The Other Crew
The woman's name was Katya Volkonsky. She had the same face, the same scar on her left hand from a welding accident on Titan Station, the same habit of pushing her hair behind her right ear when she was thinking. She was accompanied by four crew members who matched Katya's team member for member — same names, same faces, same mannerisms. They were not clones. They were not recordings or projections or hallucinations. They were, as far as any available test could determine, the same people. They had the same memories up to a point — the same childhoods, the same careers, the same assignment to the maintenance mission. The divergence occurred at the moment of departure. Katya's team remembered leaving from Ceres Station six months ago. The other Katya's team remembered leaving from Ceres Station fifty-three years ago.
The other crew had been on Station Zero since its launch. They had arrived, they said, on the same maintenance mission, responding to the same power anomaly, and they had found the station empty and operational and exactly as expected. They had conducted their inspection, found nothing unusual, and attempted to leave. The airlock had refused to open. The docking clamps had locked. The station's communication array had gone silent. They had been trapped, maintained by the station's automated life-support systems, aging normally, living in the corridors and common