Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Last Launch
The countdown echoed through empty halls where thousands once worked. Commander James Vance sat alone in the cockpit of the Prometheus, listening to automated systems tick toward zero. Outside the reinforced windows, Cape Canaveral stretched silent and overgrown, nature already reclaiming what humanity had abandoned.
"T-minus sixty seconds," the computer announced, its synthetic voice the only sound besides Vance's own breathing.
He'd spent forty-three years on this planet. Forty-three years of breathing its air, walking its soil, loving its people. Now he was the last one left to leave it behind.
The Quiet Plague had earned its name. No coughing, no fever, no dramatic symptoms to mark its passage. People simply grew tired, then still, then silent. They fell asleep and never woke up. Within eighteen months of its emergence from a thawing permafrost pocket in Siberia, it had claimed seven billion lives.
Vance had watched his wife Rebecca slip away on a Tuesday afternoon, her hand growing cold in his while she dreamed whatever final dreams the dying dream. His daughter Amelia followed three days later. He'd buried them both in the backyard of their Virginia home, under the oak tree where Amelia had once hung a tire swing.
That was four years ago. He'd spent the time since preparing for this moment.
"T-minus thirty seconds."
The Prometheus wasn't designed for solo operation. She was a supply vessel, built to ferry equipment and provisions to the Mars colony. Her crew complement was supposed to be six. But Vance had spent months reprogramming her systems, automating what couldn't be handled alone, removing what wasn't essential. She would get him there. That was all that mattered.
Mars. The Ares Colony. Thirty-seven souls who might be humanity's only survivors.
For ten years after their founding, the colonists had sent weekly transmissions. Updates on crop yields, equipment repairs, the small dramas and triumphs of building a new world. Vance had listened to every one, first as part of Mission Control, then alone in the abandoned facility, the recordings his only company.
Then, fourteen months ago, the transmissions stopped.
"T-minus ten seconds. Nine. Eight."
Vance gripped the armrests. He'd run the calculations a thousand times. The Prometheus carried enough fuel, enough food, enough oxygen for the seven-month journey. He would arrive at Mars, find the colony, and discover what had happened to the last pocket of humanity beyond Earth.
"Three. Two. One. Ignition."
The engines roared to life, and Vance felt the familiar crushing weight of acceleration press him into his seat. Through the cameras, he watched Earth fall away—blue and green and white, heartbreakingly beautiful despite everything it had lost.
"Goodbye," he whispered to no one.
The planet that had birthed humanity shrank to a marble, then a point of light, then vanished into the black.
Vance was alone with the stars.
