FREE STORIES 2012(36)

The extra space is mostly given over to aeroponics. Living in the Liberty now feels like living inside a greenhouse. The loss of gravity has allowed Beth and Chris Mendenhall to start farming the walls and ceilings. Sometimes you float into a chamber and its like being on the inside of a kind of biological geode. All around you are the tendrils of Soya plants and the broad leaves of ferns.

At union   last week, Beth and Chris announced that they were engaged. Commander Campbell ordered that the last of the chocolate pudding be served and joked that he was saving the ice cream for the birth of the first child in space. At least I think he was joking.

Tom and the engineering crew are working around the clock taking the sensors, vents, antennae and all the Liberty’s other external hardware and extending them out on a forest of ducts and conduits, metres long. Then we grunts come along with our lances and the ice blocks as big as pool tables and make with the igloo building before the engineers reattach the hardware on the new ice.

It's hard work. At close to absolute zero, ice is as hard as steel. And even in microgravity the big blocks of ice still have mass and inertia. Getting them going is hard work and manoeuvring them into position even harder. We've had a few injuries. Muscle strains and one nasty crushing. Fumi was only saved from a broken ankle by the bulk of his suit. Even then his foot swelled up like the pulp of a blood orange.

God, I miss blood oranges!

When I go to sleep at night, my forearms are burning with fatigue and I sleep like the dead. There is talk of modifying some thruster units to help manoeuvre the ice, but it was voted down at union  . We need the exercise.

I'm glad of the work. This week marks the closest approach of Earth as its tighter orbit means it catches up with Tempel. Soon we will leave the plane of the ecliptic and start our journey out into the black. When we failed to make the orbital correction burn that would take us away from the comet, we started on a whole new mission. One that I am responsible for. Even though Commander Campbell is still nominally in charge, this joyride was my idea. Fifteen people's lives bet on my blurted out suggestion.





Personal Log: Lori Childs - Ice Miner

Date: 17/06/2038 (+1 year, 6 Months, 12 days)

Distance From Earth: 4.265AU





Some of us make more sacrifices than others.

I saw Tom Barischoff in the flight deck today. With no need for course corrections or any hope of landing on Mars, the compartment is now given over completely to storage. The only instrument of any worth is the radio which is the only reason the space is not given up to the wet warmth of aeroponics. I sometimes go there to escape the pervasive heat. Tom, it seemed was there for different reasons.

"Talking to my wife," he said. His eyes were raw like wounds. In his hands he clutched a scrap of something that glittered even in the low cabin illumination. He caught my stare. "I coated it with some of the diamond monofilm we were supposed to test on Mars." he said. "I was worried it would fade."

It was a small photograph of a size easily tucked into a wallet. As he turned it in his hands I saw the faces of a woman and a child pressed together in a shared hug and smiling at the camera.

I felt instantly ashamed, both for intruding on his privacy (and God knows that's hard to come by on board ship) and also for forgetting that Tom was married.

Back when the vote was taken to hitch our fate to a speeding comet, it was Tom’s vote that had settled it. Tom with the unofficial voting block of his engineering team, and his affable matter-of-factness that brought along many more. Tom with his casual competence that comes from years of getting real machinery to work in a real world that cared nothing for appearances and politics. Tom and his selfless action against interest.

I realised then that although I had forgotten about Tom’s wife and child, others had not. They saw this man with so much to go home for vote to take a ride out of the plane of the ecliptic and they figured that was the only way to go.

And so here he was... weeping in front of a radio while his words made the thirty five minute trip back to Earth. Plating family photos with abrasion-resistant film and looking in vain in his engineer's tool kit for a tool capable of mending the broken jagged lump in his chest.

The speaker crackled with a woman's voice as raw as Tom's eyes. I left them to it.





Personal Log: Lori Childs - Engineer’s Mate 2 Class

Date: 12/02/2039 (+2 years, 2 months, 7 days)

Distance From Earth: 3.486AU





I'd almost forgotten what gravity feels like. We're spinning up slowly: barely half a revolution per minute at the moment on a five hundred metre tether. That's enough for about 0.15G. But after acclimatising to Mars gravity and then spending nearly eighteen months weightless, believe me fifteen percent is plenty.