05:41 — Placement. Logged from the command station: six September, five aboard, five green, dwell clock running. Eight hours certified, and we spend them by the timeline. The placement report inside the first quarter hour: cabin placed and seated on the far reference; hull carrying nine hundred and fifty millibars outward; seals dry on all eight segments; power internal; outside gauge forty-nine millibars and steady. Medical, for the record: there is no version of forty-nine millibars that is anyone’s to breathe. Own air, first breath to last.
Two ledgers open at placement, two voices — dose on the quarter hour, drift at the tenths — with a standing instruction that nobody sums them.
Morning — Excursion one. Mast, then the search pattern. Surface party of two, beacons three and five green on the cabin bus, individual at the sill and not before; walk-in under ten minutes from every point of the pattern; drift 0.13 at release to suits. The plan, first page to last: at the threshold we are five people in five couches going home as one mass.
Afternoon. The quarter-hour reports record a surface party of three, out on a strengthening bearing. Dose ledger green to the hour.
13:37:03 — Certified threshold executed. Return called. Acknowledged from the cabin without pause; walk-in ordered, count-off by beacon on the minute.
13:37–13:51. Two minutes into the walk-in, an acquisition eight months in the wanting resolves on the mast. Identification validated twice on the near side — against the spring capture, and against a source record that owed nothing to either — and stated for the loop as identification only. One additional carrier frame recommended by the scientific authority; the recall held by the operational authority, over the certifying officer’s objection, entered before the decision where it could still do work. The frame runs nine minutes and two seconds. The envelope banks, whole.
13:51:32. The line the procedure required, one line, time-tagged:
6 September 2071. Return order reinstated 13:51:32. Certified threshold executed 13:37:03.
The walk-in. The arithmetic on every screen of the mission, and nobody reading it aloud: twenty-three minutes of walking against a margin of fourteen, and the margin falling faster than anyone walked. Depth applied from the near side to widen the window; decay tracking the drive, twice, same sign; no further depth. At the last flag, the recovery page went to verdict on every repeater, both sides of the link:
WINDOW SUFFICIENT FOR ONE COMMON-REFERENCE SOLUTION. CABIN — ONE MASS ON SURFACE-BUS ISOLATION: SOLUTION CLOSES. SURFACE PARTY — THREE REFERENCES: NO SOLUTION.
The last minutes. A reference redefinition, authority key logged, committed from the surface while the sever order was still crossing the loop. The sever ordered twice and refused twice; noted in the cabin log at the commander’s dictation that it would not be ordered a third time. Three surface beacons converging under one boundary — one mark, three suit tags inside it, all green. The cabin one mass on a reference the window no longer reached, the hatch open, the couches rigged.
14:31 — Loss of signal. The combined surface beacon, internally coherent for its ninety-one seconds, dark.
Annex — receive states
As the whiteboard carries them, in the duty lead’s block capitals, dated, because screens change and the accounting would live where a human hand would have to wipe it:
| Station | State |
|---|---|
| Surface party — combined beacon | Dark since 14:31 on the sixth. Unchanged |
| Commander’s beacon | Carrier products, nothing that parses. A receiver assigned around the clock |
| Systems — suit buffer | Buffered fragments. Authenticated. Intermittent |
A recall command goes out every six hours, serialised, logged, countersigned at issue. The fragments come when they come. The floor keeps the receivers manned and the decode standing, and the procedure supplies one word for a watch in which nothing arrives, which is quiet.