Kadvin

What lay before them on Jupiter Station was, in her mind, the most beautiful thing Kadvin had ever seen. Nothing could compare to this, the beautiful awe-striking expanse of space; the sparse yet constantly sparkling darkness consuming everything not held within those clear glass tubes.
When a hand lifted to brush hair from their eyes, Kadvin noticed tears that itched in the corner, her entire soul moved by the sight before them all.

“This is why I became a Solarnaut” came a whispered sigh as she took that first step onto the carpet. In the encompassing silence, and the soft scratching sound of Alpha Team walking along the corridor, the only witness to this breathy exaltation was space itself, twinkling in unconcerned observation of all around it.
To see space in it’s bare glory, to touch the skies and taste of air never smelled by mankind. Nothing had been so clearly defined in her dreams.  When Kadvin had joined the Aquanatics program initially, it was in defeat, accepting that she could never qualify for the dangerous duty of Solarnautics. The day they’d gotten their approval to join Zeta team had been one of the best she could remember, if only because it meant finally Kadvin was going into space!

She let the others in Alpha Team, Jory included, drift ahead as they received instructions, or asked questions, entranced by her first true view of space. Staring through a porthole, or watching a V3D of the ocean of light and dark that stretched out before them could not compare to the lie her brain told her when she reached out and ‘touched’ space, her fingers collapsing against the perfectly clear glass of the polyclast. Only the physical reminder that something stopped their progression eased the small sense of vertigo that threatened the edges of their awareness, staring into the bottomless oubliette that was their universe.   Her retreating digits left a modest smudge on the otherwise flawless surface, the young Solarnaut stuffing both hands in available pockets with a sense of guilt at making a ‘mess’ of the lovely sight, even apologising in a mumbled tone to the very walls around them.

It was almost as if she expected the wall to yell back, to become affronted by her curiosity, but that wasn’t going to happen, for a few reasons: most importantly, because no-one who stepped onto Jupiter Station could resist testing the lie of the perfectly clear polyclast, could resist proving to their innermost self that they were not entirely in space. Secondly, the small machines that polished the glass to this fine finish remained as unbothered by the existence of a few fingerprints as they seemed to be by the nearly constant space dust accumulation on the outside of those very same, carefully shaped tubes. It was no small feat to maintain this perfection of science and the presence of fingerprints bothered no-one for very long. Cleaning was part of the respiratory cycle of Jupiter Station.

“What IS it?” She asked a uniformed and smiling Science Explorer when Alpha Team had started separating into their various assignment areas in the pre-flight debriefing, leaving Kadvin alone in one such briefing area. “I’ve never seen a glass so clear in all my days. And how is it strong enough to not chip when the space flack comes flying?”