sufficiently strange, and no one questioned the etymology. Tello himself seems oblivious, though, as if he forgot it was he who came up with the name for the fiercest enemy — and the first alien race — humans have ever encountered.
  
  Rufus Tello. Yes, he's still loitering around here somewhere too, usually poking around once or twice a day, as if he has morphed from being your plant manager to your emotional health counselor. He wants to meet you for lunch. He wants to cook you dinner. It's all well-meaning, but you sense there are plans behind those eyes of his, and that's what scares you. You know what he wants, and it's something you can't give him.
  
  What he doesn't know is that he almost had you. You had almost reconciled yourself to the fact of your widowhood, that Diden and Ihon were completely gone, and that all you could do was mourn their memory. Tello was no Diden Ureste, but he was a constant companion, and if nothing else that constancy was about to wear you down.
  
  Until Gwil Socci showed up on the station a few weeks ago.
  
  Gwil was an old friend, a playmate before puberty and a confidant in the years immediately after. Most importantly, she was your Maid of Honor when you married Diden.
  
  You almost didn't recognize her at first. She was one of hundreds of people who arrived all at once one day, pouring out of the belly of a cargo ship, all of them dirty, hungry, confused, and despondent. They were not unlike most other Chaandrian refugees, but word quickly got out that this batch was special. These people had actually been on the planet itself. They had witnessed the Iib Ch'iib destruction, and had somehow survived the gassing. These were survivors in the truest sense of the word, making the rest of you look like a bunch of posers for watching the invasion from the sidelines.
  
  She wasn't looking for you, and you are ashamed to admit you hadn't even thought of her in months. Her clothing was in tatters, and she was helping an injured woman you didn't know. But when by chance your gaze met Gwil's, the recognition was instantaneous.
  
  You tracked her down after she in-processed with the station's registrars.
  
  "Theryl! Oh my goodness, it really is you!"
  
  "Gwil! I never thought I'd see you again!"
  
  You hugged, somewhat surprised by the firmness of your old friend's embrace. It took you a moment to realize she was weeping. For you, the demise of Chaandria had been a distant event, observed safely from afar. For Gwil, it had been a holocaust. Meeting an old friend, someone she had known from childhood, could only serve to remind her how much she had been changed by the horrors she had experienced.
  
  You had many questions, namely how anyone had managed to escape the planet when the official wisdom had always been there were no direct survivors. If these people made it to safety, there could be others.
  
  Gwil was in no condition to be interrogated, however, so you allowed her to hold tightly onto you for what seemed like half an hour, right there on the main promenade. Then she let go, and made an effort to compose herself, although her nose wouldn't stop running.
  
  "Diden should be here. He'd be so relieved to know you're still alive!"
  
  Wait. What?
  
  "You didn't know?" she continued. "I saw them no more than a month ago. Ihon is getting so tall! There were maybe a dozen of us living in the ruins of Ummeed ka Shahar, pockets of people trying not to be seen as they... as they...." She pauses at the memory of some unspeakable atrocity.
  
  "We heard there was a unit of Sanrakshak that had survived the attack. They had a ship, and they were trying to get as many people as possible off the planet. Diden was not in my group, but it turned out he had been hiding in a building just a few blocks away. I saw him! He knew you were on Little Chodry, but none of us knew the crickets hadn't attacked you. We all assumed the worst. He was devastated. He tried to remain upbeat in front of Ihon, but I could tell he thought you were dead."
  
  "Where are they? Did they make it?"
  
  "No. I don't think so. Oh Theryl, you have no idea how horrible it was there. Many of us tried to make it, but the crickets were merciless. They mowed people down like we were blades of grass, they attacked the main force of the Sanrakshak with no concern for their own safety. Just slaughter, everywhere. When we finally made it to the cargo ship, we were all compartmentalized into the separate holds. So I couldn't see everyone who was on board. I just know I haven't seen Diden and Ihon since that one day on the street in Ummeed ka Shahar."
  
  The news was devastating to you — not that your family had indeed survived the initial attack, and may in fact still be alive on Chaandria, but because you had lost faith in Diden's ability to survive. You had been on your way to find them when you allowed inconclusive information to convince you they were gone, that there was no human left alive on the planet. You had given up on them.
  
  This is what now keeps you up at night, watching the changing views of Tyuu through that tiny porthole in your compartment. No one is going back to Chaandria, no one will listen to your pleas that there are other survivors still stuck on the planet. The Tyuuan authorities have more pressing matters, and they insist the new Astral Navy will be a defense force, not an attack force. There is nothing anybody can do. "Have you filed the names and descriptions of your relatives with us?" the pink-skinned bureaucrats say. "Oh, well, then we'll be sure to contact you as soon as anyone matching their identities registers with us here on the station. Good day, Mrs. Ureste."
  
  And thus you remain in limbo, stubbornly stuck here even as the population of the station slowly begins to decline. Nowadays there is only a small number of new arrivals, but many more departures as most of the refugees start to resettle on other worlds. Gwil Socci has already moved on; Rufus Tello probably will eventually too. You remain, consumed with guilt for not doing more when you could, terrified of what might happen if you let go again.