The ARGO EPIC, ending "home"

      It was several months ago and we were approaching the Asteroid Belt on our way home.
      This time they've named the gap we were shooting for after the passage across the tip of South America, the Strait of Magellan.
      And we'd made up enough time that we could slow down a little as it approached us in its orbit with the rest of the band of rocks with nothing better to do.

      "It's not a straight strait," Candice said looking at the images of the field that showed where we were to go.
      "No, it's not. We're going to have to adjust our course as we go instead of just gunning it and making a run for it like we did going out."
      "Up to you," Baxter said looking at the Captain.
      We were all in Command, looking at him.
      "There's no other way to get home. The next gap is at least six months away. The one we used is on the other side of that."
      We were all in command, looking at him, and waiting.
      "We've got to go for it."
      "Yes, sir," most of us answered.

      We had plenty of time to get ready for it so we checked and double checked everything.
      Baxter and Ulrich were worried about my lab pod because it had taken a direct hull piercing impact before and had thusly used up most of its leak sealant inside the hull. So I was under orders to leave the hatch shut unless I was in there.
      Once again, we had to reel in the solar panels and the reactors, and the petals that protected Command.
      Then we took a collective deep breath and plunged in.
      Well. Almost.

      It took a month for what had been empty space ahead of us to begin to return objects on even the most sensitive radars. Then in a week or so there were more.
      Then we began to be able to see various rocks in the telescopes.
      Then the images began to get closer together, and worryingly, larger and faster than last time.
      And what was supposed to be a fairly clear route through the belts of the Belt was a little more crowded than we'd hoped.

      There were several times when we had to pull everybody in from the lab ring because some bits of a failed planet were too close for comfort.
      We took several impacts, and had to use some more of the foam here and there to seal leaks when one of those rocks got way too close.
      We even had to make a couple of course corrections that were a lot more sudden and dramatic than anybody on board was comfortable making. The Argo groaned and shuddered, but it held together, and took more than a few dings and dents.

      Then came the clearing that really was a clearing about two thirds of the way through the field itself. The only sizable rocks on the scopes were a couple of hundred thousand kilometers away from us.
      We had a chance to double check the damage and catch our breath for a day or so.
      Then Candice broke the bad news, and I have to wrap this up and get back to work.

13 part two

      That last push through the Magellan passage was just as intense as any other part of the trip. Finally the Captain just told everybody to hang on and get a can of foam ready because we were just going to make a run for it.

      Most worryingly, there was one storm of rocks of various sizes that were all traveling like rifle bullets that appeared out of nowhere and pummeled the front half of the ship and punched a hole clear through one of the cargo pods that was docked on the ring.
      One of the other areas that took significant damage was the labs on their short struts amidships. One of them was mine. One of the 'bullets' went clear through and caused the hatch to close to preserve the air in the rest of the ship. Ivan's had a couple of holes in it but his pod's self healing goop in the hull did its job, but one the perpetrators of the damage was still in his lab as well so he got a souvenir. The third pod had taken a hit that had cracked one of the portals and we had to put a panel over it from the inside to keep it from leaking air into space.
      It took an hour or so for one of the emergency robots to seal the leaks from my lab from the outside. Then we could get in and work on it inside.
      "If you'd been in here, it wouldn't have been good," Ulrich said to me as he checked the new patches in my lab.
      "I would have been," I said and looked at the entry and exit points. "Right there. It would have hit me...." I tried to imagine my usual work position. "Probably in the right shoulder."
      "It would have hurt."
      "yeah" I whispered and felt a deep chill all the way to my soul. It had hit right when I would have been in there except I'd stopped to check in with Lynn about the resolution on one of the highband scans we were running. I'd thought about coming to the lab and calling her on the com, instead, I went up to her lab to see her settings. While I was in there, we broadcast the alert for imminent collision and warned everybody to hang on.
      "You must have a guardian angel," he said as he went back up the connector to check the other pods.
      I looked out at space and thanked the only person I knew who was out there for keeping me safe.

      When we finally cleared the other side of the inner belt, two of the protective shields over the command deck wouldn't open. There were holes in other parts of the ship, and one of the cargo pods we were using for storage had been ruptured and had to be ejected. In it we lost some dehydrated food, a full set of spare uniforms, and some old parts from some of the robots and drones, but because we had learned the hard way earlier that the cargo containers were vulnerable to damage from things that might not do a lot to the ship, we had moved everything critical into the docking ring where it was safer. So the good food, booze, and party supplies were in the docking ring. Well, as were some of the scientific equipment that had been put into storage for some reason, most of the outside robots because they would have been chewed up by the passage, and anything else that we couldn't afford to lose. Spare uniforms and dehydrated cabbage soup we could lose.

      Now the Captain told Baxter to turn the engines all the way up and find out what the Argo could really do.
      But while we were still months and months away from home, just seeing Mars as a red dot off to the right and EARTH to the left as a little bright blue dot was enough to make us all excited to bring this mission to an end.
      "We're back in the old neighborhood," I said to Ulrich at one point.
      "About time," he muttered and went to refix a nagging air leak where a rock had dented the joint between two of the sections.

      "I can't believe it's been eight years." I said in the rec area at one point.
      "Eight years, seven months, nineteen days.... " Narda paused and looked at the clock, "and seven hours and however many minutes." She smiled, "I'm kidding about the days and hours, I don't know when to actually count our departure."
      "I know," I said thinking back to that day, "when the tech's transport undocked and went back."
      "You're right. Do you want me to figure it out?"
            "no"

      One of the shocks we got was from that ongoing time tracking experiment.
      Earth had been ahead of us time-wise for most of our mission.
      It peaked when we were out by Saturn to where twenty four hours on Earth was only about twenty-three hours and change on the ship.
      Now, we were getting closer and closer to being back in sync.
      It was endlessly fascinating to various ones on Earth, and they sent questionnaires for us to fill out asking about our perception of the passage of time and all that.
      Well, sorry to disappoint them, but on the ship, a day's duty was a day's duty. An hour or three sitting and staring at the readouts as one of Saturn's moons went through the electromagnetic shadow of another moon was an hour or three. Did a handful of seconds matter to us, or to the moons? Not really. It only seemed to matter to the fancy clock in the storage bay and some graduate students on Earth.

      I couldn't believe how slowly Earth grew in size in the windows. When we went by Jupiter and Saturn, they seemed to grow noticeably bigger every day. Then I thought about the difference in size of the planets. They got a lot bigger faster because they WERE a lot bigger to start with.
      But all that mattered was that Earth was getting bigger.

      We had one last party party in the beach pod.
      Baxter and Ulrich said it was our duty to drink up the last of the starshine bootleg gin-ish rotgut liquor they had been making so they could decommission the still before the technicians arrived and discovered it and wrote a report about unauthorized use of ship's equipment.
      We did our best.

      Considering that it was now over nine years since we'd left home, the mission came to an end so suddenly we were left speechless.
      The ship had been slowing for a couple of months, then the Captain changed course slightly and we watched the Earth's Moon get larger in the windows, then we changed course again and again to loop around the Moon and the Earth itself to slow ourselves down, then we actually began to orbit the Moon and we could see several of the adapted cargo pods on their way out to meet us.
      When the first one docked, it was officially the end of our mission.

And Now. Goodbye, Argo Epic

      I'm in my lab pod to make sure all my data and observations were saved, and that this last bit of my log is uploaded to the main server.

      I've been told that I will be the guest of honor in the next few months at parades and festivals in Canada and Michigan. And I've already been offered speaking engagements

      I had started packing 'my stuff' as soon as we began firing the thrusters to begin to slow the ship to enter orbit. So I'd spent the last couple of months basically living out of tote boxes. But then all of the sudden we were to load all of our stuff into an empty cargo pod to be transferred to the space station and then be ferried to Earth.

      Captain Merrick was coming out of the docking ring while I was moving my stuff into it. He stopped and helped me secure my containers in the pod and made sure they were labeled for me. Then he stopped me when I turned to go out.
      I could tell by the look in his eyes that he didn't want to discuss the stowing of cargo.
      "Miss Livia, once all of this is over, I'd like to see you again. Not as your captain, but as a good friend." He stared into my eyes. "As a very good friend."
      I didn't know what to say other than, "I'd like that, Captain."
      "Very soon, it won't be Captain. You'll have to call me Jerry."
      "That's not your first name."
      "No, it's not, but it's the friendlier form of my middle name, and I want you to be my... ... friend."
      I felt myself smiling. "Yes, sir."
      We were interrupted by a racket coming up the connector to the docking ring followed by some of our chief engineer's more colorful language.
      "Hang on, I'll help you," I called down to Baxter.
      "Pass it out and I'll stow it," Captain Merrick said.
      "Thank you both," Baxter said from below the larger of the boxes that was jammed in the connector. "Can you move it?"
      "Sure."

      We all gathered on the Command Deck while a small army of technicians fanned out through the ship to take apart various mounted experiments and instruments.
      Captain Merrick went around and shook hands with every one of us. But I noticed that when he shook my hand, he was smiling.
      "It has been an honor serving with all of you. And with Doctor McCarthy," he turned toward the window and saluted the stars.
      We all followed suit and I felt tears start to well up in my eyes.
      "Our mission was an unqualified success. We absolutely made history, and have every reason to be proud of what we accomplished for the rest of our lives."

      Everybody said something similar, as did I, then we went to finish getting whatever we had to do done before we left for the last time and the incoming batch of boffins and engineers got here to take our ship apart.
      The only one staying on board was Ulrich. He was part of the dismantling crew as he had been the assembly crew.

      Candice was grinning at me as I came out of my bunkroom for the last time.
      "I saw that smile."
      "Whose smile?"
      "Yours and his."
      "He wants to remain friends when we're on Earth."
      "He wants more than that, you were his one and only pick for the replacement for the crew when Dr. Lee pulled out."
      "Oh. I didn't know that."
      "He didn't want me to tell you."
      I thanked her for trusting me with it now, then I went back in to check in the storage bins in my room one more time.
      Then I came up here to get whatever was left in my lab, dictate my last log entry, and then go wait with the others for them to clear our transports to head for the space station.

      There's nothing left here now but memories. Some good, and some... otherwise. But most of them are good.

      On the whole, it's been a nice trip.
      Thank you, Argo Epic.

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the other ending "not"

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