Broken Glass Rain

My thumb keeps catching on the edge of the paper. It’s real paper. Heavy. It cost more than my rations for a week, but Elena likes things she can touch. I bought it from a guy in Logistics who swears he scavenged it from a pre-war archive in the northern craters. It’s thick and slightly yellowed, like it’s been waiting a hundred years for someone to ruin it with bad news. I haven't written much yet. Just her name at the top. Elena. The ink from my pen looks blacker than the shadows outside the porch. I wonder if the mail-ship even made it past the Van Allen belt. There were three flashes near the high-orbit lanes last night. Big ones. Silent white bursts that looked like camera flashes in a dark room. Most of the mail-drones are automated now, and they don't have the shielding to handle a direct EMP or a cloud of shrapnel. If the ship was vaporized, this paper is just a very expensive piece of trash. But I keep writing anyway because the silence in this bubble is louder than the alarms.

I look up from the desk. The Earth is hanging there, framed by the reinforced polycarbonate of the porch. It’s spring back home. Or it should be. I remember the way the mud used to smell in April—that sharp, wet scent of things coming back to life. I remember the way the wind felt on my face, messy and unpredictable. Here, the air is recycled. It tastes like copper and old sweat. It’s been filtered through a thousand lungs and a million machines until there’s nothing left of it but the bare minimum required to keep your heart beating. Through the telescope, I can see the green of the forests, but it’s muted now. It’s hidden behind the ring. It isn't a beautiful ring like Saturn's. It’s a messy, jagged halo of dead satellites, pulverized glass, and frozen fuel. We call it the glitter. It’s the remains of every communication network, every weather tracker, and every spy bird that’s been blown to bits over the last six months. It’s a graveyard of data, and it’s getting thicker every day.

I stand up, my knees cracking in the low gravity. I still haven't gotten used to the way my body feels light but my head feels heavy. I walk over to the telescope. It’s a custom rig, something I built from spare parts and scavenged optics. The official base sensors are all pointed at the Far Side, looking for incoming kinetic strikes, but I only care about the view. I lean in, pressing my eye to the rubber cup. The view is blurred. The silicon dust in orbit is reflecting the sunlight, creating a haze that washes out the continents. I reach for the manual filter dial. It’s a physical wheel, clunky and old-fashioned. I turn it slowly, clicking through the infrared and ultraviolet bands until the glare starts to fade. There. The North American coast. It looks jagged, the lights of the cities mostly gone, replaced by the dull red of fires and the occasional blue spark of a power station failing. The glitter is everywhere. It looks like a cloud of static frozen in space. Millions of pieces of pulverized tech, each one moving at seventeen thousand miles an hour, waiting to shred anything that tries to leave the atmosphere.

A thud vibrates through the floor. It’s not a sound—there’s no air outside to carry sound—but a deep, bone-rattling shudder that comes up through the lunar rock. I grab the edge of the telescope stand to steady myself. The floor tilts, just for a second, and then the base alarms start to scream. It’s a high, piercing tone that makes my teeth ache. I look toward the horizon. A plume of grey dust is rising from the Far Side, a massive, silent fountain of moon-dirt illuminated by the harsh sun. A rogue missile. Or maybe just a piece of a carrier that finally lost its orbit. Either way, it hit hard. I look at the pressure gauge on the wall. The needle is twitching. Then, I hear it. A tiny, sharp hiss. It’s coming from the corner where the porch meets the main hub. I walk over, my heart hammering against my ribs. There’s a hairline crack in the primary seal. It’s small, no bigger than a fingernail, but I can see the frost starting to form around the edges as the moisture in the air escapes into the vacuum.

"Great," I mutter. "Just great."

I reach for the emergency sealant canister kept under the bench. I’m shaking, but I manage to aim the nozzle at the crack. The foam comes out in a thick, grey glob, expanding instantly to plug the leak. The hissing stops, but the alarm keeps going. I stand there, staring at the patch of foam, waiting for my breath to slow down. The door to the hub slides open with a mechanical whine. Corporal Reyes steps through. He’s young, maybe twenty-four, with a buzz cut and a look of permanent boredom on his face. He’s wearing his flight suit unzipped to the waist, showing a grey t-shirt stained with grease. He doesn't look like a soldier. He looks like a bored kid working a night shift at a gas station. He looks at the sealant on the wall and then at me.

"Seal’s leaking?" he asks. His voice is flat, disinterested.

"I fixed it," I say. "What was that impact?"

"Rogue kinetic. Probably a de-orbited railgun platform from the last volley. Hit about fifty clicks out. Command says we’re fine, but they want us to stay in the pressurized zones until the dust settles."

"Fine?" I gesture to the window, to the Earth and the ring of shrapnel. "Does that look fine to you?"

Reyes shrugs. He walks over to the telescope and looks through it without asking. "Vibes are bad, man. I get it. But hey, as long as the data-center nodes stay up, we’re still getting paid. My contract says I get a bonus for every month the Lunar-South relay stays active."

"Your contract," I say, the bitterness rising in my throat. "You’re worried about your bonus while the world is literally tearing itself apart? Look at the orbit, Reyes. There’s nothing left to relay. It’s just junk. We’re guarding a graveyard."

"It’s not just junk," Reyes says, pulling back from the telescope. He looks at me, and for a second, the boredom slips. He looks tired. "There’s still traffic. The corporate clouds are still running. Someone somewhere is still buying stuff, still sending messages. The war is just... it’s part of the overhead now."

"The overhead," I repeat. "People are dying down there. My daughter is down there."

"Yeah, well. My mom is in Phoenix. Or she was. I haven't heard from her in six weeks. What am I supposed to do? Go down there and fight the shrapnel?" He looks back at the telescope. "The glitter looks cool at night, though. Like a disco ball."

"It looks like a coffin," I say.

He doesn't respond. He just stands there for a minute, watching the Earth. Then he sighs. "You got any real tobacco left? I know you were hoarding a leaf."

I look at him. I should say no. I should save it for the day the mail-ship actually arrives, or the day the war ends. But looking at the crack in the seal and the grey ring around the world, I realize that day isn't coming. I reach into my pocket and pull out a small, airtight pouch. Inside is a single, dried tobacco leaf. It’s dark brown, almost black, and it smells like soil and smoke. It’s the last piece of the old world I have. I pull out a small pipe, hand-carved from a piece of scrap metal, and start to crumble the leaf into the bowl. Reyes watches me with hungry eyes.

"One hit each," I say. "That’s it."

"Deal."

I light it with a small torch. The smoke is thick and harsh, burning my throat in a way that feels honest. It’s a real sensation, not the sterile, filtered emptiness of the base air. I inhale deeply, feeling the nicotine hit my brain like a hammer. I pass the pipe to Reyes. He takes a long drag, closing his eyes. For a moment, the alarm in the background seems to fade away. We’re just two men in a bubble, miles away from everything that matters, watching a carrier ship go dark in the upper atmosphere. It’s a tiny speck of light, a silver needle catching the sun, and then it simply isn't there anymore. It didn't explode. It just got hit by something small and fast and stopped being a ship. It turned into more glitter.

"That was a heavy transport," Reyes says, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. "Maybe the mail."

"Maybe," I say. I look at the letter on my desk. Elena. I think about her standing in a field somewhere, looking up at the sky, seeing the artificial aurora we’ve created. I wonder if she knows I’m still here. I wonder if she remembers the smell of the mud. I pick up the pen again. My hand is steadier now. I don't write about the war or the missiles or the leaking seal. I write about the spring. I write about the way the light looks when it hits the water in the creek behind our house. I write about the things that are still real, even if I can't touch them anymore. The tobacco is burning down, the embers glowing a dull orange in the dim light of the porch. Outside, the moon is silent and grey, and the Earth is a ghost of itself, wrapped in a shroud of its own making.