Chapter 2: THE THREE-METER CRUCIBLE
Reaction control thrusters fired along the bow, sending a muted, bone-deep thrum through the composite deck plates of the primary bridge. Nine hundred meters of titanium ribbing and carbon-nanotube skin drifted sideways across the terminator line. Outside the forward optical feeds, the militarized International Space Station Staging Node hung against the curving sapphire bulge of the Pacific. It looked less like a laboratory and more like an orbital shipyard welded onto a fortress.
Christina stood at the center of the elevated command riser, her booted feet locked into the magnetic floor strips. She kept her hands clasped behind the small of her back, where the tailored charcoal fabric of her flagship tunic pulled taut across her shoulder blades. Around her, the tiered stations of the bridge glowed in cool, clinical blues. Above every console, recessed into the matte-grey bulkhead junctions, the tiny white status diodes of the ISO optical nodes burned without blinking.
Six hours had passed since the central hub briefing. The dry assembly cradle was already thirty kilometers astern, receding into the dark, and Proxima I was sliding under her own sub-light maneuvering thrusters for the first time. Every telemetry packet, every heart rate spike, and every shift of posture on the flight deck was rising via laser link to Geneva with a two-second orbital bounce.
Below the riser, Master Navigator Natalie Martinez leaned over the primary helm yoke. The low-cut collar of her charcoal pilot tunic left the warm olive skin of her throat and upper chest bare to the bridge's chilled, recycled air. Her dark espresso hair was braided tight to her skull, exposing the tense line of her jaw as her fingers danced across the haptic attitude controls.
"Lateral translation at zero-point-four meters per second," Natalie called out, her voice crisp and pitched for the overhead audio pickups. "Closing on the dorsal expansion ring. Range two hundred meters, alignment within three millimeters of nominal."
Executive Officer Blake Lively stood directly behind the helm pit, one gloved hand braced on the anodized rail separating navigation from tactical. Her honey-blonde braid hung straight down between her shoulder blades like a plumb line. She wore her utility harness cinched tight over her navy-trimmed uniform, emphasizing the long, athletic cut of her waist and hips as she leaned in to cross-check the approach vectors.
"Velocity?" Blake asked.
"Dropping to zero-point-two," Natalie replied without looking up from the glowing reticle on her glass. "Firing forward verniers in three, two, mark."
A short, sharp hiss vibrated through the forward spine as nitrogen-hydrazine thrusters spat white vapor into the vacuum. On the main volumetric display, the sprawling silhouette of the ISS Staging Node expanded until its armored fuel modules and skeletal radiator wings filled the projection field. Harsh halogen floodlights mounted along the station's docking gantry washed over Proxima I's unpainted bow, turning the bare deflector rings into blinding silver arcs.
Christina watched the telemetry waterfalls scroll across her repeater screen. She did not correct their vectors, because there was nothing to correct. Earth-side parliamentary auditors were watching this docking sequence over breakfast coffee in Brussels and Beijing, waiting for a ragged burn or a barked correction to justify another committee inquiry into the crew roster. Instead, they were getting a machine operated by statues.
To the left of the helm, Katheryn Winnick occupied the internal security console, her steel-blue eyes tracking both the station's external hull sensors and the internal corridor feeds. The deep neckline of her armored base tunic framed the dense muscle of her collarbones and the pale swell of her chest beneath the navy blast plates. Beside her, Anya Taylor-Joy stood braced against the bulkhead in full strike-grade armor, her wide-set hazel eyes fixed on the station's airlock geometry as if calculating how much plastic explosive it would take to crack the seal.
"Station telemetry shows minor thermal expansion on the ring's outer truss; do we adjust the magnetic latch tolerances?" Blake asked, turning her head slightly toward the riser.
The ice-blue gaze met Christina's across five meters of open deck. There was no hesitation in Blake's posture, only the clean, deferential geometry of a second-in-command presenting a variable for executive stamp. Behind that professional calm, Christina caught the faint, rapid pulse beating at the hollow of Blake's throat, the solitary proof that the woman felt the weight of four billion eyes at her back.
"Hold primary tolerances," Christina said, her voice even and unhurried. "Let the hydraulic collars force the seating. The station truss was built to take our mass."
"Aye, Ma'am. Holding primary latch profile." Blake turned back to the pit, her hand dropping briefly to brush the reinforced fabric of Natalie's shoulder as she leaned over the console. "Helm, bring the dorsal collar in hard on the three-point capture ring. No soft-dock delay."
"Hard capture confirmed," Natalie said. A faint, predatory trace of a smile touched the corner of her mouth as her fingers keyed the final Vernier pulse. "Ten meters. Five. Contact in three, two, one."
The impact arrived not as a crash, but as a low, resonant clang that rolled down the nine-hundred-meter keel like distant artillery. Twelve titanium docking claws slammed home against the station's armored collar. High-torque electric winches whined inside the overhead bulkheads, drawing the two vessels together until the synthetic elastomer seals compressed under forty tons of mechanical preload.
A second, heavier shudder ran through the floor plates. On the master status board, twelve amber indicators flipped simultaneously to solid green.
"Hard dock achieved," Natalie announced, lifting her hands cleanly from the yoke, palms open to the overhead cameras to show the console was locked out. "Mechanical coupling at one hundred percent. Inertial dampeners slaved to station attitude control."
From the forward access trunk came the muffled, rhythmic thump of pressure valves opening. Compressed nitrogen and oxygen hissed through the umbilical manifolds, equalizing the three-meter transfer tunnel between Proxima I's dorsal spine and the station's militarized expansion ring. The bridge air system adjusted with a brief, popping pressure shift against Christina's eardrums.
"Atmosphere equalized at one hundred and one kilopascals," Blake reported, straightening to her full five-foot-ten height and squaring her shoulders toward the command riser. "Umbilical power and data hardlines are live. Station Quartermaster requests permission to begin antimatter canister transfer to the stern containment pods."
Christina released her magnetic boot locks and took one measured step down from the riser. The gold trim of her collar caught the blue console light as she surveyed the five women on the forward deck, and beyond them, the twelve white camera lenses embedded in the bridge dome. Every uniform was immaculate; every chin was set at the precise angle the selection tribunal had paid trillions of dollars to purchase.
"Grant engineering clearance for the fuel transfer," Christina said, stopping beside Blake's rail so close she could smell the clean, sharp scent of starch and warm skin rising from her XO's collar. "Commander Winnick, take Specialist Taylor-Joy and secure the station-side gantry before the rest of the cadre crosses the seal. We have forty-eight hours of high-G integration drills and payload loading inside those modules, and the station personnel are not ISO-vetted to our standard."
Katheryn unlocked her console harness with a sharp metallic click. "Understood, Captain. No station personnel within ten meters of our hatch without my visual clear."
"XO, with me at the dorsal airlock," Christina finished, holding Blake's eyes for a fraction of a second longer than protocol required before turning toward the main lift. "Let's go meet our hosts."
The dorsal airlock swallowed them one at a time, and then they were inside the umbilical.
The transfer tunnel was a three-meter bore of titan-weave sleeving, its interior lit by strip lamps that strobed past as they hand-over-handed along the guide rails. Christina moved first, Blake a meter behind and offset, their boots magnetized to the walk strip in alternating rhythm. The ship's pristine composite gave way at the station collar to bare aluminum ribbing, to cable runs taped in place by someone in a hurry years ago. The air changed. Proxima I had smelled of outgassing composite and new manufacture; the station smelled of hydrazine residue, machine oil, and the cold metallic tang of fuel operations baked into every surface.
"Twenty-two years of crew passing through this throat," Blake said, voice low. "You can feel it."
"Feel the grip, Commander." Christina hooked the next rail. "Zero-g takes the unconditioned first."
At the station-side gantry, Katheryn landed ahead of them and stopped moving entirely. Anya came through behind her, pale braids floating loose for a moment before she tucked them back under her collar fitting, and the two of them took the junction like a squad room: Katheryn at the hatch, Anya angled outward with a sightline down the transshipment ring in both directions.
Station workers were already visible at the far bulkhead, six of them in grey coveralls, mag-boots clamped to the deck, hauling tether lines for the canister rails. One lifted a hand in greeting.
"Hold there," Katheryn said. The words carried flat down the ring. "ISO protocol seven-one-two. No station personnel within ten meters of the Proxima I access seal without clearance authentication."
The worker lowered his hand. "We've got a transfer schedule."
"Then your schedule includes ten meters." Katheryn's steel-blue eyes went from his face to his chest patch, reading it without expression. "You'll receive the manifest handshake from Specialist Taylor-Joy. You will not approach the seal. Confirm."
A pause, the small war of a man deciding whether a woman in armored charcoal with security insignia was worth arguing with in front of four billion viewers. "Confirmed."
Anya drifted to the ten-meter line and planted herself on it, arms crossed over her blast plates, wide-set hazel eyes tracking each worker individually, cataloguing them the way she had catalogued the camera grid. Christina watched the perimeter snap taut and said nothing, because it needed saying nothing.
She and Blake pushed off down the transshipment ring toward the fuel manifold deck. The station's interior was utilitarian in a way that bordered on neglect: exposed coolant piping running bare along the overhead, guide rails worn bright at the hand positions by two decades of gloves, halogen work lamps bolted in clusters that threw hard-edged shadows. At every bulkhead junction a white optical node burned steady, and, newer, a mobile ISO audit drone hung in the ring's centerline, rotating slowly, its lens cluster swiveling to keep them centered as they moved.
"It's following," Blake said.
"It's auditing the fuel transfer," Christina said. "Which is us."
On the manifold deck, Serenay Sarıkaya was already half inside an open containment panel, sealant still smudged along one forearm, a magnetic tool wrist-deck strapped above her elbow. She backed out at their arrival and did not salute, again.
"Captain. Twelve canisters, staggered transshipment, forty minutes per unit." She wiped her hands on a rag that only relocated the grime. "The station crew does the rail work. My people do the lock-in. Nobody touches a containment collar but my people."
"Your people are nineteen decks aft," Blake said.
"They started walking an hour ago. I started three hours before that." Serenay keyed the manifold display, and the stern containment pods rendered in amber, six pods, twelve cradles, each canister a sliver of cold antimatter suspended in its own magnetic throat. "First pair is on the rail now."
The first canister came down the guide rail tethered and swaddled in thermal blanketing, handled by two station workers at the permitted distance, then caught by Mackenzie Foy at the pod interface, the Systems & Propulsion Specialist's small frame braced against the collar as the cradle jaws opened. Christina stood at Blake's shoulder at the manifold console, close enough that their harnesses nearly touched, and both of them watched the telemetry scroll.
The audit drone hung two meters off the deck, lens cluster locked on the canister.
On the pod's status column, a number climbed out of its green band. The thermal trace on the canister housing rose past nominal in slow, steady ticks, one-tenth of a degree per minute, then two-tenths.
"Cryostat balance drifting on unit one," Mackenzie called. "Saturation margin narrowing."
"Balancing valve," Serenay said, already moving. "It's the station's feed line, not our pod. Their thermal preconditioning ran hot; the expansion junction is choking the return loop." She pulled a stowed actuator bar from the panel, kicked off the deck, and crossed to the junction piping in a single flat trajectory. One turn. A precise quarter-turn, timed against the pressure differential she was reading off her wrist-deck without pausing to look at it.
The hiss in the line shifted key. On the display, the thermal trace peaked at one-point-four degrees over and folded back into green like a wave settling.
"Return loop equalized," Serenay said, drifting back to the console. "Whoever maintained this junction last should be reassigned to something without valves." She looked at Christina. "Remaining ten canisters will go clean. The margin was their side, never ours."
"Logged as a station-side anomaly," Blake said, entering it. "Ground review will see the drone's footage of your correction before they see my report."
"Then they'll see a quarter-turn," Serenay said, and went back into the panel.
Christina stood a moment longer at the console. Blake's hand rested on the rail beside hers, two centimeters of bare rail between them, and under the overhead lamps she could see the fine sheen of exertion at her XO's temple, the immaculate braid slightly loosened at the crown from the tunnel transit. Neither of them moved their hands. The drone's lens rotated toward them, patient, and Christina lifted her chin a degree, giving it the officer it was instructed to record.
"First pair locked," Mackenzie confirmed. "Cradle jaws at full preload."
"XO," Christina said, pushing off the rail. "The cadre is suited and staged. We have a simulator bay two rings forward and forty-eight hours to make twenty-two women one machine."
Blake released the console and turned with her, falling into position off Christina's left shoulder as naturally as breathing. "Station's high-G bay is rated for six bodies in rotation. We'll run the rest in waves."
"Then wave one is ours," Christina said, and led the way forward down the ring, past the ten-meter line where Katheryn and Anya stood their post, into the station's deeper industrial dark.
The high-G bay announced itself by sound before sight: a deep subsonic hum bleeding through two pressure hatches, the resonance of a centrifuge ring the size of a ship's keel turning somewhere below the deck. Then the hatch opened and the space swallowed them whole.
It was a cavern stripped from some industrial hell, forty meters across, ringed by acceleration pods and zero-g harness grids that hung from the overhead like silver spiderwebs. Mock airlock chambers stood clustered at the far arc, their hatches scarred by years of breach drills. Halogen floods threw hard white planes across bare titanium. High on the curved walls, ISO optical nodes studded every junction, dozens of them, all burning steady.
"Padded rigs, full harness, magnetic boots cycled," the station bay tech said, and then stepped back, because the cadre was already moving.
Katheryn hit the harness rack first and worked down the row, checking each of her five with a hard yank at the composite webbing. Anya took the adjustment without looking away from the mock airlocks. Natalie dropped into the nearest acceleration pod and pulled the five-point harness until the straps bit through her tunic, then released one centimeter, precisely, the way a pilot released straps.
Blake stood at the rack beside Christina, feeding the webbing through its buckle with quick, economical pulls.
"Tension check," Blake said, and turned her back.
Christina set her gloved hands at the base of Blake's harness and hauled the shoulder straps down and tight. The fabric compressed; Blake's breath went shallow against the load, ribs expanding against Christina's knuckles on the exhale. She cinched the waist strap last, then gave the whole rig one final test-jerk that lifted Blake half a centimeter off the deck.
"Secure," Christina said.
Blake turned and did the same for her, hands moving across the webbing with a touch that was impersonal and thorough and left the straps molded to Christina's body like a second skin. Their eyes held for a moment at zero distance. Above them, a node burned.
"Scenario brief," Blake called, stepping back. "Simulated emergency decompression at the ring's starboard mock-up. Three-G sustained rotation, zero-g vector shift at the sixty-second mark, breach team seals and stabilizes within four minutes. Station record is four-fifty."
"The station record is for men who sleep eight hours a night," Katheryn said, dropping her helmet liner into place. "Three-forty."
"Three-forty," Christina confirmed, sealing her own collar. "Winnick leads the breach. Martinez, you own the rotation. Lively, you're my shadow. Go."
The centrifuge engaged.
The acceleration built the way it always did, not as a push but as a weight, the ring's rotation dragging blood toward the feet, the harness biting into shoulders and thighs. Christina's vision narrowed gently at the edges at two-G, held at three. The whine of the drive arms rose to a scream she felt in her sternum more than heard. Beside her, Blake's jaw was set, sweat already cutting a line from her temple down the taut strap of her neck.
"Decompression event," the bay AI announced. Klaxons. The mock airlock chamber ahead of them began venting theatrical atmosphere, fog screaming across the deck, and the hatch seal blew its simulated fragment with a bang that rang off forty meters of titanium.
Katheryn went through the fog like a blade. Anya behind her, low, blast plate leading, one hand slamming the emergency spool onto the breached frame. Natalie's hands moved on the rotation override, feathering the centrifuge's speed, trading G-load for approach angle with a pilot's casual brutality. Christina's legs burned, three-G turning every step into a controlled act of will, and she crossed the deck anyway, deck plates hammering at her soles, and took the manual isolation valve in both hands and hauled it through its arc while her shoulders screamed.
Then the vector shift.
The ring's rotation cut and the floor went away. Three-G collapsed to nothing in half a heartbeat and Christina's inner ear dissolved; her body kept trying to fall in three directions at once. Blake caught her, one gloved hand locked on her harness across the chest, and Christina caught her back, and for two full seconds the two of them hung in the sudden zero-g with their weight on each other's grip, breathing hard, faces a handspan apart.
"Vector shift," Blake said, ragged, close enough that Christina felt the word more than heard it.
"I felt it."
They pushed apart on the same beat and went back to work. In the drifting fog, Katheryn's strike team sealed the breach frame link by link, Anya's hands steady and fast on the spool, and Natalie killed the venting simulation with a clean hold on the flow controls. The klaxons died. The silence afterward was enormous, broken only by twenty sets of lungs pulling air.
"Stabilization complete," Katheryn announced. "Three-twenty-six."
The score read out on the bay's main display in amber, and under it, the station record, crossed out by nothing at all. Somewhere overhead, a hundred optical nodes had recorded every gram of it, every spike, every hand.
The ring wound down over five slow minutes, the hum dropping through octaves, and gravity returned as a soft settling into their joints. Christina released her harness with a click of composite and stepped out of the rig, and her knees informed her exactly what three-G had cost. Sweat ran freely down her spine under the tunic. Blake landed beside her, hair escaping its braid in pale tendrils at her temples, chest heaving.
"Four minutes wasn't the record," Blake said between breaths. "It was the trap."
"And we beat the trap by eighty-four seconds." Christina pulled her collar open a single notch, letting the bay's chilled air hit her throat, aware of the nearest node and unconcerned. "Debrief, port console, ten minutes. Hydrate first."
Katheryn crossed the deck toward them, unstrapping her helmet liner, moving like the drill had been a warm-up. She stopped at the console, keyed the replay, and the breach sequence bloomed in the volumetric display, five women in fog and weight, flawless.
"One correction," she said, tapping Anya's spool placement. "Frame anchor sits ten centimeters aft in true vacuum. Anything else, we fly it as drilled."
Christina watched the frozen image of her own hands on the isolation valve, and Blake's hand on her harness, both preserved in amber light for Geneva to review at leisure.
"Fly it as drilled," she said, and reached for the water line.
The water line dispensed lukewarm recycled stream and Christina drank it without tasting, watching the bay's main display hold the amber 3:26 above the crossed-out station record like a flag planted in someone else's soil.
"Observation dome," she said to Blake, quietly, off the side of the console pickup. "Ten minutes. Then we pull the cadre home."
Blake unclipped her harness rail and followed without question.
The forward observation bay sat two pressure hatches beyond the simulator complex, a dome of layered borosilicate glass canted toward Earth, and it was the first room Christina had entered in ninety days that had no console in it. Just benches, a stowed exercise kit, and glass. She keyed the hatch open and the light hit her like weather.
Earth filled the lower third of the dome, the Pacific turning beneath them in a single vast curving limb, cyclone systems spiraling white off the equator, the terminator a hard line of burning gold advancing across the day side. Above the curve, the station's militarized gantries reached out like the ribs of a half-built cathedral, fuel silos and radiator fins and laser comm masts strung with running lights. And locked into the dorsal expansion ring, nine hundred meters of unyielding grey, Proxima I hung with her bow pointed away from all of it, at the dark.
Blake braced both hands on the glass rail and breathed. The harness marks still ridged her tunic at the shoulders; the braid had given up entirely on one side, honey-blonde strands drifting loose in the station's low spin gravity.
"Eighty-four seconds under the trap," Blake said. "Geneva will have the footage before their lunch."
"Geneva can frame it." Christina lowered herself onto the bench, and only when she was sitting did she allow the three-G to arrive in her thighs as a deep, humming ache. "Nobody's in this dome but us and one lens."
There was. It burned steady above the hatch, white and patient.
"So talk to it," Blake said, and there was something almost like humor in it, and underneath the humor something raw. She turned back to the glass. "Daniel watches, doesn't he. He told you he would."
"He watches." Christina looked at Earth instead of the lens. "Houston downlink carries the public feed. He texted after the boarding. One line. The ship's bigger than the house." She let the silence sit a moment. "Twelve years of marriage and he compresses it into a message a teenager would send."
"Is that complaint or gratitude?"
Christina considered it honestly. "Gratitude. If he wrote what he actually felt, I'd read it, and then I'd be his for the rest of the transit, and there are twenty women behind that hatch who need me to be nobody's." She rubbed the ache out of one knee. "Yours?"
Blake's jaw worked once. "There's no one. You know that. The academy took the years the marriage would have needed." She paused, and her ice-blue eyes came around, and for a moment the composed XO was simply a woman of twenty-nine looking at a woman leaving everything. "But I understand the arithmetic. You do the countdown the whole time. Days to separation burn. Days to four-minute light lag. Days to when a message sent home stops being a conversation and becomes a letter."
"And after that it becomes a memory with a delay," Christina said. "The charter knows. That's why the lenses are everywhere. They're not watching for treason, Blake. They're watching for grief doing damage."
"Then let them watch us grieve well."
The words came out flat and final, and Christina heard in them the whole architecture of the woman she had chosen as XO: the record of never giving concessions, extended now to her own interior life. She stood, and the standing cost her something, and she paid it.
"Debrief is over," she said. "Sound the cadre. We cross the seal."
The corridor outside the dome had already filled. Twenty-two women in charcoal and navy moved through the station ring in a loose column of pairs, and the station's own personnel flattened themselves against bulkheads to let the formation pass, and above every junction the white nodes burned, and Christina understood suddenly that the formation itself was the answer to the grid. Twenty-two women who could not have a private hour would have a public one, and they would make it excellent.
At the Proxima I access seal, the trouble was waiting for them.
A station quartermaster stood at the threshold with a datapad and the particular confidence of a man holding a form. He was older, silver at the temples, station service patches up both sleeves, and he planted himself directly on Katheryn's ten-meter line as if the line were decorative.
"Commander Lively." He lifted the datapad. "Administrative verification. ISO audit directive seventeen requires a crew manifest cross-check and personal effects inspection before final uncoupling. Station-side obligation. Fifteen minutes per officer."
Katheryn was already moving toward him, but Blake got there first, and Christina let her.
Blake stopped one meter inside his reach and did not look at the datapad. She looked at him, at full height, the loose strands of her braid still escaping at her temples and somehow making it worse for him.
"Directive seventeen governs station stores and station personnel," Blake said. "It does not govern ISO vessel crews. Proxima I's manifest was authenticated in Geneva, biometrically, at boarding. There is nothing on this ship or in this crew for you to verify."
"I have station authority to," he began.
"You have station authority over station property." Blake's voice did not rise. It dropped instead, into a register Christina had only heard her use once before, at the tribunal, and the corridor around them went quiet enough to hear the life-support manifolds hum. "This seal is a sovereign ISO boundary. If you cross it without my written authorization, I will have you removed by Commander Winnick, and the removal will be on the live feed, with your name on it, and directive seventeen will not protect you from the review board that watches four billion people watch you delay an antimatter-carrying vessel's departure schedule. Do you want your fifteen minutes per officer now, Commander, or do you want to survive this shift?"
The quartermaster looked past her shoulder. Katheryn had arrived at Blake's flank and was looking at him with the specific unblinking patience of a woman who had ended arguments permanently in worse places. Anya, at the ten-meter line, had turned her head slightly, and was watching the way one watches a door she might have to go through.
The quartermaster keyed his datapad off. "Station-side obligation is noted as... declined."
"Not declined. Out of scope." Blake stepped aside, clearing the seal. "You're welcome aboard for a water top-off. Under escort. Declined."
He left. The column exhaled as one body.
Katheryn spoke to the air between them. "Twelve of twelve canisters locked in the stern pods, cradle preloads at full, gantry clear, station personnel withdrawn to ring nine. Umbilical purged and pressure-tested. We can cast off whenever you say, Captain."
"Say it from inside," Christina said. "Cadre, cross the seal. Home."
The umbilical took them back one by one, twenty-two women hand over hand through the three-meter throat, and the smell changed from hydrazine and old aluminum to outgassing composite and new manufacture, and Christina felt the shift land in the crew as something almost like a spoken word. This was the hull they would die in or not die in. It knew them.
The bridge filled and emptied and filled, stations taking their bodies the way sockets take plugs. Natalie dropped into the helm pit and her hands found the attitude controls before her harness was done. Serenay's voice arrived on the engineering channel from eight decks aft, sealant on her forearm again by the sound of it.
"Stern pods confirm twelve for twelve. Drive stack is warm and hungry. Give me the word."
"XO, release the station," Christina said from the riser.
Blake stood at her own console and keyed the separation sequence, and her voice went out over the ring speakers, formal and unhurried.
"Proxima I to ISS Staging Node. Separation in thirty seconds. Stand clear of the dorsal collar."
The umbilical retracted first, the three-meter throat folding away in pantograph sections, and then the winches ran backward and the twelve titanium docking claws released in staggered pairs, each one a deep structural thump Christina felt in the riser's magnetic deck strips, the ship letting go of the station one grip at a time. On the volumetric display, the two hulls drifted apart by centimeters that became meters.
"Collar clear," Natalie said. "Verniers to station-keeping. Requesting burn authority."
"Burn authority granted," Christina said. "Take us out, Navigator."
"Internal power to propulsion," Serenay confirmed, and the hum came up through the keel, the deep low-frequency note of the fusion drive spinning its cycle to life, a sound Christina had only heard in tests and now would hear for six years. "Stacks at idle burn. She's yours, Martinez."
Natalie feathered the main drive and Proxima I leaned forward. Not a lurch; a lean, a long deliberate falling toward the dark, the station's floodlights sliding backward across the bare deflector rings and falling behind. The militarized gantries receded. The radiator wings shrank to needles of light.
"Clearing the satellite net," Natalie called, voice level and quick. "Geostationary band in four minutes, debris shell above that. Vector's clean."
Blake read the confirmation waterfall at her station. "Ground control transmits godspeed and a request for hourly telemetry. Geneva signs off our departure window."
"Hourly telemetry for four years," Christina said. "Then the letters begin."
She looked forward, past her crew, past the burning white nodes studding the command dome, to the main optical feed, where Earth had become a brilliant blue coin losing itself against a black so total the stars looked punched through it. The coin was behind them now, shrinking. Ahead, in the display's far corner, a small red point burned steady: Proxima Centauri, waiting four point two light-years out with an engineered sky.
"Course to the target vector, helm," Christina said. "All departments confirm operational readiness for main drive ignition at High Earth Orbit."
"Navigation confirms."
"Engineering confirms," said Serenay, on the channel.
"Security confirms," said Katheryn, from the console at Christina's left, steel-blue eyes on her internal feeds.
"Command confirms," Blake said, and took her position at the XO's station, one pace down and right of the riser, exactly where the geometry of the next six years had already put her.
The white eyes burned. The coin of Earth winked out behind the deflector housing. Nine hundred meters of ship fell together toward the red point, and Christina Hendricks stood her riser and let it fall.
"Steady as she goes," she said. "We're going."