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Chapter Eleven

“Your controls,” Kamara said to Bowden as he took his hands off the stick. He looked over and smiled.

Bowden forced himself not to wipe at the sweat pooling on his forehead as he took control of the spacecraft. Kamara had already shown him the intercept twice, and he’d made it look ridiculously simple both times. Before Bowden could even see what Kamara was doing, they’d been alongside the target, close enough to grab it with the packet’s claw arm.

Bowden nodded once as he found the target outside the canopy. All right, here’s where you shut this bastard up by performing the best rendezvous you’ve ever flown. He oriented the small craft with a puff of the control thruster, then another to null out the first one’s thrust once he had the craft aligned the way he wanted. Bowden thrusted toward the target: a pod from a small rotational habitat the Dornaani had wrecked as they bulled their way through the system. Bowden kept a close eye on the target and gave two bursts from his thrusters, but—despite the thrust he’d given the packet—the pod seemed to move away from him and downward.

Bowden took a deep breath and released it slowly. I’ve got this. He lost sight of the target and pitched the spacecraft’s nose down to find it again. As it came back into view, it now seemed to be traveling on a different track from what it had been, and he frowned at it in concentration. You’re not getting away that easily. Satisfied with the orientation, he again thrusted toward it. The pod—as if it had a mind of its own—again moved away from him and down. He tried the rendezvous a third time, but never got any closer than he had on the first run. All he succeeded in doing was moving higher and farther away.

Damnit!” he exclaimed as it drifted off again.

He looked over to find Kamara chuckling. “I’ve got the controls,” the RockHound said.

Bowden gratefully relinquished control of the craft, and his shoulders slumped. Before he could clear his head, the pod filled the front canopy, close enough to touch, its trajectory matched perfectly by the small packet.

“Okay, damn it, how did you do that? The more I drove toward it, the farther it moved away.”

“It’s all a matter of understanding orbital mechanics. The pod isn’t moving away from us; you’re taking us away from it.”

“How so?”

“It’s a matter of energy. You looked out the canopy at the pod, then you aimed and thrusted hard toward it. However, by giving the craft more power, you caused it to fly faster, which moved you higher in orbit.”

Bowden looked out the canopy at the large moon below him, which orbited the fifth planet in the system, and shook his head, trying to understand.

“As you moved to a higher orbit,” Kamara continued, “the pod seemed to fall away from you, but it was an optical illusion; it stayed in its same orbit and you moved away from it. Although it seems counterintuitive to your eyes, which are used to flying in atmosphere, you needed to slow down to catch up to it.”

Bowden thought about that a little and held up his hands to simulate the two craft and how the rendezvous was supposed to occur. Finally, he shook his head. “Okay, I can see what you’re saying, and I guess it makes sense. Faster pushes you out to a higher orbit. What I don’t understand, though, is how the hell you make rendezvousing with the pod look so damn easy!

Kamara’s smile grew. “Practice, mostly,” he said. He tapped the controls a few times, changed the packet’s orientation, and the pod appeared again in the cockpit window, about a hundred meters away.

“The way you do it,” Kamara said, “is that you have to visualize it backward. Instead of looking at the target and driving toward it, like you would in the atmosphere, what you really have to do is visualize the intercept point and work backward from it. The pod is in orbit, and we want to get the ship to it, so where do you have to put the ship so that as you slow down or speed up—either will work—the pod gets closer, and we meet it at the spot you visualized?”

Kamara cocked his head. “Does that make sense?”

“I think so…in some sort of twisted, bizarre logic. Basically what I need to do is not look at the target so much as fly the craft to where we intercept the target’s orbit.”

“Exactly,” Kamara said, smiling. “Nothing could be easier.”

Punching you in your self-satisfied face would be a hell of a lot easier, actually, Bowden thought, but instead he said, “Do I get another shot at it?”

“One more,” Kamara said, looking at their plot. “It’s going to burn a lot of fuel to get the pod back to the habitat from here.”

“Fine.”

“You’ve got the controls.”

“I’ve got ’em,” Bowden replied. Just don’t fuck this up. Just don’t fuck this up. Just don’t fuck this up.

Understanding the concept, Bowden found, wasn’t the same as understanding the course of action necessary to bring about the desired action, but at least he now understood the issue well enough to not approach the solution backward. Pursing his lips, he visualized where he wanted to meet up with the pod and applied a touch of the thruster that would slow him.

Nothing seemed to happen. It might have moved a little closer, but it was hard to tell. He goosed the thruster a bunch harder.

“Easy,” Kamara said as the pod grew larger, quickly. “Going easier on the thrusters and being more patient will make things—shit!”

Bowden had tried to take out some of the closing velocity by hitting the retro thrusters; however, he had changed the orientation of the rendezvous, and the imparted energy drove them faster toward the orbiting pod.

“My controls!” Kamara yelled. He grabbed the stick and initiated a full burn.

Slam! Metal screamed and tore as the ship glanced off the pod.

“Put your helmet on!” Kamara said urgently. He got the ship under control, then fastened his own helmet.

“Are we losing air?” Bowden asked.

“I don’t think so. But it’s always a good precaution to put your helmet back on until you’re sure you’re not. A slow leak is insidious. You feel yourself getting warm and happy as you asphyxiate, and then…nothing.”

“So what do we do now?”

“We go back to the habitat and assess the damage.”

“Without capturing the pod?”

“Yes, without capturing the pod. Hopefully, we didn’t knock it out of orbit enough that it will reenter and burn up. There was probably a bunch of good stuff onboard, besides what I would have gotten for the pod itself.”

Bowden winced. “Sorry.”

Kamara shrugged. “It was my fault for trusting too much in your skills. Hopefully, we can go back after it tomorrow. If the ship isn’t too badly damaged.”

Ouch. Nothing like a midair collision on your first familiarization flight.


They flew the rest of the way to the habitat in silence, and Bowden could tell the RockHound was worried about the damage he’d done to the ship.

They landed, and Kamara shut down the ship and was out of his seat before Bowden could grab his stuff. Bowden found him looking at the bow of the ship, where three deep gouges ran for about four feet across the nose. A couple of wires also protruded from where something used to be mounted.

“Sorry,” Bowden said. He pointed. “What used to be there?”

Kamara scoffed. “Auxiliary rangefinder.”

“Why didn’t we use it?” Bowden cocked his head. “Wait a minute, when we were going through the list of gear, you said your ship had a computer that let you calculate intercepts. I know it was rudimentary, but why weren’t we using that?”

“Because technology breaks.” Kamara shrugged. “And sometimes it leads you astray. It can’t be trusted. You have to be able to do intercepts visually, so that you know when the technology is wrong. There might be times, like in an emergency, where you’d have to use it, but I would never actually want to have to use it.”

Bowden chuckled.

“You think that is funny?” Kamara asked.

“No, not really, but when you first showed me this craft, you told me I was going to wreck it.”

Kamara raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“At the time, I would have bet you that you were wrong.”

Kamara waved toward the craft’s nose. “It appears you would have lost.”

“Yes, I would have.”

Kamara looked at him for several seconds. “So?” he finally asked.

“So, I’m trying to work my way around to saying I’m sorry, but pilots have a hard time saying negative things about their skills in the first place, and then admitting they were wrong in the second.”

“And?”

Bowden took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And you were right. I was wrong. My in-atmo skills didn’t translate into flying in space. And I did wreck your craft.”

Kamara smiled warmly, the first time he’d done so. “Good. Now that you have admitted that, perhaps you will actually come to believe it, and then we can really make some progress.”

Bowden gave him a half smile. “I do believe it. And I hate that Murphy is going to take the cost of repairs out of my paycheck. Well, we don’t actually get a paycheck at the moment, but I’m sure it’s going to cost me somehow.”

Kamara shrugged. “The damage isn’t that bad. I’m not sure we’ll even need to mention it to your Murphy.”

“No? You think those gouges will buff out?”

“I do not understand. ‘Buff out’?”

Bowden explained the concept.

“Ah,” Kamara said with a chuckle. “We would say, fill with dust.” He shook his head. “I said it wasn’t that bad, but it will need to be fixed before we can take it out again. And we’ll want the rangefinder. One of the maintenance people here owes me a favor, though, and perhaps we can do him a favor the next time we go to Outpost. If you’re willing to assist him in mounting the module—”

“I am,” Bowden interjected with a nod.

“—then he probably won’t charge us, and there’d be no reason to have to mention it to anyone.”

“That’s great.”

“No, what would be great is if you were willing to listen to me.”

“I am.”

“Good, then let’s talk about inertia while we wait for my friend to come on duty.”


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