Shauna announced over the ship’s intercom that she needed everybody at their stations in about thirty minutes, allowing everyone time to do whatever they wanted to do in the meantime. The crewmates went out the door of the dining area and into the north hallway. Terri turned left to go check on something in the medical bay while the others went through the door directly opposite the dining room, into the common room. Rosalyn trailed behind Sam as they made their way in. It was a warmly-lit place with exercise equipment, televisions, couches, sofa chairs, a home-style (albeit fake) fireplace and every comfort of home an astronaut would tend to miss during their long journeys. Al had removed his shirt—exposing a very muscular, fit chest—and was laying on the bench-press for some extra exercise lifting something over two hundred pounds while Mitchell was sitting on one of the comfortable leather couches next to his meowing cat reading something on his smart device. Sam went to a couch facing the TV and turned it on. It was showing what would at this point be a slightly old broadcast from back home, sent to them via radio transmission courtesy of FAER.
With interaction somewhat sparse between them all, Rosalyn was a little surprised how close the crew had become in their time together. Most of them had seen each other before around FAER headquarters from time to time—Al and Mitchell had gone through engineering training together, in fact—but in many ways most of them had been strangers at the start of the voyage. Rosalyn had never worked on the Novara before now, and only Captain Beele and Dr. Jones had been with it from its commissioning. The three engineers had been moved to the Novara from less profitable ventures a couple journeys prior, and Randy had been with the ship since a few trips before that, each of a shorter duration than this rather atypical eighteen to twenty-four-month trip.
Sam turned the TV to an on-site news report.
“—Flooding and high winds have caused numerous disasters. The local zoo has been reduced to shambles and many animals have died or escaped. You can see here that the lakes Mendota and Monona have sort of merged together into one big lake, causing untold millions of dollars in damage to hundreds of homes… We don’t yet have a body count…”
Sam grimaced. “Ugh, that’s awful.”
“Wait, d-did that say Lake Monona? By—by Madison?” sputtered Mitchell, looking up from his cat and smart device at the broadcast.
Rosalyn stood with her arms crossed just beside the couch and checked the headline listed below the newscaster. “Yeah.”
“My sister lives in Monona. Holy crap—I’d better make sure she’s okay!”
He looked back at his device and started typing. The message he wrote out would have to be relayed over the ship’s powerful communication systems through the vast distance of outer space to FAER, which would relay it to the intended recipient—Mitchell’s sister, in this case—many hours later. The impossibility of instantaneous communication was almost like living in the days before the Internet, something only the crew’s great-grandparents would know anything about. Funny, thought Rosalyn, how progress sometimes cycled back on itself, in small ways.
Sam pulled something out of his coat pocket and stared at it. With his slightly long black hair and kind-looking face he was usually a comforting presence, but he displayed now a look of melancholy. The man on the news network kept talking while standing in a scene of devastation, and Al was grunting with sweaty, bare muscles gleaming as he lifted the barbell. The air here was pleasantly tempered and cycled through the vents regularly.
“What’s that you’ve got, Sam?” Rosalyn asked, leaning closer to him after she noticed something shiny in his hands.
He looked up at her and opened his hand wide to show a small, sparkling, polished-looking gem of a striking lime green color fading into burnished red. “Just something I picked up on Lucius. I’m gonna give it to my girlfriend when I see her again.”
She stooped down to look at it. “Wow. That’s pretty nice. Ammolite?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Something like that.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, if you’re gonna keep a souvenir, I’d run it by FAER first if I were you.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Ahh, they’ll be okay with one missing rock. They’ll probably be so mad about the missing beer that they won’t even notice.”
Rosalyn shook her head, but she couldn’t help but smile. “Well, whatever. …It’s nice, though. She’s gonna love it, Sam.”
He beamed at her.
Shortly, Rosalyn turned and threw off her coat as she used an exercise bike to keep up her health. Sam got bored of the TV and went to throw darts on a dartboard, leaving Mitchell to watch the news with great interest. Each of Sam’s darts landed true; he’d gotten much practice over the months.
Before long it was time for everyone to get to their stations. The TV went off, and Rosalyn, Randy, and Terri went to the Bridge to join Shauna while Sam, Al, and Mitchell headed to the lower floor to attend to their engineering duties.
The hallways they walked through to reach the Bridge were all aesthetically pleasing, conforming the many unseen cords and pipes, covered behind metal or plastic sheets, into the shape of the walls so that the hallway itself stretched onward in a tall, vaguely hexagonal shape. The other halls on the ship were like this as well, and most doorways similarly hexagonal and automatic.
The Bridge was large but simple and practical, with an upper level containing four main seats in two rows of two, each one with a large panel of keys in front of it. Railings blocked off the edge of the upper level, and small ramps led to the lower level where numerous buttons and switches were set along the walls, as well as screens set into stations. Dominating the room of course was the large pane of thick, reinforced glass out in front, where the void of starry space opened up before them, never lacking in splendor, majesty, and wonder. In the distance was 730-X Zacuali, a shining orb where they would spend the next few days of their lives. This was the clearest they had ever seen it; the night before, it had looked the size of a pin, but now it was roughly that of a basketball.
It was a grayish-white sphere, one quarter of it shrouded in darkness, the rest of it showing signs of thinner, polluted atmosphere and somewhat turbulent weather. Though it was clearly not a friendly place, it was beautiful in a way that only extraterrestrial objects could be.
“That’s a big rock,” said Terri as they took their seats.
“A big rock hopefully stuffed with lots of smaller rocks,” remarked Randy.
“That is the one FAER picked, right?” Terri smirked. “We’re not gonna find some much tinier planetoid hidden behind it?”
Shauna shook her head. “No, ma’am. She’s the one.”
She gave a pleased sigh. “Wow. I’m really proud of them. They chose something promising for once.”
Rosalyn laughed. “Yeah, I agree. You can actually thank them and not me, because if it were up to me, we wouldn’t have even come this far.”
Shauna turned to her with eyebrows raised. “You tried to change their minds before we left, didn’t you?”
She gave a mock-nervous laugh and scratched her chin. “Well, funny you should jump to that conclusion, Shauna, because I didn’t, uh, admit to that…”
The other three laughed.
Shauna grinned as she said, “I love you, Rosalyn. I don’t know if they appreciate you, but I certainly do. Anytime you think I’m being an idiot, you go ahead and let me know so I can explain to you in full detail why you’re incorrect.”
“Will do,” said Rosalyn with a wink.
Rosalyn began to feel excitement about seeing 730-X Zacuali up close, but she framed it in context of the financial importance of their mission. FAER didn’t pay them to be excited explorers, as fun as that was to imagine. They got paid to do the work and haul the minerals. That was what she lived for.
Still, this was clearly bigger and grander than anyplace they’d been before. It was hard to remember her doubt of FAER’s decision close to a year ago when first reviewing the possible routes they could take on this journey. “We’ll see how this compares to the asteroid belt,” Rosalyn said as she took her seat and strapped on her headset.
“Those were small fries compared to this beast,” said Shauna with hungry eyes. “We need to step up our game for FAER. I want this ship stuffed to the rafters for dramatic effect.”
Randy started typing at his station. “We should have gone here on the first stop, not the last. We’re gonna find a sea of minerals and gems and leave it all there to be pirated by some other company.”
“We got the first probe data about this place just before we left,” Shauna answered. “Nobody could have reached here before us.”
Rosalyn smiled. “And there are laws, Randy. Despite what Sam says, this isn’t the wild west. We’ll stake a claim here, assuming there is something to find.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Still, if I were one of the suits at FAER I might not announce this abroad until they get more ships out to this part of space. Or maybe a freighter carrying an entire mining operation settled on the planetoid. I don’t trust any of the other companies for a second.”
The minor planet was growing larger and larger. Shauna scanned the screen on her station intently. “Set engines at seventy-five percent.” She then turned to Randy and said, “I hope I didn’t get everyone’s hopes up too high. The data’s promising, but there’s always a chance that the stuff the radar picked up is just traces.”
“Even space dust goes for a decent sum,” said Terri.
Randy retorted, “Not as much as platinum and rhodium.”
“We’ll be there pretty soon to see for ourselves,” Shauna said.
A few minutes passed by. Terri got up and went down the starboard ramp to attend to something near that wall, and Rosalyn went to check a screen station beside her.
“Hey, the landing cams are off,” Rosalyn noted with puzzlement after a moment.
Hands on a digital keyboard, Terri looked at her with brown eyes, dressed in her lighter-tan FAER doctor’s uniform, her braided hair tied back in a bun. “I know, I just turned them off. I always turn them off when we land. I don’t want FAER to see some little dent and dock us any pay.”
Rosalyn stepped back and raised an eyebrow. She realized what Terri meant: FAER did not dock pay for dents that the Novara received during space travel, but they did penalize for dents if they were received through less-than-perfect landings.
“We can’t do that,” Rosalyn objected.
“Okay, then pretend we never had this conversation,” Terri said with an irritated smile.
“Foundation policy is spelled out very clearly that every part of the ship’s travels is to be recorded, Doctor.”
“Stop worrying about it. They can’t penalize us if the cams happen to go out for a short period. I’m just saving us some money, Roz. Are you really gonna be concerned about that?”
After a pause of silent stares, Rosalyn rolled her eyes before turning away; this wasn’t worth her time. She went up the ramp and sat back down to focus on the screen and the ship’s exterior before her. Terri eyed her with resentment and a bit of victory before she turned back to finish programming the cameras to come back online once they touched down completely.
As Terri returned to her seat, Shauna turned on the intercom to reach the others not on the Bridge—Sam, Randy, and Al—who would be busy monitoring engine performance and taking care of general ship maintenance. “We are nearing the outer atmosphere. Standby for further directions. We’ll see how difficult this atmosphere wants to be.”
“Oh, yeah—atmospheres. Forgot about those,” said Randy, half-joking. Landing on asteroids was simpler than this would be. He begrudgingly recalled how he had imagined that the next time they would tear through an atmosphere would be when they returned home to Earth, where he’d reunite with his girlfriend Lilah, who worked in FAER’s Research and Development department. But no such luck.
The Novara moved through empty space at supersonic speeds, but now that it made contact with something pushing against it, it really felt like it was hauling. The rattling increased dramatically and they could hear faint wind rushing as the grayish-white orb consumed their entire field of view. Rosalyn and the others could feel their bones shaking, their fingers almost buzzing. The ship rocked, shaking the seat-belted crewmates in the Bridge. Captain Beele gave orders for the other crewmates below to brace themselves, making sure they hadn’t been injured. This entry of atmosphere had happened to them many a time upon past return journeys, but it still had a way of shaking them up. Not to mention the fact that they were used to breaking through Earth’s, not 730-X Zacuali’s, atmosphere.
After several minutes, Rosalyn’s breath grew steadier as the ship gained more control. The air around them seemed to tremble still. Actual features of the planetoid’s surface came into view: barren, icy plains and mountains and frozen lakes, bits of rock being tossed about in storms of wind. The sight of a new place that had existed for untold hundreds of billions of years, but had never been set foot upon before…it always gave them a sense of sacred awe, even in the midst of the great noise of atmospheric entry.
“Entering the lower atmosphere,” said Shauna. “How’s our entry looking?”
Randy typed and tapped furiously. “Took a little bit of a dip, but we’re rebalanced. Looking good.”
She touched her hand to her headset and barked, “How’s our engines?”
After a moment the voice of Al Chittering came on their headsets. “Everything’s solid down here.”
“Fantastic. Rosalyn, direct us toward that mountain. It should be marked on your screen.”
Sure enough, the radar data had pinged a particular mountain range as the one they were to visit. It was a flatter-than-standard set of mountains with lots of rocks slumping over one another. A huge, violent storm looked like it was raging on the far side of the mountain, but thankfully they were headed just east of that.
Chatter continued between each of them as they combined expertise to ensure a balanced and smooth landing. Rosalyn shrugged away the surreal feeling of being on another planetary object as she did her work.
“We’re headed towards that big ledge there,” she said to the others.
There, about one quarter up the height of the mountain, was a flat outcropping of rock that connected with the steepest section of the mountain on this side where a small, dark section opened up into the caverns. An ideal landing spot.
Some powerful winds slapped into the ship now and then, but at last it seemed that they were in the clear. Each of them breathed sighs of relief as the Novara slowed down more and more and came closer and closer.
“Get that landing gear out,” Shauna said, voice like a whip.
Terri smashed some buttons and then they could hear the shifting of mechanical pieces and extending of the landing gear. Rosalyn missed a sidelong glance stolen at her.
The humming and rushing of machinery gradually diminished until the ship reduced to minuscule speeds. Everything came to a soft, final stop as they collectively felt the weight of the ship settling against the weight of 730-X Zacuali, and a sense of disquiet settled upon them. They had made it there.
Now they had to explore it.
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