Starship Walker

Earth Orbit

Earth Orbit

For a moment, as Liam lay in shock, Gillian held her breath. But the instrument echoes she saw from his mask showed that everything was normal.

"Don't worry, we're Ok!" Mr Dryen announced. "The system caught it!"

The ship was safe. As Liam sat up on the stage, Gillian pulled her mask off. Even still wearing his mask, Liam looked dejected. He pulled it off slowly and looked up at Gillian.

"I did it again!" he muttered.

Gillian walked over and gave him her hand. He stood up, towering over her, and looked so downcast that she wanted to put her arms around him and take his head on her shoulder. But Liam was too tall for that.

"Don't worry, Liam," Gillian said. "This is just something you'll have to get past. You'll grow out of it, I'm sure." She looked up at his face. "And you've just piloted this ship back to the home system!"

"There is that, I suppose," he muttered, glancing around the Navigation centre, where people were going about their business or, if they were guests, starting to leave. Captain Xing gazed at him and saluted. "Well done, Mr Pendry!"

"Thankyou, Captain!" Liam replied.

They stepped off the stage together, and Celia joined them. She gave Liam a demure kiss. "Congratulations, Liam - your first live Walk! Bad luck about the fall."

"Thanks, Celia. I could have done without such an embarrassing finish!"

"Pendry," Gillian said. "Liam 'Pendry'. We don't get to hear surnames much, except from the Captain. I'm 'Mr Berry', by the way."

"He calls you 'Mr'?"

"I think it's supposed to be an honorific. It's a merchant navy custom, I presume."

Celia said to Liam, "I saw you turn towards Gillian just before you fell; it looked like you were saying something. That must have distracted you."

Liam nodded, his face downcast. "I should keep focus right up until I go offline." He turned to Gillian. "So it looks like you're on for the final leg?"

"Apparently," Gillian replied. "I don't know when. The let-down needs some planning. We have to map a route through the Oort cloud, before we can work out a let-down path into the ecliptic plane." She added, "And they've added a special control to disconnect me if I, um - have another turn."    

This work began immediately. Mr Morris and Mr Dryen, having pin-pointed the exact location of the ship relative to the sun, now plotted its position relative to the latest Oort cloud maps, and their latest observations.

"The outer comets and planetoids in the Oort cloud are constantly perturbed by nearby stars, so they tend to wander," Mr Morris told them. "That's why everything has to be recalculated for each let-down. Right now, we think we've got a clear path to a spot in the solar system about twenty degrees above the ecliptic plane, with only a couple of course changes."

He explained that the Oort cloud was rocky junk, ice and other frozen gases, with planetoids and two full-size planets as large as the Earth. It all rotated around the solar system up to a light year out. Automated observatories, permanently positioned in the cloud, tracked all the major and some minor bodies, and calculations located the rest, using the gravitational effect of the major masses. The map needed to be updated on each return journey.

Mr Morris rotated the three-dimensional version of his map in front of them, to highlight Gillian's proposed path.

"I'd say it'll be about an hour, maybe a bit under, for you to cross through the cloud, Gillian," Mr Dryen said. "You'll see we've marked the end of the let-down on the orbit of Earth at L5. We'll treat that as the notional target; nobody expects you to get exactly there."