[Estimated reading time: 9 minutes]

The atmosphere in the airlock oozed out into space, the suit Jas was wearing expanded slightly around her, and the large iris in front of her opened slowly to reveal the darkness of space. Jas looked straight ahead and her eyes quickly found the familiar stars. They had moved slightly since yesterday.

She touched a control in the palm of her right hand and a soft exhale of vapor moved her forward, out of the safety of the airlock into space.

“Testing the drone net,” she spoke, then a prolonged jet of particles slammed into the inner seal of the airlock and Jas accelerated out of the vapor-filled cavern, like a bullet out of a gun. “One, two, three, alarm,” she counted, and on right on cue the on-board computer spoke its usual warning.

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[Estimated reading time: 2 minutes]

[Previous Chapter]

Continents are passing through an area of space around Mars that we have dubbed the Arena, they whisk through space and tug infinitesimally on the atoms of the red planet, urging it to change orbit and break away from the Sun’s embrace. We do not know why this is, just that it is. Asteroids large and small, mostly heavy cores of iron, they all curve in a myriad of paths through the system, the only common point being Mars. On this predictability we have begun to use the deluge of asteroids as a mighty river that carries our species out and away from our Earth.

The space-faring age of humanity has just begun.

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[Estimated reading time: 2 minutes]

[Previous Chapter]

Once the world was aware of the barrage of asteroids that were pulling Mars away from us, toward a terrifying neighbor just two hundred light years away, we began to plot and scheme.

The asteroids were flying through the Field of Attack, nick-named the Arena, and this is where we concentrated our efforts. There was a long train of ships that set off from Florida launch-pads and crossed the void of space toward Mars. These rockets were packed with computer hardware, sensors, propellant, solar cells at first, power cells later on, powerful radios. A few of the early ones failed until we patched them enough to just be able to power on. Early adoption and all.

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[Estimated reading time: 3 minutes]

The research team behind the asteroid fly-by in 2015 is publishing their latest asteroid findings in Nature, and the news is not good. The team is a well-known group of individuals who specialize in asteroid study, who often use simulations as part of their work to determine the paths their subjects will trace through our solar system. They have been tracking the hundreds of thousands of asteroids (332,908, as of this writing) per year, and after three years of research they are able to provide us with evidence that Mars is leaving our Solar System.

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