It was a mottled, blue and green marble of a world with wisps of white clouds chasing gray. There was a night side with no cities to mark it, a terminus from light to dark with only the thinnest edge of graying twilight. She’d seen it from above often enough that it likely should have lost its magic by now, but somehow it still held some strange allure. It was probably because Earth had so long ago lost the innocence and purity suggested by the view of this faraway world, orbiting a star that was not Sol, and here she was, watching it, studying it, lightyears away from the world that had given birth to humanity.
There was a strange surreality to that knowledge, especially when one knew that perhaps it wasn’t originally meant to be this way, but there she was anyway.
A light flashed on the console in front of her and she glanced over, away from the curving viewport at the front of the shuttle, then toggled her comm. “Skypoint station, this is shuttle six. I have the beacon. Permission to land?”
“Granted, six,” the bored-sounding tech at control answered, voice a bit scratchy over the comm. There was a solar storm and it’d been kicking out enough radiation to play havoc with transmission quality all day. “Bay three.”
“Copy, control. Thank you.”
“Stay on your present heading, Dr. Drake. Maintain course and speed. Thank you.” The comm clicked off. For a second, she closed her eyes.
“What is our ETA, Hunter?” Ilya asked from the cockpit hatch, his familiar, thickly accented voice bringing her out of any nascent daydreams. It was probably a good thing.
She glanced at the board. “Ten minutes,” she said. “Not likely to change, either,” she added, surveying the space around the station. “No traffic today.”
“There usually is not,” the scientist from the Russian Consortium observed, following her gaze. “It is likely better that way.”
“Probably right,” she said, watching the slow, lazy spin of the station’s cylinders. At its present orientation, Skypoint was giving them an impressive view of three of the arcology pods—desert, savannah, and semi-aquatic number one, if her guess was on target. It was hard to see this far out, the distance a touch too vast to read the exterior markings, but the color of the light from the viewports on those arcologies seemed right.
Ilya watched her and shook his head. “I have known you for these four years, Hunter, and you somehow always seem to look at the station like she is your lover. The planet, too. I never understood.”
“I don’t know why,” she said, anticipating the question as Ilya sank into the empty co-pilot’s seat. “I guess all of it just hasn’t lost its magic yet.”
“Hm.” There was some bare trace of humor in his grunt and Hunter had to smile, glancing sidelong at him. She could see the faintest beginnings of a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. “For your sake, then, perhaps I hope it never does lose that magic you say it has.”
“You don’t see it?”
“I am too pragmatic, I think,” Ilya said, leaning back. “I see my work. Our work. I know what it means.” His gaze strayed, though, toward the planet they were leaving, still visible even as their ship sailed toward the station. “I do sometimes wonder, though. What was it like for the early ones, the cosmonauts? Did they look down in wonder even as they already knew—did they already know—that someday there would be nothing left?”
“That’s a little morbid.”
“Aye, perhaps,” he allowed. “But you cannot deny that it is true.”
On that, he was certainly right. It was the unspoken assumption behind the work they were doing at Skypoint, the studies they were running. Earth was past the point of no return—or if it wasn’t, it would soon be there, despite best efforts that had come too late. It would not continue to support humanity or any terrestrial species for too much longer, a fact that had been recognized in the decades before either Hunter or Ilya had been born. That was why research outposts like Skypoint existed, why humanity had started the process of colonization on at least a dozen worlds already. They were a vastly preferable option to the O’Neill stations that had cropped up during her parents’ childhoods.
Most of the time, she tried not to think about what it all might mean, or how much time humanity’s homeworld—because Earth was still their homeworld, the seat of power and governance—might have left. She suspected the time might be shorter than any of them wanted to contemplate. The deeper she got into research, into her science and that of her colleagues, the bleaker and bleaker things seemed back home by comparison.
“No, I can’t,” she sighed. “But it’s still morbid.”
“I do not think you have known me to be anything but,” Ilya observed with a straight face, then smiled. “At least we have this. And our work.”
“Aye,” she whispered. “That we do. The samples are secure?”
“Of course. And our escort is restless and the assistants are playing cards. They wanted to know how much time they had.”
“And you decided escape was preferable to answering their question promptly.”
Ilya grinned. “You know me so well.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, staring out the viewport. “Too much time in the lab together, I guess.”
“Indeed. Do you expect to find anything different in these samples?”
“Well, there hasn’t been anything different in the past three batches from this area,” she said. “I’ve been going over the old datasets. I doubt there’s anything but who knows. It’s been a while since they ran a survey.”
“Mm. Before both of our times.”
“Seems to be how it goes,” she said, then shrugged. “If there’s nothing odd or particularly intriguing, the area gets put at the bottom of the list until we cycle back through again. That’s just how it goes.”
“The phage from zone C-972 has been proving useful at Carom, I heard.”
Her brow furrowed. She knew what he was talking about—something they’d found on a survey nine months earlier, in a different area they’d surveyed. “From who?”
“I have a friend at Cosmo-Twenty,” Ilya said. “They are working with it to help the terraforming process. Said it has been eating a toxic sludge and turning it into potable water.”
“Well, that’s good. Been a minute since we got something practicable out of this.”
“Proving our continued relevance,” Ilya said. “There are worse things.”
“Yeah,” she murmured. “There sure as hell are.”
“So every so often, it is something exciting.”
“That’s true.” She touched a control, bringing the nose of the shuttle up slightly relative to the station. Six had a bad stabilizer, but there hadn’t been time to repair it before they’d needed it for the survey, and it wasn’t mission-critical to have it fixed as long as the pilot was experienced enough. She fit the bill in that regard. Ilya watched her, shaking his head slightly.
“It amazes me still.”
“What does?” she asked, her brow furrowing for the barest moment.
“Somehow, while doing all of those other things that you did before you came to the station, you found time to learn to fly.”
“These don’t take all that much,” she lied. “These shuttles are easy, especially when the station can do most of the hard landing work. Autopilot does a lot. If you want to learn, it’s mostly a few simulations and some practice.”
“You seem much better at this than a few simulations and some practice, Hunter. Do not play games with me. I have known you long enough to see through them.”
One corner of her mouth twitched into a smile. “I guess you have, haven’t you?”
“Yes.” He watched her for a few seconds more as her fingers tapped a few more controls, making slight corrections. “How is Dr. Ricard? I do not know why you spend so much time with him now that you are recovered.”
“Well, he’s wicked smart and easy to talk to,” she said without looking at Ilya. The station loomed large above them, now, the planet below now out of their line of sight through the viewport, though back in the cabin, the assistant scientists, techs, and their security escort would be able to get a stellar view through the starboard and aft ports. “He and I have collaborated on research. You should try it some time.”
“Mm,” Ilya grunted. “I do not think so. He is not my type of researcher.”
She snorted, swallowing a laugh. “Really.”
“Yes.” He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate and glancing over at him for a second, she saw that he was just shy of brooding, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed against his chest. “And he does not seem very fun.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I am a scientist, Hunter. I have used my powers of observation to determine this.”
That only made her grin grow. He scowled at her.
“You think this is funny.”
“I absolutely do,” she said. “One hundred percent. You don’t know him at all.”
“No, he does not seem like very much fun. Why would I want to? I only like fun people.”
“You like me.”
“I do,” he agreed. “But you do clearly know how to have fun. Dr. Ricard? No. No, he does not. When he drinks, he drinks alone. He does not share, he does not talk, he simply sits and stares at the glass as if holds the very secrets of the universe. And then he drinks and says nothing. Does not smile. Nothing.”
“I wasn’t aware that you’d ever seen him drink.”
“Not often. Never since you came here.”
She smiled faintly and shook her head. “Well, despite your assessment and observations, I can assure you that he is, in fact, actually fun.”
“I do not believe you but I will accept that you, at least, think he is fun. I, however, do not think so. But you have not answered my question.”
“He’s fine,” she said. “You would know that if you bothered to show up for your physical.”
Ilya railed off a string of expletives in Russian so potent they’d have stripped the paint off the bulkhead if they’d been a solvent. “That bastard. Did he put you up to that?”
“No, he just kind of sideways mentioned that not everyone is as good with keeping up the routine things as they should be. That’s all.”
“Mm,” Ilya said. “I see.”
“Are you going to complain about that now?”
“Should I?”
“I don’t know,” she said, slanting a look and a wry grin in his direction. “Half the time I’m not sure why you do half the things you do.”
“Ah, well. That is all part of my charm, Dr. Drake. All part of my charm.”
Her follow-up smart-aleck remark was cut off by a transmission from station control.
“Shuttle six, we have you on beacon. Cut thrusters and set auto.”
Hunter reached for the boards, starting to tap controls, changing the system over from manual to autopilot. “Copy, Control. Do you have my frequency?”
“We have your beacon. Stand by for computer landing.”
“Copy, Control. Thank you.”
There was no response beyond the shuttle shivering slightly as the station’s auto-landing system took control over its navigation. She leaned back, wincing slightly at the sound of things rattling a little back in the cabin, casting another look toward Ilya. “Sometimes, I think I wish they’d let us just land the damn things ourselves.”
“Do you think it would go more smoothly that way?”
“At least half the time.”
He made a noncommitmental noise and shrugged. She hadn’t really expected anything other than that, not really. Her gaze drifted back to the viewport and the station, which now eclipsed the view of anything else. She could see workers in the bay they were approaching and exhaled quietly.
“You do not like this part,” Ilya said. “I have seen you. You get all tense.”
“Yeah, I know,” she whispered. “You never asked why, though.”
“I always thought that if you wanted to share it, you would.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe someday, Ilya.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed.
There was a loud clank on the hull. She winced, muscles tensing further, growing worse when there was a second clank.
The shuttle shivered.
Then, after what felt like a lifetime, the shuttle settled against the metal deck with a creak and a groan of station gravity asserting itself on the old craft.
“There, you see?” Ilya smiled as he stood up. “All is as it should be. Come. Let us get off this creaking death trap. We have work to do.”
“Yeah,” she whispered even as he stepped out of the cockpit. “I guess we do.”
