She supposed it was pride.

Well, it would pass, with time. After all, when the present generation had retired, there would be no more Earthborn, ever.

So she put up with their prejudices, and waited for her own time to come, and listened to their stories — endless stories, five billion of them — tales of the time before the Bottleneck, of bravery and disaster and displacement — of unlikely acts of heroism linked with names in her own family lines — and of even earlier times, of an incomprehensible, vanished world, when everyone believed the Earth would forever be their home, as it always had…

But she didn’t want to wait for dead men’s shoes.

She pulled herself tentatively along the slide wire, and made her way to the PMU station, on the starboard side of the hab module. The Personal Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair, with foldout head- and leg-rests on a tubular frame. Nadezhda ran a quick check of the PMU’s systems.

Then she turned around, and backed into the PMU.

“Sagan, Nadezhda,” she said. “Suit latches closed.”

Copy that.

She pulled the PMU’s arms out around her and closed her gloved hands around the hand-controllers on the end of the arms. She unlatched the folded-up body frame. She rested her neck against the big padded rest, and settled her feet against the narrow footpads at the bottom of the frame, so she was braced. Today’s EVA was just a test reconnaissance, but a full field expedition to Icarus could last all of eight hours; the frame would help her keep her muscle movements down, and so reduce resource wastage.

Nadezhda released her tethers. A little spring-loaded gadget gave her a shove in the back, gentle as a mother’s encouraging pat, and she floated away from the bulkhead.

…Suddenly she didn’t have hold of anything, and she was falling.

She had become an independent spacecraft. The spidery frame of the PMU occulted the dusting of stars around her.

She tested out her propulsion systems.

She grasped her right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in her helmet as the thruster worked; she saw a faint sparkle of exhaust crystals, to her right. In response to the thrust, she tipped a little to the left.

When she started moving, she just kept on going, until she stopped herself with another blip of her thrusters.

She turned in space, and looked at the Moon. She pressed a stud on the side of her helmet, and the Moon’s image was magnified, so that its crescent filled her helmet. And the crescent’s edge was softly blurred by a band of light, which stretched part way around the darkened hemisphere.