Love that stays

Before getting into the story, let me introduce to the core team of Ahana's space centre whom she would be working with- 1. Akshay Khurana- 35y- Mission director/Lead scientist 2. Tara Mohan- 43y- Systems Oversight/ Deputy mission director 3. Ahana- 26y- Satellite Systems Engineer 4. Rohit Menon- 30y- Telemetry and data systems Engineer 5. Vivek Sinha- 34y- Propulsion Engineer 6. Nisha Verma- 32y- Guidance, Navigation and Control Engineer 7. Karthik Iyer- 36y - Flight Dynamics Specialist 8. Farid Siddiqui- 45y- Communications and Ground Systems Lead 9. Ananya Rao- 28y- Systems Testing and Validation Engineer As I have mentioned previously this is only the core team, usually dozens of them would be working together. You don't need to remember the character names, it's just for the familiarity. The space centre is fictional and doesn't exist in real life. Thank you. ______ Time: 11:32 AM Rows of consoles stretched across the floor, each one carrying its own quiet responsibility, moving in careful coordination toward a single moment. The world was watching. The pressure was immense. Ahana sat at her station, the soft glow of her screen casting light across her face. The payload readings stared back at her like they were keeping a secret she hadn't earned yet. Her mind ran on a loop, all green, all stable like a prayer she was trying to believe. Her fingertips hovered over the keyboard without touching it. She was reading the room. Everyone looked calm, of course. On the outside, everyone always did. "Telemetry nominal." Rohit's voice came first, slightly breathless, the way it always was during launch windows. His eyes didn't leave his screen. "Propulsion ready." Vivek didn't look up. His tone carried that particular certainty of a man who trusted his calculations more than he trusted people. Months of testing lived in that voice. "Guidance locked. No deviation." Nisha's words were straight and sharp, clean as a blade. Near the centre console, Akshay Khurana stood with his arms loosely folded, gaze fixed on the main display. He wasn't blinking. Whatever doubt had flickered inside him, he'd buried it somewhere behind his eyes, and there it would stay until this was over. The room quietly organized itself around him, his stillness was its own kind of gravity. To his right, Tara Mohan stood slightly behind, not watching the screens. Watching the people. Ahana shifted in her seat. This was her first satellite launch as a core team member, and her stomach hadn't gotten the memo about staying calm. The room was picking up pace now, commands flowing faster, the air tightening with every passing second. "Initiate the final sequence," Akshay said. Ahana exhaled slowly and checked everything one last time. "Thirty seconds." Karthik leaned slightly toward his console. "Ground link stable. No delay." Farid's voice followed, even and sure. Twenty seconds. Rohit's brow furrowed. "Wait!" He stopped. Started again. "There's..." "All stations, maintain protocol." Akshay's voice came down like a door closing. "No speculations." Rohit said nothing more. But his jaw tightened. Ten seconds. Ahana noticed and slid closer to him. "Rohit, what's wr.." 5. 4. 3. A flicker. Not visual. Numerical. Small enough to miss. Large enough to matter. "Launch." The ignition sequence fired. A deep, controlled roar filled the audio feed. On the main screen, the rocket lifted, clean and steady, exactly as rehearsed. And then it wasn't. "Telemetry fluctuation!" Rohit's voice cut through the room, certain now in a way it hadn't been before. "It's minor within tolerance, we can manage!" Vivek shot back. "Nisha, check for deviation!" Akshay's composure fractured at the edges. "Trajectory variance increasing, sir!" Nisha's voice climbed half a note. She was holding herself together by threads. Tara's voice came next unhurried, the calm of someone who had stood in rooms like this before, more than once. "Ahana. How long before we lose it?" "Seconds, ma'am." The word landed like a stone. Even Ahana could hear the panic she was trying to iron out of her own voice. "Abort window?" Akshay asked, quieter now. "Closing, sir." Karthik didn't look up. "Ten seconds." Too late. The data fractured. Numbers bled into red. The feed cut, sound first, then motion, then everything. The room that had made perfect sense sixty seconds ago no longer made any sense at all. Silence settled in. Heavy. Absolute. Rohit's hand trembled against his console. No one spoke. They all stood there doing what humans do after losing control replaying it, frame by frame, the way you replay an embarrassing memory at two in the morning when sleep won't come. Ahana felt her eyes sting. She blinked it back. Not now. Ananya noticed anyway. She reached over and quietly laced her fingers through Ahana's. Ahana managed a small smile in return. It was the most she had. There was no time to fall apart. They had a nation to answer to. Rohit pulled up the full telemetry log and began combing through millisecond-level delays. Ahana traced an integration lag. Nisha found the deviation T-plus six point one. Slowly, the picture assembled itself: each system had been compensating, independently, just slightly too late. Individually, the errors were invisible. Together, they were catastrophic. A delayed engine response. And then collapse. Outside, the press had already gathered. Of course they had. It was a live stream. Embarrassment in front of the entire world. You'll sleep just fine, Ahana, she thought to herself, with the particular dark humour of someone who absolutely would not. "Core team with me." Akshay's voice was steady again, the fracture sealed back up. "Press conference. Answer only what you're asked." Everyone nodded. The moment they stepped in front of the cameras, the questions arrived like a volley. "Sir, what went wrong?" "Was this a technical failure?" "Is this a setback for the mission?" Akshay waited. One breath. Then he stepped forward. "Yes," he said. "It was a failure." A pause. "We experienced a partial ignition failure. The engine initiated combustion but could not sustain it. Thrust was insufficient, and the vehicle lost stability shortly after lift." A hand shot up. "Does that mean a basic system malfunction? Something that should have been caught before launch?" Akshay tilted his head, just slightly. "If you're asking whether we test our systems before launching them, yes. We do." "That didn't answer the question." "It answered exactly what you asked." A beat of uncomfortable silence. "Was this human error?" Ahana's gaze moved. Not toward the reporter. Toward Akshay. "No." "Then what was it?" "A failure." "That's vague, sir." "That's what happened." A quiet, uneasy ripple moved through the room not from the team. "Isn't this a significant loss of taxpayer money?" Akshay's expression didn't change. Something in his posture did. "Yes." "And how do you justify that?" He looked at the reporter for a second longer than necessary. "By continuing to work." He let that sit. "Space missions are not guaranteed outcomes. They are calculated risks. Today, the risk did not pay off." "That sounds like a very expensive mistake." "That sounds like a misunderstanding of how this works." Another reporter leaned in. "Other countries have had successful launches under similar conditions. How does your space centre explain falling behind?" "By not comparing unlike situations for the sake of a headline." The room shifted. "Who was responsible for this system?" "We operate as a team." "Can someone explain what 'partial ignition' means? For clarity?" Akshay didn't turn. But his voice shifted — subtle, deliberate. "Ahana." She stepped forward. When she spoke, her voice was steady. She didn't know quite how, but it was. "The ignition sequence was initiated. Fuel injection occurred and combustion began. However, it did not sustain long enough to generate the required thrust." A reporter said, almost to himself: "So the rocket lifted... without enough force to stay in control." Silence followed that. "Could it have been detected before launch?" "No. Because the ignition sequence completed." She held the reporter's gaze. "The failure occurred within milliseconds of combustion. It was not detectable under pre-launch conditions." She stepped back. Returned to her place. Tara moved forward. "We will not resume work on this mission until directed by higher authorities. This concludes the press conference. Thank you." They left. Eight months. Gone. It was personal to Ahana in ways she couldn't entirely explain, not just because it was her first project with the core team, but because she had quietly, privately needed this to go well. Needed to prove something to herself she'd been carrying for a long time. That she wasn't as unlucky as she always seemed to be. That the universe didn't have it out for her specifically. STOP. She caught herself. Stop, Ahana. Do not go there. You know what happens when you go there. She knew it was all science. Causality, not fate. She knew that. She just couldn't always feel it. Years ago she'd drawn a hard line between her personal life and her work, and mostly she kept it. But her mind was not the kind that stayed still, and grief had a way of finding the cracks. She was still standing in the middle of that thought when she felt a hand settle gently on her shoulder. —— That's it for the first chapter. I know it's boring with these scientist details but I want it to be as realistic as possible. Thank you!