Nicely done; the emotions rang true for the most part, creating a moving story. RAH's influence was evident: I thought you did a very good job with the overall tone of the tale.

Just a couple of things: Saturn, around which Titan revolves, is further away from the asteroid belt than Earth, let alone Mars. Sure, gravity assists from Jupiter -- if it happens to be in the right place along its orbit -- and Saturn itself (on the return trip) can give you a bigger push. But I still have major trouble with the line: [Titan] wasn't as grand as Mars but it was often much closer for the miners who worked the asteroid field. Even when Mars is on the other side of the Sun, relative to a particular asteroid, and Saturn isn't (making it a half-a-billion mile trip in either direction), Titan's not going to be "much closer" than Mars.

The other point's an observation, not a complaint. I think it was Vito Russo in his book The Celluloid Closet who observed that society's ambivalence (or worse) to same-sex relationships made it very popular in fiction to kill off at least one of the two partners before the story ended, to avoid any possibility of their living happily ever after. I'm not sure whether it was the Catholicism in the story or the setting of it in an environment which (except for the Caretakers) resembles the ones of 1950's Heinlein novels, but that came to my mind here.

Eric

(One last thing: I learned the relevant line from Stevenson's poem as "home from sea" rather than "home from the sea". Both versions show up in online searches, but it scans better without the "the", and it reportedly appears the shorter way on Stevenson's headstone and in at least one poetry collection published (1890) while he was still living. (Heinlein's own use of the poem in his story "Requiem" seems to have botched it rather badly: the copy I pulled out of the San Francisco Main Library as a teenager had been hand-corrected in at least three places by a previous borrower.)