The Phoenix Colony

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. The thing is, you can -- just not in the most literal sense. When it's the collective screams of eight billion people, you can hear it in your soul. Chloe knew this from first-hand experience, along with everyone else aboard The Phoenix colony ship. It was once among the last three transport vessels that departed the dying planet, and everyone aboard those transports witnessed its final moments of existence. Chloe considered it an unlucky thing, to have witnessed Earth's demise so intimately. The other ninety-seven transport ships had embarked on their journey several months before The Phoenix, The Brasília and The Ottawa. The inhabitants of the earlier departures were very likely far enough away to have seen only a brief flash of light, but the others had front row seats to the extinction event. The magnificently horrifying scenario also cut short the journeys of both The Brasília and The Ottawa, leaving just one lone ship to navigate amid the path of unpredictable debris that spread out from the shockwaves birthed by catastrophic blasts.

Earth had long been at the point of certain demise -- far longer than Chloe had been alive. For everyone in her generation, and at least two generations before hers, existence was pretty close to impossible on the surface of the planet. By the year 2475, most of the planet's human and animal inhabitants lived subterraneously -- and the most well-off lived in a heavily fortified floating community just outside of Earth's atmosphere. These were the people who controlled the availability of food, medicine and other precious resources which had become critically scarce. Humanity in general was in survival mode, and world's elite took full advantage of it. It was a temporary arrangement, however. When the heat from the sun became too intense for surface-living, the community outside the atmosphere -- called Jericho -- sustained damage. That's when The Colonies Project began. It was a project of great hope for mankind with the ambitious goal of saving as many people as possible. The project itself took close to a hundred years to complete. During these years, Earth had become a prison work camp for those who weren't lucky or privileged enough to live in Jericho.

Two hundred transport vessels were intended to be programmed with the coordinates of more than a dozen exoplanets that had atmospheres similar to Earth. Naturally, the privileged residents of Jericho had priority passage aboard the ships, which put fifty transports at full capacity before they were even constructed. An additional eleven ships were reserved for essential workers who would continue their lives as the slave class to the greedy and powerful. The remaining transports were to be filled with only those fortunate enough to pass the muster of the Jericho elite, which would still leave the majority of Earth's citizens to fend for themselves. This was a death sentence for everyone who couldn't make it aboard a transport vessel. This stark reality was duly noted when the construction of the ships was halted, and only one hundred of the promised two hundred were completed. Shortly after the one hundred ships were constructed, more than half of them departed without any type of warning. Just two days following the departure of more than sixty passenger vessels, a powerful solar flare struck Jericho and knocked out all of its power and life support systems.

The departure of the remaining transport vessels was a chaotic mess while Earth appeared to be right in the path of several highly-radiated solar flares. These flares ignited fires on the surface of the planet, and melted the outer walls of the heavily fortified city of Jericho. The solar events came and went with increased frequency as the northern hemisphere of the planet came closer to the giant source of energy during its summer season. The planet was going through a slow, but inevitable, burn. By the time the final three transport vessels had exited the atmosphere of the dying planet, the embattled floating city of Jericho began to ignite in a series of explosions brought on by the extreme heat of the sun's rogue blasts of energy. When the already-damaged nuclear core of Jericho's power grid ignited, what resulted was calamitous.

A colossal blast of radiation ballooned outward in a dome of intolerable heat, fully consuming The Ottawa and The Brasília. The outermost edge of the dome created a forcefield effect that violently collided with The Phoenix, and pushed it outward, separating it from the other two vessels. When the shockwave pulled back inward, after ballooning out, the atmosphere surrounding it acted as a violently ebbing ocean tide. The Ottawa and The Brasília were both pulled back into the hypocenter of the Jericho reactor explosion zone. Communication became impossible between the three transport ships. All that could be heard over the shipwide loudspeakers of The Phoenix was dead-silence, while all five hundred passengers watched what unfolded helplessly.

Chloe took control of The Phoenix when the autopilot feature failed to engage the hyperstream manifest. The self-taught pilot punched the throttle as hard as she could, and navigated away from the volatile display of planetary destruction. From a distance she could see the crumbling wreckage of Jericho burning through the atmosphere of Earth, including the three massive reactor cores that were once used to power the utopian city. Seven hundred thousand tons of steel and titanium rained down on the planet through the atmosphere with a tremendous amount of other debris, including the nuclear reactors that were in active meltdown. The impact of the nuclear devices along with the jagged metal debris on the surface of the planet had cataclysmic effects. If there were any human survivors following the event, they would either starve to death or suffocate from the fallout. Chloe must have flown over five hundred parsecs away from the volatile wreckage before the autopilot reengaged.

She could feel the heavy energy of death, despair and pain, and in her psyche she could almost hear the sobs of anguish among the people that were left behind to expire. These were the phantom screams of an entire species forced to sacrifice themselves for the fortunate few.