We were two hundred kilometres above the Atlantic and closing in on the dead satellite. I wanted to take it slow and safe, and make it to the end of another shift in one piece. For the first time since Lex, though, they’d trusted me with a partner. With the way they’d been rushing the newbies through training, it was going to be an exercise in babysitting.

I could see the target ahead; a speck at first, blossoming through my visor into the solar-winged carcass of a broadcast sat. I fired my suit’s deceleration burners in short, smooth bursts as we closed in. Cole struggled to stay in level formation beside me, shooting ahead and then falling behind as he corrected his approach. He was a young, skinny, wide-eyed thing, straight from the Graduate Program. 

It was easy to forget we were all racing around the Earth at the best part of eight kilometers a second. 

I drifted in slowly and made contact, grabbing a handhold on the sat and anchoring my suit to it with my tether. As I looked back, I realised Cole was coming in way, way too fast. My breath caught in my throat. Cole realised this too, at the last second, and cranked his brake burners hard. Spurting sharp, purple jets of flame, he banged into the satellite and I winced at the impact. Wave of white-hot nausea soon passed once I realised he was okay. He began to drift back out, arms and legs kicking, but slow enough for me to reach out and pull him close so he could clip himself on. He was shaking a little, but his vitals on my HUD seemed to be okay. Nothing broken.

 “Christ,” I said. My heart was still racing. At the sight of him coming in hot, too fast to stop, my mind had autocompleted what would come next. The memory came in a rush, visceral; the body ragdolling out into the black, tank ruptured and limbs shattered inside the suit.

“Sorry, Miss,” he said.

“Do you have any idea how close you just came to dying?”

He mumbled another apology.

“This isn’t fucking VR training. You slam into something, it slams back, and it’ll always win. You need to come in gentler, okay? You alright? Nothing broken? Suit holding?”

Cole nodded quickly, his helmet opaqued to block out the sunlight. “I’ve got it. Everything’s fine.”

If it wasn’t fine, he’d know. “Alright. Christ. And look at this mess.” A little patch of the satellite had scorched from his approach, where his collision had caused the whole framework to gently turn, the logo of whatever company it belonged to melted away. It was an old, tired thing, pitted with scars from microcollisions. I wondered how long it had been up here, how long ago it had ceased to be useful.

“We’re lucky we’re sending this one down the well anyway,” I said, angling my body and firing a brief flash-burn to cancel out the satellite’s new spin.

He didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so we got to work. My heart rate lowered back to normal.

I unhooked one of the decay flares from my suit’s belt, taking care not to let it drift away. I was a grunt, what the other satellite jockeys jokingly called a firestarter. Other jocks did repairs on damaged sats or affixed new pieces of equipment to existing ones, but firestarters had the most basic job: strapping a decay flare to satellites that were past their sell-by-date, and boosting them down the gravity well to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

I hadn’t always been a firestarter. I’d been a full-fledged satellite modtech, once, climbing the ranks with everyone else.

Until Lex.

“Cole,” I said. He’d been staring over the top of the sat, down towards Earth, as western Europe came into view.

“Sorry.”

“Watch,” I said, talking him through the process. I fixed the flare in place, the satellite’s estimated trajectory appeared on our HUDs, hitting land somewhere in northern Africa. I moved the flare further along the sat, angling it until the projected impact field was in the middle of the Atlantic, far away from civilization. Nothing survived reentry ninety-nine percent of the time anyway, but if that one percent happened over a megacity… it wasn’t worth thinking about.

The kid was watching intently. He had his head screwed on the right way, even if there wasn’t much inside it. 

“Then you press the button here,” I said, “which should give you a few minutes to untether and move the hell away.” Instead, I deactivated the flare and reattached it to my belt. “You try.”

Cole unclipped one of his own and fixed it to the sat in the same place, watching how the sat’s earthbound trajectory on his HUD shifted with even the slightest adjustment to the flare’s angle. Finally happy, he turned to me.

“So I press this now?”

“Go ahead.”

As Cole’s hand came away from the armed flare, it lit up with a ring of tiny red lights. The first one blinked out, then the second, darkness creeping around the ring.

“Alright. What now?”

“On to the next one.” I brought up the map of dead sats that needed deorbiting. The next one wasn’t far away; perhaps an hour or so at full burn. A couple of minutes out, I instructed Cole to drift and turn back to face the way we’d come from. Regardless of the schedule, it was the kid’s first time, and it was customary to watch your first decommissioning in all its glory.

From our far removed position, I knew the last few lights on the decay flare were blinking out one by one, even if we were too far to see them. When the last one vanished, the end of the flare lit up with a long, bright flame, and the sat started to drop away. It looked slow at first, but I knew that was just the distances involved. Within a minute of ignition, a decay flare could send a two-ton satellite screaming down the well to the tune of 50,000 kilometres an hour. The speed was imperative to ensure nothing survived re-entry. 

As the flame shrank and vanished against the backdrop of the Earth, we carried on, my flight path straight and Cole drifting amateurishly from side to side.

My earpiece crackled. “Miss?” It was Cole. He was a hundred metres behind me, the recommended distance to avoid passive scorching during an acceleration burn.

“Please stop calling me Miss,” I said. “It’s Nick.”

“Sorry. Nick. Am I… am I doing okay? They said my performance today would decide where I’m assigned.”

I gritted my teeth. “You’re doing fine.”

“I know I fucked up coming in too fast on the satellite. It’s not a big deal, right?”

I took a moment to compose my answer, the opacity of my visor darkening as the Sun came up around the side of the Earth. “Look, I’m just not used to supervising someone else up here. I usually work solo. You’re doing fine. Especially if it’s your first day. The suits can take a bit of getting used to controlling.”

“Thanks.”

“But you have to be more careful up here. Are you sure you know what you’ve gotten yourself in for?”

“I think so. They throw you curveballs in all the sims.”

“And did any of that prepare you for actually being up here?”

There was silence on the comm, and I was sure that behind me, he was looking down, at the mycelial networks of towns and cities glowing on the night side of the planet, dawn sweeping round to wipe everything clean.

“No.”

“What is it you’re after?” I asked. “You want to be a firestarter like me?”

Another silence. “No offence. I’ve always wanted to be in the Orbital Corps. I figured I could start as a satellite tech, get my vacuum hours in, and apply during the next intake.”

It was cute that he still had dreams. I thought of Cole trying to defend a station in fast, frantic zero-G combat. 

“I was joking,” I said. “No-one wants to be a firestarter.” 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pulling level with me, at a safe distance. “So why are you… I mean, your profile says you’ve been doing this for a few years now,” he said. “Aren’t you eligible for a promotion or a transfer or something?”

For a second, I seriously considered telling him. About Lex. How she’d abandoned her dreams of becoming a marine biologist after college and abruptly joined up as a satellite technician, seeking freedom from the worldwide shitshow at ground level, from the weight of Earth’s gravity. How I’d followed her on a whim, scared of being left behind, of her outgrowing me, and losing her altogether. How we’d started out as modtechs in the first generation of satellite jockeys, extracting the obsolete hardware from otherwise healthy sats and integrating the new tech; far more efficient and cost-effective than hauling up an entirely new sat. How we’d gotten good at it, despite my early awkwardness in the suits.

Then how she’d developed bad habits. How I’d encouraged her. How we’d gotten bored with our allocations, goading each other into playing chicken; brake-burning at the last possible moment before landing on the dead satellites. How I couldn’t come close to describing the thrill of blackening the surface of the sats as I came to a halt, just in time. Then the noise Lex had made over comms, the second before impact, the time she’d got it wrong. How her broken body, spinning erratically, had slipped down the well, and how I’d been too paralysed with shock and fear to dive after her. She’d probably died on impact with the sat. But it was the probably that killed me. I’d been terrified of losing her, but when it came down to it, I’d just hung there and watched her fall. 

I considered telling him that dying wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. Sometimes being the one left behind was far, far worse.

“Firestarting suits me just fine,” I lied. I hoped my profile, whatever it was he’d checked or been shown, hadn’t mentioned her. But if he had seen, screw it. It was the truth.

“Beats working down there,” Cole said. I looked down, at the vagueness of the land beneath the smog vortexes of East Asia, at the glittering fractures of wildfire fronts across Siberia.

It was a while before we reached the next target, an old American satellite the size of an eighteen-wheeler. I instructed Cole to slow his approach as the satellite grew larger, staying alongside him as a guide. “This feels way slower than in the training sim,” he said. “Better late than plastered all over it, though, I guess?”

Safe inside my helmet, I clenched my eyes tight shut for a moment, my silence turning his question into something rhetorical. 

This time, Cole came in gently, his boots feather-light as he landed on the sat. Cole remembered how to tweak the angles from the first time, and I let him finish off. He was a quick learner. He looked to me for approval, and I nodded. The flare was armed, and we boosted back to a safe distance.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s wrap this up. Head back to base.” We didn’t have enough air or fuel for a return journey to the next target. “Come on.” 

I was almost enjoying the company, having a partner up here again. I pushed the thought aside, guilt-tinged. We boosted out together, back in the direction of the closest Orbital Deployment Centre, soaring against the Earth’s spin. The Pacific was below us now, the Earth a faceless marble, terrifying in its blankness.

“Miss? I mean, Nick?”

I let it slide. “What?” I said.

“I’ve got a yellow circle on my visor. And my suit is making a noise.”

His training had a lot to answer for. “Hold on. Cut your boost.” He did, and I glided alongside him. I could see the yellow circle blinking on his visor, visible to me in reverse. 

No. Not a circle. A letter O.

Oxygen.

I reached around and hovered my hand over his tank until I felt a slight pressure tickling the suit’s microsensors. There, as I looked closer: a hairline fracture in the metal. Somehow, it was holding. The metal was strong enough to hold the pressure, but air was dripping out regardless. It must have been when he banged into the first satellite. God. It had been leaking all this time. The pressure sensors in his tank must have been damaged as well. It was only when his air was on the verge of running out that any alarms were raised. His flight had been a little erratic, drifting ever so slightly to the right. I’d been stupid, stupid, chalking it down to him being unaccustomed with the controls.

“What is it?” he said.

I was frozen. We were too far from base for him to make it. For a second I thought about strapping him to a flare, but that was beyond suicide. Without atmospheric drag, he’d have no way of stopping, his brake burners too weak. He’d hit the station at Mach 1000 and turn it to dust and plasma. He was probably going to die up here.

Probably. 

I remembered how much I lost the last time I froze. How I never found anyone like her again. My body rebelled against the thought of history repeating itself due to my carelessness, and I started to move before I fully realised what I was doing.

“Hold still,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Just something on your tank that needs tweaking.”

I tightened off the valves that connected Cole’s tank to his suit and disconnected it. Brand new red lights started flashing. 

“Uh…” he said.

“It’s fine,” I reassured. He would be fine. There would be enough air floating around in his suit and helmet for a minute or so while I made the exchange.

Before I could second-guess myself, I disconnected my own tank, straining behind me, and fastened it onto Cole’s back, releasing the valves. I fitted his tank to my back, completing the swap, and a big yellow O flashed into view on the inside of my visor as it connected.

“Hey, the circle’s gone,” he said. “Thanks. Is my tank okay? What just happened?”

“No problem,” I said. “Just a dodgy connection. I’ve tightened it up for you.”

I pushed away from him until we were at a safe distance to reignite our burners. 

“Cole?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Listen. You go ahead. I want to hang back for a while.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Base is half an hour straight ahead. I’m just going to enjoy the view for a moment, and write up your report.”

“But how do I…”

“Just follow what your suit says. Stick the autopilot on if you need to.”

“Uh, okay,” he said. “Thanks, Nick. For today, I mean. Showing me the ropes.”

“You know, I think you’d be a good firestarter,” I said. “If you really wanted to be.”

He nodded, and then he was gone, boosting off towards the orbital base. His flight path was perfectly straight now, unwavering. 

I looked down at the Earth. We were back over North America now, and I twisted myself around to orient it north-south. It seemed correct this way up, like a map of home. 

I typed up Cole’s recommendation on my HUD, making sure to go into great detail about his willingness to learn, his eagerness, and his early signs of aptitude in vacuum. The last part was stretching the truth a little, but he seemed to learn quickly, and soon it wouldn’t be a lie. I sent it. 

The yellow O on my visor blinked to red. I didn’t want to die up here, alone, gasping for air. I wanted to be down there, where home was, when we were together and everything was still possible. The Earth yawned open below me, stretching itself wide, my tears blurring the light as if gravity was warping it.

I aimed myself downwell, cranked my burners up to full power, and did what I always knew I should have done. I dove after Lex.