Somewhere in the solar system.
An asteroid the size of one of Mars’ moons floated alone in orbit around the sun, in all its majesty. Formerly a cosmic dust-covered rock, it had been completely worked over and half of it had been cut off, leaving a flat surface from which grew an enormous docking tower. The half that remained was still a natural rock, though the cosmic dust coating it had been swept away, leaving the surface clean, while the docking tower was made of a dark gray hadfield steel alloy, as most of the empire’s hardware in space was.
A study in contrasts, the natural half of the asteroid was dark, while the docking tower was brightly lit with brilliant flashing lights and painted signage highlighting the various docking bays of different sizes.
(Ed note: Picture Omega, from Mass Effect 2.)
[Outpost 134, this is ISA-EV-343398 on leading approach, requesting approach lane and docking assignment,] the captain of a kilometer-long vessel reported.
[Outpost 134 copies requesting approach lane and docking assignment. Come to zero thrust and prepare for inspection, 343398,] the tower replied.
[Roger, coming to zero thrust and rolling out the welcome mat, 134. 343398 out.]
A bright yellow light shone from the tip of the docking tower on the imperial outpost and flashed over the exploration vessel. It turned green and the comms crackled to life again.
[Welcome to Outpost 134, 343398. You’re assigned to docking ring seven, dock seventy-one alpha. Please be advised that you and your crew will be subject to ARES authority while docked and that most of the outpost is restricted to civilian personnel. Trespassers will be dealt with expediently.
[With that out of the way, enjoy your shore leave, and happy New Year. Outpost 134 out.]
……
Inside ISA-EV-343398.
‘Despite spending more than six months in deep space, the beauty hasn’t faded,’ Captain Kim Miller thought. She had never imagined she would be able to even ride to orbit, much less deep space in the solar system, and had given up on her childhood dreams when she turned thirty.
Who would have imagined that, eleven years later, she would be at the helm of an enormous spaceship overseeing the docking procedure with a space station that could only have come from the fever dream of one of the authors she grew up reading? Definitely not her, that was certain!
“Helm, line us up for the catch and reverse thrust to minus fifteen hundred FPS relative,” she ordered.
“Aye ma’am, lining her up and preparing for catch maneuver,” the helmsman replied.
The ship’s executive officer, Dennis Campbell, tugged the imaginary wrinkles out of his uniform as he stood beside the captain and gazed at the display on the fore bulkhead of the bridge.
“I’ll never get used to this, I think,” he said. “I mean, it’d be one thing if all of the outposts were built to a standard template, but... we’ve visited an average of one outpost every two weeks and they’ve all got their own character. Isn’t that amazing, Captain?”
“Status report, Mr. Campbell. Save the observations for when we’re not docking a million ton vessel with an outpost the size of Deimos and focus on the task in front of you,” the captain rebuked.
“Aye aye, ma’am. All stations reporting all green and cleared for the catch,” the XO reported, feeling chastened. Captain Miller was right; even though it was a routine procedure, they had experienced enough potential catastrophic failures during their training in the simulation to know that they needed a hundred percent of their focus when performing the complex line-up and catch procedure.
(Ed note: When docking with a moving object that’s in orbit in space, the vessel docking begins the procedure ahead of the object they’re docking with. Then they come to zero relative velocity—the same speed as the thing they’re docking with—
and line up with the docking port before slowing down and letting the bigger object “catch up” to them before finally docking. Hence “line up and catch”.)
Captain Miller acknowledged the report, then asked, “Three-
ninety-eight, any update on our schedule?”
[No, ma’am. Nothing in the database right now, just a week of shore leave for the New Year celebrations and a note to attend a briefing on station here in Outpost 134,] the ship’s AI replied.
“Looks like we’ve got some proper shore leave this time, not just a refuel and refit cycle,” the ship’s engineer, “Scotty”, excitedly said. No matter what their name was before joining the imperial space agency, all ships’ engineers were called Scotty, just like all medics in every branch of the military were called Doc.
“Scotty” had joined the dangerous exploration mission for two reasons. The first was curiosity; he just plain wanted to know what was out there and whether it would go bump in the night or be like diving into a pot of gold. And the second reason was the generous bonuses he could earn, bonuses that would go a very long way toward supporting himself in a manner that he would like to become accustomed to.
After all, the strict regulation the empire was still under while its fledgling economy grew to a point where it would be independently viable ensured that five hundred END was enough to survive in the empire. But there was a vast gulf between survive and thrive, and he desperately desired to bridge that divide by sating his curiosity.
It would be killing two birds with one stone.
Going into the program, he had thought that it would be more dangerous than it’d proved in actual practice. The only times he had “died” were all in the simulators, where the crew’s instructors would throw them into desperate situation after desperate situation, waiting for them to fail so they could chew them out afterward. Eventually, however, they began succeeding, and their number of successes grew until they had been assigned to an exploration vessel.
Thus, he was caught unawares by how easy the job of ship’s engineer was made by the automated maintenance bots and constructor swarms at his disposal. The only times he would have to step in would be when the multiple layers of failsafes failed and left him as the sole bulwark between a successful mission and a failure that led to some, if not all, of the crew dying miserably when all systems went down and the vessel went Dutchman.
He supposed that was the reason that justified the large bonuses he was paid; the risk of space exploration was minute, but very, very real.
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