Elegy of the First Pioneers

    Jorim Callan drifted at the threshold of the big, blue planet of Chloris. Five-thousand kilometers closer and he’d be in the kill zone of the Terrestrials’ orbital defense platforms and surface-to-space missiles. He was certain that his very distant nieces and nephews were holed up somewhere in the crater-cities of the Malina Chain. That great, domed ribbon of shattered ice taunted him as it entered and left his view with each revolution around the planet, reminding him of what he and his people were denied. If anyone by the name of Callan did reside snugly on the surface, they had long forgotten the ancestors that had disappeared into the abyss. Now the ancients had returned and their offspring disowned them. 

    The difference of a few decades was all it took to set Jorim upon his strange, melancholic fate, which was now coming to a close thirty-one light years from Earth. Like millions of others, he had believed himself unspeakably lucky to be born at a time when scientists actually fulfilled, even exceeded, their promises of technologically-driven prosperity. No amount of research had stopped the oceans from rising, and mainstream VR was only a distraction from a lifetime spent on the life support of UBI. However, Jorim would always remember his reflection in his laptop screen when the aluminum arrow ignited with the force of the sun, disappearing above the horizon to take its place amongst the stars. In the relative darkness that ensued, Jorim stared at his own rapturous expression as he sat numbed and bewitched by this flight of Icarus. 

Jorim learned later - centuries later - that the history books had called this period the Exodus, and at the time, he had indeed felt that he was chosen. He had answered the call to spread his offspring amongst the stars, he would be a founding father of a land that he would mold like putty. Columbus had planted his flag on only one New World. With magnetically shielded nuclear fusion engines, Jorim’s horizons encompassed as many worlds as there were grains of sand beneath Columbus’s feet on that fateful landing. 

Aboard the Rising Tide just past Saturn, Jorim died the little death of oblivion. The anesthesiologists put him to sleep and sent him into the infinite dimension of hibernation dreaming. Jorim’s unconscious mind polished his fantasies with a lucid sheen as they tumbled through his mind for three-hundred years, becoming more real than the dreamlike limbo Earthbound life. When Jorim awoke, it was only to be greeted by fresh hardship and ennui. 

    It felt odd and almost perverse to envy the youth when his conception of the younger generation had died off in a long gone era. The children of his brothers and sisters, destined to grow up on a forsaken Earth, became the ones who founded humanity’s interstellar age. With fresh advancements in curvature propulsion drives, they didn’t have to fight the currents of space and spend centuries in deep sleep to awake to their promised land. They soared through spacetime in their tens of millions, distorting the space before them and propelling themselves like paper boats through the fabric of the cosmos. They, not him, had seized the perfect moment in time and technology, dashing all of Jorim’s ambitions while he dozed in his coffin-shaped pod.

    This was a godlike power, Jorim thought, as he tried, for the thousandth time, to wrap his head around the engineering and physics that had allowed these Terrestrials to usurp his place on Chloris. They wielded gravity - a fundamental force of nature - like a common combustion engine, yet despite their mastery over a domain reserved for gods, the Terrestrials lacked the magnanimity and open hearts to welcome their weary, fellow wayfarers. Immoral omnipotence didn’t necessarily make them devils; the Terrestrials were more like toddlers driving cars. Casual, careless, and ignorant of their capacity to ruin a life before it properly began. 

Due to the time dilation induced by the near-lightspeed travel of curvature propulsion, the first colonists of Chloris experienced the flight from Earth to landfall on Chloris as a fifteen hour journey. Meanwhile, to the sojourners of Onux Fleet, of which Rising Tide was a part, those fifteen hours occupied a span of fifty-eight years. Including the three decades that they had already spent clearing the Oort Cloud, Jorim had only made it halfway to Chloris when the newly self-proclaimed Terrestrials were already establishing a second human civilization. Four generations had entrenched themselves in the craters of the icy planet by the time the naive, bleary-eyed settlers of the Fleet arrived at their doors. 

    As a harbinger of their soon-to-be exile in orbit, the gravity-starved men and women of Onux Fleet first met their Terrestrial counterparts at the welcoming reception in the Continent. The Terrestrial envoys advertised the orbital station’s easy resupplies of food, water, oxygen, and spare mechanical parts. In fact, it had been specially retrofitted for long-term habitation while their government drew up a resettlement plan for the fresh arrivals.

    Welding new exhaust plates onto the Rising Tide’s bulky fusion engines after the event, Jorim had had the chance to accost one of these children of Chloris, easily identified by the man’s plush garb. 

    “You know, I’ve technically been waiting three-hundred years to see the planet we both call home,” Jorim began amiably. “Any chance I can take the next shuttle down? We need fresh air recyclers anyways, as well as deuterium and tritium to keep our power generators going.”

    The diplomat brushed him off with the vague, meaningless bureaucratic language that had somehow followed Jorim from the evening news on Earth to the upper atmosphere of this cloudy, azure-encrusted planet. 

“We know you’re all eager to get your feet on solid ground, and I’ll tell you, I’ve personally never seen our Near-Space Bureau work so efficiently. Everything from quarantine protocols and orbital transit development is being expedited as quickly as possible.” The Terrestrial’s tone of deep concern shifted to the upbeat optimism of one whose welfare was secure. “In the meantime, we’ll make sure you have everything you need to live comfortably in your ships and on the Continent.”

    Jorim felt the muscles in his face sink into a frown. Perhaps the envoy was simply an airheaded fop or maybe he thought he could mollify Jorim with the promise of future comforts. Whatever he was thinking, the stubby, bearded man gave Jorim words to resent for the rest of his life. 

“Well, whenever you do make it to the surface, I recommend buying your own Pelagic whale fur parka first thing,” he said with a complacent grin as he stroked the hems of his coat. “You’ll find that it’s both fashionable, pragmatic, and quite common dress. That’s your first piece of advice from a native Terrestrial.” 

Jorim’s piqued expression remained frozen on his face as the envoy walked away and mumbled some indistinct praises about the “magnificent migration” of these cetaceans. 

    Four decades later and Jorim had yet to experience any diversion outside of his desultory daily life. Drinking his water rations, eating his scheduled daily protein bars, and hoping that the resettlement committee would approve their next oxygen shipment on time - these were the rhythms of Jorim’s days. 

    At least his sons were young, healthy, and capable of strengthening the Orbiters’ ragtag floating communities of ships and stations. The Rising Tide - Jorim’s shelter for his centuries of hibernation - had been designed to convert into ground habitation upon landing on Chloris. Today, it languished in the same dock on the Continent where Jorim made its first repairs. His children were still jerry rigging its greenhouse filtration systems and power cores to keep themselves and their families from suffocating. 

    To the Orbiters, every facet of life was political, from the quantity and timing of their food shipments to the quality of the air that they breathed. Every mention of and interaction with the government on Chloris seemed to bring fresh cause for bitterness and cynicism. 

    “The nitrogen ratio in the air is off again, and the entertainment feeds fill our ears with the whiny woodwind soundtracks they call pop. Asphyxiate us or bore us to death, but have some mercy and don’t do it at the same time.” Gabriel Callan tossed the next hands in the poker game to his father and brother with a disgruntled sigh. 

Yuriel peeked at his cards and smirked sardonically. “I know their wireless carries more content than just the top hits, and I’m so tired of listening to ‘Beam Me Up’ on repeat that I’ve actually gone through every archived song in the Tide’s hard drives. Now I know how it feels to be an ancient like Dad.”   

“If they gave us new mining drones, we could at least stop bothering them for more lithium every two weeks and make repairs ourselves,” Gabriel continued. 

    “You actually think they’d want us digging through the inner asteroid belt on our own, and then what, build a new fleet? They just need our bodies so they can extract as much ore out of Zhormugan as they need. More than they need.” Folding his hand, Yuriel leaned back in his chair. “What a hellscape of a moon. Luna was an Eden compared to those volcanic ejaculations.”

    As depressing as it was to compare a desert rock to paradise, Jorim, who had sailed past Luna’s pitted face in another age, could only silently agree with his son’s heated assertion. He saw then that he was kin to the monstrosities of nature. After all, Jorim and his children lived in tandem with every deadly phenomena that lurked beyond an atmosphere, from piercing rays of radiation to massive rocks that spewed poison gas and blazing lava. The cosmos itself had spawned this generation. Memories of Earth and its fecundity could only serve as a curse and a burden to a man who stalked great plains of nothingness for his solace. 

    While the stocky men and women of the Malina Chain plodded through their sheltered, domed cities in 1.8 G, Jorim and his sons began their work beyond the ken of planet-bound man, flitting through their weightless realm like dark angels.

“Strip the rest of the reinforced carbon from that crate,” Jorim instructed Gabriel as they circled around the frame of a half-built quarry boat, which bled from molten red scabs in recently welded sections. Desiccated corpses of decommissioned satellites and abandoned shipping containers hovered nearby, supplying the raw, metal flesh for the Callans’ Frankensteinian creations.

Within two weeks, Yuriel was reporting to “Admiral” Jorim as he gingerly used the newly christened Senkompata’s magnetic prongs to pick globules of freshly cooled ore from the pyroclasts launched beyond Zhormugan’s gravity well. Other Orbiters soon honed in on the cornucopia of raw materials that spewed from the moon’s eruptions and joined in on the bountiful harvest like flies drawn to rotting fruit.  

“Check out our Great Leader,” Yuriel whispered to his brother loud enough for Jorim to hear. The family stood at their porthole in their room in the Continent, watching clouds of Orbiter vessels go about their business of mining, repairing, and building. From scrap and rock, they were building an empire out of emptiness. 

“I never thought an old Earthling like dad could be such a spaceman at heart.” Yuriel meant to be cheeky, but the three men felt the tacit pride in the statement as insect-like ships and ferries and cargo vessels invigorated the skies with new activity, new life. 

Framed between his two lanky, pale sons, Jorim felt power flow through his limbs for the first time since his youth. The formerly abandoned and driftless space-dwellers had noticed the Callans’ efforts to raise wealth out of the trash and waste of their environs. They had witnessed the Terrestrials’ impotent attempts to control events outside of the skies in which they had caged themselves. From nothingness, the Orbiters spawned a society governed by norms and economics that previous humans could only have considered wholly alien. 

When Jorim first saw the construction drones and ghostly silhouettes of the security contractors that hovered around brand new mass driver cannons, he had smiled in self-satisfaction. 

“Only real strength and force can breed such a frantic reaction,” he said into his mouthpiece. “The Terrestrials’ fear is a direct reflection of our power.”

Yuriel and Gabriel were now pilots of their own rigs and were out surveying potential resource deposits. They laughed and congratulated themselves and their father on the arrival of these deadly, mechanical apparitions. Violence meant struggle, a clash that would lead to change. 

Their days passed with renewed purpose. For the moment, they were hoarding, upgrading, and expanding their spacebound apparatus while the Terrestrials solidified themselves into inaction with their iron curtain. But in the vastness of space, no shield was too concrete or impervious to prevent the leaks that would soon cascade into an existential flood. 

Jorim’s last meal with his family was a simple affair. An unusual tidal warming effect in the subsurface oceans supposedly reduced the season’s catch, and the Terrestrials could only afford to send up barrels and barrels of dense, briny dulse. A transparent correlation existed between the size of orbital food shipments and Terrestrial outcries against alleged violations of the Clear Skies Agreement. However, Jorim heartily dug into the garnishes of phosphorous-fed strawberries and cucumbers from the Continent’s greenhouses that accompanied his pulpy, salty stew. 

“We’ve evolved from mere bottom feeders,” Jorim said between mouthfuls, “and our work can finally begin. A path to our true home has been paved, and all we need is to place our feet firmly upon it.”

His sons responded with a mock salute and shouted in unison, “Lead the way, commander!” 

Jorim watched them with satisfaction and compassion at the repast’s close as Gabriel cleansed the dishes with the air scraper while Yuriel left to deliver leftovers to neighbors stricken with radiation sickness and cancer. His children would become the stolid pillars of unity and action that their people needed for the trials ahead. They would take care of themselves and others. Though his ambitions had once rivaled the exploits of Earth’s greatest conquerors, Jorim now looked forward to entering the next stage of his life having accomplished none of the goals that he brought to Chloris. The knowledge that his sons were secure and prepared was enough. 

Wordlessly, Jorim left his cabin and walked along the narrow, metal halls to the hangar, counting every clank of his magnetic boots against the scuffed, gray flooring. He boarded the Senkompata and altered its pre-programmed course away from Zhormugan and towards Chloris’s upper atmosphere. His whole life, he realized, had been a dream, whose sole purpose was to awaken his fellow dreamers from their slumber. To bid a dream goodbye was an unconscious, natural rhythm essential to the inception of the next day. 

Waiting until the crossfire overlap of mass driver platforms five and six were at their narrowest, Jorim activated the chemical burn on the Senkompata and glided into the expanse that lay between him and the delicate, snow-topped surface of Chloris. All his comms receivers and alarms were set to silent, and he relished the calm and quiet of outer space with only his ship’s rumbling engines as white noise. As he entered the crossfire zone, he activated the fusion engines and banked to the left, forcing any locked missiles to pursue him against the gravity of Chloris’s spin. 

The opal blue of the planet’s surface now encompassed his entire field of vision. The flames of atmospheric friction generated by the Senkompata’s descent filtered Jorim’s view of the thick layer of ice. When the pockmarks of the Malina Chain swiveled into his front porthole, Jorim felt animus and amity bubble up within him one last time. 

The great, checkered domes that capped the craters like overgrown zits were grand and imposing, much more so than when seen from outer space. They enclosed the abundance and wealth of a civilization that was Jorim’s birthright. 

Now Jorim was coming home to claim his inheritance, and his children would soon follow. He hoped that other Orbiters could see his plunge towards the crater chain from where they floated far above. He was their shooting star and he already knew what they wished for. All they needed now was to see the flaming sign and claim what was theirs.