The all-terrain vehicle engine sputtered before giving out, but the driver cared not that the vehicle it had used was inoperable.  The vixen screwed a helmet onto the pressure suit she wore over her uniform.  The seal of the United Nations Space Agency was visible on her right breast, while “Stavros, Eva” was visible on her left.  She opened the hatch on the vehicle once she had sealed up the suit, starting silently into the cratered “dark side” of Prometheus, a moon of the larger, greener planet Rhea.

Stavros could recall their arrival in the alien system.  It had not been more than two years ago that the first buildings on Gaea, the primary planet of operations, had been erected.  Now, she had witnessed the final undoing.  Seven had attempted to flee Rhea with her, but an attack had damaged the shuttle beyond the capability of even reaching the station in orbit of Prometheus.  Those not killed out right in the crash were too badly wounded to move on.  Eva had held her lover in her arms as he passed on into the next life.

And now, she stood at the edge of a crater, the pristine blue gem that was Gaea filling the horizon of the diminutive moon.  “You bastards!” she yelled, tears dampening the fur around her eyes.  “You killed us! You doomed us all!”  Eva needed to vent her emotions, dropping to her knees.  “Why?” she asked to no one in particular.  “Why didn’t you send more help?”  Tears continued to flow feely down her face, and she ran the gloved fingers of her left paw through the thin dust before her.  Stavros picked up a rock with her right paw and looked at it for several moments before quickly writing something in the soil before her.  She rose and read over the single word that now lay at her footpaws.

Eva gently squeezed the rock in her right paw, and looked out at the word she’d scrawled before her in the Promethean dust.  Taking the rock in her left paw, the vixen shut her eyes and inhaled deeply.  Without another thought, she brought the rock into hard contact with the faceplate of her helm, shattering the transparent silicate easily.  A sudden roar of evacuating air died to silence within seconds; she surrendering her own breath to pass unchallenged.  With all the will she had left, the fair vixen fought the urge to writhe.  As death took hold, Eva fell beside the word she had scrawled in the dust.  The word read: “despair.”