The Light of the Earth As Seen From Tartarus by Annie Bellet

Author:Annie Bellet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scifi, science fiction, future, space travel, space flight, novelette
Publisher: Doomed Muse Press

Part Three:

49 days in transit

Ian slid along the corridor linking the rooms in the half-walk, half-glide they’d all perfected over the last weeks. The few hundred square feet of space no longer felt as tight and lonely. He’d even been invited to play gin rummy with the rest of them, though he was woefully behind in points.

He ducked his head into the lounge and was surprised to see it empty. He reversed his track and tapped lightly on Nick’s door. No answer.

Heidi’s room was next to his own, and he’d seen the door open when he’d gotten up to head for the lounge. He moved on, wondering if she might be hiding in Jack’s room. The two of them seemed to have quietly rekindled the relationship they’d just started right before Jack left. It had fallen apart quickly, the broken and bitter Jack driving everyone away from him after the accident.

Bitter and broken, until Ian had promised him he’d rebuild the Prometheus and they would go back. A promise I finally kept. Ian smiled.

Jack’s door was open; his brother sprawled on the bed reading on his NetPad. Ian waved as he paused and then moved on toward the control room.

Heidi and Nick were there, sitting next to the monitors, heads together, talking in low, tense voices. They jerked apart as Ian stepped into the doorway. They looked as guilty as teenagers.

“Okay, I wasn’t worried, but now I am. What’s up?” Ian folded his arms, his eyes shifting between them.

“Come on, Nick, we have to tell him,” Heidi said. She looked almost pale, her full lips pressed tight, drained of color.

“We’ve got a leak.” Nick pushed the words out quickly.

“What kind of leak?” Ian’s hands tightened into fists as he gripped his own arms. He felt his headache returning from its week-long hiatus.

“In the IDG.”

“No, no,” Ian said. He unfolded his arms and grabbed at the walls to steady himself. “Not this. Not again. It can’t happen again.”

“No, not like Prometheus II, Ian,” Heidi said, rising and reaching out to him. “It’s not leaking anything like before.”

“For one,” Nick said, “It’s leaking into the ship, not out. And as far as we can tell, the leak is really minor so far. Very small.”

Ian took a deep breath. Another. “Leaking into the ship? So between the outer hull and the middle one?”

“Yeah, exactly. So all the gel can pollute so far is just some empty space between hulls. Just like we designed.”

“So far?” Ian shook his head. It didn’t sound like disaster, yet. But they both looked too worried for this to be as minor as they were saying.

“Well, there might be some pocking, corrosion in the middle hull.” Nick swiveled in his seat and motioned to one of the monitors. “There’s too much stuff between us and the outside of the middle, I can’t get a good sensor reading and definitely no good images, not from in here. But what I can get, it looks. . . not good.”

Ian bent over the monitor, slowly making sense of the data there.

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