Commander Samuel Aristharkos stared at the oscilloscope, its green line as flat as the barren plains of Chryse Planitia outside the protective domes. It wasn't a technical failure. The antennas were perfectly aligned, and the relay satellites in orbit were functioning flawlessly. The problem was the source. Earth was silent.

"Nothing, Sam?" asked Dr. Elena Vance. She was the lead exo-biologist of the Ares-Prime colony and one of the few who still found the strength to visit the control room.

No supply ship had landed in eight weeks. The last vessel, the Vasco da Gama, had departed hectically in February 2067. The crew had brought grim news: the conflict over Taiwan had escalated. China had moved in earnest. The USA, riddled by internal unrest and economic decay, had been barely functional. Europe had attempted to build a defensive line with the remnants of NATO—Japan, Australia, and a battle-hardened Ukraine. That was the last they knew. Then came the silence.

In the mess hall, people sat in silence. Only 231 souls remained on Mars. Engineers, botanists, geologists. Men and women who had come to build a new world, only to find themselves stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere.

"We have supplies for two, maybe three months," said Kaito Tanaka, the logistics officer, during a crisis meeting of the five senior staff members. "If we reduce caloric intake to the absolute minimum—pushing ourselves to the brink of being unable to work—we might gain another four weeks. But without fresh seeds and without spare parts for the hydroponic filters, we will starve. Slowly."

"And the rescue ship?" Vance asked.

"The Icarus?" Tanaka laughed dryly. "She barely has enough fuel to reach orbit. A return flight to Earth requires calculations and acceleration phases for which we no longer have the chemistry. We are here. And we are staying here."

Aristharkos rubbed his eyes. He thought of the old Hubble Telescope. It was a relic from the early 21st century, long since replaced by James Webb and its successors, but it still circled out there, forgotten in the void. It had been built to explore distant galaxies, but its mirrors could also be reversed.

"We need certainty," Aristharkos said. "I’m going to try to hack the Hubble relay. It’s old enough that our emergency codes might still work. We need to see what happened down there."

It took three days to reactivate the old protocols. The crew worked mechanically. No one spoke of the fear. The station’s surroundings suddenly felt more hostile than ever before. The red dust lashing against the reinforced windows was no longer just a geological fact—it was a shroud. Finally, the monitor flickered to life. The connection to the Hubble Telescope was established.

"I'm aligning the mirror," Aristharkos whispered. His heart beat against his ribs like a trapped bird. "Focusing on the Northern Hemisphere. Coordinates Western Europe... East Asia."

Elena Vance stepped behind him. Kaito Tanaka and two other technicians held their breath. The image took minutes to build, line by line. The delay was the cruelest torture physics could inflict. At first, they saw the blue. But it wasn't the brilliant sapphire blue they knew from the photos of their childhood. It was a dirty, murky gray-blue.

"Clouds?" Vance asked hopefully.

"No," Aristharkos said, his voice thick. "Ash. And soot."

He zoomed in further. Where the strings of lights from Paris, London, and Berlin had once marked the night side of the planet, there was now utter, unnatural darkness. There were no more artificial lights. No cities. Only glowing scars stretching across continents—the afterglow of nuclear fires that had turned entire regions into slag. They panned the camera east. The coastlines of China and Taiwan were buried under a massive black blanket. Earth's atmosphere had collapsed, saturated with the dust of a billion incinerated lives.

"Nothing lives down there anymore," Tanaka whispered. It wasn't speculation. It was a mathematical certainty speaking from the spectral data. Methane and CO2 levels had spiked. Earth was no longer a blue dot. It was a grave.

The silence in the control room was heavier than the gravity of Jupiter. Five people stared at the monitor, where their entire history, their families, their hopes, and their origins had been suffocated in a gray haze.

"We can't tell them," Vance said suddenly. Her voice trembled.

"We must," Tanaka countered. "They have a right to know why no ship is coming."...>>> coming soon >>> PART2