The looming silver behemoth lumbered through the star-dusted vacuum with an ease belying its bulk—a tear-shaped drop fallen from the eyes of those who had seen the death of their Mother. It’s lustrous, fifty-mile surface of plating and antennas regal but sterile. Near the rear, where the steel leviathan’s invisible wake distorted stars and made them twinkle, a man looked out a reinforced plasti-glass viewport at the greens, browns, and blues of the great sphere hoving into view below that his descendants would call their new Earth.
She was a crawler—a surface-monkey, some of the insiders would say down their noses. She could see a shape darken the dull yellow light emitted by the square viewport visible between her braced legs. She finished tightening the worn pon-wheel and slipped her tri-wrench back into its pocket on her thigh. She slid her moor line—the ship’s artificial gravity did not extend everywhere—to the nearest longitudinal cross-slit and used small metal rings on the hull to pull herself down to peer inside.
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