A New Hope

DATE: Year 308-B. Sol 421

LOCATION: The Cydon Academy, West Mars Republic

STATUS: Geography Class

The lecture hall was shaped like an amphitheater, carved from cold basalt.

Magister Grain paced the stage. She was younger than the math teacher, severe and sharp, with a cybernetic ocular implant that whirred faintly when she focused.

-The paradox of the Age of Rust, Grain said, her voice amplified by the acoustics of the stone, is that we survive inside machines we can’t really build anymore.

She tapped the holographic projector. A shimmering blue wireframe appeared in the air above the students.

-The Terminator, she said. The Great Track of Mercury. A metal husk across the circumference of the planet. The Terminator is the line where day turns into night, the only sliver of the planet remotely habitable for human life. And humans stopped the orbit of this planet to make that sliver stationary. The Terminator doesn’t refer to the metal husk, it refers to the region. The hologram rotated.

-The Solar Mercury Republic claims their ancestors did all that. Stopped the orbit of Mercury! They have a crater they say proves it. They raised an Empire to prove it.

-The MTC actually claims they licensed the original technology. Both are lies. The Terminator is a Golden Age artifact. Its propulsion drive uses a gravitational siphon we cannot replicate. Its hull alloy is a formula we lost in the Data Purge of Year 103.

-Yet through all that, ignorance may be more pernicious than the actual loss of knowledge. Consider this. We know the Earth date that fell on Sol 1 of Year 1-A, March 22, 2335. We even know it was a Friday. And we commemorate the Rip on Sol 188, because Year 1-A was set retroactively to start on the first day of the Martian Spring. But if you told an average Martian the year was 2624, they’d stare at you blankly. It doesn’t mean anything.

Clara sat in the back row, tapping her stylus against her leg brace, not paying attention anymore. But she knew the West Martian Republic was the only place that admitted the truth that humanity was shrinking. That they were squatters in the ruins of giants.

-And we’re ignorant of what we once built, Grain continued, walking through the hologram of the spinning city. We are custodians. We patch the hull with inferior steel. We replace fusion batteries with chemical sludge. We blast ourselves with radiation. We weld our crude ambition onto the perfection of our ancestors.

Grain stopped. She looked directly at the class.

-Why does this matter? Because a custodian has to know when a system is failing. And we’re failing. She waved her hand, and the hologram changed. It showed the Sky Cities of Venus, discs floating in yellow clouds.

-Tens of millions of humans once lived in these cities, before the domes started to breach. Now it houses squatters and would be warlords. And the buoyancy engines on Venus are degrading by point-zero-four percent per cycle. In fifty years, they’ll fall into the crushing depth of Venus’ atmosphere. The image changed again. It showed The Oases of Mars, the water works at Mars’ polar caps.

-The water pipes are breaking down. We don’t know how half of the terraforming wires work. Our ancestors never finished. We may witness its complete reversal.

Clara looked up. That was news to her.

-The MTC denies it, Grain said. But atmospheric measurements and climate monitoring doesn’t lie,

A heavy silence settled over the room. It was the crushing weight of entropy. The realization that they were existing somewhere it was getting harder and harder to exist. Somewhere it should be impossible to exist.

The bell chimed. A soft, analog gong.

-Dismissed, Grain said, deactivating the hologram. For your assignment, select one of the Ancient Wonders and write a story as if you were visiting it. What would you look for? What would it make you think about yourself and the world around you?

The students shuffled out, forlorn. Clara gathered her datapad. She knew what the Magister was talking about in intimate terms. She had lived in the Belt. She knew things were always broke and broken. The trick wasn't fixing them, it was making them work for you.

The mess hall was loud with the sound of lunch. Five hundred students were clattering trays, eating synthetic protein, and gossiping about the war.

Clara sat in the back, alone. Her tray of Slurp was cold. She was watching the news feed on her datapad. It was a loop, playing over and over again.

MTC OFFICIAL REPORT: Vessel 'Mighty Sparrow' destroyed in Sector 4. Pilot Jimi Phoenix confirmed KIA. Convoy presumed lost.

The footage showed a grainy, long-range view of the Halo. A bright flash of white light. A cloud of expanding debris. And then, nothing.

-They’re dead, a boy next to her said, chewing with his mouth open. Vaporized. My dad says the MTC used a Kinetic Driver. Nothing survives that.

Clara ignored him. She was looking at the data stream running underneath the video. It was encrypted, hidden in the static of the broadcast, but Dr. Murray had taught her how to get her way around.

The MTC report said the ship was destroyed. But the Registry, the automated list of active transponders in the solar system, told a different story.

She scrolled down.

ID: THE MARLEY STATUS: ACTIVE VECTOR: OUTBOUND (Venus Transit)

Clara tapped the screen. A second signal had appeared, faint and erratic, broadcasting on a frequency usually reserved for garbage scows.

ID: THE MIGHTY SPARROW STATUS: ACTIVE VECTOR: OUTBOUND

Her breath hitched. She opened the image file attached to the signal, a sensor sweep taken seconds before the ship vanished into the dark.

The resolution was terrible, just a thermal blur of the cockpit. But she saw it.

The pilot, a man with a metal arm. And in the co-pilot’s seat, a flash of yellow.

Small’s drone helmet.

-He made it, she whispered.

-Who made it? the boy asked, leaning over her shoulder. The terrorist?

Clara stood up. Her leg braces whirred, locking into place.

-Shut up, she said, and grabbed her pad, shoving it into her bag.

She walked to the recycling chute and dumped out her tray. She needed a map. She walked out of the mess hall and down the long, red corridor toward Dr. Murray at the Archives. The bioluminescent moss on the walls glowed softly, lighting her way.

Venus was a long way from Mars. It was across the sun, across the war, across the silent death of space. But distance was just math. And she was good at math.

-Run, Small, she whispered to the stone walls. Run fast. I’m coming to find you.

NEXT: THE VENUS RUN: https://www.honeyfeed.fm/novels/27963