Preflight

The tape was still running when Darrell Grant zipped his bag shut.

He didn't need to watch it back. He'd filmed twenty minutes of nothing — Mara moving around the kitchen with her back to the camera, Casey slouched at the table not looking up from his phone, the dog nosing at the leg of a chair — and somewhere in the middle of it he'd said something about the light being good today, and nobody had answered him, and he'd let the camera keep rolling anyway. He didn't know why. He told himself it was for later. For Casey, maybe, someday, when he was older and might actually want to know what his father's kitchen had sounded like the morning before he left the planet.

He ejected the tape, wrote nothing on the label, and put it in his jacket pocket like it weighed something.

"You're going to miss the bus to your own launch," Mara said from the doorway. She wasn't smiling, but she wasn't not smiling either. Fourteen years married did that to a face — taught it how to hold two things at once.

"There's no bus."

"There's a bus, Darrell. There's always a bus."

He crossed the kitchen and kissed the top of Casey's head, and Casey let him, which was its own kind of gift these days, and said, "Bring back a rock or something," without looking up.

"It's a star, bud. Can't exactly bring back a piece of it."

"Bring back a picture, then. Everyone's going to ask."

"Nobody's going to ask," Mara said, not unkindly, just true. That was the whole shape of it, really — nobody was going to ask, because in nineteen years of manned spaceflight going from miracle to Tuesday to afterthought, nobody much cared anymore what four people in a tin can four hundred million kilometers from home were doing, even when what they were doing was going to watch a star die from closer than any living person ever had.

Darrell didn't say any of that. He said, "I'll bring back a picture," and meant it, and went to find his shoes.

Two hours later he stood on the tarmac at the XAN1 launch facility outside Waterlake, watching a documentary crew of exactly one man pack up a single camera because the network had decided, at the last minute, that a livestream would do. The crowd — if it could be called that — numbered maybe forty people, half of them XAN1 staff, a dozen more who looked like they'd wandered over from the highway rest stop to see what the fuss was, and one kid holding a sign that said GOOD LUCK GRANT in handwriting that suggested his mother had done most of the work.

Rachel Trust found him by the fence, looking, as always, like she'd already left the planet in her head and was just waiting for her body to catch up.

"You know it used to take an act of Congress to get press credentials for one of these," she said. "Now I had to beg a guy at the Herald to run three paragraphs on page nine."

"You wrote the three paragraphs yourself, didn't you."

"I wrote four. He cut one." She didn't sound bitter about it, exactly. Rachel had spent six years fighting to get a crewed observation mission funded instead of another disposable probe, had testified in front of a subcommittee that visibly wanted to be anywhere else, had watched two administrations shelve the proposal and a third quietly resurrect it only because a private contractor had offered to eat half the cost in exchange for the data rights. She'd stopped being bitter about indifference somewhere around year three. What was left now was something closer to defiance — the specific, stubborn joy of a person who has decided to care enormously about a thing that the world has decided not to.

"The Sister Star doesn't need press," she said, watching the sky the way other people watched a door they were expecting someone through. "It's going to be the loudest thing that's ever happened, whether anyone's watching or not."

"That supposed to be comforting?"

"It's supposed to be true." She smiled, finally, the real one, the one that had gotten her into rooms full of men who didn't want her there. "Come on. Preflight."

William Wilson was already at the gantry, arguing with a technician about a torque reading that was, by his own admission, probably fine, but probably fine wasn't a phrase William enjoyed applying to a spacecraft he intended to still be inside of in six months.

"It's within spec," the technician said, for what was evidently not the first time.

"Within spec isn't the same as correct."

"It's the same as correct when correct isn't a number that exists yet."

William looked up as Darrell approached, and something in his face eased, the way it always did — fourteen years of friendship distilled into the particular relief of oh good, an adult is here , even though William was, technically, six months older than Darrell and infinitely better at his job.

"Tell your best man his bolt is fine," the technician said.

"His bolt is fine, Will."

"You haven't even looked at the number."

"I don't need to look at the number. I need you to get in the capsule before Rachel starts reciting the mission timeline from memory again, because she will, and it's forty minutes long."

William laughed — a short, real bark of a thing — and clapped Darrell on the shoulder with a hand that lingered half a second longer than it needed to. Nobody watching would have noticed. Darrell noticed. He'd known William since they were twenty-three years old and broke and convinced they were both going to be somebody, and in all that time William Wilson had exactly one tell, and it was that half-second, and it meant something he wasn't going to say out loud on a tarmac with a livestream running.

"You good?" Darrell asked, quiet, just for him.

"I'm always good." William hitched his bag higher on his shoulder. "Nobody's waiting up for me. Means I can't screw it up for anybody but myself." He said it light, the way he said everything that wasn't light at all, and turned to double-check the torque reading himself, and that was the end of the conversation, because that was how William ended conversations he didn't want to finish.

Xavier Freshwillow was the last one up the gantry, and the youngest, and it showed in the way he kept glancing back at the fence line like the last forty-five seconds hadn't already happened forty times in his head.

His wife wasn't there. She'd wanted to be, and then hadn't been able to get the morning off, and then — three days ago, in the kitchen of their apartment, not quite crying — had told him she thought she might be pregnant, might, the test had been faint, she wanted to wait and be sure before she said the word out loud where it could be wrong. He had six months of a mission and no way of knowing, and she had six months of not knowing either, and they had agreed, in the specific insane calm of people who have run out of better options, that this was fine. That six months was nothing. That there would be a picture, eventually, of him meeting a fact instead of a maybe.

"You're doing the thing," Rachel said, falling into step beside him.

"What thing?"

"The staring-at-the-fence thing. Everyone does it. I did it. Darrell's doing it right now, he's just better at hiding it."

Xavier huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Does it get easier? Once we're up there?"

"No," Rachel said, and then, because she liked him, because he was twenty-eight and trying so hard to look like this was nothing, "but it gets quieter. There's a difference."

They strapped in with forty minutes of daylight left and a livestream audience that would peak, according to the numbers nobody bothered to check until later, at just under nine thousand people — fewer than had watched a cooking competition finale the same afternoon.

Darrell didn't think about that. He thought about the tape in the duffel under his seat, already packed for the return, a gift he hadn't quite explained to William yet, something to hand him on the far side of the mission when there was time to say the things he wasn't saying now. He thought about Casey's voice asking for a picture. He thought, briefly and without letting himself finish the thought, that Mara had not come to the launch, had said the drive was too much with Casey's schedule, had not been lying exactly but had also not tried very hard to make it less true.

"XAN1 flight, this is Hope, all systems nominal," William said into the comm, and something in his voice had gone entirely professional, entirely calm, the sound of a man who was very good at being exactly as steady as the moment required.

"Copy, Hope. You are go for launch."

Through the window, Darrell could see the sky starting to go that particular color it went before evening — not yet the deep blue-black of the photographs he'd studied for years, just an ordinary sky over an ordinary town, Waterlake spread out beyond the fence in the last of the light, water tower and grain silos and the church steeple he'd been christened under, the whole small unremarkable shape of a life about to fall four hundred million kilometers and four months away.

Somewhere out past all of it, invisible to the naked eye, indifferent to whether anyone on Earth was watching, the Sister Star was already dying, had been dying for longer than any of them would live, and had chosen — with the perfect, uncaring timing of the universe — this particular six months to finish the job.

"Ten," said the voice from the tower.

Rachel reached over and found Xavier's hand without looking, the way you'd steady a table.

"Nine."

William's fingers moved over the console, unhurried, sure.

"Eight."

Darrell closed his eyes and thought of nothing at all, which was its own kind of prayer.

"Seven."

Somewhere below them, a boy who had asked for a picture was standing at a fence with his mother, both of them smaller than either would ever be again, watching the last ordinary thing that would ever happen to their family.

"Three. Two. One."

Hope left the ground.