“He’s not one for helping me in situations like this. I hope all that I’d need to pull off another maneuver I can get from the book,” Adam said.
“Don’t worry, a little OJT will never hurt you. Just act like you own the ship and you expect your words to be obeyed.” Erin looked at the thin frame of her companion, leaning back against the wall as they stared off at the planet. “You just… might have to act pretty forcefully to umm… compensate.”
“Hey now,” Adam replied. “I know, twelve, but you don’t have to keep rubbing it in. I swear I’m gonna tell Draco to up the hormone dosage.”
The doctor laughed again. “Honesty is served cold on Gemini.”
The pair continued their interactions for two more days, until the lander began bleating its reminders about the pending return to its home station. As quickly as the arrival had approached, so had the departure. As time ticked down in the command center, Erin and Adam sat together for the last time.
“You’ll keep in touch, right?” Adam finally asked after a low-key conversation where each had been avoiding the exchange to come.
“If you figure out a way, of course I will. I still have questions, and I’m sure you do as well,” Erin said. “We’ve got a single radio channel to manage communications here on the station that’s open for one hour every day. Outside of that, it’s all powered-down and shielded to increase the experiment’s isolation. If you can jump on that feed, knock yourself out.”
Adam smiled again, scanning across her face. “I might have to do that.”
“If you screw up the timing and blow my experiment, I’ll come hurt you.”
The sensation was increasingly strange. Erin, in a way, reminded him of his old acquaintance, in appearance if not in mannerisms, but the mechanism by which to do that made no sense in his mind whatsoever. He found it far more logical that he was simply reading base triggers, which were common to most people for the first time, and interpreting them as similarities.
The alarm blared again and they got to their feet. “Well, Commander Montgomery, it has been a pleasure,” Erin said. “I don’t think the place will ever be the same.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” he replied. “Until next time.”
The jolt of the lander detaching from Gemini’s docking collar brought an inverse of the sensation Adam had felt when he had let go of Draco for the first time. He had left days before to face the unknown, but today, he was returning to order, such as it was, and to the daily assignments in preparation for his real purpose, whatever was to become of it.
Truthfully, he had grown in general over the few short days spent on Gemini, owing not the least of which to Erin’s biting wit. Adam could tell it was her playful way of approaching conversations, but it was something he had severely lacked in his regular banter with Draco. While the AI had gotten more relaxed through its ongoing learning and regular software updates, it didn’t have the style of a fully-formed person.
The engines kicked on one more time, and the capsule picked up speed as it prepared to make its dive at Saturn’s vaporous horizon. Through the windows, the clouds resembled the layers of glass mixed within an antique marble, representing another phase in Adam’s ultimate journey. He reached for the tablet and settled in for what he knew to be a long flight.
***
Back on Gemini, Erin’s mind slowly shifted gears back to her normal daily routine. The week’s experience had certainly not been expected, and at the moment, the command center felt uncommonly quiet. Although it hadn’t been something she had considered much before, in the twilight of the commotion, she became aware that there was something missing, as if a light had been flashed across a dark space, only to illuminate an unseen landscape that was unknown and now unforgettable. The light had quickly dissipated, leaving only a memory of a long-since-lost corner of her life.
She retained more than a shred of animosity toward the Gemini AI, which had evidently deceived her to the point of risking damage to their experiments. NASA would hear from her before too long, but for the moment, Erin was pleased to be back at work again, slogging through the backlog of the week, holding within her a strange lightness at the thought of, for once, not being out in the universe alone.
Base Station
Adam’s first indication for Draco Station’s approach was the unexpected firing of the booster engines as the lander began its steady deceleration from its slingshot around the planet. As if he was returning home from a long vacation, he eagerly awaited the docking, although he knew that nothing on the other side of the hull had really changed at all. The mission would continue whether he was present or not; Adam knew for the moment he was really only needed in the face of a disaster or if the community back home needed a personal touch for their public releases.
The seals locked around the transport’s collar, and the pressure quickly equalized before the hatch released and Adam took the first step back into his habitat.
“Welcome aboard, Captain. All systems online,” Draco announced in its dry and deep voice as Adam entered.
“Thank you,” he replied. “No action items, I assume?”
“Negative at this time. You have a message from Mission Control waiting in the command center, and I am preparing for next week’s pod deliveries. It is good to see you back on time after, I hope, not distracting Gemini Station’s staff too badly.”
“Of course not. I don’t know where you get these ideas. Dr. Moroder seems well on her way with her study.” He glanced at the various camera feeds as he made his way back to the command center. “I don’t know what great evil I was committing by going there; it didn’t impact her work.”
“Knowing of one another’s existence distracts you from your primary mission, and thus my system was ordered to minimize such interactions.”
Adam felt a pang of conscience knowing that Draco was correct; he had put a sizeable hole in the doctor’s schedule, and it wasn’t like he didn’t provide the kindling to a dangerous existential fire, but he had gone through most of the same unscathed. As far as he could tell, humans were pretty hardy when it came to dealing with such measures. “Do you have the specifications for Gemini’s instruments? I’d like to know more about Erin’s work.”
“Yes, it’s waiting in the command center. You’ll likely need additional instruction to understand the details, which I have also assembled and am prepared to render as requested.”
“Thank you,” he said, quietly relieved that the vendetta between him and the station had been given an avenue to dissipate.
The message from Mission Control could wait, Adam decided, and he skipped ahead to the information on Gemini Station. He paged through the more generalized documentation on the equipment and slowly began to delve into the collection network itself. Striking him first was the sensitivity of the instruments, and at once he understood the problem with their setup.
While the research antennas and the communication radios didn’t occupy the same area of the spectrum, they used bands that were susceptible to harmonic frequencies and white noise during their transmissions. There likely wouldn’t be a method to further remove the interference without access to the tools on Earth, but at least Erin had given him a shred of approval to keep in touch.
“Are you planning to contact Gemini Station?”
“Yes, why? Do you want to offer to help?”
“No, I think you can handle this yourself,” Draco said. “I know you can handle a probe launch, and you’ll gain a bit more respect with Dr. Moroder if you can plan and execute the particulars of a dependable data link.”
“Your kindness knows no bounds,” Adam said, beginning to think through the logic of his new project. He supposed the primary difference from the previous probe launches would likely be the length of the flight. Where the others had been of a defined length of time, he was now essentially building a long-duration satellite without the benefit of a nearby solar body for power. He settled on a medium-duration probe that he could stack with ext
ra fuel tanks, keep in orbit for an extended period to relay communications, and then have a predefined burn to bring it back to Draco Station for refueling.
***
With only a week of effort, Adam had the probe built, fueled, and readied for launch, the transmission network being a straightforward exercise in applying the protocols already included on board the stations themselves. If Draco was programmed to show it, Adam knew he would have been impressed at his student’s progress.
Unlike before, the probe accepted the stack of fuel tanks without issue, and Adam dumped his experiment into the launch tube, watching with satisfaction as it flickered off into the distance. The maneuver was more complex than the ones he had planned before, requiring the probe to speed up to advance in its orbital position before returning to the higher position to maintain clearance of the planet’s body.
“Give me a countdown to when it gets in position and sync us with Gemini’s communications window,” Adam ordered as he retreated from the front edge of the docking bay.
“As you wish.”
“Good,” Adam acknowledged as he scanned across the collected equipment that was lined up around him. He thought back to Erin’s words that he should do more with the opportunities that he had been given. He still had time before the Hydra crew arrived, so he mused he might as well make the most of it. Nothing sparked within his mind, until he studied the diagram of the planetary system drawn on the workstation’s display.
He scrolled about the expansive collection of rings, the barrier moons, and onto the outermost orbiting bodies. They had logged over sixty objects under the ‘moon’ category and the tags were in orbits spread about in all directions, with even his previous target, Atlas, now receding away as Draco raced ahead in its trajectory farther down the gravity well.
“Dare I ask what you’re considering?” Draco asked as if exasperated.
“I want to see Janus.”
“You can.”
“No, I mean in person.” Adam shook his head, zooming in on the tiny body. “Up close.”
“Do you mean for this to be a way to impress the good doctor?”
Adam paused. The idea must have suppressed itself within his subconscious. “I don’t think so. She just mentioned that I use the time I have here effectively while I can.”
“Before the next crew arrives and you are required to be on-call and respectable?” Draco asked.
“Yeah, all of that.”
“If you so desire, but it might be more useful than you think. At least it’s within your prescribed list of tasks from NASA to be able to pilot and land a craft on a foreign body. Janus would easily count as a fitting examination of your skills.”
Adam raised an eyebrow, confused by the turn. “You’re not going to talk me out of this? I expected to have more forceful words.”
“In this case, I do not. I will not be providing as much assistance during the lander maneuvers, but you’ve proven yourself so far in the simulator.”
There was no distrust nor any tics which would have tipped Adam off that the AI harbored an ulterior motive in the suggestion. In a way, Adam nearly felt as if his bluff had been called; he had been found out, and now if he didn’t follow through, he’d be held accountable and a message from the AI would be on the first communication burst to Gemini Station, Draco Station Commander: Coward. “All right,” he managed. “Get me an optimal launch window, and I’ll work my magic.”
***
The resulting preparations consumed most of Adam’s time over the days that followed his declaration. For once, Draco had relented on most of his instruction, intent that his astronaut’s mission was within their outstanding parameters.
Adam had been scanning the large command center display for hours, intently plotting the path of the lander in order to hit the moon’s orbit. Without a doubt, it was the longest shot he had planned, and no number of simulations would fully convince him that success was assured. He didn’t think Draco would let him fail, but he didn’t know how far the AI would take its examination.
“It’s about time you figure out how to use your own hardware.”
Erin’s voice was enough to snap Adam out of his single-minded focus. He spun about at the sound, realizing the communication channel had finally opened between the two stations.
“I can only do so much about the orbital dynamics,” he replied, approaching the monitor mounted in the console. “I had a probe designed and built the same damned day of getting back here.” Adam sighed, relaxed at the sight of the doctor on the screen. “Anyways, I’m glad to see it works. Good to see you. How’ve you been?”
After a two-second delay, Erin shook her head with a laugh. “Whatever. I thought you were supposed to be good. A real commander would have figured out a better way. And yes, things have been great.”
“Well let’s see you do one better,” Adam said as he crossed his arms and took a seat facing the screen, content in his skills.
“Can’t. Doing real work over here. You should try it sometime.”
“I’m one step ahead of you. I’ve already got a mission slated for Janus.”
“The sponge!” Erin laughed and clapped in applause. “If you’ve ranked them and are gonna hit up all the moons from least-to most-interesting, you’re off to a good start. It might take a while before you see anything worthwhile.”
Adam rolled his eyes for effect. “Your jealousy is so transparent. By the way, my visit didn’t affect your experiment, did it?”
“Oh my God, yes, it was terrible. We might never recover,” Erin replied with a swept hand across her forehead. The performance stumbled as she failed to deliver the line with a straight face.
Adam was surprised by the jovial tone of his associate on the far side of the planet. Whatever had gotten into her had certainly made the discussion easier, if not downright enjoyable. She continued to discuss her late-breaking developments with the survey until the station overrode the channel for a higher-priority transmission from Earth.
As the screen went dark, Adam almost felt lonely, as if the need for contact had been dormant in his system since his arrival, only to be awoken at the first chance to be around other fleshy beings. It also didn’t help that somehow Erin continued to occupy the same register in his brain as another had in his previous life. He felt an increased determination to not only go through with the manned expedition, one which he had inadvertently signed himself up for, but to make it fruitful if not exciting in the process.
He went back to his planning. The moon had existed in much the same state for millennia and likely far longer, given the bevy of impacts and craters long etched into its surface. It remained of low enough density to resist the pull of gravity and keep its oblong shape, which, while making the eventual liftoff easier, did nothing to simplify the landing over its broken ground.
The thought caught Adam as his mind continued to swirl. There had been no conclusive study performed on Janus regarding its age, composition, or its real history. With the equipment loaded around the station, he began to assemble the logical flow to fill in some of the blanks. By taking core samples around the surface, he could begin estimating their composition, and if he got lucky he could begin to estimate the age of the formation.
As much as he quietly hoped, there was no chance at all to figure out what had ultimately created the body—if not remnants of the solar system’s creation, then a proto-planet that had long since left the universe. Either that, or it could have been a captured comet, finally secured after a billion years of traversing the galaxy. As his head continued to wander, Adam considered how he’d even tell the myriad layers of material apart.
He had access to an electron microscope in the lab, along with a scanner to measure the specular refraction of sampled material. Detecting radioactive content would be more straightforward, he determined, given the number of tools present on the station for monitoring such phenomena.
After a quick pass through the equipment bay, Adam located the corin
g system for removing planetary samples. More than a simple drill, the device was able to cut precisely-aligned holes to a depth of over five hundred meters, as long as it was fed by a steady supply of sample collection tubes, of which there were also many in stock. Before that day, Adam hadn’t given the tool more than a cursory glance, as he hadn’t considered it useful in his daily routine nor his foreseeable future. The nearby ring fragments weren’t large enough to warrant such a study, and without a rock to stand upon, Saturn itself wasn’t a candidate in the most liberal sense of the word.
He prepared the lander in much the same way he had before, except for the addition of the mobility unit and the data collection appliance. Securing it all against the lander’s cargo frame proved to be the greater challenge as Adam hadn’t before had the opportunity to practice the skill.
***
“You promise you’ll be hands-off this time around?”
“Of course,” Draco said. “If you make a mistake, it’s all on you.”
Adam laughed to himself as he began the launch procedures for the lander, first by evacuating the docking bay of its atmosphere and when the pressure had equalized, by releasing the floor beneath his life-bearing capsule. Gravity jolted as he fell away from the station and instinctively floated about to locate the nearest booster stage.
It was similar to coming in for a landing, he decided, as it required maintaining a constant speed relative to the station, seating the lander against the docking collar, and finally pulling the entire assembly free of the surrounding pod. Draco had made the whole experience look easy. Adam found a great deal of skill was required to keep a constant position about the radially-spinning object. Carefully, he manipulated the pair of controls to apply a hair more force to the rear of the lander, essentially pushing him into a flat spin at the same rate as the station itself.
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