Then she walked to the horizon, as far from the shaft as her failing suit could take her, and sat down on a ridge of frozen ammonia to watch the stars. Behind her, the Sisyphus detonated. The nuclear flash turned XV-827 into a brief, furious sun. The shockwave vaporized the shaft, the cathedral, the sphere.

By the time she reached the surface, the radiation storm was beginning. The Sisyphus ’s reactor would go critical in six hours. She had no ship. No fuel. No hope.

Her EVA suit was old, patched with memory-polymer tape in three places. But it held. She stepped out onto the surface of XV-827, and the silence was absolute. No wind. No seismic tremble. Just the faint, subsonic groan of a world freezing to death.