Recovering Apollo 8 (special edition) by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch [Rusch, Kristine Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

The trip toward the object that Richard now called the Needle took both more preparation than the trip to the capsule and less. More because, deep down, Richard had never expected to find the astronauts, so he hadn’t done some of the basic imaginings he’d done for the capsule trip, and less because modern ships were so much more efficient than they had been eleven years ago.

For one thing, cargo runs from Earth to the Moon base had become common. Trips out of the atmosphere were even more common, with wealthy and upper middle-class tourists opting to stay in orbiting hotels.

The Needle never even approached Earth orbit. He floated out there for fifty years, following a predetermined path of his own. At his closest point to Earth in exactly eight months and one day, he would still be a hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

Richard had ships that could easily go beyond the Earth/Moon run. One of his companies was on the forefront of Mars development. NASA had bought several of his deep space ships (not an accurate name, Richard knew, but NASA liked the sound of it) for their first manned Mars missions, and several other companies had bought more of those ships to scout Mars locations for another base.

Richard had stayed out of most of that planning. He didn’t really care about Mars. His interest was still in the needles and the haystacks and space itself, not in colonizing the solar system. He figured someone else could take care of that, and until his meeting with Tolemy at ACP-S, he had let them.

After that meeting, he’d seen his mistake. The ships his companies had designed were for transport—humans, cargo, matériel—not for maneuvering or quick travel. To get to the Needle and match its orbit, he’d either have to design his own kind of ship or buy one from one of his far-sighted competitors.

And he only had eight months.

So he bought several of his competitors’ ships—something that took more middlemen than he had thought it would. His competitors thought he was trying to steal proprietary information or at least copy proprietary technology, and while that might be a side benefit of this trip, it certainly wasn’t Richard’s intention.

Instead, he tried to make the ships as Richard-friendly as possible.

Deep Space Darts, as these ships were called, were designed for long travel at great speeds. All engines and fuel, little interior room. The ships’ accommodations were cut down too much for his tastes. Richard examined half a dozen from various international companies, and worried about how travel would feel—cramped and narrow and uncomfortable, not something he wanted to experience, even though he was an in-shape fifty-eight.

He needed some kind of cargo area with a separate environmental system, and a good cabin.

In the end, he bought one of his competitors’ largest darts and gave his own team two months to retrofit it. He made certain the ship was supplied with the right equipment—a state-of-the art grappler (complete with multiple hand sizes), automatic lifeboat technology, and an up-to-date medical unit.

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