The One Way Ticket
Major Dmitri Sorokin had volunteered for the mission because he had nothing left to lose, which was the unofficial qualification for every one-way trip in the history of space exploration. The official qualifications — flight hours, psychological stability, expertise in experimental propulsion systems — he possessed as well, but Roscosmos had learned decades ago that the people who performed best on missions with no return trajectory were the ones who had already, in some essential way, left the world behind. Dmitri's wife had died two years ago. His daughter lived in Montreal and called on birthdays. His apartment in Star City contained a bed, a shelf of books he had already read, and a photograph he could not look at. He was, by every measure that mattered, ready to go.
The ship was called *Lermontov*, after the poet, which Dmitri appreciated — there was an honesty in naming a doomed vessel after a man who had died in a duel at twenty-six. The *Lermontov* was small, built for a single occupant, its interior a compromise between functionality and the minimum space required to prevent a human being from losing their mind over an indefinite period. The experimental drive occupied most of the ship's mass — a device that the engineers described in terms Dmitri understood were metaphors, because the actual physics had not been translated into language yet. The drive did not burn