Chapter 8

Leo leaned back in his crash seat, feeling the weight of his body compact him down, and looked at the news feed.

“We’re here at what some locals are already calling New New Shanghai,” the reporter – a pretty Devonian boy with a slick backed purple haircut and bright red skin, dressed in a thick parka with fur lining and pressure gloves. His face was covered by a thin skein of the pressure mask and his ears had caps on them, while he stood inside of the half completed structure of a large, sparse looking hexagonal building. Warming lamps glowed behind him. “As you can see, the teams are at work constructing what will be the central cafeteria, and...”

Behind him, several drones went whisking by, their specially designed helicopter blades chittering and buzzing against the thin Martian atmosphere. They were carrying boxes and parts to people who were working full out, their chatter carried primarily through radio, though their voices were audible in the tinny air.

“There is another load of civilians arriving ... uh...” The camera swung around.

The view of the exodus on Mars was something else entirely. Even from this somewhat pedestrian standpoint, Leo wished he could whistle with this much pressure on his face. But his cheeks were sagging under nearly four times their weight, and his whole body felt like a stone. Breathing and thinking was hard enough, let alone whistling. He still managed to be impressed, despite how sluggish his brain was right now.

There were trucks. There were skim-sleds. There were big burly ice-harvesters, the ones with the belled sides that were designed to park and melt water from the permafrost soaked upper skin of Mar’s topsoil, then filter out the neurotoxins and radioactive particulates out of it. There were repurposed Union tanks – themselves relics from the Five Minute War and left for the paltry Ground Defense Forces to tinker with in their spare time between building roads and getting kittens out of trees – trundling along, their backs and turrets covered with people. There were kitbashed tumblers that looked like old Earth plantlife that spread via wind dispersal but made of metal and full of people clinging to the interior.

It was, according to the news media, the fifth largest human mass migration in recorded history, only exceeded by the mass flight of civilians during the Five Minuet War, the 2^nd World War, the Taiping rebellion and the commensurate disruption in food dispersion, and ... well...

They kept saying the Archship was the largest – citing the titanic stores of frozen sperm samples and ovum, but Leo wasn’t sure if it counted. He flicked his right hand’s fingers, tapping several buttons, spelling out his idea bit by bit.

Do you think the arcship counts as large migration?

A second later, Bolide’s response chirruped up.

Absolutely!

only 50k, Midnight sent. Imore Frenchies walked out of Alsace and Lorraine

It was fifty thousand people on a giant spaceship! Bolide said then added her customary emoji: ^~_~>

what is that

I’m ear pointing at you!

ok

Leo saw, out of the corner of his eye, just barely in his peripheral vision, that Midnight was rolling her eyes. The two Devonians were handling the acceleration just as well as he was – though Leo had heard from some other students in the academy that Devonian ears ached horribly after a long enough time in acceleration. For him, it was the breathing that was really getting to him. Another chirrup came in his heads up.

change channle plz?

A second later, Midnight added.

Leo had to keep himself from shaking his head – he wasn’t sure if he would be able to get it back into a proper position if he did. His eyes flicked to the HUD’s corner and he realized, with a jolt, that his efforts to not think about the timeline was paying off: They were actually far closer to the end of the burn than expected. His eyes flicked forward and he tapped over to Midnight’s favorite show. The fact Bolide tolerated it and he liked it too would make up for the fact that his gut knotted, every second he wasn’t watching the news. It was the only way he could be close to Gillian.

It ate him up inside that he was burning towards Earth – and whatever safety was there – and his girlfriend and Tessa were both back on Mars.

And what is Tessa to you? He thought to himself, while on the show, the canned laughter and the antics of the robotic monkey living with the two astrophysicists started to play. It was a stranger and more complicated question than he had expected. It was fun watching her with Gillian – in the same way it was fun watching Gillian bounce on Midnight’s strap on. Bolide wasn’t so much into strap-play, though she had tried it at least once. Her attempt at ‘dirty talk’ had left Gillian in stitches. But there was some deeper, darker part of him that reveled in the way that she was drawn to him. It wasn’t even that she was his type, exactly – it was more that she was the kind of girl who normally would never give him a second glance, sexually.

But he had gotten a glance.

Hell, he had gotten more than a glance.

Part of him wondered if there was a part of his brain that was, like, messed up in some way. Maybe his long term lack of exposure to Devonian pheromones thanks to his nose filters had left him unable to be normal about big butch lesbians.

Maybe he was worrying about that because it was actually less upsetting than worrying about the math.

Because the math said that if the RKV that was hurtling towards Mars had even a modicum of control, it could decelerate. Right now, the fleet that was preparing to try and decelerate it was working one of the most frantically overwatched part of the spacy. If they fucked up their equations, they’d decelerate the incoming attack such that it would hit Mars while the wrong hemisphere was facing the wrong direction – and that exodus would have become a death march, and Gillian and Tessa would both be consumed in a blaze of quasi-atomic fire.

He closed his eyes. Clenched his jaw. Released it.

show not funny

The message was blinking on the screen when he opened his eyes. He flicked his gaze over to Midnight, and saw that water was standing in her eyes, streaming down her cheeks. She sniffed in hard, an ugly noise under high Gs.

He turned it off – and without a screen to fill, the timetable on their flight flashed up. The two girls let out wheezing cheers, barely able to push the noise out. Because there were only two minuets left before they cut off this part of the burn.

One minute.

Thirty seconds.

Leo heard the trilling alarm of acceleration change.

Then-

Sudden, blissful ease. He leaned forward and gasped – as sound not unlike fifteen explosives going off all at once rang out around him. The superstructure of his command groaned as if it was about to come apart. Leo closed his eyes – while Bolide, her voice surprisingly chipper, caroled: “The acceleration booster is away, we’re at half mass. Beginning reorientation.”

The ship trembled. Micro-gravity became a sickening rotation as their engines – like the engines of the rest of the closely packed fleet – spun around to aim at the distant light of Earth.

“Does ... it... have to sound like the end of the fucking world when it comes off?” Midnight asked, rubbing her chest, wincing. Leo was pretty sure Bolide also noticed her wiping her eyes clean and sniffing her nose up – but Bolide pretended she didn’t. Midnight’s voice sounded purely brash as she continued. “God, rebuilding all those boosters is going to be a bitch and a half.”

“That’s why we got them,” Bolide said, her voice even. “It’d be pretty silly to build extra engines for emergencies and not use them in emergencies.”

“It just rankles me to chuck them off into space and let them ... drift off to who knows where,” Midnight said.

“Actually, they will end up in this orbit, and will be collected by robot hauler in...” Bolide tapped at her controls, flexing her fingers. Leo unstrapped himself from his seat and stood – the primary engines of the clipper had come online and they were on 1G again. A long, slow, steady burn that would bring them into orbit around Earth. “Twelve years.”

“Huh,” Midnight said. “Waste not fucking want not, I guess.”

“What would fucking waste be,” Bolide said, her tail twitching behind her. “Just used condoms?”

“Dirty socks,” Midnight said, grinning at her Devonian partner.

Bolide’s brow furrowed. “Huh?”

“C’mon, you never had to clean up one of Sponson’s cum socks?”

“No, he mostly used me for his cum dump,” Bolide said, so matter of factly that Midnight choked.

Leo turned to face Bolide, who was looking as innocent as humanly possible – ears up, tail stilled, the whole shebang. Midnight sighed and started to run down her checks. “We’re good on all the remass tanks. Uh, send the com confirmation.”