Dutchman Waiting

Spacewalk

"You'll have to show me."

"Tomorrow. Where's the sail?"

"Solar sail? I don't have one."

"How do you plan on getting it back to Earth? Isn't that the goal here?"

"Maybe later, another mission, but not this time," she answered, barely paying attention.

"We're partners, and I'm looking for a payday," Vadym stated.

"Well, get a solar sail, then." She replied.

"What are you planning on doing out there that can't be done from Farside station?" he inquired.

"I'm collecting samples and analyzing them. Our team at Farside discovered this moonlet, and my family wants to know more about it."

"So, you're, what, planting a flag?"

"Look, you are getting paid very well. What does it matter if I want to dance the Shastriya Nritya on it?" she retorted, adding a half-hearted and somehow sarcastic dance step.

"It matters because what you're asking to do is dangerous, and I want to set the record for the most missions completed without dying. I don't want to be going out there to play games. If we are going to land on that asteroid, then we are going to tow it back and get the goods."

This seemed to have an effect on her, but she came back with a settlement.

"You're the captain. Once we're out there, what you say goes. I won't argue. But I need to get to there. I'm not crazy, I promise, and this isn't a whimsical gap-year journey, and I'm not just some rich sorority girl."

"Three of those things might be true, but the last one..." Vadym's attempt at humor was lost on her.

"I was never in a sorority." She was on the edge of anger.

"Fine, I'll get us a sail."

Vadym wasn't good with people, and he knew that about himself. He tended to chide people a little too much. His father had left him with an instinctive urge to goad, to test people. For him, it was a mark of trust that they could return the banter. For most, though, it was just annoying. It's why he chose this career, or maybe why this career chose him. Either way, he let it go.

After leaving the hangar, they went their own ways, and Vadym found himself wondering where she was staying. There was still one old luxury hotel, some forgotten trillionaire's old house for people with too much money and too little sense.

The next day, he got to the lift station early with a single backpack full of new clothes and a few sundries for the ship. She had an open-bay rover full of luggage and scientific gear. As always, he was in his vacuum suit, white fabric with blue-gold-blue racing stripes, covered in zipped and Velcro pockets with the rectangular backpack. Her suit had no pockets at all and was a deep sunburnt orange with dark green stripes. The scarf was gone. She looked a little like a tiger, with charcoal-black skin and orange accents. It was custom-made, very expensive, and top-of-the-line. Farside Station again. That's good – she wasn't cutting corners to save a penny, but buying a fancy suit is easy – learning to live it in another.

Typically, a lift rocket to lunar orbit holds a dozen people, but with the crates, there was room for only the two of them as the chemically-powered glorified elevator took them to the parking orbit of Theseus some hundred kilometers up. The autopilot approached the ship from the side, and Vadym's home slowly grew in view. The mass of the ship was the Nevin drive, a large, flat black cylinder on the aft end, like a hockey puck ten meters across. Someone had stuck a long tube into the middle of the puck and then put another puck, even bigger, halfway down the length. That was Theseus. Glass ball on one end, then a gap, then a massive puck, a bigger gap, then the Nevin drive on the back end. The central hub was five meters across and fifty along the axis, while the largest ring was twenty meters across.