Forty six men, and fifty one women. That’s all that were left. They were the brightest minds the earth had to offer, and from all over the planet they had come. Most had traveled in secret, rightfully terrified for their own lives, and for reasons other than the nuclear fallout. Man can be a jealous thing, and a chance to live could give plenty of cause for anyone of them to kill. It wouldn’t have been hard to steal a few pieces of identification, to pass for something that those lesser men and women were not, and so the utmost of care had to have been taken. It had seemed that most had become nothing more than beasts in the recent months, faced with their impending, irrevocable doom. Those who were to be left behind, those who were destined for nothing else but ashe and nuclear dust, had only grown more feral as the fallout had spread closer and closer to what they had once so affectionately called their homes. Now there was only anger in the world. Love has been replaced by envy, community by greed. No one was safe, simply because everyone knew no one would survive. No one except those one hundred and one men and women who had been invited. They alone were the final hope for humanity, and they alone would have to persevere.
It had been seven months since the end of the world, and only a day longer since the Last Hope had been set on it’s long and arduous course. They had escaped just in time, those brightest minds of the planet that had been gathered together and jettisoned into space. Earth was already doomed, and the men and women now hurtling through the nothingness around them were the final remaining humans. Set on a course to what was decided to be the last refuge of man, the very last hope for humanity's survival, the great red planet now loomed before the survivors’ gaze, set adamantly ahead of them like a great and giving god, providing for these men and women what would hopefully be the most basic of human necessity, a place to foster life.
Soon these ninety seven would arrive to what promised to be the most incredible adventure in the history of mankind, and to what each and every one of them hoped desperately would be the beginning of a new start to everything. The prospect was glorious, and within each of these brilliant human beings hearts, even amidst the terror and shame that stilled remained deeply set, was a burning kernel of hope. Hope that they would be able to do correctly what had been done so wrongly before, and create a life that would always be worth living, for everyone.
Captain Samantha Reindeen was the woman behind it all. She alone had seen the signs of impending doom, and she alone had had the wherewithal to do something about it. Years even before the end Samantha had begun her work, designing and perfecting in secrecy a space vessel capable of not only reaching Mars, but of transporting dozens to her great desolate surface. As a younger woman she had been in charge of NASA’s Space Exploration Program, and through her experiences there and her own studies, she had been able to design and complete this ship in a time most would have thought impossible. With the help of her handpicked and rigorously vetted crew, Samantha had developed a plan to not only allow for man to continue to exist, but for it to flourish upon its new home. Of course for this plan to succeed, Samantha needed those who she had chosen to accompany her, and inexplicably, some of them had failed to present themselves. It would be of no matter though, for whatever reason these men has failed to arrive, the plan would have to go on. With or without them.
The voice of Sergeant Phillips, the crews lead linguistics expert and temporary voice-comm operator, rang out over the ship's integrated communication system. “Captain Reindeen, it appears our descent is imminent. We’re finally here.” It was Adam Lennox, standing just besides Samantha as he usually was, who spoke up first.
“Fucking finally! How long has it been now, seven damn months? I feel like I’ve been going crazy for six of them… I can’t wait to get out this tin can, I feel like I’ve been breathing dirty air since we got into this thing.”
Samantha refrained herself from reminding him, for what would have surely been the twentieth time, that the air had been processed and clean, and there was no tin in the body of her ship, or in any other part of it, for that matter. She had read so many of Doctor Lennox’s critical analysis of space time, and it never failed to shock her when she heard him speak. He was just so much more eloquent on paper than in person that she could hardly believe her ears every time he spoke.
“Adam... calm down, it will all be over soon. We’re here.”
