The first time Connie fell in love was on her second-first day of third grade.
It happened immediately after her family's move to northern Calisota. After a week of big box trucks, of motel rooms with strange odors and noisy ice machines, of weird takeout food, and of her parents being stressed and snippy with each other and especially with her, Connie had finally ended up in another new bedroom. And before she could even start unpacking, she'd been whisked away and dumped off at a new school mid-semester.
Second-first days of school were the worst. First-first days of school were hard too, but at least everybody went through them together at the beginning of a school year. Sometimes friends from the previous year would reconnect after the long summer, making it easier to get used to new teachers and new classrooms and new lessons. But whenever Connie moved during the middle of a school year—something she had already gone through the previous two years—she had to face all of that newness completely alone.
She spent her entire second-first day of third grade enduring stares and whispers from students who already had friends and didn't know what to make of the new girl. Her hair wasn't right. Her clothes weren't cool. She watched all the wrong shows, and she apparently talked funny, even though they were the ones who sounded weird to her. None of her teachers could pronounce her name correctly, and they always stuck her in whatever desk hadn't already been filled, which meant she always sat where no one else wanted to.
But finally, the last period of the day arrived: history class. After going through some more staring, another butchering of Maheswaran by yet another teacher, Connie got the desk in the front corner of the class, the one nearest to the teacher and the door. She took the unfavored seat, paying little mind at first to the boy sitting next to her. He had dark hair and darker eyes, and he fidgeted in his seat, looking as done with the day as Connie felt.
Then the lights went out, and the best thing that could ever happen in a classroom came to be: movie day. Connie had arrived in the middle of a unit on the Space Race, and that day the teacher showed them a documentary on the Apollo program.
Connie watched, astonished by grainy old footage of towering rockets ascending on columns of fire. Between segments of talky old men who wore big glasses and skinny ties, she sat in awe of armored pillbox capsules that circled the Earth at thousands of miles an hour, being driven by daredevils who left everything behind—even gravity!—just for the pursuit of knowledge and adventure.
She waited, breathless, as Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind. She watched Buzz Aldrin waving to the camera with the Earth above his shoulder, its vastness made into a tiny blue marble from the surface of the Moon. And she bounced excitedly when the two astronauts had approached the Tranquility Tower, the strange alien structure at the edge of the lunar sea that had mystified scientists for hundreds of years, the investigation of which would be one of the major goals of their mission.
Aldrin and Armstrong documented everything about their mission to the tower: how they used strobe lights to flash mathematical sequences, trying to gain the attention of anything that might be living inside the tower; how they pounded on the tremendous pentagonal hatchway for long minutes, seeking any kind of reaction; how their tools couldn't make a scratch in the doors, the alloy of which mystified them and defied all metallurgical knowledge; and how, finally, they had affixed a message of peace repeated in every known language on Earth to the outside of the tower and returned to their lander.
Though its journey had otherwise been a triumph of human progress, the Apollo 11 mission had failed in one respect, and Tranquility Tower, that alien structure that had watched over mankind for millennia, still remained a mystery.
Or at least, it remained one for the rest of that day: the documentary was too long for one class period, and so the teacher had to pause it when the bell rang.
"So boring," the boy sitting next to Connie muttered. He stuffed his things into his bookbag and pushed past Connie as part of the mad rush of students leaving the classroom.
Connie didn't give the boy a second thought. Long after the other students were gone, her eyes were still glued to the paused screen, staring so intently that she missed the teacher asking her if she was alright. But she didn't care.
She had fallen completely in love with outer space.
"The Moon? The Moon. The MOON!" Connie exclaimed in disbelief. She clutched her hair as the two words ran circles in her brain, getting bigger and bigger every time she thought them until her head threatened to pop. Then her head quirked, and she said, "Wait. 'The' Moon? Which moon?"
"Earth's moon?" Lapis said, exchanging confused looks with Peridot.
Both Gems jerked backwards as Connie yanked fistfuls of her hair straight out to either side. "That's my favorite moon!" shouted Connie. "I mean, it was my original-favorite, but then I kinda got into Phobos and Deimos, like a tie, because I thought we'd be colonizing Mars by the time I got into high school and I wanted to turn one of them into a secret base and the other one into a big, hollow, potato-shaped library. But fat chance of colonization after all that defunding, right? So then it was Enceladus, because of all the water. Like I was thinking, if you're going to create an outpost at the edge of the solar system, you'll need water. But that was just a phase. Every girl has a Saturn phase, am I right? So my favorite-favorite is Earth's Moon again, because I figured if I was ever going to accept a presidential nomination from off-planet, it would be while I was an astronaut commander overseeing the construction of our first Lunar base after I campaigned on re-funding our space program!"
Peridot goggled at Connie during the long seconds it took the girl to regain her breath. "Um, okay," the engineer drawled. "So, you're coming, right?"
She had been prepared to beg and plead to go on the mission, and now all of that readied energy exploded inside of Connie like fireworks. "I can come?" she shrieked.
Lapis shrugged. "Sure, if you wa—"
"YES. Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes!" Connie's whole body vibrated with the force of her heartbeat. She began to pace back and forth, trying to funnel her million-mile-an-hour thoughts out through her mouth. "We need so many things. A space suit, a thruster pack, a lunar rover, golf clubs, a zero-g toilet…air? Air! Do I need to pack air?" she demanded.
Peridot laid a hand on Connie's arm, trying to calm her. "I've been there before, Connie Jade. There's air there." Then she frowned. "Wait, am I remembering that right? …mmmmnnnnnnyyeah, I'm pretty sure there's air in the Diamonds' base."
Right. The Gems had gone to the base twice already.
All of the excitement within Connie began to wither as she realized what going to the moon would actually mean. It would be a Crystal Gem mission. That meant assembling the Crystal Gems. "Do… Do we need to go get the others?" Connie asked, her voice slamming into a hush.
Sharing a look of bemusement with Lapis, Peridot snorted and said, "For a trip to the moon? It's not like we're going to Betelgeuse! Besides, do they come and get us every time they go on patrol?"
Lapis shot Peridot a coy look and said, "You told me you were too scared to go on patrol until you finished your—"
"Immaterial!" shrieked Peridot. "We can go to the moon and find the information I need all on our own." Rubbing her chin in thought, she added, "Actually, it might be better with just us. The others became 'emotional' when I accessed Pink Diamond's database. Especially Garnet."
Hand on hip, Lapis Laid, "Sounds good to me. I can carry both of you and fly us up there if you want." She gestured, and the waters in the pond jumped straight up, gathering itself into a wobbly sphere.
Connie grimaced at the levitating water. Sunlight rippled through its depths, revealing the lumpy remains of the origami fish she had made. Without Lapis's careful attentions, the fish had succumbed to wetness and pressure, crumpling into a soggy little ball. "No offense, Lapis," she hedged, "but I think a water ball ride would be a little too explosive decompression-y for me."
The water jerked back into gravity's hold, pounding back into the pond shaft in a split-second waterfall as Lapis slapped her forehead. "Right! The breathing. I always forget that part. And we were just talking about air, too!" She shook her head and chuckled.
Peridot nodded sagely. "Also, I want my own seat on the way there. We'll just take the ship."
Excitement thundered inside Connie as she followed the two Gems across the yard and around the side of the barn. There, atop a circle of dead grass, stood the captured Roaming Eye. In spite of standing in the open with no tarp or covering, the ship's hull didn't have a speck of mud or dust, or even bird droppings. The only splotch of color near to it was the Pumpkin curled up and napping in its shadow.
Peridot's gemstone flashed, and the side of the ship opened into a ramp. The soft mechanical noise roused Pumpkin into a barking fit that ran her in circles around the base of the ship. "Feel free to board at your convenience," Peridot announced, taking up position at the bottom of the ramp and gesturing to the hatch. "Please don't touch the controls, as you might accidentally start the gravity engine and kick the ship through the planet core."
"Ugh. That would be a whole conversation with the others," Lapis joked on her way up the ramp. But she very pointedly closed her hands behind her back as she climbed into the main cabin.
"No touching," Connie agreed. She stepped toward the ramp's base, but then stopped, tugged backwards by a sudden remembered promise. "Oh, hold on!"
She dug her phone out of her pocket and opened a group text to her parents. A long line of reminders from her mother and bad jokes rom her father took up most of the archived conversation. Most of the texts she had sent back were updates on how training was going, or if she had gone anywhere with the Gems. Keeping her parents in the know, just as she had promised.
Chewing on her lip, she stared at the screen with thumbs poised. After a few deleted attempts, she finally settled on, "Flying to Moon w/Gems. Safe. No fighting. Will call when I get back." She capped the message with a heart and a smiley emoji and sent it on its way. Then she turned her phone off, just in case they saw the message too quickly. She didn't want to delay takeoff with answering the thousands of questions her parents would, and admittedly should, ask. Forgiveness is better than permission, she told herself, and hoped it would still be true by the time she returned.
Her legs trembled as she mounted the ramp. The force of her own heartbeat shook her whole body, making her shake uncontrollably. As she passed into the hatch, she lost her breath to the sight of the Ruby-sized starship bridge. Its circle of consoles and workstations surrounded her, a living compromise of function and elegance, as if NASA had collaborated with all of her favorite sci fi showrunners to make a masterpiece in warm, muted colors.
Then something else clicked in Connie's brain. She ducked back out of the hatch to examine the curve of the hull, then back into the hatch to examine the curve of the cabin wall, and then back out of the hatch again to marvel at the difference between the two. "Is this thing smaller on the outside?" she exclaimed.
Peridot ushered her fully into the ship. "Try not to focus on the spatial compression. You may have a psychotic episode," the engineer told her. A patter of feet tickled the ramp behind them, and they turned to spot Pumpkin mounting the ramp with trepidation. "No, Pumpkin. You stay here. Go start repairs on Nikki while we're gone," Peridot instructed her, and made a shooing motion.
Pumpkin lashed her vine tail in delight at the command, then took off running for the front of the barn.
Connie shot Peridot a look of surprise. "Can she really do that?" she asked.
"Well, no. But she likes to feel included," Peridot explained. She slapped the wall next to the hatch, and the ramp rose and melded seamlessly back into the hull, making the bulkhead behind them whole again. Then the engineer took the center console behind the viewport, bringing its controls to life with her touch. "Now, let's go! The sooner we get there, the sooner we get our answers."
Connie scrambled into the next seat over from center. Feeling around at the sides of the chair, she asked, "How do we strap in?"
"Strap in to what?" said Lapis. The blue Gem reclined in her seat with her bare ankles propped next to her console's controls.
A low hum vibrated up through Connie's chair as Peridot announced, "All systems check out. Heh. Almost as if some exemplary technician had assumed responsibility for this vessel's upkeep." She preened as best she could from her seat, and then pressed both hands on the console. "Here we—"
"Ooh!" Connie exclaimed. "Can I do the countdown? Please?"
"Um, sure?" Peridot answered, looking confused.
Closing her eyes, Connie clutched the sides of her chair and centered herself. Already she could hear the sound of the engines pitching into a whine, readying for takeoff. Even without a spacesuit, or a rumbling solid rocket booster ready to explode beneath them, or a cargo hold full of freeze-dried ice cream, this was the moment she had dreamed of for years. She drew a long, solemn breath to brace herself, and then began to count. "Ten! N—"
"We're here!" announced Peridot.
Connie's eyes flew open, and she gaped through the viewport in wonder at a gray, cratered landscape rolling beneath them. The Roaming Eye swooped down to follow the surface at dizzying speed, even while the stars above them hung motionless and stunningly clear. She hadn't felt the slightest tug of acceleration in the trip from Earth. Evidently, the sound of engine "buildup" had actually been the entirety of their trip.
But she didn't care about missing the trip. The first sight of the Moon had her out of her chair and up onto the console with her nose pressed to the viewport. Her breath fogged the glass as she breathed in wonder. "Wow…"
As Peridot hurried to deactivate and reroute the controls underneath Connie's knees, Lapis contented herself by picking crud out from between her toes, hardly sparing the viewport a glance. "Yeah, this place is a total dump," she grunted.
"It's beautiful!" Connie cried. Her eyes swallowed every crevasse, every crater and ridge that rolled underneath their hull. It was a mountain vista frozen inside of a timeless vacuum, a sight that only a handful of Earthlings before her had ever seen. For once, she wished her booking would seize her eyes and immortalize the moment inside of her, guaranteeing that she could never forget the moment.
Even enraptured as she was, Connie didn't miss the look of disbelief crossing between Lapis and Peridot. She didn't mind, though. There were some things that ancient spacefaring aliens just couldn't understand.
Seconds later, a glimmer emerged on the horizon, and Connie's excitement swelled as the sight of Tranquility Tower rushed to meet them. The ship slowed and dipped toward the tremendous pentagonal hatch that Armstrong and Aldrin had knocked upon all those years ago. Connie had studied the grainy photos from the Apollo missions and the telescope imagery taken of the site, but neither one had done the base justice. Like a monolithic pylon, it rose from the surface, its towering form supported by struts on either side, its upper echelons capped beneath an elongated crystal dome.
The pentagonal hatch cycled open, and Peridot brought the Roaming Eye into a hangar to land atop a four-colored floor. There was a soft twmp as the ship touched down, and then Connie flew out of her seat and danced impatiently at the back of the cabin.
"C'mon! Let's go!" she whined.
While Peridot shut down all of the ship's doodads, Lapis rose from her chair and stretched languidly. Then she padded over and, with a smirk, took Connie's hand and pressed it to the cabin wall. The material glowed in the shape of Connie's handprint as she pulled away, and then the rear wall lowered back into a ramp.
As the gloom of the hangar revealed itself to Connie, she felt a wash of dead air pour into the ship. The atmosphere balance felt normal to her lungs, and aside from being a bit dry, it didn't seem particularly stale. But as soon as the air pressure equalized, the world around Connie became perfectly, unnaturally still. In the absence of the ship's thrumming engines, Connie felt no stirring and heard no movement save for the Gems behind her. The air, the ground, the building, all stood in absolute silence. And that silence made the interior of the tower feel more alien than its inhuman architecture ever could.
Her two guides urged Connie's awestruck body down the ramp. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, her memory aligned with it. Steven had told her about his adventures to the Moon, and his descriptions had lingered especially on the four towering murals above them, one on each wall that resembled the full spectrum of the Diamond Authority at the time of the base's construction. White, Blue, Yellow, and Pink loomed large above them in silhouette, a style that matched those mosaics of the Diamonds that Connie had seen in Ascension's terminal.
Then the stillness of the room broke with a wave of alarming motion that erupted from the floor. The edge of the vast hangar flew upward in a series of long, slender panels lifting out of the smooth alloy. Each panel reached its apparently designated height and then froze in place, with each next panel rising a little higher in the sequence, until the panels formed a grand stairway that spiraled up around the edge of the hangar and into the next floor above.
Peridot stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting on Connie with a ready smile. "Shall we?" she called.
Connie sprinted down the ramp in reply. As soon as her foot left the ship's surface, she felt her stomach lurch, and she soared into the air. Her cry of surprise became a shrieking laugh as she pinwheeled her arms to keep herself upright almost twenty feet in the air. "That's right! Moon gravity is only sixteen-point-six-six-six-six percent as strong as Earth gravity. Which makes it six-six-six-six times cooler! Woo!"
Peridot shook her head, but her smile was obvious even in the dark. "Why are humans so enamored with their inability to adapt to something as ubiquitous as gravity?" she said.
Lapis floated underneath Connie, her wings flicking in a lazy backstroke to keep pace. "Lighten up, Peridot," the Gem teased. "Everybody knows gravity sucks."
"Not so! I've always found gravity quite…attractive? Eh?" Peridot cackled at her own joke, affording it the only laughter it received, which was far more than it deserved. Once finished, she began hopping up the sequenced panels. "But enough frivolity. We ascend!"
Lapis followed in the air, nudging Connie along with little daydream-y pushes that lofted the girl as though she were a beach ball. Connie delighted in thumbing her nose at even the Moon's gravity, trying to flip herself as many times as she could between each push. Eventually her stomach gave up on trying to feel sick and accepted that she had turned herself into a living centrifuge. Even her half-hollow shrank back from the sheer, utter joy she felt, a joy so great that it blazed out of Jade's gemstone in a wash of green light.
She didn't even mind when an errant sailcloth spooled out of her between flips and fluttered down into the shadows far, far below.
Eventually, though, Connie had to debase herself by using her own legs again when they reached the ceiling, and she had to mount the stairs to follow Peridot into the next level. A much shorter room awaited them, one that also spanned the entire breadth of the tower. Its only feature stood at the room's center: a stout, cylindrical pedestal with a sphere the size of a bowling ball housed atop it.
The idol-like design of the pedestal and its sphere grabbed at the inner explorer in Connie. "What is that?" she said, launching off of the stairs toward the room's feature. Already she could feel herself trying to guess at the sphere's weight, wondering if they had something on the ship of equivalent mass to replace it so they wouldn't trigger any booby traps when they removed the sphere.
Peridot caught Connie's foot in the air and dragged her back onto the stairs. "It's just some old monitoring equipment. It only works if you know where you want to look, and that won't help us with what we need. That's upstairs."
Following Peridot up to the next and final level, Connie was glad she hadn't wandered. The stairs brought them to the tower's observation deck beneath its crystal dome. Connie launched herself at once against the inside of the dome, staring out at the fractal lunar vista. She tried to spot the legs of the Eagle lander, or the flag planted next to them, but she couldn't see either one as she drifted back to the floor.
"Oh, no! It's broken!" Lapis cried.
Connie turned around and forced herself to take in the rest of the room, not just its magnificent view. At the center of the room stood a tall, stepped platform almost thirty feet high, and atop the platform's highest step was a triangular throne fit for a Diamond. In front of the throne should have been a broad white control panel. Except, the panel wasn't a panel anymore, merely rubble strewn before the seat. Connie could only tell what shape the rubble had once been based on the shape of the larger pieces. She bounded up the steps to join Lapis and Peridot at the throne, trying to remind herself that they had come to the Moon for a purpose.
But while Lapis despaired at the rubble, Peridot seemed unconcerned. "Not to worry. I was here when Garnet threw a temper tantrum and obliterated the control panel. Thus I anticipated this issue."
Steven had told Connie a different version of events, but she couldn't deny the results were the same. "Are you going to reconstruct the computer and run an algorithm to rebuild the lost data?" Connie asked eagerly.
Peridot blinked slowly at Connie. "Did you just select those words at random?" she asked.
Cheeks heating, Connie scrunched her head into her shoulders and sniped, "No! I've heard them from…experts." In movies.
"I don't need to rebuild anything. Garnet smashed a console," Peridot explained. She knelt down to the rubble and heaved one of the larger pieces aside. Underneath its pale bulk, the rubble revealed a circular gap about as large as a fist, featuring an array of iridescent metallic threads coiling in and out of the opening. "Everything that actually kept the data is housed in the platform beneath us. The console is just a means to access that equipment. Ergo, if I bypass the console, we get the data!"
"Bypass it with what? I am so lost right now," Lapis complained, and bounced her scowl between Peridot and the rubble. "Camp Pining Hearts really should have done more computer episodes."
"That would have ruined its rustic appeal. Also, I'll bypass the console with this!" Peridot reached into her bushy hair and withdrew a smartphone, and then reached back inside for more. "And with…with…thi—argh, come on…with this!" Finally, she rummaged out a lump of tangled cables from her hair.
Connie raised an incredulous eyebrow. "You keep stuff in your hair?" she said.
"Of course! Like the rest of me, my hair is not merely a feat of aesthetic perfection, but it is also highly functional!" bragged Peridot.
One corner of Lapis's mouth quirked into an affectionate smile. "I love it. You're like an adorable little Peri-pocket," she said.
Dark color flooded Peridot's cheeks, and she hurried to collect herself. "Yes, well, wait to congratulate me if this actually works." She knelt and began fishing out lengths of differently colored wires. But after just a few seconds, she stopped and frowned into the conduit.
"What's wrong? Did you forget an adaptor?" Connie teased. She wanted some small payback for the drubbing the little engineer had given her, even though that exact data retrieval plan had totally worked in Data Heist III: Heist City, and again in Data Heist IV: Heist City 2. But she also secretly hoped that Peridot had forgotten something, because that would mean another trip to and from Earth.
"Of course not," Peridot said, dashing both her hopes. "But it turns out I don't need one, because it's already here."
Now Connie blinked slowly. "Wait. An Earth phone adaptor is on the Moon? Is this a time travel thing? Did we leave an adaptor for our past selves in the future?"
"No! Or, I guess, probably not. I don't know," Peridot growled, becoming frustrated. She rubbed at her face as she glared down into the narrow opening. "It's not an Earth adaptor. It's Gem tech. In order to access the database, I would need to wire together a patch that could interface with it. Except somebody else already did that, and then they stuffed the patch back in here. It makes no sense unless—"
"Somebody else was already here." Lapis's lazy demeanor evaporated. The graceful Gem hunched, turning in a circle as if to spot some lurking predator. Her whole posture screamed for flight from the dome in every sense of the word. "We should go."
Connie couldn't completely disagree. The throes of her astronautical glow couldn't quash the feeling that someone was here for them, or was already ahead of them. She knew none of the other Crystal Gems would have come to the Moon in secret, and certainly none of them had the technical knowhow to do what Peridot described.
"In a minute," Peridot grunted. She had both fists wrapped in the wiring, and was pulling at the bundle with her whole body. "The end of the patch is caught…on…something…!"
With a mighty heave, Peridot loosed the wires' ends from the conduit. The object that had been stoppering it flew up and out, arcing overhead in a high path that dropped it at the bottom of the platform's far side.
Connie watched the odd blockage as it drifted toward the floor. It was a golden orb perhaps slightly larger than her fist. A soft light emanated from the orb's surface, trailing across the white stone of the platform as it skimmed past the steps. And as Connie stared, her memory began to itch.
Polarite stood at one of her crates and worked her long fingers under its lid. From out of the crate she produced a small, smooth, oblong carton. And when she opened the carton, she revealed two golden spheres sitting across three little cradles inside. Even from a distance, Connie could see a faint glow around the spheres, and she felt a tingle run through her body as she looked upon them.
Pyrite grunted. "Two? What happened to the other one?" she asked as she accepted the carton from Polarite.
Polarite's measured expression broke for a smile. "I used one as a precaution. No Sapphire am I, but I can make educated predictions."
Back in the strawberry patch, where Shard's forces had unloaded their cargo ship, Connie had caught sight of the golden spheres, which Polarite claimed had come from Shard herself. And Pyrite had seemed to covet them as a weapon.
Her eyes widened, and Connie threw herself into the air after the floating orb. "No!" she screamed.
But she could only watch, trapped in a slow-motion fall as the golden orb struck the floor with a deafening plink.