The Tumble

the suit is warm. Jade is thankful for that. a huge comfort in the doomed situation. it is a relic from the Middle Reich of stellar exploration, designed at a time when chic was still important, but tech had moved well into the new wave of super-efficient advanced life support. still, it has it’s bugs. with age the perspiration re-sorbers have become sluggish, resulting in a light but frustrating and accumulating level of fog and damp. like a personal humidifier. memories rise in her of small snatches of time visiting what remained of the equatorial forests - hot, wet, foetid, oxygen-starved - strange, but necessary and rare escapes away from the safety of the last vivosphere. she can smell her own despair in the sweat that condenses on the visor’s inner surface and trickles, vermiform, towards her neckline and chest. raining on the inside.

she breathes consciously, focusing on her third eye, embracing her training. calm and accepting within the embrace of terror and certain finality. fear present but presence of mind moulded into something that approximates calm. no room for panic. not enough oxygen to scream with. crying will only drown her in the suit, or boil her, ultimately. better to prepare for the fire, for allowing the searing heat to quickly remove all capacity for pain, at least through her skin. her attention flickers away from her impending blending with the ozone and drifts back to the locket and chain.

it is almost a hologram, in the way it floats, flies, falls. the chain is looped into a fixed form reminiscent of a diving whale, no friction, yet, to buffet it’s body or to lift it’s tail with a surge of pressure. the locket itself makes the tail, inverted in the sinuous mirrored curve of two swans face to face, universal symbol of love. she can’t reach it, can’t touch it, but it is there, flying with her, lighting her way. catching and broadcasting flashes of vermillion light from the distant red sun like a leaping fishes’ scales as dusk approaches. a beacon inhabited only by the embedded holograms of her father and her twin-sister, both long gone, both lost to the final plague, both immortal now inside the forever-silver.

she had entered the air lock in an attempt to exit the ruptured orbit-pod and manually activate the booster jets. she had removed the chain from her neck and hung it on a utility hook as she activated the ultraviolet cleanse. the only way to enter the suit was naked, maximising the potential of the thermo-hydro-regulators to read and respond to the skin, all jewellery removed so as to avert any potential of a breach in the lining of the suit. she had intended to slip it into a sealed pouch in the tool belt of the suit, but the pod had thrown it’s final hiccough and the valves activated before she had tethered herself to the slide-rails. in the popping shunt of air as the ports closed at the proximal end and opened at the distal, she had lost grip of the locket and, grasping desperately, had knocked it out in front of her as she leaped, diving hopefully into the void towards a hopeless resolution, with the locket leading the way.

so now she falls, hurtling through space-time tangential to the planet below whilst imperceptibly creeping closer towards it. she is the just too heavy drifting log in the maelstrom that sucks everything within its sphere in and downwards to be pulverised on a jagged sea bed, leaving only the flotsam with the perfect mass free to bounce back to the surface once the tide switches and releases the vortex. but this is no sea bed on her immediate horizon. she knows what is coming. her training has prepared her. so here it comes, a juggernaut, the unthinkable tumble from unreachable stars back in towards a charred and scarified planet, punching like a bullet through molasses into a violently turbulent and unpredictable atmosphere that the elders wouldn’t even recognise as of the Earth. she would experience a tortuously slow rise in temperature, for a time, then an exponentially unfolding inferno, towards inevitable vaporous combustion. the flash point itself would quickly follow friction ruptures in the suit and she would know she was about to burn even as she ran out breath, her vision blackening and her skin searing, leaving only her hearing to witness the roar of the upper stratosphere as it consumed her entirely.

the escape had been so close. there were six of them in the shuttle, launched from the St Victor Star-Pad on the western Haitian peninsula. a perfect launch. the second of the final five ever departures. the flight protocol was clear. each flight that reached the moon’s orbit would receive a pulse from the moon’s magnetic launcher and be catapulted within the influence of capture of the Mother Warpship.the first shuttle had made a perfect loop, disappearing into the lightless haze beyond the moon, just glints of red reflection on a field of black, dimmer and dimmer. she had been watching it through the apical port as their own flight had emerged from the Earth’s atmosphere. and then they had hit the satellite. one of a hundred thousand scraps of junk whipping around the Earth at eleven thousand kilometers per hour. could have been another lost locket for all she knew, but enough to knock the shuttle well of it’s keel and careening sidelong into the peri-Earth orbit. she was the only survivor from the impact.

she turns again. seeing Earth, to locket, to Earth, to locket, to Earth. in the centre of her field of view now is the Indonesian archipelago, thousands of blotches and specks of red, brown and rare green, strewn across a breathtakingly blue canvas and uncharacteristically free of cloud-cover. the monsoonal system still rolls further north, though more extreme in presence and in absence than it once did when her grandparents were able to tend clean soil for clean food, mostly. she can see the building mass of cloud crowding in on itself over the Tibetan plateau and preparing to erupt over the edge of the Himalaya into the northern Indian river valleys to drench and soothe the mounting heat of the plains. with nobody and next to no moving creatures left to enjoy the quench.

the thought brings her back to the suit. it’s hot now. has been getting hotter for some time as her attention wandered in wonderland, longing after the locket, seeking one last moment to say farewell to her family, and lusting after the Earth that was, that she has finally seen from the stars but is soon to be consumed by. she feels the pressure of the atmosphere ripping at the suit. she feels the sudden rush of freezing cold enter and dance jarringly around her with the internal heat. the visor clears suddenly. a final crystal clear lens on the world, and she turns one more time. the locket’s chain is flicking around in the breeze now, and glowing orange, now white, and as the colour is drained from her vision and the shadows bulge she whispers her last parting prayer to the locket and her family within.

stay with me.

please don’t let me burn alone.