Valerie pushed off the wall of the corridor, making her way to the bridge. The others followed, silent as ghosts. It was a small ship, all things considered, just large enough to comfortably fit up to seven crew and all the supplies they’d need to make it to Mars, the ring, and Cavendish. Naomi wanted to swim through the air and explore every corner of the vessel. It was novel, but soon it would hold no secrets.

In the bridge, they paused, hovering above the seats and the consoles.

“Well, goddamn,” Valerie breathed.

Below them lay Earth.

It didn’t look like a marble; it was too clearly alive. The clouds crawled slowly, the planet bisected by the line of day and night. On the night side, the lights of cities glimmered. There was Europe, a gleam of brightness over Paris, Berlin, Kiev, strung together by smaller cities like linked synapses. Southern Europe was largely dark in summer as people who could fled north to places like Finland or Estonia. Lightning flashed over Morocco. Far to the north was the green glow of the aurora borealis. Charged particles from solar wind burning up in the atmosphere. It was Naomi’s first time seeing the Northern Lights. She’d seen the Southern Lights, and thought them beautiful on the expedition to Antarctica during her undergraduate degree, smothered in a parka as she gazed out at the horizon. From up here, it looked like magic.

The day side illuminated what the night could not—there was no ice in the Arctic Sea. The Antarctic wasn’t visible from here—this time of year was constant darkness for the southern pole. In summer, it’d show expanses of black land dotted by large, turquoise lakes, some the size of small European countries, the glaciers melting. She wondered if the lights from the oil rigs recently put up in the Ross Sea would be visible from space. The Antarctic treaties had been broken long before they were meant to run out in 2048.

The land on the other continents was too brown and golden, the green too sparse. There were swathes of land where humans could no longer survive, and the habitable areas were growing crowded. There was even some gold-green in the oceans from dust storms blowing off the continents and fertilising phytoplankton blooms. They’d managed to fish out most of the Great Pacific garbage patch, at least, though even if they hadn’t, it might not have been visible from orbit.

Earth was such a little, vulnerable thing in the grand scope of the universe.