The Relentless Moon (Lady Astronaut Universe #3)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

I was exhausted and the only thing keeping me awake was the fact that I sometimes drool when I fall asleep.

Kenneth has his church and I have mine. The incense is the heady aroma of petroleum products in the form of fuel and tarmac. We have our catechism of call signs and the high holy language of acronyms. In the temple that is the hangar, we store our artifacts, relics, and holy vessels. I got out of my car, and my fellow priestesses of the sky looked around, waving.

I’ll admit that my actual impulse was to throw the lot of them into an airlock until we could send them back to Earth. And if a “conversation” happened with some emphasis on the effects of decompression on the human body? It was not my best moment. Not that I’d had many of them recently. I focused instead on the order of operations rather than things I couldn’t fix.