Dale Scott had lingered at the edge of the “picnic” crowd, eating his fill of vege-fruit while watching Valya Makarova and her new little friend.

He had learned that the girl’s name was Camilla, and she had not come to Keanu on either Object. She had been…grown here.

She was, in Dale’s mind, a fucking alien.

And it appeared that the only person here who could communicate with the fucking alien was his psychotic ex, Valya. Well, if exes could manage to work together on matters like child custody or division of property in the blessedly benign environment of planet Earth, Dale and Valya ought to be able to submerge their bad feelings in face of the common challenges of survival on a fucking alien planet.

Especially if Valya’s linguistic skills opened up an inside track. And who better to help her…distribute and possibly exploit her hard-earned knowledge than the man with whom she had spent so many hours in bed?

Dale Scott loved having the inside track. The idea of it, anyway. He had rarely been able to get it.

So, from a distance, he watched, waiting for an opportunity to slide over to Valya and Camilla.

Meanwhile, from a different angle, he could watch Zack Stewart and Harley Drake at the far edge of an arm of the sullen crowd—Houston people, mostly, with a few Bangalores thrown in. They were talking about something important.

But what? And why wouldn’t they share it?

Well, he knew the answer to that.

Dale Scott had come to NASA in the same astronaut candidate class as Harley Drake, but from the Navy. He had flown F/A-18s off carriers and was a solid aviator and even a test pilot, but not a spectacular one.

Nevertheless, he had not only made it into NASA, but had snagged an assignment as a pilot on one of the last shuttle missions. Then he had been faced with this decision: Go back to the Navy, or become a space station astronaut.

Scott was already forty-three the day Atlantis made its final touchdown. He had a master’s in aero engineering, but had never attended other schools; he was never going to get back on the fast track to admiral, not that the Navy would ever promote an astronaut to flag rank. The Navy wasn’t going to let him stay in a cockpit, either; hell, with all the uncrewed vehicles coming on line, even for carrier ops, the service was actively pushing pilots into jobs where the only flying was done with a video game joystick from some bunker in Virginia.

NASA not only still let him fly jets, it required him to log twenty hours a month!

No, going back to the Navy was a quick ticket to oblivion. (A casual inquiry to the Pentagon confirmed it: The best job he could hope for was “war-fighting staff” at some base in Afghanistan while waiting for retirement.)

So, stay at NASA. Problem with that was, the only choice was to qualify for space station duty. Which meant (a) more time learning to operate the station’s remote manipulator arms, (b) hours of work in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab’s water tank qualifying for EVA, and, worst of all, (c) getting conversational, if not actually fluent, in Russian.

Oh, yeah, and committing to almost three years of mission-specific training in such garden spots as Moscow; Tsukuba, Japan; and West Germany.

It was the most miserable time of his life, worse than when his parents split up; worse than his second operational tour flying F/A-18s off the USS America, where he’d had to fly a whole shitload of post-9/11 intercepts and at one point was convinced he was going to have to bring down an American airliner; worse than his first marriage; even worse than his association with AGC Engineering.

For example, NASA had told him that of his two-and-a-half-year ISS assignment, he would be spending twelve percent of his time in airports. He had misunderstood; he had believed that to mean “in transit.” No, flying time was separate! He spent hundreds of hours just sitting in fucking airports!

Which meant he was exhausted whenever he moved from Houston—where he began to have zero life, losing a succession of girlfriends—to Moscow, where he found himself drinking a bit too heavily.

In the old days, he would have essentially flunked out; some trainer would have tattled to management. One of his colleagues would have dropped the right word in the right ear—bang. Dale Scott would have developed a “medical condition,” likely good old “cumulative radiation exposure,” and been quietly moved out of the ISS flow into a less stressful job.

But that hadn’t happened. Maybe it was due to the fact that NASA was having a tough time finding volunteers for ISS missions—two dozen astronauts left around 2011 rather than make the transition.

In any case, Dale got his training done. He had great hand-eye coordination and was a fast learner, and better yet, had mastered the art of smiling when what he really wanted was to punch someone in the face.

Which was his first impulse when he learned that he’d been assigned to serve under a thirty-five-year-old Russian who wasn’t even a fucking pilot.

Dale had been launched to ISS on a Soyuz with his Russian commander and an engineer from Japan. They joined another crew of three—two Russians and a NASA astronaut named Zack Stewart to form what was known as Expedition 31/32.

Shit—literally and figuratively—immediately began to go wrong. First of all, the toilet in the American segment of the station failed, forcing Dale to work with Zack on tedious, smelly repairs.

No sooner had they finished that project than an ammonia line on the outside of the station sprung a leak, meaning that Zack and Dale had to do repairs on that, too.

Dale had proven himself in the EVA pool and did a creditable job on the work, which required three space walks over the course of ten days and left him exhausted, his hands clutched like an old lady’s.

And in a bad mood. He noticed that, as Zack’s Expedition 31 was winding down, preparing to give way to a new crew and Expedition 33 and then go home, that no one was talking to him.

Now, life aboard the ISS was a bit like what Dale imagined life aboard a Navy vessel might be, allowing for smaller crew. There was scheduled work, some of it science, most of it station “operations,” which generally meant maintenance.

There was mandatory exercise, over an hour per day for each crew member.

There was the lack of female companionship. Dale had not realized what a challenge that would be—hell, he had soldiered through two longish stretches in Russia living the life of a monk, and together they almost added up to the ISS tour. (He had not been celibate during his first visit to Russia; for his pleasures he had had to worry about disease and missing money.) There had been some slight chance that one of his crewmates might be female—not that he had any expectation of enrollment in the Hundred-Mile-High Club with a female astronaut or cosmonaut; he only hoped to find a whiff of estrogen in the dull ISS atmosphere.

There was damned little privacy, with each crew member allotted a coffin-sized “stateroom.”

Then there was the noise, the constant drone of fans and motors. In the Russian segment the decibel level was frankly unacceptable; it would have earned NASA a fine from OSHA.

It all made him uncomfortable, unhappy, unproductive. ISS crews worked on the “job jar” method…the various control centers in Houston, Korolev, Europe, and Japan would uplink daily lists of activities that contained, in addition to the usual operational tasks, a good number of mundane chores that usually got divided up by the crew.

Dale quit volunteering for those. He decided he was going to do his work; if Houston wanted him to handle something else, Houston could tell him.

The larger problem was that he lacked motivation. He didn’t care about the mission. He would have happily piloted the shuttle through half a dozen missions, or landed on the Moon. But six months in orbit? It was nothing but looking at stars, pissing in jars.