【by Juan Garcia】

Leddard never knew if it was simply her mind playing its games, but artificial gravity never felt the same as the real thing. There was an itch there, as if they hadn’t calibrated the grav-engines to the exact amount necessary to where her mother earth would become with her again, where she would feel its lovely pull. She felt that same disconnection every time she left the atmosphere no matter the method, and it let a festering feeling build up within her. It was because of this that she never ventured farther than Luna. The thought of a three-month journey to Mars or the year-long voyage to the Jovian system made her stomach turn. To think that once those journeys had taken twice the time even in the right launch windows.

But this meeting was in orbit. So the festering feeling remained. The moon they had once treasured as a natural wonder of the night had turned itself into an anthill of construction and swarming spacecraft, a little launchpad for Earth’s powers. Luna 15 was the largest creation, a tangle that, upon approach, resembled a clawed hand reaching towards space. Engineers had taken to calling the station the Devil’s Fingers. 

A flash of light, a tinted shot of the sun’s brilliant ultraviolet gaze, illuminated the transport chamber as it passed through the station’s circuit elevator. Leddard squinted away and focused on both the doors and on her security team, a solid wall of armor and weaponry gleaming larger than life in the bulk of the exoskeletons. Peace talks indeed.

The suit itched as well. The brains over in the Global Space Authority had originally fashioned and fitted the thing to resemble the standard Terran business model, but discovered from disgruntled diplomatic reports that it had an unflattering…bulbous effect on the fabric that left the Lunars snickering. Leddard liked the newer model better, a flexible flow of interlocking plates under black kevlar, more akin to the military design save for the overeager blue of their diplomatic armbands. They bore the iconic Earth compass beside the flag they each represented. She remembered the long-ago history lectures of the first NASA suits they had sent in the late twentieth century—fat and stiff things, delicate and unprotected. The life support systems had yet to be compacted then, appearing like slabs on their backs.

Another downside to the artificial gravity was that it came with artificial turbulence. She gritted her teeth and held on to the safety railing as the transport shuddered from some unknown mechanical quirk, likely harmless. Captain Harper, the head of the security detail, smirked back at her nausea.

“Eyes front, captain,” she snapped. His beady eyes returned to the surely fascinating view of the blank steel doors.

They passed another harsh sunbeam. The light lit up the visages of two more of her fellow diplomats, Sarah Hogan and Li Yang, both itching in their unfamiliar attire. Their aides, dressed in simple station jumpsuits, held the diplomats’ golden-visored helmets clumsily in front of them. Leddard caught the wary gaze of Li, the Chinese ambassador as the control panel by Harper beeped to signal an incoming stop on the circuit. “Don’t expect them to welcome you with open arms this time, Mr. Li.” The last squadron of soldiers the GSA had sent to Mars had been decimated, the only ship returning being a ruined hull with the words HELLO TO THE TYRANTS OF MAMMON painted on the side. That had certainly given the news feeds something to talk about. This was all after their last ceasefire, where the Chinese diplomat beside her had tried to appeal to the colonists’ rejection of the corporations by offering his own government’s aid. Clearly the Martians had lumped them in with the western corpos, much to the eastern country’s chagrin.

The man scowled at her but said nothing. Hogan also gave Leddard the cold shoulder. Rival corporate shit, real American of her. Leddard knew that the feeling of pride associated with serving her government was of older days. Now, at least on their side of the Delhi Accords, patriotism was an antiquated subject matter. Leddard was for CraftX and Hogan for BreakWater, that was that. The collapse of the United States was still indeed a sore subject matter, but nobody could deny the truth that afterwards, the survival of the corporation meant survival for everyone. And so, the new replacement for the nation-state ascended from the pit. Now those that carved up those old countries were forced to reckon with the nations that remained as well as whatever pretenders cropped up in the colonies. Mr. Li was a representative of one of those old matters. However, they had proved reliable for CraftX in dealing with the new catastrophes on Mars, the same being said for India and the European Coalition.

The alarm blared and the transport slowed to a stop at a merciful velocity. Nevertheless, the diplomats that had never quite seemed to grow their space legs clung to the railing with white knuckles. Then Leddard took a deep breath as the airlock decompressed with a hiss and the doors slid open with silent venom.

She strained to pick herself up off of the ground among the haze of smoke, but her hand slipped on something wet and warm, and she fell with a groan. Something had stiffened her leg, swollen it in the suit. She felt a roaring pain at the edge of her consciousness. Her ears were still ringing from the first shots, but she thought she could hear someone screaming horrendously. She opened her eyes only to see soldiers around her, and not her own. She cried out and was dragged by her suit to the front of the deck, where the terrifying strength of an exoskeleton forced her to her knees and put her hands in TazerBox manacles. She felt the prickle of threatened torture arc over her fingers.

Then she managed at last to get a good look around her. The deck of Luna-15 was the same as she remembered, save that the place was completely abandoned of personnel. Workspaces and monitors were strewn across the floor or broken entirely. The screens that had lit up the room’s ceiling a year beforehand with displays of spaceports or navigation paths were blacked out. Soldiers filled the room like black phantoms in their NukeSuits, the thruster ports lining their frames like dragon spines. A pit filled her stomach as she saw the carnage of what remained of her security detail in front of the transport doors. Some of the Terrans were still alive, groaning as they clutched at their likely mortal wounds. Leddard felt herself trembling as she fought to regain her composure, and looked down at her leg. She saw it with a mix of fear and revulsion; a swollen mess that leaked a steady stream of scarlet onto the deck.

“You,” said a rough voice. She looked up to see a soldier looming over her with his assault rifle casually slung over his suit. His hair was matted and overgrown with a ragged beard to match, and his eyes were haggard and squinty. The man’s cheeks were sunken and through her pain Leddard could observe a tattoo on his cheek of three small stars. He indicated at her diplomat’s armband. “You’re with CraftX.”

“I am.” She said it as calmly as she could through the ardor of her leg. “You—you’ve breached the cease-fire. Do you people understand what this means for you?” She couldn’t help but finish with a wavered tone as she saw Martian soldiers lift up Hogan’s remains for identification. Oh God, she thought. They were going to butcher her.

The soldier looked at her. “Do you know where my family is?” he asked.

“I—what?”

“My family,” he continued. “2088 for Terra. CraftX said they were relocating the civilians in Sector 3 for new excavation projects. The other sectors never saw any civvies come in. They never saw my family. So—” he raised the rifle and pressed it to Leddard’s head. She yelped as the barrel burned her scalp, but the man kept it steady. “Where are they?”

“They—well, they—wait, I think you should wait, ah, wait a moment.” Her mind flashed to reports of clandestine operations in the third sector of the Olympus Mons colony, things that few eyes saw and fewer eyes minded. Or was it the Acheron site? There was an onrushing sensation of the consequence of her apathy, and she almost laughed at it. The endless fucking paperwork, the numbers and statistics that were just pixels had taken form and danced their way into her life, hadn’t they? 

“Where are they?” the man screamed. His voice echoed in the open metal space. The raiding party had stopped what they were doing to look save for the pair working with the few control stations that still functioned. They wore the same beaten-down face as her tormentor. The same judging eyes.

There was a beat that settled the air. Past the mass of the rifle barrel that occupied her vision, she could see that the man’s finger sat on the trigger, prepared to snuff her out.

“I think we both know where they are.” She sank to the floor with a smile of disbelief.

“Yeah, I think we do,” he replied.

They left her behind in the ruin of the station, clinging to life among the bodies of her team. A Terran extraction team found her there several hours later once they commandeered a ship to reach the station. Luna had been plunged into a state of blackout by an electromagnetic pulse weapon set by the Martians. The cities of Proxima and Velum had suffered for it, with ships crashing into their ports to kill hundreds. The governments of Earth, both corporate and national, scrambled to recover from the ambush, but the message had been sent. A reminder that in the stars, on the edge of thought and vision, new powers were rising against the old world, an Earth broken by its many saints of greed.