The sky had been so brilliantly blue back home. I hate that at the end, all I see is black, black, black.

“What does it look like to you?” my sister asked, never slowing her swinging as her pudgy hand pointed at a fluffy nimbus cloud.

I kept pace with her, even if swinging so high made my stomach roll. I considered the white blob, my mind working to come up with a suitable answer.

“A spaceship.”

Marie snorted, the golden pigtails of her hair trailing behind her as she swung higher and higher.

“No way. It’s a pony.”

It was that perfect midwestern summer day; the cicadas screeching in the trees and the air hanging thick with humidity. The water of the lake across the park caught the sun in lines of brilliant white reflection, and I hoped soon Daddy would take us swimming to escape the heat.

I wrinkled my nose at Marie, skidding my heels in the dirt until I came to a stop.

“It’s my opinion. Opinions can’t be wrong.”

She didn’t skid to a stop, instead letting herself slow down naturally.

“A stupid opinion.”

When her swing finally came to a stop, I was preparing to storm away and tell on her, when she spoke up again, a thin, frightened note in her voice.

“T-Tara? Is your helmet cracked?”

I paused, fear skittering through me. “What?”

Her eyes were wide, pupils blown from terror. “Is your helmet cracked?”

I reached my shaking, gloved hand to the glass of my helmet, tracing the lines of the cracks, spreading through the face of my helmet like the roots of a tree.

Suddenly, I’m not on the slightly rusty playground outside of our vacation cabin. Instead, I’m in the shattered wreck of the Crete, the rudderless hulk of the cruiser being taken by gravity.

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

🦇🦇🦇

The USS Cydonia had been tasked with establishing an orbit around Saturn to get a closer look at one of the more promising moons, Titan. We had planned to drop high-definition cameras and probes onto the surface and have the information beamed directly back to us. Still, in order to do so we had to get closer than the enormous Cydonia would allow. Sure, NASA could have made the delicate tools a little more rugged, and a little smarter, to make the journey from the Cydonia to Titan independently, but they had a better idea.

NASA had been toying with the idea of smaller, more agile space cruisers that could launch from the bigger ships for years. Of course, the upfront cost for one of these manned cruisers would be high, but the hope was that they could be used time and time again to collect samples and launch the so-called ‘dummy’ gear closer to the target destination, eliminating the need for complicated automation.

So, with the mission to Titan looming, it was finally time to test the cruiser out. It had been docked on the Cydonia, stocked the scientific payload for Titan, and I had been chosen to be its first pilot.

I had been the pilot for rocket planes back on Earth before I became an astronaut, and that certain skill set made me a sure thing for the SC Crete’s maiden voyage. I’ve flown simulation after simulation and even piloted a prototype in low Earth orbit. When we were given the green light, there had been little fear in me.

But it was different now. Now I was afraid.

There had been six of us on the Cydonia, and besides maintaining their position to wait for my return, their sole job had been to monitor my flight and recall me if there were any issues.

Their voices had crackled over the radio almost constantly when I first launched, threads of exhilaration and anxiety in their words, but eventually they had gone silent, only checking in every thirty minutes as required. It would be hours before I returned, and the novelty had briefly worn off.

Incredible that any of us could ever tire of anything out here in the sprawling blackness of the universe. Nearly my entire field of vision was Saturn now, encircled, yellow-grey, and all-consuming, and Titan a flaxen target growing closer and closer. I had been warned repeatedly that the scale of it all would mess with me once I was out here in the smaller cruiser, but I hadn’t really understood until I was finally free of the Cydonia, just a tiny metal grain in a sea of giants.

“Tara,” the radio had squawked, minutes before disaster. “This is Jonathan of the USS Cydonia. Status report?”

“All clear,” I answered robotically.

“Confirmed.”

There was no reason to worry. Jonathan and the rest of the Cydonia had eyes on me.

Right? Didn’t they?

The micrometeoroid would have been almost impossible to detect, probably a chipped-off piece of a P-type asteroid orbiting somewhere nearby. I didn’t blame the rest of my crew. I couldn’t. I just hoped they wouldn’t carry my death on their shoulders forever.

It struck like dark lightning, only slightly bigger than a quarter, but swift enough to destroy the glass half-globe of the windshield in front of me effortlessly. The Crete didn’t notice right away, still rocketing forward, leaving pieces of glass behind it. The meteoroid exited with nearly the same force it had entered, punching a hole through both my air recycler and the hull before resuming its eternal voyage through the skies. A mindless, rocky mercenary.

It seemed to have taken less than a millisecond. I think I forgot to breathe at first, just watching in mute horror as every light and screen on the control panel switched from green to red in an instant. At first, the vacuum from outside of the ship pulled at me from both holes in the ship, but within seconds the debris from the trashed air recycler clogged the smaller hull hole and everything that had been sucked downward was suddenly sucked up again, through the hole in the glass.

My shock was so complete that I didn’t even move as a rogue screw from the wreckage pinged off the glass of my helmet, moving faster than I could see, cracking it like a spiderweb. Still sealed, but for how long?

At first, I was filled with panic, but my training kept my spiraling mind contained as my body went through all the protocols. The silence inside my helmet was deafening, but with a few frantic presses of the buttons of the control panel, the radio was swapped from the onboard one to the smaller communicator near my ear. I switched from the dwindling air coming from the destroyed recycler to the small tanks on the back of the suit. Okay… okay. I had a second to think.

“TARA!” someone screamed over the communicator. “We’re reading catastrophic system failures. What’s happening?”

I could feel the forward motion of the cruiser slow as the systems all crashed at once. I probably had little time to talk before the backup battery in my suit went, too.

Steady, I told myself. Steady.

“I’m here… the Crete is disabled. I’ve lost my air supply. I need to be extracted.”

It was still Jonathan on the other end of the call, and he sounded almost as panicked as I did, but he was able to force out the instructions, anyway.

“You’re drifting. Gravity is pulling you off course… you either need to steer towards us or at least remain in one place. It will take us over two hours to reach you, and the farther you drift, the longer it will take.”

“Negative, I’ve lost all control. The engines are dead.”

Jonathan was quiet for a few breaths.

“Repeat?”

“The engines are dead, Jon. The hull is breached.”

It’s then he lost composure, his usually deep voice breaking, “Tara…”

I closed my eyes, ignoring the blaring alarms and the luminous red buttons slowly fading to black.

“I need you to tell me my chances.”

“We’ll never reach you,” he whispered.

All I could say when told the date of my death was “Oh.”

It was that simple. We’ll never reach you. Oh.

I wish it had been different, that living wake, but it wasn’t. None of the other crew members came to tell me goodbye, full of horrified denial. There was just me, the whooshing noise of space desperately trying to pull me from my restraints, Jonathan’s quiet, watery sobs on the other end of the comm, and of course Saturn, taciturn and endless. If I closed my eyes I could almost hear it, too, a greedy siren pulling in just one more satellite.

“Stay with me,” I begged the man on the other side of the comms, on the other side of eternity, as I watched the spiderwebs on my helmet spread wider, millimeter by millimeter. Like frost on a windshield. Like the branching arms of a snowflake.

“I will.”

Jonathan spoke to me no eulogy. He didn’t ask me about my childhood, or my life. Really, he didn’t even speak much at all, but knowing he was there kept me calm. I quieted the alarms coming from inside my helmet, knowing they were distressing him even more, but even they went silent eventually, and I knew my reserves were running low.

The public thinks they understand space, but one that they don’t comprehend is the hairsbreadth between life and death. The hull of a ship, the rubber of an air hose, or in this case, the glass of a helmet.

That distance from death also made them ignorant of the syringe and needle in the necks of our suits, or the specific order of buttons that have to be pressed on the small keypad on our interface to engage it. It ensures that there is always a way out, no matter the situation. Morphine.

As soon as the comm battery died, I’d input the code. All thrust coming from the ship was gone, only being carried by the gravity of Saturn, leaving shards of glass and metal in its wake, glittering like thousands of miniature stars. I was being pulled constantly towards the enormous hole in the windshield, but my harness kept me in my seat. Maybe after the morphine, I’d undo the restraints and become just another object trapped in that eternal orbit. Titan and Iapetus, Enceladus and Mimas, Dione and Tara.

I’m sure the oxygen was getting thin when I slipped into the dream of Marie and me on the swing set. When I’m pulled from the fantasy, however many hours later, even the static of the comm is silent. The batteries are all dead, and I’m truly alone. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

“You’re not alone,” Marie said, crouching next to my seat, somehow seven years old again as she took my gloved hands in her small ones.

“I’m hallucinating,” I told her, aching to tuck her stray, floating hairs behind her round little ears.

“Not alone, not anymore,” Marie assured me, sapphire eyes shiny with tears. “Never again.”

I laughed bitterly, pulling one hand from the grip of my sister and pressing the buttons on my suit to initiate the kill-switch injection. I hyperventilate on the last number… I don’t want to die. I’m not ready.

But eternity is coming for me. My helmet audibly cracks, and like an eggshell tapped on the corner of a bowl, it finally shatters. I should choke as the air is sucked from my lungs, but I’m too sluggish, too euphoric to even try for one last breath.

Space is silent, except for Marie.

“The needle’s empty. You already pressed the buttons, Tara. Now let’s go!”

My skin is flash-freezing, but I lift a hand to my throat… and she’s right. It aches on the side, and when I turn my head, seeking oxygen in some sort of death spasm, I feel the needle tear through my skin.

Marie helps me undo the buckles of my harness. My hands are still working despite the moisture in my eyes having frozen them forever open. But it’s fine. I wouldn’t want to blink and miss this moment, anyway.

When the belts finally fall away, Marie wraps her arms around my neck, and I embrace her as we are pulled into the vacuum, holding her small body close. She weighs nothing. Neither of us do.

Saturn is silent and unforgiving.

Nevertheless, she takes us into its orbit, cradling us, welcoming us, and there we will remain. Sisters spinning amidst her rings–binary stars. Dead, empty, and iced over, until we plummet through the atmosphere thousands of years later, like two tiny renditions of Cassini, burning away long after our mission was complete.

🦇🦇🦇

It had taken so long to get home that by the time Jonathan Nichols, captain of the USS Cydonia, stepped foot onto Earth once more, the world had already grieved and nearly forgotten.

Not him, though. The last breaths of Tara would haunt him for the rest of his days.

NASA, of course, had kept a copy of her obituary, and in search of some sort of closure, Jonathan read it over and over again, before simply looking at the picture of her face, feeling hollow.

The obituary read:

Tara Anderson, age 29, died a hero aboard her vessel, the SC Crete, in a catastrophic accident. She is preceded in death by her father, Don Anderson, who passed at 61, of natural causes, and twin sister Marie Anderson, who passed at age 7, after an accident at the family’s lakeside vacation home.