Rikki stammered, “I…I’m in favor of deciding that later.”
Ad libbing are we?
“Fair enough,” Dana said. “I’m game.”
“Think about this,” Li said. “We need to be serious. For the sake of the children and their heritage. Blake? You understand, I’m sure.”
Rikki’s eyes smoldered.
“I’m with Li,” Carlos said.
At least his hormones were.
Dana said, “Four out of six, or captain’s prerogative: take your pick. We’ll go with Rikki’s suggestion. And Li, we’re following your lead by choosing names before the landing.”
Li bowed her head in defeat—exultant inside. After this finely crafted debacle, none would think of her as subtle.
May they never learn the error of their ways.
Soon enough, on a dozen folded sheets of paper, two sets of six numbers waited to be drawn from opaque bags. One set related to the planets, the other to the crew.
If luck came to Li’s aid, she might even get to name the world below. That would be a pleasant bonus. But no. In the lottery for planets she drew four, one of the gas giants.
In the second round, Li did get the consolation prize of naming “her” world first. She picked Hobbes, just in case Carlos had drawn the second planet. He had, alas, only drawn the innermost planet, the Mars-like world. Glancing to Li for approval, or maybe to claim a favor, he declared his world Confucius.
Antonio, going next, had drawn three: the biggest, nearest, gas giant. He dubbed it Ayn Rand. He didn’t meet Li’s gaze. If his selection weren’t defiant, he wouldn’t have anyway.
For the outermost world, when her turn came, Dana chose Kierkegaard. An interesting choice: a philosopher who had not made it onto Li’s recommended reading list. Existentialism. Christian ethics. Blah, blah, blah. Better, though, than the biblical nonsense to which Li had expected Dana might turn—not that Li would deny that the old myths resonated with people. Quite the opposite, in fact. She admired the old stories’ cultural tenacity, just not anyone gulled by them.
Rikki, dithering still when her turn came, settled on Newton for planet five.
But it was Blake who had won the sweepstakes: the privilege of naming humanity’s new home. When at last the moment came to exercise his right, he didn’t, as he had intimated, opt to call the planet Home.
The world they would settle would be known, forever after, as Dark.
22
“Ready back there?” Blake asked. On his cockpit instruments everything showed green. “This will be fun.”
“Ready,” Rikki called from behind him. She sounded dubious about the fun.
He toggled on the radio. “Endeavour, this is the shuttle Discovery. We’re go for launch.”
“Safe journey, Discovery,” Dana radioed back. “Keep in touch.”
“Will do,” he said.
With mountains and valleys, lakes and rivers and seas, icecaps and glaciers and boundless plains, Dark beckoned. Here and there, a whorl of cloud obscured his view. The planet was in all-but-full phase, and even the slender visible rim of night side glimmered in double moonlight.
“Releasing docking clamps,” Blake announced. “Engaging thrusters.”
With puffs of compressed nitrogen, he edged the dart-like shuttle away from the much larger ovoid that was Endeavour. “I’m off to deploy our cargo,” he reported.
Endeavour could have delivered the weather microsats as easily as the shuttle, but he wanted to get a feel for his controls before attempting entry and landing.
He had his doubts this exercise would buy them more than flight practice. None of these satellites would stay parked. Not with three close-in natural moons to perturb their orbits. Not with the innermost moon dipping daily below the altitude of synchronous orbits.
Five or six microsats, even drifting, might keep the entire planet under observation and maintain a line-of-sight comm ring. They had three.
Synchronous orbits? Above Dark, the notion was ludicrous. Out of necessity, they would learn to live with sporadic downlinks when one of their few satellites happened to wander overhead.
The scarcity of on-orbit sensors was emblematic of everything they lacked. Automated landers. Robotic swarms to make the initial explorations. Construction equipment. A real med lab. Months of food in reserve. Portable reactors and enough deuterium to—
Stop it, Blake ordered himself. You’re alive. It’s time to earn your place among the lucky few.
“Copy that,” Dana said. “When you’re done with your deliveries, how about you find us a nice homestead.”
“Beachfront property,” he promised. “Discovery, out.”
“Copy.”
Blake flipped off the ship-to-ship radio. “Main drive in ten seconds.”
“Okay,” Rikki said.
No one had commented on his spontaneous christening of the shuttle.
Carlos and Antonio were probably sick of picking names. Dana, traditionalist that she was, might even approve of Blake’s choice. Discovery had been among the ships bringing the original settlers to the Jamestown colony. Another Discovery had accompanied James Cook’s third expedition around the world. Robert Scott had taken yet a different Discovery to Antarctica.
And Li? Blake supposed she was off licking her wounds after the name-the-worlds fiasco. Unless she had found a reason to like the name. When the Jamestown colonists sent their Discovery seeking a Northwest Passage, its crew mutinied. They abandoned the captain, Henry Hudson, in a small boat. He was never seen again.
And Rikki? She was all but monosyllabic. She was mad about something, and he had no idea what.
He asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
He guessed. “We’ll find a place for the colony. We will succeed.”
“I know,” she said, but her voice was sad.
“Your family would be proud.”
“And yours,” she said.
He found no more solace in the reassurance than she had.
Discovery’s trajectory plunged them into darkness. As his eyes adapted, more and more stars appeared—except where the Coalsack took a huge chunk out of the sky.
“Coming up on the drop point,” Rikki called.
“Copy that.” He kept watch on his own displays. “On my mark, make the drop. Three, two, one, mark.”
“First satellite dropped.” There was a pause. “Telemetry received. It’s online.”
He went on the radio. “Endeavour, that’s one satellite on station.” While its onboard fuel lasts. “We’re on our way to the next drop point.”
“We have it,” Dana said.
On the way
