Work in progress.
Jastra Dusa sat and looked on as her belongings were forklifted into the Sky Tether to be loaded onto her transport. In eight and a half hours she would be setting off on a rocketship towards another planet: the journey itself would take almost six months, the window in which they could leave was less than a month and it would be atleast two years minimum before she could come home. She wondered whether she had made the right decision.
No one had expected Paddy to live this long. A number of small tumors had been found nine months ago and despite multiple successful operations to remove them even the best predictions had suggested he would die due as a result of his advanced age and the stress of these operations. It had never been her plan to take him with her because Jastra had always expected her companion to die before she left but now the decision had already been made and there was no going back. Paddy, her cat, was going with her.
She had used almost all of her personal cargo on discretely repackaged catfood1 and the rest on various toys, trays with nothing more than a small suitcase for her uniform and a few sets of underwear. It wasn't ideal but needs must. Picking up the disguised carry case, with a sedated Paddy inside, she stood up and stepped onto the Sky Tether as the last crate was loaded and the doors began to close.
The Sky Tether is one of a number of huge elevators built during the early stage of space colonization to facilitate unprecedented tons of cargo being transferred into the heavens to be transferred back and forth between the Earth and the Moon, the first colony, but now a number had been built to deal with the quantity of cargo being moved. The journey would six hours and then another two hours to board and load their ship: the Hermes before finally setting off on the journey of a lifetime.
The Sky Tether was a large rectangular elevator cabin with a storage area taking up the central floor, the mechanism in the lower floor and a passengers seating and observation deck on the top floor. She ascended a service staircase and found herself in a fairly spacious room with five other passengers intended to board the same ship as herself.
The first, Martian Foreign Secretary, to board had been the two returning Martian representatives. Every two earth years a travel window opened in which the journey between Earth and Mars was achievable and representatives would be sent in each direction to relieve those sent previously. The first man she recognized as Ewen Scott who had traveled as a young boy with his parents aboard the second transport to Mars sixty eight years ago, briefly he had served as First Minister to Mars, he was in his early nineties and looked like he might drop dead at any moment.
The second representative, Martian Migration Officer, was a much younger man who she did not recognize. A brief internet search had revealed that he was Byron Gant and had traveled to Mars during the Labor Surge--he had served as a worker on various construction projects Martian Expansion projects, including Ceres, before elevating to Minister for Infrastructure. He lost this position due to some controversy over worker safety lead to a mid-window resignation. Popular opinion was that he had been sent to Earth as a representative in the hopes he would not return when his tenure expired: evidently he had decided otherwise.
More familiar to her were the Earther passengers of which there were, including herself, four.
The first was the outgoing Earth Diplomatic Representative to Mars, Vincent Wood, a personal acquaintance from when they served on the United Earth Law Committee together. She smiled but didn't approach him, they would be spending more than enough time in each other's company in the near future, as she took a seat by the narrow window overlooking the ever expanding horizon.
He himself was stooped to peer out of the, for him, relatively low window.
By this point the Sky Tether had already departed from their home on Earth and was rapidly, yet almost silently, ascending towards the nothingness of space. The only external viewing was a letterbox like window that stretched at eye level around three of the four walls with various tall seats spread out along its length.
Already sat on these seats were the last two of her fellow passengers: the tourists among the group. The first was a young woman with the type of briefcase only carried by people who wanted to be seen as the type of person who carries a briefcase. It was an old boxy maroon leather item with brass closings and made an odd hollow wobbling noise every time she fidgeted with it. Briefcase, she decided, was probably one of the various corporate agents sent between Mars and Earth each window to look for investment opportunities or negotiate mining contracts. It was hard to tell if she was an Earther who should know better or a Martian who had found what they believed to be a precious antique.
The last passenger, other than herself, was a young black man with a tablet and digi-pen. Unlike everyone else he wasn't wearing formal wear but instead jeans and a hoody and as they ascended he scribbled notes down on the tablet he was carrying. His face flashed through various emotional expressions as he witnessed the world flashing by below him and then screwed up in perturbation as he tried to put it into note form. She found herself staring as she realized she enjoyed watching someone else beholding the beautiful scene more than she actually enjoyed watching it herself briefly he caught her eye and she smiled authoritative, yet politely, until he looked away.
Recently they had reached cloud level and despite distant airplanes audible screaming in the distance there hadn't been much to see for the last ten minutes. All at once the clouds parted and they were looking down on a rolling sea of cotton wool stretching off to infinity on all sides. Above the sky was still a brilliant blue and in the distance several planes could be seen criss crossing the sky.
Dusa, to any of the other passengers who looked away from the view, was a middle aged woman with short blond spiked hair. She was short and stocky in build and wore the uniform of a United Nations Police with blue beret. Jastra Dusa was the outgoing Representative Police Commisionner of the United Earth to Mars and as, despite extensive devolution, Mars was still considered a member of the United Earth she would be the most senior officer of the law on the planet upon her arrival. It was a controversial subject for most Martian Citizens and the prospect of their planet being policed by someone the average citizen considered an alien, often literally, was growing less and less popular.
1 Ironically the recipe of which was only slightly different to the dried food preserve that most space transports fed their crew in the first place.