Hurtling through space at a speed of forty-five thousand kilometers per hour had seemed terribly exciting to Nadya when she first joined the Space Program. Nowadays, she found pod drops almost relaxing. They were the only occasions she was ever truly alone.
She enjoyed working with Aidan and his constant presence kept her from going mad when her life included little to none human interaction for years on end. Yet… she needed some privacy every now and then, and she cherished it dearly.
It reminded her of the infinite steppes and starlit skies of her youth, before all the implants and augmentations required by the Valkyrie Corps. It reminded her of the windswept streets of Ulan Bator, where she could disappear for hours, a nameless teenager lost in the crowd. Then night would fall and she would head home, praying that her mother and father would not be at each other’s throats again. More often than not, her prayers remained unanswered.
She often wondered how a marriage could go so bad when it had started out so good. Her parents had been in love and then she was born, and everyone had been happy for a while. Until the day they no longer were.
The change had been almost imperceptible. Her father started working late. Eventually, it became so late it was practically early. She refused to believe there was anything wrong, in that wishful way only a child could. He was her hero, after all. He was her dad. The first Mongolian on the Moon.
Then she began noticing her mother’s puffy eyes and the hushed arguments at night, and she knew. That tension soon spilled over into the open and marked the onset of a profound change in Nadya. She could not understand why two people would choose to keep making each other so miserable day after day, instead of finding greener pastures elsewhere (which they never did).
She no longer wanted to become an astronaut so she could be like her father. She wanted to become an astronaut so she could get away from him. When he passed away years later, her mother said they had stayed married partly because of the life they had built together, but mostly so their daughter could have a "normal", if not ideal family in a world, in which biology no longer mattered when it came to making babies. It took Nadya a long time to fully understand their sacrifice, and even longer to forgive herself for running away.
Now, she was coming back. Her parents were long gone, along with the rest of the population on Earth. She checked her internal chronometer. Forty-five minutes had passed since Aidan launched her capsule from geostationary orbit, where her ship would remain until the mission was complete. The trip was supposed to take forty-eight. She would be entering the atmosphere soon.
Sorrow suddenly gripped her throat. Her tears mixed with the suspension gel she was floating in.
“I’m so sorry, dad. Somehow, I turned you into the Antichrist, when in truth you were just as lost, and flawed, and confused as everybody else was back then.”
Nadya let herself cry for a little while. She could feel the air friction outside slowing down her descent. There was a reason all communication channels were disabled during pod drops, she figured. Nothing could prepare her for an assignment better than cleansing her mind at Mach 36.
Her capsule hit the ground.
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