Fade

fade
verb, intransitive
To gradually grow faint and disappear. To lose or cause to lose color or brightness. To lose freshness and wither (of a flower). To gradually become thin and weak, especially to the point of death. To lose strength or drop back, especially after a promising start (of a racehorse). Gradually lose intensity (of a radio signal). To become temporarily less efficient as a result of frictional heating (of a vehicle brake).

They were left only with one another now. At the beginning of the voyage, they had taken turns using the ship's radio, talking to the friends and family they had left behind, sometimes for hours. Their departure had been so flurried, so packed with activities, that they all felt that necessary statements had been left unsaid. Once they left Earth's gravity well, a great silence sourrounded them and their ship, and their duties were too few to fill the time. None of them had thought much about how they would while away all those hours, when they weren't in cryo-sleep, so they called home while they could.

After they crossed Mars' orbit, the signal took noticeably longer to traverse the distance. Their conversations took place as in slow motion. All began to sense an impatience on the part of those on Earth with the increasing delay between question and response. The travelers still clung to those conversations--those emotional lifelines.

After they departed the Solar System, the delays became almost interminable and the signal's strength began to fade. Some of them gave up. They said their last goodbyes, not even waiting for a response, signed out on the ship's duty board, and went to their cryo-pods for the long sleep. Those whose duty was to stay awake for the first three-month watch felt the loss of not only their contacts on Earth, but of most of their shipboard companions. As they monitored their descent into the long, chemically-induced slumber, they already missed them.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.