The Audience

The Audience

By Sean McMullen (excerpt)

The Javelin expedition had a single point of failure, which is something that disaster recovery people hate. There was enough reaction mass to get us to Abyss and stop with our tanks practically empty. All the gas giants of the solar system had ring systems of ice, so the designers had gambled on Abyss having rings as well. The gamble had paid off, so we could refuel and eventually go home.

Had the designers been wrong, there were two disaster recovery plans. One was for us to go into suspension once our explorations were done, and wait decades, or event centuries, for a follow-up expedition. If the moons of Abyss turned out to be interesting, we had the alternative of living out our lives there.

Mikov and I took the shuttle into the edge of the ring system, trailing a hose with a thermal lance and grapple on the end. This I attached to a chunk of ice about the size of an ocean liner during our first spacewalk. In doing so, I made humanity’s first contact with an extra-solar world.

“That’s one small gloverprint for a man,” I begun.

“And about two months of your pay docked if you finish that sentence,” said Landi in my earpiece. “Lucky this is not going live to Earth.”

“Okay, okay, I have touched a star and it is ice,” I said.

The Audience. Photo by Elena

“Once more, this time with a sense of wonder. The taxpayers back home want significant moments, not corny jokes.”

The thermal lance got to work, melting the ice and sucking the water into the half-mile hose leading to the Javelin’s tanks. It would take several weeks and dozens of spacewalks to collect the millions of tons of reaction mass needed to refill our tanks, but propellant to get home had priority over everything else.

“Hard work to make an exciting story out of a good outcome, eh Jander?” said Mikov.

“True, disasters make the best stories,” I replied. “My work is to make sure I have nothing to write about.”

The term science fiction was coined three hundred years ago, but evolved into what the academics call reactivity literature. How do humans react to the unknown? I write about it as a hobby. More to the point, I had been published. Some selection subcommittee decided that having an author in the crew might be a good idea.

Although weak, the gravity of the ring fragment had attracted some ice rubble to its surface, and I selected a fist-sized chunk to take back to the shuttle. With our ticket home now more or less secure, the science could begin. The shuttle made the short hop back to the Javelin, and I handed my insulated sample pack to Saral, the biologist, for analysis.

I was lying on my bunk in the gravity habitat, having a coffee and watching some drama download from Earth when Mikov rushed in.

“Saral’s discovered cells!” he exclaimed. “The ice is full of bacterial cells.”