The First Poisoned Breath We Took

I wouldn't consider myself anything special, just a human girl trying to find my place in life with family and friends. I finished college, majored in mechanical science, trained more to fix what broke, because I liked knowing how things worked.
I ended up on Aster Vale, a distant frontier colony built on fragile hope and taking data, a world unimaginably far from Earth, the only place I'd ever called home.
It wasn't the adventure I'd imagined, just working on a telescope array calibrated to scan atmospheric composition and orbital drift, watching a desolate planet that wouldn't grow anything anymore.
Just watching the red dust work its way into every seam and joint, collecting in every corner of everything. Watching the genetic scientists trying to grow enhanced trees or sustain farm animals, pushing modified life against a dying biosphere. All good in theory when the atmosphere still held; when pressure, oxygen balance, and thermal bands were stable enough to support it.
Until it all went wrong.
Now I stood on the Starship Eidolon, with less than fifty colonists left. It was cold enough to bite through the fabric of my jacket, and I gripped it closed as lights flashed red and alarms blared, warning systems overlapping in tones that never quite synced. I had to steady my footing as the ship jerked under uneven thrust, pushing hard as we pulled away from Aster Vale's gravity well.
I watched as the people I had spent the last six months with sob, cried out for loved ones, coughed, and tried to fix injuries-something they had no training for. Others didn't look so good, lying there too still, too quiet, kind of lifeless. There were supposed to be around 150 of us. I knew for a fact most were dead, but I couldn't bring myself to think this was all that was left.

The thing I couldn't shake was why they wanted to kill us.