From Above
opening excerpt
There was nothing above me except the weight of worlds. Tears frozen beneath my eye, body broken, indistinguishable from the wreckage I lay in. Jupiter’s heavy presence threaded through the maelstrom raging overhead but the planet itself was unseen. Beyond the atmosphere lay Saturn and Mars and Earth, along with the billions who called them home.
A mirrored helmet came into view, my rescuer. I saw my own face, a sleek oval stencilled with serial numbers and pockmarked with debris, a lone eye sitting dead centre. Flanked by cracked optical lenses and ranging sensors that used to tell me everything and now nothing. No voice to complain because the bottom half of my skull sat ten metres away.
Unseen and unheard, the sky was crowded with electromagnetic currents, gravitational eddies, and subatomic things never catalogued by humans. Earth had been studying Jupiter’s moons for over a century, yet I was the first to make contact with the largest one, Ganymede. Sent to explore the surface, I had not predicted the dense nature of the magnetic storms between planet and moon. The last thing I remembered was the cracking of my titanium exoskeleton as it slammed into the icy landscape.
Two marines had found me. They reconnected my neural core and promised that a larger rescue vessel was on its way to tow me home. Climbing atop my body, they communicated their surprise to each other, wondering if the faint activity in my brain was simply old commands stuck in a dying loop.
No such luck, I decided. They told me that she was out there.
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