The ISS Vigil

CW: Grief, mental health

The plan was a beautiful, violent thing.

It lived in Commander Thomas Thorne’s bones, a symphony of timed explosions. T-Minus 10 seconds. Main engine start. T-Minus 6. Four. Three. Two. One. Solid rocket booster ignition. Liftoff. We have liftoff.

The memory wasn’t a memory; it was a physical imprint. The tremor began as a deep, subsonic growl, the sound of the planet objecting. Then the thrust, a giant’s hand pinning him to the seat, vision blurring, chest compressing. The roar wasn’t a sound you heard; it was a thing that happened inside your skull, shaking your thoughts loose. He’d watched the sky through the viewport morph from blue to indigo to the perfect, star-studded black of infinity. A nine-minute ride from everything he’d ever known to a new, crystalline reality: orbit.

The plan’s next movement was serene. Six months aboard the International Space Station, The Vigil. A ballet of science, maintenance, and the silent, profound wonder of watching the world turn below you. He’d scheduled his final EVA for December 28th. A symbolic look back at Earth before turning for home. Undock: January 2nd. Splashdown: January 3rd. He’d timed it so his first breath of real air would be cold, January air, sharp with pine and promise.

The plan was perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

The first crack was a whisper, not a scream. December 28th, 14:33 GMT. He was in the cupola, tethered, watching the terminator line sweep over the Pacific, dragging a ribbon of dawn behind it. His tablet, Velcroed to a strut, chimed with a priority message from JAXA.

>Thorne, Commander. Urgent. Yokohama Splashdown Zone compromised. Post-typhoon debris field. Recovery unsafe. New return window: TBD.

TBD. To Be Determined.

He read it twice. The station hummed around him. Earth, breathtaking and indifferent, continued its roll. Three letters had just cut his tether.

Mission Control was infuriatingly calm. “Just a minor recalibration, Thomas,” came Capcom Sarah’s voice, a studied slice of Texan normalcy. “We’re re-routing you. Think of it as an extended mission. A bonus view.”

His crew mates, Koji and Anya, received the news with professional stoicism. Their own return was still scheduled for January 2nd on the separate Soyuz. The dynamic shifted subtly, immediately. They were now passengers with a departing flight. He was becoming a resident.

The days condensed into a strange, slow-motion ritual. He helped them pack their personal kits—the small pouches of photos, keepsakes, and data drives. The farewell was a clumsy, weightless embrace in the airlock.

“Keep the place tidy,” Koji said, his smile not reaching his eyes.

Anya just squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t use all the hot sauce.”

Then the clunk-hiss of the docking seal releasing. A gentle nudge. Through the thick glass, he watched the Soyuz capsule, a beetle of scorched ceramic and metal, drift away. For a moment, it was just another star. Then its engines fired, a brief, brilliant flower of orange in the black. It streaked away, a falling star in reverse, carving a line directly toward Earth, toward home, toward gravity.

Silence flooded the Vigil . It was a new kind of silence. Before, it had been the productive silence of a working lab. Now, it was the silence of an empty cathedral. The constant hum of life support was no longer a background note; it was the only note.

Mission Control filled his days with busywork. Inventory the Russian module’s spare parts. Re-calibrate the spectrometers. Film a tour of the station for a school group. It was the architecture of distraction, and it was paper-thin.

The problem was the light. Without the anchor of a crew schedule, the station’s ninety-minute orbit became a disorienting strobe. He’d float through the Node, and in the span of a single task, day would flash to night outside the ports. One orbit: the Sahara, a boundless expanse of burnt umber under a fierce sun. The next orbit: the North Atlantic, a heaving plate of lead-grey under a cosmos of frozen stars. Christmas, New Year’s, Tuesday - they were all just names for different configurations of shadows on a planet he could see but not touch.

He began dreaming of weight. Not just gravity, but the specific, tactile heft of a world that pushed back. The resistance of a garden spade in damp soil. The pull of a full rucksack on a hike. The satisfying, final click of his car’s ignition. Up here, everything was effort without resistance, action without echo.

On the tablet’s calendar - December 31st - Mission Control patched through a live feed from Times Square. The roar of the crowd was a tinny, distant thing. He watched the glowing ball descend on his screen, its reflection a ghostly smear in the black cupola window. A million faces, upturned. A collective held breath, waiting for a future to begin.

He was waiting for a ride.

“Happy New Year from all of us, Thomas!” Sarah’s voice was bright, jarring.

“What’s the date up here, Capcom?” he asked, his voice flat in the static.

A pause, longer than comms delay should account for. “Say again, Vigil?”

“Nothing. Happy New Year, Houston.”

After the call, he found himself in the airlock, facing his EMU suit - the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, a bulky, white cocoon. His own personal spacecraft. He placed a gloved hand against its cold, composite shell. On the other side of the outer hatch was the pure, serene void. The ultimate silence. For a moment, the temptation was not frightening, but logical. A final, perfect step into the between.

He jerked his hand back as if burned.

The resupply mission was supposed to be his lifeline. The Dragon capsule, scheduled for January 5th, would bring fresh supplies, a friendly face, and the confirmed schedule for his own return. He watched its approach on the telemetry, a pixel of hope growing brighter.

It exploded at T-Minus 43 seconds to launch. A clean, silent fireball on the monitor, no sound in the vacuum of his headphones. An “anomaly on the pad.” Investigation required. No new launch date.

His new window was now a blank space on the calendar. The word from Houston was: Weeks. Maybe months.

That night, during the long pass over the dark side of Earth, he killed all the interior lights. He floated in the cupola, un-tethered, in absolute darkness. The station’s hum was the blood in his veins. Earth was a vast, black absence below, defined only by the pinprick constellations of human cities that clung to its edges like luminous moss.

And that’s when he saw the other star that didn’t move.

It wasn’t on the traffic schematic. It was higher, older, its silhouette angular and wrong against the Milky Way’s river of dust. A derelict. A Soviet-era station from the rumours of the ’80s, Kosmograd-7 or some forgotten ghost, its orbit a slow, decaying ellipse that had, by cosmic accident, synced with his own purgatory.

He reported it, voice detached. Houston’s response was swift, firm.

>Vigil , Houston: Negative object on your vector. Telemetry shows clear space. Likely visual echo from internal reflection. Recommend sleep cycle, Thomas.

It was no reflection. He trained the external telescope. He saw the jagged tear in a solar panel, the grey, pitted skin of its pressure hull, a single, dark viewport like a blind eye.

He had a neighbour. Another soul caught in the Lagrange point between life and whatever comes after.

He didn’t hail it. Communication felt like a violation of its silence, and his own. Instead, he began to sync his routines to its passes. During the dark-side orbits, he’d float in the dark and watch the silent, angular shadow glide past, a companion in limbo. He named it Ghost.

Then, on a morning that felt like any other, the text finally came.

>Thorne, Commander. SpaceX clear. New window firm. Undock: January 28. Splashdown: January 29.

He read the numbers. January 28. A solid thing. A destination.

A tremor that had nothing to do with rocket engines went through him. It wasn’t joy. It was the deep, unsettling lurch of a chain being pulled taut after lying slack for so long.

That night, during Ghost’s transit, he didn’t hide in the dark. He switched on every light in the Cupola module, making Vigil a blazing beacon in the night. He faced the window.

The derelict appeared, a sharper darkness against the starfield. As it reached the point of closest approach, something on its hull caught the sun’s raw, unfiltered light. Not a random glint.

From the depth of that dark viewport, a single, bright, unwavering point of white light winked on. It held for three precise seconds.

A signal. A recognition.

Then it vanished, and Ghost slid back into the endless ink.

Thomas Thorne floated, utterly still. The last light from Ghost had faded back into the starfield, but its echo seemed to pulse in the silence, a phantom heartbeat in the station’s quiet hum.

Then, the static hiss and crackle of the scheduled comms link. Capcom Sarah’s voice was there, but the tone was wrong. The practiced, breezy confidence was gone. It was strained, heavy.

“Vigil, Houston. Thomas, we have the update.”

He said nothing. The silence stretched, filled only with the whir of a circulation fan.

“We have… two options.” Sarah’s voice was precise, clinical, a surgeon explaining a procedure with no good outcome. “The Dragon capsule is cleared. We have a firm return window. Undock on the 28th. Splashdown on the 29th. Recovery teams are green.”

A flutter, a phantom muscle memory of relief, tried to ignite in his chest. It died instantly.

“However,” she continued, the word a guillotine. “The post-flight medical review of your latest biometrics is… concerning. The calcium loss, the muscle atrophy indices… they’re beyond our predictive models. The doctors believe the extended delay has pushed your system into a novel adaptation state. The deceleration trauma of re-entry, followed by immediate re-immersion in full gravity… they are modelling a high probability of catastrophic cardiovascular event. The odds are… not good, Thomas.

She paused, letting the void swallow the words. Not good. In the lexicon of Mission Control, it meant certain death.

“Option B,” she said, her voice dropping, becoming almost a whisper. “The Russians have a modified Progress freighter, a long-term, slow-boost vehicle. It’s a supply ship, not a crew return vehicle. It could be re-tasked. It could reach you in six weeks. It has a reinforced couch. It could bring you home… slowly. A gentle, spiral descent. It would take four months.”

“Four months,” Thomas breathed, the words hanging in the air like frost.

“Four more months of this,” Sarah confirmed, the truth laid bare. “To maybe survive.”

The screen on his tablet lit up. Not with a checklist, but with a live feed, patched through from Houston. The image was grainy, lagging. It was his living room. The Christmas tree was still up, needles brown, a sad skeleton in the corner. His wife, Lena, sat on the sofa, her face pale and blotchy from crying. Their two children, Ben and Chloe, were curled on either side of her. Ben, twelve, stared at the floor, his jaw clenched in a way Thomas recognized as a desperate fight against tears. Chloe, eight, held her mother’s hand, her eyes wide and uncomprehending, fixed on the camera he knew was mounted on their TV.

“Daddy?” Chloe’s voice was small, shredded by distance and compression. “The lady says you’re sick up there.”

Lena looked up, her eyes finding the lens. In them, he didn’t see anger. He saw a vast, weary devastation, and a love so exhausted it was just pain. “Thomas,” she said, his name a whole sentence of grief. “Just… just come home. However you can. We’ll be here.”

Ben finally looked up, his gaze fierce. “You promised you’d be back for my championship game. It’s in March.”

The feed cut. The screen went dark, reflecting his own hollow-eyed stare back at him.

The ambition that had fuelled him - the relentless drive to push higher, to see the curve of the Earth, to be a man of steel and vacuum - felt like a stranger’s memory. A poison he had chosen. He had traded the weight of his daughter’s hand in his, the smell of his son’s hair after a game, for this: a silent, spinning prison at the edge of everything.

Why? The question wasn’t philosophical. It was a physical rupture inside him. He had loved them. He did love them. So why was he here? To prove he was exceptional? To escape the mundane? He looked at his hands, floating before him - tools that could fix a billion-dollar spectrometer but could not wipe a single tear from his child’s face.

He was a ghost to them already. A voice from the sky. A pixelated face that froze and broke apart. To go home and die in front of them, to make them witness his body betraying the legend… was that a gift? Or to stay, to become a true ghost, a story that slowly faded over four more months of silent orbits, giving them time to let go, to remember the hero and not the broken man?

“Vigil, Houston. Thomas. We need your decision. The Dragon launch commit clock starts in two hours. Do we send you the fast descent protocols, or do we begin negotiations with Roscosmos?”

He looked out the cupola. Earth rolled past, achingly beautiful, infinitely far. He looked in the direction Ghost had gone. The silent, permanent resident of the between. A place with no questions, no promises, no slow-motion goodbyes.

He keyed the mic. His voice was sand.

“Vigil copies.”

A long pause from Houston. “And your decision, Commander?”

Thomas Thorne watched the terminator line swallow another continent into night. He saw the lonely, glinting lights of a ship crossing the dark Atlantic, moving towards a harbour. He saw the endless, welcoming dark where Ghost lived.

“Standing by,” he said.

And he let the silence answer for him.

The End