Huw Langridge

...As the Earth swung past the view-port of the accommodation module, Frank could see the South Island of New Zealand creep slowly round to the dark side. The island was surrounded on all sides by the expanse of the South Pacific, and to the south he could make out scattered storm clouds, which churned up over the Antarctic’s ice fields...

When the module’s rotation carried the Earth out of sight, the deep star field came into view. He pushed his face close to the view-port. Without the glare of his home planet to obscure the light of the stars, he could see the infinite expanse spread out before him. It was a beautiful sight, a clearer version of the image that populated the summer nights of his childhood. Except this time he was not seeing those tiny distant points of light though a telescope hampered by orange city lights and localised pollution. Now he was able to look directly into the past life of the universe, and see everything it had to offer.

Somewhere below him, a controlled thrust burst altered the trajectory of the Daedalus. The ship was beginning to break away from Earth’s orbit and would soon be out of its gravitational free fall, on a transfer orbit to Mars...