The Final Mission

By: Cal Merritt

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Day 248. Systems nominal. Crew performing within expected parameters. Morale: adequate.

Also: Earth is gone. The six of us are all that's left. The mission continues anyway.

My name is Cal Brennan. I'm an aerospace engineer eight months into a two-year deep space mission. I keep the ship running. I also talk to the CO2 scrubber, which I've named Gerald, and I consider this professional.

A gamma ray burst hit Earth while we were eating lunch. We received the news four hours after the fact. Mission Control sent four paragraphs in eleven minutes, which tells you something about the people who worked there.

We could go back. The math says it wouldn't help. So we're still moving forward — toward the anomaly signal we were sent to investigate, toward whatever is out there repeating a pattern that doesn't fit any natural model, toward the thing that the last six humans in existence are about to find.

I fix things. That's what I do. I fix the ship and I fix the coffee maker and I fix the coupling assemblies that don't need fixing because my hands need somewhere to be while I figure out how to carry the weight of everything else.

The mission continues. Because what else do you do?

The Final Mission is hard science fiction for readers of Andy Weir and Emily St. John Mandel. Technically rigorous. Darkly funny. The kind of book that sneaks up on you.