[Hard SF] Children of a Dead World

They told us Earth was dying. That was the push. The impetus. The impulse, if you'll allow a bit of spacer's humor over something like that. Warming oceans, scorched and humid tropics, the whole shebang. People migrating in vast waves, the detritus of humanity moving from ancient habitations to nearer the poles and nearer to life. Resources drying up even as the need for complex machinery spiked, supply chain crises mushrooming like tiny little nuclear fireballs across a million different spreadsheets as industrial managers scrambled and screamed and failed to make things normal again. All that was what gave mankind the push to leave the cradle. We poisoned our mother Earth and her anger made us leave.

So we left with panache as we rode that impulse born of a poisoned world, with flooded wasted Florida and barren Baikonur launching station modules that were assembled thousands of miles away in Europe. Engineers in Andhra desperately cobbled together ark-ships for orbital habitation while Chinese space scientists set about calculating cometary trajectories for water mining. The drifting smoke columns of rocket launches were seen day in and day out, far above the turmoil of old mother Earth.

Ruined Florida was the backdrop for Canaveral, polluted Kazakhstan the setting for Baikonur, humid sun-scorched Guinea the home for Arianespace. Hainan Island glared at Tanegashima across a narrow ocean, both of them flinging rockets into the skies as if to vent their rage. The Indian spaceport at Sriharikota was uninhabitable in summer and home to the roar of engines in wintertime.

Across the great sweep of our homeworld, collapsing nation-states warred with barely-stable ones while in the background moved the greatest engineering effort that we as a species have ever attempted and possibly ever will.

We did it. We left Earth and we dumped God only knows how much genetically engineered bacteria into the Venerian atmosphere, strip-mining the Kuiper Belt with automated drones and their motherships darting from ore-rich rock to ore-rich rock on the long burn past Jupiter before the slingshots of gravity wells took them home again. We strip-mined the asteroid belt, carving up rocks and sending the ore-rich chunks to via drone-piloted spacecraft that fueled up on Titan. We planted people on Ganymede and on Titan, fueling and supply points for the Belt mines and repair points for the robotic miners. We scattered the best and brightest we had among the planets of the Solar System in a desperate effort to put enough material together to keep humanity alive.

And we did it. We damn well did it.

There are a million people on a half-terraformed Venus even as I write this. A million people living far from home and far from their ancestors, on a place that we wrought over the course of a hundred years. A place where the machinery humming in orbit keeps them alive and keeps the planet on course for habitability, a place fed materials by Earth and the Belt. A place where the millions upon millions of Earthers are to be slowly moved, as nations sink or crumble and people have nowhere else to go.

There are fifty thousand people scattered across the Kuiper Belt and the moons of the gas giants, living in domes and sealed habitats where the light of the sun and the angry radiance of Jupiter filter in through shielding and polarized polymer. Their ships and their drones dance amidst the vast inky blackness of space, past the immensities of gas giants and to the mineral rich asteroids upon which the foundries of Earth and Venus are fed. Titan fuels the Belt from its ethane oceans, settlements on Titan home to scientists and engineers fed on hydroponic food and sustained by shipping from Mother Earth. Ganymede is their staging post and relay, grim domes in orbit of mighty Jupiter where repairmen work on drones and ships and signal relays.

Old Mother Earth is their womb, in whose orbit there are five thousand spacers and the skeletal yards for drone-miners and ark-ships alike.

You can see nuclear-thermal engines flare in Earth orbit as newly born ships begin the Long Burn to the Belt, their bright enthusiastic torches intermingled with the dimmer flares of miners bringing home their finds. The great ion thrusters that propel ark-ships and the fusion thrusters of the newest of the cargo lifters are a light in the orbital dark, taking the products of Earth to Venus and the Belt – and keeping them alive.

For Old Earth is where we proud spacers are born and sustained, in some form or another. Without our mother, our poisoned beautiful cradle, we would die in this inky blackness that we have scattered ourselves across.
But now our mother is dead. We are left as the children of a dead or dying world and we somehow must endure.

Nobody knows yet what happened. We are all months away from an Earthside transmission and the window for data transfer is yet to come. All that we can say is that scheduled packets from the powerful Earthside transmitters have not come through. Earth has gone silent.
Before she did, she screamed.

We heard news of launches, of plague and bioterror and horror upon horror in a brief series of terse data-packets. Terse words flung out into the darkness like grenades or shellfire, each brief hissing voice a herald of the deepest tragedy in history. Accusatory or apologetic, sobbing or defiant, we heard them all and we don't even know who they were.

Was the American calling for his God the President? Was he some officer, left in the broken ruins of a nation that had limped on for a century? We don't know.

Was the Russian indeed their President, ordering orbital assets 'home'? Or was this some warlord seeking what technology he could find from among the stars?

Was the Indian who broke down in tears on the transmission from Andhra indeed a spacer? Was he the terraforming expert who he claimed to be? Is there salvage to keep us alive on Old Earth?

We don't know.

We don't even know who shot first and who still lives. We don't know if we will live.

But all we can do is try. We will endure. We will bury the dead and aid the living as best as we can.

From the broken remains of humanity on dead mother Earth, we will find what we need.
Humanity will go on.

Pick one colonial command:

[]Ganymede: This was the relay point for miners heading to the Kuiper Belt, a place with a thin oxygen atmosphere and ice at its poles. The equator is home to domes and launchpads, where the magnetic field of Ganymede is strong enough to keep the colonists from being irradiated. The main purpose of Ganymede was repair, refueling, relaying and resupply for the Belt – with Venus needing to be fed ore and raw materials it is needed more than ever. Can it last?

[]Venus: Home to the fractious thousands of colonists sent by every nation on Earth, a place that is sure to experience turmoil as the news of what happened filters back to the populace. Venus is nominally self sufficient, but lacks the refined raw materials to keep its equipment active. A lot of that came from Earth. Some came from the Belt. You will need to scavenge, ration and pray in order to stay stable and alive, for yours is the new home of humanity. Should you fall, we all do.

[]Titan: The refueling station farthest from Earth in orbit above the varicolored immensity of Saturn, where ethane oceans wash against the ice. Titan is where the Belters refuel before beginning the Long Burn back to Earthside orbit, and where the habitation domes are the most precarious. You are essential to keep material flowing back to Venus and what is left of the orbital refineries around Earth, but you will have to stay alive to do that.

AN: Tagging @Blackstar for interest.
Voting may begin.