Every day comparing herself with the experts—scientists and engineers, prospectors and explorers—who’d been selected for what they knew and had accomplished. Every day, finding herself wanting.
At least she wasn’t an Earthworm. She’d lived her entire life under pressurized domes. She reacted instinctively to leak alarms and recognized the tell-tale signs of hypoxia. She’d been in space, if no farther than to the Moon. Breathing gear and pressure suits were familiar.
To pull her own weight, that left her with only a million other subjects to master. When Blake and Dana were off-world, stress-testing the DED, Rikki studied everything she could find about standard shipboard systems, and the half-dozen nearby solar systems any of which might be chosen as their destination, and about terraforming. With Clermont undergoing its final overhaul and provisioning, she haunted the shipyard, asking questions, tagging along behind Blake and Dana for whatever insights she could absorb without getting in their way. And in any time left, she pored over the latest life sciences. Astrobiology had changed a lot since her undergrad days, no matter that the very existence of its subject matter remained in dispute.
Not that with any of these topics she could do more than skim the surface. Mostly she hunted down libraries and knowledge bases that might be useful, adding them to the near-endless list of digital resources the still-to-be-integrated shipboard AI would continue to ingest for as long as the ship remained within comm range of Mars. And fretted about what else she could be doing, or should be doing, or might have done.
Till Hawthorne, of all unlikely people, had ordered her home for a day of R & R.
“Rikki, sweetie, are you all right?” Janna asked. “You look exhausted.”
“Maybe a little tired,” Rikki admitted. “The mission trainers work us hard.”
“Good talking to you guys,” Blake said. “I’m going to get this little lady”—said looking up at Rikki, and with a self-deprecating grin—“to a chair.”
She found a seat on the sofa, between Mom and Grandma Betty. Grandma had a crochet hook in hand and a half-made doily on her lap. Knitting, tatting, crocheting: Grandma did them all. She kept her hands busy with needlecraft at all times. When time permitted, Rikki had always intended to have Grandma teach her the ancient arts. Only time would never permit….
There on the sofa, people kept seeking out Rikki. Whatever she saw or heard or said, she knew could be her last memory of that friend, that neighbor, that relative.
Never able to say goodbye.
And poor Blake? His family was on Earth, with just about everyone he’d known before meeting her. There wasn’t time, not even by DED, for sentimental journeys. Which of them had it worse?
Her eyes brimmed, and her cheeks quivered with the struggle not to weep.
Mom tugged on Rikki’s sleeve. “How should I say this? You seem very emotional today. Are you and Blake all right? The truth, now.”
The truth? The truth was that untold eons ago, two neutron stars fell into a deadly embrace. That the longer their mutual orbit decayed, the more they warped space-time itself. That shortly before the stars smashed together—before they collapsed into a black hole, in that cataclysmic process spewing gamma rays and subatomic debris—the gravitational waves cast off by the inspiraling stars had become so intense that even across 7500 light-years they were detectable—
To herald the doom that followed close behind. Day by day, as the gravitational waves intensified and measurements accumulated, Antonio revised his estimate downward.
The truth was that within days she must leave. The truth was that in a few years everyone here to see her off would die a horrible death.
“You’re scaring me, sweetie,” Mom said.
The truth, even if Rikki weren’t sworn to secrecy, could not help. But a lie might. She knew the news Mom and Dad and her grandparents had been hoping to hear, words that beyond excusing her moodiness and exhaustion would create a bit of joy.
“Blake and I are pregnant,” Rikki whispered. “It’s early. We’re not talking about it yet.”
“That’s terrific!” Mom whispered back. “You two will make great parents.”
“Hold on,” Grandma Betty said. “You’re pregnant and you’re going to Titan? For two years?”
“Titan’s not far, not using the new drive.” Rikki’s guts clenched with the evasion. “Besides, we’ll have a doctor and infirmary onboard.”
“You don’t look so well.” Grandma patted Rikki’s hand. “Take it from a pro, dear. The morning sickness goes away.”
Later Rikki saw Mom take Dad aside to whisper in his ear, and Dad breaking into an ear-to-ear grin. As they were leaving, Dad picked up Rikki and spun them both around as though she were a toddler.
“See,” Dad said, beaming, “I still have it in me.”
After the last guest finally departed, Rikki sobbed for hours.
6
Dana imagined herself as an island of stability amid a sea of chaos. In smart specs and a headset, she figured she looked like a cyborg.
She stood on Clermont’s bridge, where mechanics had unbolted an arc of consoles—for nav, comm, flight, and sensors—to accommodate extra radiation shielding in the bow. Simulations drawing on the ship’s design and maintenance files predicted that, with a handful of exceptions, the existing wiring harnesses would accommodate repositioning everything twenty centimeters aft. With the consoles moved, she and Blake, without a lot of knee room, would still manage to sit here. Most others among the crew, when they drew watch duty, would want to stand.
Flick.
Her specs cut to an external security camera. Beyond the thirty-meter ellipsoid that was Clermont, like some giant North American football perched on fore-and-aft landing legs, stretched the gentle curve of the temporary dome that by nautical tradition was called a dry dock. White mist rose from the LOX and liquid-deuterium tanker trucks waiting to offload. Stevedores bounded up the ramp into Clermont’s aft air lock toting crated chunks of a short-range shuttle and up the ramp into the fore air lock with starter-culture tanks for the newly installed food-synth vats.
Flick.
In the already cramped crew quarters, under
