Artemis War by Phil Huddleston

Author:Phil Huddleston [Huddleston, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Phil Huddleston
Published: 2020-03-29T05:00:00+00:00

It was a bit strange to Artemis - despite her travels, training and simulations, she had never actually seen her native Solar System from space.

It was a far cry from the mythology of her original bio life. Saturn was beautiful, huge and bright, ringed, with dozens of moons. As they approached, she felt an emotion she didn’t know she still had…

Nostalgia, she thought. Certainly not homesickness: I won’t give in to that. I’ll call it nostalgia.

As they came up to Saturn, she saw Mars on this side of the sun, a bit off to the right of their trajectory. Even farther off to the right was Jupiter, well ahead of Saturn in its orbit.

“Ensign Artemis, we’ll wait here at Saturn. Take your element and scout around Mercury, see what you can see. Stay behind the planet and just peek around, see what’s out there.”

Artemis acknowledged. She and Pentax left the formation and streaked for Mercury. The sun-scorched planet was just to the left of the Sun, so they were able to follow a curving trajectory that kept them completely out of the view of Earth, arriving directly behind Mercury.

Establishing a true geostationary orbit over Mercury was impossible. Such an orbit would be so quickly perturbed by the sun that it would not be stable for any length of time.

However, they had enough power in their system engines to establish a temporary and artificial geosynchronous position, one requiring constant adjustment against the Sun’s gravity. Using this approach, they slowly inched forward relative to Mercury until they were barely peeking over the radio horizon of the scorched and barren planet’s surface, toward the current location of Earth.

A bit less than a full AU away due to her orbital position - just under 140 million miles - Earth shone brightly, a jewel in the blackness of space. Their passive sensors could detect nothing near the beautiful planet, only her moon and a few scattered space rocks.

“I don’t see anything, Pentax. How about you?” asked Artemis on tight beam.

“Nothing,” said Pentax. “Just the planet, the moon and rocks. Should we use active lidar?”

“No, definitely not without orders,” said Artemis. “We’ll report back to Captain Angelid and go from there.”

Leaving their highly unstable orbit, the two frigates went back the way they came, in a curving trajectory that kept them hidden from Earth. As soon as they had line of sight, they reported by tight beam to the Captain.

Captain Angelid acknowledged and waited for them to return to the squadron, now lurking in the moons of Saturn.

“Very well, everyone,” said Angelid to the squadron. “It looks clear. But I’m still not going to waltz in there without a better look at things. We’ll do a full scout.”

“Ensign Nertade, scout to System East all the way to the 30AU point. That’ll put you at Neptune. Check everything, asteroids, minor planets, whatever. Check Mars as well on your way out, it’s slightly to the East of us so somewhat on your path. Then work your way back into the system, checking again on your way back.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.