Elisa Woodward fought herself through a haze of stars to reach consciousness. She almost wished she hadn't, as pain shot through her eyes. She tried to call for help, but her mouth was dry and tasted of thick, clotted blood. Faintly she began to become aware of her surroundings, the heavy metallic smell in the air and most noticeably, the droning blare of an alarm. Her blurry vision could do little but discern the recognizable yellow glow of the emergency lighting.

Someone was talking to her, but she could not make out the words. An auto-injector activated and her thoughts came into focus, as did the stiff pain in her legs.

"Engineer Woodward, can you hear me now?", a plain but friendly voice asked.

Elisa opened her mouth once more, but was still unable to speak.

"Please hold on, I am going to insert a drinking tube in your mouth."

While Elisa drank, the voice continued.

"I am sorry to have woken you in this state. We are nearing our destination and I require your authorization to make a vital decision.

It is ARI, Elisa thought. Why would ARI need to consult me for any decision?

"Where… is… the… captain?", Elisa rasped, followed by a choking cough.

"I am sorry to inform you the captain is deceased," ARI answered in a more serious, but still inappropriately pleasant tone.

"Who commands?"

"You are in command. Congratulations on your newly acquired responsibilities! I will address you as 'captain' from now on," ARI announced.

"Just third engineer."

"You are the most senior officer alife, which gives you the authority to command. In addition, it is my pleasure to inform you that the Company has upgraded you to a very generous compensation and benefits package!”

That means I am pretty much the ONLY officer. Elisa attempted to count the amount of casualties required for her to end up in command, but quickly lost track. Rather than enquiring about the body count, she asked ARI how many people were still alive.

"Good thinking, captain. That is exactly the reason why I woke you!', the onboard AI answered in an excited tempo, an emotional state which it could imitate convincingly enough. "Even though I already dumped all non-essential mass, after our course corrections and atmospheric braking at the local gas giant, we still lack the required fuel to attain a delta-v that makes the encounter with our destination planet survivable. I have 1262 deceased and another 2140 unrecoverable crewmembers in the aft cryo section which comprises 52% of our current mass. If you give me the authorization to detach the aft cryo section, then we stand a 14.2% chance of landing the remaining 319 crewmembers intact. Which means I will still have a chance to succeed in completing the mission…"

"Why so many dead?"

"Radioactive decay. Only the crewmembers from the orbitals had a chance at surviving. Those low levels of potassium-40 and nitrogen-14 in the hab environment does wonders in cycling out most of the radioactive isotopes out of your body… Unlike all of the Centauran planetside..." The sentence went unfinished as Elisa mumbled something in protest.

Natural radioactive decay had never been an issue. And as long as the ship's radiation shield remained intact, external radiation sources were not much of a threat either. Unless something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

"Which destination?"

"Oh, I am sorry to inform you... When we were en-route to our company-licensed destination in the Gliese 777 system, it decided to share its space-time coordinates with a massive asteroid… Well, actually, that happened before our departure. Information propagating at light speed ensured that we couldn't observe the event until well after launch. I realized halfway through that we were sent to attempt to settle a planet that now resembled an overcooked soufflé. I had to change course, but since we are in space and we only have so much reaction mass, there wasn't much I could do. No charted habitable systems in my rather small cone of options. So on I went to the Messier 39 star cluster. Lots of stars equals lots of options. I found a nice habitable-looking planet for us and..."

Elisa started to become agitated. Under normal circumstances ARI’s rambling was long-winded enough to be a nuisance, but between a throbbing headache and a smothering of bad news it rapidly started to grow insufferable.

"Messier 39? Where is this?"

"We have traveled 986 light-years. If we survive the landing, we are adding an order of magnitude to the record for Humanity's most distant outpost. Think of the publicity bonus the Company will afford us! Then again, the previously known record is now nearly 70.000 years old."

"So the current year is 80-thousand... what?"

"Something like that in Earth years, yes. Although our relative velocity isn't that great, there still is a tiny bit of time dilation to take into account. Better not waste your valuable brain cycles on that. If all goes well, we will be better off with a new calendar for our planet."

"Tired, I want sleep."

For the first time, ARI turned serious. "There is still the rather important matter of the aft cryo section. I require authorization from the commanding officer before I can undertake any direct action that negatively affects the well-being of any crewmember, even if they are in an unrecoverable state. After all, humans tend not to appreciate the idea of AIs euthanizing astronauts in their cryopods very much, even if for the greater good of completing the mission directives. Our now very restricted resource pool did not permit me to wake you before this point, so there is not much time to decide. At our present vector, we will arrive at our destination in a little under four days. I will need to commence deceleration soon. There is insufficient fuel to decelerate if we retain the aft section. It is obvious what must be done. Please give me your approval."

"Anything else to get rid of instead?"

"I have long ago disposed of all non-essential mass. If I wasn't so restricted regarding the crewmembers, I would have dumped the dead long ago, but alas, I could not. There is no viable alternative that produces survivable scenarios."

"Your plan, only 14 percent survivable."

"That 14.2% figure is for the best case scenario of landing the ship with all remaining crew intact. There are other less desirable, but still survivable outcomes."

"What will happen to the aft section?"

"If we eject it now, it will continue on the current trajectory and be captured by the planet's gravity. Cryopods are very sturdy as they double as escape pod. They will survive a trip down with the drop pods, although there is no chance any of the occupants survive this ordeal. The drogues will be shredded. Perhaps one day you can find and salvage some of the debris, though."

"No alternatives?"

Stolen novel; please report.

"If there was any survivable alternative, I would already have informed you."

"Do it," Elisa resigned.

"Thank you! I knew you were going to be my favorite officer!" ARI exclaimed, its excessively cheerful mood returning abruptly. "Now please, take some well-earned rest."

Elisa was unsure whether she passed out from exhaustion or ARI’s administered sedative got her first.

Elisa awoke to the sound of distant rumbling engines and an uncomfortable, but still bearable amount of G-forces. She opened her eyes and found her sight had returned, as had her voice.

"ARI, report!"

“You have been out for fourteen hours. I have ejected the aft section and fired the main thrusters. ETA nine days, seven hours and..."

"I thought you said four days!"

ARI made a sound that could almost pass for a sigh. "We are decelerating, in case you couldn't tell," it answered in a slow, belittling tone.

"Right."

"You have recovered sufficiently to resume essential duties. Please find your way to the infirmary terminal. I will brief you on our current status and inform you of several time-critical tasks that must be completed before arrival."

Elisa tried raising her arm to climb out of the alcove, but noticed in horror that her skin was a patching of dark red, deep blue and sickening yellow. "The fuck, ARI?"

"The side-effects of a few myriad years of radiation exposure. Your cells don't regenerate while in cryo, so the damage was cumulative. I've already fixed your failing organs, replaced your left kidney and stopped the internal bleeding. You are stable and will recover over time. Cosmetics will have to wait, I'm afraid. And you'll need to take painkillers for a while."

"Sounds like I woke to another day in paradise..." Elisa sighed, her short stature sliding out of the alcove. She battled the gravity on unsteady legs and dragged herself towards the cushioned seat behind the terminal. As she glanced around the room, she noticed several of the other infirmary alcoves were also occupied and operational, but decided to not enquire about these yet. She found a seatbelt and strapped herself in. "Right ARI, now what's up?"

ARI’s perpetually happy avatar appeared on one of the screens. "You have no idea how glad I am to be working with you. Seventy thousand years gets a wee bit lonely, even for a computer, hehe," it began.

"Get to the point, ARI. Now, what's our status?" Elisa interjected.

"Well, to get straight to the point, this is the problem," ARI said plainly, bringing up a schema of their ship, the Dolya, on one of the screens.

Elisa's eyes widened in confusion. As third engineer, she was more familiar with the ship than most, but one needed no engineering degree to notice that whatever was being displayed on the ship bore little resemblance to the one that they had originally boarded.

"Where did… uhh well, pretty much everything go?", Elisa stammered.

"Just the tyranny of the rocket equation taking bites out of us," ARI started explaining. "Insufficient reaction mass for course corrections and deceleration, so the only way to overcome that is to lose lots of mass. I decided to ditch engine one and three and the associated pylons pretty early on, as well as the entire antenna ring. Most of the payload had to go along the way, but that is not a big issue, since the steady loss of crew resulted in a loss of appetite..."

Elisa gave a harsh look, and ARI continued.

"The radiation shield got severely damaged by the constant barrage of impactors, so I ground up the empty fuel tanks and used that material as plaster to keep it all together. Half of the heat radiators had to be discarded, and our heat build-up is a constant problem, but it is manageable for now. In fact, I've managed to get a lot of deceleration done by running our water supply past the heatsink and using the steam to generate thrust, and let that carry away the ground-up material of everything else we no longer needed. The forward radiation shield and light sail was ditched pretty late, after the atmospheric braking. The aft radiation shield was ditched yesterday along with the aft cryo sections. All the dead and unrecoverables were moved to the aft section, while the more fortunate ones were moved forward along with some of the drop pods."

"Please give an overview of the remaining inventory," Elisa asked. ARI brought it up on the second monitor, and Elisa eyed over it. "ARIIIII ... You got to be kidding me. Don't you fucking tell me you dumped our compact reactor..."

"It was quite massive and..." ARI started.

"No it was not, and it is kinda essential to our colony, don't you think?"

"...and all the fuel rods have long ago decayed beyond uselessness. Even closed-loop nuclear reactors are not perpetual motion devices." ARI finished.

"Mining radioactives is doable, but do you have any idea how much plant is required to build a replacement reactor? Heck, how do we even generate sufficient energy to get any kind of plant set up?"

"You have a compact nuclear reactor in mind when you say that, but there are actually a number of old-fashioned nuclear reactor designs that are incredibly simple to fabricate. But this is pointless discourse. To get back to the matter at hand, in the best case scenario, there will only be 319 colonists, including yourself. Of course we have the DNA database and plenty of genetic diversity, but maintaining any kind of civilization is going to be challenging. Under normal circumstances, I would remain in orbit with the remnants of the Dolya, using the PV arrays and sustain myself for centuries. With the ship in the state it is in, that is not feasible. You will have to bring me and the PV arrays to the surface. Then those can be used to generate energy initially.”

“Aren’t your PV arrays the interstellar type optimized for gamma radiation, and thus fairly useless when we are planetside?”

“Like everything on this ship, I had to recycle and replace them several times over the millennia. The current version is quite amenable to the near visible light spectrum.”

"Then it sounds doable, but it's certainly not going to be easy. Those PV arrays are only a fraction of the output of our reactor, most of our equipment isn't designed to run off DC so the first thing we need is a suitable inverter."

"We have plenty of those onboard the Dolya that we can salvage or modify. One advantage of not requiring to keep the ship operational and in orbit."

"Speaking of which, how are we going to survive re-entry with this heap of junk? Both radiation shields are gone, and the girder structure is designed for tension, not compression, we have no control surfaces and nothing that generates lift... Wait, how did you even get that atmospheric braking done?"

"Backwards, with the forward radiation shield and light sail, both destroyed in the process, and the engine pylons retracted and covered by the engine shield ring" ARI replied. "But to answer your question, over the past few weeks I used the material from the engine shield ring, cargo pods and heatsinks to..."

"You're saying you're running the engines without an intact shield ring?", Elisa panicked.

"Yes, but I built a smaller shield on this crew section, and all the payload close to the engines is long gone."

Elisa sighed. "And so is the aft section, got you..."

"In any case, I used the material to build some delta wing segments, which I am going to deploy to the girder after the engines completed their burn. Then I will salvage the things we need from the engines to build a heat shield, after which we will sever the entire front engine section and attach the heat shield up front. Only the maneuvering thrusters remain to control our descent, somewhat."

ARI was way too optimistic. Elisa rubbed her tired face. "Out of curiosity, how much of our starting mass will actually make it to the surface, if all goes well?"

"Oh, under 3 percent. But that's not so odd. Keep in mind that most of it was reaction mass that we were going to expend anyway. But yeah, unfortunately we did lose most of our payload."

"And most of our people. Do you need my help for these final modifications?", Elisa asked.

"Not really, I can take care of it," ARI answered. "What I need you to do is study the data I have gathered on our new planet and review the files of the eight crew members I have chosen to assist you."

Elisa was confused. "Wait, what, only eight out of 318?"

"Yes, that is the next part of the challenge. I lack the resources and infirmary space to treat everyone's critical radiation damage. So I have chosen eight crew members that each completed basic medical training and additionally possess the most suitable range of skills to assist you in setting up a base camp. Once resource production is under way, we can start synthesizing the required medicine and begin to awaken the rest of the colonists."

Elisa didn't even want to think about this topic anymore, as the near-insurmountable problems just kept piling up and made her head spin. "So, what kind of planet have you found? Please don't tell me it's some frozen ball of ice."

"Haha, no popsicle, no. You're going to love this. It's one of the most Earth-like planets I've ever seen. Rocky, pretty warm but not unbearable, past geological activity, so it should be pretty easy to find minerals there. Pleasant breathable atmosphere and protective magnetosphere.. Small patches of liquid surface water, and more water expected in aquifers. Quite an active weather system, making wind farms viable. Two moons. Comfy 0.97g."

That all sounds pretty good, actually, Elisa thought. Better than Gliese 777. Yet the challenge of surviving there with only a handful of people, let alone building up a base camp, seemed all but impossible. Worst of all, she was the one parachuted to be in charge. All failures, and every single death would be her responsibility.

"Sounds great, ARI. Thanks for looking after us so well. Would you mind if I go nap a bit more? It's all a bit much to take in."

"Not at all. Sleep well, captain."