A Case of Time-Travelling Shorts

Death of a Phoenix

Props to xFakingaSmilex for the opening sentence. Hope you like it! (Also, click on the video link for some background music to set the mood)

They say that time is the answer to everything, but when I look back, time was always the problem. They think so too: they've told me in my nightmares. The shit always hits the fan when I'm about to sleep. Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds: the difference between surviving, and being here. I stared through the reinforced glass. I couldn't see far.  Just swirling dust, and flares that caressed the alien sky like a lion might caress a gazelle, if those  things still walked the Earth.

I sat in Phoenix's cabin, my pilot's badge rusted, its wings mocking my failures from underneath the console, where I threw it all those years ago. They blame me. You were meant to save us... Deprived of the chance to rise from the ashes of our solar system, resigned to disintegrate inside it. To never wake. Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds too late to have saved them all. Sweat trickled down my back, soaking into the navy jumpsuit; the coolant system couldn't keep up anymore. The console-needles danced among the oranges, reds, creeping higher with every passing year of silence, counting down the rest of my life with mechanical efficiency.

Month by month, year by year, I've watched the red giant swell in size. Stranded here. Phoenix was a bird without wings. Though I was the only one breathing on-deck, I wasn't alone. They make sure of that.

I used to visit them, down that echoing metallic staircase. I'd stare at the cryo-slumbering faces. But now they haunt me. I think they know what I've done to their friends. They play tricks on my eyes. They do. You don't believe me, but I've seen them. Shadow fingers on the panels. Whispering. You were meant to save us... In my head, I hear their nails scratching at the glass. Wanting vengeance.

Time. There is so much of it when you have nothing left to do. I sucked some stolen cryo-fluid out of a tube, from the empty berths next to the air-lock. They know. Those thirty eight lifeless bodies and eight hours of salvage work. Back when there was a chance that salvation would arrive. I needed the oxygen, the cryo-fluid, so I pushed them out of the airlock all those years ago, their bodies limp and unresponsive. Except that one. Grasping hands and wild eyes. You were meant to save us...

A hangman's laugh escaped my lips. I've failed you all. We were dead. All of us. What difference did a couple of months make? I passed a viewing window: the surface. Its terraforming efforts long abandoned. It looked like a half-wrapped present, wrappings flapping open in the uninhabitable air. They called for my blood, hounding my thoughts down the corridors. I had to get free of them. 

With trembling hands, I punched in the code: 'Release airlock.'

I awaited my freedom as blistering, pork-crackling, tongues of flame encircled me.  But the voices did not stop.They never stopped. The dead are not merciful. They are cruel.