“I feel like we should take them with us,” Dellian said as he watched the fish glide across the pond and vanish under the sluggish waterfall, only to reappear again a few seconds later.

Yirella slipped her arm around his shoulders. “You can’t think like that. Not anymore.”

“I know.”

Together they looked up through the vaulting geodesic glass roof. Juloss was a thick crescent below the station, its terminator line creeping across the Deng Ocean.

“It’s beautiful,” she said wistfully.

“We can come back. When it’s over.”

“That would be nice. I don’t think there would be many of us, though.”

“Really? I bet most of the squad would come. Hell, maybe most of the Morgan. Where else could we go? This is home.”

She gave him a gentle kiss. “It’s where we were born. It’s where we trained. But home? I don’t think we have one. Not yet. That’s something we have to build for ourselves. Afterwards. Hey, who knows, perhaps the Sanctuary star legend will turn out to be real after all, and we can go and live there.”

He gazed up at the blue-and-white crescent, his mind filling in the continental coastlines on the nightside. “You know, back on Earth they said whole continents were lit up by city lights at night, that they were like miniature galaxies. Can you imagine that? There were so many of us on one world.”

“And look what happened to them. Human worlds can’t afford that kind of population again. Not until we win the war. We have to have enough traveler generation ships to lift everyone off a settled planet in an emergency. Nobody must ever be left behind. Not again.”

“But if we could’ve stayed here…what a world we would have built.”

Yirella rested her cheek on the top of his head. “You really are an old romantic at heart, aren’t you?”

“I just believe in us, that’s all. I mean, look at it!” Dellian gestured extravagantly at the planet. “We did that! It was a lump of naked rock when our ancestors arrived. Fifty years to terraform it. Fifty years—that’s how long it took us to give life to a whole planet! And it’s brilliant.”

“It’s tragic.”

“It’ll still be here when this is all over. We were careful; no signal ever escaped. They don’t know humans were here, and they never will, now.”

“I hope you’re right. All the worlds in this system have terrestrial life on them now—bacteria in the comets, lichen on the asteroids, weird frogs on Cathar’s moons.” She grinned at the memory.