“And it is with that sentiment that I address you all today,” Arianna pronounces, strongly, firmly, to the horizonless crowd stretched out before her, leaking out into the hallways surrounding the conference room. “that sentiment of boundless exploration and perpetuation of our stance amongst the stars, that I address you here and now. It was the job of our forefathers to step out amongst them and take our first peek at the life that could be ours out there in the cosmos, but it is now our duty to reach up and grasp it. With me today,” she holds a hand to her right and starts introducing the six people obediently set down in scrounged up metal chairs from the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building.

“Dr. Ionnes Rhadistreos, as we all know the first man on Mars, and since an accomplished doctor of astrodynamics and a senior member of SETI, the search for life, and an honored guest here today; Major Riley Vonn, of the National Spaceflight Taskforce, and the future commander of the Gaia; Corporal Jana Cotte, Chief of Agriculture on board the Gaia and an accomplished veteran of the Sagittarius missions to establish a Lunar colony at New Rochelle; Dr. Ulysses Beckett, Doctor of Planetary Science and Earth-Space Dynamics, to be the scientific commander of the Gaia; Dr. Leaf Fadel, the future flight surgeon of the Gaia; and Maya Kasana, Chief of Internal Ecology for the Gaia.

“These five represent only a part of the Gaia crew, numbering twelve in total, but, as one can imagine, the rest of their number are very busy in preparing their launch on the SLS2-101 early next month. From there, they will dock with the Gaia, waiting in High Earth Orbit, and will be off by the conclusion of the first week of March. I now turn the mic over to Phillip Jensen, the Director of Astronauts here at NASA. He’s pretty much their boss,” she makes a sweeping gesture to the six honored guests sitting patiently, if not a little nervously.

Maya Kasana can’t help but feel outranked as she sits at the far end of the lineup of chairs, watching as Phil stomps his way over to the podium. She’s not a doctor, she’s not a higher-up in any branch of the military, nor is she a veteran of any mission to the Moon, Mars, Venus, or anything, really. She went to space once, a few years ago, as part of a Virgin Galactic thing to the International Space Station, and that wasn’t even that big of a deal. She is perpetually self-conscious of her position- Chief of Internal Ecology? What the heck’s that?- and she imagines people whisper behind her back. It doesn’t seem to be that useful of a skill to have an something like a spaceship, especially a conventional one like the Orion missions or the ISS or Tiangong; but Gaia is anything but ordinary.

She sits up straighter- she had realized in a huff that she was slouching a little- but no one pays her any heed as Phil talks about the selection process. She has been curious as to this, indeed- why anyone would choose her over someone with a doctorate- but has never had the courage to actually accost the man to ask him that fatalistic question, why.

“All of our astronaut candidates are the best at what they do, of course, and these who sit before you are no different. Each is an expert in their field and a lesser expert in two more, serving as resident know-it-alls should anything go wrong with any systems. Dr. Rhadistreos learned the handiness of this certain key aspect back in April of 2031, when, as you or your parents will remember, his spacecraft accidentally lost pressure for thirteen minutes, nearly killing his entire crew. Alas, he is here with us today,” Phil smirks and looks over her shoulder, “If not rusty and worse-for-wear, but here with us nonetheless.”

The old man nods and gives a genuine smile to the jarring joke and the crowd as a whole.

“As for the rest of the lot, I’m sure many of you have followed their training process over the last year and half. Specifically that incident on the border of Morocco during the desert survival training, yikes,” this stirs the audience into a chortle. “All the same. It is now a good time to inquire all those questions you were dying to ask. We’ll start with the front.”

He picks a journalist at random. “What is it that the other seven are doing that they were too busy to make an appearance? Surely they know the importance this mission is taking to the citizens of the nation.”

“I can take this,” Riley mutters loudly, and someone passes her a mic. She talks, no noise comes out, and she flashes her practiced grin as she flicks the power on on the damn thing. “It is precisely for that reason that they aren’t here. We are here because we know that it is our duty to answer the questions of the nation, but it is also our duty to see the mission succeed. As we’ve learned too often, the launch is the most dangerous part of any mission; and, by that same token, that old adage- ‘Once you reach orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere’- still rings true. It is their mission to make sure that the launch goes off without a hitch. We’ll see where we are once that goes swimmingly on the second of next year,” she folds her hands primly into her lap, flicking the mic back off.

“Next question,” Phil says. He chooses another journalist, probably at random again. He’s a small man in a dark blue suit, with shoulder-length hair that makes him look entirely out of the ordinary.

“This is for the crew of the Gaia. Sorry, Ionnes.”

Riley hands him the mic. “No offense taken, young man,” his grandfatherly nature seems to leak into the rest of them.

“Right. For all of you. I think many of us saw Major Vonn’s appearance on the Late Show a few nights ago, and I must congratulate you for your performance. He’s a tough nut to crack, that Donahue, but some of his questions still resonate with the nation, particularly his talk of ethics. How can it be appropriate for so much money to be spent on this endeavor when billions still lie starving on our own planet?”

Riley rolls her eyes and doesn’t even try to take the mic back from Ionnes. Jana, tidy little thing, raises her hand and conjures up a mic from somewhere. She’s always been small, with her auburn hair tied back in a loose bun. She has to be in her mid-thirties now, which makes her the oldest person to be accepted for the Gaia mission by far, but her integrity and candor remain unmatched. Her blue eyes, more than anything, look tired. Maya knows her primarily as.. something of a wallflower. She’d never hurt a fly, even if it hurt her first- but she’s horribly competent in her field, growing things, and that will come in dire necessity when they lift off. Sometimes Maya thinks her sole goal of this mission is to get away from everyone and tend to flowers until she dies.

“Yes. We get this question more than you’d expect, and it’s always a tough one to answer. Of course we’re familiar with the families who have died to war or disease or famine, and our hearts go out to them. Every time, we stand together to make sure that… that they are well taken care of. Our mission is something else entirely. If that is the horrible present, we look to a brighter future.”

“How can that future be brighter if we have no part in it?” The long-haired man seems ripe with controversy this day, Maya Kasana notices.

“That’s where you’re wrong, you know?” Jana asks rhetorically. She has a bad habit of doing that. “It will benefit humanity- as Riley so astutely pointed out, it already has.”

“You mishear me, my dear Dr. Cotte,” the man slyly says. “Remind me, in what year will your ship return to the vicinity of the Earth?” Maya thinks she can perceive the familiar snippets of a French accent in his voice. She had spent a three-year period in Paris not too long ago, travelling around with her father for business reasons.

“93 Billion years from now, yes. And it is more than likely that the Earth will have ceased to exist by then, in any respect,” she says.

“93 Billion years. I know that I’ll never live to see the return. How can you justify it as an exploration mission when there will be no one left to receive the results?”

“I think that that’s the point of the mission, in some small part,” Ulysses steals the show. He’s a lumbering man with a large beard and a shaved head, dressed as they all are in a NASA/Kennedy jumpsuit. “For instance, I’m the science officer. Do I think that anyone back on Earth will ever know of my results? No, not the more important, more distant ones, anyway. But I do have faith that the human race will survive any challenge presented to it, and that when we return we will find something altogether alien and new, and be welcomed back with open arms.”

“That’s very long term,” the long-hair man doesn’t seem to shirk away from the giant of a man. Probably because he’s so far away, Maya muses.

“I suppose so.”

“What if there’s no one here when you get back?”

Ulysses looks to Riley for advice, but she shrugs. They don’t know, and they won’t. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, but rest assured that we will not sit meekly and let that come to pass. I’ve heard others call us something of an ark, to protect the species from itself, and I can truthfully see that.”

Phil jumps up to the mic as soon as Ulysses finishes, not letting the conniving man in the crowd finish whatever bedeviling thought should plague the crew next. “Next question, please. Yes, you.”

A billion and a half hands shoot up, Maya is absolutely sure of that.

“You called it an ark… does that mean your primary mission is something different than the popularly circulated interpretation?” One loud man in the front and center manages to wring out of the chaos.

Phil looks nervously back at the astronauts, but it’s not like no one has ever dared utter this most obvious of questions to the people who would know best. Each knows what the unlisted cargo is in the Spacecraft’s solidly-shielded storage bay, after all, and they have been briefed extensively on what their mission is to be should the worst come to pass. Of course, it’s unlisted for a reason.. and that reason will not be what the astronauts speak of, under no circumstance.

“It’s an obvious secondary purpose for the craft,” Dr. Fadel recites tritely. “Everyone who knows anything about space travel is familiar with this statistic- that the Earth, no matter what we do, will become submerged in the expanding Sun in around four billion years’ time. That’s inevitable, and of course it is our duty as a species to escape this fate.”

“More than that, though,” Jana Cotte takes Riley’s mic again and, while still looking horribly tired, manages to respond. “I think that the Gaia is really a kind of proving ground for this ramjet technology. Just because our mission parameters will be very different from the spacecraft of tomorrow, the ones going past the turn of the century and onwards- the ones that will colonize the stars- it doesn’t mean that our technology will be all that different, right?” She shrugs defensively. “Think of the ship as a giant experiment in this technology, to prove its effectiveness and to be a mission and message to the future. That’s how I think of it, anyway.”

The questioner takes a second longer than usual to sit back down. Of course Maya’s suspicious of anything- the media is never a friend, only a casual observer, with you on your best day and documenting absolutely everything on your worst. She may be young, but at least she’s come to grasp that lesson. She can see questions sparked by their collective answer in his eyes, but also restraint as he consigns himself to allow another individual the floor.

“Next! Ah, you,” Phil pulls someone random again, this time a regular-height middle eastern man.

“Let me refer back a second, to the ark comment,” Maya rolls her eyes nervously but doesn’t say anything. She can hear Riley huff from the other side of their confined stage. It seems, unsurprisingly, that their attempt to assuage the public of that fact and avoid answering it altogether have been altogether unsuccessful. “Dr. Fadel, you called it an obvious second mission for the craft. What did you mean by this comment?”

“Now, listen to my words,” she says primly. “I didn’t say second mission. I wouldn’t say that, because it isn’t. I said secondary purpose- that’s something different, at its core. Being part of the mission implies something more than what it is, and what it is is a fact. We will be the last modern humans, no matter what happens. We will still be alive- if everything goes well- in 93 Billion years and have stories out the yazoo to tell to the evolved humanoids that still inhabit the nearby space. We will be the last vestige of our modern society- that’s not something in debate, I hope, because it’s obvious.”

“What if another craft overtakes you?” He asks, but it’s drowned out by a distant rumble of discontent noise from the crowd.

“Sorry, please repeat the question?”

“What if another futuristic craft overtakes you? It is theoretically possible to break the speed of light, and after that, all bets are off, correct?”

“I must correct your diction again, sir,” She comments, ever-so slightly smiling. “This is something we get often. You used the word theoretically in your question. That’s not it. What you meant to say is hypothetically, because it is by the very theory of special relativity that it is determined that nothing can ever go faster than light. All attempts thus far are… unproven hypotheses. Whether that reigns true in the future may or may not happen, but it’s certainly not a guarantee, I suppose,” She tugs on her ponytail, a long thing, bringing it around and in front of her. She strokes it while continuing to answer.

“In fact, it’s also that same theory that states that time dilation will affect our spacecraft in magnificent ways…” she trails off, and no one makes any attempt to interrupt her thought process. “The universe is built so that nothing can go faster than light. If you get too close, it’s only mechanism to keep you from going over is to.. to slow down time around the spacecraft, so that you are perpetually accelerating asymptotically close to it without ever actually encountering it. The number- that difference between the speed of light and your speed- is referred to as tau, and the smaller it is, the slower time goes around the ship, all to prevent it breaking this.. ultimate universal speed limit.”

“I see,” the reporter says before quickly seating himself once again.

“All right,” Phil smiles. “Who’s next?”

A tall woman with an athletic build in a ruby red pantsuit stands. She holds a tablet- one of the new carbon fiber ones, from the looks of the stiffly woven pattern on its back. “Opponents of the Gaia program say that it would be far more efficient to use antimatter fusion rather than hydrogen fusion to propel your craft. How do you respond? To the whole crew, and anyone else who wants to answer,” she purses her ruby lips.

“I can take it,” Ulysses chuckles. “You don’t understand antimatter, do you?”

“Not as well as you, I’d care to wager.”

“Let me spell it out for you,” his minor Canadian accent shows through. “Antimatter is expensive to produce and volatile to try and contain in any conventional form of fuel tanks. The only way to store it is a few atoms at a time, circling them over and over again in a magnetic storage facility. That’s not something we can easily do on the small, closed-loop electrical systems on the Gaia. That’s why it’s such a simpler option to simply bring a fusion reactor for the Hydrogen instead- it’s comparatively easy to obtain and store.”

“And you do that with the.. ramjet, yes?”

“Uh, yes. Yes. Does she… want me to go into the details?” Ulysses looks to Phil for advice.

“Ma’am, do you want the details? It’s all quite complicated.” The director inquires.

Her feathers bristle at that. “Why, I think I’m qualified enough to hear it, thank you very much.” Phil backs off again, taking a seat, while Ulysses moves up to take the podium.

“It’s a simple device, really. It’s a magnetic field that we generate from a few motors, that draws in Hydrogen ions to a series of collectors. The automated fusion reactor that we’re calling the AFR uses this fuel to conduct fusion- that is, smashing the atoms together to form Helium. This generates a lot of spare energy that we convert into electricity, and the rest of the energy is converted into kinetic via the expulsion of the Helium out the back of the ship, thus driving it forward. It’s a constant process, and it always works at 10 meters per second per second. Of course, that’s just an arbitrary number used to simulate gravity onboard.”

“I see. And I hear that this process cannot be used to simply accelerate the craft out of Earth orbit without a few nudges to get it going fast enough?”

“No, not really…,” he curls his luscious beard. “The Hydrogen collection process basically sends the hydrogen flowing through the ship and right out of the back. It all takes place quickly, and we need a steady source of Hydrogen to keep it going. We can’t do that if we’re going too slow, because we’ll use all the hydrogen in the area and then be exhausted and have none left after… a few minutes, at most.”

“Thank you.”

“Just so he doesn’t kill me later, our AFR is managed by our own Joshua Manes, who could not be here today because he also happens to be our backup Rendezvous manager and is currently training to knock our docking with Gaia next month out of the park,” Ulysses takes a step away from the mic.

“Any more questions?” Phil snakes his way around a retreating Ulysses and steals the mic back. “Yes, you.”

A dark-skinned man with medium length hair and piercing green eyes calmly iterates in a bellowing voice, “You talk of the systems onboard all the time, of how complex they are and how the mission is a triumph of scientific technology. What I want to know, is about the crew. What are they like, how do they work together, et cetera.”

Riley snaps to this. “I’ve never known another crew to be any better than what I’m stuck with here…” she trails off and earns a solemn rumble from the audience. “I’ve spent the last three years of my life with them, and I will spend.. a much longer time than that out amongst the universe with these people.” She looks at each one of her crew present in turn, eyes lingering on Maya. “Each is totally worth the expense to get to know them, to become their friend, and to go on this voyage with, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

In a sudden burst of energy, Maya decides that she wants to speak. “I’d like the mic,” she croaks. I hope no one heard that. Was that a voice crack? I thought I was done with those, she thinks.

Riley shrugs and passes it over. Dr. Fadel, bristly and stern-faced as ever, her black, curly hair frizzy and baked in the midwinter Floridian sun, makes hardly a movement to grab the mic back and pass it to her, but she grasps it out of her hand and holds to it white-knuckled all the same.

“I just want to say,” Maya feels like standing, so she does just that, even though she’s fairly certain that Riley made a point specifically not to. “I just want to say that I’ve always felt inferior here, amongst this group of doctors and.. air force colonels and… Space Task Force majors… but I’ve never felt like an outsider, thanks to them. I’ve never been shunned because I’m the youngest, or because I’m literally the Chief of Internal Ecology- what is that, anyway? - or anything else. They’ve made a conscious effort to ensure that I’m an integral part of the team for every step of the way and that this trip- this grand old road trip- will be a blessing for me rather than a curse. I’d just like to say that I appreciate that,” she stands there, awkwardly, with wet eyes for a few tenuous seconds before squatting back down again; she looks nervously down the line as she hands the mic back to the others and Riley winks at her before turning away.

She’s on the front page of the Times the next day. Cecilia Virgillito- officially the EVA specialist, unofficially the heart of the team- emails the text of the document and, at breakfast that morning, stands up at the front of the bleached white mess hall and reads it off of a bright blue tablet.

“‘A Grand Old Road Trip, that’s what it is,’ says Gaianaut Maya Kasana in heartwarming speech to Press Conference at Kennedy,” she swoons. Her silvery hair- perfect as always, shining in its hybrid sort of red gold- shimmers brightly in the drab, sweaty air of the swamp. Maya wonders silently to herself whatever Cecilia will do once they board the Gaia- there’s no safety in shampoo there, unless they have the audacity to attempt to grow it in the ship’s admittedly large planting surface. She might talk to Dr. Cotte about it. Probably not.

The woman at the front holds up a finger. She’s not done. “Maya Kasana, 22, iterates the bonds of unity that will hold the intergalactic crew together on their odyssey to the stars next month. Backed up by comments by her commander, the infamous Riley Vonn,” Cecilia interrupts herself. “Riley, I didn’t know you were infamous.”

“You don’t watch Dan Donahue, do you?” she asks, although obviously it doesn’t need an answer. She’s sitting farther down the twelve-seated table, next to Ulysses and the First Officer himself, Arlie Harrison.

The astronaut complex is actually packed- NASA’s mission manifest calls for a crew rotation in New Rochelle- and the heart of the Cape is as busy as ever with rookie astronauts pleading their case to Phil that they should be on the next ship up there. In addition to that, there are growing calls for a manned mission to probe the clouds of Venus or even set up an outpost on the far-flung Titan- all primarily funded by the spare funds NASA’s been getting from publicity gigs off of the whole Gaia extravaganza, and funding raises thereof. Of course, partially because of this, the Gaianaut table is at the front of the room- the bosses seem to think that they are to be held in a higher station, given their impending mission and comparative fame. Maya doesn’t disapprove.

Cecilia reads on. “Backed up by comments by…. blah, blah, blah… Astronauts discuss the physics required to send them on their journey and the necessary Venus transit…”

“That’s not right, is it?” Maya whispers to Joshua Manes, to her left. His curly brown hair, unkempt and misshapen in a mass of bed-head- is nevertheless his most appealing feature. His slightly crooked nose sits on a face is pock-marked by the scars of some disease from his infancy and makes it look, from afar, to be perpetually covered in soot or ash. “We won’t transit anything, we’ll intercept and fly-by.”

“Did you expect anything different?” Joshua muters. “This is public journalism we’re talking about. They couldn’t add two plus two without stirring controversy and hyper analyzing everything. It’s like my old english classes all over again.”

This earns him a grin from Maya. She likes the rocketman, their fusion specialist- he’s always honest. He might not be nice, or even sympathetic at times, but man, if he isn’t the most candid person there. She could psychoanalyze this trait and determine that he never made many friends in his school years, serving both as a cause and a result of this peculiar iniquity, but she made it a policy to never be overly judgemental towards anyone, much less a future- or better, technically a current- crewmate for the rest of her life and very possibly more than that.

Meanwhile, Cecilia is still gabbing away. Maya assumes that she hasn’t looked up, because it was implied that the minor speech she is still giving was addressed to Maya, who has had thus far an exceptional lack of attention. She finds that the spotlight follows her, but she always chases it off.

Later that day, Maya finds herself on the beach, a few miles down from the Space Center. All the astronauts are required to keep up being physically fit- it is wholly impractical to suffer maladies in space, not the least of which heart attack, stroke, others- can be leveled against measures such as daily exercise. And Maya likes to run; that’s a factor as well. When she first was chosen, among one of the largest pools of candidates in NASA history, she explored the area around Kennedy thoroughly. Now, it’s familiar with the well-worn terrain and has developed a routine- ten miles a day, something easily manageable even when she feels like utter shit, down the beach and back. Seeing the ships far on the horizon port between various Atlantic seaports and, presumably, Miami never gets old. She likes to imagine the story behind each one. This one she sees now, a sailboat with a crimson sail and a white, sturdy-looking hull, is obviously some rich CEO’s private craft, set sail on a gentle, luxurious cruise on a day off from the onerous work it would take to obtain such a vessel. Or perhaps it’s obviously a poor man’s fishing barge, out making a living for his children so that one day they may go to school or own a home or any other dream unduly labeled as American.

All the same, the boat eventually drifts under the horizon, and Maya runs on.

Eventually she’s recalled to the astronaut complex for a ‘Cultural Briefing.’ These usually comprise of the Gaianauts being stuffed in a room together and the door being locked, and then they are lectured on some point of human society that they may or may not need in the future. Occasionally they are recalled solely to learn the basics of some foreign language that they are fully aware they will never use, and yet other times they are called in to discuss the history of a long-lost culture. All these things and more will be readily accessible on Gaia’s extensive data drives- they are meant to hold pretty much all of human knowledge and learning thus far in their history.

That being said, the higher-ups are all too aware what kind of a life that the Gaianauts could have had had they decided to stay. Because of the parameters of the mission, all the astronauts chosen range from early to late twenties, with Jana Cotte being the notable outlier for her extensive work and, Maya might add, exceptionally well-written doctoral paper on agroponics- a technique that will become vital to the survival of the crew in a few months’ time, when initial supplies run out. For obvious reasons, the astronauts will be missing most of their lives on Earth- whatever they could have had, it will now cease to exist. Whatever future they were destined to have- that loving husband, those twins that would someday grow up to be massively successful in some field or another, that house they would buy down by the lake- all that is gone, given up for the confines of the most expensive moving vessel ever built. (Notably not the most expensive thing ever built because the Pyramids at Giza are theorized to have taken somewhat more, and one observant individual might take note of the fact that they do not, in fact, move.)

She scampers into the back of their conference room at a quarter past ten that morning feeling refreshed and a little out of breath. The month preceding the whole team had spent in isolation training- that is, living, just the six of them, in an enclosed environment with no opportunities for entry or exit until the month was up- as a sort of final exam, just to make sure that the team fit together seamlessly and everything possibly foreseen was accounted for. So she hadn’t gotten any time to run through all of that. It was a mission she had given herself to rehabilitate herself up to her usual pace before liftoff, now just two weeks away.

Riley, for a change, is hidden away in the back, her head laying on the table, hair sprawled out across it in front of her. She may or may not be sleeping, Maya can’t decide. She is sitting as far away from Verity Zamora, the ship’s nerdy IT professional and self-acclaimed ‘AI Wrangler,’ as possible- of course. Those two, while teammates, have always been each other’s antagonist. They try to hide it from the public- and from NASA, because, let’s face it, they both want a part of this mission, and such extreme insubordination as infighting would never be tolerated- but Maya has found that everyone sees her as a willing vessel in which to give confidence. She knows, for instance, that they used to be very good friends, until they weren’t.

The others are scattered around; Joshua is off to one side, a notebook in his hand, eagerly copying- ah, yes. Muslim History is written in chalk across an old-timey board at the front of their small lecture hall, along with a rudimentary map of the Ottoman Empire. There are no Muslims on the flight, which is something the more vocal Muslims expressly objected to when the crew was announced a year and a half ago.

Maya lets her gaze trail around. Amber Lazar, the stellar scientist serving, for now, as Ulysses’ assistant sits, back straight as a board, next to Arlie- his buzz cut dark hair visible on caramel skin, although his face is hidden because he’s looking the other way. Jana Cotte and Leaf Fadel perch to their right, and across the shiny white table from the four of them is an odd pair, the well-versed Cecilia and the lonesome Christophe Borrero, the only French and, indeed, European astronaut making the journey. His official position, like Maya’s, seems useless at first glance. He is, on record, the ‘Mechanisms Controller,’ but his double master’s degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from Polytechnique would trump any attempt to label him their mechanic.

Ulysses stands with Verity and Hale Garner, the other ‘Mechanisms Controller’ and himself an accomplished astrophysicist at Caltech, at the back of the room. He grunts a concerted ‘hello’ to Maya as she saunters in. She’s obviously late. The lecturer, dressed in formal wear and definitely middle-eastern, gazes at her with welcoming yet concerned eyes, but does not cease speaking.

“And it was with this battle- let me say again, Yarmouk- which allowed the armies of Mohammed to enter unopposed into the Levant and Egypt. This essentially shifted the balance of power in the region away from the Romans and towards the Caliphate. Any questions so far?”

Dead. Quiet.

The teacher- Maya doesn’t know his name- looks over them suspiciously for a second before continuing. “After that, it was something of a foregone conclusion that the Romans would be in retreat for the next four hundred years, fighting a series of retreating wars culminating in 717 AD.”

Maya noisily scoots a chair back next to a delirious Riley Vonn and cringes at the raucous noise it makes across the hard, cold tile. Her commander barely stirs, and Maya is sure that she’s fallen asleep- except that she turns her whole head to look back at her. Teeth gritting mildly and bags thickly layered under her eyes, she murmurs, “So, when do we go into quarantine again?”

“Two days,” Maya rattles off.

“And why are we in here learning about centuries old wars, then?”

“You’ve heard the spiel; besides, you’re the commander, aren’t you supposed to be the one telling us to pay attention?”

She grins meekly. “I am the commander. Therefore, I commanded Arlie to go tell them all to pay attention. See what a good job he’s doing?” Maya nods absentmindedly, glancing to their right to see that the center table is, in fact, filled with six productive bodies, actively engaged in the discussion on the Second Siege of Constantinople.

“Taking liberties?”

“I prefer the term… seniority…,” she yawns audibly and Amber shoots her a bitchy look from their periphery. Lazar, Maya has discovered, is not one to be willingly ordered about so easily, and one to quickly and violently oppose any attempt at ‘hypocrisy,’ such as Riley, who may or may not have made the arrangements for today, being the only one really not paying attention to the lecturer. This character trait of Amber’s made her an exceptionally poor candidate for any branch of the American military, which is why it was so surprising when she actually managed to be accepted into something as rigidly built formed a hierarchy as the space program. It’s known that any mutiny in space- such as has thus far been unprecedented in American spaceflight- would be disastrous to both morale, health of the crew, and potentially hardware on the flight. There have been instances of the entire crew banding together and protesting firm and taxing schedules sent to them by mission control, thus making their own little mutinous vessel from the ground. But a civil war, as such as something of this sort would be, has never before been seen.

Yet all the same, Amber Lazar continues to leer at the both of them while Maya eyes her in the corner of her eye.

The two of them settle into a routine; over the course of the thousand year roller coaster ride that is Muslim fortunes in the middle east and later north Africa, Riley gets up and paces around the back while Maya scrawls notes, then Maya takes her turn, often chatting silently with Ulysses, Hale and Verity, still hiding in the back and conspicuously close to the door. Eventually, the ordeal ends. But that isn’t it. No, of course that’s not it, because the life of an astronaut is one of constant work for surprisingly little pay, and the day has only just started.

Briefing is next. They’re going into quarantine in two days, just to make sure that they aren’t exposed to any viral diseases that could jeopardize the mission. Gaia is designed to be a perfect, closed system, where disease is virtually nonexistent- the only two sources of bacteria are the well-monitored soil in the two massive AG-G Modules, where they are to grow all their food and medicine, and their own stomachs, which are unlikely to produce any diseases in such a vacuum of input.

Maya briefly reflects on the facts as they troop to their next assignment. She has two more days until she’ll be enclosed in quarantine, and that for two weeks before their launch on the second. That’s two days of freedom, she supposes. Two days of a normal life, or, at least, marginally normal, before she’s placed into an environmentally controlled room and never allowed to leave.

Actually.. that’s not true. The Gaia does have two reusable methane/oxygen fueled landers. She was very interested to learn that the engineers designing the thing thought those would be necessary for anything. The Gaia, for almost all of its mission- no, all of its mission- would be going far too fast to slow down. Even in the Venus encounter in a few months- they could aerobrake in its massive atmosphere, but that’s not the point of a gravity assist. The thing about an assist like their planned trajectory- or any gravity assist for that matter- is that the acceleration the spacecraft would gain is roughly equal to two times the planet’s orbital speed, plus the spacecraft’s initial velocity. This magnifying effect is greatest at Periapsis- that is, the closest approach to Venus- they’re going much faster that they will have been or will be at the beginning or even the end of the encounter, because they’re technically falling towards the planet and towards the sun at the same time. That’s when they’ll finally have the speed to fire up the ramjet- at Periapsis of Venus. After that, they’ll accelerate exponentially for the rest of their lives, passing Altair in a few years and skimming the galactic center in a few decades.

That’s why it makes so little sense to include landers- because of the way Gaia’s engine works, to slow down they’d have to flip the whole ship around and fire backwards for the exact same period of time they fired forwards- that cancels out all the kinetic energy, and they’re at rest relative to the sun, which, by the way, will be a pretty poor frame of reference, all things considered.

Of course, Maya knows exactly why they have landers. So do all the other crewmates. The secret, as always, sleeps in the cargo bay of Gaia even now.

She continues to reflect for a good while, walking silently, outside the main body of the group. Riley trails her, standing tall but with visible slouch. Maya knows that there aren’t any cameras in here- that means there’s no one to see her sign of weakness but the crew. She can respect that.

The rest of the day is a blur. Briefing is quick- they’re simming for the entire day. They sim launch, they sim docking- they even sim the Venus encounter. It’s all down to muscle memory by now, and by the end of it, said muscles are tired.

At the end of it all, Maya finds herself sitting on the beach a few miles downrange from the launch site. She can see the VABs- three of them, for three simultaneous launches, if they ever need that. The rockets have to be done by now, there’s no other way. They’re mostly in there for protection from the weather, she thinks.

She turns back to see the sun just as it sets over the western horizon. The blue and red and purple hues that it casts will be some of her last, she thinks wistfully. She soaks it in- the majesty of the cloud tops rising kilometers upon kilometers into the sky, the way the sunlight glints off the sides of each, making it seem so puffy and real, like thick cotton candy on a midsummer’s day.

It’s especially beautiful the way the sun makes a line of fuzzy light shifting upwards into the just emerging stars, how Venus drifts to its side like a magic guardian. She supposes that it’s probably symbolic of something, but she’s too tired to care to figure out what it is. Probably for the setting of one part of her life and the incipient other? Or maybe it just means that the Earth has rotated so far that the light, travelling 93 million miles from the center of the sun, can no longer get to her. She likes to think that it’s the first one.