Eos

'Never thought the Cape would get used again,' Clark said.

'Not like this, anyway.'

Kim looked out of the porthole. Funny that, the window wasn't even round. Just a throwback. To the original ships . Everyone had seen pictures of wooden vessels with sails, or battleships with funnels and huge-barrelled guns. Kim could never figure out why they'd decided on Spaceships. Space-planes, that made more sense. Some ancient prof in the academy had said that Science Fiction pre-dated manned flight, so they made up words from what they knew. The whole class had cracked up when Kim had said it was more likely because the Navy was the senior service.

Kim looked across at Clark, already strapped in although countdown was still half-an-hour away. He'd be a good co-pilot for the trip. Kim wasn't sure about his rôle on the planet. Still, the tests were very encouraging. It might work. They were to be the first to venture out of the Solar System. It was an honour, of course, but... A look over at Clark raised the old doubts. Would the experiment work with a Sino and a Cauc? It had to. Station Mars had been a failure, a noble one, but a fiasco nonetheless. Kim's father had died at Polar Station Scott on Mars. It was known as Station Mars, from the get go, as if none of the pioneers expected any further stations to augment their own settlement. The text books said it had been a flawed expedition: Captain Kim Sun Wah had refused to take the experimental sled with its fusion powered engine. When the generators began to fail for the last time, his vidi-blog had accepted responsibility for the error. Kim was proud of that at least.

The Academy of Space Exploration was tough for the brightest and the best. Tougher still for someone whose father had ended Space Exploration for three decades.

'I'm going aft, Clark. Gotta check everything's squared away.'

Clark laughed, 'Knock your self out.'

The fact was the command module was sealed off from the lander. There was just room to stand behind the crew's seating. The giant Titan rocket meant that the modules stood a kilometre above Terra. The hydroponics, the seeds and the cloned livestock embryos took almost all available storage in both modules. There were enough food jabs for 3 months, two of which would pass before System Egress. Eos lay a week into Pegasi 51. They would have only a week to force the eco-dome into productivity. Clark had saved the day in Ice Station Amundsen during the last dry run, at Terra's North Pole. He'd stayed awake four days regulating the hydroponic tanks. Kim had felt sick in the mornings, taking most of the day to recover.

The digital display showed 7 minutes to lift-off. They were heading for the South Pole, on Eos. Psychometrics said they had the right stuff. Kim hoped that applied to the equipment. The last locker catch was double-checked. Time to strap in.

'C'mon, Kim, 5 minutes. Let's run the checks.'

Kim's hand hovered over the belt buckle, then touched Clark's face.

'It'll be okay, won't it?'

Clark took her hand and kissed it through the siltex glove,

'It has to be, doesn't it?'