Where the Sky Ends

“They’ll never let us land,” Vesper said into the crackling comms unit of her scuffed EVA helmet. The words tasted bitter, like the underripe soy beans that had gone into the tofu she had eaten that morning.

Without looking, she stretched out her gloved hand. The massive piece of pre-formed plasteel, twice the size of her lanky body, still hung in the almost-vacuum beside her, right where she had left it. From her vantage, it had not moved, but that was a trick of the senses. It whizzed around the curvature of Earth at the same twenty-seven thousand kilometers per hourshe did.

“Bio-gen sent up fuel for a long boost, so at least we won’t crash in a while,” Jian’s voice replied over the comms channel, crackling over the static.

He wasn’t out here, floating four hundred kilometers above the perpetual blanket of smog that covered what used to be North America. Beyond the roiling clouds, a dust storm the size of Texas moved across the urban sprawl, turning the landscape an ugly grey-orange.

“Probably figured out we’d fall on their heads,” Vesper bit back at her longtime friend.

She hooked a magnetized boot into a handhold, securing herself against the ever-present drift. The cable clipped into her belt felt no more secure than a frayed rope, a flimsy tether to the falling behemoth. No repair crew with even a shred of sanity left in their skulls would trust gear this old, this patched.

Bracing her body, she shifted, and with a click she felt rather than heard, secured the panel back into its rightful place. Then, with a fluid twist of her entire body, she looked up. Her EVA suit, a relic of Martian engineering battered during endless repair runs, felt as articulated as a child’s toy.

Behind the curving expanse of Hab-Unit 8’s glass dome, the Sun rose for the fourth time of the day. Its blinding rays danced across the solar panels and mirror arrays, unfurled like a high-tech flower thirsting for its life-giving light. In that brief, brilliant halo, the decaying structures of the displaced Martian habitat looked almost… nice. For a fleeting second one could almost imagine it proudly sitting among the red sands of the home it’d left behind a decade ago.

“If you’re done with your bellyaching, get clear of the machinery,” Kaito’s voice cut in, older, rougher than Jian’s, seasoned by command and used to barking orders. “Come back inside.”

Commander Kaito, formerly of the Martian Colonial Force, probably had to adjust to their new life the most. Now, there was almost nobody left to command but the hundreds of Martian children he’d saved, growing up in the liminal space between Earth’s indifferent sky and the decaying metal shell of Hab-Unit 8.

“Got it, on my way back,” Vesper replied.

She pushed off the pockmarked hull, gliding along the scarred plasteel. Micro-impacts from a decade of orbital debris had pitted the surface. The ever-growing graveyard of shipwrecks and broken satellites loomed above, dappled sunlight flickering between them. It painted shadows on her visor and created the illusion of moving though an ancient metal forest.

Behind her, the massive mirror array she’d spent the morning repairing creaked and groaned into position. It caught the precious photons, funneling them into the massive arboreum. There, in the sterile warmth and artificial nutrients grew fields and fields of genetically modified soybeans. A botanic marvel, they were the single, most precious thing on Hab-Unit 8, the verdant proof that they had kept themselves alive for the last ten years.

Another twist, moving through the micro gravity of Earth’s low orbit like a fish through water, and Vesper’s magnetic boots clicked against the airlock’s floor grates. The thick door protested as it closed but the seal sat tight, she and others like her, repairing the habitat around the clock, made sure of that. Any loss of atmosphere would spell ruin for untold portions of their fragile home. The wait for pressure to equalize felt like forever.

Then, finally, the light turned green and Vesper heaved open the inner airlock door. The room beyond was dim and lined with rows of empty lockers. In the past, each locker held its own EVA suit. Over the years, the many became few and now only a dozen lockers held the patched together remains of the once impressive Martian preparedness.

Vesper released the magnetic hold of her boots and twisted out of her suit as she moved. It was easier this way. After a decade in nigh-zero G, Vesper moved as if she had never known gravity at all. She stored her suit in its locker, plugged the respirator into its charging port, and left.

There were no automatic doors in Hab-Unit 8, not anymore. As the constant rain of debris destroyed more and more of the solar panels, all power had to be conserved. Vesper cranked open the manual lock on the next hatch and squeezed past the opening before doing the reverse on the other side. She breathed in deep, the pure, fresh oxygen embracing her, flooding her cells, washing out the stale, metallic smell that permeated the hand-me-down respirators.

Beyond the door were the Hab-Unit 8’s verdant lungs, the fields of hardy plants that had taken over for the failing air scrubbers years ago. Vesper pushed off the wall and flew across the vast chamber, just a few centimeters from the fragile leaves. Her fingertips brushed them as she passed, a gentle, almost reverent touch for this precious resource. A small smile ghosted on her lips.

This was her favorite perk of being on the orbital repair crew, the permission to be up here, inside the glass dome, breathing air that almost felt too clean. With a flick of her wrist and a twist of her waist, she turned before she could hit the wall, placing her feet firmly onto the plasteel. A push and she soared through the rays of reflected light, dancing between them like a mythical fairy.

“Vesper!” Jian’s voice reached her from behind two rows of hydroponic shelves. “Vesper, wait!”

Instead of doing as Jian asked, Vesper pushed herself off the corner of a water pump and accelerated. Her head swirled from the speed and the sudden turns between the rows and stacks of plants.

“Vesper, stop! Ria will be mad at you again!” Jian shouted from somewhere behind a tall stack of leafy greens.

With a sigh, Vesper spun her body in the air and braced herself against a conduit. Her bones creaked from the strain of the sudden stop, a dull ache that she ignored. She whipped her head around, looking for Jian, her straight, black hair standing off her scalp like a dark halo.

There, she spotted him above the shelves of Quadrant 14. He was a lanky youth with knobby limbs and brown, monolid eyes. A real stickler for rules.

“What are you doing out here, Jian?” Vesper asked as she floated toward him, slower this time. “You are supposed to be on the comms.”

“You were taking so long that Kaito sent me to find you,” Jian replied with a model frown. He even crossed his arms for that extra emphasis, a habit he had picked up from the adults. “We are not supposed to play up here, you know it.”

“I have never even touched anything,” Vesper complained, flicking her wrist to descend. She swept her hand over a shelf of soybean plants, her fingertips just shy of touching them. “Others bump into things, but I don’t. See?”

“Ah…” Jian looked. It wasn’t a good look. “Vesper?”

“What?” Now she looked, a frown darkening her face.

Something ugly was among the green, sticking out like a sore thumb. Her breath caught in her chest. A quarter of the shelf was turning yellow, the edges of the delicate plants dry and crisp.

“Oh no,” she mumbled as she leaned in close.

“Did you bump an irrigation pipe?” Jian demanded as he floated closer. His eyes searched the delicate network of pipes, as if unable to look at the yellow plants.

“I didn’t,” Vesper bit back, bitterness rising in her throat. But the endless lessons from Hab-Unit 8’s botanists, drilled into her class since childhood, resurfaced. There was no time for anger, for blame, or for lies.

Carefully, she reached into the rows of plants and plucked out one of the yellow leaves. She pushed off from one of the beams holding the shelves in place and the momentum carried her all the way to the squat building in the middle of the dome.

“Kaito!” Vesper called out before she had even cranked the door open wide enough for her slender body to pass. “Kaito, you have to see this!” Too impatient to wait, she squeezed through the narrow gap into the room, which was crammed full with holo-screens and scuffed chairs.

“What is it, Vesper?” Kaito asked, without looking toward her.

He sat in one of them, a worn safety belt securing him to the cushions. It was a ridiculous habit, born from a life lived in gravity, and it should have long disappeared just like the roundness of his face and most of his muscle mass. Yet, just like his skin clung to his narrow jaw, he clung to old habits born inside the gravity well of Mars.

With Kaito was Ria, one of the botanists responsible for the plants outside, a woman with drawn features, as thin and fragile as the organisms she cares for. She floated next to his chair with a dark frown on her pale face. Vesper could not remember even a single day when that frown wasn’t there.

“The plants in Quadrant 14,” Vesper called across the room as she surged toward them, using the patchwork console as a stop. She held up the wilted leaf as if it was a dying pet. “They are dying!”