This is a short serialized novella - call it a long short story - that’s for paid subscribers only. There will be a downloadable PDF at the end of the serialization. Enjoy!

-

Re-Read Part 1

Re-Read Part 2

Re-Read Part 3

Re-Read Part 4

Re-Read Part 5

11 - The Long Throw Home

The sky over New Mexico was a perfect blue. Not the sickly, acid-tinged haze of the Collapse Years, nor the brittle ceramic white of the early Solar Reform but a deep, living cobalt that stretched to the horizon. The old carbon scrubbers stood silent now, their fractal towers repurposed as climbing frames for genetically-tailored ivy that turned sunlight into liquid hydrogen. The air smelled of chaparral and the faint, clean ozone of the orbital elevators’ discharge.

This was an Earth that had mined its way back from the brink.

The Anderson Receiving Yards sprawled across what had once been the Jornada del Muerto desert. Where uranium mines and fracking pads had once poisoned the groundwater, vast solar collectors now floated on self-repairing hydrogels, their surfaces shifting to track the sun. The raw materials that fed them came from the asteroids, shipped into orbit on barges, on schedule, almost without fail, for hundreds of years.

How those barges had changed things.

Lithium from Pallas had made possible the fusion revolution. Helium-3 mined from lunar regolith powered those carbon capture arrays that scrubbed the last of the ancient poisons from the atmosphere. Rare earth metals, an extremely outdated term, wrested from the gut of Vesta, built the neural networks that managed the Great Rebalance, the delicate, planet-wide dance of restored ecosystems and tempered human needs.

The Anderson family’s remaining descendants lived quiet lives now. Their ancestral holdings had been dissolved into the planetary trust centuries ago. What remained was a small monitoring station staffed by AI and a young woman named Lira Anderson who monitored the automated feeds from the Long Throw barges while doing her coursework.

Lira’s workstation overlooked the Yards. From her chair, she could watch the drones disassemble each arriving barge with surgical precision, sorting metals and minerals into the humming distribution network that fed Earth’s eternal, effortless abundance. The system required no oversight. Hadn’t for generations. Yet doing a stint at the Anderson Yards was something all Anderson’s did, usually in youth, as a way to honor and remember their impressive family legacy.

Lira Anderson tapped her bare toes against the polished basalt floor of the office, feeling the deep-earth vibrations of the ground transports moving around. The morning sun filtered through the bioreactive glass ceiling, dappling her workstation with fractal patterns that shifted as she moved.

An alert chimed softly from Lira’s feed. Anomaly detected, off schedule.

She sighed, expecting another sensor ghost. The Yards were full of them—echoes from the old uranium mines, glitches in the quantum sorting arrays. Or it was orbital clutter, a problem that was considered solved decades ago, but space is big and there’s still a few pieces of garbage tumbling around.

Then the screen resolved.

There was a barge, sporting Anderson markings, approaching Earth orbit. That part was fine. Normal, even. What wasn’t fine or normal was that the barge was approaching earth at ten percent of the speed of light, and was going to skip right off the atmosphere.

Again, the loss of a single barge is not even noted on balance sheets, such is the wealth the Earth enjoys. The barges are dumb sleds, flying boxes. But this barge was feeding telemetry to Lira, crude, outdated telemetry that took her a few seconds to collect.

It sort of looked like medical support data.