Chapter 1
Standing at the kitchen sink, she took a final swallow of coffee before rinsing the mug and heading off to work. Glancing out the window, her eyes swept over a pair of silly plastic glasses she’d placed on the sill a couple of months ago after attending a New Year’s Eve party. Ever since, the glasses had served as a daily reminder that it was 2458 and that she’d made a vague resolution to make this a year of change.
Dr. Erin Flynn O’Reilley was thirty-two years old and had been a general practitioner for eight years. Riverside Hospital had been good to her, and she’d deeply enjoyed her work, consistently earning top ratings from both her patients and her employers. But she’d been sensing for some time that there was something more. Something that was missing and needed to be found.
A couple of weeks ago, Erin stumbled across a recruiting ad for the Earth Space Alliance, ESA, and although she’d never even remotely considered going into space before, the idea kept working on her, and something deep inside kept telling her to look into it. Learning more about the program doesn’t mean I’m automatically locked in and committed, she told herself.
Erin set up an appointment with a local recruiter, and three days ago on her sacred weekly day off, she headed into the ESA office. Everything in the neat, efficient-looking office was bright and polished. The moment she stepped through the door, she almost felt as if she’d stepped onto one of the vaunted fleet ships. The recruiter was warm and friendly, but also serious and grounded in reality. ESA typically trained space physicians itself, having a well-regarded medical college. Prospective medics learned on the job in flight, working alongside experienced flight docs and gaining extensive hands-on experience. As an already-licensed physician, Erin would skip the general courses and go straight to the space med section of the curriculum and begin hands-on work on day one. The pay was decent, and the long-term benefits of working for the space alliance were very appealing. Best of all, she could learn more about treating other species of humanoids, something that was still quite limited on Earth. In fact, she could count only three cases in her eight-year tenure—not very exciting or challenging. Erin left the appointment two hours later after she and the recruiter had agreed she should take a week or so to think things over before going forward and completing the initial testing application.
As Erin went about her day after the appointment, she couldn’t seem to get the idea of going into space off her mind. She wasn’t getting any younger, and her initial stint would be over in five years, at which point she could re-up or walk out and resume a practice on Earth. She had no real ties—just Morris, her orange-striped cat, whom the recruiter had assured her could join her on assignment. Her parents now lived half a planet away in France, so she only saw them a couple times a year, but she could still do that when she took her annual leave, and she could, of course, keep up with her weekly live chats with them too from aboard the ship. And her last romance had ended over a year ago—no, better said, it had crashed and burned thanks to her crushing schedule and the fact that medicine had always taken priority over intimacy. At least with Rob, anyway. No, there was nothing really tying her to Earth. She resolved to sleep on it, and whatever presented itself in the light of dawn tomorrow would surely be the right path. Besides, wouldn’t the recruiter see how decisive she was if she gave her response the very next day? Uh-oh, she thought. Is that a lean? Does my heart already know the answer?
