Madeline Bernard heaved a deep sigh as she stretched out on her cot aboard the Dove.

The research mission to Terra had been the most thrilling, but also most exhaustive of her career. Merely obtaining the permission to access the cradle of humanity had taken months. Authorities had only allowed her to bring three other researchers along, all of which had had to prove impeccable citizen records. Even so much as a parking offense had not been tolerated. In the end, she had had to resort to a trick or two, because these days, nobody really had a perfect record, especially not herself.

She cast a sideways glance to the other side of the room, where a lanky young man lay awake on his cot just like her, staring up at the ceiling with an empty gaze. Data scientist Booker Clyde was a peculiar kind of genius. When talking to him, one might have come to the conclusions that the taciturn young man with the distant look on his face and the messy hair was not particularly smart. But eloquence simply wasn't one of his talents. He had many others, though, and one of the lesser obvious ones was hacking. He had been the key to bringing all of them here, because Booker had polished their records to a sheen without leaving a digital trace of his doings behind. All he had asked for in return was to be brought along on the mission himself. He had wanted to see Terra with his own eyes.

The next member she had picked for their team was a xenobotanist from Madeline's own research group, Irina Petrov. She was terrifyingly quick-witted and smooth-spoken. Her academic record was stellar, and she was one of those odd cases where a brilliant brain could be found inside a stunningly beautiful head. Irina knew how to use all of her qualities very well, and her charming demeanor had provided all of them with a certain leeway under the otherwise strict scrutiny of their chaperones.

The fourth person on this mission was ecosystem engineer Hank Barnes. He possessed a unique combination of the curiosity of a child, the foolhardiness of a young explorer, and the moral flexibility of a man who had spent decades of his life watching entire planets wither and die due to the indecisiveness and incompetence of authorities. Barnes had a deep-seated dislike for the laws of man. Madeline was certain that even if they hadn't been friends for decades,and even if the mission hadn't led them to Terra freaking Mater, he would have agreed to it all in a heartbeat. If only because it involved fucking over the authorities in order to get here.

Madeline still didn't understand why they kept the planet under such a tight lock down. Neither did she understand why there had been soldiers escorting them every step of the way, as if they were scared that the team of expert scientists were nothing but a bunch of kids with grabby hands on a school trip. They had spent twenty exhausting hours on the surface of the planet, collecting samples without a break. Not a split second longer than scheduled, and all of it under the cold eyes of the grey-clad, armed men and women. And on their way back now, the Dove was flanked by a dozen Aedes fighters, like a pesky mosquito swarm.

Now that the Dove was on its way back to the Atrahasis, their research vessel that had carried them here and that they had been forced to leave behind at the outer edge of the solar system, Madeline found herself unable to fall asleep, despite her exhaustion.

"Maddie," a voice whispered from the door, "You awake?"

She sat up on her bed and found Hank standing in the doorway, casting a lance left and right along the corridor before entering. He was not exactly known for his cheerfulness, yet the extent of the frown on his face made her wary.

"What's up?" she asked as she sat up.

"There's something I need to show you..." the man whispered.

He planted himself on the bed next to Madeline and handed her a tablet. In the bunk bed overhead, she could hear Irina rustle in her sheets. The tips of her long blonde hair hung down like a curtain as she peered over the edge of her bed to look down at what Hank had brought.

"Did you find something interesting?" she asked in her sweet voice.

"I used the Dove's scanners to collect some data on radiation levels while we were on Terra," he began, "I thought we might as well make the most of our time there. I had the ship scan all kinds of frequencies, I just thought it might reveal something interesting about the atmosphere, solar flares, you know, that kind of thing. Instead... I found this."

Madeline stared at the feed that played on the tablet. The images were distorted and glitched, but that did not help to diminish their disturbing and abhorrent nature.

"What the hell is this?" she whispered.

From the other end of the room, Booker approached.

"Can I have a look?" the data specialist of their team asked.

The moment he touched the tablet, white lines began to glow on his dark skin, extending from the tips of his fingers up along his arms, and from the corners of his eyes down along his cheeks and neck.

"I couldn't make out where that signal originated from, can you?" Hank asked. "It seems distant, but..."

"It's actually from within this system," Booker said, shaking his head, "But it's faint... only an echo. I cannot make a lot of sense of the signature, but... it's old."

"How old are we talking?" Madeline asked.

"Decades," Booker replied in a flat voice, and a shiver ran down Madeline's spine.

"So... what is this?" Irina asked, as she climbed down from her bunk bed and took a closer look over Booker's shoulder. "Is this... real?"

"Real, yes." the man replied. "It's a real SOS signal."

"If it's an SOS, wouldn't the military vessels have answered it already?" Irina suggested.

"Judging from the signature, it's a beacon. If somebody had answered it already, they would have probably turned it off...." Booker answered.

"The Dove has extremely sensitive scanners," Irina pointed out. "So they might have not picked it up..."

"Or the fuckers are purposefully ignoring it," Hank concurred, his voice a low grow, "And hoping that nobody else will notice."

"Do you really think they'd do such a think?" Irina asked, a furrow appearing on her brow. "...what do you think, Maddie?"

"I certainly wouldn't put it past them... Can you pinpoint the location of that beacon?" Madeline asked Booker.

"It's... from one of the Jovian moons. Europa."

"Europa? Are you sure? I didn't know there's a colony there," Irina remarked.

"There was," Hank chimed in. "It was one of the first extensive terraforming endeavors during the early phases of space colonization in the twenty second century. Harder to transform than Mars, but it ended up habitable. It never sustained a very big colony though. As far as I know, it was more of a large research station. A couple of settlers, but they relied on supply runs from outside for the most part. A day on Europa is... about three and a half Terran days. Back in the day, solar sheets had not been invented yet, and the planet has no internal magnetic field. Nights are long and dark, and they constructed an artificial atmosphere that would cloud half of the planet in a haze to protect it from extensive solar radiation during the days. Plant life did not thrive particularly well there."

"They would have been resettled when the government was moved to Neo-Tokyo, just like the colonies on Mars, Titan and Ganymede. Right?" Irina asked, but her question carried a doubtful tone.

"Doesn't look like they've been resettled," Hank said in a low voice, pointing at the tablet between them.

Madeline covered her mouth with her hand as she pondered over what they had just seen. They had just passed the orbit of Mars, and would pass by Jupiter's orbit soon. They would have to decide on what to do fast.

"We need to check it out," Madeline said firmly.

"I agree," Hank said. "Something about this is fishy..."

"I'm in," Irina said.

Everybody turned to look at Booker now, whose gaze snapped up from the tablet in his hands. He blinked at them.

"Uhm, what? Oh. Yes. Of course. Sorry, I've been thinking about ways to distract the Aedes fleet so we might be able to land there. I'm thinking of feigning an oxygen leak..."

A smile washed over Madeline's face at his words. She had picked the perfect crew for this mission after all.

"... but our pilot might not be willing to land on Europa, specifically," Booker pointed out.

A wicked grin appeared on Irina's face, as she walked over to her locker, "Oh, just leave him to me. You sabotage the ship, and I will make sure that he will think landing on Europa was his own fantastic idea. Once he radios his friends and gets us there, he'll take a long nap, and we will have enough time to check the place out."

She combed through her luscious blonde hair while she spoke, and then rummaged in her locker until she produced a small black tube. She uncapped it and applied a sheer layer of lipstick.

"A 'nap'?" Hank asked, raising one eye brow.

"Don't worry, Hank," she said, blowing him a kiss across the room, "I have a PhD in xenobotany. I know how to calculate a sub-lethal dose."

Madeline giggled at the confused look that data specialist Booker threw back and forth between the two of them. She would explain to him later what exactly Irina had just put on her lips.

"But you guys do know how to fly this thing, right? Just in case he's out a bit longer than expected," Irina pointed out.

"Of course," Hank said, straightening his shoulders. "Maddie and I put the Dove together, after all."

"Well then, let's do this. Do your worst, Booker. We're counting on you!" Irina said, and cast the tall young man a smile that made him blush so intensely that the blood rushing to his face was visible even against his dark skin, all the way up to the roots of his tousled hair.

Booker delved into the cyberspace of the ship to sabotage the oxygen level displays with a serious expression on his face. Madeline watched as he gripped the tablet with one hand tightly, the other flying over the screen with a speed that caused the glowing lines on his skin to blur. She looked up when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

"If there's anybody still out there, we'll find them," Hank said firmly.

Madeline nodded in silence. The distorted images of the SOS broadcast had burned themselves into her mind like glaring lights. The extent of the destruction was harrowing enough, but what truly got to her, and what had shaken all of four them to the core, was the image of a pale-faced girl, pleading for her life.

~ ~ ~

On their approach to Europa, it became clear what the planet had been used for, originally.

The Jovian moon Europa was an ideal place for astronomical research. With the night cycle lasting for three and a half standard Terran days, the large telescopes and radio stations that had been placed on the surface of the planet had sufficient time to collect tons of sophisticated data. The night side was perfectly clear, thanks to an atmospheric monitoring and control system that withdrew all moisture and haze to the light side of the moon, to shield it from solar radiation during the day.

Even decades after it had been abandoned, that system was still operational. They wouldn't even have spotted the colony underneath the dense clouds if Rutherford hadn't scanned the entire surface.

"Atmospheric conditions are stable," he noted, "Radiation shielding seems to be less efficient than it used to be, and there are traces of radioactive isotopes all over the place, but overall radiation levels do not pose a significant health risk. No protective gear or external oxygen supply will be required, ma'am."

"Thank you, Rutherford," Null said.

She rolled back her shoulders and took a deep breath before she placed her hand on the controls of the ship's main air lock. Then she realized that she was not alone in the corridor.

"What are you two doing?" she asked Higgs and Heisenberg, who had moved to stand behind her.

"Captain, are you sure it's a good idea for you to go out there alone?" Higgs asked.

"The planet is completely abandoned," she replied, "No signs of organic life... not of the multicellular kind, at least."

"That doesn't mean it can't be dangerous, Sir," Heisenberg chimed in. He pulled an assault rifle from the arsenal on his back, as if to remind them of the last time they had overlooked a threat of the inorganic kind.

"That may be true, but I really don't think I'll be needing your help here," she insisted.

Come on Null, why don't you want them tagging along? Lars asked her.

I just... don't want to drag any more people into this.

They are our crew, Lars pointed out. They will follow us anywhere. Happily.

That's precisely what worries me.

"If you don't require your help," Higgs said as he crossed his two front appendages over his chest, "May we request shore leave?"

"Shore leave?" she raised an eye brow.

"I heard that organic crews sometimes participate in shore leave together to reinforce their bonding," Heisenberg remarked.

The way the two androids looked at her expectantly had something comical about it. She could not help but smile.

"Well, if you put it that way," she said with a soft sigh, "Let's go on shore leave together."

"Be safe, ma'am," Rutherford called out behind them as they disembarked the Blackstar, "I'll have some fresh tea prepared upon your return."

~ ~ ~

The thick, dense fog lay over the colony like a blanket, but it couldn't hide the horrors that had occurred here. Black craters dotted the rocky, white soil, and the pavement of the streets and walkways was fractured and jagged. Most buildings had been destroyed by the countless blasts, and those that had withstood the bombardment had collapsed over time. There were no signs of life among the ruins of the buildings. But as they walked in silence for a while, they soon came across the black silhouettes that had been burned into the walls of buildings here and there. The frozen shadows of the former inhabitants of the colony seemed like motionless ghosts that haunted the place now.

The planet was silent as death. There was no chirping of birds or insects, no rustling of wind. The only sound was their food steps, a pair of boots and two pairs of android feet, as they walked through the streets of the destroyed colony. Inside their mind, silence had descended as well. It seemed to Lars as if the dense fog had seeped into the colorful space inside Null's mind, tinting it grey. Her dread was tangible to him, he could taste bile at the back of their mouth and felt the icy grip of fear around their heart. She was equal parts anxious and horrified to find out the truth.

As they reached a crossroads where petrified remains of trees lined the streets, Null froze in her tracks.

"I remember this..." she mumbled.

From the darkest, deepest depths of their mind, Lars could feel a memory well up. It was one he had never seen himself in any of her dreams. As Null cast a long look across the street, the memory overlaid their vision with an image of how this place had looked like before. The white soil had been unscorched, and the trees had carried crowns of dark red foliage that almost seemed to glow against the white haze of the fog, the bright soil and the white-tinted buildings.

She turned around, and let her gaze wander up the hillside. Up ahead in the distance, there was a house, half-built into the slope. It was still intact, except for a large, partially broken window that faced their way.

"This... is..."

Lars could feel a wave of adrenaline surge through their body, and for a moment it washed away the haze inside their mind. More memories made their way to the forefront now, flooding her with a tide of images and emotions so powerful that she gasped, and Lars could feel tears well up inside their organic eye. He did not immediately comprehend many of these emotions, because they related to a sense of nostalgia probably only organics experienced. Because they could forget, and remember. But he could still feel these emotions just as much as she did, and they were so powerful that they were about to bring Null down on her knees. He expanded his influence over the body to steady her for a moment, wishing more than ever he could be there for her physically.

"This is home," they both said in symbiosis, once they had made sense of the memories and emotions..

Her feet carried them up the path to the house on their own. She skipped the twelfth step of the stone stairway, where in a different time, in another life, a small flower had begun to grow between the cracks of the stones. There was no trace of that flower left any longer, but her body remembered.

The path led to the front door, and she hesitated for a moment, but then she pulled it open. The room behind was dim, but they didn't need much light to see that it was completely trashed. A thick layer of white dust had settled over the shattered remains of furniture and various belongings.

To their right, there was what might have been a living room once. As she slowly made her way through the debris toward the remains of the large window, shattered glass crunched underneath her footsteps. She cast a look at the street down below at the foot of the hill, when a sudden motion at the corner of their eye caught Lars attention. He snapped their head around and blinked in confusion.

For a second, he could have sworn that he had seen an image of his Captain standing there.

Sorry, Null said in their mind. That was just a dream. Or... a memory of a dream.

I didn't know you had those, he remarked, I thought you only have dreams of your memories.

She smiled faintly as she turned back to look at the rest of the room.

I remember many things now, she said wistfully as she crossed the room to the other side. Or rather... the things that I remember finally seem to make sense.

She bent down and shifted some of the debris, digging up a broken picture frame. In the dim light, the picture still clearly showed an X-ray image of a spinal cord with broken vertebrae.

That's what happened to your father, Lars recalled. Why he was in a wheel chair.

Yes, she noted, picking up the second image, the one of the Milky Way in the night sky. It's why he became an astronomer, and not an explorer. Why he spent his life here, and not on a ship at the edges of known space.

With a heavy sigh, she got back up to her feet.

But I still don't understand what happened-

Her thought was cut short when another movement from the corner of their eyes alerted Lars once more. He rushed to the forefront of their body and whirled around just in time to block a blow to their face with their forearm. Evading another blow, they stumbled back a step, and shifted their stance. When the third blow came, he caught the fist and twisted it down, meeting the gaze of the assailant.

A pair of glowing blue eyes on an otherwise featureless, white face was directed at them. They flickered for a moment, and even in absence of eyelids, Lars and Null immediately knew that it meant that she was blinking in surprise.

"Ca-calliope?" Null asked incredulously.

The android's eyes flickered again, and then began to glow brighter than before.

"Evelyn?" the android exclaimed, equally confused, "It's... it's really you? Oh, I can't believe it... I..."

Making an electronic sound reminiscent of a sob, the android rushed forward to pull them in a rib-crushing hug.

~ ~ ~

Higgs and Heisenberg had followed their Captain with some distance, until she had rushed off towards one of the houses. Suddenly, they had heard a commotion, and now Heisenberg barged through the door, his gun readied.

"Pharaoh!" he exclaimed. "Let go of his Highness, or I will destroy you!"

Higgs came up behind him and peered over his shoulder. The small figure of their Captain was not alone in the room. An android had her arms wrapped around her in what Heisenberg apparently mistook for a choke hold, but Higgs clearly identified the gesture as a hug. He put a hand on the Reaper units shoulder to calm him down.

"His Highness?" the android repeated with a female voice, and loosened her tight hug. "But this is..."

"It's alright, Heisenberg," the Captain said breathlessly, "This is a friend. Her name is Calliope."

"Calliope?" Heisenberg repeated and lowered his gun.

The lights on the front of his face plate flickered as he eyed her suspiciously, just as she seemed to scrutinize Heisenberg and Higgs now. She had a strange body, and was clearly a very simple, older model, not made for combat. Her overall shape was that of a human female, even including protrusions around her head reminiscent of a chin-length haircut. They framed a face with two blue, almond-shaped lights for eyes, but no features otherwise. Her body was covered in something that Higgs recognized as silicon polymer, but the smooth coat had been torn in various places, revealing the metal underneath.

"You know this android, ma'am?" Higgs asked.

"Yes, Higgs," she answered, smiling at it. "Calliope raised me."

"Forgive me, Evelyn," Calliope said, "But who are these people you have brought home with you?"

"Evelyn? Home?" Higgs repeated, confused.

"They are my crew, Calliope. They're... friends," the Captain explained. "And they don't know my old name. They know me as Amy."

"So you really did it? You became a Captain? Oh, I'm so happy for you, Evely- I mean. Amy."

She sounded confused, and the lights on her face flickered for a moment.

"I'm sorry, I must... I must seem very rude to you, don't I? I should offer you something to drink... pl-please have s-seat, or... ah-"

She turned around to rummage through the debris, but her motions seemed jagged an erratic. Suddenly, she froze altogether.

"F-forgive me," she said, her voice trailing off. The lights on her face flickered one last time, and then they dimmed and went out, leaving her frozen in place.

"Calliope?!" The Captain exclaimed with a panicked voice.

"My apologies," Calliope's voice resounded through the room. "This mobile unit has definitely seen better days. If you don't mind, I'll converse with you like this."

The Captain heaved a sigh of relief and nodded. She moved to the other end of the room, where she placed herself on the more or less intact remains of a sofa. Heisenberg stepped up to the broken window, and observed the streets below the hill with his weapon readied, as if he expected somebody to ambush them. Meanwhile, Higgs stepped closer and inspected the mobile unit that Calliope had left behind.

"Captain, this unit is decades old," Higgs noted. "This entire place... has been abandoned for years. And you say you grew up here? What happened?"

"That's precisely what I came here to find out," the Captain said. "Calliope, I need you to tell me what happened here..."

"You don't remember?" the AI asked.

"I remember you. And my father. And I know that something... bad happened. I know that I only survived because I was put in cryo, and somebody rescued me from this place seventeen years ago," the Captain said. There was a wistful expression on her face, and she bit her lip before she continued, "But I don't know what happened here before all that."

Calliope seemed to hesitate for a moment.

"They... they attacked the colony," she said in a low voice, "The first bombing run came without warning. When everybody thought it was over and went to the shuttle port to evacuate, there came a second. And everybody left after that probably died during the third run an hour later. You... you were the only survivor, because your father put you in cryo when the first bombs fell, and because this house is structurally more sound than most of the others."

"Who attacked the colony?" the Captain asked, "Raiders?"

Calliope made a sound reminiscent of a disdainful snort.

"No, Evelyn. It was Neo-Tokyo. Neo-Tokyo attacked and razed Europa to the ground."

____
A.N.
I feel at this point, there's probably nothing really knew you've learned from this chapter - it has been suggested to me that the flashback in the first part is redundant considering the ending of the previous chapter. However,  I felt compelled to explain how it was possible that Evelyn was able to leave the Sol system. I'm kinda telling the whole story backwards here, so in the next chapter, we'll finally get to what exactly happened on Europa all those years ago.