There was a time when she had danced through tall grass, cool soil beneath her bare feet, and laughed and smiled. The sun was high, with wandering clouds making their lazy trails in the sky and spinning stories. Flowering forget-me-nots dotted the ground and she was very careful to avoid their protected patches, treasuring the puddles of vibrant color they created.
There was a time when she had lain on her back, staring at a revolving rotunda of stars, while fireflies glimmered in the air around her.
There was a time when she had felt truly free, when she awoke to the kindest smile she had ever known, when the warmth of friendship was more brilliant than memories of sun-kissed summers.
Now, sitting in her little captain's chair in her cold metal spaceship, tracing a high orbit above an unfriendly planet through the inky black of space, she knew those times were past her.
She was growing desperate. This was where they had all told her to go, the place that had come screaming from their lips when faced with the threat of death. Seven months spent hunting... seven months spent fruitlessly casting about the cosmos.
Her shaking fingers stroked across the gunmetal that had kept her safe and kept her going since her hunt began. She fingered the safety latch back and forth, the clicking barely audible over the omnipresent hum from the ship.
Her mind recoiled at the thought of having to kill again. She did not enjoy it--did not want to enjoy it; it sickened her, made her dizzy, made her loathe herself. The rush it gave her was unbidden, unwanted, and for days after it always wracked her with guilt and haunted her dreams. But surely it was necessary. Surely the ends would justify the means--
She jerked in her seat and slapped a bank of switches into an upward position and the vehicle shuddered and lurched suddenly, changing its orbit. An unregistered satellite swooped through the space she had just vacated.
A little sigh passed her lips, and she shuddered, setting everything in front of her back to the way it was meant to be. Her thoughts flickered between memories like a water strider searching for something with which to nourish itself.
She was so very tired.
Tonight, or today--her sense of time was shot to hell from an excess of interplanetary travel--was going to be the end, whether she met success or failure. From here there were no more leads, no more loose ends to tug upon, no more mouths to coerce secrets from.
Her eyes roved across the planet that loomed like a giant before her. Her nerves were frayed; she needed a distraction. Her eyes found large, distinct chains of islands in one of the planet's plentiful seas, and she began to count, grouping them in powers of two.
Her hands found their way to the controls, and she grasped them firmly. She spoke to the ship, told it which sequences to initiate, recited call numbers to rouse idling navigational processes from their slumber, and began her controlled plummet towards the planet.
As the ship hit the atmosphere and she was greeted by the familiar red glow, she imagined that she could feel its warmth upon her cheeks, and for a moment, she was a child in a field again, dancing in the summertime.