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nights as a child. Just a lot bigger.
    Unless he found a way to the moon’s surface, or one of the other stations or space colonies in the system, this was also going to be Evan’s highly scenic tomb.
    Evan’s breathing system was an efficient rebreather, which scrubbed carbon dioxide from the air he breathed out, juiced up the oxygen to the required level, and then reused that air. Even so, he had just over eight hours of usable air remaining, as the suit had just informed him.
    “Suit, please advise. Is there any achievable flight path leading to a survivable impact on Foray?”
    “No. The available thrust is for attitude adjustment and very minimal maneuvers. We cannot leave the orbit of Foray.”
    The answer had not changed from the last time he had asked, a few hours before.
    By the numbers, it was crazy. He had escaped from the Aurora system and made it to Kelter. Counting the trip through the newly discovered glome, that was fifty-six light years. Over five hundred trillion kilometers. And now he lacked the means to make it across the last hundred thousand kilometers of space. Such a tiny distance, less than a billionth of what he had already traveled. Unattainable.
    Evan had found out a lot about being in an EVA suit for more than an hour or two. For one, space is not so vast if you are stuck inside a suit. The claustrophobia came in waves, each peak worse than the one before. He had begun to contemplate simply peeling the suit off, just to be free of it for a moment until the hard vacuum took him.
    Breathe.
    His clothes had shifted and now had folds that rubbed against his side. His lower back itched. In theory, he could pull one of his arms out of its suit arm, and make adjustments. In practice, he didn’t dare. What if his arm got jammed part way in or out? He had started to try it once, a few hours ago, but could not make himself commit through the crux of pushing his hand through the narrow space under his armpit.
    Breathe.
    Evan had tried, many times over the past few hours, to leave a last message. For Kate. Each time the suit played it back, he had cringed, and ordered the message erased. What could he say that would mean anything in a message, recorded in the memory of an EVA suit, carried until some future day when his body was found?
    Would she even care anyway? For all Evan knew, she had long since moved on, and a message would be an unwelcome surprise.
    Calling for help. That was an option. It would probably work, at least in the sense of attracting attention. Most likely the wrong kind. It would be the last resort. If he got down to a few hours of air, then he would ask the suit to send an SOS to anyone who would listen.
    When was the dividing line? Enough time to be sure that there was no hope otherwise, but some reasonable prospect of someone getting to him in time. If the warships didn’t simply dispatch a missile.
    Maybe Mira was actually on Kelter and had received his message. Realized it was for her. Decoded it. Decided that it was worth lifting into space swarming with warships in order to see what was on the vector that he had supplied. And so she was coming for him right now.
    Described that way, it didn’t sound so likely. Mira wasn’t his pilot any more. She didn’t owe him anything. When Evan had been provided with the research opportunity of a lifetime two years before, he had cast her off with little hesitation.
    Evan had seen plenty of traffic go by, from the new glome emergence toward Kelter. Six warships had accelerated past, and then turned to decelerate in order not to hurtle past the planet.
    He had instructed the suit not to use any active scans such as radar, but the suit was able to track the warships easily using a combination of visual sensors and passive radar detection. The other ships did not seem in the least bit concerned about being tracked.
    If the Affirmatix fleet was indeed pursuing him, then there was one irony in that. Affirmatix, his expedition sponsor –