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Sundancer Falling by Geoffrey A. Landis In orbit, the first rule of survival is: act slowly. In an emergency, take time to assess your options; act with deliberation but not haste. Your instincts may tell you to act fast, but your instincts will kill you if you don't think. You ignore this rule at your own peril. The explosion was a flash of white followed by the flickering glitter of debris spinning off into space. I was loading film canisters onto the Sundancer and happened to be looking the right way to see it. One of the pieces was a space-suited body. In an instant it shrank away to a speck and vanished. I flicked on the rendezvous radar and swiveled it around to try for a trajectory fix. The worker who had been flung away from the station had been slightly further out from the rotation axis than Sundancer. I punched my radio in to the suit bands, meanwhile running Sundancer down the cable to the spot that would match his outward velocity. I'm an astronomer, not a pilot, but I'd trained on the simulators enough to fly it in an emergency. I ran an abbreviated preflight check. The red LED display indicated Sundancer had full tanks. While it carried fuel only for orbital adjustments, not major burns, there was enough to get back to Antaeus if I didn't use up too much in the rendezvous. Nothing on the suit bands. Previous - Next |
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