Free Spindrift by Allen Steele

quietly. “It’s just that…well, I can’t help but notice a certain difference between him and Mr. Harker.”
    â€œIs that so?” Collins kept an eye on the radar, carefully maintaining a safe distance between the OTV and the dry dock. “I hadn’t noticed.”
    By then they were passing the service module. Forward of the reaction-control thrusters, two probes were mounted on either side of the hull: Larry, the lozenge-shaped vehicle meant for atmospheric entry, and its larger brother Jerry, a spherical robot designed for orbital reconnaissance. She had no idea why they’d been given these names, other than that they held some literary significance for their designers. Past the service module was the four-port docking module, the most narrow part of the ship. Her own craft, the Maria Celeste , rested belly-up within its cradle, her dorsal hatch mated with the air lock. She noted that the OTV that had transferred the flight crew from Tsiolkovsky Station had already departed, flown back by a harbor pilot who’d been waiting aboard ship for the crew’s arrival.
    â€œYou haven’t?” A dry chuckle. “I certainly have. Mr. Harker is…well, forgive me for saying so, but he’s obviously the more capable officer. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.”
    â€œNot my place to say.” Although I completely agree , she silently added. By all rights, Ted should have been given command of the Galileo . He’d graduated at the top of his class from the ESA training center in Geneva, and his grasp of astronautics far exceeded Lawrence’s, who’d struggled through the four-year officer training program and was barely qualified to hold command-level rank in the astronaut corps. Yet Ian Lawrence was the scion of landed gentry, his father a peer in the House of Lords, while Ted Harker came from a working-class family in Wales. Since the UK had been the primary financial backer of the Galileo ’s construction, though, Lord Lawrence was able to pull strings to make sure that his son was named as its commanding officer, despite the objections of those in the ESA who knew that Theodore Harker was far more suitable for the job.
    Bloody class system , she thought. This ought to be Ted’s ship. Ian’s just a rich laird looking for something to add to the family crest.
    She distracted herself by inspecting the concentric bulge that protruded from the hull just forward of the telemetry platform. The housing for the diametric drive, stowed until Galileo reached the Kuiper Belt. Ramirez stretched forward against his seat harness to admire it. “Very efficient engineering,” he murmured. “Have to admit, it’s an elegant solution to a problem…how to make the drive torus small enough to pass through the starbridge.” He looked back at her again. “You haven’t answered my question.”
    â€œThat’s because you haven’t asked one.” Before he could reply, Collins nodded toward the window. “There’s our home for the next four years.”
    Galileo ’s hab module was the foremost section of the ship: a drum-shaped cylinder, little more than forty meters long, with portholes and emergency hatches spaced along its four decks. At the end of its blunt bow was its deflector array, six conical pods arranged along a ring-shaped structure; it was designed with redundancy in mind, so that even if two more deflectors failed, the rest would continue to operate. Likewise, the module was connected to the rest of the ship by a slender neck; in the event of an emergency, the module could be detached, to survive on backup power and life-support systems until—at least in theory—the crew could be rescued by another ship.
    Yet rescue was almost a moot point. Although plans were being made for the eventual construction of a sister ship, the Columbus , the fact of the matter was that if the Galileo met with