“Why couldn’t they have just nuked the thing from orbit?” was becoming a personal motto.

“Orders are orders,” was the inevitable reply.

Whatever the reasons, it always ended with Jonesy, Gillian, Thrakers, and me, Fawkes, shoved into a reentry capsule dropped unceremoniously in the middle of nowhere.

At least the skyline is interesting, I mused, perched atop the airlock of our battered excuse for a vehicle.

Jonesy and Thrakers were below, trying in vain to shift enough weight inside the cargo module to tip the capsule right-side-up from sideways, while Gillian was busy puking his breakfast into the recycler.

Our descent had been, to use a technical term, a little bumpy, meaning that our antigrav had failed and we plummeted uncontrollably, saved a chunky-salsa fate only by a long-forgotten emergency parachute.

Thus, the silvery line of the skyhook on the horizon and the stunning vista of the Irian nebula, the other moons, and the sapphire gem around which they (and we) orbited were an afterthought.