The Alpha Centauri Expedition

4. Valley of Grief

Her blood ran cold. She instantly recognized it as the place where the Antasena spacecraft crashed into the cliff and exploded violently. It was the place where her father had fallen! Gayatri's eyes were fixed, and her mind stopped working. All she could see in her mind was her dearly missed father's face.

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On Wednesday early morning, June 19, 2458, the call to the dawn prayer awakened Lieutenant Gayatri from her sleep. She rose and sat at the edge of her bed. She uttered a brief prayer as part of her wake-up routine, but then she was jolted back to reality as she remembered what she would experience later in the day. Her team would undergo their final flight training with the Bimasakti simulator. However, it was not the virtual flight that troubled her, but rather the destination they would be heading to.

The flight path of the Bimasakti spacecraft to Alpha Centauri passed through Saturn's largest moon, Titan, before the spacecraft continued its journey to leave the solar system. Two other spacecraft, Cakrawala I and Cakrawala II, were already waiting on Titan to accompany Bimasakti in the expedition to Alpha Centauri. In the morning's virtual flight with the simulator, they would attempt a self-rescue maneuver to land the Bimasakti spacecraft on Titan as a practice for emergency situations. They had to land Bimasakti at the Titan II space station located on Titan's surface so that the crew members could safely seek refuge inside the space station.

The Titan II space station was located in a narrow valley surrounded by high and steep mountains. The valley was called Saptonium Valley because it housed the rare saptonium mines. Titan II Station was built as a stopover facility for the astronaut miners extracting saptonium. Landing a spacecraft in the valley was not an easy task due to the strong and constant winds. The pilot had to possess exceptional skills to safely land the spacecraft in the narrow valley.

For Lieutenant Gayatri, landing the spacecraft in Saptonium Valley was actually not a difficult task. She was an exceptionally skilled pilot. She had even landed spacecraft in more perilous locations without significant difficulty. During her previous assignment on the Jatayu spacecraft, she successfully landed it on the peaks of hills and ice valleys on Jupiter's moons, Ganymede and Europa. Those places were more hazardous than Saptonium Valley, and she handled it with ease.

But Titan was a place she always wanted to avoid. The memory of an incident eleven years ago was still vivid in her mind. When she returned home from school that afternoon, she found her mother sitting in the corner of the couch with red, swollen eyes. Every day after school, her mother would share news from her father on Titan. Her father never failed to recount his daily experiences there. Gayatri admired her father greatly, and she eagerly awaited news from him, always eager to hear about his new adventures in space. But that afternoon, her mother shared a story she never wanted to hear.

"Gaya... papa... is no more...," her mother's voice sounded soft yet resonated within her. Suddenly, her world seemed to collapse. Gayatri sat down next to her mother. She could already imagine what had happened. She fell silent and didn't want to hear anything more. Her heart shattered into pieces. One sentence from her mother was enough. She didn't want to ask anything. She was afraid to hear any stories about her father at that moment. Gayatri embraced her mother. They held each other tightly, crying inconsolably.

"Papa's plane crashed...," her mother said with a weak voice.

"Enough, ma... Don't tell me... I don't want to hear it...," Gayatri said while sobbing. What she felt at that moment was a deep longing for her father. The longing was quickly replaced by a piercing sense of loss. She couldn't imagine her father being gone. Suddenly, there would be no more laughter and jokes from her father. No more warmth in his presence. No more adventurous stories that fueled her spirit. No more role model to inspire her.