Jesse leant back as he listened to Harry continue. It was difficult to watch him in the pilot’s seat. Jesse’s fingers tingled with longing. He wanted to be seated before the controls. He wanted to feel the hum of them beneath his palms.
As most of his job began when they got close to station, so he had several hours yet to sit and twiddle his thumbs. Every time he looked out the window his home, the Damocles, was smaller. It looked like a beetle, the command module a glassy head bolted to the fat steel thorax of the living modules, the kitchen and bedrooms. Most spectacular was the enormous vaulted abdomen of the greenhouse, a space garden reflecting the stars. Jesse imagined Cai watching them depart in his lab, amongst the long grass. Was Juno watching him too? Were the other young astronauts, Kennedy, Cal and James on the Orlando, watching them approach? Perhaps they were sitting on a sofa in their own living modules, their feet tucked under them, searching the sky for the shuttle.
After an hour of flying he didn’t need to look out the small porthole of a window to know how far they had come. The Damocles was only a round speck in the sky and they were in microgravity. Jesse’s face had begun to swell and his back ached.
‘You’re moon-faced,’ Poppy said, her auburn hair floating up around her ears, her cheeks doughy and pink, the veins in her neck bulging. She unstrapped her seatbelt and grabbed her knees, turning a slow somersault in the cramped space of the shuttle. She finished upside-down and waved to the camera with a swollen grin. Jesse swallowed an anti-nausea pill, tightened his seatbelt and tried to sleep.
4 P.M.
HIS COMPUTER WOKE HIM when it detected the station. The words ‘LOCKED ON’ flashed in red letters in the corner of his screen. From this distance, Orlando was like a white spider in the sky, although it looked larger on his display.
The space station resembled the Damocles – a hulking mass of solar panels, pressurized modules and trusses, assembled in space. The American flag painted on its side spanned ten metres. It was far more spacious than Damocles, built for circling in low orbit over the pale moon and not for interstellar travel. At the time, the Orlando was the single most expensive item ever constructed in human history – that was before the Off-World Colonization Programme.
‘Can you hear me Damocles? Congreve? Comm check.’
It was Juno’s voice in his headset, and it startled him into alertness.
‘I’m here,’ Jesse told her.
‘Is it beautiful?’ she asked, breathless. Jesse nodded at the internal camera feeding back to the ship. He was captivated by the prospect, the lovely light radiating off the frozen moon. The orbiting station looked small in comparison.
‘All right,’ came Igor’s gruff voice through the line. ‘Plenty of time for daydreaming and chit-chat when we’re all on station. Now it’s time for the real work to begin. Jesse, are you ready?’
It was a game of cat and mouse. As their shuttle slowed they would enter into Europa’s orbit, just above the station in what was called a ‘phasing orbit’. Jesse’s job was to monitor the engine burn as they made their first orbital transfer. Suddenly the Congreve was a hive of activity, Harry and Commander Sheppard issuing commands and talking into their headsets with Omar Briggs, while Igor instructed Jesse over the headset and Poppy kept the channels operating. Jesse could see Captain Briggs’ face on the screen, examining the incoming data from the Damocles.
‘All systems nominal,’ Commander Sheppard said over the intercom.
‘I didn’t catch that?’ came the captain’s voice. Commander Sheppard groaned and unlatched his helmet, fiddled for a moment with his mic. ‘Can you hear me now?’
‘Loud and clear,’ Omar confirmed.
‘Having a bit of trouble with my helmet and mic.’ Sheppard exhaled. ‘Ready for rendezvous in ninety minutes. Harry, issue the command for docking probe extension.’
They were close, and it was a great feeling. Jesse had watched the videos of docking procedures, seen the probe lock onto the port on a space station and then, once the hatch opened, all the hugs and laughter as the crew on the shuttle greeted the crew on the station. He remembered the air of exhilaration. After the long journey, to be united. The crew on one station had lined the walls with banners and balloons. It had been like a party. That was what awaited them in under two hours.
BY THAT POINT, THE shuttle was so cold that Jesse could see his breath in the air, and ice condensing and cracking on the inside of the little portholes, forming spidery white veins along the edges. He pulled a pair of gloves on and shuddered. His lips and chin had grown numb while he slept, and he wondered how Harry had retained his mobility in the sub-zero temperatures.
‘The crew on Orlando have performed an orbital boost that puts us in almost the same orbit. Now, as we descend to dock with them,’ Poppy was saying into her microphone, ‘we’re being captured by the moon’s gravity. Which is about a tenth of Earth’s. We’re flying just above station now.’ She pushed out of her seat and held the camera near the frosted window. Jesse could just make out the tiny shadow that their shuttle cast over the station’s hulking frame.
‘It’s a very tense moment now, as we reach the space station,’ she said in a shallow whisper. ‘If the thrusters fail to slow down the shuttle could crash into the station—’
‘Harry’s about to perform a side-burn so that doesn’t happen,’ Solomon reassured them, with a relaxed smile at the camera.
That had happened to Jesse a few times on the simulator. He’d come close to the station but failed to slow down in time and crashed into a solar array or, worse, an entire module. At the speed the Congreve and the Orlando were travelling, even a small collision would be enough to tear through both hulls. He felt a brief flicker of relief that it was Harry behind the controls, not him.
‘Is that a docking probe you’ve extended or are you just pleased to see me?’ Captain Briggs chuckled over the intercom.
‘That’s the first time I’ve heard that one,’ Commander Sheppard replied, rolling his eyes.
‘You boys.’ Jesse saw Sie Yan laugh and nudge her husband on the monitor. It was nice to see the easy intimacy between the three of them.
Jesse leant forward in his seat. This was the hardest part. With the docking probe extended, Harry had to bring it in for ‘the kiss’, as Solomon called it, where it would push into the port. Jesse realized he was holding his breath – they all were. There were two hand-controllers to pilot the shuttle; one that controlled lateral movement and another that controlled rotation. Though he ached to watch his own hands steer, Jesse admired Harry’s precision, the exact angles he turned, and he watched through the window and on the monitor’s schematic as they moved into the perfect docking position.
‘Hang in there,’ said Captain Briggs. ‘You’ve got a skilled pilot there, Shepp.’
‘Trained him up myself.’ Sheppard’s voice was humming with pride.
They were about 100 metres from Orlando when it happened. Harry had been about to issue the final command. Jesse had been staring so intently at his display that his memory of it came not from witnessing the incident himself, but from the video that survived on Poppy’s camera.
There was a flash of blinding light, like a star collapsing, but no sound at all.