NaNoWriMo 2014, Day Three

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

Chuck Wendig and others who write about the craft of writing and the job of writing have spoken about the need to write on the days when you just don’t feel like writing. When your get-up-and-go just got up and went some time before you dragged your sorry butt out of bed. When you have the attention span of a kitten, and the energy of a drugged sloth.

Today was one of those days. I wrote anyway. I make no guarantees about the quality of the words, or even the order in which they’ve been placed. For all I know this reads like a printout from a cryptographic one-time pad.

Good luck to us all.

{{ Aaaaaannd then I posted the “regular” article for today and saw someone else on Twitter who was going to the same event so I tweeted “so am I!” and then that got picked up by some of his followers and I just got to spend the last hour tweeting and FaceBooking and following and friending… On the one hand, it is really neat to get followed by people that you’ve been following for years. On the other hand, if I thought November was going to be busy before this… }}

CHAPTER TWO

“Todd, have you got a few minutes?” Alsby asked asked, hanging in midair outside the hatch to Miller’s personal quarters.

Miller had been born and educated on Earth. Despite all of his years off-planet, his gravity-based bias still showed in the way everything in his quarters was oriented with the minus-Z surface as the floor and everything else arranged relative to that. Alsby was hanging “upside down” in that reference frame, so she swung herself around to minimize any incongruity Miller might subconsciously perceive.

“Of course, come on in, Susan. I was just going over our current navigation data.” Above his desk floated a projection of Saturn and her moons, interspersed with various trajectory lines and figures. “SaSEM, we can continue this discussion later.” The projection disappeared.

“Actually, that was what I wanted to talk about,” Alsby said, crossing the room to hook her toes under a restraint bar next to the desk. “SaSEM, can you put that back up, please?”

“Of course, Captain.”

“Have you had a chance yet to go over the updated mission directives?” Alsby asked.

“I skimmed them, read the summary, but I’ll dig in deeper later today. Is there anything in particular that I should be looking at?”

“No, I just want to make sure we’re all going to be on the same page regarding our priorities. I know you and your team signed up for a pure science mission. I haven’t had much more time than you have to go over the new material, but I see where there are sections that could be interpreted as abandoning those science goals. I’m going to need your help to make sure that no one gets too carried away with that line of thinking. I don’t think that’s going to be the case at all.”

“But we are going to be curtailing some of the science, right?”

“Perhaps, but we might also find ourselves increasing certain parts of the program as well. Being here the extra time will give us those opportunities, and if we succeed in jumpstarting the program to give us some industrial capacity here, one of the benefits will be a lot more close-up exploration of the system. FlightOps will call it ‘prospecting’, you’ll call it ‘sample return’, but it will be the same thing.”

“That will satisfy Cheryl and her minions, they wanted to put a probe or a rover down on every ice ball out here. Maybe now they’ll get their chance, or at least they’ll get close. So who’s going to lose out? I heard qualifiers in the way you were carefully picking your words.”

“We’ll see,” said Alsby, “but my first thought is that Fan will be losing some significant amount of time on her equipment. We were originally only supposed to have a handful of orbiters and landers before we left. If we’re going to end up as a communication hub for dozens or more, we’ll need to convert most or all of the optical and radio telescopes for more conventional uses.”

“Yeah, she won’t be happy.”

“The key point is that all of the science we’re doing has to lead to some sort of practical payoff, sooner rather than later. The geology, mapping, sample returns, magnetosphere structure investigations, looking at Saturn herself and the rings – all of those things can be justified because they can lead to something we’ll be able to utilize in the next few years. Most of the astronomy is just this side of pure theory, and it can be done from elsewhere in the system anyway.”

“She will argue with all of those points, and I wouldn’t call her observations ‘mostly theory’ to her face. At least, not if you want her to keep talking to you for the next ten years or so.”

“I know, but we’ve got limited resources and a legitimate state of emergency for the foreseeable future. Why don’t you get together with her and see what parts of her program have unique factors that can’t be done from Ceres, Farside, or O’Neill. Maybe something that expands on her surveys for comets and asteroids, especially objects that we might be able to utilize.”

“I can do that,” Miller said. “What was it that you wanted to review on the navigation plan?”

“I want to look at how we should optimize the sequence for our targeting of the various moons, given the new directives and the list of resources that we’re going to need to find. We’ve stayed pretty far out so far, mainly to do our first encounters with Titan. The landers were supposed to come later, after we dropped into orbit around Titan, but we need to get some quality data fast regarding possible life there.”

“Did you mean what you said earlier about how we will proceed if we find signs of any kind of biology?”

“Absolutely. I know that there will be factions down system that will want those hydrocarbons and volatiles at any cost, but they’re not here. We are. We may have made a mess of things on Earth, but we’re not going to destroy any extraterrestrial ecosystems on my watch.”

“I guess it’s a good thing that this isn’t a military vessel or mission,“ Miller said. “At least, not yet it isn’t. That sort of talk could get you court martialed. But I agree with you all the way.”

“I hope it won’t come to that. We’re the pointy end of the spear out here and we’re being given the short end of a pretty shitty stick. That should buy us some leeway and the ability to make most of our own decisions. Besides, if I screw it up, by the time we get back there won’t be anyone to arrest me or any place to lock me up.”

“So, where do you think we should be going?”

“We’ve got another flyby of Titan in two weeks. I want to get two of the landers ready to go down. They’ll be able to communicate with us through the orbiters we’ve already dropped off.”

“SaSEM, you’re still there, correct?” Miller asked.

“Yes, Todd, I’m still here.”

“Can we get the Charlie and Echo landers prepared for that launch window? That would give us one on land and one in the ocean.”

“Yes, Todd, I believe we could do that on that schedule.”

“SaSEM,” Alsby said, “could how soon could we prepare one of the complex landers for a rendezvous with Iapetus? I want to put one rover or jumper down on the dark side and one on the white side, both with spectroscopic gear and samplers, with an orbiter for communication and imaging.”

“That will take several weeks, ma’am. Currently none of the probes with jumpers have orbiters attached. The next window for an Iapetus orbital insertion would be in ten days, with the next one after that in another fifty.”

“What are you thinking, Susan?” Miller asked. “We were only going to make long-range observations of Iapetus until we were ready to leave.”

“The schedule for our leaving has changed, and with the shopping list we’re looking at, I want the option of checking it out. Before it was just a curiosity, now I want to know if it’s got anything unique or useful.”

“But we were going to use the complex landers for looking at some of the bigger, inner moons. If we use one for Iapetus, which one do we leave out?”

“We don’t leave anything out. We’re going to go in there ourselves, looking for a place where we can build a station.”

That got Miller’s attention. He rocked back a half step and cocked his head as he looked at the display still floating above the desk.