Exodus

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Commander Fiona Mulligan had made a habit out of watching the sunrise.

Of course, when you were on board a two-hundred-and-forty-foot-long hunk of metal, hurtling along at just over seventeen thousand miles per hour in a low orbit above the earth and completing almost sixteen revolutions of the earth a day, you got to see a lot of sunrises.

The longest most crew members of the International Space Station got to sleep at any one time was about six hours; couple that with the disorienting effect of waking surrounded by darkness after one period, then sunlight the next, and it could play havoc with your biological clock. Fiona had found a simple solution, though; whenever the opportunity presented itself, she would try to time the end of each sleep period to coincide with one of those sunrises.

Dawns aboard the ISS were a very different affair from those the billions of souls on the gleaming blue planet beneath her feet experienced. Most earthbound sunrises could be obscured by clouds and smog and cityscapes, obfuscating the simple wonder of watching the birth of a new day. By contrast, the little market town of Dorking, in the UK where she had grown up, had given her an exemplary view of the heavens and fueled her love of space when she was just a child. But even those misty mornings and ebony nights of her childhood paled by comparison to the godlike perspective afforded her and the ISS crew, so many miles above the earth. Up here, they were simply glorious.

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