‘I’m going to assume you haven’t heard from home either,’ Lei said. ‘We’re pretty sure we know why. We arrived day before yesterday, but there’s no signal from the ground. There’s no anything from the ground. We tried calling the lunar base, and that pinged back, but it’s an automated signal. Their equipment works, but nobody’s home. So we roped in the nearest satellite, and . . . well, it’s fried. They all are – nothing’s responding to us. We’re still gathering info, but everything points toward a massive geomagnetic storm.’

Oh, was my first thought. Of course. And then: Oh. Oh, no. No.

I don’t know how to describe what I felt as the magnitude of what happened dawned on me, without insulting what you on the ground have gone through in the wake of the sun’s betrayal. What is my upset, compared with yours? I cannot imagine what you have endured. The technology I live in – the technology Earth built for us – did not fail, has never failed. We have not starved, or frozen. We have not sat shivering in the dark while our food spoiled and our vehicles lay paralysed. And worst of all, we knew this could happen. We’ve been impotently worrying about what a solar flare could do to electronic infrastructure since the 1900s. But my generation was so preoccupied with fixing the mess left by the unaddressed-and-fully-known-about environmental disaster of the previous generation that we committed the same sin of criminal procrastination against yours. I ask no forgiveness for this, because we deserve none. I do not know what conditions were like for you and yours; I can only guess that it has been devastating, given your silence lasting years and not months. How much have you rebuilt? How much could be salvaged?

How many of us are left?

‘We’re going to land this evening,’ Lei said. ‘We don’t know who’ll be down there or if anyone’s waiting for us, but the good news is, since our comms are working, we’ll be able to contact you again once we get the shape of things. Tomorrow, hopefully. Uh, the one thing, though’ – his face went wooden as he tried to keep his tone neutral – ‘we suffered some damage to our hull somewhere along the way here. Not sure how yet, but we’ve got a bunch of yellow lights.’

‘Oh, God,’ I whispered. A damaged hull can mean a lot of things. Some are innocuous. Many are not. One is the possibility of burning up in re-entry. And with no way to call ground crew for support, and no one waiting to pick Lawki 5 up if they needed to eject . . . The astronaut in me had been trained for the risk every one of us faced, had no illusions about our mortality. The human in me couldn’t help but feel sick.

Lei’s face suggested he mirrored my feelings on both fronts. ‘We’re sending you all our mission reports, just in case, uh – but really, don’t worry. Plan on having drinks with us when you’re home, yeah? Be safe out there. We’ll call you tomorrow.’

The video ended. I’d never felt the air in that room sit so heavy.

‘They could go to the Moon,’ Chikondi said. ‘They could wait it out there.’

‘Wait it out for how long?’ Jack said, not unkindly. ‘We know how waiting it out goes.’

‘I’d want to go home, too,’ Elena said. ‘I’d want to know. I’d want to help.’

‘Besides, there’s no telling when the base was abandoned,’ I said. ‘Functional comms doesn’t mean life support is working.’ I shook my head, my stomach refusing to settle.

Elena squeezed my shoulder. ‘We’ll wait for tomorrow,’ she said. ‘That’s all we can do.’

Tomorrow arrived, followed by another, and another, and another.

Lawki 5 did not contact us again.

When the day never ends and the world has no rhythm, it becomes vital for you to make one of your own. I slept like a teenager my first weeks on Votum, letting my body determine its ebb and flow. I did not pay attention to the time on the clock. I drank when thirsty, worked until I needed rest, rested until bored. I never abandoned protocol, but I did not need rigid checklists to follow it. I knew the rules. I knew what needed doing. I wrote myself reminders, not marching orders. I did not chide myself for days in which I did nothing but nap and make a salad, because they were paired with days where I fixed, dug, sampled, studied. Sometimes I went for walks outside – not fieldwork, not exploratory hikes. Just walks. There was a destination I came to enjoy quite by accident – a crumbling ridge overlooking a hypnotisingly flat plain – and no matter where else I wandered to, I often ended up right back there, following the foot-wide trail worn by my steps alone.

I did not feel joy in this simplicity, as I did on Aecor. I don’t know what to call the feeling. ‘Emptiness’ sounds depressing, ‘stillness’ dull. I think that Votum is like the mirror in my cabin. It doesn’t presume anything, doesn’t force any decisions. It doesn’t angle itself toward me. It just lets me think. I respect it deeply for this.

After each walk, I’d return to the Merian coated with a fine layer of red dust, clinging to my suit like a second skin. I loved watching it dance around me in the airlock as the fans brushed it loose. The particles formed murmurations, which gently twisted toward the vents as they were shooed back outside. Every time, as I watched the dirt disappear, as the sterilising plasma wreathed me in swirls of airy purple, I stepped back into my craft feeling a little bit lighter than I had the time before. I know it was only my suit that was cleaned, but something nameless – something that had originated within me – was scattered to the wind along with the dust. Whatever it was, I did not need it back.

Chikondi burst into the cabin, waking both me and Elena. ‘Cubesats,’ he gasped. He started to say something else, but gave up, frantically gesturing at us. ‘Water,’ he managed.

We threw on clothes and ran.

Jack was in the data lab, furiously entering commands into the console. ‘It’s coming in now,’ he said.

‘What’s coming in?’ Elena said.

An image spread across the screen: Votum from above, a parched rockface with the occasional accent of airy cloud. I’d seen this patch we were looking at before, a series of canyons the team back home had nicknamed the Furrows. The telescopes in Earth’s orbit hadn’t been able to see what lay inside them, but we could. The grand majority of them were empty – geologic wrinkles, nothing more. But in one, way down deep in the shadows, there lay something promising. A reflective sliver. A filament a casual glance would miss entirely.

We held our breath.

An enormous smile spread across Jack’s face. ‘Told you,’ he whispered.

‘This looks like a good landing site,’ I said, pointing at a plateau near the canyons. ‘I know we just got the lab set up, but—’

Chikondi started gathering everything that wasn’t bolted down: styluses, water bottles, someone’s jacket. The message was received. We were packing up, and we were doing it now.

We launched, and landed.

We set up camp, again.

We left the Merian at dawn the next day, and hiked some four kilometres out.

We rappelled down the ancient walls into the shaded dark. The canyon wind whistled past, greeting us ghostily.

We walked for a time, our footsteps echoing in all directions. Had there been such echoes in this canyon before? I wondered. Was the air here accustomed to carrying sounds beyond those it created on its own?