By Rachel Ashcraft
The planet reached up and grabbed Veida.
Her descent had been smooth until something launched from the ground, an old weapon, arcing like a stone. Her ship’s defenses reacted too late. The hit threw off her trajectory, and she lost navigational control. The impact cracked her ship like a nut.
Veida woke to the taste of blood. Not just in her mouth, though her lip was split, but deeper, in the neurolink’s feed, static and blood merged. The signal glitched behind her eyes. The link, implanted near her brainstem, spasmed with every attempt to reconnect. A deep throb in her skull. Pain flared in her leg, bent wrong under her console.
The neurolink blinked alive, a flicker behind her eyes, then died.
The silence inside her skull was terrifying. No diagnostics. No help.
“Reboot,” she whispered hoarsely. No reply.
The ship around her screamed various alarms. Veida crawled for the hatch.
She was here to study the beora, migratory pollinators. Data hinted at a fragile rebirth. If she could document it, she might help save others.
Footsteps.
The hatch hissed open.
Two figures stood in the port. A woman, tall, dark-eyed, her hair pulled back severely in a bun, her facial features wan and chiseled by past hunger, a few mech-implants hung loose, braided together from her ear to the back of her skull. She held a knife by her thigh. Two of her fingers were metal. And a girl, wiry, with a metal arm that caught the sun and blazed golden white.
Veida flinched back. Her vision pulsed with each heartbeat.
“You a city rat?” the woman asked.
Veida tried to speak, but pain blazed through her head. Her thoughts slid. Her link should’ve stabilized her vitals and compensated for shock, but there was nothing.
The girl stepped closer. Her metal arm was old tech, joints soldered by hand. She moved Veida’s hair. Veida tried to pull away, but vertigo curled her inward. The touch was gentle. The ship floor was cool on her cheek.
“She’s not like them, Ma,” the girl said. “No skull ports.”
“She’s linked,” the woman said. “I know that far-off look. Trying to query your neurolink?” She toed Veida’s side.
Veida tried to shake her head. Everything tilted.
“No port,” the girl repeated softly.
The woman knelt. Her calloused fingers hovered at Veida’s temple. “Or it’s inside.” A raised knuckle, as if to knock. She smelled like forest and the Old World oil in the divots of her mechanical fingers.
Veida sank, vision darkening, afraid of the knife. The scent of ozone and scorched bark. The girl’s face hovered, strange, ethereal, glowing.
The girl looked like a deity she had seen revered on an earlier planet. Lyna she would learn her name, just like the sun goddess. What a coincidence, she thought. Where she steps, flowers grow.
Light reflected from the girl’s metal arm. Beautiful, she thought. Then static.
She awoke to voices.
Muted at first, then sharpening. Veida lay still, eyes half-lidded. Her leg throbbed, splinted with some type of fiber and something rigid. The pain felt distant. Medicated. But her skull pulsed.
Status? she queried.
A low drone. Then-
Connection corrupt.
Integrity: 12%.
Warning: Bio-sync desynchronized.
A whine split her skull. She sucked in a breath, jaw clenched to keep from crying out.
“…don’t like it, Lyna,” a woman’s voice said.
“She wasn’t hiding it. It was in a vid strip. Her coat pocket. I just touched it.”
A pause.
“You just touched it?”
“I was curious.”
“You’re always curious. That’s how people get killed.”
Lyna didn’t answer. Paper rustled-a thin, dry sound.
The woman said, low, tense, “She has full records. Cross-species pollination. Recovery zones. Field notes. Taken from the city?”
The pollinator data. Curated by her own hand-mapped hives, bloom patterns, and decades of speculation. Why were they afraid?
“I studied this,” she said. “Before. In the labs.”
“She’s not from the city,” Lyna said.
“We can’t know that.”
“She’s hurt. She got shot down.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. When she doesn’t come back, they’ll send others. They’ll want that ship. This is bad, Lyna.”
Something stirred in Veida’s skull-then broke in static. Her neurolink spat out a half-rendered map:
Bio signs.
Location: scrambled.
She opened one eye. Light filtered through thick cloth draped over a support beam. A shelter.
She needed to explain.
Veida reached weakly for her coat. Trembling fingers brushed the vid strip, nudging it deeper from view.
“I’m getting tea leaves,” the woman said, exasperated. Veida saw her exit the shelter.
A shadow moved. Lyna again, crouched beside her.
“You’re awake.”
Veida met her eyes. Lyna’s metal arm rested on the bed. Sweat slicked her forehead. Heat poured off her. A fever? Veida tried to reach the link-nothing. Cut wires hung behind Lyna’s ears.
An external version of the neurolink. Familiar, but obsolete.
“I’m Lyna. That’s my ma, Caru.”
“Veida,” she managed.
Caru returned. Footsteps, quick and deliberate.
“I told you not to touch her,” Caru snapped.
“She looked at me. She’s in pain. Her head.”
“And you didn’t think I should know?”
“She doesn’t seem dangerous.”
“You’re awake,” she said. Not a question.
Veida tried to nod. “Yes.”
A thin whine cut through her mind—her neurolink was failing to parse voices, assign names, catalogue tone.
“Not City,” she managed.
Caru narrowed her eyes. “No one just comes here.”
“I’m here to study. Fieldwork..”
Caru’s mouth tightened. “Fieldwork?”
“Beora. I came to find them. I have data.” The room spun. Veida clutched her head, sick with vertigo.
Caru leaned back, watching like she still might be faking.
When it passed, Veida glanced at Lyna behind her mother, arms crossed. The girl’s metal arm caught a streak of light. For the first time, Veida saw the damage: scorched plating, rusted joints.
“It’s not functional,” she said hoarsely. “Her arm.”
Caru flinched.
“It’s fine,” she said too quickly.
“I can help.”
“No.”
“I’ve got tools. In my ship. I keep a spare kit for my ankle.”
She slowly drew up her pant leg, revealing mechanics just above her boot. The synthetic joint caught the light. “I do my own maintenance.”
“You don’t look like you can fix anything right now,” Caru said. But her eyes lingered on Veida’s leg.
“Let me prove it,” Veida said. “Please.”
Behind the pain, the link whispered again: intent analysis incomplete. Risk matrix unstable.
A new data point: Lyna has an elevated heart rate. Hope?
She had to make it clear: she wasn’t here to hurt anyone.
The air smelled of boiled greens and something sweet.
Caru knelt in the corner, heating water over a rust-ringed burner connected to a scavenged cell. She used the same dull knife from before to chop vegetables.
Veida’s neurolink pulsed faintly, distorted.
Lyna pulled her arm closer. Her thin, synthetic, oil-based shirt rose just slightly, revealing red, mottled skin at the edge of her elbow. Infection – grade 3, the link supplied. That explained the girl’s pallor. The sweat.
The feed shifted toward Caru. She passed close, retrieving a pot lid. There was a pale surgical scar behind her left ear-wires cut beneath.
Veida leaned closer. The same company that made her own link. An old model. All external at first-bulky and vulnerable to disconnection.
Forced installation?
What model? she queried her link. A 3D image flickered into view. Glitching, but legible. How had it made it here? A planet barely out of its industrial age?
On the counter, Caru wiped her hands on a stained towel and laid the knife down without looking. But Veida felt every motion. Measured. Ready.
“You don’t trust me,” she said.
Caru turned. “You say you’re not from the city.”
“I’m not.”
Her expression didn’t change.
“In my ship,” Veida said, “below the footwell. My tools are there. I can fix Lyna’s arm.”
“You can’t walk.”
“You can get it.”
The silence held. Caru turned back to the pot, letting the steam rise between them.
Caru returned with the kit and set it down without a word.
Veida opened the lid: fine pliers, microdrivers, a torque reader, even injectable antibiotics.
Lyna sat quietly nearby, her damaged arm cradled in her lap.
Veida leaned forward and swayed, nausea rippling through her. Her vision pulsed, and diagnostics bloomed across her inner sight: scattered and contradictory.
Caru stepped closer, eyes narrowing. “You don’t look good.”
She moved to the stove, brought out dried roots, salt, and leaves, and poured boiling water over them.
“Drink this,” she said. “It’ll help with swelling.”
The bitter drink sparked on Veida’s tongue.
Lyna placed her arm on the table. The joint was red, swollen, but the arm’s ingenuity struck Veida. It was formed from repurposed parts, stabilized with scavenged hardware, and padded with boot lining. Crude but sound.
“This is amazing,” Veida said quietly. “Who made it?”
“I did,” Caru replied. “After we left.”
Veida’s gaze drifted past Caru to a chair made of twisted vines, bent and bound eloquently.
“You have an eye for building things,” Veida said.
Caru nodded sharply. “She shouldn’t have needed it.”
Veida took the antibiotic, injected it, and began aligning the joint. Lyna didn’t flinch, watching the procedure the whole time. The neurolink pushed blueprints in front of Veida’s eyes-incomplete and glitchy, but enough to guide her: how joints fit, how to solder, connect nerves, and lubricate.
“It all just came to you? Did you ask your link?” Caru touched the cut wires behind her ear. “They used this to watch us. To cut it is a capital punishment. But to have one like yours—knowledge piped in whenever you ask? Can you show me?”
Veida faltered.
“But that would be too much, wouldn’t it?” Caru said, casting her gaze over their small shelter.
“While I’m here, ask me anything. I’ll do my best to answer. I found your world in an old archive. The name: beora. Pollinators I’ve studied across systems. I came to find how they survive here—how there’s still flora.”
“You’re looking at it,” Caru said. “Just me. Flower by flower.”
“You pollinate all this yourself?”
Caru nodded. “Every season.”
Veida smiled. “That’s incredible.”
Lyna moved her fingers one by one as Veida asked her to test them out. “I know they’re there. The Beora. I can show you.”
Caru cooked the vegetables she pollinated that evening.
After dinner, Veida asked to see the port on Lyna’s head.
“You cut the wires?”
“It stopped. At first, it was constant screaming, an alarm. I thought I was going to go crazy. We couldn’t sleep. Then the closer we got to here, the sounds started to fade. Then silence. I had never heard silence before. In my own head, I mean. It was different. I knew the city’s sounds. The beora. They sawed and hummed like the city. I could hear them first above everything else. I know they’re here. We didn’t start completely from scratch. There was a patch of trees and thorns here.”
In the back of Veida’s mind, she had pulled up the company that made their tech. “Use on outer planets.” She queried.
“BrainLine technology is used across the universe to aid individuals and corporations in reaching their goals. A company with a humanitarian goal of connecting planets and people and making our universe more harmonious.”
Query: Use for enslavement.
BrainLine is a technology used in a variety of situations and planets. The creators are not held liable for use that goes against the intended purpose. With such a vast scope of use, there is no feasible way to monitor all applications.
Veida felt cold.
“What do you know about the Beora?” Caru asked. “You’ve seen them in other places?”
“Yes. Different forms but acting in the same way across multiple planets. The beora’s proboscis is precise, evolved with these plants. An evolutionary pattern repeated.”
“Why study them?”
“To understand how life adapts, how cooperation drives survival, and changes a planet. A quiet resilience. That’s why I’m here—not just for the beora but to see how they fit in this world’s pattern.”
Caru nodded slowly. “And you think we’re part of it.”
Veida met her gaze. “You are. What you and Lyna do off-grid, barely resourced, truly matters. You’ve kept each other alive. Restored tech I’d have discarded. That small-scale survival is the bigger picture.”
Caru looked away, but Veida saw a flicker behind her eyes.
Veida exhaled. “The smallest parts,” she said, “are often holding everything together.”
The next morning, Veida found Lyna near Caru’s garden. A thicket of thorns walled the east side like a living fence.
“I brought something,” Veida said, opening a small tin of seeds. “Fast-growers. Adapted to harsh soil. They’ll give shelter and draw pollinators if conditions are right.”
Together, they planted them, pressing the seeds deep and scattering water drawn from a barrel beside the hut.
As the sun warmed the soil, thin tendrils began to stir. Something moved near the thorns.
“There,” Lyna whispered, pointing. “They’re hiding.”
The vines had overgrown, clustered tight where the beora must have nested. Lyna stepped forward and used her repaired arm to part the thick growth.
A shimmer of motion, then wings. Thin as breath. Translucent and pale, with veins like circuitry. The beora hovered, barely disturbing the air.
They watched how they hovered and knew exactly where to go, how the plants seemed to respond.
“They remember,” Lyna said quietly, still watching. “How things used to be.”
They stood in silence until the beora drifted back into the thorns.
Veida spread out a cloth and began to draw: markings, designs, instructions—how to care for the new plants, how to shelter them, how to invite the beora to return.
Lyna leaned close, pointing and asking questions. Caru watched from a distance, arms crossed, her face unreadable.
In the evening, Veida limped with Caru over to her ship. Caru ran her fingers over the frame. “It’s similar,” she said under her breath. “Even if I don’t want them, I still remember the blueprints. Do you know what’s damaged?”
“Not quite,” Veida admitted.
“What is it like?” Caru asked. “I mean to travel. To have seen all the things you have.”
“This is better.”
Caru laughed.
Veida rested her hand against the door, and it slid upward.
“You can’t say that definitively.”
“It’s always searching, never settling. Existing in-between places.”
“What’s it like to have cut the wires?”
“It’s quiet and it’s empty.” Caru stood in the center of the ship.
“Anti-Visitor shields most likely,” Caru said, kneeling by the controls. “Probably fried something on your entry. But you don’t need my help to fix it.”
“I’d like it, though,” Veida replied.
Caru glanced at her. “You maintain all this yourself?”
“Blueprints.” Veida tapped her temple. “Half our training is ship maintenance. Not ideal, scholars don’t make the best mechanics.”
“But you pulled blueprints for Lyna like it was nothing.”
“Bottom of my class. Still passed.”
Caru laughed. “Can’t you stop? Just settle down?”
“I can’t seem to. There’s always another problem to solve.”
“I guess everyone has their programming.”
“Maybe,” Veida said. “But I carry people with me. I remember their worlds. Their stories.”
“But you leave them.”
Veida didn’t answer. Her neurolink buzzed with a soft, static noise.
Caru tugged at some wires. “I don’t think the whole thing’s fried. Easy fix.”
Veida sat near the back of the small cabin, heart pounding, not for the ship, but for what she was about to offer.
“If you want,” she said quietly, “I can wire you into my system. Not the city’s. Mine. A personal link, tools, knowledge, and systems that could help you and Lyna. You’d have full control. Disconnect whenever you want.”
Caru froze. Her face was unreadable in the soft cabin light. “You want me to reconnect? After everything we told you? After what they did?”
Veida’s chest tightened. “This isn’t like that. I promise-”
“You promise?” Caru’s voice sharpened. “Have you been lying? The ship, the crash, the questions. Are you from the city? Sent to find us?”
The words hit like fists. Veida stood, her ankle twisted. Pain flashed white.
Caru didn’t move.
Then, “Oh, hell. Wait.” She dropped to her knees beside Veida.
The neurolink flared:
Warning: Damage to joint integrity exceeding safe parameters. Continued exertion is ill-advised.
“I’m okay,” Veida muttered.
Caru helped her sit up, then stopped. The console had flickered on when Veida fell. A sequence scrolled: violet-lit gardens, cliffside hives. Worlds Veida had visited. Places she’d studied.
“You’ve been studying them,” Caru whispered. “Not just here. Everywhere. You weren’t lying.”
Veida nodded. “Pollination systems. Patterns between worlds. Species like the Beora exist on hundreds of planets, each playing a pivotal role. I just wanted to understand why. That’s all this ever was.”
Caru sat back against the wall, trembling. “Everything in me was braced for this to be a trap. I’ve lived so long waiting for the net to close.”
“I get it,” Veida said softly. “But I’m just an itinerant scholar with an ankle full of screws.”
Caru laughed, shaky. “I’m not saying yes. To the connection. I’m terrified of it.”
Veida nodded. “Then don’t say yes now. It’s on your terms. Never theirs again.”
Caru looked at her, eyes uncertain. “I’ll think about it. For Lyna.”
They sat at the open hatch. Veida’s leg was stretched out, carefully bound with a taut wrap from the med-kit. The ache pulsed in time with her heartbeat, but the tea Caru had brewed was warm in her hands and better than anything the ship’s dispensers could brew.
Caru studied the horizon. “I wasn’t expecting to react like that.”
They watched as Lyna, just ahead of them, swung her arm around playfully.
She grinned, then jogged the last few steps and flung herself into Veida’s arms.
“You actually fixed my arm,” Lyna said, moving her fingers, thumb to pinky.
Veida straightened, unsure what to do with the warmth rising in her chest.
“I only adjusted a few things,” she said. “Your ma did the real work.”
She could say more. How on one planet could the government have built arms like Lyna’s for war? How she’d once studied the interface specs to disable them, not repair them. How her hands still shook at night when she thought about the carnage.
But she didn’t. She’d let them go.
And for the first time in days, the neurolink hummed at the base of her skull like it used to.
Veida held her. “I’m glad it’s working. I’ll leave you my tools so you can fix it anytime you need.”
“I’ll see you again?”
“You will,” Veida said.
Lyna beamed, then looked over her shoulder. “They’re really back. The beora. They must like you.”
Veida smiled. “I think they like you.”
Caru was quiet.
“You can connect when you’re ready,” Veida said gently, pulling a small chip from her satchel. “Or never. No pressure. No monitoring. My people’s archives. My field notes. It’s not wired to anyone but me. I’ve left the interface simple. You’re in full control.”
Caru’s gaze flicked to the console, then back to the hatch. Through it, she could just see the silhouette of her daughter.
“You gave her freedom,” Caru murmured.
Veida shook her head. “No, that was you.”
Caru didn’t smile, but she held the chip close.
Lyna waved from the ground, her hand raised to the sun, moving her arm freely, light haloing her like in the beginning. That reaching sun goddess; the legend said that where she stepped, the flowers grew. Veida ran a hand behind her ear. There was nothing to tug loose. The action posed only brought images of pain.
Empty, dark, quiet.
Later, long after Veida was gone, an image downloaded from her link. A lush garden. And then more followed. Caru sent her images: flowery patches and the beora, now housed in large wooden structures. Then, more creatures started to appear. They brought with them seeds from other places on the planet that must have been as rebellious as Lyna and Caru’s.
The last image came years later. A view of the planet from space. Lyna, in her own ship, built by her mother’s hands, floating far above, looking down on her planet with its growing forest stretching through the red wasteland.
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