As they continued walking down the shaft, they passed the maintenance airlock. The outer wall of the maintenance shaft was already disconcertingly thin, and the concept of any kind of a door poking through that wall made Lester's hairs stand on end. His mind wandered back to Earth, where he had become used to the crushing weight of water outside of such walls. But here he knew there was nothing at all on the other side, and it upset him. He could remember ascending, strapped in and gliding upward, then breaking the surface of the waves with a lurch before the slow settle and gentle rocking in the break. So long ago.

Hendrix stopped moving, and Lester followed suit. The echoes of their clanging steps stalked off into the dark. A large, bolted-down panel spanned the grated walkway in front of them. “Okay,” Lester said, and pulled an electric torque wrench from his belt, “let's get this opened back up.”

The inspection found nothing amiss.

II. Days

Eight days later, Lester was walking to the chapel for pre-shift service. He was exhausted, having spent the previous night absently tinkering at his tiny corner desk, the space cluttered with an engineering toolkit, electronics set, and faulty, flickering jumpsuit. He was as bad as Hendrix, except that the question he had been dancing around didn't have to do with the news, or how the search the previous week had found nothing to explain the communication blackout. In frustration, Lester had ditched the tools and knelt on the floor, hands clenched tightly together, and fixed his eyes on the mechanical rails crisscrossing the ceiling. The question. The question. Is any of this—space exploration, abandoning home, a journey through unending void—Could this be what God intended of his creation? Lester was looking at the ceiling, but space had the unusual quality of making a man lose track of which way was up.

Before finally heading to bed, he'd fired off a message to Mayne.

News had spread around the station that communication was completely down from Earth. Command finally issued the announcement from Belka at the end of the previous shift:

Both stations have lost contact with the Earth. Diagnostics testing has confirmed that there is no fault in receiving or transmitting on our end, though we have no way to know whether our messages are being received by Earth. At this time, both stations will continue following routine procedures.

Lester filed into the chapel near-to-last and took up residence against the calming teal padding of the back wall. Given the size and nature of Strelka station, having only 63 crew, and his own arrival being the most recent growth in population, it was entirely natural that the room was tiny, and that the wood grain of both pews was a low-resolution print. The chapel was awash in peoples, perfumes, and poise—maybe 15 in total attending, certainly more today than the usual crowd.