“You mean we’re looking at two alien races?” That was Patrick. “This is getting even cooler!”
“Are we sure we’re even dealing with one?” Lucas turned away from the marker, as if it made him nervous.
“Let’s let the experts decide and decipher,” Zack said, not especially eager to give up the lead role—but not wishing to have his team waste time debating when there was clearly more exploration to be done. “It would help if they could see this.”
It took half an hour to restring the cable and bring the camera to the site of the marker. As the startling images traveled at light speed along the cable, back to Brahma and Venture, and then, two seconds later, to Houston, Bangalore, and the world, Pogo gestured at the high ceiling—higher than a basketball hoop—and broad passage.
“Whoever or whatever they are, they’re big suckers.”
This is so frustrating!!! I used to be able to watch shuttle and ISS EVAs minute by minute! How come we’re only seeing a few reports every couple of hours?
POSTER UK BEN AT NEOMISSION.COM
Shuttle and station missions used TDRS satellites that provided almost constant coverage and communications. Destiny and Venture rely on their own antennae. Welcome to flight Beyond Earth Orbit, fan boy.
POSTER JIM FROM KSC, SAME SITE
Tea Nowinski’s father had an expression that, unfortunately, perfectly described his daughter’s job during the EVA into Vesuvius Vent. Forced to serve as the link between Zack and Patrick and mission control, she was “the meat in the sandwich.” Squashed, covered in mustard, not a pleasant place to be.
In fact, she also had to serve the same role for Dennis Chertok and his commander aboard Brahma. For the past four hours, all she had done was flip switches to change frequencies on the radio, back and forth from the direct link to Zack and Patrick, and at times Lucas and Natalia, then another channel to Houston (formerly Weldon, now the Stay-2 shift director Josh Kennedy), then a third channel to Taj in Brahma.
All the while watching the startling imagery that flickered on the small screen on Venture’s control paneclass="underline" the view from the bottom of Vesuvius Vent; the pavement; the cleft; the dark, forbidding passage.
The marker.
Maybe it was better that she was so busy, or she would have been paralyzed at the implications . . . that she and Yvonne and Dennis and Venture and Taj and Brahma were sitting not on the icy/rocky surface of a Near-Earth Object, but on the hull of a giant interstellar spacecraft.
And possibly a few kilometers—or meters!—from its crew!
She was only able to hear fragments of the reaction in Houston, the automatic use of the stoic word copy to acknowledge the latest bombshell, broken by Kennedy’s occasional honest blurt of “Wow” or “Oh man.”
What was going on with the Home Team? For that matter, what was her father thinking, back home in Woodland Hills?
What was really going through Zack’s mind a kilometer from here?
She wanted to be dealing with those matters, not feeding Yvonne Hall and checking her dressing, or searching out bandages and medical gear and food and water for Chertok, all the while struggling with the question of what the cosmonaut was seeing, and whether he should see it.
Her immediate goal now, at EVA plus four hours, was to get Dennis out of Venture.
Yvonne rested in a hammock stretched across the rear of the Venture cabin at nose height. There was another set of attach points even higher up—it was where Yvonne was originally supposed to sleep. (Venture’s main cabin was taller—four meters in height—than it was wide, a design necessitated by its dual use as a vehicle capable of lifting off a planetary surface. In lunar gravity, there was no danger in falling out of a hammock eight feet off the ground.) But that would have put her out of reach. Even so, Dennis had had to stand on a stool to perform his basic surgery.
“I have done all I can do,” Dennis announced. “She will be stable for at least a day. In this gravity, possibly more. But my professional recommendation is that you return her to Earth at first opportunity.” He smiled to show that he was aware of the political and operational challenges of that decision.
“I’ll tell Houston.”
He indicated the airlock. “I will need some help suiting up.”
“Get started and I’ll be right with you.” As the cosmonaut slipped through the hatch into the next chamber, Tea climbed the stool to have a look at Yvonne. “How’re you feeling?”
“About like you’d expect.”
Tea had conflicting views of her fellow astronaut. She had known Yvonne for a decade—had actually served as the astronaut in charge of training Yvonne’s group of candidates, so she had seen the young engineer’s baby steps into the program. She had proved to be middle-of-the-pack in most regards . . . she lacked the operational strengths of some of her colleagues—those who had come to NASA from military units—and sometimes let her temper show.
But it turned out that she possessed astounding physical skills and a long-distance runner’s stamina (Yvonne ran marathons) as well as terrific eye-hand coordination that made her everyone’s choice for both remote manipulator work and EVAs, those being the two primary skill sets needed for station and lunar missions.
She wasn’t just a jock, either; Yvonne turned out to be uncommonly levelheaded about the social aspects of being an astronaut, unlike a few of her fellow candidates, who fell into the usual trap of thinking they were the space world’s equivalent of rock stars.
Tea had, of course, known that Yvonne was Gabriel Jones’s daughter from a failed first marriage. Growing up in and around NASA had probably cured Yvonne of any illusions about the special nature of astronauts. At the time Yvonne joined the office, her father was actually in Washington at HQ, deputy associate administrator for exploration, one of the folks charged with developing and managing missions to the Moon . . . and to Near-Earth Objects. Jones’s appointment as JSC director had no immediate effect on Yvonne’s career. There was also some sniping about who got assigned to a flight crew—by anyone who didn’t get assigned; any reason would do.
(Tea could only imagine what snarky comments were zipping around Building 4-South when her lover, Zack Stewart, was not only placed on her crew, but given her command!)
Destiny-7 had originally been Tea’s mission, and she had not only approved Yvonne’s assignment, she had asked for her.
And now, having seen Yvonne’s accident, having had to deal with its aftermath, she wondered if she’d made the right choice.
Yvonne had made no obvious mistake, it was true—but she had demonstrated one fatal flaw:
She was unlucky.
“Can I get you anything?” Tea hoped Yvonne could drink on her own . . . “Do you want your father back on the line?”
“God, no.” The injured astronaut shifted in the hammock, moaned. “Just get me my PPK,” she said.
Tea wondered briefly why Yvonne wanted to share the hammock with a big silver briefcase, but if it made her happy—and quiet—she was all for it. “Coming right up.”
“Shut up, Jason. The only thing we’ve learned from dealing with aliens is that they can’t be trusted.”
“So you’re suggesting we can only fight them.”
“Well, we could surrender , which is obviously your preference. But I like mine better.”
EXTRACT FROM STARSHIP “KILROY WAS HERE,”
A SCI-FI NOVEL BY WADE WILLIAMS (1999)