In the early morning of 2148, an old Martian ship entered Earth's atmosphere. When the hull armor plates began to heat up, long orange streaks ran across them, as if someone had dragged a red-hot needle over metal, and it became hot in the control room, as if someone had turned on an oven.
"Heat on the hull, eighty-seven percent," said Cal. "The old man is holding."
"He was holding when we weren't even in the blueprints yet," grumbled Maren. "He'll manage."
The ship entered the upper layers like a knife into butter: first quietly, then louder and louder, until the howl of air turned into a continuous roar. Ira laughed—shortly, nervously:
"I thought it would be more beautiful."
"Beautiful only happens in simulations," replied Cal. "In real life, it always smells of burnt paint and sweat."
The hull metal, crisscrossed with weld seams and charred by old plasma burns, vibrated under the pressure of dense air, and the ship began to force its way downward, heavily but confidently. Like a stubborn veteran who, despite everything, had to reach the end of the journey.
It had been built in the early 2030s, when Mars was more a dream than a home, and no one thought these heavy, imperfect freighters would become the last link between two worlds. Since then, it had delivered cargo to the Red Planet three times, and once had almost burned up on the return journey. Then came a long, forced rest of one hundred and eleven years, during which it stood under the dome of a makeshift hangar.
All those years, it was carefully maintained by engineers—first those who had arrived on it, and then the descendants of those first people who had left Earth hoping to return one day. And now, after more than a century, the ship was truly returning—but to a world that no longer existed.
Inside, a tense silence reigned, as dense as the clouds being torn apart by the hull outside. The three crew members stood by the wide viewing port, behind which there were still only streaks of gray and fiery light. Each held themselves as if this were the moment they had been preparing for their entire lives, though none of them had ever seen Earth with their own eyes.
Commander Maren Hold, a tall, solid man with hard features, stood closest. He seemed calm, but it was that special calm behind which tension hides—his lips trembled almost imperceptibly as he watched, unblinking, the shimmering air giving way to dense layers of clouds. Next to him, Ira Solis, the navigator, was almost pressed against the glass, trying to make out something in the foggy whiteness. In her eyes was a strange mix of anxiety and hope. Cal Tarmon, the ship's engineer, stood behind but watched just as intently, his hands clasped behind his back.
They were born on Mars. They grew up among red deserts, narrow domes, and a constant lack of everything—air, water, heat, time. For them, Earth was a legend, a collection of fragments from old video recordings, endlessly re-watched films, faded archives, and memories of a few dozen elders from the first generations.
When the clouds finally parted and the first view of the surface opened beneath the ship, no one spoke a word. This silence was not one of confusion—it was heavy, oppressive, so thick it felt as though time inside the ship had stopped for a moment.
Earth was... different. Not blue, not shining, not like the one that flashed in textbooks, but a strange, uneven, dark color. Huge land masses were covered by dense, rigid forests, so thick they seemed like solid green seas. In other places, the land remained gray, speckled with endless patches of ash—remnants of the catastrophe that had destroyed civilization in a single day. The coastlines looked grotesquely reshaped: the ocean had risen, swallowing cities, plains, entire countries—now tens of thousands of square kilometers of what people once took pride in lay hidden beneath the water.
New York appeared first. The legend, the heart of civilization. From the height, its giant blocks looked like old scars on the planet's skin. Manhattan was almost indistinguishable: the street grid could only be guessed by the straight lines of trees that had grown along former roads. Skeletons of skyscrapers jutted out from the green mass like broken teeth. Some were partially flooded—the sea had encroached far inland, and the water reflected the charred walls like a mirror with no pity.
Ira slowly exhaled, as if only now remembering to breathe.
"I didn't imagine it like this," she said with sadness, almost in a whisper. Maren nodded without taking his eyes off the view below them.
For several seconds, no one said anything. Because there was nothing to say.
One day. That was enough to destroy everything.
On September 17, 2037, humanity finally fulfilled its eternal fear—the fear that one mistake, one order, or one act of madness could erase millions of years of evolution. No one knew anymore who had pressed the button first, and it probably didn't matter anymore: within a few hours, the oceans were boiling from falling warheads, and only pillars of fire remained of the cities, visible even from space.
The colonists only saw flashes—tiny points of light that turned into a huge shining dome covering Earth like a lid over a dying world. And a few days later, radioactive fallout finally shrouded the planet's surface in a dense layer of brown haze, and contact with Earth disappeared—swiftly, sharply, forever.
But they could do nothing to help—that became clear in the first weeks after the catastrophe. Communications were cut off, cargo flights ceased, and the small Martian colony, accustomed to receiving from Earth everything beyond their modest means, suddenly found itself utterly alone on a cold, merciless planet. Fuel, equipment, spare parts—all of it had always come from the home world, and now, deprived of support, people faced a frightening reality: their continued existence depended solely on themselves.
Yes, they had hydroponic greenhouses providing air and a modest harvest. They had workshops to repair old equipment. But rocket fuel—the lifeblood of spaceships—was produced exclusively on Earth. And without it, the old ships standing in makeshift hangars for nearly a century were just dead metal.
The years dragged on, slow and heavy, as if the planet itself resisted human presence. People worked to the point of exhaustion, building something new literally from the wreckage of the old, inventing ways to survive in conditions they were never prepared for. But it was in this mercilessness that human character and persistence showed themselves—the very same stubbornness that had once turned a wild planet into the Earth capable of sending their ancestors to Mars.
In time, they found small deposits of useful minerals deep underground. These were not the giant mines from science fiction novels, but tight, narrow shafts, more reminiscent of Earth's during the Gold Rush. But even that was enough—the reserves sufficed to erect a small plant for producing rocket fuel. The project, which had seemed impossible after losing contact with Earth, grew slowly, year after year, until one day the machinery hummed and the first liter of precious fuel filled the reservoir.
The colony celebrated this as a victory. As proof that people could still move forward, even if the whole world had collapsed behind their backs.
Meanwhile, the ship continued its descent, the vibration of the hull growing sharper, rougher—as if testing the limits of strength of everything left from the old technology. Ira checked the parameters on the panel, but her gaze kept slipping to the observation screen, where dark plains, crossed by rivers that had long changed their courses, raced beneath them.
"Altitude thirty-five thousand," she said.
"Adjustment for twenty thousand meters," Maren replied curtly, correcting the course.
Cal quickly ran through the sensors, checking the condition of the engines—they were older than all three crew members combined, and the fact they still worked was almost a miracle. He knew every sound, every vibration, every delay in the systems, and now the ship was singing him the song that machines sing when pushed to their limit.
"Hang in there, old man," he said quietly, more to the ship than to the others.
Ira gripped the armrest as the hull jerked again, but the ship held and continued its descent, cutting through the dense atmospheric layers.
As soon as they stabilized, Maren set the ship on a circular route to see as much as possible. Africa below was unusually green: where deserts once were, now grew broad, heavy forests. Europe looked shattered—some regions completely submerged, others hidden under new vegetation. Asia was a chaos of gray and green patches—cities had completely disappeared, yielding to jungles that seemed to swallow all traces of human presence.
From the height, it all looked not like a world that had once perished in war, but like a world that had outlived humanity and now continued to exist on its own—silent, frighteningly indifferent to the fact that billions had once lived here.
"Everyone... just vanished," whispered Ira.
"Not everyone," corrected Maren. "Some must have survived the blasts. Then winter came. And it finished off the rest."
According to astronomers' calculations, the winter lasted almost forty years. The sun disappeared behind ash and soot. Temperatures dropped to minus sixty even at the equator. Oceans froze along the shores for hundreds of kilometers. When the ash finally settled, only those who had managed to hide deep underground or in the warmest corners of the planet survived. But there were too few of them. Hunger, cold, radiation. Within two generations, billions were reduced to less than a million. Then nature took its course.
They flew around the planet at an altitude of twenty kilometers, conserving fuel.
After flying over New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and finding the same picture of destruction everywhere, the ship crossed the Atlantic and set course for Europe.
Paris looked no better. The thousand-year-old city stood barely half-intact: the Eiffel Tower had collapsed, broken into three huge metal arches overgrown with moss. Where the Louvre had been, a black crater gaped—as if someone had torn the city's heart from the ground, leaving nothing but ash and water that filled the depression. Giant trees grew along the Seine—their canopies met, forming a green tunnel completely hiding the river's course.
Further on—Eastern Europe, and soon Moscow appeared below them. Hundreds of square kilometers—a continuous gray-black field of destruction. There were so many missile strikes that the craters from their warheads overlapped, turning former districts into chaos. The towers of Moscow City stood half-destroyed, their skeletons jutting from the ground like frozen ribs of a giant. Rivers were blocked by debris, and water spread through the streets, turning them into canals.
When they reached Japan, Earth showed another facet of the catastrophe. Tokyo was piled to the horizon, but not by a single explosion—it was destroyed by time. Skyscrapers leaned and hung over each other, forming sharp angles and shadows like giant blades. Roads were overgrown with a dense carpet of plants—where multi-lane highways once ran, green rivers of intertwined branches now flowed.
Ira said almost inaudibly:
"It feels like Earth is trying to hide any trace that humanity ever existed."
When the ship, having circled Earth, came out again over the coast of North America, the sun was already sinking toward the horizon, and the world below was painted in long, blood-rust shadows.
Los Angeles was perhaps the most frightening. The coastline was different: the ocean had eaten away tens of kilometers of land over the century. The city's ruins lay partly underwater, partly on a narrow strip of land. The Hollywood Hills were covered by giant trees rising higher than the former villas. The downtown skyscrapers stood half-flooded, and between their floors, where offices once were, flocks of huge birds nested.
The ship was completing its last circle, and Ira began to plot the return trajectory to Mars. They had done what they came for. The planet was dead. There was no one to return to here.
"Maren, look southwest. Clark Mountain. There's something there."
On the hillside, at an altitude of almost two thousand meters, a regular earthen mound was visible. Too regular for nature.
"It looks artificial," said Cal. "And relatively recent. Clearly made after the war."
"Descending," Maren ordered curtly.
The ship hovered a hundred meters above the slope. Below—a perfectly round hill about three meters high, all overgrown with shrubs. At its top rose a cross, crudely welded from iron.
"Someone left a grave here for someone very dear to them," Ira said quietly. "After the catastrophe."
They went out in spacesuits. The air was still toxic—much of the radiation had long since sunk into the soil, but the air remained poisoned for many years. Clean snow crunched underfoot, and beneath it, real soil was visible. Ira bent down, ran her palm over the grass, and wept.
The inscription on the cross had been completely erased by rust, which in places had eaten through the iron to the base. Only deep grooves remained where letters once were.
Cal walked around the cross and crouched at its base.
"Here... look, Captain. A slab, deliberately moved."
He pushed—the stone gave way with a creak, revealing a narrow cavity.
"A hide," he said. "Someone specifically made it so this place would be found."
Inside lay a small zinc case, neatly sealed along the seams with transparent plastic. Everything was done so hermetically that the contents would be preserved for centuries.
"Take it aboard, Captain?" asked Cal.
"No, I won't allow that thing on the ship," Maren cut him off. "We don't know what's in there. A virus, spores, a radiation source—anything."
"Commander, this is the only thing left to us by one of the survivors!" objected Ira.
Maren looked at the cross, at the snow-covered mountains, at the silent planet.
"Fine. We open it. But only here."
The case opened with a quiet hiss. Inside was nothing but an ordinary squared paper notebook, worn but remarkably intact.
"Paper..." whispered Ira. "Real paper. From wood."
Cal carefully turned a couple of pages. The ink had faded, but the text was still legible.
"It's a diary," he said.
"We take it, but only the notebook," Maren decided. "The case stays."
They placed the find in a sterile container and returned to the ship. An hour later, Phoenix was already on its return trajectory to Mars. Earth remained behind—green, beautiful, and for many centuries poisoned for all living things.
Several days of flight passed. The first, most acute impressions of what they had seen had dulled, but the weight of what they had found still pressed on each of them—a heavy burden that lay on their hearts and wouldn't let them forget that their home world was dead.
One evening, by ship's time, the crew gathered in the mess hall. The container stood on the table. Maren took the notebook in his hands.
"We promised the colony to bring back any information about what happened," he said. "It seems we've found it."
Ira and Cal nodded silently. The commander opened the first page and began to read aloud in a quiet, even voice:
"September 17, 2037, Saturday, began with the piercing sound of an alarm clock shattering the silence of my bedroom..."
And in the small mess hall of the old ship flying between two worlds, the last voice from Earth quietly began to speak.