Desperation
Cernan draws long breaths, not yet processing his surroundings. His world feels infinitesimally small, as though he can only perceive his own body and the ground beneath it. His hands explore his legs, midsection, chest, then up to his neck and face. Everything is in place. Nothing is mutated or scarred or otherwise mangled.
His Zero Suit is intact, and a few mismatched pieces of his suit's armor remain. Part of the chest plate hangs limp from his shoulder, the other half gone. He feels like he just woke up from a twenty-hour sleep. The last thing he remembers is reaching out to touch Samus, saying... something... to her, then darkness.
Only now does he absorb his surroundings. He recognizes the test lab where he faced off with-
McAlvoy!
He leaps to his feet, spinning to face the safety chamber. He's surprised to see it shattered, its consoles crushed to bits. No sign of the derelict director, no sign of the plasma tank, no sign of...
"Samus?!" he calls out in a panic. No one is there to answer him. The lab is dark, only the faintest light coming from the sparse backup lighting on the walls. He searches for the tachyon gate, but it's gone.
His mind races. What happened? How have things changed this much? Unless...
Cold realization dawns on him. The tachyon wave. It took him as he was transferring his suit. There must have been some reaction, some unforeseeable consequence of the timing of it all and... oh no.
He traveled through time again.
He grips the sides of his head, pulling on hair, and screams in frustration. "Are you kidding me?! AGAIN?! Why the hell can't I just die?!"
000
Cernan travels the dim-lit halls of Lirahad, calling out as he goes. All around him is an eerie dearth of life in this once lived in space. Garbage litters the walkways. Old cabling is strewn about, abandoned. The station's plantlife, once meticulously groomed, has long since expired. It fills him with resonating unease and a supreme sense of isolation. The holographic projectors that once simulated a midday sky have gone dead, exposing the metal rafters above, bearing down on him like a closed fist, gripping him in this artificial wasteland.
Thousands of feet of empty space in all directions around him, yet he feels trapped. He occupies his racing mind by trying to hypothesize what happened. They must have abandoned the station, he thinks. Maybe the tachyon radiation from the gate hung around for a while? If that's the case, the dead plants can't tell me how long it's been.
His mind pulls back to darker considerations. How long has it been..? God, what if it's been another two thousand years? Please, no... I can't do this again... stop it! Get a hold of yourself! Assume nothing, verify what you can.
He steels himself, tracing his steps through the station and back to his apartment.
000
The doors in The Apex still are open, including the emergency stairs. Good thing, since the elevators no longer have power. The station likely opened all doors when McAlvoy's gate started killing people. As Cernan comes to the floor of his place, he glances down the hall. The window he and Samus shattered during their battle has gone unrepaired, with only a temporary opaque plexi put up in its place.
His footsteps reverberate in the unoccupied hall, the lonesome sound reaching his ears and hammering home his isolation. He tries to ignore it.
Like the window outside, his old apartment is still a mess from his fight with Samus. Cernan tiptoes over broken shards of wood, stone, and metal. He skips his room and heads straight into Samus'. He knows she won't be there, but he needs to verify it to settle his mind.
Nothing. No sign she was ever present here.
He drags his feet across the apartment to his room, eyes to the ground. Several tools and various devices litter the floor. He searches around for one of his old datapads, finding one thrown beneath his bed. Of course, it has no power at this point. He brings it to one of the wall chargers scattered about the room, but when he plugs it in, nothing happens. Of course, they probably diverted power to emergency resources only.
But his suit could power it. He closes his eyes and focuses on the suit, trying to call it from the ether. Nothing comes. He snaps his eyes shut again, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists while grunting. Still nothing.
Oh well. Time to get resourceful.
He uses what remains of his gauntlet to bash one of the dim backup lights open. He yanks the light fixture out of the wall, extending the loose cabling within and detaching the bulb hardware. Arranging several electrical parts from the items scattered in his room, he creates a safe circuit to charge the datapad with, then sits down with a heavy sigh, waiting for it to come back to life.
Cernan suddenly feels exhausted, like he's about to fall unconscious right in his chair. With a deep sigh, he hefts himself back onto his feet and trudges over to the bed. However, he stops just short of it. He glances back at the datapad, then walks to Samus' room. He flops down on her bed, sending up a fine layer of dust.
Bit by bit, he strips away what's left of his broken Tachyon suit. Even if he had the hardware to reconstruct it, he doesn't have the technological resources. He'll have to manage without it for now. Eventually he lies in Samus' bed in only his Zero Suit, his last tie to a world outside of himself.
He lays there for what feels like hours, trying to get some rest, but he doesn't feel at ease enough to fall asleep. The shadows feel oppressive, the silence echoes thunderously in his ears.
The thought of Huang cursing his name with her final breath and shriveling up into a frail, bent corpse in his hands burns in his mind. He can see the scientists of BSL trying to claw their way out of McAlvoy's trap and dying in front of him. Every gruesome detail still stands out in his memory. He shifts and rolls over, trying to block it out.
He buries his face in the pillow, trying to pull any remnant of Samus' scent from it, trying to comfort himself. But no matter how much he desperately tries to imagine it, no part of her remains in this place.
No one is here to save him.
000
The moment Cernan awakens, he goes to check the datapad. It has just enough charge to turn on and boot itself, perhaps last a few minutes. He checks through it, trying to find his notes, but nothing about his work remains. He breathes a sigh of relief. His worm worked. All remnants of his research should be gone. At least he can count that victory.
Next, he opens up the station portal page, looking for any important bulletins. Instead, a different page returns.
Lirahad Station servers offline.
Radiation hazard detected. Please proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to an evacuation zone.
He double checks the page's base code. It's not an active infomatic, but a static message forwarded to the device. He tries a different page and gets the same response. Must have forwarded it to all devices before cutting the local network.
He starts hyperventilating and places his hands down on the desk in front of him to keep himself steady. He closes his eyes to keep his head from swimming. "Stay calm. Stay focused. Not out of options just yet."
Gathering himself, he takes a tool belt still lying on the floor, loads it up with what useful equipment he can find, and leaves his apartment, heading for the nearest docking port.
000
Empty. Not a single vessel in sight. Not that he's surprised. Touring the abandoned station explicitly clarified that the station's inhabitants had taken anything of value. He chews on a bar of dry ration, some kind of calorie-dense grain and oats bar. It's bland and tasteless, but he's so hungry he doesn't care if it tastes like cardboard. He scrounged it up from the broken debris of the kitchen. Samus always liked to keep a few tucked away, just in case. Told him she had an assignment back in her GFA days where they lost power and had to go several days without access to a fabricator, and never wanted to experience that again.
He's thankful for her preparedness.
Cernan moves on from this dock, walking the perimeter of the station to the next, then the next, then the next. Not one has so much as an escape pod left. He moves on to the private enterprise levels, but every door to the lab pods is locked. The pods probably disengaged from the station to be towed away long ago.
All the while, he feels creeping dread tighten its grip around his neck. He frequently has to stop to sit and gather himself, his breathing heavy and labored. He wonders if the air in the station needs to be cycled now that all the plants are dead. Maybe he's not getting enough clean oxygen. But that thought doesn't put him at ease. He continues onward, only one thing certain.
He has to get out of here. Soon.
000
Next stop, the communications hub. The ground level of the central spire of the station provides direct access to its primary antenna. Cernan doesn't know if it's even active, but it's his only remaining hope.
There's just one problem. Of all the doors in the station, this one is closed. An enormous set of hydraulic steel doors bars his way.
He pulls a screwdriver from his belt. He grins at the simplicity of it; two millennia still hadn't changed one of the most basic leverage tools. He slides its flat end between the doors, pressing insistently. The tip lodges a good inch deep before stopping. He pushes, grounding himself when he feels his feet start to slide out from under him on the smooth steel floors.
Forcing with all of his might, he feels the doors part just a little. For an instant he smiles to himself, and then, as if to answer his sudden hope, the screwdriver snaps. He lurches forward, tumbling to the ground and slamming into it arms first. He hisses and sits himself up, looking down at his shaking palms. The broken screwdriver slashed through his Zero Suit in the fall, and a bright trickle of red drips down from his palm onto his legs. He squeezes it a few times to see how deep it went; not much, though it stings like hell.
The end of the screwdriver still lodges in the closed door. Cernan grimaces and gets back to his feet, stalking away from the communications entry. "Alright bitch... we'll see about that."
000
When Cernan returns, he's carrying several pieces of scrap he's picked up from the station. Metal bars, coils of wire, steel bracers, anything long enough to provide him some leverage and thin enough to wedge, and a rubber mat for him to stand on from one of the docking bays. He's wrapped his hand in what looked to him like a clean hand towel that he's torn into strips, the rest of which hang from his tool belt.
For hours, he drives his collection of levers into the doorway, over time forcing them further and further apart. Eventually he has several in at once, and he wraps a length of rubber cabling around them to bundle them up together.
He takes position on the rubber mat, letting out a whooshing breath and shaking his limbs loose. Bracing himself, he huffs and pushes. He knows all of them together provide less mechanical advantage, but with enough of them, he's hoping he forces the gap open just wide enough for him to slip through.
Cernan strains and grunts, and the doors crack open with a metal screech. He doesn't let the minor victory get to him this time, instead staying on task and shouting as he pushes his muscles to their limit. They burn and scream as the balls of his feet dig into the rubber mat beneath him. He can see inside the comms station now, along with the faint glow of lit up screens and consoles.
But all the force he's exerting suddenly turns on him. His handle on the bundled levers slips and the doors snap back closed. He falls sideways, and the sharper bits of metal in his amalgamated lever slice through soft flesh as he scrapes across them.
Cernan lands on his back, teeth grit as he scowls in agony. Trembling, he lifts his head enough that he can see blood pooling on his chest from the slashes. That was stupid, he reprimands himself, rolling back and forth to try to distract himself from the pain. His breathing is hot and shallow, catching in his windpipe, burning in his throat. Should have protected myself from the sharper ones. God, that was stupid.
The pain recedes enough that he's able to breathe stale air back into his lungs, and he shakily takes strips of hand towels in his belt and lays them across his chest to blot the wounds. In his agonized stupor, he presses them as deep as he can into the wounds, feeling for how serious they are.
He touches his sternum. The towels rapidly drink in a deep red, the white fibers staining a solid color in a matter of seconds.
Cernan lays there, the pain ebbing and rendering him to a kind of unique, sharpened state of hindsight that only comes after suffering a serious injury. He should have looked for medical supplies before anything else. He's been rushing for a solution to the fundamental problem so much he neglected his survival.
What if he bleeds out? What if this is how he dies? Not to an alien assassin, not to an insane cyborg cultist, not to a legendary bounty hunter, but to his own negligence? He chuckles to himself, wincing as the action causes a spike in pain. If that's the case, it's only fitting, he thinks to himself. After all, it was negligence that brought me here to begin with.
Cernan waits for an end that doesn't come. Then, once he's sure he's still alive, he forces himself to sit upright, hissing as pain shoots through his body. Blood runs down his chest in thin rivers, but not so much that he's in danger. He feels lightheaded.
In that lightheadedness, he glances up at the wall beside the door... his expression falls... and he curses his own stupidity.
On the wall, he reads the words Manual door crank — Open panel to use, just above a hinged steel panel with a handle on it. So focused on the problem, he failed to see a solution just under his nose. He cracks into a laugh so loud and energetic tears roll from his eyes.
He laughs at the absurdity of it all.
Cernan struggles to his feet and pulls the panel open with little effort. Inside is a wheel with a rubberized handle, with arrows painted on it showing the direction to turn it.
"In my defense, those letters are very faded," he says aloud, trying to convince himself. He takes hold of it with both hands, letting the towels on his chest fall to the floor. He winces as stagnant air touches the open wounds. "Make sure you follow the direction of the arrows, Cernan! Wouldn't want to miss the obvious instructions, Cernan!" he openly derides himself.
It isn't easy, but with his remaining energy, he cranks open the doors. His useless bundle of levers falls to the ground with a loud crash. He steps over them, huffing and wheezing. His wounds are superficial, but he needs to treat them soon or risk infection. Fortunately, he finds an intact first aid kit stored right next to the entry doors, bolted to the wall. He pulls out ointment, gauze, bandages, and a disinfectant ray he hopes is still functional.
Stumbling over to a chair sitting in front of a host of computer screens, he treats and dresses his cuts, then lies there limp, staring at the ceiling and embracing the actualizing sting of his wounds. The pain grounds him in the moment. With a deep, tired inhalation, he rights his posture, turns to the consoles, and gets to work.
000
"Day three of my isolation. I've scrounged up as many of the ration bars as I could from the wreckage in my apartment. A thorough search of the others only found some spoiled dinners left behind when the residents evacuated. Can't risk getting sick, so I left them. Most of the people here probably depended on food fabricators for their meals, so they never worried about having to go without them. It's not like Lirahad didn't have regular contact with the outside world, so they didn't need to store food."
Cernan sits in front of the communications console, absorbing his reflection in the screen. To keep track of the days, he's kept a log of his time spent on the station.
"Speaking of which, I'm surprised I haven't gotten contact from anyone on Herelia Prime. It's in this system, so it's not like the signal I sent out can't get to them. At least, assuming the comms array is still fully functional. I ran a diagnostic again, and it's still powered by the solar generators, and I'm getting back full checks on all systems. I don't understand what's wrong. Still, I'm going to sit tight."
He pauses. Outside of his tribulations, there's not much to say.
"... that's all for today." He reaches forward and shuts off the recording.
000
"Day six. I'm rationing my... rations. I'm down to two bars. Just going to have half a day for now. Still no word from anyone. Now I know why. Lirahad isn't close to Herelia Prime any more. I went to one of the observation decks and got a good look at the sun. It's a white dwarf. The star of the Herelia system is yellow. So... they moved Lirahad. I suppose it makes some sense. Wouldn't want some dumb kids to borrow daddy's space shuttle and take a trip out to the haunted science station potentially rife with tachyon exposure on a dare. And for all the brushing up I did on engineering and physics when I got here, I never did the same for astronomy. I have no idea what the constellations are if I'm not on Earth. No way to pinpoint where I am."
He falls quiet, lacing his fingers together and resting his face on them. His facial hair has gotten scraggly, and he scratches it with the sides of his fingers.
"What I can't figure out is why I'm still on Lirahad if they moved it. The last time I suffered a tachyon-related accident, I was flung thousands of light years into space. Now I'm in a different system, but still localized in the same celestial vehicle. Hm. Questions to answer later. In any case, the antenna here is powerful enough to reach across three systems. Someone will pick up the distress signal." His voice betrays his lack of certainty. "I broke open some plumbing to scavenge drinkable water. Took a lot of breaking, but I think as long as I have access to more apartments, I'll be fine on that front."
He reaches down and holds up a plastic jug that sloshes with discolored water.
"No matter how much I boil it, it stays this color. Tastes like stale garbage but it's better than dying. Anyway... I haven't explored all the residential buildings yet. The ones closer to the core of the station are military barracks. Maybe I'll find more rations there."
He's quiet again.
"... I want to talk to someone. Anyone."
After another moment of silence, he reaches forward and shuts off the recording.
000
"Day... day twelve."
Cernan doesn't immediately say anything more. He sits there, head bowed toward the ground, leaning forward on his knees. His beard has gotten thick and dirty, with flecks of indescribable material stuck within it.
"... I've been hearing things. Sounds off in the distance, getting closer. It started a few days ago. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to sound like a rambling madman. But maybe if I talk about them, they'll go away."
His head slowly rises.
"I am... I am Doctor Cernan Roan. I created Earth's first prototype FTL starship engine." He smiles. "And if you think I sound like a babbling lunatic now, hang on to your seat."
Cernan sits straight up, staring not at his own image on the monitor, but straight into the camera, challenging it. He can barely look at himself anymore. He's gotten so thin that he can see his skin hanging on his bones.
"History says I died in a failed test of that engine, but the truth is I got thrown two thousand years into the future. I met a woman named Samus Aran. She saved my life... many times, in fact. During our time together, she fell in love with me, somehow. And... though I tried to ignore it... I fell in love with her."
He looks up, staring into the shadows looming in the rafters. His hands come up to stroke his face, feeling how shallow his bony cheeks have become.
"All I wanted was to go back to my fiancée. She was pregnant, and I didn't know until I got here. So I deliberately ignored how I felt about Samus. I thought if I never entertained the thought of staying here, never considered reasons to stay, I'd have no other choice but to prevail. I came up with the batshit crazy plan of making a working time machine. And for what it's worth, I succeeded."
Cernan leans forward again, staring into the camera. He motions to the surrounding room with one hand.
"But it was too dangerous. It's what left Lirahad like this. And the man who made it possible for me took that tech and almost killed everyone aboard the station."
Cernan's gaze falls.
"He... he did kill everyone on the station. At least seven times. Samus and I tried to stop him but... but I was too weak. I kept getting in her way, or she'd hurt herself trying to protect me. I watched her die... over and over and over again. And then I'd kill McAlvoy and use the gate to send me back. I could only ever go back to the start of that fight. And the more I fought, the more exhausted I was. I... I gave up."
He buries his face in his hands.
"So I put it on her instead. Abandoned any responsibility and left her to clean up after me. I gave her my suit, and I don't know if she succeeded or died anyway. I haven't seen human remains on the station, but for all I know, it got cleaned up between then and now. God... if I went through all that and still didn't save anyone... save her... maybe I deserve this."
He's quiet for a long time.
"I don't even know how long it's been."
Another long silence.
"I keep seeing Dr. Huang when I try to sleep. I keep seeing my own hands bashing Dorian into a pulp. I keep seeing Samus die, over and over again... sometimes in ways I know didn't happen. It's getting harder to distinguish which ones are memories and which are just nightmares. It's just like before…"
He trails off.
"Maybe I deserve this. I told myself I chose this era because going back was too costly. It was going to get people killed. But maybe that was just a convenient excuse to latch on to. It might be true... but it's also true that this future was enticing. That Samus was enticing. Maybe choosing to abandon my plans wasn't a decision made from pragmatism. Just trying to put a noble spin on it, claim I'm protecting people. Maybe it was just bog standard infidelity. Living in a fantasy was more important than raising my son."
He stares off to the side, through space.
"Even if I could get out of this, I am never, ever, going to try to go back again."
He stares straight into the camera again, his expression hard.
"Cernan Roan is dead."
And he reaches forward to shut off the recording.
000
The next day, Cernan takes his daily trip to the comms station. He sits there, his own reflection looking back at him, taunting him. Empty nothingness pervades every fiber of his being.
He's given up on anyone finding him. It won't matter, they won't make it in time. So what point is there in continuing this wasteful ego trip? No. No, it no longer matters. He reaches forward and closes the recording program.
As he sits there, holding onto the reserves of his energy, he tries to reflect on happier times. It's not Samus' face that he sees in his mind's eye, but Veronica's. Nervously holding her hand as they wait out the rain on their ruined first date. The tender sensation of her skin beneath his lips the first time they made love. The happy, tearful expression on her face when he proposed to her.
"I don't want to die like this..." he murmurs. What should be a spirit bolstering cry to the heavens comes out as little more than a hoarse, defeated whisper.
With what remains of his depleted reserves of energy, he lifts his frail body back up and shuffles out of the comms station. He's not sure how long it takes to get to the overlook by The Apex. Time doesn't mean anything to him at this point. He leans on the guardrail for support, his breaths weak and shallow. He struggles to keep his sunken, tired eyes open.
From here, Cernan can see the impact his body left behind when Samus speed boosted him out the window and into the park below. Faced with the grim certainty of his mortality, all he can seem to focus on is his regrets. The deaths of everyone aboard the station weighs him down seven times over. He submits to nihilism, thinking his existence was a mistake.
His gaze travels down to the level beneath him. A dark, intrusive thought forces itself to the forefront of his mind.
"All of this was my fault... ever since I got to this time..." he mutters to himself, overlooking the dead park in front of him, slumped over the edge of the balcony. "Dad was right about me..."
A far off memory occurs to him, as though incensed by his wallowing self-pity. Samus glares down at him, chewing him out for his self-obsessed ego.
You're sitting here pretending like this is all because of you, acting like you're the center of the universe, like you're the only person responsible and the only person who can fix this. Grow up. Bad things happen and they're rarely ever because of one person. The worst things almost never are. Life is more complicated than that.
The memory ignites a spark, kindling something within him.
But if you want to sit here in this cell and self-flagellate, fine, I'll leave you in here and deal with this alone. I'm always ready to deal with problems like this on my own.
"No..." His eyes harden and he grits his teeth. Suddenly, he pushes himself back up. "You know what, no! I didn't kill those people. McAlvoy killed them! I might have made the base design for the gate, but he's the one who went overboard and built the damn thing in a populated area!" His hoarse, dry voice raises further as he rants. "In fact, I fucking saved most of the civilians on this station! I'm sure of it! And I did it alongside a god damned intergalactic superhero! I might not have much faith in myself, but I know her. How in the hell could I ever doubt her?! She absolutely saved those people!" he shouts into the void. His tone claws out from the pit of despair, steadily growing more manic.
Cernan leaps up onto the ledge, spreading his emaciated arms wide.
"You know what else? I made the first interstellar engine and jump started humanity's space age! I saved billions of lives from a resource-death apocalypse! And I made fucking time travel!"
He paces back and forth on the ledge, somehow maintaining his balance, counting on his fingers.
"And I was engaged to the smartest, most gorgeous woman on Earth. We were gonna have a family! And you know what else? Two-thousand years later, somehow, I charmed the most badass bounty hunter in the galaxy without even knowing it!"
He whips around, shouting into the empty station in front of him.
"You hear me?! I'm a god-damned history maker and a fucking supergalactic time-traveling paramour! So fuck you, dad! I'm more than you ever were!" he screams, voice hoarse and ragged. "And in the end you died in dirt in the middle-of-nowhere Georgia, and I'm going to die on a fucking space station two-thousand years in the future!"
His defiant roar is so energetic, he loses his balance and tumbles backward off the ledge. His body throbs with pain, but all he can do is stare up at the ceiling in quiet contemplation.
"Two millennia to get the hell over you and my death knell is cursing your name... god damn you."
Cernan's outburst was so extreme he's sure it should have burned through his dwindling calories. Yet despite that, he feels more energetic than he did before his frenzied diatribe. He gets to his feet, brushing himself off.
He can feel his sudden burst of vigor receding already, and opts to capitalize on it. "Well... if I'm going to die here, I'm going to make one more log. I have some things I need to say."
And with that, he starts off toward the comms hub again, now with determination and defined purpose.
00000
If you have a moment, please consider answering any of these questions for me in a comment!
1. If you don't know who Cernan is, do you feel like you got a good feel for his personality? If you do, did this chapter seem in character for him?
2. Do you mind that this chapter diverts from focusing on the Crosshair crew?
3. Does the chapter make you want to know what happens next?