Earth

“By the way, I watched you snag that hook, first pass. Did you take over from the computer again? No machine pilots that smoothly.”

Teresa knew she was blushing. “It looked like the program was stuttering so I…”

“Thought so! Now I’ll have to brag insufferably at mess. It’ll be your fault if I lose all my friends up here.”

The capture maneuver was actually simpler than it looked. Pleiades now hung suspended below the space station, from a cable stretched taut by gravitational tides. When it was time to go, they’d simply release the hook and the shuttle would resume its original ellipse, returning to mother Earth having saved many tons of precious fuel.

“Well, I reckon it’s cause I’m paht Texan,” she drawled, though she was the first in all her lineage ever to see the Lone Star State. “Ergo mah facility with the lasso.”

“It also explains why her eyes are brown,” Mark Randall inserted from nearby.

Jason’s image glanced toward Teresa’s copilot. “I don’t dare comment on that, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it.” Then, back to Teresa, “See you soon, Rip. I’ll reserve a room for us at the Hilton.”

“I’ll settle for a broom closet,” she answered, and hang it if Randall took the wrong meaning. Some people just couldn’t imagine that a husband and wife, meeting for the first time in months, might want above all else to make contact, to talk quietly and preserve something neither of them wanted to lose.

“I’ll see what I can arrange. Stempell out.”

After securing the hook, their first task had been to offload tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Likewise the extra orbital maneuvering propellants Teresa’s careful piloting had saved. Every kilo of raw material in orbit was valuable, and the station offloading crew went through the procedures with meticulous care.

The holo display showed Pleiades suspended, nose upward, just below the bottom portion of the station — Nearpoint — the section closest to Earth. It was a maze of pipes and industrial gear hanging by slender, silvery threads many miles into the planet’s gravity well. Teresa watched nervously as three station operators in spacesuits finished draining the aft tanks. Only when the hoses were detached at last did she release a knot of tension. Explosive, corrosive liquids, flowing only meters from her heat shielding, always made her edgy.

“Crew chief requests permission to commence cargo offloading,” Mark told Teresa.

“Granted.”

From the maze above, a giant, articulated manipulator arm approached Pleiades’ cargo bay. A spacesuited figure waved from the bay, guiding the arm gingerly toward the mysterious Air Force package.

Colonel Gle

Fortunately, the crew outside couldn’t hear his backseat driving. And Teresa didn’t mind. After all, he was charged with equipment worth several hundred million dollars. Some anxious muttering at this point was understandable.

So why do I detest the man so much? she wondered.

For months Spivey had been working closely with her husband on some unspoken project. Perhaps it was her dislike of being excluded, or that nasty word “secrecy.” Or perhaps the resentment came simply from seeing the colonel take up so much of Jason’s attention, at a time when she was already jealous of others.

“Others”… meaning that June Morgan woman, of course. Teresa allowed herself a brief remise of resentment. Just don’t let it cause an argument, she reminded herself. Not this time. Not up here.

She turned away from Spivey and sca

In addition to the hook-snatch docking trick, tethered complexes like this one offered many other advantages over old-style “Tinkertoy” space stations. Long, metalized tethers could draw power directly from the Earth’s magnetic field, or let you torque against those fields to maneuver without fuel. Also, by yet another quirk of Kepler’s laws, both tips of the bola-like structure experienced faint artificial gravity — about a hundredth of a g — helpful for living quarters and handling liquids.

Teresa appreciated anything that helped make space work. Still, she used remote instruments to examine the braided cables. Superstrong in tension, they were vulnerable to being worn away by microscopic space debris, even meteoroids. Statistical reassurances were less calming than simply checking for herself, so she sca

Overhearing Spivey, clucking like a nervous hen as his cargo cleared the bay, Teresa smiled. I guess maybe we’re not that different in some ways.

The Russians and Chinese had similar facilities in orbit, as did Nihon and the Euros. But the other dozen or so space-capable nations had abandoned their military outposts as costs rose and the skies came increasingly under civil control. Rumor had it Spivey’s folk were trying to cram in as much clandestine work as possible before “secrecy” became as outmoded up here as below.

The crane operator loaded the Colonel’s cargo into an old shuttle tank — now the station freight elevator — and sent it climbing toward the weight-free complex, twenty klicks above.

“Request permission to prepare the airlock for transit, Captain.” Spivey was already halfway down the companion-way to middeck, impatient to join his mysterious machine.

“Mark will help just as soon as the tu

One spacesuited astronaut examined the transparent transitway co

“I’ll see to Spivey,” Mark said, and started to unstrap.

“Fine.” But Teresa found herself watching the spaceman outside. He had remained in the bay after finishing, and she was curious why.

Climbing atop one of the tanks at the aft end, the station crewman secured his line to the uppermost insulated sphere… then went completely motionless, arms half outstretched before him in the limp, relaxed posture known as the “spacer’s crouch.”

Teresa quashed her momentary concern. Of course. I get it.

A little ahead of schedule for once, the fellow was seizing a chance that came all too rarely. He was watching the Earth roll by.

The planet filled half the sky, stretching toward distant, hazy horizons. Directly below paraded a vastly bright panorama that never repeated itself, highlighted topographies that were ever-familiar and yet always startling. At the moment, their orbital track was approaching Spain from the west. Teresa knew because, as always, she had checked their location and heading only moments before. Sure enough, soon the nubby Rock of Gibraltar hove into view.

Great pressure waves strained against the Pillars of Hercules, as they had ever since that day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean had broken through the neck of land co

Where the great waterfall once surged, now diurnal tides interacted in complex patterns of cancelation and reinforcement, focused and reflected by the fu

To Teresa, the patterns proved beautifully, once again, nature’s love affair with mathematics. And not only the sea displayed wave motion. She also liked looking down on towering stratocumulus and wind-shredded cirrus clouds. From space the atmosphere seemed so thin — too slender a film to rely all their lives upon. And yet, from here one also sensed that layer’s great power.