So Helen was no longer bored...       -----     "You've got to be kidding me," Jackie said, glancing at the image of Helen in the upper-right corner of her HUD, then back at the crescent-shaped line cutter she was using to cleanly removed the cracked section of piping for part of the Odin's neo-NERVA rocket nozzle assembly. "A Bemmie arm-plate? In the ice?"   At their current distance, the delays were only a couple of seconds, so she simply had to be patient. Helen answered in a moment. "I'm not saying [ Continue reading... ]

  There's exciting work to do.  Unfortunately, there's some not-exciting work to do, too...     -----            "This," Helen said to apparently empty air, "is possibly the most boring thing I have ever done."        "Coming from someone who used to think spending weeks scraping away a centimeter of rock from some dead bone using dental tools was fun, that's a hell of a statement," A.J. said.        "It's nothing but the truth. At least with those rocks you got to do something. With this," she [ Continue reading... ]

  So our friends were getting ready to rescue the General... and rescue themselves with Odin...     -----     Chapter 14.        "Disconnecting in three, two, one – off." Horst, with Anthony's help, dragged Munin's small section of the thick, insulated, double-wrapped cable back and stowed it securely near the reactor housing. "Everything stable?"        "No problems, Horst," answered A.J. "Batteries all full, we're running on them, drain shows what we expected. Get back here in a couple of weeks and we [ Continue reading... ]

  Our friends were settling in finally, and maybe there's a little time to relax...   -----          "Alone at last," Jackie said, deliberately using the old cliché.        "Yes," Horst agreed, looking surprisingly nervous. "We are."        One of the additional inflatable hab units had been transformed into Vacation Hotel Europa, as A.J. had dubbed it – a place where people could go for time separated from the group. The unit, originally meant as two separate living spaces, had been made into a single larger [ Continue reading... ]

  Well, our friends had gotten bad news...     ====            "So there's no chance of repairing the reactor?" Madeline asked, looking mostly at Jackie but keeping an eye on everyone else in the conference room of Munin. This was a crucial factor, and she had to make sure that no decisions were made without as much certainty as possible.        Like most engineers, Jackie instinctively shied away from absolute certainty. Centuries of experience had taught the profession that real life machines and [ Continue reading... ]

  We don't get many chances to see his point of view, but let's check in on Nicholas...     -----          "Got a minute, Nick?"        Nicholas Glendale looked up to see Walter Keldering standing in his doorway. "For you? Always. Please, come in, take a seat." He waved towards his coffeepot – the low-gravity device that Joe Buckley had designed for the station a few years before. "Coffee?"        "Don't mind if I do," Keldering said. "Always time for me? A change since the old days when Maddie would be [ Continue reading... ]

  Time to start getting ready to go home, eh?       ------          "Even with the reactor scrammed, the radiation in there's gotta fry the dust, A.J.," Brett said doubtfully, looking on as Jackie prepared to pour approximately three liters of Faerie Dust into an instrumented funnel-shape that was positioned above Nebula Storm's main reactor, fitting precisely into the small but fatal hole in the casing.        "Oh, no doubt about that," A.J. agreed cheerfully, and Horst continued for him, "And if we had [ Continue reading... ]

  Time to settle in; they'll be here a while...   -----        "The E.U., it did not advertise that its astrophysicists were expected to do heavy physical labor," Anthony LaPointe said with dry humor.        Helen laughed as she tried to position her piece of the huge gray-white mass of material. "I don't remember them specifying that for their xenopaleontologists, either," she said.        "Yeah," Larry said, "but at least paleontologists spend their time breaking rocks regularly. We astronomical types look at [ Continue reading... ]