Expendable - James Alan Gardner [27]
Prope clenched her fists tighter with every collision…which was no doubt why Chee did it.
Yarrun had already taken his place at the Explorer station, and was programming probe drones for preliminary surveys of the planet surface. This was routine work; he nodded to me as I walked by, then went back to his gauges.
On the view screen, a purple speck had begun to differentiate itself from the background of bluish stars. We were not on a direct course at the moment, so the speck drifted slowly to the left. I grabbed one arm of the command chair and stopped Chee’s gyrations long enough to push a button on the chair’s control pad. The purple spot blossomed to the size of a baby prune.
“I thought Melaquin was supposed to be Earthlike,” Chee said. “Why is it purple?”
“Blueshift from our speed of approach,” Prope answered. “I can computer-correct the color if you let me work the controls….”
But Chee had already keyed in the correction, plus an extra level of magnification. He muttered, “She thinks I’ve never heard of blueshifting. I just forgot, is all. Too long since I’ve been on a real bridge….”
“Anything special for the probes?” Yarrun asked me for the sake of formality. The rules of rank said he should defer to me, but his programming skills were at least as good as mine, and his planetography intuition was superb. I waved for him to proceed and he turned a knob. “Probes away.”
Four projectiles appeared on the screen and sped toward the planet. They looked like ejaculated Sperm, wearing a milky film dragged off the Jacaranda’s own envelope. The wispy white coating hung loosely about the probes, held by the faint magnetic fields generated as a side effect of internal electronics; but within a few minutes, those Sperm coverings would lose their grip and fall away into hot little eddies of nonrelativistic spacetime that would take years to normalize. I watched as the Sperm cover slipped off one of the probes, curled, and rolled in on itself; but before the other covers did the same, the computer running the monitor lost its battle to keep the probes visible, and they vanished into darkness.
“Shot our wad, did we?” Chee asked.
Prope winced at the expression.
“Yes, sir,” I told Chee. “Now Melaquin knows we’re coming.”
Sitting on the Edge of Immortallty
Time crawled by. The probes would take five or six minutes to reach the planet and assume their initial scan configuration, then there’d be another two minutes before we started receiving data.
One of our instructors at the Academy (Explorer Commander Dendron, afflicted with a progressive muscle disorder that pulled his face taut over his bones like a rubber mask stretched on a cannonball) encouraged us to smoke a pipe of tobacco during this waiting interval. “Nothing like a comfortable pipe,” he would say whenever he could manipulate a lecture in that direction. “Calms you, gives you something to do with your hands, and irritates hell out of the Regular Vacuum types. Imbues the upholstery with your presence too—you may go Oh Shit within the hour, but the smell of pipe smoke will stink up everything till the ship gets decommissioned. What other immortality do we have?”
In fact, ECMs were granted another form of immortality besides tobacco fumes: the Memory Wall at the Explorer Academy. The wall recorded the names of all Explorers who went Oh Shit in the course of duty. Perhaps it was significant that Commander Dendron didn’t consider our Memory Wall as a true memorial for the Lost. You had to be remembered by “real people”—other Explorers didn’t count.
Chee’s Pipe
Neither Yarrun nor I had been swayed by Dendron’s suggestion; we did not smoke as the probes sped toward Melaquin. Chee, however, chose that moment to pull a briar pipe and leather pouch from an inner pocket of his jacket. As he opened the pouch and pulled out a pinch of dark-brown shreds, the rich brandied aroma of tobacco took command of the bridge. I had smelled