Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Right.’ Jesse pointed to the computer in front of him, which displayed a digital image from the shuttle’s external camera with a grid overlaid. ‘This system uses radar and information from the Damocles to determine exactly where Orlando is. If we looked out the window right now, we couldn’t tell it from another star in the sky. But, in an hour or two, when we get closer, the system will spot it, lock on and we’ll know we’re getting close.’

‘That’s when your job really begins,’ Poppy encouraged. ‘Can you explain it?’

Jesse shifted in his seat; the force of gravity was halving every minute and he was beginning to feel the stretch in his spine. Astronauts grew a few inches in microgravity – a change that was accompanied, at least in Jesse’s case, by almost constant back pain.

‘Orlando is in a very low orbit above Europa. Every ninety minutes it does one rotation of the moon – which means it’s actually moving quite fast. Our job is to catch up with it and dock with it while we’re both moving.’

‘Well, actually – that’s my job.’ Harry’s sharp eyes appeared in the lens and he waved for the camera. ‘I’m the pilot for this mission. I…’

Jesse leant back as he listened to Harry continue. It was difficult to watch him in the pilot’s seat. Jesse’s fingers tingled with longing. He wanted to be seated before the controls. He wanted to feel the hum of them beneath his palms.

As most of his job began when they got close to station, so he had several hours yet to sit and twiddle his thumbs. Every time he looked out the window his home, the Damocles, was smaller. It looked like a beetle, the command module a glassy head bolted to the fat steel thorax of the living modules, the kitchen and bedrooms. Most spectacular was the enormous vaulted abdomen of the greenhouse, a space garden reflecting the stars. Jesse imagined Cai watching them depart in his lab, amongst the long grass. Was Juno watching him too? Were the other young astronauts, Kennedy, Cal and James on the Orlando, watching them approach? Perhaps they were sitting on a sofa in their own living modules, their feet tucked under them, searching the sky for the shuttle.

After an hour of flying he didn’t need to look out the small porthole of a window to know how far they had come. The Damocles was only a round speck in the sky and they were in microgravity. Jesse’s face had begun to swell and his back ached.

‘You’re moon-faced,’ Poppy said, her auburn hair floating up around her ears, her cheeks doughy and pink, the veins in her neck bulging. She unstrapped her seatbelt and grabbed her knees, turning a slow somersault in the cramped space of the shuttle. She finished upside-down and waved to the camera with a swollen grin. Jesse swallowed an anti-nausea pill, tightened his seatbelt and tried to sleep.

^{4 P.M.}

HIS COMPUTER WOKE HIM when it detected the station. The words ‘LOCKED ON’ flashed in red letters in the corner of his screen. From this distance, Orlando was like a white spider in the sky, although it looked larger on his display.

The space station resembled the Damocles – a hulking mass of solar panels, pressurized modules and trusses, assembled in space. The American flag painted on its side spanned ten metres. It was far more spacious than Damocles, built for circling in low orbit over the pale moon and not for interstellar travel. At the time, the Orlando was the single most expensive item ever constructed in human history – that was before the Off-World Colonization Programme.

‘Can you hear me Damocles? Congreve? Comm check.’

It was Juno’s voice in his headset, and it startled him into alertness.

‘I’m here,’ Jesse told her.

‘Is it beautiful?’ she asked, breathless. Jesse nodded at the internal camera feeding back to the ship. He was captivated by the prospect, the lovely light radiating off the frozen moon. The orbiting station looked small in comparison.

‘All right,’ came Igor’s gruff voice through the line. ‘Plenty of time for daydreaming and chit-chat when we’re all on station. Now it’s time for the real work to begin. Jesse, are you ready?’

It was a game of cat and mouse. As their shuttle slowed they would enter into Europa’s orbit, just above the station in what was called a ‘phasing orbit’. Jesse’s job was to monitor the engine burn as they made their first orbital transfer. Suddenly the Congreve was a hive of activity, Harry and Commander Sheppard issuing commands and talking into their headsets with Omar Briggs, while Igor instructed Jesse over the headset and Poppy kept the channels operating. Jesse could see Captain Briggs’ face on the screen, examining the incoming data from the Damocles.

‘All systems nominal,’ Commander Sheppard said over the intercom.