Courvosier Station
Courvosier Base, not even a pinprick of light when I q’d in, expanded below me, bigger and bigger, until I could see every detail of the dark foothold man had carved on Earth’s longsuffering companion globe. The long receiving funnel of the marnite storage, the bare, dusty acreage of the landing site, the gleaming black matte of the outer dome and the smaller atmosphere caps scattered around it in a Brownian field of dark pockmarks, nearly lost in the deep shadows and highlights of the cratered moon’s surface. They were all becoming familiar to me. Not quite a homecoming, but familiar.
“Send the ping, Clarence,” I said. My hail was immediately responded to by the automated attendant, which fed Clarence course info for the autopilot to follow. No driving allowed for me, except in the event of a full systems failure, at which point I would be all rights already be dead or unconscious.
Gryphon tumbled past my head, practicing his long jumps. Towards the end of our long trips, he always got a little antsy. We’d been out nearly an extra two weeks this trip, so my crazy patsy had been leaping from wall to wall for nearly a month. Three month stints were bad enough, but we’d run clear through my personal food stores and most of the company overstock this time around. Except for that final chocolate bar, still perched like a promise in its foil on top of my station shoes.
Now that we were within a five minute lag window, I determined it was as good a time as any to call Tim back.
He answered immediately.
“Korinne! We were worried about you, we heard you had some trouble with some military cargo.” His thin, lined face peered at the viewscreen slightly to the left of his console cam.
I responded with voice only, since I was saving my last clean uniform for my mandatory debrief after landing. “Hey, Tim. Yeah, we had some complications. I’ll put it all in my report.” I wasn’t ready to display the havoc Captain Android and his guards had wreaked on my ship’s interior, either. CPS was going to be presenting military insurance with a hefty claim, to be sure.
