Second Chance Read Online Free

light-seconds away from Achebe, and getting farther away every day, but two of the dozens of probe satellites that Cassiopeia had scattered throughout the system over the last fourteen years were in orbit around it. And, according to the chart, one of them was in almost exactly the right place. I used my stylus to direct it to take a high-resolution stereo pair in IR and visible light, then moved onto another phase of the analysis while waiting for my images to arrive.
    Ten minutes later I got something, but it wasn’t what I’d expected. Tien shot out of the port from Gamma work bay, diving right at me and looking like she was ready to spit nails. “What were you thinking? ” she said, jerking to a halt with one hand on a panel edge.
    “What?”
    “You just turned Sat Fourteen around to point at the damn planet. I was in the middle of a system-wide solar wind analysis that needed simultaneous data from all the sats. I’m going to have to set up the whole thing again! You’ve cost me days of work!”
    So that had been the meaning of that cryptic confirmation message. Focused on my task, I’d just tapped OK as I did on so many other such messages. “I... I’m sorry. I didn’t know...”
    “Why the hell didn’t you check the chromo first?”
    “The what?” The word was vaguely familiar, but with all the new concepts the crew had thrown at me in the last few days I couldn’t keep them all straight.
    “The fucking chromo !” She pulled herself in front of me and keyed my monitor to a new display. Hundreds of tiny colored squares filled the screen, shimmering and shifting about like the crowd at a soccer game. She pointed at a wide band of light teal that spread across the lower part of the screen, with one orange square vibrating in the middle of it. “See? There’s Sat Fourteen, right in the middle of my pattern.”
    “I... I see, but I don’t understand. I’ve never seen this display before.”
    “You... you’ve... ooh! ” She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head with an inarticulate noise of irritation. “Kay kay. Hue is topic, luminance is importance, saturation is relevance. Proximity indicates correlation, of course. Jitter is freshness, jump is urgency. Use the help if you get lost.” She pointed to a tiny question mark in one corner. “If you have any questions, ask Bobb. But until you can learn how to avoid stepping on other people’s work, I’d suggest you leave the damn sats alone! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a solar wind analysis to set up. Again!”
    And she dove through the port back to Gamma.
    After Tien left, I just hung there for a moment, clutching my stylus and clenching my teeth. How dare she just barge in, rip me a new one, bury me under incomprehensible jargon, and storm out? It wasn’t my fault I’d died. I hadn’t asked to be vived without proper training. I was trying as hard as I could to catch up, and I’d asked the crew to cut me some slack. If this was the consideration I got... well, then, to heck with her.
    On the other hand, I had messed up. I should have realized that a satellite was a shared resource, and found out how to check that no one else was using it. I should have read and understood the confirmation message before tapping OK. But I hadn’t, and now I’d made an enemy.
    I considered following Tien and asking her forgiveness, but the vehemence with which she’d departed made me think that it might be better to wait a while, until she calmed down. In the meantime, I decided to learn about this “chromo” thing so I didn’t make any more stupid mistakes.
    I stared at the jittering, dancing array of squares for a while longer, feeling foolish and angry with myself, then tapped the question mark—the only thing Tien had mentioned that made any sense at all.
    A chromo, it turned out, was a shared-source software tool for visualization of dynamic information. The Cassiopeia crew hadn’t started using them until some time after my last memory.