Outbound

It was all I had left of her, and it was my only way out.

Earth is a bad memory, Mars, a nightmare. If I wanted a future on Titan I needed to board that last shuttle.

My fist was clenched tightly around the heirloom, my lone possession in this strange red world. One that came at far too high a price.

The line shuffled forward once more. Two steps closer to my destiny. Or my inevitable doom.

Bitter tears rolled disobediently down my cheeks, marking their passage through the accumulated grime and wet dust that soaked them. It came from the terra-forming platforms, great spindly towers spewing moisture across the sky day in and day out. Giant sprinklers, really.

That muck was great for the planet but terrible for humans. If you were unlucky enough to breathe in a lungful of it your time on Mars was numbered in a matter of days. Not weeks. Hence the regulation masks coating everyone's faces. Nose-to-chin. Those that could not afford goggles, such as myself, had scarves and hoods to keep out the dust. With the sheer wind churned up by the atmospheric turbines, most people were clutching their rags tight to their bodies.

The guards watching the line had filtered helmets. Jerks.

I risked a look upward, out over the sea of downcast faces all searching for salvation here in the red sand dunes. Sparse vegetation dotted the hillsides, the kind of patchwork shrubbery that oozes out of a high desert. Not the lush green stuff from home but a strange alien blonde instead. Or grey, if it was slowly dying like the rest of us. Something the scientists cooked up just for Mars in those gross white labs that were more bunkers than buildings.

On my left I could see two or three of those dome-topped labs just taking up space in the red desert, rich science-types bustling back and forth with samples and expensive meals, wearing nice clothes, thinking nice thoughts.

Not us though. The ones in line. We were all refugees from a broken Earth, hoping for a ticket on the last outbound flight, the Concordia. Our only way off this rock. I wish I could say it was a gorgeous craft, but in all honesty, I had never seen it. Most Martians knew better than to look to the sky. We had all seen the monsters that false hope could turn dying people into.

Stars know I’ve heard every variation of 'weren't a damn thing up there worth reaching for' since I arrived here, aged nine.

The line started forwards again. Two at a time. Just like always.

Two strangers had their fate decided at the head of the line. One outbound; loading up for a chance at a future. The other going nowhere; headed back to the wetted red dust-ball that Mars had become. Headed back to the control of the armored 'peacemakers' who never made an ounce of peace in their whole damn careers. Jerks.

I told myself I was not going back that way.

When it was my turn to move, my feet shuffled forward two steps, leaving my imprints in the army of bigger marks in the clinging muck below. Hopefully, my last and only souvenir from this wet rock.

I sure as every-hell-there-ever-was would not miss Mars.

When he passed me, the man going nowhere ripped his mask off and inhaled; deep and slow. One breath. A lethal dose.

My eyes went wide and I found myself unable to release my white-knuckled grasp on my prize. The last thing Mom ever gave me. She had pressed it into my hands in a frenzy. Like she already felt it was going to be her last chance. Her last words rang in my ears, "Take this. Use it to build a better life."

Her death was nowhere near as fast as it felt, watching. One night she was Mom. Next morning; a banshee clinging desperately to life. Hours of her screams all blurring into one memory. While I watched helplessly from the doorway, Clutching my prize; a damn necklace.

I called med services and they said they would send someone to retrieve the body sometime that week. Jerks.

Later it would be explained to me. Her mask slipped. She caught a lungful of dust. Just one was all it took.

I thought back to my ride in that first shuttle, from Earth to Mars, trading one apocalypse for another. Back then I thought the engine on that old hunk was the loudest thing I would ever hear. Louder and more violent than all the gunshots echoing through the crumbling cities of Earth. Louder than the agricultural mechs on Mars, or the peacemakers' machineguns in the dead of night. The kind of loud that makes tuning forks out of your bones and makes you feel like you’re going deaf.

The silence that fell when the screaming stopped? That’s the loudest thing I have ever heard.

More bitter tears. More streaks to track their path down my cheeks. More wet dust. Two steps.

Truth be told I never dreamed I would leave Earth, much less Mars. This was all her dream. She decided we were all going to leave the system on one of those generation ships we had heard rumors about out on Titan.

Mom got us off Earth, she gave us our first big step, then died before she could take the next.

Which just leaves me to chase her dream.

A shove and a flurry of angry voices pushed me two steps forward to the end of the line.

The fear gripped my heart harder than I was clutching that necklace. Ironically, the dangling pendant was a heart shape. Not the beloved Earth symbol, but an anatomically correct human heart the size of my thumb. Mom was cool like that. A little gothic. Dry humor. Said some weird shit just to make you laugh when the days were heavy and the dark felt right. The bad days, those were where she shone the brightest.

Probably why I miss her right now.

My competition was an old scientist. Claimed he had learned at the greatest institutes good old Earth ever produced. Claimed he knew all kinds of things about quantum this and interstellar that. Seemed pretty impressed with himself. So did the guards.

When it was my turn to start my speech, I really tried.

My mouth was dry, not only with dehydration but with fear. I stumbled over a few incoherent words, acutely aware of how embarrassing a way to die this was, but all I could think of were the screams. Turned back from salvation because I failed to string a few bloody words together.

The guards exchanged a wordless glance and looked back to me behind their hardened masks.

Quite a sorry state I must have been in. My face was covered in hot tears with red clay streaking down into my mask. One hand clenched tight with a little string dangling from it, the other clutching at my throat trying to clear the way for a speech I could not get out to save my life. Literally.

One of them pointed to my fist and prompted, "Got something there, kid?"

I forced my disobedient arm to rise. My wrist rotated, palm upward. But my fist remained closed.

One of the guards laughed. Sharp and cold. Jerk.

In the hours I had waited, my death-grip on the damn necklace had done two things. First, I could not feel my fingers, which was the least of my concerns. The second was what broke me.

The laughing guard stepped past the old scientist and grabbed my wrist, letting his rifle dangle down from the chest strap. He pried my cold fingers open to reveal my mother's heart pendant; now resting in two halves, both dangling from the faded blue string she had always worn it on.

I am not ashamed to say that I cried then. Sunk to my knees and simply wept. For nothing was right in the worlds, not one thing.

The guard pulled the broken pendant up to his helmet and rubbed a dial on one of the sides. When activated, it projected a holographic message recorded by my mother.

Hearing her describe me, and our story, from her view made me cry even harder. I missed a lot of what she said as a result. But those around me heard. She said I was brave like my father, who gave up everything so she and I could escape Earth. She said a lot of stuff like that, all of it conjuring thick emotions which kept me from speaking.

At some point I felt hands helping me up, convincing me to stand and face the guards who would decide my fate. I heard the tail end of my mother's speech before the hologram winked out of existence.

"... is all I have left. All my dreams I send with him. He is my very heart. Find it in yours to give him the chances I never could. Let our children be humanity’s legacy. Let them brave the bright frontier of the future in our stead. This is my last and greatest wish, and all I have left to give. "

The hologram vanished.

Mom was gone again.

The silence that followed left me feeling numb all over. I tried to speak. I tried.

Nothing came out.

The guards stood there, rattled. They looked back and forth until one of them pointed to the scientist and then gestured towards the shuttle.

Gasps of ‘no!’ rang through the crowd, but none dared move against the armed guards.

The scientist, my fate in his hands, took a long moment staring into the shuttle before he stepped backward and explained, "I have lived a long, good life. Loved deeply, lost much, and lingered perhaps too long. It is someone else's turn to run life's gauntlet." He turned to me and waved me onwards. "Go on, kid. Make your mother proud." He turned and strode back into the wet red desert. Towards an end. Leaving me to chase a beginning.

I looked back at the guards, who just looked tired. I looked at the crowd of faces all telling me that they would not hesitate were they in my shoes. And finally, I looked at the heart-shaped locket in the hands of the second guard.

That moment felt real. I know of no better way to say it. Just like that moment of silence when she died. A moment of truth and clarity where shit gets real and you either adapt or you break.

Climbing into the shuttle? It felt fake. As if the last real moment had passed me by and I was living in the blur that followed. Like ripples in still water. Like at any moment I might wake up from a daydream somewhere back in line, still clutching that heart-shaped locket.

…

Mars never looked more beautiful than when I was leaving it behind. Outbound for that bright future Mom dreamt of. Outbound for Titan and, just maybe, beyond.