So that was a positive. Only a week. Rosalyn continued to sort out her kit, reminding herself that Walters was just about to rotate out for family time, and that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t hurt to try to be amiable for this last trip.

Rosalyn packed her kit with extra testing nodes. Unlike Walters, she had done her homework. The Brigantine accommodated up to ten researchers. The only craft that ended up with messier salvage situations were exploration ships. Crews testing the edge of known space often ran into danger, and the missions had a tendency to end in bloodshed—even if Merchantia personality checked for resilience and stability in exploration crews, they couldn’t always avoid space blindness.

It was a new thing, space blindness, the kind of sudden, previously rare condition that took over news hours and podcasts and medical roundtable discussions on Earth. You couldn’t turn on the latest talk show without hearing things like, “Are we pushing crews too far?” or “The cost of the new horizon . . .”

Humans just weren’t meant to be cooped up in little metal boxes in the middle of nowhere for years on end without relief. It did something to you. It chipped away at your humanity. MSC rotations were meant to counteract the side effects, but exploration was still important, and the human cost was, apparently, acceptable. Cryotechnology was still young and there were limits. Even her father’s company, Belrose Industries, had been poking at the possibility of using drugs to alter brain chemistry and make humans more fit for long-term space travel.

Rosalyn cringed away from the thought. She had been on that project when Glen happened. God, but there was a time when she had loved that job. The research. The sense of urgency. The feeling that she was doing something important. If they could find a way to keep human bodies from negatively reacting to the length of space travel, then there was no telling how far people could go, or what companies like Merchantia would find with their probing missions. And of course there had been friends, like Angela, and like Lin, a new intern that collected vintage lunch boxes, and Saruti, who had walked Rosalyn through her first autopsy . . . She hadn’t expected to miss them, or her fish, so much.

The work was easy to miss, too. Satisfying. Challenging. She had felt a breakthrough coming. Angela felt it, too, and had left to head up a new deep space research branch, keen to procure more samples, more data . . . The new position for Angela started just before everything imploded with Glen, and sometimes it was hard not to blame her for not being there. If Rosalyn had friends to tell, friends that would listen, maybe everything would’ve been different.

Maybe Glen would have lost his job. Gone to prison. Paid.

“You’re gonna feel the bump any minute now.”