Margins

Yusuf ran the burn three times before he told anyone, because the first two times he assumed he had made an error, and the third time he understood that he had not made an error. The numbers did not care that he wanted them to be different. The Calloway had enough propellant to put three people on a return trajectory to the inner station, or four people on a trajectory that fell short by an amount you could measure in days of dying. He sat with that for a while. The hab module hummed around him, the same indifferent hum it had hummed for fourteen months. Down the corridor he could hear Priya laughing at something, and Tomas answering, and the fourth voice, Ren, quiet underneath. He would have to walk down there. He would have to say it out loud, and once he said it out loud it would be true for everyone, not just for him. He checked the math a fourth time. It stayed the same.