Mary Ketch

“To embark on a mission so full of unforeseen challenges demonstrates great courage and strength of will. You have maintained that courage even as circumstances have become radically different from anything you have encountered or prepared for in the past. You are, truly, an excellent woman.”
~SCARAB

As many children throughout history have done, Mary Ketch spent many nights of her youth looking up at the stars and imagining what it would be like to visit them. Unlike most children throughout history, Mary was fortunate enough to have been born in a time where that was an absolutely achievable dream. 

Her fascination with the stars and the infinite variety of space captivated her throughout her youth. She told everyone who would ask that she was going to grow up to become a starship pilot one day, and she said it with a conviction that left few doubting its truth. Though learning many of the mundane realities of space travel dampened her naïve enthusiasm to a degree, such as the extreme distance between stellar objects that even superluminal travel could take months to traverse, her determination didn’t waiver. 

Mary applied to the Detroit Flight Academy directly out of high school, putting her enthusiasm to the test in a long, grueling flight program. She logged hundreds of hours in atmospheric flight, interplanetary flight, superluminal flight, space walks, and ship maintenance finishing the program and gaining a blue-level piloting certification, granting her authorization to pilot almost any kind of ship anywhere in colonized space. 

But in-between her rigorous training regimen, Mary gained something else as well: a husband. Mary met John Ketch shortly after joining the flight program, and the two managed to find a surprisingly fulfilling relationship in the scant few moments Mary had to spare between flights from one end of the Home System to the other. Though her necessary time away undoubtedly put strain on the relationship, they always managed to make the most of the time they had. They were married shortly after she graduated the program, and they travelled the world for their honeymoon on a ship she piloted herself with her brand new certification. 

Though she was now out of the program, Mary did not have any more time at home than she’d had before. Indeed, she now had much less, since she had gone from flying in circles around the home system to performing intersystem commercial flights. Even the nearest exoplanets still took weeks of round-trip travel time, and some took much longer. While Mary made the most of the time she had at home, and occasionally had the luxury of a few weeks of downtime in-between jaunts outside the solar system, the months she spent abroad nevertheless put further strain on her marriage. 

One particular mission caused a shift in Mary’s outlook on her entire career path. On a standard cargo supply run to the high-gravity planet Tahani, Mary nearly lost control of her vessel. The planet’s high-density atmosphere with its turbulent winds and high-energy storm clouds combined with its strong gravitational pull to create the most challenging set of circumstances Mary had ever encountered. She managed to stabilize the vessel and land safely, but she’d never come so close to losing control of a spacecraft before. Her mortality and the extreme fragility of human life inside the confines of a starship had never felt more real to her than after that flight. Though sobering, this realization may not have had much impact on her career path if not for one other unexpected realization that came on her way home: Mary was pregnant. 

Mary and John had discussed the possibility of children many times. It was something they did both want, but Mary knew it was at odds with her dreams of being an interstellar pilot. A fetus could not develop properly in microgravity: if she was going to carry it to term, she would have to ground herself for the duration. Early child development also could not occur properly without planetary gravity, as healthy bone and muscle growth would be hindered without it. Children could not endure prolonged travel in space until they reached physical maturity without suffering long-term health issues. If Mary had a child, she could not take that child with her on lengthy voyages out of the Home System, and she was not willing to be absent in the life of a child growing up without her on Earth. 

Mary had a hard choice to make. If she was to become a parent, she would have to abandon her career, at least until that child grew up. She knew she wanted to have children one day, but she hadn’t expected to have to make the decision so soon. In the end, hard though the decision had been, Mary made her decision. 

Mary left her aspirations behind and changed her career path, taking a new job as a shuttle pilot for Solios Intersystems. There she traded her long-haul voyages to distand worlds like Samrat, Showalter, and Hayden to short, simple hops between Earth, Luna, Mars, and Venus which could be completed in a day or two. She was still flying, but the sense of adventure was gone. No longer was she seeing the wild, untamed worlds at the fringes of settled space, instead growing intimately familiar with the same set of spaceports she’d visited countless times during her training at the academy. Still, she found her joy in the adventure to come: parenthood. 

Mary’s pregnancy was troubled, however. Her marriage, which had stalwartly endured the tests of time and distance brought by her career now faced another conflict. Prenatal genetic screening, a commonplace practice throughout the Colonial Hegemony in the 22nd century was seen widely recommended for its ability to isolate and correct potential genetic birth defects in a developing fetus, ensuring the child would grow up to live the healthiest life genetics could predict. However, a minority conservative population still rejected the process, insisting that genetic modification for any reason, even for purely corrective purposes, was inherently immoral. Mary’s husband John came from a family of traditionalists who shared this value. 

Feeling pressure from her husband and his family to forgo the simple genetic screenings she would have otherwise elected to do, Mary committed to a purely natural pregnancy: a choice she would resent forever. 

A series of complications caused the pregnancy to fail late into her term. Though it could not be conclusively confirmed, it seemed likely that the miscarriage could have been avoided with the sort of corrective gene editing she had forgone at John’s behest. 

Mary was angry. Angry at John for pressuring her, angry at herself for giving in to that pressure, and angry at the universe for what it had taken from her. Resentment built between Mary and John: the first obstacle to their relationship they couldn’t seem to overcome. They both claimed to want to salvage their marriage, but if there was a path to doing so, Mary couldn’t see it. She needed time. Time away from John, time away from the life she’d chosen that hadn’t chosen her back. She sought a respite with her first love: the stars. 

It was during her search for new intersystem piloting jobs that she was approached with just what she was looking for. Exotech Industries was assembling a survey team for an expedition to the newly-discovered planet Tantalus 13, and they needed a good pilot to get there. It would be a long trip: more than a year there and back, but she would have the honor to be one of the first humans to set foot on a new world. It was everything she’d dreamed of as a child…the dream she’d thought she’d left behind. 

John asked her not to go, and that made up her mind to do just that. She wouldn’t be pressured this time. The choice would be her own, for herself alone. She knew a year away from an already troubled marriage would likely only deteriorate it more, but she nonetheless knew she had to make this journey. 

Mary Ketch wasn’t certain what she was living for anymore. But for now, for this mission, she was living for lost dreams.