Don lurched to a stop as he missed his hatch. He had to climb back up a few steps before he could slip back into his POD. He took a moment to close the hatch and retract the consoles surrounding his recliner.

Gripping the ceiling rungs, he swung back into his recliner, flopping down on the comfortable material. His chronometer showed roughly two minutes remaining until the shift change.

The consoles crowded back around him like concerned maintenance bots worrying over a busted pipe. A few quick commands later and he was back to reviewing the flight logs. Today was mostly going to be a babysitting job. The autopilots did a lot of the heavy lifting. Don was primarily a monitor who stepped in when something went wrong. There was one pickup on the agenda which would require his supervision but the rest of his flock were safely on route. Gliding languorously to and from the belt. That would give him plenty of time to coax RAM-10 towards Luna.

The red lighting scheme in his pod shifted to yellow as the one-minute threshold came and went. Don double checked his console configuration and pulled the manual controls into a more prominent position.

A chat window popped open in the top left corner of his screen and Sam’s face appeared. All of the familiarity of a minute ago was gone, replaced with a calm professional demeanor.

“Citizen SH-835 reporting for shift change”

Don knew the steps to this dance “Citizen SH-836 acknowledges. Initiating shift change now.”

He toggled the proper switch and the POD lighting shifted from yellow to green and pulsed with every second elapsed.

“Initiation confirmed. Serve well Citizen” With that, the window containing Sam’s face winked out of existence.

Don commanded his screen to mirror Sam’s. She was still fiddling with RAM-10. Don started the program which would alert him if any RAM’s deviated from their course and excluded RAM-10. He then gripped the manual controls and waited for his shift.

The lights flipped over to blue and Donovan was in control. He began by killing the power to the ring of ion drives leaving the RAM in freefall. A freefall which covered over a hundred miles per second but the acceleration would just be a hindrance for what he had planned. He put the drives through a standard checklist, confirming their range of motion and they all checked out except for drive 14. Don switched his main screen to the view from the free camera, affectionately dubbed Rover.

Don quickly checked it’s charge before piloting it out of the protective housing. The bay door swung open and revealed a field of stars, pinwheeling lazily.

“Rust” Donovan mumbled. He didn’t check if the RAM was spinning before shutting the drives down. Sam must have been trying to spin the entire thing to compensate for the busted drive. It was a good idea but it would make it harder to keep Rover in place long enough to get a good look at drive 14. He piloted Rover out a few dozen meters before turning it back to face the RAM. The only sign that something was there, besides the IR proximity readings from Rover, was the stars which temporarily winked out as they were eclipsed.

Don typed in the command to switch on the RAM’s external lights and the ring flared into existence. The light glared off of steel and ice alike. The RAM was an ugly thing. All function and no form but it did get the job done. It was a collection of girders, pistons, and drives. A bulbous lump slid past Dons screen as the mover continued rotating. It was one of the twin fission reactors powering the behemoth.

The RAM was cinched around an oblong chunk of dirty ice nearly a kilometer long and roughly half that in width. This delivery will provide vital resources to the city, resources needed to produce food and atmosphere. Recycling can conserve almost all of our current supply but without the influx of materials provided by the Shepherds, the population would slowly dwindle away to nothing. Donovan took a moment to feel proud.

The feeling faded quickly. He hadn’t delivered anything yet. After pulling up a schematic overlay he waited for drive 14 to come into view. As it did, he activated the recording function and piloted Rover around the drive getting as close in as 10 meters constantly adjusting to keep the drive in view as it spun around the asteroid. The drive was massive. Several times the size of Donovans POD, it was one of 20 identical drives, evenly spaced along the ring. Each one was fitted into a housing designed to reorient the drives or even swivel a full 180 degrees for braking maneuvers. The housing was a tangled nest of components, and the cause of almost every pain in the butt problem Donovan was trained to deal with.

When he was satisfied with the survey he flew the camera back to its housing and let the autopilot make the final approach and docking maneuver. He was sure Sam had already done a similar survey but it paid to be thorough. He didn’t want an inquisitor paying him a visit anytime soon, or anytime at all for that matter.

Don relaxed a bit and reviewed the other RAMs. Nothing new there. He reoriented the drives to counter the spin and started them up at a low setting. It would take hours to stop the spin Sam had imparted to the asteroid. The mover had enough power to do it faster but it wouldn’t do to rip his payload in half. It was good to impart some spin to the payloads to add stability but it made the manual calculations much harder. No reason to take risks on his first day anyhow.

Don started reviewing the recorded footage of drive 14. He paused and rewound the tape inspecting every support and actuator until he found the problem.

A span had been bent out of place. That wasn’t catastrophic on its own but it bent in just the right way to jam one of the actuators open. Probably a micro-asteroid collision.

“Perfect” Donovan complained to no one “I hate it when I’m right.”

It wasn’t something he could fix with the limited repair capacity on the RAM. He would have to take it into luna like he thought. Just to be sure he hadn’t missed anything, Don reviewed the logs from Sam’s shift and found the same conclusion.

Don began working on a flight plan to take his busted mover in. It would be faster to leave the asteroid behind but that would be a good way to get chewed out so he made a plan to insert it into lunar orbit and pick it up again on his way out. In seven hours he could stop the engines from decelerating the spin on the asteroid and begin his burn in a large arcing path towards the moon. He didn’t like how much extra time the curve would expend but it was worth taking it nice and easy when moving something so large into a high-traffic zone. Don punched his new plan into the queue and set an alarm to remind him to check in on it before the end of his shift.

Don added a full diagnostic of RAM-10 to his and Sam’s shared to do list. May as well get an overhaul while we're patching up that component.

Roughly ten hours and three stim tabs later Don was thoroughly worn out. The pickup went terribly. He cracked the asteroid as he was drilling anchor-wells and had to leave 20% of it behind or risk having it come apart mid-transit.

It would be a massive understatement to say he was relieved when the lights in his POD shifted back to green indicating the upcoming shift change. He gladly flipped the comm switch dedicated to his partner.

“This is Citizen SH-836 reporting for shift change”

“Citizen SH-835 acknowledges. Initiating shift change now.”

The green lighting in Don’s POD began flashing yellow.

“Initiation confirmed. Were running about 20% light on RAM-3 and you might want to double check my nav-plan on RAM-10. I’ve got it running on 18 drives, slow burn to Luna. Good flying Sam.”

I gave her a little salute before logging out of the com channel. The lights faded back into red and Don sagged into this seat.

“That wasn’t too bad.” he said to himself. It wasn’t. In truth, the day was easier than most of the simulator trials he faced in the last few years. The stress of knowing it was real took something out of him nonetheless. He reached for his feeding tube and had a quick dinner. He lay back, letting his recliner retract into the wall as the sedatives took him in their cottony embrace.

“That wasn’t too bad at all.”