Second Chance Read Online Free Page A

But, according to the local history log, once they’d started the team had gotten into the tool in a big way, and used it to coordinate all their activities. Several members of the team—including, most disquietingly, myself—had even developed new software features and contributed them to the chromo-using community. The satellite information chromo Tien had showed me was just one of a dozen in the ship’s computers.
    I could see how useful chromos could be—the information density of that twitchy screen was enormous. I could also see that, unless you had started from the beginning and learned the system bit by bit as it grew in complexity, the learning curve would be extremely steep.
    There was a tutorial. I started in on it.

    -o0o-

    We had one meal a day together, in Gamma habitation bay; we called it “dinner” although it was breakfast for some, a midnight snack for others. This was our time to share findings as well as food.
    Tien had put some amazingly beautiful photographs of Balzac’s ring system up on the big monitor. As the slide show advanced, she pointed out the delicate structure of the G ring, peculiar waves in the H ring, a shimmering rainbow of ice crystals in the B ring. Balzac’s rings were even bigger than Saturn’s, relative to the size of their primary, and their peculiarities hinted at answers to longstanding questions about the formation and maintenance of Saturn’s rings—answers that would never have been forthcoming from study of only a single solar system—and raised more questions, even more intriguing than the answers. Ideas and speculations ricocheted around the habitation bay like lasers, with Nuru finishing Kyra’s sentences and Mari pointing out interesting implications of Tien’s latest theory.
    At one point Matt’s hand brushed against Tien’s, and a significant look passed between them. I wondered if they were sleeping together.
    Sex was permitted by the mission profile. All the women were on birth control, of course, implanted before vival. We’d been offered sex-drive suppressants as well, but after reviewing the side effects we’d agreed as a group that no matter how young and lithe our cloned bodies might be, our minds were those of mature adults and we could deal with the close quarters without chemical assistance. It was another decision that had seemed to make sense when I was making it for my clone.
    Despite the lively technical discussion, Kyra was looking sad and pensive. “I wonder what Mkebe Osarenogowu would think of all this?” she asked, naming one of the most prominent astrophysicists back home... or at least, one who had been prominent at the time we’d left. He was almost certainly dead by now.
    “Or anyone on Earth,” Tien added, reminding us all that we still had not re-established contact. Faces fell all around the table.
    Bobb looked both sheepish and angry. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve been giving the problem as much attention as I can, but every time I think I’m getting close to a solution it seems that something else breaks.”
    Nuru broke the melancholy silence that followed by taking the remote and advancing to the next image. “What’s that feature there?” she asked Tien, pointing out a thread-thin wavy ring in the otherwise-empty gap between D and E rings. Tien started to explain, getting more and more excited about the possibilities, but Kyra had a different theory, and soon a lively scientific debate erupted.
    Tien waved her spring roll at the monitor to emphasize some point. Kyra grabbed at the remote to zoom in on the gap, but Matt was more interested in another part of the image and refused to hand it over. The two of them mock-tussled briefly over the remote, until Matt neatly slipped it out of Kyra’s grasp and flipped it behind his back to Nuru. But Mari snagged the remote from the air, and used it to back up to a previous image she’d wanted to examine in more detail. “Otcha otcha!”