The transit from Earth had taken twenty-six days, and for most of them Maren had been quietly and persistently unwell in a way the mission’s medical briefing had called common during initial adaptation and had not otherwise prepared her for.
She had read the solar system for a living from a chair in Copenhagen. She had known its distances precisely — known them better than the people who flew them, in some cases, because a number does not deceive you the way a body does. Now her body was inside one of those numbers, and the number had turned out to have a texture: the constant low nausea of a system that did not know which way was down, the headache that came from the fluid in her skull deciding to live somewhere new, the strange grief of legs that had nothing to do. She had spent the first week reading the ship’s environmental telemetry the way she read everything, because the data did not change its mind mid-sentence and her inner ear did, and somewhere in the second week the readings had stopped being a comfort and started being just the readings, and she had understood that adaptation was less a thing that happened to you than a thing you eventually stopped fighting.
Mars Orbital Station came up on the forward feed on the twenty-sixth day, and she watched it from the transit ship’s small common screen with her arms crossed and one finger resting against the bridge of her glasses, not tapping, just resting.
It was larger than it read on a schematic. Everything was. The station was a long irregular spine of modules and trusswork, lit unevenly, turning with the slow deliberateness of something very heavy, and below it Mars was the colour the cameras always rendered too warmly and that was, she could now see, exactly that colour after all — a dull, mineral red, banded with the paler dust of the high latitudes, one storm system smeared grey across the eastern limb. She had looked at Mars ten thousand times. She had never once looked at it and felt the floor of her attention drop away, the way it dropped now, because the planet on the screen was not a dataset. It was a place she had come twenty-six days to reach, and she was about to leave it.
And docked along the station’s lower spine, held in a cradle of scaffolding with service umbilicals running off her in a dozen places, was the MSV Marina.
Maren had read the ship’s specifications. She knew her mass, her fuel fraction, the rated tolerance of the hull she was looking at. None of it had told her that the ship would look, against the red planet, less like a vessel than like a decision — a long dark fusion-drive hull built for a survey of Jupiter’s moons and pointed now at a place she had never been designed to go, on a timeline that did not leave room for the slingshot return the engineers had drawn into her original trajectory.
And then what, Maren thought, which was the question she had carried since Geneva and had not yet heard anyone answer out loud.
The transit ship began its approach. She uncrossed her arms and held the rail.
Ezra met her at the station-side airlock, which she had not expected, and which she understood within about four seconds was the kind of thing he did.
“Dr. Falk.” He put out a hand, registered the careful way she was holding the wall, and adjusted — turned the handshake into something she could brace against rather than a thing that would set her drifting. “Ezra Calloway. I built the ship you’re about to get on. First time off Earth?”
“Is it that obvious.”
“You’ve got the look.” He said it without unkindness. He was broad through the shoulders in the way of people who had grown up in lighter gravity and trained against it deliberately, dark hair cut short, a beard kept at the edge of trimmed, and he wore a Martian Space Authority jacket that had clearly not come off his back in some time. There was workshop grime worked permanently into the creases of his knuckles. “Twenty-six days in transit and then the station spins you up to half a g and your body files a complaint. It passes. Walk with me, it’s better than standing — gives the fluid somewhere to go.”
She walked with him. It was, marginally, better.
“The Authority sent the ship’s designer to fly with her,” she said. “I read that in the briefing. I assumed it was a line. A reassurance for the people signing the funding.”
“It was a line.” He said it easily. “It’s also true. The Martian Space Authority wanted her builder on the hull, the Joint Space Programme thought it looked good, and I—” He paused, the first hesitation she’d seen in him. “I wasn’t going to put eight people inside something I made and then watch it leave from the ground. That’s not a thing I know how to do.”
They came around the curve of the station’s main corridor, and through a long port the Marina was there again, closer now, vast and patient in her scaffolding.
“She was built for Jupiter,” Ezra said. He had stopped at the port without seeming to decide to. “A survey. Out and back, two years, a slingshot home around the planet to save the fuel. I know every weld in that hull. I know what she’s for.” He looked at it a moment longer. “This isn’t it. They’ve pointed her at an intercept at about 5 AU and a fleet that’ll be crossing into the inner system right about when we get there, and the return trajectory is—” He stopped, and chose the honest word. “Theoretical. They could carry us home. We don’t know that they will. Nobody’s been able to write the line that comes after arrive.”
Maren looked at the ship. And then what. He had said it without her having to.
“You’re telling me this,” she said, “the way you’d tell someone before they signed.”
“You already signed. I’m telling you because you’re going to be reading whatever that fleet does, and I’d rather you did it knowing exactly what kind of ship you’re reading it from.” He turned from the port. His ease had not left him, but underneath it she could see something more careful, something that had thought all of this through long before this corridor. “Martians are raised to know that staying alive is a thing you do together or not at all. I’m not going to pretend the math is better than it is. I’d just rather everyone on board chose it with their eyes open.”
“I have spent three years,” Maren said, “explaining to people why the thing they’re worried about is a sensor artifact. This is the first time the thing isn’t.” She looked at the Marina. “My eyes are open.”
Ezra studied her for a second, and then something in his face eased into what was almost a smile. “Good,” he said. “Briefing’s in an hour. Come and meet the rest of the people who said yes.”
There were eight of them on the manifest and six of them in the briefing room, which was a wedge-shaped compartment on the station’s command spine with a long table and a wall display showing the outbound trajectory as a thin bright arc bending away from Mars toward a point four months into the future.
The Joint Space Programme ran the briefing through a mission coordinator who had come up from the surface for it — a precise, grey-suited woman who spoke in the register of someone reading a document she had not written, laying out the command structure, the chain of authority under Accord joint command, the rules of engagement in the event of contact, the protocols, the contingencies that existed mostly to give the word contingency somewhere to live. Maren listened and read the room at the same time, which was a skill she’d developed in Geneva and disliked having.
The friction arrived eleven minutes in, and it arrived from a man she recognised.
He had come in late and stood rather than sat, against the back wall, tall and composed in a Lunar Defence Force uniform that the Accord’s joint command permitted him to wear and that he wore, she thought, precisely because they permitted it. She had last seen him in an emergency briefing in Geneva, reading a tablet against a wall, asking a question about legal frameworks so cleanly that the answer had embarrassed itself by comparison. She had noticed him then and not learned his name. She learned it now, when the coordinator addressed him directly.
“Commander Amara represents the Lunar Defence Force on this crew, as tactical specialist.”
“And as the only person in this room,” Yusuf Amara said, “whose government did not get a vote on whether this mission proceeds, what its mandate is, or who commands it.” He said it without heat, in the same precise unedged way he’d spoken in Geneva. “I want that on the record at the start, so it doesn’t have to be a surprise later. The Earth Accord built the chain of command in this briefing. The Lunar District Assembly was offered observation. I’m here under Accord authority, flying a Martian ship, to make contact on behalf of a humanity that did not, in any meaningful sense, send me. I’ll do the job. I’m very good at the job. I just decline to pretend the structure is something it isn’t.”
The coordinator’s expression did the small institutional thing that expressions did when they had been trained to receive difficulty without letting it land. “Noted, Commander.”
“Thank you.”
Across the table, Ezra had gone still. Not angry, she thought — weighing. Two of the people in the room had stayed exactly as relaxed as they’d been before, which made them more interesting than the ones who’d tensed.
The first was a sergeant in a Defence Force uniform of a different cut from Yusuf’s — Accord military escort, the manifest said, Sergeant Dara Mbeki — who had her boots up on the strut of the chair beside her and watched the exchange with the open, slightly amused attention of someone keeping score and not yet ready to take a side. When the coordinator moved on, she caught Maren looking and offered a small dry tilt of the head that managed to communicate, without a word, yes, this is what the next four months are going to be like.
The second was a wiry, dark-eyed woman at the end of the table with a tablet full of cellular schematics she had clearly been reading the whole time — Dr. Sian Reyes, mission biologist — who looked up only when the contact protocols came around, asked two questions about quarantine and atmospheric exposure that were sharper than anything the coordinator had a real answer for, wrote down the non-answers without comment, and went back to her schematics. She had the manner of someone who had concluded some time ago that the institution would not protect her and that she would therefore have to do it herself, which Maren found, on no evidence at all, immediately trustworthy.
The coordinator reached the last item, which was the acknowledgment.
It was a formality. A line on a screen, a thumbprint, a record that each member of the crew had been briefed on the mission’s risk profile and accepted it. The coordinator read the relevant clause in full because she was required to, and the clause was careful and bloodless and said, underneath its language, the thing the whole room already knew: that the MSV Marina had a planned return trajectory whose feasibility could not be guaranteed at the point of departure; that the crew acknowledged this; that they went anyway.
And then what, the room did not say.
One by one they pressed their thumbs to the panel. Reyes without looking up. Mbeki with a small private smile aimed at nothing. Ezra slowly, the way he did everything that mattered. Yusuf last, and a half-second after his print registered he looked across the room and his eyes found Maren’s — the faint, unspoken recognition of two people who had stood in the same room while it filled up with a number neither of them could put down — and then the moment passed, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing yet that needed saying.
Maren pressed her thumb to the panel.
The arc on the wall display did not change. It had been waiting for them the whole time.
Ezra found Yusuf afterward in the Marina’s engineering bay, which was where Ezra went when he needed his hands on something, and which Yusuf had clearly sought out for reasons of his own.
The commander was standing at the open inspection panel of the tactical systems array, reading the layout with the focus of someone learning a weapon he would have to trust. He didn’t turn when Ezra came in.
“You designed the sensor suite,” Yusuf said. “Not the tactical package.”
“The Authority designed the tactical package. I designed the ship it bolts to.” Ezra picked up a torque driver he didn’t need, set it down again. “You had a problem with the briefing.”
“I had a problem with the structure. That’s not the same thing.” Now Yusuf did turn. In the bay’s harder light he looked tired in a way the briefing room hadn’t shown — not the tiredness of a long day but of a long argument, carried for years, with no resolution available. “I’ve read your file, Calloway. Hellas Basin. Martian Space Authority. You grew up watching the Accord write Mars’s rules from an office on a planet you’d never been to. You know exactly what I’m talking about and you sat there at that table looking like you wanted to disagree with me.”
“I wanted you to be wrong,” Ezra said. “That’s different from thinking you are.” He leaned against the bulkhead, arms loose. “Mars got its space authority because the Accord decided fighting us for it cost more than letting us have it. Luna’s asking for less than that and getting nothing, because Luna’s got the strike and the Assembly and the word nobody’s saying out loud, and a colony that scares them gets handled differently from a colony that just irritates them. I know how the structure works. I’ve spent my whole life inside it.” He held Yusuf’s gaze. “I just also think the eight of us are about to be the only humans within 5 AU of the most important thing that’s ever happened, and I’d rather we got there as a crew than as a list of grievances. Both things are true. Martians are good at holding two true things at once. It’s most of what the planet teaches you.”
Something shifted in Yusuf’s expression — not agreement, but the registering of a thing he hadn’t expected to be offered. He looked at Ezra for a moment longer than the conversation strictly required, the way you look at a person you’ve just revised your estimate of and are not yet sure in which direction.
“You’re not what your file says,” Yusuf said.
“Files are written by the Accord,” Ezra said. “I wouldn’t trust them on Lunar matters either.”
That landed. Yusuf’s mouth did something that wasn’t a smile and was related to one, and for a second the bay’s hard light held the two of them in a silence that had changed temperature without either of them deciding it should. Then Yusuf turned back to the tactical array, and Ezra picked the torque driver up again and found, this time, an actual use for it, and neither of them said anything else, and the not-saying had a quality to it that neither would have been able to name and both, in their separate ways, noticed.
“Four months,” Yusuf said eventually, to the array.
“Four months,” Ezra agreed, to the bracket in his hands.
Whatever that was going to become, it was not going to become it today. But it had started. They both felt it start.
Sian Reyes had decided, somewhere around her fourth long-haul posting, that the people who treated shipboard intimacy as a scandal were the same people who had never had to keep their own company for nine months inside a hull, and she had stopped explaining herself about it long before she’d boarded the Marina.
Dara Mbeki had come to the same conclusion by an entirely different road, and that was most of why Sian liked her. The sergeant had appeared at the door of the medical bay that evening with two cups of something the station optimistically labelled coffee and the air of a person who had read the situation accurately and was offering, not assuming.
“You did that thing in the briefing,” Mbeki said, handing one over. “Asked the questions nobody could answer and then wrote down that they couldn’t answer them. I enjoyed it.”
“Someone has to keep the record honest.” Sian took the cup. The bay was warm and low-lit, the station’s hum coming up through the deck, and the door, when Mbeki leaned back against it, swung shut under its own slow weight. “You had your boots on the furniture.”
“I’m loyal to whoever’s most clearly right in the room,” Mbeki said. “It was a quiet day for candidates.”
Sian laughed, which she hadn’t expected to, and set the coffee down, and that was more or less how it started — easily, the way the best of it always did, without anyone having to make a case for it. Mbeki crossed the small bay and Sian met her halfway, and the first kiss was unhurried and certain, a thing already agreed to before it happened. The sergeant’s hands settled at her waist with the same confidence she did everything else, and Sian let herself be turned and backed gently against the edge of the exam berth, and reached up to draw Mbeki’s mouth back down to hers.
There was nothing furtive in it. That was the thing Sian had learned to value — the absence of apology. They got each other’s jackets off without ceremony, Mbeki’s uniform tunic and Sian’s worn field shirt, hands moving over warm skin in the bay’s low amber light, and where Sian’s were quick and exact, Mbeki’s were slow, deliberate, learning her with the patience of someone who intended to be paying attention the whole way through. The sergeant put her mouth to the line of Sian’s throat and Sian felt the small involuntary catch of her own breath, the day’s accumulated tension finding somewhere to go at last.
“All right?” Mbeki said, against her skin.
“More than.”
The berth was narrow and they didn’t care. Sian drew her down onto it and Mbeki went, settling her weight without crushing her, and for a stretch of minutes there was only the warmth between them and the unhurried physical conversation of two people who had decided, separately and then together, to be exactly where they were. Mbeki’s hand moved down the length of her, slow and sure, and found her, and Sian’s breath went long and uneven as the sergeant kept on with the same unhurried attention, watching her face in the amber light, reading every small shift and answering it. Sian reached for her in turn, and they found a rhythm that belonged to neither of them and both, easy and rising, the station’s deep hum running under it the whole time.
When it took her it took her quietly, her face turned into the warm angle of Mbeki’s neck, one hand tight at the sergeant’s back and then loose, and Mbeki held her through it without hurry and then let Sian, unhurried in turn, do the same for her — watched the composed amused face come apart and gather itself again, which was its own small privilege, and was not remarked upon, because it did not need to be.
Afterward they lay tangled on the narrow berth, too warm, not minding it, the coffee long cold on the counter.
“Four months,” Mbeki said to the ceiling, in the tone of someone noting the weather.
“Four months,” Sian agreed.
Neither of them made it sound like a burden. On a long-haul hull, with the right company, it wasn’t. That was the whole point, and everyone aboard who’d done this before already understood it, and the ones who hadn’t would learn.
Maren did not sleep well her last night on the station, which she attributed to the half-gravity and the strangeness and not at all to the thing she was actually carrying, which was the date.
Launch was in fourteen hours. She lay in the narrow bunk in the crew block with the station turning slowly around her and thought, the way she always thought, in numbers — and the numbers, for once, all pointed the same way.
The fleet was just past 60 AU now, and closing. Ten months since she’d pulled a discard flag at one in the morning in Copenhagen and refused to let it go; ten months in which a heat signature she’d marked as sensor error had become eighty-three distinct objects, then a confirmed approach, then a global condition, then a mission, then this — a bunk on a Martian station, a thumbprint on a clause that did not promise to bring her home, a crew of strangers who had each said yes for reasons she was only beginning to learn. The signal delay to the fleet was down to under a third of what it had been when she found it. Every week it shrank. Every week the thing she had flagged got closer to becoming whatever it actually was.
She thought about Ezra at the port, saying nobody’s been able to write the line that comes after arrive. She thought about Yusuf pressing his thumb to the panel last, after everyone else, refusing to make it easier than it was. She thought about Mbeki’s dry tilt of the head and Reyes writing down the non-answers, and about the easy unremarkable warmth she could feel already settling over the crew like the ship’s own atmosphere — eight people choosing, out of whatever each of them had, to be the ones who went.
She had spent her career reading the solar system from a chair, finding the error in her own reasoning before she trusted the result. There was no error in this one. She had checked. She had been checking for ten months.
In fourteen hours the Marina would burn away from Mars on a trajectory bent toward a point four months into the future, toward a fleet that had crossed most of the way in from where she’d found it without once answering the prime sequences humanity kept broadcasting into the dark.
And then what, Maren thought, one last time, into the turning quiet.
Nobody had answered it. They were going to go and find out.
She slept, eventually, and the station carried her on toward morning, and the fleet came on.
