Many generations later. Dawn over a Mars of seas and forests and white cities, and the sky is blue.
People stroll a seaside promenade in the open air with no helmets, and there are kites. In a green park beneath tall trees the original outpost sits preserved, smaller than anyone remembers. In the memorial plaza stands a bronze statue of four astronauts with their helmets under their arms.
Captain Kaia Okafor lays tomato blossoms at the statue's base and looks up at the bronze faces for a long moment. Nearby, in a glass case, old HELIX-R1 rests with its lights dark, retired at last after three centuries. Kaia's young daughter Vela presses her nose to the glass, wide-eyed.
Night, on the summit of Olympus Mons, high above the clouds: an observatory. Kaia sits at the eyepiece of a great telescope, and through the lens is a golden star with a small blue world beside it.
In the HELIX Council chamber a holographic star map shows a route leaving the solar system. The council rises and applauds as Kaia is named captain. In orbit, in a shipyard ring above a blue-green Mars, a colossal starship takes shape; workers in sealed suits weld hull plates with sparks drifting away into the dark. The name painted on the hull in giant letters is NOVA. A seed vault is loaded aboard, seeds descended from Yuki Tanaka's first tomatoes. A crew of eight assemble on the hangar deck. Kaia walks onto the gleaming bridge for the first time.
Night at home. Kaia tucks Vela in; on the shelf above the bed sits a little toy rocket, very old. Kaia stands at the window afterwards, looking up at the stars.
Dawn at the spaceport. A shuttle stands on the pad and crowds gather on an open green plain. Kaia and her crew walk out toward it. Her mother, Adaeze, stops her and presses the old photograph of the first crew into her hand, the same photograph the museum kept under glass a century before. Kaia kneels and hugs her daughter tight, and Vela gives her the toy rocket. On the gantry Kaia looks back once and waves. The crowd waves back, HELIX flags in the wind.
The shuttle ignites, flame and steam billowing across the plain, and climbs into the blue Martian sky. Vela watches it go, holding her grandmother's hand.
The shuttle glides in to dock with the vast starship. On the bridge Kaia takes the captain's chair, her crew at their stations, and sets the old photo and the toy rocket beside her console. Below, Mars turns: blue oceans, green continents, white clouds. Her hand rests on the drive control.
NOVA's engines ignite in a brilliant blue-white plume. On the hills of Mars, at night, crowds watch a new star cross the sky, and Vela points up at the moving light. NOVA sweeps past Jupiter's great storms. NOVA crosses the rings of Saturn. Kaia stands at the great forward window with the stars ahead.
And memory arrives, all at once, in the time it takes the choir to draw breath: the first bootprint on Mars. Lena's handprint in the red soil. The first breath inside the dome. The first seedling. Nova, the first child born on Mars. Nova and Leo on the dome floor. The first rain. The first green shoot. Kaia smiles through tears, the old photo in her hand.
NOVA leaves the solar system, the Sun shrinking behind her. The ship becomes a point of light among the stars. The Milky Way blazes over Mars, and one light moves outward.
Outward. Always outward.
