Chapter Text
Where lies your landmark, seamark, or soul's star?
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
***
The sky over Kansas had never felt more like a lid.
Marlena Glenn stood on her parents’ back porch, coffee mug warming her palms, and watched a jet trace its slow white arc across the blue. A commercial flight, probably. Denver, maybe Salt Lake City, to Atlanta. Looking out below, wondering who could be bothered to live in a place so flat, so square with all its farms and fences. Two hundred people more focused on their in-flight entertainment and what was waiting for them at the other end. Looking down, not up.
How could you not look up when you were thirty-two thousand feet in the air already? How could you not wonder what it would be like to go just a little higher, a little farther, until you left the tethers of gravity behind? Until the sunkissed pastel turned to bluebonnets and into crushed-velvet black spangled with uncountable glittering silver stars? How could you not want to know?
“Marlena, come on—Aunt Jennifer’s here, and she wants a picture with the astronaut.”
Her mother’s voice carried through the screen door, bright and brittle as spun sugar. Not her niece, not you, but the astronaut, reminding Marlena of exactly where she stood in the scheme of things. She took one last swallow of coffee—bitter, the way she liked it, the way no one else in the family drank it—and turned back toward the house.
The party was in full swing. Her parents’ living room, normally so quiet you could hear the grandfather clock ticking from three rooms over, had been transformed into a cathedral of streamers and paper plates. Red, white, and blue bunting draped the mantel. A cake sat on the dining table, frosted with a lurid rendition of the Valiant—her ship, her beautiful little single-seater, rendered in tooth-achingly sweet icing that tasted faintly of chemical vanilla. It looked like something out of one of those old cartoons from the 1980s, its shape more a fantasy than the top of the line experimental spacecraft waiting for her in Texas. At least her parents and the grocery store bakery were trying. That had become her mantra, something she clung onto with increasingly greater desperation.
She smiled for Aunt Jennifer. She smiled for Uncle Ray and Cousin Bethany and the neighbor from three doors down who’d once watched her scrape her knee on the sidewalk at age six and now wanted to hear all about “that Jupiter moon thing.” She smiled while her father put a hand on her shoulder—a farmer’s hand, thick and calloused—and told the assembled crowd that his daughter was doing just fine, just fine, weren’t they proud?
And they were. She could see it in the way her mother kept straightening the photos on the mantelpiece, the way her father’s chest puffed out every time he said Europa. But it was the same way you were proud of a show horse that took blue ribbon at the county fair. The animal belonged to you, and you admired its performance, but you didn’t sit with it in the barn at night and ask it how it felt. She’d stopped expecting anyone to, years ago. But she hadn’t stopped the wanting, which only made it worse. He had acres of soybeans to his name, knew the land the family had farmed for forty-odd years, the neighbors and the way the air smelled before a storm. That one of his children wanted to leave the land that had ground itself under his nails and into his soul was a puzzle he’d never managed to work out, but he was going to convince himself to be proud, because that’s what you did.
“Where’s Matt?” she asked, when the crowd thinned.
“In the back,” her mother said. “Helping your father with the grill.”
Matt. Older by three years. He’d stayed. Taken over the farm equipment business when Dad’s knees started going. He had a wife now, a kid on the way, a mortgage. He was grounded and real in a way Marlena never had been. He was here.
“And Danny?”
Her mother’s mouth flickered. “He’ll be along.”
Danny. Younger by two years. The baby. He’d stayed too, technically, though stayed implied a direction. He worked part-time at an auto parts store and spent the rest of his hours in the basement playing first-person shooters and telling anyone who asked that he was “working on something.” He was here. He’d always been here. And at the rate he was going, he was never going to leave.
Marlena had left for college at seventeen and never looked back. Oklahoma State, then MIT for the master’s in aeronautics, then the Air Force, then Houston. She’d broken the sound barrier before she turned twenty-five. She’d flown experimental craft that had no business being in the air. She’d been selected for the NASA astronaut training program, for experimental craft testing, the Mars missions—and now this.
First human to Europa. Farthest anyone had ever gone. Her name on every pair of lips, every headline, every history book printed for the next hundred years.
And still, when she stood in her parents’ living room, she felt like a little girl holding up a finger painting, waiting for someone to hang it on the refrigerator in between her brothers’ awards and certificates and invitations.
“Hey, superstar.”
Matt emerged from the kitchen, apron over his polo shirt, grill tongs in one hand. He looked like a younger version of their father, with the stocky shoulders of their mother’s Czech ancestors, the same weatherbeaten skin. The family brown eyes, though his jaw was wider. They both had the red hair of their father’s side, his more earthy and auburn. It suited him; hers was a red that spoke of rocket launches and great balls of fire, drawing attention. She wasn’t quite the milkman’s daughter, but there were days she wondered.
He pulled her into a one-armed hug that smelled like charcoal and beer. “You ready for this?”
“Born ready,” she said, and meant it.
He held her at arm’s length, looked her up and down. Raised an eyebrow, as though he couldn’t quite believe she was his sister. “You know Dad’s going to give a toast later.”
“God help us.”
“God help him. He’s been practicing for a week.” Matt’s grin softened into something more serious. “I’m proud of you, you know. For real.”
It was the for real that nearly undid her. She blinked hard and nodded. “Thanks.”
“Just come back, okay? Mom’ll kill me if I have to explain to her why her only daughter is floating around Jupiter forever.”
Only daughter. That was her. The spare. The girl. The one who’d tried so hard to outrun that designation that she was ready to run all the way to the edge of the solar system.
“I’ll be back before you know it. You’re getting ready for planting, you’ll barely notice I’m gone.” She didn’t say it with malice, but it was a truth he knew as well as she did. That this was even happening was a miracle eked out because it would have looked strange if they hadn’t. Marlena was fairly certain she was the most interesting thing to happen in Concordia, Kansas since Garth Brooks had put one of the bars in a song almost seventy years back.
Matt didn’t have the heart to deny it.
Danny showed up two hours in, smelling slightly of weed and carrying a six-pack of cheap lager as a peace offering. Their mother took the beer with a tight smile and steered him toward the cake. He gave Marlena a wave that was half shrug, half salute, and she felt the familiar ache settle into her rib cage.
She loved him. She did. But somewhere along the line, between his first D in algebra and his third year of “figuring things out,” she’d stopped expecting him to understand. He’d never had to chase anything. Everything he wanted—a roof, a family, a place—had been handed to him by virtue of staying put.
The toast came after dinner, when the sun had dropped below the horizon and the sky had shown her a riot of oranges and pinks and purples, hues she wouldn’t see for weeks. Her father stood at the head of the table, a glass of bourbon in his hand, and cleared his throat in that particular way that meant he was about to get emotional and try to hide it.
“Marlena,” he said. “Our girl.”
The room went quiet.
“I won’t pretend I understand what you do up there.” He gestured vaguely at the ceiling, as if orbit were just on the other side of the shingles. “But I know it takes guts. And I know you’ve got more of those than anyone I’ve ever met.”
Her mother nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.
“You were always reaching for something,” her father continued. “Even as a little thing. Remember when you built that rocket out of soda bottles and launched it into Mrs. Patterson’s rosebush?”
Laughter rippled through the room. Marlena felt her face heat.
“I guess what I’m saying is—we’re proud of you. We always have been.” He raised his glass. “To Marlena. The best damn astronaut in the family.”
“Only astronaut in the family,” Matt muttered, and everyone laughed again.
But Marlena heard what he didn’t say. We always have been—but the words had to be dragged out of him, didn’t they? They had to be coaxed from some deep well, dredged up like a body from a river. And even now, even here, his eyes kept drifting to Matt, to Danny, to the sons who’d stayed. Reminding him of what he had, instead of the child bent on flinging herself out of orbit and away, away, away.
She loved them. She did.
But loving them would never be enough. They wanted something she was not, something she could never be: a daughter who stayed and who needed them. A girl who wanted phlox and violets in her garden, to show llamas and rabbits at 4H, who wanted a husband and a family and would be across the border in Nebraska or maybe even down in Oklahoma. One who didn’t talk about trajectories and the heat-diffusion qualities of ceramics. They had been able to explain her when she was an Air Force jet pilot—their daughter in the military was easy enough. It made sense to explain to neighbors and friends and the newspapers.
Their daughter in space was harder to swallow. There was no one they had to fight in space, after all; it didn’t do anything, the way soybeans and soldiers did. Science was nice, when it increased crop yields and helped predict weather. But who needed experimental spacecraft to get to uninhabitable planets faster? What did it matter what was under Europa’s crust or around the rings of Saturn?
Marlena wanted to go. There was always something new to find, a new limit to run up to and smash through, a new discovery to make. There was nothing to compare her to aside from herself, and that was the way she liked it. Everyone’s love had always come at the cost of what she could bring them. Surely if there was an alternative, she’d have encountered it by now.
She slept that night in her childhood bed, clutching a spare pillow to her chest, and stared up at the old glow-in-the-dark stars that speckled her ceiling. There was the moon, and Mars, the scattered asteroids of the Kuiper Belt, Jupiter, and beyond. Eyes always out, never in; Venus and Mercury existed, of course, but they’d never captured her attention quite the same way.
Once, she’d put the universe onto her ceiling, held it all in the palms of her hands before laying it out the way she envisioned. The closest most kids ever got, even now with increasingly regular transport to the moonbases and the nascent base on Mars. And here she was, putting it impossibly far behind her.
The next morning, she kissed her mother goodbye on the porch. Her father shook her hand—actually shook it, like she was a business associate—and then pulled her into a hug so fierce it cracked one of her vertebrae.
“Safe flight,” he told her like he always did, like he could will it into being. He dropped something small in her pocket. Her eyes dipped down; he shook his head. “Not yet. Once you’re—wherever you’re going.”
The drive to the airport was quiet. She’d rented a car for the trip home, something sensible with good gas mileage, and she kept her hands at ten and two and her eyes on the road. No music. No podcasts. Just the hum of the engine and the endless Kansas fields scrolling past.
She thought about the Valiant. Her ship. Her beautiful, brutal little machine, waiting for her in the hangar. One seat. One pilot. One woman, alone, for three months.
The psychologists had flagged it, of course. Concerns about isolation. Concerns about prolonged solitude.
She’d passed every test. She’d smiled at every evaluator. She’d said all the right things.
But the truth was simpler: she wanted to be alone. Not because she didn’t love her family, but because being with them was a slow kind of drowning. Out there. there would be no one to disappoint. No one to perform for. No one to measure her against sons who’d done nothing but exist.
Just her. And the stars. And the call she’d been hearing since she was twelve years old, lying in the grass half-frozen in the December night, watching the Perseids burn through the atmosphere.
⁂
Johnson Space Center felt like coming home in a way Kansas never managed to. The familiar smell of coolant and coffee and human sweat. The hum of ventilation systems. The quiet, focused energy of people who understood exactly why she was doing this, instead of asking why she had to as though there was something strange about it. They were excited to launch her off into the black, enthuasiastic and grateful for the experiments she’d be taking with her and the research data she’d be sending back. It was heartwarming. She could have been any pilot and they’d have been as excited, but Marlena liked to think that, over the years, she’d earned a bit of shine to her name. She wouldn’t call herself a glory hound, but she was good at what she did. And by God, it was nice to feel wanted.
Quarantine was two weeks of near-isolation and practice, practice, practice. She and her backup Jessica Torres lived nearly in each other’s pockets, gossiping and quizzing each other. Marlena was ruthlessly strict with her quarantine: no one wanted to be scrubbed and have their backup take their place. She liked Jessica—had no problems laughing with her, spotting her for weights, or quizzing each other back and forth. They’d piloted experimental craft together before. But this was different: only one person would be going up in the Valiant. Marlena had no intention of letting Jessica into the pilot’s seat.
Competitiveness was healthy, and no one knew that better than astronauts: thousands competing for a double-handful of available slots in the program. Between having to live up to Matt’s achievements and succeeding to prove she didn’t need the handholding that Danny did, she hadn’t had a day of coasting on her laurels and she wasn’t about to start now. She doubled down on her revisions, all the points of burn and gravity assist (thank you, Mars, for being in the right place at the right time), went through another physical exam and final check of the pressure suit they’d prepared for her. A new breed, this one made her think more of comics from the mid-twentieth century, as streamlined as it could be without impacting the need for something pressurized. The gloves and articulation were the smoothest yet. Everything about this mission and the new propulsion unit seemed to be the sleekest and most advanced yet.
It would hardly to do send someone out in one of those suits from the 1980s with a spacecraft like the one waiting for her in the hangar, after all.
The Valiant was a marvel of engineering, a single-seat craft powered by a new, highly experimental drive that could cut the transit time to Jupiter massively She didn’t want to think about the unscheduled rapid disassemblies, but the engineers were sure about it this time. Enough small-scale tests to make her brain ache, followed by uncrewed full-scale tests. They’d sent one up into orbit and brought it back down on autopilot. The heat shields were good, the propulsion unit behaving within tolerances. The math was elegant and brutal, but she trusted it. She checked it as far as she could, eyes scanning the pages and screens.
She loved it. She loved the precision of it, the way every decimal place mattered, the way a single miscalculation could send her spiraling into Jupiter’s radiation belts or slingshotting past the target entirely. This was what she’d been born for. This was the thing that made all the family dinners and the half-smiles and the we’re proud of yous bearable.
She even went onto social media and made a joke about needing a few months’ worth of movies, and was there anything coming out in the next few months she could get a screener for?
If nothing else, she’d have the latest reboots of Spider-Man and Jurassic Park to keep her busy.
Flush with success and riding that high, on the seventh day of quarantine, she called her mother.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” her mother said, halfway through the conversation. The words were offered gently, almost hopefully.
Marlena stared at her own reflection in the dark screen of her tablet. “I know.”
“We’d love to have you home. Even for a little while. There’s a nice man who just moved in two blocks down.”
Really? That again? “I’m not interested in dating, Mom.” Not to mention how frustrating it was when she was asked by the media, every time, and how no one seemed to think of how many people wanted her as their trophy—and how quickly most of those people wanted to be the one that finally got Marlena Glenn to settle down. “Anyway, this mission is too important—and if I backed out, how do you think that would look? How disappointed would they be if I bailed?” She tapped her tongue against her teeth. “You always told me to finish what I started. I’ll come back after the mission.”
Her mother’s sigh was soft and sad. “You always say that.”
It was true. She always came back. But coming back wasn’t the same as staying, and they both knew it. “You can always come down to Houston,” Marlena countered. “It’s been years since you’ve come to visit anyway. How about you come to watch me take off?”
“Oh no, I couldn’t do that. What if something went wrong? And I’d have to be right there? Who would be home for your brothers? No, I’ll watch you climb into that rocket from the safety of the sofa.”
Marlena rolled her eyes so hard they ached. “Mom, it’s been tested six ways to Sunday.”
“And you’re still an experimental pilot. A test pilot. You could go back to just flying jets for the Air Force, couldn’t you? Normal piloting. Or even fly planes for the airlines, you know they’re always looking for more female pilots—”
Marlena snorted. She’d had to fight to pilot jets in the Air Force, too; the hierarchy was implacable, unshakable, and she’d worked her way up to a captaincy with a degree and hard work. They’d find a way to drop her on desk duty, even with all her years of piloting experience. Put her on public relations and media junkets for the dog-and-pony show. Drum up new recruits with her, the American Girl Next Door turned space explorer. Higher, further, faster. Her eyes slid to the schematics of the Valiant on her desk again. She ran her fingers over the thin plasfilm, tracing wings and thrusters, the layers of radiation shielding she trusted with her life.
It took a lot to put her life in someone else’s hands, but she couldn’t imagine a life other than this. Always on the move. Always looking for that next leap into the air, the
“I’m happy where I am, Mom.” Metaphorically, at least.
The sigh on the other edge of the phone was dramatic and familiar. “Can’t blame a mother for worrying.”
Just once it would have been nice to hear a congratulations, but Marlena knew when something was impossible.
The rest of quarantine passed in pleasant haze, the interminable paperwork and rehearsals, practices, training sequences in mockups in the quarantine facility. Proving again she knew a how to address a rapid decompression. If there was a problem on ascent or on re-entry, did she have it all turned into muscle memory? Could she locate emergency equipment in the interior? What if her power went out, her nav instrumentation, her connection to Earth? Where were the weakest links?
She knuckled down and didn’t stop even when she went to the suit room on the day of launch. The techs were skilled but impersonal—everything painstakingly professional. The last human touch she’d have for months: as casual as it was, she remembered the brush of hands on hers. She made eye contact with one of the techs and exchanged a wry smile.
Last briefings, last interviews, last photos with her helmet in her hand. Everyone masked or carefully distanced, because they’d learned their lessons with the Apollo programs and kept them up through Artemis and Ares; no one wanted to be the one to give an astronaut the flu or something worse. The Air Force half of her laughed; it was used to suiting up and getting the hell out the door, but her years at NASA had proved it worthwhile. The idea of being alone halfway between Mars and Jupiter with the flu or pneumonia would be damn near a death sentence. The Valiant was too important to risk that way.
There was one last leak check for her suit as she got into the cockpit, a shift of cords and cables and comms checks, CAPCOM counting down in her ears.
Her favorite words, piped directly into her ear: “You are go for launch.”
Exhilaration. Rockets beneath her, launching her skyward, what felt like an elephant on her chest trying to force her to stay in the gravity well, tethered to this unique sphere of green and blue floating in the vastness of space. A thought spared for Laika and Felicette as she shot skyward—they had started, but she would continue. Past the point of Apollo, and Challenger, and then the Kármán line, feeding Mission Control all the information they wanted, muscle memory and training taking over.
There was nothing like it. Nothing could capture the sheer magic of this—and it had to be something magical, as the elephants eased off her chest and her body began to take on that peculiar not-weight of microgravity. She grinned, giddy as a schoolgirl, working her way through checklists and maneuvers, losing herself in the prescribed motions of an experimental flight.
Nothing could compare to this.
⁂
The flight was bliss.
Not without work—there was always work, experiments to run, data to log, systems to monitor. But the work was hers in a way nothing on Earth had ever been. She ate when she wanted, slept when she wanted, listened to the same album on repeat for three days straight without anyone telling her to diversify her tastes. She watched Casablanca and The Godfather and 2001, which made her laugh at its depiction of zero-g. She read three novels and started a fourth and wrote fourteen pages in a journal she’d promised herself she’d keep.
She talked to Earth when she could—there was work to do, experiments to set up or run for researchers because there was no such thing as a single-objective mission these days. Whatever data she got would be valuable, sent back twice daily. Statistics on the experimental drive and the navigational equipment, the condition of the spacecraft itself, her own health status. Video recordings once a week for the psych team and the physicians, some of them nothing more than recordings of her work-out routine to prove she was doing the mandated exercises. There was journaling and note-taking to do, offering feedback on the meals they’d packed and the equipment, noting any problems she encountered, answering questions by video or text for schoolchildren around the world. Even her rusty Russian and Chinese were pulled out, no doubt received on the other end with hilarity, to remind everyone of how important these kinds of global missions were, as she shook her packet of rehydrated mapo tofu at the camera.
Mars grew closer. Marlena called in to the base for a video with a handful of the researchers available, just to hear voices and see faces that weren’t her own and weren’t burdened by a long lag. And then Mars, too, began to turn into a red marble in the distance behind her. She emailed Matt photos of Jupiter growing larger in the forward viewport. She even got a message from Danny—dude this is insane—which she screenshot and saved to her personal drive. Small things, but they mattered. As the weeks wore on, the calls grew shorter. Her mother ran out of things to say. Matt’s emails turned into one-liners. Even the PR team started to sound bored.
She didn’t mind. She had the stars, the bean sprouts, the convoluted attempts at playing solitaire in zero g. Always the math to check and re-check, always the dreams about what might be just around the metaphorical corner. If this drive worked—and it certainly seemed to be—it would open up travel to the rest of the solar system. Research would be able to advance in leaps and bounds—the number of new sites that could be established? The speed of dropping probes, bringing out scientists, developing colonies? The fact that it could put more solar systems within reach?
Jupiter grew, and Europa with it. The halfway point of the mission ticked over, and Marlena adjusted her trajectory one last time. Slipped into the pressure suit she hadn’t worn since the day after launch, because the radiation projections were just this side of uncomfortable and the suit could make a difference.
And then the storm hit.
It came out of nowhere.
One moment, the Valiant was humming along, her systems green, her trajectory true—Jupiter a swollen gold disc filling a third of the forward viewport, Europa still just a pale coin off to port, waiting. The next, the proximity alarms were screaming and Marlena was being thrown in the cabin, hard enough to see stars that weren’t outside the viewport.
“What the—”
The ship bucked. Her teeth clacked together. She tasted blood. This was not part of anything they’d rehearsed, anything they’d prepared for. Alerts blared, and she knew that forty-five minutes from now Houston would be asking what was happening.
She didn’t panic. Test pilots didn’t panic. They assessed.
But assessment required data, and her data was lying. It had to be.
Instruments were going haywire. Radiation spiking from nominal to evacuate-the-room levels in less than two seconds. The external temperature sensors were reading absolute zero in one breath and the surface of Mercury in the next. Outside, through the forward viewport, she could see something—a roiling mass of dust and ice and light, twisting like a living thing, like a maelstrom painted in colors she didn’t have names for. Not a storm. Not any storm she’d ever trained for.
Not a solar flare. Not a micrometeoroid shower—or at least, not only one, because they certainly were plinking off the Valiant’s hull and making her grateful she’d pulled on the pressure suit. It was like a cosmic storm of some kind had whipped itself up into being, then decided to crash straight into her. All this space, a nearly infinite amount of it. Months—years!—of projections and space-weather monitoring, constant checks and updates, and then…this.
“Houston, Valiant.” Her voice was calm. She made it calm. That was the trick. “I’ve got—something. Unknown phenomenon. Extreme turbulence. Working to resolve. Looks like we’re really going to test that propulsion drive.”
No response. Of course no response. The delay was too long now—she was past Mars, past the asteroid belt, pushing into the outer system. Close to Jupiter, close to the big one, close enough that even light took forty-five minutes to travel from here to Earth. Forty-five minutes there, forty-five minutes back. An hour and a half before she could even begin to get answers.
She sent the message anyway.
Another jolt. Harder. The restraints bit into her shoulders. Her harness creaked—actually creaked, like a rope bridge in a windstorm, and that was not a sound she’d ever expected to hear from military-grade webbing. Somewhere behind her, she heard a panel pop loose and go clattering against the bulkhead, followed by the unmistakable sound of something else breaking free—her emergency water stores, maybe, or one of the experiment lockers. Hopefully nothing that would careen across the interior and clock her in the head.
“Come on, girl.” She didn’t know if she was talking to the ship or herself. “Hold together.”
She pulled up her trajectory plot. The numbers swam for a moment—her eyes were rattling in their sockets, her brain struggling to focus—but she forced herself to read them.
She recalculated. And recalculated again.
The numbers didn’t make sense. And the numbers always had made sense.
The storm—whatever it was—was altering her trajectory. The universe outside didn’t even seem to match up as wave after wave of solar wind and cosmic waves crashed against, over, through, the little craft. She sat there for a moment, floating in her harness while the storm rattled her teeth and the alarms screamed and the universe outside her viewport twisted itself into impossible shapes. She thought about the math. She thought about the abort sequence, about the fuel she’d need to turn around, to break free of the storm’s pull, to limp back toward Earth on whatever remained. She thought about what that flight would look like—weeks of silence, of failure, of slinking back to Johnson with her tail between her legs.
If she could even find home. Nothing on the screen looked like the solar system she knew. Jupiter had moons all right, but the sight outside her window wasn’t Jupiter and its moons. It was too small, too swirled with cloud. The astrographic readings her systems were giving her looked like gibberish. There were sudden gravitational pulls from directions there shouldn’t be, and the micrometeoroids were growing less micro by the moment.
She thought about her mother’s face. About the I told you so that would live behind every smile, every we’re-just-glad-you’re-safe.
She thought about her father’s handshake.
She thought about Matt’s for real, and Danny’s dude this is insane, and the way neither of them would ever quite look at her the same way if she came home early. If she came home having failed.
The choice lasted maybe half a second.
She disabled the proximity alarms—they weren’t helping anyway, just adding noise. Reoriented the ship to minimize surface area, presenting the smallest possible profile to the storm. And then, because there was nothing else to do, she turned the ship toward the cloud-swirled planet growing wider and wider in her viewscreens. She could calculate a trajectory on the fly but she didn’t know the size of this planet or the gravity of it or where she might even land. One ocean, one large hourglass-shaped landmass that she could see, a massive peninsula thrust out to one side of it nearly at the middle.
“Valiant to Houston,” she said, recording for the log, for posterity, for whatever historian might one day piece together what happened out here. “I am deviating from mission parameters due to unforeseen environmental factors. Will provide updated telemetry when able. Recommend—”
The ship lurched. Her head snapped forward. She bit her tongue.
“—recommend preparing alternate mission profiles. Valiant out.”
She didn’t cry. She didn’t pray. She didn’t curse.
She just held on, and watched the impossible colors swirl outside her window, and wondered if this was how it felt to be the first person to see something no human had ever seen before. Valiant slid through the atmosphere, elephants back on her chest with a vengeance. Watched the black turn to a blue that wasn’t Texas bluebonnets or the ocean in the Gulf or even in the Pacific. Watched the ground come up and habit try to align the spacecraft with the biggest, flattest space she could find, the cabin now flooded with red and amber alert lights. She fought desperately to bring the craft level. Bail out? Or try and land?
If she could make it along the valley she should be able to bring it to a stop. Every flap and skid went out, every thruster cut to the bare minimum to keep her from stalling out in the sky.
The Valiant dug into the earth—was it even earth, here?—like one of her father’s plows, soil cascading up over the nose and the viewports. She rattled. Something snapped and she slammed forward in the seat, restraints no longer holding her wholly in place. Her head slammed back, the pressure suit helmet rattling. Pain arced through her body.
The thing about being a pioneer was that sometimes you ended up somewhere nobody had ever been.
And sometimes you never came back.