The Gantry

By Christian Exenberger

Ian's life hasn’t gone quite to plan. His business has collapsed, and taken his marriage with it. To escape, he enters the fledgling world of freighting cargo to the stars, aboard the interstellar cargo vessel, The Gantry. He enters a world where the dangers of space team up with politics, religion and moral outrage in an effort to kill him at every turn.
He enters a world where time is meaningless and stem cell therapy strips the years from the body, giving Ian a glimpse of immortality, while under threat of sudden death at every turn. He enters a world of solitude, where relationships struggle to exist, and intimate human contact is a luxury which must be taken advantage of whenever it is available.
Set against the backdrop of rampant religious extremism on earth, the Gantry is a no-holds barred look at early, sub light speed space travel. Technically detailed and sexually explicit, it challenges social norms, while examining a dystopian world where religious extremism is the norm. It looks at the physical and social side effects of hibernation, and prolonged absence from life. The Gantry is an enthralling tale which will leave you wondering what the future has in store.
Not suitable for audiences younger than 18. Contains scenes of Language, Nudity, Sex, Violence and Prejudice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Exenberger
• Release date: Jul 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370547661

Christian Exenberger

Christian Exenberger was born in South Africa, where he has lived for most of his life; except for a few of his early years, when he was very young and couldn't even count yet, and lived in Austria. He moved to Australia in 2016, where he lives near the sea with his wife and children, and where he was able to ditch the drudgery of work for a while, and indulge his ambitions to write.His lifelong passion for science-fiction began early in life, around the time when he was learning to count, and when the buzz of the first moon landing was still fresh in the world's memory. He grew up on a diet of Asimov, Clarke, Price and L'Amour; Sci-fi, adventure, and shooting bad guys at noon.Christian would probably have become a scientist if he wasn't such a dreamer. But every interesting fact he learned, held the potential to take him on an adventure, somewhere deep into his daydreams. And when the lessons were boring he was sure to be M.I.A as well. He still wonders how many of his teachers, who barely noticed the attentive, well behaved boy sitting quietly in the front row, realised that they might as well have marked him absent most of the time.So he became a software developer, a curse which has kept him too busy to spend much time writing... until now. His style is hardcore science fiction, taking a few small liberties with the science for the sake of the fiction.Christian writes near future science fiction, which seems as though it would be nearly possible to achieve with technology as it currently is. Nearly, but not quite. He also enjoys throwing some erotica into the mix, whenever it's appropriate to the story while trying to bring the reader into the character's point of view, to experience the story from the character's point of view.Christian's first full-length novel, The Gantry, released in July 2016, started life in 2001. Written in the gaps between job, wife and kids, it finally had the words "The end" added to its pages in 2012. Four years later, after long hours of arduous polishing, Christian has turned it into something someone might actually want to read.

Book preview

It was the ugliest thing Ian had ever seen, as it hung against the black of night, like some giant, dead spider tangled in its own web. Eight immensely long legs stretched out below it, straight and stiff as from rigor mortise. The tiny body dwarfed by the giant egg sac suspended between its legs. Rows of compound eyes stared off into deep space, quietly contemplating some unknown destination that, in death, was no longer reachable.

A coat of unkempt, course, metallic hair covered the torso, and angled out in all directions. Spikes and combs, and here and there satellite dish shaped. A stalk like protrusion angled out and forward from the legs, like some grotesque mutation.

At the end of each stalk, a set of shiny wings was folded against the body. An egg was suspended beyond each set of wings. Cylindrical, metallic and open at the base, as though the progeny of this space monster had already hatched and headed off to seek prey, or perhaps to avenge the death of their mother.

Tiny insects scurried around the spider, scavenging. Freed from fear of the monster now dead; dragging long strands of web tighter and tighter around the legs, ensuring that it could never come loose again.

A voice by his ear brought Ian back from his day dream.

Incredible, isn’t she?

The illusion faded and was replaced by the cold, metal structure of the Gantry.

Yes, Ian replied, that was indeed what she was, incredible! He turned and looked at Cynthia as she continued.

C’mon. The shuttle will be leaving in a few minutes and we had better be on it, she said, and Ian grabbed his duffel bag, and took one last look at his new home before following her rapidly retreating footsteps.

~~~

Chapter 1 - Ian

Ian put his book aside. Thoughts of his wife, Meredith, kept intruding on his reading, ruining his concentration. It was two months since he had seen her last, and he was missing her. Ian conjured the image of Debbie’s naked body, to stop himself from thinking about Meredith.

He pictured the curvature of her back and shoulders as she ground her tender bottom at his groin, while they made love. The way her breasts gently bobbed up and down in zero gravity. The gentle lines of her thighs and hips, and the delicate smell of her pubic mound as he had muzzled his way between her thighs. But instead of being distracted from his wife, he felt the sweet sting of guilt at the love he had made with Debbie.

He had last seen his wife two months ago. No, that was crap! He thought. Complete and utter crap! Meredith was his ex-wife now, and the last time he had seen her was more than twelve years ago. OK, so he had only been conscious for two months of that time, but that was irrelevant, he thought. But it was a difficult thing to get his head around.

Thoughts of Meredith and Debbie were forcefully driven from his mind by the piercing shriek of alarm bells.

Fuck! he swore to himself, while tensing his shoulder muscles to ease the creepy sensation crawling up his neck and across his shoulders at the sudden surge of adrenalin. The noise had nearly made him fall out of his chair. At least it would have made him fall if he had been sitting in a chair, or if there had been any gravity to facilitate falling. He jerked involuntarily, and felt like a complete idiot for doing it, but fortunately there was no one around to see.

Ian unhooked his tether and pulled hard, propelling himself towards the ladder on the far wall, caught hold, and with a quick kick against a ladder rung, propelled himself through the porthole that led to the level above. A few more kicks and thrusts and he was strapping himself into the command chair, the plastic upholstery ice-cold against his naked skin.

He couldn’t think straight amidst the cacophony of alarm bells, and wasted precious seconds figuring out how to get the infernal thing to shut up. He found the button blinking quietly, camouflaged among a hundred other flashing buttons, icons and messages, and jabbed it with his finger. With quiet restored, Ian tried to ignore the panic that was filling his chest, and force his mind to focus on the myriad of flashing warning messages that were the oracles of his impending doom.

Collision warning! Warning; collision imminent! ouch! He thought. That’s bad! He had no time to waste, but in his panic he couldn’t remember the standard operating procedure, which he needed to guide him. He dragged his thoughts back over his lectures on emergency procedures, anything on collision warnings, while he frantically jabbed the screen with his index finger, acknowledging the messages one by one.

His lecturer's droning monotony came back to him, The Gantry has a very thin skin. It has an outer and an inner layer to provide insulation. It will allow a small object, up to ten centimetres in diameter, to pass through with minimum resistance. The shell is segmented. Any punctured segment will quickly fill with instant drying chemical foam, and seal the puncture in seconds. Even near the speed of light, a collision with a small object will cause very little loss of human life or air. Except, of course, if the human is in the direct path of the object.

The memory made Ian feel a little less anxious even though it wasn’t really helpful. After acknowledging the last message, he scanned the screens to see if he could find a readout, which would tell him if the object he was dealing with could be categorized as small.

He found the graphic display of the object and its trajectory, dutifully displayed overhead, just as the alarms started shrieking again. The object was roughly oval in shape, your classic asteroid. It was a hundred and twenty-seven point two metres long and it was a little less than thirty metres across at the narrowest point.

Shiiiit! That’s not a small object! his brain screamed at him, barely audible over the rush of adrenalin, which swept through his brain and made his heart pound in the back of his throat. He scanned screens trying to find some hint that would tell him what to do, but warning messages kept popping up as fast as he could acknowledge them, and the shrieking alarm was raising his blood pressure until his head felt like it was going to burst.

He checked the screen again, to see if the object was on a direct collision course, or if it would be a near miss. The readout obligingly traced the asteroid’s trajectory, and almost gleefully, showed him that it would be a direct hit, in twenty-three minutes and fifty-five seconds. Bullseye! Fuck! Ian thought. The damn thing didn’t even have the decency to miss the command module and just take out the cargo.

Vague lectures returned to Ian, about how the cargo section of the Gantry was designed to break free under impact. The cargo would be lost but the command module and crew would still have a fighting chance. But not this fucker, it was going to hit them straight on, squash the command module like a bug, and rip the cargo to pieces. Half would head off in whatever direction the meteor was going and the other half would probably end up as a new group of comets, somewhere in the Alpha Centauri system.

Evasive action! The memory struck him like a physical blow. He had to take evasive action! He pictured his lecturer standing there, quoting from the book like he always did, … if the object is more than ten centimetres across you must take evasive action, because an object of this size would create a hole too large for the automatic repair system to seal. Fuck! Ian thought. Give me something useful!

The ship's systems aren’t capable of detecting objects smaller than five centimetres across early enough to allow evasive manoeuvres … No! No! No! Ian scanned his memory through the panicked adrenalin fog, if the object is larger than a metre in diameter, the ship won’t … Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Ian felt as if he was going to wet his pants if he panicked any more than he already was, even though he wasn’t wearing any pants.

As the ship increases speed, it becomes more difficult to change course. At the normal cruising speed of between one third, and one half of the speed of light, it will take several days to change course by a single degree. This means it is pointless trying to change course if evasive action is required. OK, now we're getting somewhere, he thought.

At high speed, a side step manoeuvre must be performed. The vessel retains its existing course, but moves sideways, out of the path of the oncoming object and onto a parallel course, using its directional thrusters.

That was it! Sidestep! Ian scanned the controls, cursing the fact that he'd only learned to use them in theory. He strained his memory again. …! …! …!

When a sidestep has been completed, and the danger avoided, you can choose to remain on the new course and correct at a lower speed once you have reached your destination, or you can correct as soon as the obstacle has been cleared. No! Damn! Hell! Fuck! No! He thought.

And the ship’s guidance system can execute the entire procedure without human intervention. Ian jerked his head around so fast that he nearly pulled a muscle in his shoulder, as he tried to look at the autopilot screen. It was quietly flicking a message, Evasive manoeuvres recommended. Continue? and the options --Manual-- and --Auto-- were presented.

Ian’s hand was shaking as he reached for the screen and gingerly touched the --Auto-- option. The alarm stopped shrieking and the screen stopped popping up messages, and Ian felt the distant rumble as the ship’s horizontal thrusters fired. There was a gentle, almost imperceptible, sideways nudge as gravity pulled at his body. After fifteen minutes the thrusters stopped. Ian checked the display again. This time it showed that, in eight minutes and fifty seconds, the object would miss them by a hundred and sixty-four metres.

The thrusters kicked in again, eventually bringing the side-step to a halt. Ian held his breath and resisted the urge to watch the scanner and try to catch a glimpse of the asteroid. There would be nothing too see. The Gantry was travelling at a little over a third of the speed of light, and the console told him that the oncoming object was doing nearly as much. They would pass each other with a combined velocity very close to two thirds the speed of light, which would put it in visible range for a tiny fraction of a nanosecond before it disappeared behind them. It would be far too quick for the camera to pick up, let alone for the human eye to see.

The console popped up a message showing that the danger had passed, but Ian’s nervous system wasn’t so sure. He had neither heard nor felt anything. Logic told him that there would be nothing to hear or feel in the vacuum of space, but the overdose of adrenalin in his veins wouldn’t let it go that easily. Bull shit! he thought. A life threatening situation couldn’t simply be evaded without so much as a whistle from the passing object to tell his nervous system that the danger had passed.

The autopilot flashed a message, asking him if he would prefer to keep going on the new course, or if he would like to revert to the original one. Ian tried to remember the arguments for and against, but his mind wasn’t interested in playing that game again. He closed his eyes and jabbed at the autopilot screen. After the third jab, he heard the computerised click, which told him that he had made a selection. He withdrew his hand and opened his eyes. A second later the distant rumble of thrusters, and the gentle tug of gravity, told him that he had chosen to return to the original course.

Sweat trickled down his chest and face, and dripped out from under his arm pits, landing on his naked thighs. He waited for the second burst of thrusters to subside, before reaching over with shaky hands to undo the safety harness, which held him in place. He slowly reached for a handhold and propelled his shaking body across the cockpit and back to his hammock.

Hormones played a confusing game with his body and his mind. His hands were shaking and, although he was dead tired after the scare the near collision had caused, his brain was in overdrive, and his muscles were energized, ready for action. He changed his mind about the hammock and headed to the gym, another level down.

~~~

Chapter 2 – Meredith

Meredith watched the shuttle take-off ramp through the observation lounge window, with her daughter. The lounge was built against a secondary peak, about hundred and fifty metres below the summit of the mountain against which the launch track was built. She was glad that they were inside, watching the scene through the protection of double glazed windows. She had been outside for a few minutes, earlier, to say goodbye to Ian. She had caught him heading in the opposite direction, on his way deep into the mountain, through customs and immigration to the shuttle boarding gates, at the far end of the track.

Even at the bottom of the mountain the air was thin, with an icy chill, which seemed to blow straight through Meredith’s heavy winter coat. The weather seemed appropriate for the occasion. Despite their fighting, and the fact that their divorce papers had finally come through three days earlier, she still cared for Ian, and the icy wind mirrored the state of her spirit at the thought of losing him forever.

Mommy! Sylvia’s voice sliced through her thoughts as it demanded her attention.

Yes dear, Meredith replied, showing her daughter a smile she didn’t feel.

Look! The countdown is starting! Sylvia shrieked, barely able to contain herself. As Meredith looked, the countdown timer was showing fifty-six seconds and counting. The display also showed a graphic of the launch track with the shuttle’s position blinking steadily at the bottom of the curve, six kilometres down the track.

Sylvia jumped up and down excitedly, this was the first time she had ever watched a shuttle launch, the first one in her class at school to do so. She had been given an assignment to report back to the class on her visit. Sylvia loved space, a little unusual for a girl, and possibly a contributing factor in her anger towards her father. Meredith dismissed the idea. She is angry because he is leaving, Meredith thought, no other reason.

T-minus thirty seconds! Sylvia shrieked, to Meredith’s embarrassment, but the handful of onlookers were just as excited. Any one of them looked as though they would have volunteered to do the countdown out loud if Sylvia hadn’t beaten them to it.

Twenty-nine …, Twenty-eight … Sylvia continued.

A tear ran down Meredith’s cheek, but she brushed it away quickly so that her daughter wouldn’t see. An icy wind seemed to run up and down her spine, as though the seams of her coat had split and exposed her bare flesh to the elements. Anger and guilt fought for control of her heart. She was angry with Ian, but even more so with herself. Angry with Ian for following his stupid dream, for his ignorance, for thinking that being a brilliant engineer was all that was needed to run a business. Angry at him for turning his back on a secure job. He should have listened to me, she thought. Then none of this would have happened.

Twenty-two …, Twenty-one …

But most of her anger was directed at herself. She felt she had been justified in her actions, in threatening to leave him when his business had failed, along with his life savings and credit rating. They had managed to hang on to the house because it was in her name, but Meredith had been frightened and had asked Ian for a divorce before the last of the property they owned was also lost.

Seventeen …, Sixteen …

She hadn’t expected Ian to react so suddenly and decisively. He had disappeared for three days, after she had told him that she had seen a lawyer about a divorce. Meredith had spent those three days seething, imagining him running from girlfriend to mistress to prostitute. Her anger had set in like a raging inferno. What had been, she now realised, an ultimatum to fix the situation had become the end of their marriage.

When Ian had returned, she had confronted him about his absence. He explained that he had applied for a position as a space freighter with the Interstellar space company. He had spent his time away going through a barrage of tests and had been accepted. The sign up bonus was enough to cover his debts, pay off the house, put Sylvia through university and still leave enough over for Meredith to splash out on a new car or a home makeover.

Twelve …, Eleven …

Ian didn’t want any of the money for himself. Aside from some deductions and a small investment that Interstellar had made on his behalf, Ian had given the entire signup bonus to her. Meredith knew that this was his way of trying to make amends. She wanted financial security and was willing to divorce him if he couldn’t give it to her. So he gave her what she wanted, sacrificing everything they had together to do so. The anger that had filled her at his imagined infidelity was ripped from her, leaving her empty.

Six …, Five …

She tried to be angry with him for leaving, but it was she who had asked for the divorce. She had driven him away because of her financial insecurity, and the knowledge felt like a lump of lead in her stomach. Ian would be gone for forty years at least. When he returned, if he ever did, she would be eighty years old. As far as she was concerned it was as good as forever, and the thought sent an ice cold chill coursing up and down her spine.

Three …, Two …, One …

Till debt do us part, she thought.

Zero

The flickering blimp on the screen slowly began to trace the course, from the bottom of the six kilometre magnetic levitation track, getting faster and faster as it went. The timer continued counting. Sylvia was jumping up and down excitedly, like a frustrated Massai warrior, continuously shifting her focus between the window, with its view of the launch track tunnel opening, and the blip that was rapidly accelerating along the track, from the other end. There was a velocity readout for the shuttle, next to the countdown timer.

Mach One! Sylvia shrieked, as the shuttle broke the sound barrier just as the countdown timer hit T-plus two seconds.

At T-plus seven seconds the launcher negotiated the gentle curve in the track, which would bring it from its horizontal trajectory into a nearly vertical one. The sound of Sylvia bouncing up and down was the only noise that disturbed the surreal silence in the viewing lounge. Everybody in the room held their breath, necks craned to watch the opening in the launch tunnel, which was situated about three hundred metres below the apex of the ramp, and about two hundred metres below their window.

The world slowed down. Meredith watched the tenths of seconds counting down on the timer, out of the corner of her eye, each one trickling off in slow motion, like the sound of Ian’s footsteps walking away, out of her life forever. When the timer reached T-plus nine seconds, the world outside the window exploded.

The shuttle emerged from the tunnel travelling at Mach four, faster than a bullet from a high velocity rifle. The stage-two rockets ignited at eye level with the observation window, and separated from the sledge that had propelled it along the magnetic track. A wall of noise shattered the silence with a cacophony of thunder, then faded as suddenly as it had begun, sinking their deadened ears back into silence.

He’s gone! Meredith thought, as she watched the thin trail of tiny ice crystals, left by stage-two’s rockets, glistening in the sunlight.

The rocket wasn’t designed to accelerate the shuttle, only to maintain the velocity that was built up in the tunnel. The rockets were strong enough to counter the effects of gravity and air resistance, but nothing more.

The second stage of the launch lasted a minute and a half and would take Ian twenty kilometres outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. At that point it would be legal to ignite the nuclear motor that would power the shuttle the rest of the way to Vesta, in the asteroid belt.

Sylvia stood alongside her mother, staring at the departing rocket, transfixed, lost in her own thoughts and dreams. Dreams of the stars, asteroids, spaceships and deep space travel. She didn’t think of her father. She had already relegated him to a memory from her past. She imagined herself, and not her father on that shuttle heading into space. One day she would become a space freighter too. She would see the planets on the outer rim, and travel to the stars. She imagined herself sitting in the command module of an interstellar spaceship, looking out at the Horsehead nebula, and giving the order to engage the warp drive.

Meredith turned her gaze to the small point of light, and a door slammed shut somewhere in the depths of her heart. The icy wind was shut out, but the hollow emptiness and the solid weight in the pit of her stomach remained. She had the financial security she had wanted, but it had cost her a husband, and it had cost her daughter a father.

~~~

Chapter 3 – Symbiosis

The lights of the gym came on as Ian entered, revealing an array of exercise machines, standing like a row of artillery pieces abandoned long ago by some passing army. Ian reined his imagination in, and examined the equipment. It was designed to work in zero gravity, so the usual weights one might have expected were replaced by electromagnetic and elastic resisters and tensioners.

There were five machines. After examining the first Ian decided that it was for leg and lower body strengthening. The second machine was similarly designed for the arms and upper body. He had to climb into the third machine to figure out what it was supposed to do. It looked like the type of thing you might expect on a game show obstacle course.

A crewman would position themselves between two rows of padded rollers, which would provide resistance for an abdominal, oblique or back workout. The fourth machine was a treadmill, with a padded weight cluster. You stood on the treadmill and placed the weight cluster on your shoulders, setting the force with which you wanted it to push down on you, and then went for a walk or a run.

But the machine that caught Ian’s interest was the last one in the line-up, which was clearly designed for a cardio workout. Even getting into the machine looked like hard work, but getting his lungs straining and his heart racing was the only thing that was going to work the adrenalin out of his system, so Ian headed for the machine.

With arms and legs in position and strapped in tightly, he started working the machine. The motion was somewhere between, or more accurately, a combination of, running, cycling and canoeing. The harder he pushed, the more it pushed back, and after a few minutes Ian felt like he had gone fifteen rounds in the ring with the heavyweight champ, who was handing him a pounding.

A few days earlier Ian had thought to look over the Gantry’s online manuals, and do some revision, but he had dismissed the notion, figuring it was too soon for him to have forgotten much. Everything had been so simple and straight forward in the lectures, the computer did most of the work. In fact, the computer could fly the entire mission solo, no humans needed. The lesson he had just learned proved this, but now that he wasn’t panicking anymore, he remembered that the computer would have taken evasive action on its own if he hadn’t acted in time. But that bit of information in the computer’s log didn’t look good on a crewman’s record.

The system was a man-machine symbiosis. Although humans did most of the flying they weren’t actually needed for the normal operation of the vessel, but they were needed when there was an emergency. The computer could do all the work without any intervention. The humans on board had to be there for the times when things went wrong.

Ian replayed the lecture in his head, clearly remembering the lecturer’s Irish accent, devoid of all the evocative colour and emotion usually associated with an Irish lilt. The lecture was delivered in a flat, monotonous drone.

… a vessel will encounter some sort of problem, which will need human intervention to resolve, approximately every second trip. The most common problems are software malfunctions. These can usually be fixed by rebooting the system. Or if there is corruption, then the entire system, or just a part of it, might need to be reloaded. This can either be done from one of the live recovery partitions, or from the restoration disks. Several copies of these can be found …

But there had to be a human on board to do the rebooting or the reloading, the computer couldn’t do this for itself.

Other problems include hardware or mechanical failure of any of the major systems, either with the computer hardware, the binary thrusters, any of the directional chemical thrusters, the fuel supply, both the chemical fuel and the nuclear fuel, the nuclear shields and Geiger generators. Or the problem could be with any one of the hundreds of other minor systems, which are all, never the less, crucial for the survival of …

Most problems were simple enough to fix if you had a decent pair of hands, but a human had to provide those hands.

The Gantry is fitted with redundant computer systems, which can correct each other for some types of problems. Some problems, most often computer viruses, can cause all computer systems to malfunction simultaneously. In these circumstances robots could do more damage than good, and possibly even become dangerous. The Gantry has no robots on board for this very reason.

Ian shuddered at the thought, how easy it would be to develop a virus, which turned any infected robot into a killing machine.

Detailed, step by step, fault finding and repair instructions are available in hard copy, or if the computer is functioning correctly it can usually talk you through the repair.

The crewman needed to have some technical proficiency, and be able to follow instructions, but didn’t need to have a detailed technical understanding of any of the systems. What they did need to know by heart, were the emergency procedures. Ian had just learned the importance of that the hard way. He resolved to study up on those procedures, and to practice each drill until he could do it in his sleep. He would never allow panic to hold him in its debilitating grip like that again.

Another lesson that had been glossed over in one or two sentences by his instructor, was that, while there were no simulators available for a unique design vessel like the Gantry, the software included a simulation mode.

The Gantry was its own simulator and could simulate any emergency, flight pattern or any other manoeuvre of the ship. You selected what you wanted to do, the computer decoupled the controls from the vessel and handed them over to the simulator. You could practice docking, low speed manoeuvring, collision avoidance, sidesteps, rotation or any other manoeuvre you felt you needed to practice.

Along with the emergency procedures, Ian vowed to practice on the simulator until he knew everything that there was to know, and had practiced everything that there was to practice. With his chest heaving, struggling to keep up with the oxygen demands of his body, and his muscles screaming at him in pain, Ian ended his exercise routine, unstrapped himself and headed for his hammock. If there had been gravity, he would simply have fallen out of the machine, and gone to sleep on the floor next to it.

When the heaving of his chest subsided, Ian’s thoughts drifted back to where they had been before the alarms had started to shriek. He thought of the good old times with his ex-wife, the times before all the shit between them. He thought of Debbie, and the guilt that had crept across his conscience when he thought about making love to her. The guilt was gone now, this was his new life, and Meredith would never fit into it in any physical or romantic sense again.

The time gap between them would widen with every passing year. Ian would be awake for only a few months at a time, but decades would pass in the real world, as he whiled away the years in hibernation, frozen in cryonic stasis. The near zero Kelvin temperatures of interstellar space would hold the years at bay for Ian. Those same years that would ravish and age his ex-wife, stealing her beauty, her vitality and eventually her life. A tear welled up in his eye as he thought of his daughter. He shook his head vigorously, forcing the thought from his mind, and the lone tear, flung from his face, drifted slowly across the room.

Ian’s colleagues, those who travelled through space beside him in the Gantry would be his friends and companions. They were the people with whom he would form relationships, create bonds, and with whom he would make a life. Like Debbie who had revived him from stasis and with whom he had spent his ten-day recovery. They had done little but eat, sleep and fuck in those ten days, before her shift came to an end, and Ian had put her back into stasis.

That had been a little over two weeks ago, and Ian was beginning to understand the passion and selfless abandon, with which Debbie had made love to him. She had been awake for ninety days and alone for eighty of those, before waking Ian. Eighty days of solitude, of the monotony of babysitting the Gantry as she drifted through space. After eighty days of being alone she got a reprieve, a ten-day overlap between shifts. Ten days of not being alone, ten days to take as much advantage of human contact as possible before another stint as a frozen ice cube, or before the long solitude of a solo shift.

Ian’s thoughts turned to Cynthia. She had been assigned to be his coach while he was still a rookie. She had shown him the ropes and had worked with him while they committed the rest of the crew to stasis at the start of the mission. He had quickly developed a friendship with Cynthia, and he