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The grandfather clock struck eight and Sarah bolted back to the rover. She reassembled it, with half an eye on a clock nearby the entire time. It was an operation that she couldn’t rush, because misplacing a part or not tightening everything back down meant that the rover wouldn’t run.
When she finished, she changed clothes, took out the tarts to cool, and gave everything else one whirlwind last check. Then she returned to the air lock and went over her spacesuit. Even though it was slender in the right places like newer suits for females, it was still bulky in all the wrong places as all spacesuits were. She was proud that hers had made more concessions to fashion than the usual alternating pink rings around the oversized joints. She had made a bumper and plastered it on her left arm: “Adenia — wish you were here!”, painted her initials across the top of the helmet in gold — “SJM”, and placed a silly pink heart sticker right over where her heart would be. She polished it until it shone.
Inside the suit, she checked all the supplies — air supply, water, the high-energy trail mix, breath freshener, and of course, emergency makeup. She only needed to restock the trail mix. It didn’t look impressive, being just a tube of brownish goo, but there was nothing better when you needed energy. She tried not to think about how many calories it contained. She closed up the suit and shut the air lock to make sure that Lloyd wouldn’t wander in.
Although the front viewing port was not as spacious as the back, she sat and gazed out through the tiny aperture, eyes fixated on the distant landing pad at the very age of the planetoid of Adenia. It seemed like two lifetimes passed as she sat there, nervously arranging and rearranging stray strands of hair until at last a tiny flash of silver intersected the outside spotlights. At first it was no larger than stray debris, as if just a wandering mirror floating aimlessly through space, but it grew larger and larger until it became the unmistakable image of a slender, silver, needle-like spaceship. Then the familiar rattle and rumbling began as the reverse thrusters lit up the sky, billows of flame and smoke. She was awash in the sheer power and the sense of triumphant arrival, as though a king had sent out so many drums of war to announce that he had set foot upon new ground — and this matched the thudding of her heart. Something great was here, and that from the spaceship would soon spill creatures tiny in comparison, fragile and feeling beings like herself, that brought the breath of companionship to her outpost in unrelenting night.
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