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“Prepare for dash entry,” the pilot called over the comm. “ETA to Luna is 38 hours.”
“I hate these,” Apollonia said. “The rattling makes me queasy after awhile.”
“The dashgates in Sol are very well maintained,” Brooks assured her. “It won’t be bad.”
They entered the gate, and Apollonia found herself holding her breath. The entry and exit had usually been the worst, that feeling of falling with rattling and shaking . . . when it came to pain she felt she was rather brave. But she’d rather get poked with a needle in the eye than have that plummeting feeling.
But Brooks was right; the sensation was markedly lesser than any dash she’d ever taken (which, granted, had not been many).
Letting out her breath, she relaxed as they began to cruise.
“Okay, you were right . . . Ian.” She hesitated using his name, it still seemed odd to her.
He seemed lost in thought, and she glanced over to him. His eyes were glazed, staring into space tiredly.
“So you’re from Earth, huh? Antarctica?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“What’s it like?”
“Cold, but the glaciers and permafrost are gone, have been since the 22nd century. At least where I was.” He paused. “It was nice.”
“Was? Has it changed much since your childhood?”
He smiled sadly. “You could say that.” But he did not elaborate.
They both grew silent, lost in thought.
She realized she did not know anything about Brooks; he was an absolute enigma. Besides the fact that he was captain of the Craton – which he technically even wasn’t, right now.
“How long have you been a Captain?” she asked him.
“Nine years, all told,” Brooks replied. “Three of them in the Trade Fleet, prior to joining the Voidfleet, and six after joining.”
A lot of that surprised her. “You’re from Earth, but you didn’t go straight into the Voidfleet? I thought only people on the fringes joined the Trade Fleet.”
“It’s not a rule,” Brooks replied. “Though it might generally be true. But yes, I spent time on the fringes of human-controlled space, worked my way through the merchant fleet, then later joined the Voidfleet Academy.”
“So how long did it take you to go from captain of a Trade Fleet ship to Captain of an SU ship?”
He smiled. “Do you hope to become a captain, Apollonia? I could see you attaining that.”
“Maybe,” she replied, smiling a little, feeling somewhat pleased at the compliment. “Got to keep my career prospects open, right?”
“Indeed,” Brooks replied. “But to answer your question – I served 18 years in the Voidfleet before becoming Captain of my first ship.”
The surprised showed on her face, and he smiled lightly again and said laconically; “Sometimes things don’t come to us as quickly as we hope.”
She nodded, and looked away, wondering if she had just been rude. Eighteen years, though! She’d always heard it took just ten years to become a captain. It had been the dream of every child to become the Captain of a starship, when she’d been growing up. So why had it taken Brooks so long? It didn’t seem to add up.
“I’m going to take a rest,” Brooks said, reclining his seat back into a full bed. The lights in the cabin dimmed automatically, and she reclined as well, though not fully prone.
Brooks fell asleep quickly, and while she did wish to rest, she did not mean to fall asleep. But then she found herself suddenly groping her way back to consciousness.
“Hello?” she murmured, sensing more than seeing the presence above her.
Opening her eyes and blinking against the lights that were still dimmed but seemed horribly bright, her heart jumped as she realized that nothing stood above her.
Yet she felt the presence. She felt the malevolence. She felt the will.
Her voice turned hard, almost not her own.
“You don’t belong here,” she said, a quiet power in her voice. It was like some other force spoke through her. Part of her but also not.
The presence observed, regarding her in a way she might regard a disgusting parasite.
“Leave,” she ordered.
Her eyes were dragged over to the side, to Brooks. The man was sleeping, but fitfully, moving as if in a nightmare.
There was a connection there. Something important, something vast and terrible and great and entirely beyond her understanding, she knew she had to warn him, but then-
She was being shaken awake.
“Apollonia, are you all right?”
It was Brooks.
She blinked, pushing his hand away from her shoulder absently.
The dim lights were not blinding now. She looked about, but saw no one, felt no presence, besides Brooks next to her.
“Where are we?” she mumbled.
“Still en route to Earth,” he told her. “Are you all right? You seemed disturbed in your sleep. Your heart was racing almost dangerously.”
She looked around, but the dream, the feelings, had faded to the point she was already forgetting them. Her heart was pounding in her chest, but it was calming rapidly, and with it she began to feel calmer.
“I’m fine,” she said, yawning. A sense of foreboding filled her, still, but she did not know why.
“I’m sorry to have woken you. You just seemed very upset.”
“Yeah, just a weird dream,” she said. A slinking thread of memory found its way into her consciousness. “What about you? Any weird dreams?”
“No,” he replied. “I don’t remember dreaming anything.”
A drone brought them some fruit drinks, a yellowish-orange drink that she’d never had before.
Orange juice, it told her. So this was the juice of an orange? She’d had candies that claimed that flavor. They’d tasted nothing like the actual juice.
“So when we get to Earth, what do we do?” she asked.
“We don’t go directly to Earth,” Brooks told her. “The hearing will be on Korolev Station, in orbit around Luna. That is the capital of the Sol System, and most of humanity.”
Her sadness showed, because he smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, it’s literally fifteen minutes to Earth by dashgate.”
“Oh, good. For a moment I thought I’d miss my chance . . .” She stretched, and flopped back in her seat. “I’ve always wanted to see the homeworld. I honestly never thought I’d get the chance.”
His brow furrowed as he looked at her. “Do you know anything about Earth’s recent history?” he asked seriously.
“Well . . . no,” she admitted. “I didn’t watch our crappy local news, it was pretty much constant lies about how great things were. And I didn’t chat with many people or have a system . . .” She perked up. “But I did watch a lot of documentaries when I was younger. Ones about the forests and the oceans and the animals and plants in them. I always wanted to see one of those giant flowers, the ones that smell like rotting meat?”
She stopped and took a deep breath and grinned.
Brooks was silent, looking at her with concern, and her smile started to fade.
“What is it? Don’t tell me that those shows were lies,” she asked.
“No, that’s not it. Those things all exist – rafflesia flowers, forests and oceans full of life. They’re maybe just not how you think they might be.”
Her heart felt like it was fluttering.
“Why?” she asked.
“Forty-five years ago, the orbital infrastructure around Earth collapsed,” Brooks said. “In the most literal sense. The Orbital Ring, the Space Elevators – all of them broke apart and crashed to the surface.”
He could see the alarm on Apollonia’s face, but also the confusion. Brooks gestured to her tablet, and sent her an image of the Orbital Ring that encircled the Earth.
“This ring was around the Earth’s equator. Elevators from the surface reached up to it, that were used to ferry people and supplies up or down. But something happened, we- We still don’t know what, or how. But all of it came crashing down.”
He paused, letting her look over the images on-screen. None showed the carnage, only the extent of infrastructure that had been placed in orbit. It was extensive; millions of people had moved through the system daily. To go from one side of the planet to another, there was literally no way easier or faster than to go up an elevator into orbit and then take a hypervelocity train.
But when it had broken up, all of it had become simply . . . debris.
“Billions died,” Brooks said soberly. “And billions more were trapped. The debris that didn’t fall remained in orbit or moved outward, creating a runaway kessler syndrome that we called the musk field – a scrapfield so dense in space that ships could not safely move through it.”
He took a deep breath. “And the ecosystem – in many parts of the world it simply collapsed. After the shocks of the climate catastrophe from centuries ago, there was one of the largest mass extinctions in the world’s history.
“But this was a second shock, only a few hundred years later. The dust from all of the debris drowned out the sun. Forest fires added to it. The world’s average temperature dropped by nearly ten degrees.”
“So . . .” Apollonia finally said. “It all died.”
“Most of it, yes,” Brooks said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she replied.
She willed herself to hold back the tears. To keep her face calm.
Brooks looked away, and she did not know if she wished he hadn’t, or if she appreciated him letting her save some face.
Because she was struggling to keep it under control.
All these years, she’d had one wish. And now she had just learned she’d been a fool to want it. That it was all . . . dead and gone.
A thought shot through her, and she looked up.
“You said you’re from Earth,” she said. “Were you . . . there when it happened?”
Brooks looked over at her. For just a moment she saw the same struggle she was going through playing over his face. Hiding pain, and refusing to show it.
“Yes,” he replied. “I lived through it.”
Other Terrestrial 