Saturn Rukh Read Online Free Page B

another engineer who is betting his life on his system, but unlike Pete, he can’t turn it on to check it out beforehand.”
     
    Leaving Pete to the task of checking out the facility, Rod and Chastity donned their helmets, exited the airlock, and leaving the Jet-Do tethered to the base of the conical ship, climbed up the rungs in the side of the crew capsule to the airlock at the center of the cone, where they cycled through together. This airlock was big enough for four people in their spacesuits. In a routine these two professional astronauts had gone through many times before, they turned their backs on each other, stripped down past their cooljohns, then redressed in the underwear and jumpsuits waiting for them in their personal lockers tucked into the wedge-shaped corners of the airlock.
     
    “Ready, Chass?” asked Rod, his back still turned.
     
    “Ready,” Chastity replied.
     
    As they turned around, Rod took a quick look at the altitude of the zipper up the chest of Chastity’s jumpsuit. The zipper was well past mid-chest and almost no cleavage showed—she was all business today.
     
    They entered the lower facilities deck in the crew capsule. The open space was a hexagon, two meters from side to side. Up the center of the room ran a ladder leading to the upper control deck. On the opposite side of the ladder from them was obviously the galley, with its preparation counter, compactor, oven, mixer, and microwave, and hatches above and below the counter leading to a freezer and refrigerator. Each of the six walls of the hexagonal room had doors. Three walls, the galley and two others marked food and equipment, had multiple small hatches leading to storage areas. The food and equipment lockers were blocked by a large tube two meters high and a meter in diameter that took up nearly a third of the space in the hexagonal room. The opposite two walls, marked AIRLOCK and LIFE SUPPORT, had full-sized doors. The last wall, to the left of the airlock door, had two narrow doors, side-by-side.
     
    “As Queen Victoria once said…” said Chastity, as she slipped into the nearest narrow door.
     
    “... never pass up a chance to visit a W.C.,” continued Rod as he slipped into the other narrow door.
     
    By the time Rod exited his bathroom, Chastity was already halfway up the ladder to the upper deck. He followed her up the rungs and through the half-circle hole in the grating that acted as a ceiling for the lower deck and a floor for the upper deck. The triangle-shaped open area in the top deck was slightly larger than the hexagonal-shaped open area in the lower deck, but it seemed more crowded since the conical shape of the ship caused the upper part of the walls to tilt inward slightly.
     
    Rod and Chastity looked around at the standardized control deck arrangement. Both were glad that they would be operating familiar equipment during this new and dangerous journey. The triangular room had three touchscreen consoles, one at each apex of the triangle. Right above each touchscreen was a heads-up holoviewport. The holoviewport acted as a normal viewport providing a view of what was outside during the critical landing phases on the surface of Luna and Mars, while at the same time superimposing navigation and status information on that view. For other operations requiring pilot control, the holoviewport could replace the outside view with any other outside view obtained from cameras placed at strategic points around the ship, allowing the pilot to observe the process of docking the ship nose-first or landing the ship tail-first.
     
    The seat before the engineering console was occupied. The person at the scottyboard swung around on the swivel arm that held the cushioned seat for the console and started to unbuckle himself.
     
    “Don’t bother for me,” said Chastity, waving a hand at him. But he did anyway and floated free with a bow. He was a young Japanese man, wiry in build, with long artistic fingers.
     
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