To Hell and Back (Hellworlder pirates)

Ch 58 New Mombasa

New Mombasa

Astarte didn't even bother with taking the train back to the space elevator, she just walked to a private landing field in a nicer part of the city and boarded an expensive looking shuttle with Alwen close behind her. The shuttle pilot closed the door and fresh air filled the cabin as the shuttle took off, she watched as the shuttle rose high above the Terran home world before accelerating a couple times the speed of sound once the pesky atmosphere was out of the way.

"What do you think of our home world?" the Captain asked wryly.

"I think I need a new set of lungs." Alwen grumbled.

She barked a harsh laugh "be glad it didn't rain on you, then you'd need new skin."

Alwen scowled "Its not funny, how could you do this to your own world?"

The captains eyes sharpened into fine blades "I know its hard for you to understand on Torwen, living in piece with nature comes easily on your world. Ecological stability is what makes your deathworld rating lower than earths despite having similar gravity, radiation, and powerful predators. But its not so easy on Earth, our world went through several extinction level events before humanity even left the trees, we didn't know that things like that were uncommon in the galaxy. Earth has been brimming with life for over half a billion years, much, much longer than most Union worlds, there's a reason it took so long for a sentient species to rise out of the mud. For the longest time we assumed that life out in the greater galaxy would be incredibly rare because of all the factors that had to line up just so for us. The reason we succeeded is because we were adaptable and industrious. We can survive in more biomes than any other Union species, most tend to stick to habitats their best suited for, we changed the habitats to better suite us, and now we are paying for it." She let out a sigh "But I wont deny that we didn't have this coming, at least partially."

Alwen pondered the Captains words. Humans and Torweni were remarkably similar, so similar one might mistake them for being the same species. Not only did they look similar, but they also thought and acted alike, and their senses were pretty evenly mirrored with each other meaning that they shared in their experience of the world. If the Torweni had been born on Earth then they would have done exactly what the humans did, and they too would sit on a dying world, which was a very disparaging thought that also highlighted how blessed they were in their home world. Torwen in comparison to earth was a very young world, in human terms they were only recently emerging out of the primordial era. Their geologic epochs were only mile markers in the rich ancient history present in Earth's crust. They were blessed with massive continental shelves rich in fish, algae, and offshore oil reserves from their own Carboniferous era. The Torweni had used those fossil fuels just as widely as humanity, but unlike Earth their world had more robust means of taking that added carbon out of the atmosphere in the form of algae blooms, which in turn allowed for a lager population of fish. Maybe given another hundred thousand years those same algae blooms would have cooled their world and have plunged them into an ice age, maybe they still would. But in the short term the Torweni had been able to safely use hydrocarbon fuels until more sustainable sources of energy became cheap enough to make the switch seem obvious.

Earth wasn't that lucky, it was a world already poised on a knifes edge for total collapse, and the birth of humanity had been enough to tip it over the edge.

"How long does your world have?" Alwen asked.

"Not sure, some say fifty years, others say we've got eighty. Still enough time to do something about it." she said as she leaned back in her sofa.