Months later, dawn over the outpost, and the greenhouse dome is no longer a skeleton. It is lush and green, crowded with leaves, a bubble of Earth on a red plain.
Night in the greenhouse. Yuki tends the tomato vines, then stops with one hand on her stomach, very still. In the med bay a scanner screen shows a tiny flickering heartbeat and Yuki stares at it as if it might be a mistake. She tells James in the corridor, and his face breaks open into disbelieving joy; he lifts her clean off the floor.
Lena records a message to Earth, smiling into the camera. Twenty light-minutes later Director Sarah Chen reads it with her hand over her mouth. In a city square a crowd watches the Mars outpost on a giant screen and understands that something has changed.
The months pass in the way they do in a happy house. Yuki, visibly pregnant now in a soft maternity uniform, harvests greens. In his workshop Mikhail welds a tiny crib out of spare capsule parts. HELIX-R1 3D-prints a small toy rocket and presents it in its claw, very formally. James presses his ear to Yuki's belly at the dome window and they both laugh. Lena and Yuki paint stars on the nursery wall.
Then a night storm hammers the outpost, the windows glowing against the dust. In the corridor Yuki doubles over, holding her belly, and James catches her. He and Lena hurry her toward the med bay. Mikhail sends the signal to Earth, knowing that whatever is going to happen will have happened before any answer comes.
The med bay. Yuki on the bed, James holding her hand, Lena in medical gloves because she has to be. Yuki strains, James's forehead pressed against hers.
A first cry. Lena lifts a tiny newborn wrapped in a white HELIX blanket.
Yuki holds her daughter on her chest, crying and smiling at once. James takes her in his arms for the first time and cannot speak. Mikhail stands in the doorway grinning and wiping his eyes. On Earth, twenty minutes behind, Mission Control erupts and Sarah Chen hugs her team. A tiny hand curls around James's finger. Yuki hangs a small placard on the welded crib: NOVA.
Dawn breaks as the storm clears and the crew gather around the crib, four heads over one small face. At night Yuki rocks Nova at the dome glass with Earth a blue star above them.
Then the years come quickly, the way the music does. Nova at one, taking her first bouncing low-gravity steps into James's arms. Nova at two, riding on R1's back through the greenhouse while Mikhail laughs. Nova at three, waving at grandparents on a screen. Her fifth birthday, a strawberry cake with five candles and the crew singing. Yuki teaching her to plant a seedling at six. Nova at seven in a small sealed EVA suit, holding James's gloved hand on the surface, looking up.
And then a HELIX colony ship comes down out of the sky in a blaze of engine light. The outpost is a colony now, many domes, habitats, roads and solar fields, and the ship touches down in billowing dust while the robots roll out to meet it. The hatch opens and the new colonists step down, and among them is a small boy born on Earth.
Nova and the boy face each other through their visors, both shy. Nova waves. The boy waves back. Then the two of them are running together across the red ground toward the domes, and Yuki, James, Lena and Mikhail stand with their arms around each other, watching.
Golden hour from the air: two small figures running, long shadows. Nova's face through her visor, beaming.
That night the two children lie on the dome floor looking up at the stars, the way her parents did on Sol 1. Nova points at the tiny blue star and tells Leo that is where he is from. Leo sits up and pats the dome floor: this is your world. They both burst out laughing.
The colony under the Milky Way, Earth a blue dot in the sky. Nova at the glass, stars reflected in her eyes.
