You are Senior Pilot Sam Puckett

Left to yourself for the next few hours while your crew unloads their cargo down at the "astronaut hotel" you keep the ship in orbit and think about your life. You have been so much more than you ever planned that at this point, you have stopped measuring it by your high-school self, and started looking at it as the norm. This greatness is what anyone can do, they just have to want to do it.

Now your ride in the heavens is ending. You can feel this chapter of your life closing and you wonder, what can top this? You have done everything; the rebel life, the valedictorian life, the soldier life, now the astronaut thing is over. The only thing left to do is the traditional stuff. Marriage. Kids. A family.

Your sister has three kids. Your movie-star friend has married a co-star twice. You are thirty-three years old, your biological clock is in the red, and you have nothing but a school-girl crush.

You blush inwardly when he looks at you, you think about him all of the time, and when he dates you get angry, but you can't let him know how you feel. This crush can't see the light of day or it will be ruined. You let yourself be meaner than ever rather than let him sense any softness.

You don't take into account that this very crush has survived death once before, when time wore it away, and it returned twice as strong. You don't even remember that earlier crush, it's part of that childhood you stopped measuring things by--all you remember is an old friendship, just like the one he has given you since you re-met. It's a painful friendship, one that tells you he doesn't want anything more than your camaraderie.

You have one other prospect: your old partner. You don't want him. You know you should, you feel like an idiot for not wanting your only realistic chance at marriage, but like a school-girl, you can't look beyond a certain lopsided smile and annoying cowlick. You want to hold out for that one-in-a-million chance that he will see through your guise and love what he sees. The odds may seem too great for someone with lesser luck in life, but out of a million people in your hometown, you touched the stars.

You have looked at life, seen something you wanted and gone for it, achieved it. The only difference now? You are too scared to take the step. Nothing can abate this fear. To take the step would be to lower your shell. Your outer walls make you who you are, without them you can't stand up. You tell yourself life isn't fair and no one gets everything they want.

You haven't slept through the night in weeks. A month ago, you bought some sleeping pills over the counter, but you haven't taken one yet. Rockets are possibly the pentacle of such heavy machinery as not to be operated while on them. Fortunately, the idea of having some on the nightstand had let your sleep a little more soundly than recent, so you were fresh and ready for the launch. Up here you aren't expected to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time, so it isn't a problem, but once you are home, and there are no more rockets with your name on them, you have no qualms about taking a little pill, if needed, in order to catch a standard seven-and-a-half hour night's sleep between working days.

You pray it won't come to that. Perhaps when you land, a new opportunity will present itself, and then marriage won't have to be your next step. Maybe you can enter politics, maybe you can become a firefighter, or star in a comedy with the movie-star. You have plenty of options. Distractions. You are convinced that you can get yourself to sleep without those pills. Yes, they will be like your uncle's bottle of Scotch in his bookshelf: security, to be felt not used.

On the tiny screen between your gauges, you can see the mission control room; ten rising rows of computer consoles in front of the NASA crest. About a hundred figures wearing headsets, moving along the aisles with coffee and papers. At this point in the mission, most are absent from their seat, getting a walk, a nap, or an early lunch. Thinking about this, you get hungry and find a freeze-dried ice-cream sandwich, which you stick in the microwave. The miracle of science, when the oven dings, you pull out a cold bar of ice-cream.

It tastes like shit—others have said it tastes like any other ice cream sandwich, but it doesn't to you, because you have always been able to taste the subtle differences between brands of all foods—but you eat it anyway for something to do. It doesn't, however, distract you from your train of thought, which has done yet another fantastic loop-the-loop and landed right back on the heart of your problem. Your crush.

"Ah, kill me," you beg, forgetting that you have the link on, so that Houston hears the plea.

"You should have processed your request for more meat sustenance." He says with a smile in his voice, evidently taking your comment to be about the snack in your hand. Gripping embarrassment prevents you from replying to this. With a noncommittal noise, you capitalize on his assumption and pretend like you can't stomach the ice-cream.

BANG.

The earpiece squeals in your ear, the lights and instruments flash, and the entire ship rolls around you, bringing a lever against your head with enough force to knock you spinning into the opposite wall.

You are Cap-Com Houston

"SAM!" You yell, lifting yourself out of your chair by your console. The image on the screen above your head is spinning out of control, you can't make heads or tails of anything on board the ship.

One word gets through her crackling link. Your name.

Flight deck is frantic around you, flipping switches and reading monitors, and giving their reports on top of each other. The image stops rolling, you can see Sam, bracing herself against something solid as she works to check the systems, shaking her head, trying to see straight. Behind you, Jack is on the ball, making orders and calling shots. Less than a minute after the bang, it is determined that she was struck by a small meteor.

You can do nothing but run protocol here as you speak for all of mission control while they double and triple check systems and secure the crippled ship. She has pulled together fast and nicely. She works as one who has done this uncountable times in a simulator, yet knows too well that the stars outside her window aren't fake this time.

After the worst ten minutes of your life, you learn with the rest of them that the life support systems are fine—for now. She is losing oxygen in a slow leak. The bigger problem is her engine. It wouldn't be a problem if she was in the moon's pull, she could do a controlled crash with her thrusters then, but no. The collision knocked her free of all moon's gravity. She's a sitting duck; floating between the earth and the moon and nothing can be done about it fast enough. She will run out of oxygen before a rescue shuttle can reach her.