Commander
Dickerson entered the lab “So what have you discovered?”
“Hello Kim.”
Tim rotated the hologram around “Take a look at this.” He gestured toward the
markings.
“That looks
like a docking reference.” She pondered.
Sam chimed
in “That is also the region of the gravity anomaly.”
“Gravity
anomaly?” Kim floated over to her console “How big of an anomaly?”
“The crew
captain said he wasn’t Galileo,” Tim called up some numbers “but the best guess
is 1/10th to 1/20th of Earth normal gravity.”
“Well we
know what happened to Gwen.” Kim shifted around “OK, I’ll take it from
here. You two get to go on a little
excursion.”
Sam looked
up “Excursion?”
Tim scowled
“I take it we aren’t going to the supermarket for milk and eggs.”
“Nope.” Kim
tried to be upbeat “You get to take a tow shuttle and go get the other
one. You can use the probe out there for
off side thrust.”
“That’s
going to take a while.” Sam was frowning now.
Tim checked
some figures on the tow shuttle “That’s going to take at least a day just for
transport, plus the time it takes to get it rigged up.”
“So you had
better get going.” Kim looked back to
her console “And make sure you take plenty of supplies, just in case.”
“What
exactly do you mean by ‘just in case’” Sam was really not happy now.
“We don’t
know the exact mass.” She looked over to Sam “We don’t know how much force we
can exert on the anchors. We don’t know
how much offsetting thrust we can really get from the probe. And there are at least a dozen other factors
that we just don’t know about.”
“Fair
enough.” Sam relaxed a bit.
“We’ll get
loaded up and notify you when we launch.” Tim was resigned to this task now.
Beginning of Story
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