Haz pressed her palm against the rusted carcass, a jolt of excitement shivering down her spine as she did so.

“And you say they moved around in these? To get from place to place?”, she asked.

An electronic hum came from her father beside her before the quick reply.

“They called them ca-hars”, was her fathers’ robotic response.

Silently and under her breath, Haz sighed “marvellous”.

“Do you suppose any of them still work? Maybe we could try to start one up with the battery we brought and-“

“Hazel”, her father interrupted, and she though she heard a thread of impatience radiating through his voice, though the droid was unable to inject emotion into their voices just yet. The technology for such expression existed, but her father had been created before it had been fine-tuned.

“I know your passion lies in unearthing the history of our ancestors, but let’s not forget what we came here for. You have limited oxygen. Do not waste it”

Haz sighed in irritation, knowing that her father was right. The tank of oxygen strapped to her back and injecting that lifegiving air into her helmet wouldn’t last her long and she had task to perform.

Haz hiked the straps of her bag further up her shoulders and continued drudging through the debris littered landscape.

In the five hundred years since the planet had been abandoned much of the artifacts left behind had crumbled and decayed, some of it rusted to red flaked hulls. In the first hundred years or so it seemed as though the plants had taken over, thick coiled weeds growing in places where cityscapes had once been.

But after oxygen levels had begun depleting in the third century post world-end, much of the life forms had died away. Many of the plants were now crispy brown husks that crunched under their boots.

It was sad really, to see what was once a beautiful place eroded and destroyed. Haz supposed she owed it to their ancestors for saving some of them and taking them to live in the free-floating city ships amongst earths satellites, but she couldn’t help but feel a pang of anger towards the ancient humans.

If they had protected the earth better, stayed behind and cared for it instead of abandoning it, perhaps Haz would’ve had the opportunity to experience this world for herself.

Before she could ponder the topic more, a string of gurgling static words itched at her earpiece.

Haz frowned and tapped the side of her helmet rather harshly and waited for the person on the other end to repeat what they had said.

“Haz? You there?”

Haz smiled at the familiar voice.

“Yeah, dad and I landed safely”

“Took you two long enough! Felix and I landed hours ago”, was Geri’s smart retort.

Haz bit back her instinct to ramble the truth to Geri , not wanting to reveal just yet that her and her father had also landed roughly the same time that the other two in her unit had. She had spent most of her time carefully excavating remnants she had only read about on old records at the database: tiny devices with cracked glass screens, crumbling cement buildings and segments of statues once built to commentated people they deemed ‘special’.

Though most of the things left behind had been destroyed by acid rain showers, thin atmospheric conditions, time, and the suns relentless heat, few relics of the earth- bound humans still remained. It must’ve been nice, Haz thought, to live amongst all of this while it still thrived.

While the Space City had expanded exponentially in the past two centuries, they were still just floating in a mass of ships in an endlessly black sky in search of a habitable planet; nothing interesting ever happened there, at least not to the extent of the opportunities the earth humans probably had.

Geri’s staticky voice came once more and Haz had to strain her ears to hear her friends’ words. At her side, her father whirred quietly, an indication that his system was rebooting. Again.

Geri had once said the reason he seemed to reboot so often was because her father’s conscience, and all the thinking that came with it, was too much for the model they had put him in. That perhaps Haz and her family should have looked into getting a more advanced robot that would more efficiently hold the capacity of his mind. But his death had been so sudden and unexpected, that in those vital minutes post death, they were forced to get the most readily available model. It was just too bad for him. Her once six-foot six engineer of a father was now condensed into the body of a jangly four-foot robot that was all shiny metal limbs and springy joints.

“Ha-Hazel”, came Geri’s choppy voice.

Haz shut her eyes and tried to concentrate on her mentor’s voice.

“We think we found the bio bank. I’m sending you the coordinates now. We’ll wait for you before we enter”

No sooner had Geri said the words that the ping from her wrist screens notified her that the coordinates had been sent.

“Coming Geri- and don’t forget to suit up. We don’t know what we’ll be walking into”

Haz turned to her father and smiled.

“Let’s go Pops, we’ve got some people to save up there”, Haz said, talking a moment to glance up towards the sky.

Though the sky was heavy with grey clouds and murky with dust, she could make out the enormous silhouette of their home- The Space City. However, and rather unfortunately, the conditions up there had turned dire in recent months.

Currently, almost a third of the population were suffering from an unknown bacterial illness that was starting to build quite the death toll. Perhaps five hundred years from now the deaths of almost 10,000 people from mass illness would’ve been manageable. But now, with a population already dangerously close to extinction, humans were in the midst of trying to preserve as many lives as possible. Since they had run out of specimens to compare and Petri dish experiments, the last resort was to send a select few- Haz included- to raid the ancient biobanks down on Earth. They were not the first group of humans to visit the planet in the past five hundred years to check on its condition, but their mission had been the most purposeful and significant one to date. If they were lucky enough to find remnants of disease treatment experiments or antibiotics left behind and preserved by their ancestors, perhaps that would be enough to save them.