So today, I Reached my target of 25,000 words. In fact, I went past that and reached... 25,007. Woohoo.
I went back and re-read 'Government Joe must Die' last night. I wa surprised - I remember it being pretty clunky, but it was actually pretty readable. Okay, the plot is a tad flimsy, but I was pleasantly surprised by how readable it was. This one, though, is taking a long time to get going. The problem is, I know what's going to happen. Last time I really didn't, which made it easier; this time, I have a plotline which I ahve to stick to, and it's taking a long time to play out. I may not even reach the good bits before the end of the month!
“Hey, Panab.”
“Hmm?”
It was Chris, from the acceleration couch next to his. They had been relocated to the briefing room; theirs were the only two couches in here. It felt lonely.
“You think the Martians could’ve sabotaged our route?”
“What?”
“You know, mined it or something. It’d be awfully easy – I mean, we haven’t exactly been silent in our approach, they’ve known we were coming for a month at least.”
Panab pondered this. “It wouldn’t take much, would it,” he agreed sombrely.
“A few pebbles in the upper atmosphere, a low orbit maybe. Crack that heatshield and we’re toast.”
Panab grimaced. “Well, thank you for that happy thought.”
“Sorry.”
A long pause. They were about twenty minutes away from Titan’s upper atmosphere now; the view from the few cameras still pointing forwards showed a distant curve of the planet’s horizon. Panab knew that that horizon line was slowly flattening as they approached – but it was happening too slowly for him to be sure he was seeing it.
The canteen smelled faintly of old meals, of greasy meat and boiled cabbage, of cold coffee and ageing plastic.
“Sorry, buddy.” Chris said eventually. “just this silence makes me nervous.”
Panab turned his head to look at him. “Chris, my old friend,” he said, surprised. “It is out of our hands. If God wills it, we die here. If not, then we continue. We can never know the time or the place. How many times in your life have you, could you have been killed by some careless movement from someone else?”
Chris gave him a look of disbelief, then laughed shakily. “Thanks for those encouraging words, pal.”
Panab shook his head, frustrated. “Sorry, I expressed that badly. But if you are worried because it is now up to fate, or God, or whatever you wish to call Him, well – it has always been so. As God wills it, it will happen. Once you accept that thought, well, you still get scared, but at least now you have a handle to help control it. A handhold on the precipice, if you like.”
Chris considered this. “I never took you for the religious type, buddy.”
Panab laughed. “Well, that’s the way I was brought up. My parents were Moslems of the Ohio Heresy. They left Earth when the Middle Eastern Moslems began their purges, and… stop me if you’ve heard this.”
“No, really, go on. What’s Ohio?”
“It was a town in America. There was… well, that’s beside the point. Anyway, my parents left Earth, stopped on Deimos for a while, but never really settled. When my grandparents died, they inherited some money, and came on out to Ganymede. I think they hoped there’d be religious freedom there, but-“
“There is. “Chris looked confused, his baffled frown looking perhaps offended.
“Yes, of course there is… but back then, well, there was religious freedom, but there was a lot of stuff to do it was a hardscrabble life. So although they were practising Moslems, many of their practises had to be curtailed just because it wasn’t possible. I mean, praying five times a day when you’re-“
“Woah! Five times a day?! I don’t even eat five times a day.”
Panab frowned a little at that, but carried on. “ – when you’re in a spacesuit, or teleoperating a robot for nine hours straight, it simply isn’t possible.”
Chris chuckled. “Sure, I can just see some big construction rig getting down on its knees in the middle of a building site!”
“Precisely. So, they remained Moslem in their hearts, and hoped to get back to practising their full religion… but, well, to cut a long story short, they brought me up with the theory, but not much practice.”
Chris absorbed this, staring up at the ceiling – which is the only truly comfortable position in a proper acceleration couch.
Suddenly the room shuddered. The ship creaked and groaned alarmingly, popping noises came from all around them. And a thin thunder started somewhere behind their backs, echoing round the ship until it was impossible o tell where it came from.
“Relax, my friend,” Panab said loudly over the increasing noise. “And remember, we have a job to do as soon as we come out of the other side.”
Then, gradually at first, the weight began pressing down on them. It felt like someone was pressing them into sand, burying them alive. Breathing was a great effort. And all around them, the ship thundered and groaned. There were a couple of distant bangs… but they weren’t suddenly engulfed in a fireball, so Panab told himself that it was something none-essential, and concentrated on regulating his breathing.
In the flight plan, the aerobraking manoeuvre was supposed to take just over half an hour. In reality, it seemed an eternity. Panab had just about got used to the noise by the time it began to subside. Gradually, his joints ceased to feel as if they were being put through a mincer, and became merely painful; then, blissfully light once more.
Phil’s face flashed up on one of the screens in front of them. He looked pale and strained, but composed. “Panab, Chris: have you established contact with the probes?”
“Not yet… ah, there it is. Probe 1 now online, probe 2 still not responding… okay, we have probe 2 now. “ Chris sounded as fresh as a daisy, in total control. Panab had to look over at him to see the sweat on his pale face, to see how much he’d been affected. “They’re all nominal, Phil. No sign of a response to our re-entry from the Martians.”
There was no response.
“Phil? Come in please. Anyone on the bridge?”
Finally, Phil’s voice came back on the line. “Chris – you may not see a response. But we’ve got one up here.”
“Bridge?”
Phil was suddenly brisk. “Yep, okay, probe team. We’ll fill you in on the details later. It’s just… the Martian commander has transmitted a brief, voice-only message to us. Hello and welcome to the system, sort of thing. We’ll replay it to the rest of the crew when we’re fully squared away with parking the ship.”
“Roger that, bridge.” Chris said formally. “We’ll continue to monitor the satellite surveillance. Probe team standing by.”
It took a good ten minutes for the post-manoeuvre checks to be sort out. The bangs Panab had heard turned out to be a camera which hadn’t retracted fully and had sheared off, hitting one of the ultra-low frequency antennae and taking it with it.
“Nothing serious, then.” He said with relief.
Freda was down with the EVA team checking out the damage. Her voice sounded intimate in his ear. “No, not at all. The ULF antennae was really only there to be used if we got submersibles into the sea – but even then, we may not even have wanted to talk to the ship in orbit, we may have had some support vehicle much closer. So it’s pretty academic. And the camera was just an inspection system, we can replace that easily. So pretty light damage, in all.”
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