Nick Abrahams still holds the official world record for the number of space launches, but he’s bored stiff with his job hosting space tours. Only when his wife leaves him, however, does he try to change his life.
He accepts a tempting offer from a Russian billionaire. In exchange for making a simple repair on Neptune’s moon Triton, he will return to Earth a multi-millionaire, enabling him to achieve his ‘impossible dream’ of buying his own California vineyard.
The fact that Nick must travel alone during the four-year roundtrip doesn’t bother him at all, as he doesn’t particularly like people anyway. Once en route he learns his new boss left out some critical details in his job description—details that could cost him his life, and humankind its existence…
Genre: FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech30.000+ copies sold world-wide
“What is that?”
Startled, Nick turned towards the sound of the voice. One of the passengers, the skinny bald one, was watching the radar image over his shoulder.
“During the flight, you should...” Nick began, but then shook his head. Here we go again, he thought. There wasn’t really anything wrong with people asking him questions during the flight. They were, in the end, paying for him to entertain them.
“Let me see...” He looked for the bald man’s name tag and read it. “Mr. Wiseman. We’ll find out shortly.”
He shifted the radar image to center on the shadow the man had spotted. Usually the autopilot handled the radar and Nick didn’t have to check it. The pilot only had to step in if something was endangering the ship’s flight path and the autopilot hadn’t determined a detour. In other words, never. Whatever was casting the shadow must have been rotating, since the intensity changed at a rate of approximately once per minute. Nick retrieved the orbital data and nodded. It was probably one of the Spacelink satellites a crazy billionaire had paid to have fired into low orbit, way back when, only to just leave them up there when his company had gone bankrupt.
“Mr. Wiseman? This looks like an old Spacelink satellite. It’s a miracle it hasn’t burned up yet.”
It was strange, though. At such a low orbit, the atmosphere would have caused so much deceleration that the satellite should have fallen long ago. But during one of the launches the satellite deployment hadn’t gone as planned, so four of them had ended up in higher orbits. Nick remembered this only because it had delayed his own first launch into space by a month. NASA had wanted to be sure that the private firm had its technology under control.
“Spacelink?” the curious passenger asked.
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