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It had been 1 year and 45 months. 5 birthdays. 5 birthdays since the last time I heard my mom's voice. For all I know mom is a thousand parsecs away on a tiny derelict spaceship, chasing fairy tales with no memory of the little girl she left behind.

Imagine my astonishment when the radio suddenly crackles to life.

“Freighter 211, Seargent Helena Grant to command, over.”

her heart skips a beat.

“Mom?”

But the impatient tone of my mother's voice cut me off. I then heard the thousand alarms blaring in the background.

“Listen dear. I don’t have much time. I just wanted to say i love you with every fiber of my being and i-”

She never finished her sentence. A deafening crash rendered through the communication line. All my frenetic screams were lost to the void.

All went to static…

***

The voice on my comm line derails my train of thought.

“Everything alright captain?”

I breathed a heavy sigh.

“Yep, 4 by 4”

“Just wanted to say we’re approaching a new solar system.”

“Alright, thanks james”

Ever since we were tiny tots and could barely cement our feet to the ground, we’d heard myths. A fairy tale of a planet. A planet with bountiful resources where humans flourished. The kind of utopia that us children of the void- born and raised in the cupolas of space stations and tiny space freighters dreamed of. They’d give this utopia funky names- irth, terra, Gaia. But now, after millenia of scavenging asteroids and habiting inhospitable exoplanets, humanity craved an elysium. We hoped that maybe, just maybe, we’d find our own irth.

Many have lost their lives in this exodus. But if there's anything I've learnt about humanity, it’s that we never give in, even when the odds are stacked haplessly against us. 

Out of the blue, a dot begins pulsing on my screen. I zoom in and a faint gasp escapes my lips.

An azure blue orb patched with swathes of brown, green and white. 

However the further I zoom in, more aberrations begin to rear their head. 

The radio crackles

“Cap, are you seeing this?”

I respond after a brief pause.

“Prepare to land, James we’re gonna pay this thing a visit.”

***

 We dock on a tall cliffside. Atmospheric readings indicate that the air outside is non-toxic, but I complete the customary checks, latching my suit into place and tightening it like a second set of skin stretched over my bones. The air here has far more oxygen than expected or even preferred. Nothing my space-born lungs are used to, and nothing I'm willing to risk.

When the ship's external air lock door hisses open,I gawk at my new surroundings, taking in a shallow breath from my tank. A stunning intensity of fauna has filled this planet. In decades of scouting, I've seen life grow resiliently in thousands of places, but never like this, never with this verdant, unapologetic vibrancy. My suit is temperature-modulated, but I shiver with anticipation under the foreign sun's rays, casting my gaze beyond the cliffside. Below me, rolling hills are laid bare. But at the base of these contours is where my vision remains nailed to.

A vast area of undulating, shifting blue. My suit's sensors confirm what I already know. This is an ocean of water, one of the rarest, most precious resources in the galaxy.

I dive in with a graceful parabola and scour for anything that moves. To my bewilderment however, this aquatic repository seems… dead

Suddenly, my body turns rigid.

“Oh my god…”

At the sea bed, I see a shipwreck. Only this ship sails the void. The name of the ship is stenciled in pristine white.

Freighter 211

***

I stumble out of the shallow waters, the chatter in my radio becoming merely white noise. The sun is dipping below the planet's horizon, where an inky vastness of blue meets the dimming skies. On the shore I am greeted by a tiny shack. Inside however, I see a fairly modern radio transmitting device. 

I turn it on and listen. 

“My name is Helena Grant.”

I whisper into my helmet “Mom”

“I have a daughter, Kady grant on… god knows where she is now”

I’m here mom, right here

“This is to inform you, whoever is listening, that i have found our safe haven, our own irth, and i am standing on it.”

A brief pause.

“Kady, if you're listening, I am so sorry we didn’t speak often. I hope you know I always loved you, I will always love you.”

Mom lets out a heavy sigh.

“This is freighter 211, Over and out.”

A stray tear trickles down my cheek. An abundance of oxygen and water before me. A lifetime of choking on shallow breaths in never-ending space behind.

I raise my damp gloves to my helmet and unlatch it.

I breathe.