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Depictions of illness and vomiting, religious themesedited by Amanda Helms
Sara collapsed into the folding chair in the rhomboid of shade by the camper pod, stared out at Terga’s vast red plains and tried to remember the French for ‘danger’. Her brain shuddered like the heat haze, but it wasn’t really to blame. It was dying, after all.
“Guess I’ll get my own.” Lucifer unfolded another seat with a thwipp of canvas to set it down in a petulant puff of orange dust. The chair wasn’t the same as the set that came with the pod. In point of fact, it wasn’t real at all. Nor was he. He was not rustling his butt down prissily into the seat, on this planet, in this system, so far away from home and so close to death.
“I didn’t want you to sit there,” Sara told him. “Hence, no chair.”
Lucifer ignored it, just the way her father did whenever she’d said something he didn’t want to hear. He’d taken her father’s form too, just to further piss her off. Dad had been a believer, born again into the church and not a fan of its Adversary, who was, apparently, sitting next to her twisting a cork out of an evil-smelling bottle of hooch with a rubbery pop and grinning with Daddy’s own teeth.
“You want some? Oh no, of course not. Still, sun’s over the yardarm, right?”
Lucifer had appeared last night after the worst of it, and hadn’t left since.
“‘Au secours’,” she tried, ignoring him. “No, wait, that means ‘help’.” She licked parched lips. It had been a long time since French class and she’d hated the teacher’s guts. “Not exactly succinct, anyway.”
“Mayday. That’s from the French, isn’t it? M’aidez,” he offered, overegging the accent to a heinous degree.
Sara lolled her head back over her shoulder to drawl in his direction but avoided actually looking at him. The yellow goat’s eyes in her father’s face were unsettling. “Nice try,” she said. “Means the same thing.”
“Of course. The last thing you want is to attract people here thinking they could help you.” He was leaning heavily on the sarcasm, but it was true. Sara didn’t want anyone to come here.
“Shh, now. I want to watch the transit.”
Above them, a gas giant filled half of Terga’s sky with whorled bands of malachite and olive green. One of its moons crept over its face, shadow skittering over the roiling cloud deck like a thief rifling through a drawer of silk underwear.
“Of course, it must just be ‘danger’,” she said. She’d have slapped her own forehead, but for the waste of energy. “Like Dangerous Liaisons. ‘Liaisons dangerooz’, isn’t that how they said it? You should know—probably there when it was being written.”
“Why are you even bothering?”
“Don-jer. Don-jay,” she said, ignoring him and instead experimenting with the mouthfeel, seeing which one sat right. At least it was likely spelled the same as the English.
“You should try drinking something again.” Lucifer’s voice was softer, verging on solicitous. If she hadn’t spent the last four hours vomiting and known exactly what effect more fluids would have right now, she might have believed he cared. He nodded towards the windmill. “You know, something not that.”
She resented his tone. Every single damn test had shown it should have been completely safe. And of course, that’s why she was here. Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d had a lot of choice.
She didn’t want to stand up, but she needed to find something to write with. And on. To put the word ‘Danger’ in as many languages and places as she could throughout the exploration camp before the end came.
***
She made a valiant attempt at scratching a symbol into the surface of the drill rig-cum-windmill above the borehole. The siding was corrosion-hardened, of course. But the spare drill bit she’d picked up was diamond-tipped.
“It doesn’t look like that,” Lucifer brayed as he leaned against an upright of the windmill’s tripod. “That’s the nuclear waste symbol.” The pump shaft within the polycarbonate sleeve heaved and sighed while the metal fins above turned, similarly plaintive. He didn’t, in fact, need to shout over the noise but clearly was the sort to enjoy being loud when people had headaches.
Sara rolled her eyes, spiking more pain through her skull. “It doesn’t matter. Gets the gist across.”
“You’re wasting your time, don’t you think?”
He looked like Harrison now, her eighth grade xenography teacher. The one who’d been the first ever to teach her about well testing.
That Lucifer, he loved a good barb.
She dropped the drill bit, arm limp. She was losing feeling in her fingertips, but it was hard to tell if it was from the work or the sickness.
“Why?” she asked, then got annoyed with herself for letting him bait her.
“They’ll probably get the hint from your dead body.” His posture was defensive. He stared at the ground for a while; the same breeze that was tickling the windmill vanes fluttered his hair.
“Besides,” he said finally, “what the hell do you owe these people?”
Mr. Harrison, the teacher, had found the very existence of well testers an affront to humankind. The idea of companies firing humans through space to check if colony planets were inhabitable, well, he’d made a lot of very pointed remarks about it, but Sara had been perversely drawn to the notion. To throw yourself off into the dark without knowing if you’d ever come back. To be the first to drink from a planet’s waters, trapped deep beneath the crust in a perfect bottle; to taste the forbidden liquor of an ancient sea.
“They might assume I died of starvation. The exploration camp was only stocked for six months. Could be a hundred years before the next expedition gets here.” The orange dust of the dry ground was getting so bright it threw spots into her vision. “Anyway. I don’t know them, don’t know who they’ll be. Could be…”
A dizzy spell slumped her to the hard ground. Her eyelids fluttered, shuttering the light of the sun, so white, so painful. Open, shut? Shut. Yes, shut was better.
“Sara?” Lucifer called from very far away. “Sar?”
***
“All long-range testing shows the remote probes have done a sterling job of engineering a breathable atmosphere.”
She examined her hands, rubbing a thumb across her other palm. The dermatitis from the dishwasher job was flaring bad today. “So, when I get there… I’d have to do some testing?”
The Bettera recruitment agent, an oil slick of a man, smiled on the other end of the beam. “That’s right. You’ll start out in a completely sealed environment. The pod will provide you atmosphere, and there’s the suits, of course. Then, when you’re sure that there’s nothing untoward, you can move on to in-person tests.”
Sara blinked at him slowly, making him spell it out.
“You’ll need to interface with the atmosphere and artesian water table, physiologically. Breathe. Drink.”
“You mean, rawdog a planet,” she said, pleased at how his mouth crawled in a sine wave of distaste.
“You could put it like that. But you’ll have done multiple tests to ensure your safety before that. You’ll be trained. Trust me, we want you to succeed here. You’ll be spearheading an entire community’s future. And let’s be realistic, before the atmospheric engineering, the planet’s surface was basically vacuum. There’s not going to be anything alive down there.”
Sara nodded. “But you need to be sure, right? Before you colonise.”
“Before we fully develop,” he corrected, chin lifted. “And then, as I mentioned, you’ll be compensated with lifetime citizenship, a high-spec home pod, a generous income, and the esteem and gratitude of the entire community.”
Esteem. Gratitude. “Sounds nice.”
“So, let’s get you signed, yeah?”
***
She was supine in the shade of the camper pod again, no idea how she’d got there. One of the precious drink cans of pure water was open by her head. The taste and smell of stomach acid told her a story, too. There was a pathetically small damp-darkness on the hard baked soil by her head, shaped like regret.
It took her several attempts to lift herself from flat-out to half-seated, propped up on her elbows, which complained urgently about the fact.
“Oh, I see you’re awake,” Lucifer said from the camp chair again. “In ancient Sumeria,” he drawled, unhelpfully, “when a bad omen came, they’d get a decoy for the king.” He was dressed this time in the body of Janek, the first boy she’d fallen madly, passionately in love with, and the first boy to shatter her heart. He was making a point. Again.
“So, if there were an eclipse, or an earthquake, some sort of sign that prophesied the death of the king, they’d go into the population to find someone who looked enough like him and let them live in the palace for a few months dressed in the royal robes. He’d get to feast, and sleep on fabrics as soft as love, get waited on hand and foot. For the duration of the danger period, whoever they’d chosen got to live like a king.”
“Sounds pretty good,” Sara rasped. She could use some soft silks and servants right about now.
“It was. For a time. In order for the king to be safe, someone had to fulfil the prophecy. So, at the end they’d kill the decoy, just to be sure.”
She groaned as loudly as she could, given the circumstances.
“They weren’t gonna kill me at the end of this.”
“You sure?” Lucifer-Janek asked, bottle poised at his lips, smug. “What exactly did Bettera Corp promise you in exchange for the possibility of dying alone on an alien planet?”
“Something no one else ever had.”
***
“You know, guinea pigs were neither from Guinea nor pigs.”
“Fascinating. Do you know any Chinese characters?”
“Of course I do. But you don’t.”
Sara had crawled up to the pod roof to mark it. In the absence of any other ideas, she made X shapes, from one corner to the other, finger painting with the last of her tomato soup. She couldn’t eat it, in any case. Dragging herself up here had taken forever. She collapsed on her back, one knee up, to rest for a moment.
“Guinea pigs came from South America. A good source of protein.” The thought of rodent meat reignited her stomach’s violent mood. “It wasn’t until later they were used in scientific experiments. I’m still not sure why. Rabbits were more plentiful.”
“So what?” she said flatly, rolling onto her side to curl into a ball. “Why do I care about what they did to small furry animals?” Lucifer, as Gyri, lecturer at Betterra University, smiled sardonically and she suddenly took his meaning. She was the guinea pig. The dehydration was making her slow.
Gyri had been the one to tell her: actually, well testers were an ancient practice. Betterra required all recruits pass the Introduction to Exobiology course at their own university. Gyri, Professor of Exploration Studies, had a habit of tangents, and this one had wandered from microbiology into history.
If settlers in the wilderness wanted to start a new village, they’d first dig a well. To make sure the water wouldn’t kill everyone before they even started, they’d send one person to stake it out, drinking from it, and see if they survived. If they did, they were rewarded and given a place of honour in the community. If they didn’t, they’d just dig a well somewhere else and try again.
It was a practice that science should have eliminated by the modern era. Except that xenobiology was, by definition, beyond human science at times. You couldn’t test for everything if you didn’t know what everything was yet. So, you had to send a human.
She’d been weirded out that a Bettera U. lecturer had freely told recruits of the potentially fatal side of their future expeditions. Now she wondered if it was a case of plausible deniability.
“I’m not a guinea pig,” she said, looking up at his silhouetted form against the pale sky. The pain in her eyeballs made the vision of Gyri with the yellow, slitted-pupil eyes jump and pulse. She laughed as she coughed up a little more bile. “I’m a coal mine canary.”
She could stretch herself out across the soup marks and make her bones a saltire visible from space. Or would they just blow away in the next storm?
She needed to think bigger.
***
She stooped to toss aside the large chunk of red agate. Smaller pebbles she could toe aside with her boot and shuffling steps were all she could manage anyway, but the bigger stones were slowing her down. The sun was getting higher, and she was already dehydrated.
“The Nazca were better at this stuff.” Lucifer was now her mother, disappointment at wasted potential written into her very posture.
“The Nazca lines, you mean.” In South or maybe Central America? She was scuffing the words ‘KEEP OUT’ in twenty-metre-long letters into the plain. A long way to go though, she was still only on the second ‘E’. “But what did their pictograms even mean?”
“I like to think they were frightening off any gods who might descend from the skies and attempt to take the land. Hey, no, don’t come here, have you seen the size of our hummingbirds?”
“You’re boring me now.”
Lucifer glanced back over her shoulder at the drill rig by the camper pod, as if to make some joke, but stopped at Sara’s warning look.
“Hey, listen, I think I speak for both your parents when I say, ‘You should stop this and sit down and try to drink something’.”
“Can’t,” she said and shuffled her feet further, swaying like a boat mast and stumbling every other step. “Can’t stop.”
***
“No, you stop. Listen to me, you have to make those bastards come get me.”
Sara held the pad close to her face, peering into it as if she could see the figures lurking behind her abandonment, just off screen, if she craned her neck enough.
Lipton, her handler, shook his head from the other end of the beam. “It’s Betterra, they’re not…” Static crackled as he got further away. It was a slow job, moving a space station, but it would get exponentially faster as it broke its grav bonds with its parking spot beyond the gas giant. “There’s been a hostile takeover, Sara, I don’t know what to tell you.” His tone suggested she was the one being unreasonable here. Well, then fuck it.
“Tell them they’re murderers. Tell them if I get out of here, I’ll sue them for reckless endangerment, felonious negligence, moral homicide…” And if she didn’t? What if she didn’t get off Terga?
Lipton had the decency to look sad. “I’m going to do my best to get you evac as soon as I can. You know it’s going to take some time to get the new board’s attention. But sit tight, you’ve still got, what, eight weeks left?”
Sara flicked up her inventory screen. “I mean, max. A hard, hard max. You’d better tell them: Terga is not going to spring crops in eight weeks. The soil is unconditioned, there’s hardly any organic matrix…”
“Have you tested the artesian bore? Is it fit for consumption?”
“I haven’t. Because there was meant to be medical help on standby and you never got that scheduled, remember?” She’d been irrigating, attempting to rehab some soil into arable. That was it.
“You never know.” Lipton’s face shimmered in static again. The comms were stretched so thin, space dust was interfering with the laser signal. And there was a noticeable lag. “At least it’s there. As a last—”
The screen went black.
***
“If it’d been me, I wouldn’t have drunk it.” The son of a bitch was wearing the recruitment agent’s face now, the one who’d signed her up.
They sat in the camp chairs and looked out towards the windmill, its faint metallic creaking like the calls of distant peacocks walking the lawn of an English manor from the days of the Raj. “You still had potable in supply.”
“I was nearly out. Either way I was dead.”
“And you had to know.”
“Yeah. Not just for me.”
There were others who’d follow. Ones who might try what she had.
“Sacrificing you was always built into this equation. Corporations are sociopathic, you know that! That’s why I keep telling you, you shouldn’t warn them. Let them, and the people that use them to settle here, find out the hard way.”
“There are a lot of people who say, ‘I suffered, so should they.’ But they don’t really mean it. Not deep down.”
Lucifer scoffed.
“A lot of people take jobs that might kill them,” she snapped. “Firefighters, soldiers, plague doctors… Are you going around bothering them? Asking if they should let someone die just because they might?” She threw a pebble weakly at his head. It sailed straight through.
Lucifer grinned and patted the side of his slicked-back coiffure, unoffended. “I mean, them I’m used to. Been trying to get them to see sense for aeons, and no dice. But you? What—and I use this term advisedly—the hell were you thinking?”
“That life should mean something. To me, even if it doesn’t to Betterra.” She flirted with unconsciousness but danced away. “The water of life.”
“Uisge beatha is water of life. Whisky. You’re rambling now.”
Sara couldn’t reply. The pain of her thirst now was a high-pitched sawing. Her body was seizing as it took hold. The end was coming. But she knew what she’d meant, so he did too. He was just being a contrarian son of a bitch again.
The water. It was life and it was death. And if she warned no-one about it, death would fall from her hands. Or life, if she warned them. It was her life that she’d given. It was her death they had taken. But she’d given them life back. And death and life and death and life.
Water. It came in a cycle, didn’t it?
***
She’d stood over the bore head that day, looked at the flow gurgling into the trough and made herself decide. The windmill had sawed and whined in the breeze as the pump raised and sank. The trough piped out to the test ground with its withered abortions of a crop. Even after composting and shovelling out her shit, the plants had atrophied, white leaves like they’d been growing under a paving stone.
There’d been one dice throw left.
She’d done endless tests; no obvious concerns. The potable water supplies were far too low. If she got a laser call tomorrow, they still couldn’t get to her in time. And what was the likelihood of that? The bore might give her an extension.
She’d spent her life wasting time, taking endless menial jobs, disappointing parents, running away from things.
It had sung benevolently as it splashed out of the pipe. She’d cupped a hand under and brought it up, trickling clear and cold through her fingers. “To my health,” she’d whispered, and sipped. She’d blinked and stared out at the desert and waited. Then she’d dipped her hand for another mouthful.
It wasn’t until the next day that her stomach hadn’t felt right.
***
The sunsets on this planet were incredible, it had to be said. Perhaps because it would be her last, she paid rapt attention, lying flat on the patch of soil she just couldn’t manage to get up from.
“I’m scared,” she said. Or perhaps just thought.
“I know,” Lucifer said, as her childhood dog. “I’m sorry.” He curled up into a ball under her arm by her ribcage and she fancied she could feel the heat.
“Will I see you, after?”
Lucifer snuffled his nose, sneezing orange dust, then resting his chin on her belly. “For what?”
She’d been reckless. She’d wasted her life. She’d been lazy, vain, hubristic, taken recreational drugs…
She’d taken the job. She’d been catastrophically stupid. She’d drunk the water.
“Oh that.” He pretended to look around, swivelling his ears. “I think you’ve had enough punishment, don’t you? And besides, you were also trying to help. Look at what you’ve done here. It counts.”
They watched until the light faded, sinking into the night. The gas giant’s malachite bands rose above, shining and swirling and finally, Lucifer blinked out. Sara shivered with the new cold and smiled.
It might be only a community of one, but she held an honoured position.
Around her, on every surface, in every medium and in every language or symbol she could remember, was written the message to stay the fuck away from Terga.
© 2026 by E.M. Faulds
3467 words
Author’s Note: This story is the second I’ve set in the Bettera Corp universe. I love the idea of science fiction as a tool to interrogate ourselves, our actions, and our ethics. Writers have been doing this for a long time: from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the Alien franchise to the hit streaming shows of today like Severance. I could imagine people like Sara being given little choice but to sacrifice themselves for exploitative companies rushing to dominate new planets. But there are always little acts of resistance innate in humans, even if they don’t see themselves as heroic. If you’re curious, you can find the first story, “Pearl and the World”, in the Gallus anthology, launched at Worldcon 2024 in Glasgow.
E.M. Faulds is a British science fiction and fantasy author. Born in Australia, she now calls Scotland her forever home. You can find her short stories in PodCastle, Strange Horizons, ParSec, and Shoreline of Infinity, and the anthologies Gallus, Nova Scotia Vol. 2, Best of British SF 2022, and ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction. In 2023, she won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Her novella, Bring Me Home, is available now from Wizard’s Tower Press. She is a member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle. Find out more at emfaulds.com
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