Ever thought about gems? For thousands of years, miners and prospectors of various cultures scoured the face of the Earth for the tiniest of precious stones, gouging from the land huge craters and complex networks of tunnels in search of their valuable lustre. It’s ironic, really. It wasn’t until mankind finally figured out how to escape the pull of our home world’s gravity and fly far above the planet that we discovered that the largest gem of all was one that we saw and walked on every single day of our lives; that shining blue- green gem that we called Earth, sewn into the deep black velvet of space. And even then, we were only just beginning to understand our new perspective of the world when it was taken from us forever.

I’m looking at another gem right now. It’s blue-green, just like Earth, but it is a very different place, orbiting a star a long, long way away from, well, anywhere you’d have heard of. I forget what they call it, they don’t exactly speak the same way we do, so all the place names are a bit odd sounding, translated or not.

I shouldn’t really ever have ended up here, that wasn’t part of the plan. Defend the planet, become unknown heroes in a secret war, go home and live comfortably arranged lives, courtesy of an international military conglomerate under the direction of the United Nations Security Council. That’s what was supposed to happen. Then things started to go wrong. The opposition was stronger than we’d been told, we were caught unprepared, and the Earth paid the price for all of their mistakes. There isn’t any comfortable lifestyle organised by the United Nations Security Council to go back to, because there isn’t a United Nations Security Council anymore. In fact, there aren’t even any nations to be united anymore.

You see, Earth is no longer the blue-green gem it used to be. Instead, it is now a dead brown lump of rock, drifting in endless circles in space, simply waiting for the day the Sun finally comes to the end of its life and engulfs it in the angry fires of a dying star. We tried to stop them, God knows, we tried. We gave our sweat and our blood to try and stop them, and when we failed and were forced to flee, we gave tears in more than equal measure.

Half of us died in that cataclysm, along with the rest of the world, and sometimes, just sometimes, I think the half that survived wished that they hadn’t. It isn’t easy, being the last of a dying race, friends and family gone, forced to flee from the end of your world and to become travellers with no place to return to. I think that’s why most of us decided to stay signed on, despite the hostile reaction that we were met with at first – we needed a reason for being. It’s not about revenge, it’s about still having a reason to go on, to get up in the morning and make it through the day. It’s something to fight for, quite literally.

We all have our ways of coping. This is my way. Every naturally hospitable world we come to, every shining blue-green gem sewn into the velvet of space, I come up here, where the windows are the largest, and I watch. I look at the emerald slabs of land floating upon the seas of sapphire, and I try to remember how Earth used to look from this far up, before the seas boiled and the lands burned. I didn’t see it from this angle very often, and I wish, oh how I wish, that I had paid more attention when I had. It was all too easy to take for granted, and a lesson that I wish I had never had to learn.

I know that the others, those not from Earth, don’t really understand. I think they have seen it so often now that they have been desensitised to it. Many of them have lost their worlds too, but their races still span many others. They have seen so many worlds won, and they have seen even more worlds lost. It’s all part of the game to them. I can feel their puzzled glares burning into the back of my neck as I watch through the triple-paned windows, just as I can feel the coldness of the dull grey metal beneath my palm as I lean against the wall, accompanied by the vague thrumming that pulses through it, caused by the engines that keep us aloft.

Of course, if I was to turn around, to look away from the window and leave that familiar, yet alien vista behind, they would all look away and find something else to talk about. But right here, even though I can’t hear them, I know what is being said. It’s him, one of the outsiders, staring out of his favourite window, like he always does. But that isn’t important. I’ll stay here, watching, waiting, trying to remember exactly how the coast of Africa looked from orbit, or how the artificial lights from night-time Europe would shine, like small clusters of tiny stars on the surface of my world, our world.

Eventually, I may be called to action, to try to defend another world, perhaps even to attack one. But it doesn’t matter how many worlds I could ever save, it will never bring back the only one I ever truly cared about. Still, for now, what else can I do? There is more at stake here than just one world, one star system, more than a single race. More of all of these will be lost before this is over, that much, at least, is certain. Maybe, though, if I can carry on, and see this through, perhaps I can find a way to lessen the pain just a little, to find some comfort somewhere, beyond these troubled moments of peace by the window. That, right now, is all I have left to hope for.

My name is Captain Andrew Rayner, callsign "Phoenix One", formerly of the 1st International Deep Space Vanguard Squadron. Perhaps one day, I’ll tell you the rest of my story. Until then, you’re welcome to share my window.