What happened to my Asteroid? Section 68:

The Reykjavik slowly approached the station while rotating around to point back toward Earth and to align the docking arms.  Albatross was not quite stabilized yet but the process was working.  Unfortunately stabilizing the station for docking and finishing the cargo transfer was consuming a lot of fuel, although the time saved to complete the resupply would be well worth it in the long run.

Transports buzzed around the station collecting cargo containers and searching for survivors or at least bodies.

The large ship slowly maneuvered into position along side the crippled station.  The station had a slight wobble due to the imbalance caused by a missing section of one of the rings, but it wasn’t too bad. The ship extended her docking arms and slowly moved them in between the rings toward the docking ports on the main hull of the station.
Station personnel watched the operation from every viewport that could see it and monitored very closely on their computer consoles from the cameras available.  The ship had personnel watching from every possible place including several people in space suits standing on the hull outside.  Each docking arm had a couple of people standing at the end of the fixes section of the docking arms and another pair at the end of the telescoping section.  Transport craft were stationed at critical observation positions between the ship and the station.  Nobody was taking any chances and all operations were going slowly.

The two craft slowly intermeshed with the docking arms of the supply ship moving between the rotating rings of the station.  Personnel on both vessels tried to behave as if this was a routine operation but there wasn’t a single person that actually believed it.  As the docking arms approached the docking ports the observing operators waved hand signals to each other indicating their observations of the approach.  Communications channels between the two craft were saturated almost to the point of being unusable so hand signals between the crew members was the best method.

The docking arms finally latched to their corresponding ports.  The crew of both vessels breathed a collective sigh of relief as resupply operations finally resumed.

Previous    Next
Beginning of Story