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The suicide burn fired right on schedule, but Kiva could swear it felt like the boosters hesitated. Her stomach went from floating in her throat to being thrust into her lower back—and boy, did that hurt. The tiny landing module shook violently. A moment later, three rapid explosions made her heart stop even as her brain reminded her body that the cushioning bags had just deployed as expected. Her eyes shot back and forth across the control panel. The landing sequence was essentially automated, and so far no alarms had gone off. Any second now she would...
She hit the Martian surface, the air rushing out of her lungs. Her vision blurred and narrowed into a tunnel for a split second as her entire body ached. Kiva willed herself back to alertness. An alarm sounded. One of the landing cushions had burst. The landing module titled to the right. As it did, another alarm sounded, alerting her to the loss of balance. She reached forward to deploy an emergency stabilizer booster on the falling side of the module, but when she pressed it she got a misfire code. Had she been a skilled pilot, she might have been able to activate manual autopilot override and use the maneuvering boosters to right the module, but she was in the wrong seat for that. The pilot’s seat sat empty next to her, a fact that the permanent lump in her throat would not allow her to forget.
The module lurched further and in that split second, Kiva reached out and hit the landing cushion override command, instantly deflating the remaining cushions. The module dropped to the Martian rocks with a painful bang and rocked into an upright position. Well, relatively upright, at least. The instrument panel before her informed her she was leaning 6.59 degrees aft.
Close enough for a solo landing.
Close enough for my last landing, Kiva Yi thought as she swallowed back that familiar lump. The hollow pain she’d grown accustomed to overwhelmed any relief she felt at managing to land safely.
She felt a wave of nausea but knew it likely had nothing to do with the landing. Three more alarms sounded. She forced herself to go through the motions and checked them off one by one. There was damage to a section of the heat shield, a potential breach to one of the empty fuel cells, and one communication antenna was no longer registering as connected. This short shit list would not have been acceptable on any other mission. She sighed and tapped the screen for each one and brought silence to the cabin.
Now it was just her heart thundering in her chest and her breathing inside her helmet. She sat there, allowing herself a moment of merely existing, merely breathing, merely being. Merely feeling this foreign gravity. The immense weight of her journey threatened to burst out of gut in a wail she knew she wouldn’t be able to reign back in. So, she asked it to wait. Just a little longer. She had a mission to complete first. Then she could finally let go. But not before then.
She wondered if the weight she felt all over her body was really the gravity of Mars or was it her soul falling even further away from her? Kiva could have stayed right there. Part of her wish she could. Was there really any point in continuing this desperate mission?
Immediately, she felt a wave of bitter guilt rise withing her chest. How could she think such a thing? What was wrong with her? She shook off her self-pity, biting her lip forcefully as she looked up at the control panel before her.
A glint of red light caused her to blink, and she realized that the sun was coming through one of the small triangular windows on the module. That’s right, she thought. There’s an entire planet out there. No point in sitting here in solitude.
After punching in the command to send news home of her rough but successful landing, she initiated the atmosphere evacuation procedure and looked out the window at the slight bit of red horizon she could see. After a minute, the landing module computer informed her that the pressure inside matched the pressure on the surface of the red planet. Only her suit kept her alive now.
Kiva Yi unbuckled herself from her landing module seat and climbed over to the exit hatch. Entering the unlock code, she watched as the hatch handle spun. The clank of the lock release was followed by the beep in her helmet that indicated the hatch was now ready to open. She pressed the button that now glowed green under the keypad next to the hatch.
The hatch didn’t budge.
“What now?” she muttered.
She pressed the green button again, but still the hatch refused to open.
In her helmet HUD, a new warning popped up: Module Hatch Jam. She leaned her head against the hatch and sighed.
The landing had been too hard. This poor lunar-made module wasn’t designed for such a rough drop. She used the touchpad on her suit’s left arm to enter a search command but threw her hands up after a moment. She glared at the hatch. It was unlocked but stuck. Reaching out, she put a hand to it and pushed. It didn’t budge. She pushed harder. Still nothing. She sighed again, fighting back irrational tears that demanded their moment. She hated crying in her helmet. Swallowing hard, she thought for a bit.
“Well, I didn’t come all this way to sit here pissing in my suit and waiting for the end to come.”
She delivered a hard kick to the hatch. It moved slightly as her joints shocked her body with intense pain. She kicked it again, feeling the jolt of pain go up her leg and straight to her head. The hatch flew open at last, bright sunlight flooding the interior of the module.
Well, bright was a relative term, she reminded herself. It felt bright-ish to Kiva in the moment. But it was far from being as bright as it had been at the outset of their journey.
She stepped out on to the Martian surface with a pang of longing for home rather than the excitement of setting foot on Mars for the first time. She had long dreamed as a young girl of visiting the red planet and yet, now that she was finally here, she felt no awe or joy. Only pain. This was a moment she should have been sharing with her partner.
She took a few tentative steps, letting her body get used to the feeling of Martian gravity. It was a good bit more than the lunar gravity she was accustomed to. But seven months in space under nearly constant acceleration or deceleration had given her a chance to get prepared for a deeper gravity well.
Looking back at the landing module, she could see that it leaned slightly. She wondered if she should try to close the hatch. She hadn’t even run a proper shutdown sequence.
It didn’t really matter now, anyway. That poor module had done its last job. It was never going home.
“Thanks for the ride,” she choked out.
Activating her positioning system display in her helmet’s HUD, she began the very last leg of a very long journey.
Possibly humanity’s last journey.
––––––––
Kiva stuffed the last of her socks into a Lunar Space Exploration Agency issued bag. A knock on the door caught her off guard. Standing there was Tsu Fang, tall and lean in the fashion of many fourth-generation Lunarians. He looked at her with those still, calm eyes.
“I know,” she said, pre-emptively. “It's premature to be packing and I'm just setting myself up for disappointment because—”
“You’ve been approved.”
Kiva stared at him, words still caught in her throat, her mouth open. The normally forgotten hum of the air circulation system seemed deafening now.
“You’re going,” Tsu said. “They thought your mission proposal had high merit and is worthy of our investment. The final Callisto IV rocket is being prepped. They’re allocating the needed fuel now for the trip.”
Kiva let out a sigh of relief, fighting back a smile.
“They are only allocating the required fuel for a one-way trip.”
She cocked her head in puzzlement at this last remark. “Yeah. That’s all my mission brief called for.”
“I argued for more.”
“Why?”
Tsu shrugged. “Cover our bases, account for unforeseen circumstances,” he said. “And... give us the option to come home.”
“What would be the point?”
Tsu shrugged again.
“Wait, why are you saying...” she started, but she could read the answer in his face. “You talked your way into being my pilot.”
“Corvin didn’t pass psych evaluation,” he said. “The whole thing was about to get tossed into an endless loop of debating and reevaluating, and we don’t have a single second to spare anymore.”
She looked down at the floor, then nodded slowly.
“I hope I’m not imposing, but you need a pilot.”
She looked up at him and breathed, “Thank you.”
“You really believe this is the landing site we should target?”
She frowned, “You saw my presentation, you know as well as I do the Martians had splintered and nearly all the scientific development was taking place in—”
“Yes,” he cut her off. “I know. But... do you believe it?”
Fighting back a sudden wave of anger, she stared into his eyes, trying to gain any insight into what he was getting at. Maybe he just needed to hear her say it. Maybe that was the last piece of the puzzle for him, the last push he needed to pack his own small bag and leave his home forever. Could she blame him?
“Yes,” she said. “This is it.”
He smiled, “Okay.”
Kiva finally allowed that smile that had been fighting its way forward earlier to surface. They were going to Mars. Her mission was approved. She was going to make a real difference. She was going to take action!
“I guess I better get ready,” Tsu said. He turned to leave and then looked back at her. “Does your family know you applied?”
She nodded, her smile faltering.
“Going to tell them the news?”
She swallowed back the icy claws that reached for her heart as she pictured her mother, father, and brother. They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. Grief had already engulfed them. But she would not let it claim her. Not when there was something she could still do.
She shook her head.
––––––––
The sun might as well have been a glorified spotlight in the sky, as far as Kiva was concerned. Sure, it had been bright getting out from the landing module on the Martian surface, but it was utterly bizarre to think that the tiny thing nearing the Martian horizon was really the same sun everyone back home dreaded. She wondered what it had been like to look out at the sun from the Earth’s surface. Tsu had been full of Earth knowledge. She listened to him talk about it to pass the time, but she struggled to retain much. Maybe it just felt pointless for her, even while it felt soothing for him.
Up here near the northern pole of Mars, the sun never ventured high into the sky, which was why they had relied on nuclear power out here. Kiva’s theory hinged on two factors. Radiation and power consumption.
Terraforming the red planet had not been completed before The Abandonment. She wondered what it had been like when those on Earth had been capable of looking to the sky with wonder and hope for their future. But pendulums swing both ways, one of her history professors had once explained. Economies, cultures, politics, religious movements, these and more formed intricate networks for societies that morphed. She couldn't imagine what that must have been like since her home city on the moon, Mond Stadt, had comprised only a million people all crammed into its ever deeper underground dwellings. And Mond Stadt had been only one city out of five.
Is, Kiva corrected her thinking. They’re not gone yet.
After The Abandonment, the cities on the Moon had formed a more cohesive alliance out of necessity. But they never become a formal country or state. And yet, they had far too much in common and too much at stake to be strangers. Life on the Moon had a way of doing that. Maybe it was the short horizon.
She trekked on, wondering if those Earthling bastards had ever really appreciated what it must have been like to walk freely on the surface of their planet without an EVA suit or the constant concern over oxygen and radiation levels.
But pendulums swing both ways.
And for the adventurous, the daring, the hopeful who ventured out to the Moon and beyond, their constant need for help eventually became a burden for Earth. Too busy trying to not tumble headfirst into an economic and ecological abyss, Earth had nothing left to offer its colonies in the sky. It had to be the first time any colonies were given independence against their own wishes. Mother Earth simply could no longer care for her needy space children.
Or so they had said.
All of this had happened long before Kiva was born. It was hard to contemplate Earth in any other way than the numb bitterness that pervaded her world. She was one of Earth's abandoned children, after all. The only reality she’d ever known was one of self-reliance and survival by determined Lunarians. The only universe she’d ever experienced was one without Earth in the picture.
Literally.
––––––––
She reached the edge of Shouming Shi just as the faint sunset shone over the Martian horizon. Lights glowed from within the semi-opaque dome covering the top layer of the underground citadel. Like the Moon, Mars offered no protection against the bombardment of radiation from the sun. Dreams of terraforming had remained just that. And without an active inner core like Earth, there was no magnetic field to do its part against solar radiation. With no atmosphere and no magnetic field, dirt became the only real radiation shield.
Was that why Mars had gone silent?
What had gone on here?
The nuclear reactor and autonomous maintenance systems kept this outpost running long beyond the last communications dropped off. After The Abandonment, when Earth turned her back on her children in the stars, Mars had hunkered down and moved on. Or so the stories went. They refused all communication with Earth or the Moon.
Kiva reached an airlock. Now to test a key part of her mission proposal. Would the universal airlock distress code allow her entry still? Accessing her internal computer via the in-helmet HUD, she brought up the distress signal command.
This was it. She held her breath and activated the distress signal.
The signal invisibly pulsed out of her suit. She watched the red airlock access light, waiting the painfully long seconds. Shit. It’s not working.
Swallowing back panic, she started the calculation in her head for how much air she had and how long it was going to take to cut through the airlock with the plasma torch when the light turned green.
“YES!” she yelled, causing her ears to ring in her helmet.
The door swung open, and she stared into the airlock and laughed. Shaking herself out of the sudden revery, she stepped inside.
Closing the hatch, she entered the command for pressurization and entry to the citadel. Staring at the metal door that opened into Shouming Shi, Kiva waited to discover if her journey—humanity’s journey—was at an end, or a new beginning.
––––––––
She’d been only six when it happened.
The isolated Earth inhabited by people who’d turned their backs on the sky, content to remain forever at the bottom of their gravity well, neglected to see their death rushing casually toward them from billions of kilometers away.
It had taken everyone by surprise. Thanks to The Abandonment by Earth, the colonies were too busy working on their own imminent survival to invest the tools and time to spy on the surrounding galaxy for potential threats. Some on the Moon suspected Mars had seen it coming, and embittered by the neglect of their mother world, raised no alarm.
Kiva had a hard time believing that.
She wondered what it had been like on Earth when they worked it out. What had people done? Lunarians had the advantage of time. It was not so with those on Earth. They’d had mere months and no infrastructure to mount a response. The scale of the comet had erased any hope of a different outcome.
She had studied it all in school. She was supposed to know the mass and dimensions of the comet. But she found she always forgot. It was pushed out of her mind by the images of cities on fire, mass graves for the suicides, the prayer vigils. The blinding blast. It didn’t matter. Only one simple fact mattered at all.
The Earth was gone.
Scattered into chunks that would someday form a new, and hardly noticeable asteroid belt where Earth’s orbit had been...
The Moon was spared. Coming around the Earth in the sun's direction at the time of impact. The angle of the comet’s impact pushed the debris away from the Moon. But with Earth’s magnificent gravity well erased from the fabric of the universe, the Moon was left to be influenced by a much more distant, though greater force.
As Kiva roamed the empty halls of Shouming Shi, she wondered if what they said on Luna was true after all. She’d refused to believe it all this time. But as her heart sank at the sight of the empty citadel, she couldn’t help but wonder if it was all true after all.
Were the only remaining members of the human race falling sunward with no escape and no future?
But she was here now.
––––––––
Three days into her stay in the empty Martian city, she concluded two things: the place was genuinely empty, and she was beyond sick of replenishing her air supply from local EVA suits and resupply outlets. It was time to find a more homey place where she could stay and climb out of that damn suit, which was getting increasingly tighter.
She was also starving and desperate to detach from the waste removal system in the suit before she got a full-blown UTI. It would be too much to hope for a shower. But she needed something to eat other than the protein sludge she could suck from a straw in her helmet.
But at least Kiva had an idea.
She tried to reassure herself that this was a good idea and not just the desperate flailing of a doomed woman with no other viable options. But an idea is an idea, right? She found herself thinking. What else are we going to do at this point? I try this or I go back to my crashed landing module and try to radio home and tell them the bad news.
Could she even break the bad news to them? Would it be better to them keep holding out hope for as long as possible? Was she doing the same now, or was there viability to this last ditch effort she wanted to make?
Deep in the bowels of the city was a secured section Kiva had not ventured into yet. Its heavy door made her figure she’d be working for some time with the plasma torch to get through. It had to be access to the city’s nuclear reactor or to some other secured scientific installation. The map she could find of the city was out of date, and the nuclear reactor had been a closely held secret. Obviously it was underground somewhere, but the Martians didn’t want that information shared with just anyone, especially given the fact that they seemed to figure that if anyone was about to show up from Earth or the Moon, it might be for a hostile takeover. And being able to hold their power sullies hostage would be a real advantage to attackers.
So maybe the reactor was down that direction or maybe there was something else? Either way, they wanted it projected, given how deep it was and how think that deer seemed. The Geiger Counter in her suit showed no elevated radiation in the area, so she figured she’d try it once she’d replenished the power for her suit’s electrical systems.
Maybe there were people still huddled away deeper under this city, with its active power supply. She fought off dread and despair, trying to remain hopeful that there was still enough of a contingency of Martian society to mount a rescue mission. Her people were desperately relying on her. It was her job as the messenger to remain hopeful and leave no rock unturned. That other messengers to other areas of Mars had failed could not enter her mind. Such thoughts threatened to drag her down below a sea of despair from which she would never be able to surface. She was sure they had looked in the wrong places. She had to be.
Of course, if what lay beyond that door was more nothing, she was really going to be out of options. But she couldn’t let herself think of that. She swallowed back the rising despair and steeled herself for one more effort, one more rock to turn over.
After all, the place was curious. Bright lights illuminated the large door. On it were no words, only a large monochromatic drawing of a tree.
She figured she’d have to use her plasma torch to cut through the door. Her careful study of old records on her trip out to Mars gave her some ideas of the scientific facility she might find inside. But those records were decades old, predating the Martian Silence. There could be anything behind this door.
Or nothing at all.
What had Tsu said on the trip out? “Not much of a gamble when there’s nothing left to lose.”
She tried to push the thought of him from her mind as she worked. But the smell of his hair returned to her nose like a ghost drifting through a silent room, the unseen ripples of love and grief tracing out from the source.
How he’d touched her... How he’d held her...
How he’d lied to her...
Or failed to tell her the truth behind his desire to volunteer for the mission.
“Not much of a gamble, indeed,” she muttered as she approached the door, the words hollow and frightening in her helmet. When had she spoken last?
She stared at the tree on the door. It was a silhouette. Almost a large icon, really. But why a tree? It had no access panel she could see, so she reached for her plasma torch as she stepped up to it.
The door slid open.
She jumped back in surprise.
Beyond it lay darkness. And in that darkness, she was certain she would either find hope or desolation.
Returning her plasma torch to its spot on her tool belt, she stared into the darkness. Why would the door just open?
Her body moved forward on its own. Her mind, her soul, her ability to hope all remained behind, numb beyond rescue now. But her body had a mission to accomplish.
The floodlights attached to her helmet automatically kicked on as she crossed into darkness. Surrounding her were tall shelves. She stepped between them and looked about. Her heart thundered as she realized that small glowing displays at regular intervals showed that the glass sealed shelves were operating.
Slowly, lights began to glow from above. It was at this point that Kiva was able to finally grasp how high the ceiling in the room was. She craned her neck back and gazed up at the glowing lights emitting from the ceiling some thirty meters above her. The shelves seemed to go nearly as high.
Looking back down at the rows, she realized what she was seeing. These were long term deep storage units. And they were still functioning!
Walking through the shelves deeper into the massive warehouse—which is what she took it for since she saw no walls to her left or right after entering—she traveled a long way. Here and there she caught glimpses of containers behind the glass. There were seeds and partially grown plants.
So one rumor was true. Mars had maintained a cryonic genetic storage system of some sort.
Her feet moved faster. Her heart pounded hard now, aching inside her chest.
Finally, she reached the end of the rows of shelves. She skidded to a stop, nearly losing her balance.
There was a body...
On the floor...
It lay on the pristine white floor next to the massive working control counsel.
She stepped closer to the preserved body. With no real atmosphere in the warehouse, there was no decomposition, just a lifeless, frozen, terrifyingly skinny form of a man. His light brown skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. His lifeless blue lips were slightly parted. His eyes stared out in frozen awe. He seemed forever petrified in a moment of transcendence, as if gazing out lovingly at a future which for him would never arrive.
Kiva stooped and took in the sight of him, feeling drawn to this spectacle of death, sensing a kinship in mortality she’d struggled to know in living. She recalled feeling this way as she was forced to prepare Tsu’s body to be jettisoned into the cosmos once the cancer took over too many of his organs. All those missions to the lunar surface in efforts to maintain solar arrays, launch missions to Mars, fix communication antennae damaged by increasingly closer solar flares, they added up to radiation overload for Tsu’s body.
Standing, she felt the child inside of her struggling against its increasingly cramped quarters. The unborn child was already living the plight of every Lunarian. Such a vast universe, and yet so inhospitable to the fragile sacks of fluid and bone with overgrown brains. Maybe it was just the way of the universe. All life has an expiration date. Humanity was reaching their own at last.
Blinking back tears, she pulled her eyes away from the dead man and at last allowed herself to gaze properly at the large control wall before her. The semicircular control station had a desk-level control pane and a single massive, curved screen that displayed the status of every sector. Cryogenically preserved were a host of seeds, plants, animal embryos, and...
She took in a sharp breath.
Human embryos.
There were human embryos.
Rushing forward to the control panel, she stared at the window displaying the Human embryo numbers. 7,877 viable embryos, according to the display. Next to that was an entire database of thousands of human eggs and sperm and other genetic material.
She glanced down at the simple control panel. It was deceptively simple. It was a single touch surface. As she drew near to it, it glowed with life, then resolved into a single blue circle that waited directly in front of her. As if drawn instinctively to it, she reached out and touched it.
The screen before her cleared and video footage of Earth appeared before her, surrounding her peripheral vision on the large arched screen. Oceans, lush green forests, cities, villages, rockets launching into space. Without words, the history of Humanity’s venturing out from its home world played before her. At last, the comet struck.
The footage now showed life on Mars. Martian cities rose quickly in time-lapse. Kiva recognized the scientific outposts being built in the footage to attempt the terraforming on Mars. But the structures weren’t complete.
The footage cut to life inside the cities. People with sunken eyes coughed. Hospital beds filled. Microscopic footage of what Kiva could only assume was a virus danced before her. Next, shots of empty city walkways and paths.
Kiva tasted the salt of her own tears, only then realizing she was crying. Something had gone horribly wrong on Mars. Something had decimated the population. A map of Mars displayed red Xs one by one over each Martian city and outpost until, at last, there were none left. The map was marked only with icons. No words.
No date either. There was no way of know for sure when this had all transpired.
Kiva looked all around the screen, trying to find any inscription, anything to indicate the time or cause of the Martian plague. Nothing. All the information was being conveyed to her by visuals alone. No language.
The screen now displayed footage of the stacks of cryogenic shelves. It showed her where other such locations could be found. It showed her labs that could be used. It showed her what could be done still to revive the human race.
It ended with a shot of a newborn child being held by a woman before the screen faded.
She stood frozen in place, waiting for anything.
What she saw next confused her. It was the same footage starting over with shots of Earth. But the colors were all wrong, like some vibrant negative image tinged with reds and purples. Had the screen broken? How could that be?
Her stomach lurched with a horrible realization. These visuals were not for her benefit. They were now playing in a different light spectrum than the human eye was equipped to see properly.
That was why there was no language in the video. Tell them the story without words, with no language and grammar. Let them see what they need to know.
She looked back to the last keeper of this vault of life and wondered if he’d ever imagined another human being would be the one to stumble upon this place. It didn’t seem like it had been their plan.
Whatever their plan had been, that was not the real question for Kiva now.
What am I going to do with this?
She turned and looked at all the rows of tall shelves going off in every direction. Could she really revive humanity in this place? What of the virus? Was it gone now that its host was gone as well? Was it inadvertently preserved on one of these shelves?
And even if she dared bring embryos to life, could she raise them? Could her children succeed where others had failed? Was she just cursing them to a cruel existence of toil, longing, and pain?
She looked back at the screen, which was cycling through the footage again in a new wavelength that to her eyes seemed mostly black and white. Was not toil and pain and longing the human story after all? Who was she to not act if she could?
But could she?
Kiva took a seat on the floor next to the last keeper of humanity’s future. She took a deep breath, feeling the tightness of the suit against her own child growing within her. She was already a keeper of humanity’s future in her own right. This was not the task that had brought her to Mars, and it crushed her. She wept with abandon, shaking herself to the floor, morning with acute certainty for every doomed Lunarian she had come to save.
How long she lay on the floor she did not know. But eventually, her air supply alert roused her. She would need to resupply soon or find the controls to reintroduce atmosphere to this place so she could climb out of her suit at last.
When she painfully rose to her feet, she found that the screen now displayed the same databases of all the preserved genetic materials, but clear icons now were displayed above each window. They bore the same monochromatic and precise style to the tree on the door that led her into the warehouse.
Could she really do this?
She felt the child move within her, almost as if delivering a nudge to remind her she was not quite so alone after all. She took a deep breath and sighed. She would not do it alone. She would likely see only the first tentative steps of this new long-term mission taken. But she could be a keeper of humanity’s future. This was not how she intended to ensure humanity’s survival when she left her home, and that thought would forever haunt her every breath. But she could teach the next keeper who could teach the next, until humanity could begin its cautious rebirth and resume its endless struggle.
She placed her hand over her belly, sighed a soul-crushed, hope-filled prayer to anyone who might still care for her race of beautifully flawed beings, and accepted what she knew for certain now to be her final mission.