Ejected Earth - Chapter One
Repost.
EJECTED EARTH
Chapter One
Residential Node | Easthold | Greylunde Territorial Outpost
28 April 2560
523 Years Post-Ejection
The air from the tunnel hubs always carried a taste of metal. Cold and sharp. Like licking the edge of a coin.
Jack liked it. It meant the filters were working. It meant the vents hadn’t frozen again. And it meant the sublimators were still melting just enough ice into the air to keep the walls from cracking.
The central node was always quiet. The walls absorbed sound like they were made to forget it. In that stillness, only the deuterium refinery’s hum sang through the bones of the dome.
Jack walked the grated platform—satchel bouncing, boots tapping. The others peeled off toward the rec hall, but Jack had his own routine.
Lights buzzed high overhead as he walked down the ramp to the StrataMole pens. Bay four was his dad’s. Had been for years. Jack knew every scuff and bubble-gum weld on that gate.
Kids weren’t supposed to be in the StrataMole pens without a tech, but Gerry always waved him through. Even this late in the day, the pens buzzed with activity. Crew chiefs barked load orders, techs swapped scorched dampers, and cleared spall from the deck plates. Junior techs raced crates against shift call.
Jack knew that if he wanted to retain his trespassing privileges, he had to stay well clear of the techs. He also knew that if he wanted to retain his limbs, he’d have to stay well clear of the StrataMoles.
While Jack waited for the activity on the decks to die down, he counted all of the techs with four limbs. One less than last week.
Seeing his opening, Jack crossed the busy thoroughfare.
Loren’s eyes never left the controls of his side-loader, but noticed nine-year-old Jack bounding down the breezeway stairs.
“She’s going out in twenty. Make it quick.”
Jack replied with a two-finger salute. Just another tech.
Lucille was already coupled to her cargo cars, ready to deliver his father’s crew their nightly resupply of provisions, equipment and materials. Jack never understood why all of the mining crews named their StrataMoles and TerraVores girl names, or why Jack’s mom hated it.
Climbing onto the lead cart, Jack opened a small door with “John Greer” written in white paint. Inside: a dented metal tin. The kind his mom used to send cookies to his dad in. Already grinning, Jack pulled out the leather-bound journal.
Inside was a drawing of a skeleton wearing boxing gloves. Underneath the drawing was written, Why don’t skeletons ever fight?
With a cringing smile, Jack pulled out a pencil and wrote.
“They don’t have the guts…You need funnier friends.”
Jack took off his satchel, sat cross-legged on the cart, turned to fresh page.
He blew away the loose graphite dust and put his pencil in his jacket pocket. Somewhere between last week’s fart joke and report card, he tucked in the note he’d written the night before and placed it back into the old metal tin.
Most of the other kids talked to their parents on expedition through vidlink, but ever since his father sent him that drawing of a funny looking Martian, Jack and his father wrote back and forth through the leather-bound notebook. Dad named the Martian Marvin.
He jumped off the cart, boots ringing out on the metal grating below.
“Thanks, Lo!” he shouted over the rising thrum of the other moles coming online.
Loren climbed out of his side loader, adjusting his prosthetic leg as he moved.
“You bet!” Loren shouted over the growing noise. “Gerry’s fixing your dad’s old Vore if you want to check—”
“Came by this morning!”
“Of course you did.” Loren cracked a smile and gave him the salute.
Just another tech.
Jack responded in kind and sprinted across the loading apron. Before leaving he stopped to watch Lucille as her fusion reactor spooled up.
Lucille’s reactor wound up slowly. The vents across her freshly painted yellow hull flickered as the coils stabilized. The startup pulse came next. Abrupt. Clean. Like a hundred breaths held and released all at once.
He’d always hold his breath with her, waiting for the thrum—slow and low. The kind you felt in your teeth.
He watched her hum to life longer than he needed to. The thrum faded behind him as he turned and started the quiet walk home.
The walk home was long. He didn’t mind. He liked the quiet and never minded the cold. It was his favorite time to dream. About the future, about Dad, Lucille—about everything.
Jack walked into his family’s hab and shed off his heavy jacket.
Jack’s mother looked up from the stove. Jack’s older sister, Elizabeth, kept her gaze fixed on her tablet.
“Hey Jackie.”
“Hey mom.”
Jack knew what home was supposed to smell like, but all he caught was the sharp dust of the logistics hub, still clinging to him for dear life.
“Supper will be ready in a minute. Go get washed up.”
Jack’s mom didn’t hum when she cooked anymore. He couldn’t remember the last time she played the piano.
She still smiled. Still asked about his day. But he could tell it didn’t come without some effort. She wasn’t sad exactly. Just…slower.
Dinner felt long, though no one talked much. When it ended, they scraped bowls in the dim light and settled into the quiet. The low hum of the node filled the silence between them, a sound they all trusted completely.
Sleep usually found Jack quickly, but not tonight. He kept seeing his dad’s old TerraVore half-melted across Gerry’s shop floor.
He tried swallowing the knot in his throat. Maybe he’d get out of school tomorrow.
Eyes shut, he dreamt of straddling a StrataMole rocketing across the frozen surface under the actual stars.
Someplace called The Sahara.
One day.
He woke before his alarm, dressing in the half-dark, still chewing on the questions that kept him awake. Questions that school couldn’t answer.
He tried thinking about anything else on the long, quiet walk back to the pens.
Gerry would tell him what happened.
Gerry was Dad’s oldest friend. From before Mom even. His mom liked Gerry well enough, but he knew she would rather Jack find a friend his own age. Or at least someone who didn’t swear so much.
“Hey, Gerry.”
“Whatcha say there, Jackie boy! Come to see Annabelle?” Gerry stood up, wiping his metallic hand with an oily rag.
“Last night I was thinking about that gas pocket.”
“She was a big fuc–” Gerry gathered himself. “What about it?”
Jack wandered by Gerry’s toolbox and pulled out the same half-inch torque wrench he always fiddled with in Gerry’s bay.
“So it was a big one. Any idea what it was?”
“Best guess? Whale carcass. Must’ve been buried under the ice shelf before any of this was even here. Drifted in, got sealed up. Over time, the organic stuff broke down and left a pocket full of gas.”
Jack sat down on the mechanics stool, clicking through the teeth of the wrench.
“My dad told me that the Vores had a way to see those. Something like radar.”
“LiDAR. Don’t ask me how—it just works. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, we know it’s there before they start cutting.”
Gerry put the last of his tools away, sat down behind his workbench and turned a screen towards Jack. “Take a look here.”
Most of it looked like static to Jack. Rings of pale green layered across dense bands of darker green. He knew what the two parallel lines were. Orange: TerraVore mainline. Yellow: StrataMole boreline.
Gerry circled a small smudge along the edge of the orange path. Barely a dip in the signal.
“Right there,” he said, tapping the screen. “See it?”
Jack leaned closer. It didn’t look like much. Not a crack. Not a void. Just a faint blur.
“That’s where it was.” Gerry adjusted the scan with a flick of his fingers. “Signal hit basalt. Dense shit. Real compressed. Soaked up the return. Read it as solid.”
Jack kept staring at the screen. A smudge on the scan. Just small enough to miss. Just big enough to matter. To do everything right…and still lose.
The knot came back.
“There’s not a system in this place without a blind spot somewhere,” Gerry said, smiling faintly. “Same goes for people, I guess.”
Gerry turned the screen back toward his workstation. “There’s an old-world saying for when fate finds us, no matter how clever we think we are.”
He gave Jack a half-smile.
“Shit happens.”
Jack stood from the stool and put the heavy torque wrench back in the toolbox—right where it belonged.
“I’m gonna be late.” Jack turned to walk out of the service bay.
“Jackie—,” Jack stopped at the yellow halon fire bottle. “John’s a real bitch. He’ll be home telling his tall tales before Day of Last Light.”
Jack smiled. “Thanks, Ger.”
It didn’t make him feel any better, but Jack never came to Gerry for comfort.
At school, Jack spent the day tracking Lucille’s route in his head. Speed, distance, stops. If they’d tested him on boreline logistics, he might’ve finally earned a spot on the coldkeep.
He counted the relays like prayers, refusing to believe anything could go wrong.
Jack’s boots hit the slab tiles before the bell finished its last chime. He had time. Lucille never left before four, but he couldn’t shake this feeling until he was holding something from his father. A letter, a corny joke, a shiny rock—anything.
He’d made it out of the residential nodes before he realized he was running. By the time he reached the hub, he was running full tilt.
The logistics hub felt asleep. Gerry and a few others tried waving him down, but Jack kept running. Whatever Gerry wanted could wait.
With each step, the voices behind him thinned.
He rounded the gate and stopped.
There was Lucille. Bay four. His dad’s—right where she should be. His pulse began to slow. Just a little.
But something was wrong.
Loren was gone. His loader, left running in the middle of the apron. The other bays—all abandoned. He stepped down the metal breezeway stairs and climbed onto Lucille’s cargo cart. Sitting on his feet, he held his breath as he opened his father’s cubby.
The old dented tin sat right where it always did.
His breathing slowed and shook. He fanned the pages. He needed a joke. A note.
Inside, a sketch.
He turned the journal in his hands, tilting into the light.
A broken voice cracked a hole in the silence.
“Jack?”
Gerry stood at the top of the stairs, breathless. His voice was cautious—guarded.
Every tech on shift stood silently behind him. Watching.
Jack squinted. “Ger?”
The sea of techs behind Gerry began to part.
The air in Jack’s lungs fled as he searched the wall of faces.
“…Jack?”
The hum of the hub and the howl of the wind from the lines behind him faded to nothing.
His mother’s slow, shallow voice drowned out everything else.
His eyes found hers the moment he heard her voice.
Tears flooded his eyes—his throat closed.
“Yeah, Mom?” His voice cracked and shook.
It wasn’t real until someone said it.
“Jack…”
“he’s gone.”
Tears wet the pages of the journal opened on his knees.
The damp pages shook as he traced its shape—his father’s last mark.
A ball.
Three arrowed lines crossing.
Well then.