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Forward Command Bridge, As God and Heinlein Intended, Haven system, Unstable Orbit around Jackal

"Captain?"

Francis stared out the window, watching flames lick the side of God and Heinlein's heatshield.

"Sir?" His communications officer, George, tugging at his arm, clearing Francis' temporary paralysis. He turns from the window and addresses the scope officer.

"How much time do we have left?"

"Eight minutes until aerocapture. Thirty-one until point-of-no-return. Sir."

Francis yanks his radio off the wall and shouts into it "Francis to Engineering. Mr. Renner, I need reactor power now!"

"We're getting fission events but temperature isn't rising above eighteen-hundred degrees. The reactor--"

Another voice, behind the chief engineer "Is behaving like a reactor, not a nuke."

"Get the old man out of my control room! We've got an emergency here."

"Wait" Francis says, recognizing the voice "Fermi, is that you?"

"Yes," the old man replies.

"Mister Renner," Francis sighs, "do you know who designed Aegletes?"

"Oh."

"Do everything Dr. Fermi tells you." With that, Francis hangs up.

_____________________________________________



Reactor Control Room, As God and Heinlein Intended, 29 minutes to point-of-no-return

"Your fuel is poisoned."

"What. That's impossible. Plutonium decays to Uranium after twenty-four thousand years. And that takes a billion more to decay. We should still have fuel." Renner throws his hands up in the air.

"How do you store the fuel?" Fermi asks.

"Same as always, you know that."

"And the reactor?"

"Wait till the thing cools down a bit, flood it with water from the tanks."

"Then there would be no problem--if the core was still plutonium. It's uranium, and it's probably burned itself down to waste by now."

"Nonsense. The uranium has even higher critical mass."

"But it micro-fissions from slow neutrons. Like in water."

From outside the control room, a familiar voice chimes in "Are you done with science lesson now? Can we go?" Boris, Sergi and Ivan float into the control room, their wide-eyed stares of wonder clearly indicating they have never been in such a place before.

"You are not bringing Bessel crew into my reactor room!"

"Do not worry. We're going to cargo. Where nukes are." Boris' casual tone does absolutely nothing to check Renner's fears.

____________________________________________

Forward Command Bridge, As God and Heinlein Intended, 23 minutes until point-of-no-return

"Orbit's down to seventy-one thousand kilometers. We've been aerocaptured."

God and Heinlein shudders, buffeted by Jackal's upper atmosphere.

"Prepare a probe. All our telemetry, the Sundiver data, everything our sensors have picked up. In case we don't make it Asphodel needs to know."

_____________________________________________

Forward Cargo Bay, As God and Heinlein Intended, 20 minutes until point-of-no-return

"One-hundred fifty megatons. One-hundred-fifty megatons. Two-hundred fifty megatons. Oh, here is forty-five megatons. Did not expect to see pipsqueak." Boris reads off yields as he floats down the cargo bay. "There are thousands here. Is half Asphodel's nuclear arsenal at least. Do you plan on blowing up planet?"

"One-fifth," Fermi corrects, "and yes, something like that." He glances around the bay. "These are all much too big. We need something small. Something you can hold in your hands."

"Our shells are that size. Shells of Bessel, I mean." Ivan suggests.

"Seventy-six millimeter armor piercing atomic ordinance" Sergi rattles off, then turns to Fermi. "Is that right size?"

"It's perfect. Let's go to your ship now" Fermi says, pushes off of a warhead, and starts floating down toward the aft cargo bay.

Boris and Sergi follow in the same manner. Ivan takes care not to use a thermonuclear device as a handhold.

_____________________________________________

Aft Cargo Bay, As God and Heinlein Intended, 16 minutes until point-of-no-return

"Here is shell." Boris holds the twenty-kilogram warhead's tip effortlessly between two fingers, and passes it to Fermi.

"Do you have any gloves?" Fermi starts to ask, then checks his watch and forgets about the gloves. "Better wash well afterwards..." he mutters, then unscrews the bolt on the back of the depleted uranium shell casing. Drawing out the dull gray hollowed plutonium cylinder, he holds it away from himself, wary of stray dust. "Maybe we should try to avoid breathing too."

"Is fine," says Boris, "Viktor used to lick them for good luck."

"Didn't you say he died of radiation poisoning? Nevermind that, get me that tin sheeting over there. We're gonna cut it into a rectangle and wrap it around the plutonium just like it is in the shell." Fermi reaches back into the shell and pulls out a smaller, solid cylinder of plutonium.

"Why we replace one metal with another? Why not just keep nuke in shell?" Ivan asks, holding up the tin sheeting while Boris cuts it with sheers.

"Because uranium absorbs and blocks neutrons. Tin doesn't."

Sergi catching on, says "So you see Ivan, today we learn how to make neutron bomb."

______________________________________________

Reactor Control Room, As God and Heinlein Intended, 3 minutes until point-of-no-return

"Won't the atmos ignite if we burn this deep?" asks Darren, the damage control officer.

"This ain't a plume--ain't like nothing is gonna fuse. We're still moving too fast for the explosions to catch us." Wilson responds.

A crackle comes over the comms, and Francis lurches upright in his harness. Fermi's voice. "I set the detonator for thirty seconds. Now, Ivan, we're gonna open the hatch now. See if you can chuck it at the glowing sphere at the center."

"Just like tossing potato." The rooskie's reply comes over the radio crisp and clear--he must be wearing a rad-suit--although Francis can't tell if the man is actually sober.

"Now Mr. Renner, I'm going to need you to flood the reactor with uranium as soon as Ivan tosses the bomb."

"Done. I certainly hope you know what you're doing, old man."

"And I need you to vent the reactor a second before the bomb goes off. Total blowout."

"Aye."

"I hit it! I think. I am of closing door now."

"Brace yourselves!"

The entire ship shakes as a subkiloton neutron bomb detonates within the reactor. Nuclear fire flares from its sides, blowing great gouts of fissioning plasma outward.

Several seconds pass, in silence, before Renner's voice comes over the radio.

"Reactor's running Captain. We've got power."

Noting his queue, Francis snaps "Full burn Mister Wilson. Let's get the hell out of here."

The helmsman pulls back on the throttle, and they are all kicked back in their harnesses, as the God and Heinlein ascend into the heavens.



______________________________________________

EVA, Factory Ship Fermi's Paradox, Erebos system, The dark side of Kronos

They sit a few meters from the hatch, just the two of them, legs hanging over the fuselage. Clad in bulky spacesuits, each with a tin can in his hand, they watch the machines below with a mixture of awe and fear. The spiders, each thirty meters in height, loping across the cracked, metallic ground, illuminated only by the arc welders they carry and the red-hot glow of their plutonium hearts.

"Historians will say that, on the day John von Neumann died, he left behind one thousand children" said Dyson, the taller one.

"If you're gonna get philosophocal on me, you might as well add a few more zeros" Taylor retorts.

The horizon turned a brilliant orange--the first glimmers of sunrise cresting Kronos' molten plains.

Taylor taps his can against the fuselage and stands up. "Beer's cold. We gotta move the ship anyways."

"Fuck the sun." Dyson says to himself, popping the hatch and clambering in.
Observation Deck 1B, As God and Heinlein Intended, Low Erebos Orbit

When he was young, Nicolas Fermi had visited the Flats of Light on an archeological survey, in search of ferryman fragments. They traveled to the dig in an armored truck with no windows. When Nico and the other scientists emerged, they wore protective goggles--the kind you wear when you want to fool yourself into thinking that you can stare at the sun.
But hiding his eyes behind polarized filters as black as the sky itself didn't seem to help--he stumbled from the truck, clutching his helmeted head in pain. The light seemed to infuse everything in burning agony. By the time he reached the camp, stumbling blind across the salted ice, Nico felt as though the blasted light permeated his very bones, attacking him with bitter, ultraviolet cold through gaps between his gloves and coat.



Erebos was far worse. The heatshield blocked the heat and most of the radiation, but Erebos enveloped them even then. Lashing spokes of plasma flared out around the ship, like waves licking over the bow. Nico knew the flares were thousands, tens of thousands of kilometers away, but he still felt them through the bulkheads, as though the god of the dead still held a grudge against Fermi for surviving Erebos' Cancer.

He can't help but squint and blink, despite all that dense metal between him and the sun. Nico keeps thinking back to his time on the Flats, when, in blinding moonlight, he had met Reines for the first time--a native of Flats of Light--an unblinking man of forty whose eyes, chapped, cracked and bleeding, would never see again.

Klaxons rouses him from the waking nightmare. "Alert. Centrifuge spindown in two minutes" the accent unmistakably Slavic--yet another rooskie. Nico wonders how half the spaceforce was crewed by the goddamn sandpeople, when less than a million actually lived in the White Sands. Probably the only people insane enough to crawl inside a Bessel. But then, by that measure, the crew of Icarus was probably pulled from the South Pole.

Gravity lessens from the comfortable 0.7 gravities, and in a minute Nico is weightless. He checks his watch, and, finding he has a good fifteen minutes to kill before burn, velcros his cup to the table and floats off in search of company.

__________________________________

Under the excruciating pull of gravity, Boris is not a happy man--even the mild 0.8 gravities he is subjected to in his quarters was point-eight too much. But for whatever reason, burns didn't bother him so much, even at three gravities or more. Maybe it was the knowledge that his suffering was finite, or perhaps the roar of the engine, but the jolt of acceleration was simply never so bad as the steady, nauseating crush of coriolis.

Sergi and Dimitri join Boris in a cheer as they become weightless, and Gregory starts passing the bottle around again. Ivan--the new kid, who replaced Viktor after he died of radiation poisoning on Mnemosyne--looks increasingly pale, and passes.
A man passes by the open airlock--old and wrinkled, definitely not crew, and so Boris calls out to him "Hello friend! You are scientists, yes? What is name?"

Nico catches his arm on the door, arresting his motion before replying.
"Yes. Fermi."

Sergi speaks up "You make bombs yes? We love you! Join us! Tell us about where we will be going."
"And who we are killing" laughs Boris, taking another swig from the bottle and offering it to the old man.

Nico had tasted the blasted stuff before--nearly pure alcohol, fermented from a tuber--the only thing to grow in the White Sands. The rooskies ran their dune buggies off the stuff. It felt like it was burning a hole in his throat, but Nico managed to keep the foul brew down.

"We're off to *hick* MS-1044-2. Yellow sun, a bit bigger than ours. Two gas giants--we'll be arriving at the near one--and half a dozen rocky worlds. We think."

"Yellow sun my ass" Gregory shouts, provoking more laughter from his comrades.

"You will have to excuse my friend here, he is not, how you say, with the times" Boris says with a smile, then leans in close to Fermi and whispers, loud enough they can all hear "and he thinks the aliens came from Streila". This time, even motion-sick Ivan laughs.

"Bullshit" is all Gregory says.

Fermi laughs quietly, looking at the bottle in his hands "So you don't believe there are other stars out there?" Gregory nods, slowly, and Fermi speaks again "One can only hope" before draining the rest of the bottle.

___________________________________________

Forward Command Bridge, As God and Heinlein Intended Low Erebos Orbit

"Confirmed, Captain. Cargo is secure; both Bessels and all the probes are accounted for. All twelve Serbers are in tubes and ready to deploy. We are ready to jettison the fuel tanks."

"What about the ordinance?"
"All warheads are accounted for, first salvo is racked sir."
"Good" Francis doesn't turn, but continues to stare out the polarized screen, watching the lancing red spots play across the interior heatshield. Four of them, each over 100 gigawatts, scorching his heatshield. Together, they almost doubled God and Heinlein's thermal power, and he'd be damned if that didn't make him uncomfortable. Sticking a continuously detonating nuke between the hab modules was bad enough.

Francis looks down, chewing his unlit cigar, and glares at the aft dorsal camera feed. Sure enough he can see them, through the static--four more Saint Ulam battlecruisers, boosting them into the great funeral pyre.

"I want the warheads pointed retrograde. We don't know if they'll see us coming."

His weapons officer flips several switches, and the missiles rotate to point aft. "I've set the computer to run gas flare equations and compute a firing solution while we're in-transit."

"We've reached thermal saturation sir."

"Jettison tanks, sound the alarm" Francis Eklund says through his cigar, and makes sure the belts on his acceleration harness are secure, then checks the digital readout to his left. "Burn in thirty seconds, mark."

"Mark" and then, through the shipwide comms "Burn in twenty-five seconds. Brace yourselves."

Francis spends the next two dozen seconds wincing at the reactor alarms, threatening the bridge crew with imminent containment failure and thermonuclear destruction.

"Sundiving in 3... 2..." the radio officer is cut out by the roar of the engines, and Francis is slammed back in his seat. Two g's--the upper limit of what Ulam was designed to handle.

"Saint Ulam Protects" the whispered, sarcastic prayer never fails to bring a smile to Francis' lips, even among the sounds of panic and chaos.

"Entering chromosphere!" his crew have to shout to be heard now. "Trajectory locked, boost complete, stepping down thrust to match friction." The engines dial down to much more reasonable levels, and Francis realizes he hasn't breathed in almost a minute.

"Are we within the jump range? Report!"

"All systems are responding. We're okay" announces Damage Control.

"Uh... We're in the jump zone... I think" the scope officer "the gradiometer is going haywire."

Tapping a control above his left arm, Francis reaches up and grabs a mic off the wall. "Icarus, we're ready to jump. Can you confirm depth?" After several seconds and no response he asks again "Icarus, can you confirm depth, over."

The reply surrounds them, alien, booming and distorted, emanating from the edge of the photosphere. "You are within the margin. You are cleared for long-jump."

Francis jams the key into its lock. Outside the bridge, they can see the Sundiver ring begin to spin. And then Erebos is gone, replaced by swirling, indistinct colors.

______________________________________

"We are horizontal, moving up toward i" Fermi says, addressing the bridge crew.

The damage control officer, Darren snorts, "it's j. We're at i right now."

Fermi, annoyed "everyone needs to be asleep before a 1º phase shift has occurred."

"Why's that?" George, the communications officer, trying to be funny.

"That's when the monsters come out."

______________________________________

Cryo Tray 1, As God and Heinlein Intended, Haven system, unstable polar orbit around Jackal
Three hundred thousand years later


Francis awakes, unlit cigar still in his mouth, to blaring alarms. He floats out of the open cryo pod--filthy xenos tech that, but it kept him from waking up as a pile of dust.

Around him officers and technicians race down the tubes to their posts. Unused to moving quickly in zero-g, it takes him almost two minutes to make it to the bridge. The gas giant looms above him, aurora glimmering, filling the sky as sun once had, so very long ago.

"Captain, we're aerobraking!"

The greatest fear of any sailor, to be swallowed ship and all by the murky green sea.

Sorry about the double post--I'll just use the second one for spaceships.

Warships



The Atomists of Asphodel




Cybernetically augmented space cockroaches.
Year 4412, eight years before first contact

Riemann stands a couple hundred meters from the rocket, sunglasses shielding his eyes from the bright glare of the SRBs. The sound of it this close is deafening.

He turns away, pocketing his glasses--the rocket rising behind him through the cool night air of the UCS's southern coastline--and jogs back to mission control. He is sixty now but still vigorous, with at least another decade or two left in him. But his friends were dying--Fermi had cancer; Bessel had been killed by a Taiben raid in the northern Corporate Badlands; Ulam killed himself and another thirty other scientists in a failed nuclear test. Neumann had been clinically dead for almost a decade now. Soon it would only be him and Reines--and Ingle, who, at ninety-five looked as though he would outlive them all. And the next generation--raised in a time of peace and prosperity--would be poor replacements.

Inside, mission control is an open multi-tiered series of lofts and platforms, like a stack of step pyramids. The past century of advancements in computer science is represented, from hand-cranked analog cams to new silicon computers from Sanctus. A vast screen dominates the room, stretching from one wall to the other. It oscillates between cameras on the ground and in space, focusing on the rocket as it ascends in the twilight, just keeping pace with the terminator.

Riemann's part in this launch ended a month and a half ago. He's here only as an observer. He climbs a staircase leading up to the balcony and takes a seat next to what remains of his oldest friend: John von Neumann.

Neumann had been dead for almost a decade--a decade ago, he had spent half a year aboard a poorly shielded space station, and returned a cripple, muscles degenerated and suffering from total organ failure. And yet here sits, watching the screen, silent but for his rasping breath and the mechanized exhale of his artificial lungs, the thump of his robotic heart.

On the viewscreen, they can see the ship emerging from the atmosphere, the launch stage firing its engines before jettisoning its payload and falling back to Asphodel. "It's... beautiful..." Neumann says, every word a gasp.

"The first of three." Riemann says, forcing a smile.

"I... won't live... to see the others..." he wheezes, confirming what Riemann had suspected. "I couldn't... have hoped... for a better... legacy." Neumann reaches down with a decrepit arm, and switches off his life support. "A better... funeral pyre..."

Riemann moves to stop him, to switch the machines back on, but that thin, frail, decrepit arm grabs his and holds it with paralyzing strength. "I die... today... in triumph or... tomorrow in... agony..." he turns away from Riemann, eyes back to the screen and his arm goes slack.

Riemann opens his mouth to speak but finds he cannot. On the screen, Neumann ignites its atomic motors. Riemann sits beside his friend and watches him die--and ascend into the heavens, propelled forward by nuclear fire.
"Oh no Marcus, you misunderestimate me. You don't have to do me any favors. This little reactor's yours--and I expect your scientists will want to build a helluva lot more of em, stick em in submarines, whatever. Feel free. I'll even give you a copy of the patent rights, if you fellers care about that sort of thing. See, I figure this little thing's more of a proof of concept than anything else--and it's damn old. Designed it before you dropped the first nukes up north.

"Say your boys tear this thing apart, start makin' some improvements--and I'll bet with those computers you got ya'all can improve on it considerably. But I've been doin' this for twenty years, and I can make you a reactor with a thousand times as much output.that's a helluva lot safer. Even got some designs on fusion reactors I'm playin' around with.

"But the EPA won't let me build 'em in the UCS. Sure they don't make smog, but they also have none of the environmental benefits of a good old-fashioned coal power plant. There ain't gonna be no global warming anytime soon if we all switch over to nuclear power no matter how profitable it is.

"Now, you hand me that chip and you can bet your ass I'm gonna run right down to Neumann Pneumatics and see if they can't design me a replica. But we're at least twenty-five years behind you when it comes to all this computer stuff. So it's a helluva lot easier for you to just give me more of these chips. I'll help solve your nation's energy crisis and you won't have to deal with a potential security hazard."
The table trembles, heralding the rocket's launch. All eyes turn toward it--a single stage satellite deployment vehicle. Roiling smoke billows out, inundating the surrounding structures, blinding Riemann and the Sanctans to all but the rocket's smoldering engines.

"Say Marcus--you don't mind if I call you Marcus, right? How much you think launchin' one of these things costs me? This one's 'bout a hundred tons, twelve ton payload."

The response is nearly instant, but not from Edison, not Telarius. "Twenty-three million, seven-hundred eighty-four thousand--"

"Cut that crap out" Riemann interrupts with a chuckle "'Course you know the figure, but you're robbin' me of my ability to make seemingly pointless rhetorical questions." Turning back to Telarius, he continues "Point is, out a that twenty-four million it costs me to launch this here rocket, twenty million goes into the launch stage. Payload's cheap as hell--just a bunch of comm satellites. Fuel costs are well under half a million. Now, ten years ago a pricetag a twenty-four million would have had fellers like myself drooling--I've got our ridiculously overblown military-industrial complex to thank for that. But then, say I could recover this here rocket, instead of lettin' it burn it on reentry or smash into the ocean." He points up--through the smoke the engine flame is still visible, far above them now. "That sort of re-usability would make me a mighty rich man. Or I could just launch ten times as many rockets."

"This one's got a vacuum-tube digital/analog processor that weighs two and a half tons--Von Neumann made it for me. Now quit your laughin'--you know the man's a genius. But the damn thing can scarcely vector thrust well enough for the gravity turn, much less a powered landing. But that microchip of yours could let me recover damn near everything. I could even start launchin' some multi-core rockets. Maybe even some fully autonomous spaceships later." He returns to his briefcase and begins to open it. "Now I figure you're wonderin' why I'm tellin' you about all this; truth is I feel I should be upfront about what you Sanctan fellas are gonna run into if you give me that chip. Well, that and I got me a captive audience." Unbuckling the briefcase, he turns it around to face Telarius. Within is a single cylinder, dull grey, sporting half a dozen unconnected nozzles and pipes.
"Now, this little baby's a three-point-five megawatt fission reactor. Sans steam turbine and uranium, of course. You can get yourself inta all sorts a trouble with a thing like this."
Year 4402, eighteen years before first contact

Ungodly bright, the sun beats down on the industrial wasteland, cutting through the smog, reflecting off the towering skyscrapers and smokestacks. No signs of nature here--not even weeds in the sidewalks. Riemann walks among the crowds, men and women wearing masks and carrying umbrellas, forming a canopy of suffocating vinyl. The ozone layer here is thin, in the heart of the Corporate Badlands; the only clouds spawned from factories, offering little protection from the sun's lethal rays.

He reaches his destination--a vast structure of glass and steel, reaching high into the sky like some biblical Babylonian taunt. The receptionist is a man with a prosthetic jaw who recognizes Riemann and waves him through.
The elevator takes him half a kilometer up, to a meeting room with darkened windows overlooking the launch site. At the table sits an energetic middle aged man, staring out at the rocket below--perhaps a decade younger than Riemann himself. Behind him stand two other men, both highly conspicuous. One of them wears VR goggles and a bulky coat: probably a gargoyle. The other is dressed as a modern knight, but his sword replaced with a wicked-looking firearm.

Riemann sets his briefcase on the table a meter or so away from the Sanctans, its black leather still blisteringly hot. "Afternoon Mr. Telarius."
The voice comes in over Bill's headset, loud and drowning in static "Hey Bill, you still alive over there?" He can't quite place the speaker, but the voice sounds familiar--and certainly less formal than he'd expect from a Sañiran inquisitor.

"Yeah, I'm doin' great" he coughs out.

"What's your O2 meter read?"

"Damn thing's busted--started showin' red fifteen minutes ago."

"We'll get you home. Just hold on a minute." Aboard Bohr, Fermi starts frantically searching the ship's supply locker. "We got any flashlights, Roman?"

"No. Your fault."

"Damn it." Fermi goes back to the comm "Hey Bill. You still got battery power? Can you switch on your lights?"

Bohr is a fine orbiter craft, but it wasn't designed to dock with another ship. The thing didn't even have lights--none where needed, not even on the dark side of Asphodel. But Gödel was designed to land on Akheron's surface, and Akheron sported more craters than the Taiben mountains. And these craters didn't glow. So landing in shadow wasn't only possible, it was the mission plan--the flattest surface Gödel could find would be at the center of a crater.

No response from Bill, but Gödel's lights switch on, and Bohr is bathed in a neon blue haze. Fermi puts on his gloves and helmet and pulls himself into the airlock.

"Hey Bill, I'm gonna open up our airlock. Can you make your way over here?" Through the porthole he can see Bill's ship, a mere twenty meters away. Fermi seals the interior airlock and undogs the exterior. His tether attached, Fermi pushes off into the abyss.

He exists in a universe with only two other objects--Bohr, behind him, Gödel ahead. Between and around them there is nothing. The neon blue light lances in through his faceplate, blinding him, and so Fermi holds up his hand to shield his eyes. To his surprise, the light goes away--entirely, as if the very act of shielding his eyes extinguished it. No haze, no reflection. The universe shrinks down to just him, one man drifting alone in the cold dark.

A sudden jerk--his tether. Panic rises in his chest and he pulls back hard, slamming himself into Bohr, frantically grabbing the handhold. Blinking back sweat, Fermi finds he is shaking uncontrollably.

Gödel's hatch opens, and Bill floats out, his movements fluid. "Nico, is that you?"

"Y-yup."

"You wanna float over here and give me a hand?"

"N-n-no way in h-hell."

Dirac's voice comes in over the comms "I'll get us closer."

Bohr lurches and Fermi sees Bill and Gödel grow bigger. Gradually, they drift together. "Nico. I'm gonna jump here--" he gasps, coughing violently. After a few moments it abates "--I'm gonna jump here and you catch me, okay?"

"Got it." Fermi untangles his arms from the handhold, calmer now.

Ten meters away, and Bill pushes off, drifting gracefully toward Fermi's outstretched arms. Fermi reaches out to grab him but can't quite reach and suddenly Bill is drifting over him, past Bohr, into the black empty sky.

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit."

Fermi pushes off, up to meet Bill, and wraps his arms around the astronaut's leg. A moment later and the tether goes taut, then jerks back, and the two swing back over Bohr the other way, slamming into the dorsal heat shielding. They are shaken, terrified, but alive, and manage to crawl back into Bohr, Fermi's muscles trembling from exhaustion and fear, Bill wheezing, barely conscious. The moment the airlock is pressurized he frantically unscrews his helmet, gasping. "Thank god. Let's go home."

"Hell no." Dirac replies, not taking his eyes off his instruments. "We're gonna map the moon first."

Bill, baffled, scowls, then laughs.

"You didn't think we came all this way for you, did you?"
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