Inspired by today’s Daily Prompt: State of your Year…

She stopped near the girls’ cave, noticing the sensors were still on. “They are so careful, now they have learned…” she told herself. Soon they would depart, for the long journey…

It had been a good year, at long last she’d cracked the code, and the girls’ language. Of course she’d been lucky. Not only she’d kept alive – not a mean feat being alone with twenty feet high monsters that could split a rock in one blow – but they had started communicating, and quickly understood what she expected.

Yes, there was the solitude, she was after all the only human being in an immensity of millions of parsecs. She sometimes thought of him, her hero, her lover, the one who had protected her with his life, his cherished body now buried in the deep grave near Alph Centauri. She carried his memory, deep, in the secret core of her heart.

The girls emerged, their pleasure in seeing her visible from the tremendous oscillations of their antennae.

“Good morning comrades!” she said. “A good year in front of us, and the ship is well advanced already!” They greeted her in return, the huge bodies mimicking a little dance. Each one of them must have weighed twenty tons. A great help when you deal in high energy metallurgy…

“One year” she thought, and on this vast planet, so rich in the resources she needed, one year was ten Earth years.