LAKE NASHVILLE

“So, what is it, miss?” a kid asked.

Martha was always the most excitable of her pupils, she thought. She’d said it was a surprise, but the little one couldn’t wait.

“I said it was special, did I?” she smirked.

“But how…”

“If I tell you before you see it, it’s less special.”

“Awwww…”

“Now, put mufflers on the lamps. We want no light,” she instructed. “Now, unroll the coverings, sit on them, and look up. To the southwest.”

For years before, she’d tried to recalculate everything, based on her observations. They had obviously raised the orbit of the old station on the last day, before the Fall was complete. After all, without that and bereft of adjustment power, it would have reentered and burned a decade ago. Years of watching the sky, recording, and doing calculations by hand gave her the current orbital parameters so that she could do a class like this one at least once.

“Missssss???”

She tried to throw a dark look at little Martha, but it was wasted in the deepening dusk.

“Okay, kids. Before the Fall, people did all kinds of wonderful things. Including going between the sky and the stars.”

“But that’s before the Fall, miss. We can’t do that. And dad says it was a lie before. Like we couldn’t go to the Moon.”

Goddamn, not another Kubrick-did-it conspirationist. Not after all these years, she thought.

“Well, today, I’m going to show you how people did it.”

“What?” “No way?” “How is that…”

“Sush. They simply went so fast that, by the time they started to fall, the ground fell away. Remember the horizon problem?”

Nobody answered. Obviously not a good memory, she had to chuckle. The principle was simple, but math was definitively going to wait. Sometimes, she despaired of the math ability of the post-Fall younger generation.

My teacher probably despaired of my own, she thought briefly before focusing again on the practical lesson of today.

“And in less than a minute, you’ll see the greatest thing we ever built up between the sky and the stars. It is still up there.”

“How can that be? The Fall…”

“It does not require any of the powers from before the Fall. It simply keeps going on… like a river. Or a rock that falls forever on a slope.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

She stopped before starting to mix her metaphors and confuse them further. Then she spotted the moving faint plot of light to the west, still lighted by the sun’s rays across the darkening sky. She pointed.

“Looks along my arm. See the light moving?”

“Ohhhh.” “Ahhhh.” “It’s real?”

Almost all low-orbit satellites had decayed long ago. The stable ones, higher up, were too small to be seen from the ground. Only the ISS was big enough and still showed up, even if you couldn't see the details.

“It’s hard to catch. You need the right time, and of course, clear skies. This year… it’s today. It's not going to last long, just under five minutes, so look carefully.”

“Did people really make this light?”

“Yes, Martha. Yes, they did. And they went up there, until the day of the Fall. I know. I talked to them until home Fell too.”

“What happened to them?” another kid asked.

“The Fall happened even up there, above the skies. And you could only live up there with the help of the Ancient technology,” she said, her words tinged with sadness, and the kids picked it up, falling silent as they tracked the slowly moving dot of light, which was slowly creeping overhead now.

“So, they’re dead.”

“I assume so. Nobody will ever know for sure. It’s not as if we can get there. Not anymore.”

NEWMAN

‟Last bit detached. Forward modules are now separated from main body,” Yaytsev announced.

‟Then let’s move into position,” Juliana ordered.

‟Let’s hope the computers will restart. It’s been almost two decades,” Shuko said.

‟We need to. Once outside of the suppression envelope, it should work. Barring radiation damage…”

They needed at least a small tablet to work. Doing orbital calculations by hand was hard, and while it was trivial to correct approximations within Earth’s magnetosphere, doing a slingshot over years required, maybe not the whole NASA, but at least smart hardware. She didn’t trust Spaceborne instincts that much.

The five let go – physically – of the station and moved into position, a five-pointed star spread around. Juliana was under the station, Frank and Ivan were just under the orbital plane, and both Shuko and Yaytsev hurrying from the station connector taking their place above.

‟All set?” she called out.

Replies came in.

‟Then get ready. Three… two… one…”

Flux lines spread, as they extended their range, grabbing on the rearmost of the two modules of the station they’d detached, and then spread the rest to mix with Earth’s own magnetic lines.

The five-fold wings of magnetic forces started to expand, and it was harder. She’d never stretched that Spaceborne ability to that limit, but the tons of the two modules they had selected were always going to be hard pushing. Inertia is relentless. Decades ago, when they were freshly changed, she'd never have dared such a maneuver.

The result was big. The interactions of the fields twisted and flexed, and she exerted all she could to keep them in control. Immense immaterial wings spread out, charged particles ripped out of the near emptiness coursing about, squeezed by the increasing flux density, creating an artificial aurora despite the void of space. Twice as big. Thrice as big. Twelve times bigger...

The ISS split in two, the rear part already visibly receding fast, as acceleration increased.

The controllers at Houston would have had apoplexy, she thought.

‟Yehaw!” Frank yelled.

LAKE NASHVILLE

She squinted. The small light structure seemed to stretch. She was getting older, after all, nearly sixty. Her eyes weren’t good enough anymore to truly observe the skies, despite the old glasses.

Faint lights started to spread around the front of the light. She gasped and heard the kids doing various “ooooh” and “ahhhhh”s.

There were now two distinct and separate points of light racing across the sky. And the forward one had distinctly visible wisps of light, making shapes like a small circle, slowly expanding and twisting as the two separated visibly, the forward segment accelerating impossibly.

“Holy fuck,” Kayleigh Byrne realized. “How is that possible… They must be… They are still there.”

She stood and whooped, startling the children.

“GO ISS! GO JULIANA!”