They were billed as Romantic Adventures in Space. Three-to-twelve month trips to uncharted solar systems, there to oversee the release and recovery of otherwise autonomous probes, adding on-the-spot human oversight which no algorithm could match. An added bonus was the chance to name the planet charted.
Dean had retired after a double dime with the navy and I was taking a sabbatical from the company I worked for. Our honeymoon had been three days in a cheap San Diego hotel before he shipped out on a six-month deployment which turned into two years, due to the second Sino-Russian war.
This was our second honeymoon, where we'd decide if we were too late to have our own kids, or should adopt.
At a distance of twelve-hundred light-years Kepler 62 was one of the furthest targets currently available, while keeping voyages to the twelve month upper limit some panel of psychologists had recommended.
The journey out proved the claim of new rejuvenation medications. It was like the weeks after we first met, better because we knew what we liked, how to make each other sing and sigh. We were lying in a warm haze when the lights turned on and a gentle alarm sounded.
"Is that four months already?" I said and jumped up, dislodging Dean so that he tumbled off the other side of the bed. "C'mon, I want to see Kepler 62b in all its glory."
We stared at a black disc. Enhancing magnification only served to clarify the darkness of the planet. It was a world created by internal fire and cooled by a dark universe. Where Kepler 62 shone on its second child the world glinted.
"No colony here then," Dean said.
"Who needs a whole planet of obsidian?" I shivered, feeling a pang of disquiet at our distance from home. "Let's get the probes away." The release commands where mostly automated. The planet was in the zone expected, it didn't have a debris field, there were no obvious signs of intelligent life. We sent the probes.
"What now?" Dean asked.
I stared at the screen. The time showed zero-eight-two-four. "Nearly zero-eight-thirty, and I've not had coffee and muffins."
Dean sprang straight, arm raised to his brow. "Coffee and muffins, Ma'am."
"That is not the standing to attention I've come to expect."
He winked at me.
The first probe came back after five days. We only knew how swiftly it had returned when we checked the details a week later. That was just after the second probe had docked, and we got a warning message for a faulty relay in the probe docking station.
"It's amber," Dean said.
"Yes, and according to the guidance that means we suit up, and go switch out the relay." I jabbed a finger at the relevant section of the manual.
"We don't need to do it now. That system's only used when we're back in our Solar System, that's eight or nine months away."
It wasn't our first argument during the trip. Just the first that didn't end in bed.
A fifth probe returned after two weeks, only ten probes to come back, and the first shouldn't have returned until week eight or nine. The amber warning still blinked away.
Dean gave in, and suited up. "You should do it," he said, and grinned at my grimace.
Without artificial gravity this trip would be a non-starter for me. We tried a row boat once, I threw up before we cleared the jetty. I go green in the hyper-loop.
The red warning, with an unstoppable trilling alarm, began soon after Dean left the airlock.
"Your suit's compromised. Come back!"
"There's nothing wrong. I'm fine." He said. "Must be a faulty sensor. Switching the relay now."
The twenty minutes he was outside were an eternity. Back in the airlock he waited for re-pressurizeation, folded the suit back into its locker, and floated in his long johns waiting for the artificial gravity field to re-engage. When the internal door reopened I sprang at him, rocking him backwards. He clutched me tight. "Told you I was okay," he said.
Later we lay in bed. For all his assurances he must have had his own worries out there for he was frenetic, almost desperate, in taking me. My shoulder stung where he bit me, my hips ached. He slept and I ran my hands over his hip while hoping we wouldn't have to adopt.
My fingers registered the smoothness of his skin, right where a scar from colliding with a shell damaged bulkhead should be.
The airlock was cooler than the rest of the ship. I sat on the cold floor and inspected the spacesuit. There was a tear in the back, on the left shoulder blade, my hand fitted right through it. A catastrophic suit failure. Death would have been minutes away.
But Dean wasn't dead.
"What are you doing?" Dean asked.
I turned. "Who are you?"
"You know who I am."
"I know who you're pretending to be. What are you?"
"The same as you. Explorers, colonizers, imperialists. And how incredible there are so few of you to seek new worlds to live on, to conquer. But you arrived here too late. We've had it's goodness, sucked up its nutrients."
"Where's Dean?"
"Dean is," Dean tilted his head, "part of us. We're learning how to be you, your kind." He stepped forward, clasped me to him, ignoring my struggles. "Our children will know everything they need."
I vomited. A convulsive heave which ripped me from the embrace and spattered his chest with bile. I collapsed to the floor, retching.
"Morning sickness? Surely that doesn't happen yet. Ah, we have so much to learn. But you can teach us."
Something landed on my back. There was a moment of heat, like my spine was on-fire. Then Dean's voice, a trillion times over, appeared inside my head, and nothing more.