Dear Orion,
You’ve
been gone twenty years and you haven’t come home once. Maybe you’ve been
waiting for me to join you, like I’ve been waiting for you to come back. I know
the plan was for me to join the Scouters when I turned twenty-one and apply to
whatever expedition you were assigned to. But things changed. I had a son. Your
son, Orion. You have a nineteen-year-old son that you have never met. I tried to contact you, I swear O, but they
wouldn’t let me. My contact requests were met with claims that you were out of
range. I know it was because you might leave when you got the news. I know this
letter, like all the others, won’t reach you either. I told him about his
daddy, all the time. We have always kept up with where you are and your
explorations. He grew up so proud to be your son. He looks so much like you, O.
Clone like really, you’d love it. His name is Fawke. In just under two years,
he’ll turn twenty-one, and, just like his father before him, he’ll be on the
first expedition possible. He’s top of his class at Rho Ion Hirsch Academy.
Just like his mum. Thank goodness he got my brains, huh?
I know the search for the other life-forms is ending soon. I
hope it means you come home. I really want you to come home. I should have
begged you to stay, to wait for me. I should have said to you all the words
that have been have been suffocating me for two decades. Instead, I watched you
dress, kissed you one last time, and spent over half my life wishing we’d had
more than one night. I’m not the eighteen-year-old girl you left that day, but,
Ori, I love you as much as she did.
Ori, why didn’t you come back to me? Or for me? That was the
deal: us two, a team, exploring the galaxies. We could have been a family, if
you had just waited three years. Or, at least, come back after you left. More
than I wish you’d been her for myself, I wish it more for you. I wish you’d
gotten to see Fawke grow up. You’d have loved our boy. You’ll probably bump
into him once he graduates and leaves with the Scouters. If you do, Ori, you
will know instantly who he is. I’m sorry you’ll find out that way.
Please, look out for our boy, Orion.
Love always,
Jinks.
632 Earth Days Later…
It was a detour, but as was custom, The Torque Scalar,
rounded Pluto as a mark of respect to those men, women and children who lost
their lives trying to settle on its surface. Every vessel crewed by the
Planetary and Galactic Scouters adhered to this memorial ritual. Before long,
Orion saw the surface of Earth, they were approaching fast. He hadn’t set foot
on his ‘home’ planet for twenty-two years, and he hadn’t missed it. There was
only one thing that would have tempted him to return over the years, but there
was no way she’d still be there, so there would have been no point. She was too
restless, too desperate to explore. It was her who dreamed of being a Scouter
and leaving Earth, he’d caught the bug from her. He could see her now; teenaged
and eager, pointing out stars and plotting courses for explorations, her eyes
all lit up and smiling. Oh, that smile. Everyone always said only two things
brought out that smile: talking about scouting and him. Orion never really
believed the latter, until he kissed her the night before he left. It had hit
him then; all the chances he had missed, what he could have had. Memories of
his Jinks and that last night consumed his mind until the rough landing jolted
him back to reality. Home. It had never felt like home. He’d been born on a
ship, and as soon as he stepped back onto one, aged twenty-one, he knew why
living on a planet never fit. He’d spent half his life looking for inhabited
planets, and just like generations of Scouters before him, hadn’t found a
single one. Proof of civilisations that had once been, but none that still
were. The last pockets of the religious orders claimed the ‘once were’s had
been failed consecutive creations of God, and Earth his victorious success. The
extensive proof that several were inhabited at the same time quickly stopped
any rational thinking minds believing such twaddle. The nutters continued
because, who needs logic when you have your mutual imaginary friend and his two
official biographies?
Disembarking and making his way through the crowd, Orion
headed for the passageway to the debriefing room.
“Doctor Krims. Doctor Krims.”
Krims.
Turning to find the voice, he watched a scarred body limp on
an apparently recently acquired prosthetic through the crowd until he reached
the doctor.
Joelle Nova Krims.
She’s still here?
He hair was loosely pinned back, with wild tendrils breaking
free; the curves of her body softer but still gorgeous, and due to the reduced
gravity, she had aged incredibly well. By the time his brain had taken in what
he was seeing, the man had left the doctor’s side.
‘Jinks. A doctor? And,
still on Earth? Why was she still on Earth?
Desperate to hear her voice, Orion lunged in her direction,
needing to be near her. He lost sight of her in the crowd for a few moments.
When he found her again, she was staring at a face he recognised as his own,
but it wasn’t his face. Had someone cloned him? Orion shook his head.
Jinks was crying now, clinging to the boy. Saying goodbye.
Again.
“Fawke Orion Krims.”
The name hit Orion like an Axon blaster. Looking frantically
to the side of a ship for a name. The
Mickey. That only meant one thing: Plutonian Settlement. Orion watched,
frozen, as his son boarded the ship and Jinks crumbled.
As Fawke disappeared from sight,
so did Orion’s chance to get to know his son. History was repeating itself, and
this time it would kill Orion Saros Rigel’s only child.
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