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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 81: Cooper 99
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 282
The landing on Luna went smoothly. The crew threw a brief farewell party to their very brief and not very official crew companion Angle, who was returning home to his family and was eager to be gone, and then turned attention to cargo. The captain had apparently been able to contract a fair amount of goods headed for Luna and Earth because it was a bad time in their orbital relations for ships to make that run and he was being paid by Angle to do it, so he could offer a decent shipping rate. They weren’t stopping on Earth, though; they were dropping the earth-bound goods here to be shuttled to the ground via space elevators which reached low Earth orbit, and someone else would take responsibility for the ultimate delivery.
The spaceport at Luna was a city of domes, more ovoid than spherical because meteorites were a greater problem in this airless world than on other planets. However, shore leave at the spaceport above Selene City was a brief few hours, partly because the window for the next leg to Mercury was very narrow and partly because Luna would be passing through that same debris field through which the ship had just passed, which meant a bombardment of meteorites on the domes. Although again these were protected by inertial shielding, every once in a while one was hit hard enough to crack. Residents of the planet lived in subsurface cities unless they actually worked at the spaceport, and spaceport workers had subsurface shelters for these events, but spaceship crews were expected to remain sheltered in their ships. Cooper would have liked to have met Angle’s family, having heard some stories about them, but they were several hundred miles away, and the captain was not going to wait the extra day for a round trip to the Sea of Tranquility Mathers clan city.
It was Cooper’s sleep period when the ship launched for the next link. They were already past the debris field through which they had now passed twice, but the lessons he had gotten in navigation had made him aware that the closer a ship was to the sun the closer together these orbital junk trails were, so they would go through several in the ten days it would take to catch up with Mercury. That was a lot of alerts, but the previous ones had been uneventful, and it seemed that no one on the ship worried about them, unless it was the captain or the navigator.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
