The Sky is Not Empty
A story from the Squad 51 Universe…
Thijin Ocklan pressed herself into the seam between the colony’s inner and outer dome, heart pounding like she had snuck off to murder someone instead of simply skipping work.
The gap was just wide enough to wedge her not-quite-50-year-old frame into, and she didn’t have to crouch her seven-foot frame, for which she thanked the Sol. Her back ached too much for bending, squatting, and hunching.
Condensation dripped from the curved panels above, cold as the voids. A faint hiss of oxygen purred through the rigged feed line she had patched together herself, because she knew damn well that Heliox Core Industries would cut her air the second her absence flagged the shift board.
She didn’t even have a good excuse. Her back hurt, sure. It always did. But today felt like too much. Like another hour bent over pipe valves and corrosion monitors might crush her permanently on the inside.
IOP, the Internal Oversight Patrol, boots passed by a few minutes ago. Not running, not suspicious, just a patrol. But they were never just a patrol.
Thijin waited until the footfalls faded, then slipped through the loose panel she had found once while inspecting a pipeline. The corporation warned lingering near the outer dome increased your exposure to radiation leaks. At her age, she figured a little radiation couldn’t do worse than another year of this drudgery.
For once, she felt alive. Alive and slightly terrified, her heart racing with each crouched step along the outer skin of the dome, as if one of the IOP’s drones might whiz by and detect her movement. But nothing stirred. She kept to the shadows, oxygen rig strapped tight, and crept toward nothing in particular. She knew the old corporate offices were out this way, abandoned for newer, swankier, and more air-tight offices.
Past the skeleton of an old water tank, a silhouette came into view, a silhouette with a dome. “What is that”” she breathed. The sun caught the dome’s curve, which was a hunk of angular metal half-that appeared to bulge beyond the dome. It had the sad, noble look of something forgotten, and there was a door.
Thijin clambered over some barrels and slipped out in the open to reach the door. No sensors pinged her. No voice from Heliox warned her she was off limits. The door hung askew and slightly ajar.
A plaque it read: IO DEEP SKY OBSERVATORY – Established 2123 by Helio Duponne
The edges were crusted in grime. She wiped at them anyway.
The door groaned but gave way easily. Inside was dry and dark, the air meter on the wall showed the air was better in here than inside the colony. She removed her air hose and breathed free for the first time ever, inhaling deep. The air was sharp with ozone and long-dead dreams.
Thijin took careful steps past empty console stations and dead monitor banks, her tank’s controls softly humming behind her. She switched it off, conserving her rations. Dust curled in the light from her wrist lamp.
She walked up to a console, and it clicked. Her heat hammered like a bomb went off, and a glow flared out from the monitor, exposing her, sensing her. She panicked, searching for a place to hide. There was just the databank, a comfortable chair on wheels, and a large telescope.
She stepped up to the telescope, resting one hand on the barrel, afraid it might vanish. The telescope aimed through the transparent panel, old, but clean enough to reveal a view so vast it punched the breath from her lungs.
The sky was black, but not empty. Stars crowded it like shattered diamonds scattered across a black that had more substance than darkness. A smear of cream and red marked Jupiter, massive and glowing, a planetary god watching from the horizon.
Below the never-ending sky, the tortured landscape of Io stretched out in bruised shades of ochre, sulfur, and rust. Volcanoes scarred the surface like old wounds, frozen mid-eruption, the ground fissured and uneven as if the moon strained to escape gravity. Faint plumes curled upward in the distance; geysers, maybe, or new eruptions unfolding in silence.
It was raw. Violent. Real.
She had never seen anything like it. The colony dome showed her the prefab walls and gray corridors, the same flickering signs and ration queues. Out here, the universe roared in silence, vast, enormous. And no one was in charge of it.
Her pulse picked up. Not with fear but with awe. For the first time in her life, her world felt bigger than her shift report.
She could have stood there for hours, just breathing in the wonder. But instead, she sat, gently and reverently, into the worn chair at the data console, wondering what this place was about. Touching the screen flickered the terminal to life. No startup chime, no fanfare. Just a plain cursor blinking like a heartbeat.
She moved closer, squinting. Awaiting uplink to Heliox Core. Enter password. Interesting. The system wasn’t malfunction. It was off grid, waiting for connection to the corporate servers.
She tapped a few keys on an old fashioned keyboard in front of the screen. If she didn’t connect to Heliox, was something else out there. She hit enter and a menu came up.
Archived Survey Data
Colony Map Index
Sol Comms System
Her finger hovered over the last one.
Sol Comms System. She had been told there was nothing else to the solar system but Io, that no one else had survived.
She clicked it.
A new menu unfolded, simple and quiet. Names of other colonies on Callisto, on Ganymede, in the Belt, around Saturn. No corporate emblems. Just location codes, basic identifiers, and one blinking status beside each: IDLE. IDLE. IDLE.
Her hands moved before her fear could catch up. She typed a simple message. “Do you want to live like this?”
That was it. She didn’t sign it. Didn’t say where she was. The console encrypted automatically, some old, protocol by paranoid Heliox corporate goons.
She hit SEND.
Nothing happened. “Of course not,” she muttered. Exhaling, she leaned back in the dusty chair. A layer of ancient padding gave way beneath her. She laughed, a short, surprised sound that echoed loudly in the quiet. When had she last sat in a real chair?
The room creaked in silence, the shifts of Io settling into its bones. She got up and wandered into a storage alcove. Empty shelves. Spare filters. Tangled wiring. Some crates. Inside the crates she found blue fabric. Dusty. Stiff with time. A stack of old Heliox-issued thermal jackets, from the early days when the company still pretended to be human.
Thijin tugged one free, held it up to the light. It had the old logo. A faded slogan stitched beneath it: She pulled the multitool from her belt, which was old and scratched but still loyal. Flipping out the blade, she sliced through the thick blue coat, cutting a long strip free. The fabric curled as she tugged it loose, decades of dust rising into the air. The fabric now as free as she was, dhe tied the strip around her neck like a scarf. Not regulation. Not anymore.
She returned to the telescope to see if she could get it to work, glancing at the console.
One message had arrived. Then two. Then six.
Simple things, blinking on screen:
“You’re not alone.”
“Please talk to me.”
“We thought we were the only ones.”
“Finally.”
Thijin settled back into the chair, scarf loose around her throat, breath fogging faintly in the cold.
Out the observation dome, Jupiter loomed like a storm god on fire. She stared at its stripes and marbled rage and smiled. She was still staring out when a thousand more replies came through.
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