"Are you sure?"

I could see it in her eyes, the flickering uncertainty, when I rolled over to check my phone beside the bed. 6:23. Not too long, now, I'm sure she was thinking. Not more than an hour, left. She was right, I knew, even then. Even as I'd turned back to her with a grin, a teasing slide of my fingers down to her waist, I knew I'd have to leave soon - the dismal, gray day spattering the lift with rain as I'd rode to the port, bag slung over one shoulder and watching her waving me off with her tears mixing with the rain.

Every time, it's been the same - the battery of tests, the scan. Mechanical limbs, thin like dragonflies, whirring and flittering around me, adjusting a thousand tiny seals and chips and vents, the familiar click of the webbing around my shoulders, my waist, drawing me in tight as lights flicked on overhead. The long, slow climb up to the gantry, the constructed womb around me, its bright, white capsule sliding home in the craft overhead.

And then the fire, the hand of God slamming me flat, back, until I think, every time, that my skin will be loosed from my bones, like the world is blazing away at the edges until I'm the only cinder left. And her, down below, waving goodbye up at the pillar of smoke.

It's just my job, really. But some days, I think back to how it must have been for those first men, riding aloft on an explosion, out into the unknown. No routes, no computers, just steel and grit and romance, knights in ablative armor.

I'd said that to her, once, and she'd laughed, and smacked me with a pillow. I wonder if she ever thought about that again, if the blackness arcing away below me, cradling its blue pearl, was something that she's seeing now. If all that black, darkness beyond imagining, is what she saw, if she mistook the twinkling lights, red and white and blue on a rubber-and-rain-slicked road, for stars. Up here with me, just once, before the darkness was all there was.

But it's time to tuck that thought away, the photograph on good, old-fashioned paper sliding back into my breast pocket, and I'm back out from the cramped observation dome, the blackness falling away. I miss that old place, some days; I miss her.

Major Vasilaya is in her place at the helm again, eyes flicking away from the charts to meet mine, and I nod tightly: back to business, the words not needing to be spoken.

It's a long haul to our next stop, after all.

We have all the time in the world.

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