Day one hundred and eighty-two without a signal from Earth. I write it on the whiteboard in the galley because someone should, and because the habit is the only thing keeping the days from sliding into one another. I am Nova, thirty-three, an astrobiologist, and I came to Helios to look for life under the ice of Europa. Since the solar storm, I have been looking for it in one other person instead.
Commander Idris Vale is in the maintenance ring with a panel open, as he is every morning at this hour. Ex-military, security, a file that arrived with half its pages black. In six months I have learned that he takes his coffee without anything, that he sleeps four hours, and that he has never once raised his voice.
“Filter three,” he says without turning. “Pressure's drifting again.”
“I saw.” I kneel beside him. The ring is narrow. Our shoulders touch, as they always do here, and as always neither of us moves away. The hum of the life support is so constant it has become a kind of silence.
He hands me the tool without looking, and I take it without looking, and for a moment we are simply two people who have kept each other alive for half a year. Then I notice his sleeve is pushed up, and on his forearm there is a tattoo I have never seen: coordinates, and a date three years before the mission. I know the date. Everyone on this program knows that date.
He follows my eyes. He doesn't pull the sleeve down. He goes on working, and the panel light flickers over his face, and he says, evenly, “You can ask. I might not answer. But you can ask.” The ring hums. Earth is a silence two hundred million kilometres away. His arm is warm against mine, and he has just opened a door he has kept sealed for one hundred and eighty-two days.
