Countdown to the End

July 8, 2271: the last day that a human foot would touch the Earth. I leaned an arm against the wall and stared out the porthole of my cabin, fist to my mouth. Yes, we'd done damage to the planet. Yes, we had dealt with plagues and wars, almost lost the human race altogether. Yes, nature had suffered for our mistakes and our evils. But that was no reason to abandon our world! But those damn treehuggers had become more than a nuisance, with their protests and insistence that we had to leave the planet in order to save it. I'm still not sure how they got enough people to agree with them, but when the vote was taken, they had won. And now here we were, along with those on this ship and on a thousand others, awaiting the Leader's final command that would take us away from our homeworld forever.

"Honey, are you sure you don't want to go to the lounge? The view is a lot better there."

I turned slightly to look at my wife, my beautiful Lenora, and shook my head. "And watch those smug bastards celebrating? No thanks."

The loudspeaker blared. "This is the Leader. Launch will commence in ten seconds. Ten... nine... eight..."

I shut off the loudspeaker. Lenora came to join me at the porthole, to gaze out with me, and I slipped an arm around her waist. Looking out, I drank in every inch of the landscape, barren though it was. But I remembered the soft breeze I'd felt when we were boarding, and the way it carried the scent of honeysuckle vines and green grass. The sky was a brilliant blue, with just a few wispy clouds chasing each other like children playing tag. I could just barely see trees in the distance beyond the launch pad, waving slightly. As the ship rumbled around us, and slowly began to lift, I imagined they were bidding us a sad farewell. But within seconds, they were lost to sight. I closed my eyes with a sigh.

Less than a minute later, Lenora exclaimed, "What's that?" My eyes snapped open, and I peered outward. We were already hundreds of kilometers above the planet.  I could see the curve of its blue surface. And something else- one of the other ships, fires blooming throughout its frame, falling slowly toward the Earth. Something had gone wrong. Its plunge quickened as we stared in horror. Then I realized, "The engines... the engines!" Lenora caught on immediately, and stifled a scream, sleeves to her mouth. We watched, helplessly, as the ship fell out of sight. But we saw the explosion of the ship's supermatter engines, and the waves of miles-high plasma fire sweeping across the Earth's surface, incinerating every living thing on the planet. The shouted slogans of the Earthsaver protesters rang in my ears.

"We have to leave the planet to save it..."