A scowling, elderly man clomped back and forth in front of us, the clicks and whirs of his electroflexor leg casings echoing through the ship’s antechamber. Monocle-like devices grafted onto his eye sockets held folds of drooping skin from obscuring his vision.

 

“New Eden is a chance for war veterans to wash away past sins and find redemption,” he said, gesturing towards a holographic projection above our heads. The Mendicant Chaplain was clothed in a nondescript skinsuit synonymous with those of his order. Does medevacking wounded soldiers from combat constitute a sin? I pondered skeptically.

 

The holographic sphere depicted dark, fertile plains under an ochre sky, then faded into pristine bodies of water meandering between mountain ranges.

 

“All colonists quickly discover that self-sacrifice and hardship are realities of life on the surface, especially since the voyage is a one-way ticket,” he continued.

 

“And why is that?” Someone from the opposite end of the antechamber verbalized my thought.

 

“Simple. New Eden is subject to constant volcanic activity,” the chaplain answered in annoyance. His brow furrowed, wrinkling the tattoo denoting his rank within Mendicant’s Salve, a humanitarian order assisting those scarred by the war.

 

“Its many volcanoes belch their contents dozens of miles into the sky, mixing with the frigid air of the thermosphere to create a planetary storm field known as the Defile. Descending through it is no easy task, but flying up against the grain is just too dangerous,” he explained. "Is the risk worth the payoff? That is for you to decide."

 

We peered out the plasteen viewport of Sorrow’s End one final time. Below the Defile’s discordant swirls of ever shifting atmosphere my new home awaited. Four months prior, I'd received a tightbeamed transmission from Mendicant's Salve, advertising free plots on a newly terraformed planet. This would be my chance to reclaim some sense of inner peace lost to the horrors of war.

 

Later, all 232 would-be colonists boarded a compact dropship in the cavernous hangar of Sorrow’s End. An androgynous voice chimed from the ship’s intercoms. “Touch down in Kidron will occur in approximately 30 minutes. Please store your personal items and secure yourselves for the drop.”

 

After attending to my belongings, I donned a polymer-based thermsuit whose silky outer layer seemed immune to wear. A faceplate extended autonomously from the back of the suit, covering my head. I climbed into my designated suspension couch as a sheath enveloped me. Viscous shock-gel slowly filled the enclosure from drains below.

 

* * *

 

As we neared New Eden's atmosphere, the ship’s approach vector angled drastically; braking thrusters flared, arresting our speed. The Defile raced up to us in a torrent of gales and shards of basketball-sized ice. The ship shuddered in response, but I was largely spared its convulsions by the shock-gel cocooning me. Smoke filled the ship's interior as oxygen and electrical lines ruptured overhead. The lights flickered and went out.

 

Panic overtook me. In response, my thermsuit’s inner membra injected hundreds of microscopic subdermals, which instantly slowed my heart, erased my mounting anxiety, and left me comfortably sedated. Which was a timely boon, because a fiery explosion in the ship's aft temporarily blinded me. Almost immediately, clinking noises sounded against the fiberglass sheath covering my suspension couch. A deluge of darkness churned around me, spewing silt and mud everywhere. Wind whipped the ship's innards across my blurred line of sight.

 

We fell through the murk like an insect battered by heavy rain. The clinks against my enclosure became pelting fists of rock and ice, creating fissures between me and certain death.

 

The smoke eventually cleared, revealing a gaping breach in the vessel’s midsection. The hull groaned against the Defile’s relentless assault, and was suddenly torn in two. My section of the ship plummeted.

 

Soon, light from outside my mangled liferaft appeared, marking the end of our passage through the Defile. Beyond the breach, distant mountain ranges somersaulted across my vision. Plains materialized across an ever-shifting horizon just prior to an inevitable crash landing. The concussive force of the impact, absorbed in part by the shock-gel, momentarily knocked me unconscious.

 

By some stroke of luck, the sheath of my couch suffered only dents and cracks. Around me, the remaining couches’ protective plating had shattered, carrying only the pulped viscera of their passengers. I exited what remained of the ship's hull into New Eden.

 

Frozen, lifeless plains and ash-covered rock formations stretched in every direction. Absent were any signs of human habitation, or of Kidron. The detritus of other vessels scattered the landscape like so many demolished dreams. Everything we were told was a lie. My thermsuit’s built-in commline crackled just then, followed by the Mendicant Chaplain’s voice.

 

“Mendicant’s Salve hereby sentences you to death for aiding, abetting, and committing war crimes in Ruptured space. May the Creator grant you mercy in the afterliii–.” The commline signal cut out seconds after my headpiece retracted into the back of my suit, apparently by some remote means. Despite the heavy sedative, I felt New Eden's draconian cold sear my face and lungs irreparably. No amount of tinkering with the suit’s settings succeeded in redeploying the faceplate.

 

Breathless, I fell backwards and squinted up at my fading future. Dozens of tiny specks hurtled across the skyline like fiery comets. Heh, gonna need lots of compost…to grow a garden of this size.