From The Ashes | The 100 S5 [Bellarke]

|4| The Forgotten

150 years since contact with Earth

Icarus was a pile of jittery nerves.

He hadn't slapped on a caffeine patch or chugged an energy shot; he was just excited. After a generation of slow travel back from the asteroid mining station where his ancestors had waited for Earth to cool from the radiation it had taken during the Last War, the Eligius Colony was going home.

Icarus was part of the space generation, those born on the journey from the abandoned mining facilities to Earth. He didn't know what it was like to be trapped by rock walls – the dark, endless stretch of space was his cage, with Earth as a faint speck on the horizon, the North Star that grew steadily bigger and bigger.

Until now, when the planet stretched large in front of him, the surface pale and gray, touched only by green in very few places.

Icarus took a deep, steadying breath before he settled his hands over the grips of the thrusters. Today, he would go from the quiet kid who aced his pilot exams to the one who brought the last of the human race back home.

No pressure.

"You got this," his co-pilot Cas said confidently. She sat to the right of him, his eyes and ears for the internal reactions of their ship. His job was to focus on the descent and setting them down smooth and safely. "Just pretend this is a sim; it will be over before you know it."

He nodded, and slowly eased the thrusters forward. The ship rumbled under his feet, their steady pace they'd maintained for a generation of travel shifting into a quicker, manually-operated speed. His heart thumped almost too-fast, pounding heavy and insistent against his chest.

This was it. No more waiting. No more tasteless protein paste from the vats of their food chemists. No more population control. They'd made it.

They didn't need to survive anymore; now, they could live.

An old space station came into view as it orbited the Earth, its circular shape warped and scarred by a hundred years or more in space. Icarus recognized it from his lessons on old-Earth technology as Go-Sci, one of the experimental stations who had been one of his colony's contacts before the apocalypse.

"Whoa," Cas said, glancing up from her panels to the station. "That's . . ."

"I know," Icarus replied, smiling.

The comms suddenly crackled to life, signaling an incoming, external transmission. That was unexpected, but as Cas flicked the switch to connect onto the signal, Icarus figured it must be an old beacon, still running after all these years. Because there couldn't be survivors on that station . . . could there?

"Ark Station to the ground," the radio crackled, static blurring the looped message so that it came through in skipping bursts.

"Wait, what? The ground?" Cas said, sharing a mirrored expression of confusion with Icarus. "There's no way anyone could have survived on the ground."

"This is Raven Reyes. If you are receiving, please respond."

Icarus halted the forward motion of the ship, which he knew would bring a flurry of questions from the captain, his block officer, the engineers in charge of making sure their engines could handle the unused strain of their descent. Because the start date of the loop had appeared on Cas's comm screen . . . and it was from six years ago.

He didn't think, he just acted.

"Gagarin to Ark Station," he said, opening communication between their ship and the received signal. "We read you."