To Dream in the City of Sorrows by Babylon 5 Page A

skimped a little on living amenities to install the best in Skydancer. It boasted a changeable system of sample compartments that she could configure by computer to be a large number of very small compartments, or a smaller number of larger compartments, depending on the planets she surveyed, how much soil and rock she had her sampler robots bring back, and what those samples contained. Although even large amounts of unrefined Q-40 samples could not reach critical mass and start a chain reaction, too large an aggregate could generate enough radiation and heat to pose a risk to the ship and her health, so it was better to keep it in smaller amounts in the fully shielded compartments, all of which could be emptied into space one at a time or all at once in an emergency. This last safety feature had also cost her plenty, even though she hoped never to have to use it. Coming back with an empty sample bay did not make the paying customer happy.
    If only she’d be lucky enough this mission to find even one planet rich enough to make the risk of gathering that much Q-40-saturated soil and rock necessary.
    What to do with the free hour she had coming up? Take a nap? Have a snack? Get some extra exercise? She leaned to her right, still strapped in her chair, and flipped on the small entertainment console screen, scrolling through the extensive index of music, movies, and books. Nothing looked good there either. What time was it? She checked the ship’s chronometer. In a half hour she would be receiving a scheduled tight-beam tachyon transmission from the UTC Operations ship, giving her the top-secret location and jump coordinates for her next stop. And, maybe, some word from Jeffrey Sinclair.
    Personal messages while on survey missions such as this were frowned upon, and usually only sent in emergency situations. There were many corporate reasons for this, most dealing with the issue of cost and the obsessive attention to secrecy these missions entailed. The corporations wanted to keep their target planets a secret from the competition for as long as possible. But she also suspected they wanted their pilots to keep their minds on the job, and not worry about what was happening at home.
    But Jeff had said he would try to pull a few strings if he could as the commander of a space station. And as she absolutely could not send any messages to him, all she could do was wait. It was something one did quite a bit of in the glamorous profession of planetary surveyor.
    So what should she do while she waited? She knew what Jeff what do in this situation. The same thing she was probably going to do yet again. It was one of the first things they discovered they had in common. “Computer,” she said, “lower the lights.” She released herself from the chair, pushed herself up gently in the microgravity, just above the console, and settled in to watch the surface of Fensalir moving broadly past the bow of her ship and to float with the incredible swarm of stars beyond the planet, all shining in the particularly intense way seen only in the deep night of space.
    And she thought of Jeff, who always tried to do the same thing at least once a day: simply look out at the stars from whatever spot on Babylon 5 he could, be it a temporarily empty Command and Control, or one of the observation domes, or even walking along the outside surface of the station in a space suit, having cobbled up some plausible reason for taking a space walk. Best way to meditate and think, he would say. And to help keep everything in perspective.
    What was he doing right now? She had left him on Babylon 5, on New Year’s Day, Earth time, two days after he had asked her to marry him. Even though they had lived together once for a short period of time, it had taken her fifteen years to say yes to that question.
    So much had changed in the years since they had first met at Earthforce Academy where she had been the second-year cadet, and he had been the incredibly handsome and