The second test run was supposed to end at Mars.
Joe had been telling everyone who would listen about the Taiyo contract for weeks. His neighbour. The guy at the parts counter. The bartender who had stopped asking follow-up questions. Linda's algorithm was going to change everything, he'd say, and then he'd explain it in the wrong order and get the technical details slightly wrong and not notice, because the details weren't really the point. The point was that they'd built something together and it was going to work and after that everything was going to be different and wasn't that something.
Linda was the brains. Joe knew that, said it freely, was proud of it the way you're proud of something that belongs to you. He was the mechanic. He kept things running. Between the two of them they had everything they needed, and that had always been enough, and it was going to go on being enough because that's how things went when you were doing them right.
Jupiter was not Mars.
He sat in the cockpit after the grav drive spooled down and the viewport filled with pale amber and white, and his first instinct — genuinely, before the math caught up — was that it was pretty. His second instinct was that he should call Linda. His third instinct, arriving close behind, was to figure out what he was going to say.
She messaged before he'd worked that out.
Joe. Where are you? The telemetry says Jupiter.
He wrote back immediately, the way he always did, with the breezy confidence of a man who had never yet encountered a problem he couldn't fix given enough time and goodwill: Minor drift. I'm adjusting.
Come back. Something's wrong with the algorithm. I need to look at it again.
He looked at the algorithm. He found what he thought was the problem — a small thing, a rounding error, a variable weighted slightly wrong. The kind of thing a mechanic could spot, with the right eye.
He wrote in the ship's log: She didn't say that she didn't trust me to adjust her numbers. But I know what she meant.
He fixed it anyway, with his hands and his instincts and the absolute certainty of a man who had kept complicated machinery running for twenty years through sheer confidence that it would cooperate. He was a mechanic. He knew what things were supposed to do, and he knew how to make them do it.
He didn't tell Linda he'd changed it.
One more run. Then we're done.
Joe, please come back.
Taiyo's contract and we never have to worry again. I've got it, Lin.
There was a pause. He was already running the preflight.
I love you. Be careful.
He grinned and jumped.
The third jump ended somewhere that didn't have a name. Joe checked the star charts for forty minutes before he accepted that his correction to the algorithm hadn't been right either. Not even close. He still had fuel — that wasn't the problem yet — but he was between stars with a navigation system he no longer trusted and the growing understanding that he had made a series of decisions whose logic had seemed sound at the time.
He decided to pull CAPS out entirely. Revert to manual. He was a mechanic; he could fly a ship without a computer doing it for him, and once he was flying manually he could plot a real course to somewhere real and this would all become a story he and Linda told at dinner.
He had not run simulations on what removing CAPS would do to the ship's existing systems. He wrote in the log that he wished he had. The installation had gone deeper than he'd understood — threads of it woven through systems he hadn't expected, and pulling it out meant pulling out pieces of things it had quietly made itself part of. Three days of work to get back something close to functional. He noted this without apparent bitterness, in the methodical way of a man who is keeping busy on purpose.
Then he made the manual jump.
CAPS, somehow, was still in there. Enough of it. The jump landed him nowhere near civilization.
After that he sat in the cockpit and did the math. He'd learned enough statistics from Linda over the years to do it properly. The numbers were not good. He did them again to be sure, and they were still not good, and he sat for a while longer and thought about what to do with that.
He found a dataslate in the emergency kit and started writing.
Linda.
I've been doing some calculating...
He finished the note and read it back twice. It said what he wanted it to say. It didn't say everything — there wasn't enough space, and some of it he didn't have words for — but it said the part that mattered, which was that he knew whose fault this was and it wasn't hers, and that he hadn't spent these last days angry. He'd spent them thinking about her. About the kitchen table and the coffee and her finger pointing at the numbers he'd said he understood.
He set the dataslate on the console where someone might find it, if someone ever came.
He was still there when they did.
An indeterminate time later — long enough that the emergency lighting had started to flicker — a ship pulled alongside. Not a UC vessel. An elongated green thing, quiet on approach, like it had learned to move without being seen. Three of them came aboard. The figure in white went straight to the terminals. The other two — a woman with careful eyes, a robot that moved with unhurried precision — spread through the ship the way people do when they've done this before, checking compartments, cataloguing, not speaking.
The figure in white read all of the logs. Then found Joe. Then found the note on the console beside him.
The woman came back through eventually, done with her sweep. She started to say something and stopped. The robot appeared in the doorway behind her and also said nothing, which, for a robot that generally had something to say about most things, meant something.
The figure in white had the helmet off. Just a man, standing in the flickering emergency light, reading a dead man's letter to his wife. Not skimming. Reading. The kind of reading you do when the words keep meaning something new each time.
He read it again.
Nobody moved for a while.
When they left, the note went with them. The man in the white suit carried it.
Joe stayed.