Besides the pinpricks of light that were portholes in the hull, there was little to give away the true size of the Titan Orbital. Some who had seen digigrams of the station with the planet beneath, automatically assuming the grey world was the same size as Earth, reckoned the space-station was small and claustrophobic. But Erebus, as the planet was known, was actually larger than Jupiter and Saturn. Were those who had been mistaken about both the planet and the station’s size to have seen a warship like the SS Reliant dock, they would have seen how massive the station really was.

Commandant Fletcher had a scale model of the Titan Orbital on his desk. It was cast in bronze and mounted on a stand that was made of iron, or lead, or some other heavy metal so that it wouldn’t topple over. On the base of the stand was an engraved silver plaque that said: The Orbital Project: A New Home On The New Frontier, Commemorating The Establishment Of The Titan Orbital, January 4th AD 2187. Well, it made a suitable enough paperweight, Fletcher always thought.

As he sat at his desk, the door double-chimed.

“Come,” Fletcher said absently.

A man in a blue jacket-uniform walked crisply into the room with his hands behind his back. “The Reliant has docked, sir,” he said.

“Thank you, lieutenant.” He didn’t know the man’s name. He didn’t recognise his face. He only knew the lieutenant’s rank because of the three braided gold stripes on his left shoulder. “Tell them I’ll be right down.”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant left the room.

Fletcher lifted the edge of the scale model and trapped the transfer request he’d been reading beneath. There was a good reason why the commandant rarely got to know the men under his command. There were three other requests already there.

He got up from his desk and the door swished open automatically in front of him. He walked down the steps and entered the elevator.

The Titan Orbital had forty decks. Commandant Fletcher’s office was on the very top level. In fact, it was the only thing on the top level. It would have had a three-sixty degree view of space were it not for the door and the steps that led down to the Operations Centre on the level below. The commandant could look out and see the entire station beneath him, but increasingly often he had found himself using the artificial opaqueness button; it acted and he used it much like curtains.

The lowest fifteen decks were interrupted on opposing sides of the station by giant docking bays that spanned the space where there should have been levels. These were large enough to swallow small-to-medium scout-craft and the average privately owned cruiser, but large troop carriers like the SS Reliant had to dock externally. This was always a hassle, because they blocked other ships getting in or out.

The Titan Orbital wasn’t a military station, and Commandant Fletcher’s rank was considered honorary by commodores of the fleet. They saw him as the equivalent of a merchant seaman of old. They saw him as nothing more than the station’s clerical administrator. And that’s much how Fletcher felt about himself whenever one of these warships docked and the military commanders pulled rank.

There were parts of the station reserved solely for military use. Fletcher felt it was a waste of space and resources that he wasn’t allowed to use these docking ports and cargo bays when the military wasn’t. It annoyed him even more that they required him to keep these unused areas powered and in a state of immediate readiness just in case they were needed at short notice. Except Erebus was so far from all the core systems that ‘short notice’ here meant five or six days: that’s how long it took ships to reach the Titan Orbital from the next nearest human outpost. Yet protocol was protocol and Commandant Fletcher’s job depended on following it.

The SS Reliant was docked at one of these reserved military ports, and the briefing was to be held in a bay known as C29-Beta. That meant it was on the twenty-ninth level, whilst C denoted its size (A being largest, E being smallest), and Beta signified it was strictly off-limits to unauthorised personnel.

As Fletcher rode there in the elevator, he remembered he’d been commandant of the Titan Orbital for eight years, but had never once been inside C29-Beta.

There were twenty-one men waiting for Commandant Fletcher when he arrived at the bay. Twenty of them were marine commandos, standing to attention in four precise lines. The other man was the Reliant’s second officer.

“You Fletcher?” he said. He was an American.

Fletcher wondered what would happen if he said no. Perhaps they would shoot him. He noticed the twenty marines were already packing serious firepower.

“Yes,” he said. “You Connor?”

He already knew the answer, and the officer knew he already knew, so didn’t bother answering. He jerked his head toward the men.

“These two squads were selected for your little outing, Fletcher. But just you remember they’re here to do a job at your request. You tell them what you need doing, and they’ll do it, but they don’t take their orders from you.”

“I understand, commander.”

“Good.” Connor exhaled noisily. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Thank you again.” Fletcher watched him go.

Turning to face the troops, he found all twenty of them looking at him. It was unnerving to be stared at by men so still and so silent they could have been statues, or portrait paintings, with eyes that followed him around the room.

He took a deep breath and sighed.

“Right,” he said. “If you’ll turn to your left, I’ll bring up the map of the surface and explain what you’re going to be doing.”

A few minutes later, Fletcher was standing in front of the large screen mounted on the wall of C29-Beta, pointing at a graphic of the planet.

“We believe the observation team landed successfully, but they overshot their designated landing zone by several kilometres. The green cross signifies where they were meant to land. The red cross signifies where they actually landed. We don’t know much about this sector; it’s as yet uncharted territory.”

The troops watched the crosses flash on the map above them.

“Because there was a significant delay between the time the re-entry vehicle was supposed to land and the time their beacon stopped transmitting, we assume the shuttle survived touchdown intact, but was destroyed subsequently. All the members of the observation team would have been aware that lethal amounts of neutron radiation would have been released by an engine meltdown, so we think it’s unlikely any survivors would still be in the vicinity of their landing site. To avoid fallout, they would have headed in the direction from which the wind was blowing.”

Several swirling white arrows appeared over the map.

“These are the wind patterns of the last forty-eight hours,” Fletcher continued, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Which led us to project this narrow radius around the landing site in which we think survivors might be found.”

A transparent red wedge emanated from the red cross.

“You will start your search there. However, we also suspect that the team might try and head to their original designated landing zone, the green cross, in anticipation of a rescue attempt. This complicates matters, because to avoid their ship’s radiation and fallout field, they would have to have taken an indirect route, which could place them absolutely anywhere within this white sphere.”

Actually, when it came up on screen, it was more of a skewed oval, but it basically covered the entire region of map he’d been talking about previously.

“Another factor our projections don’t take into account is the nature of the landscape. As I mentioned, they landed in uncharted territory, and we don’t know how and if environmental factors might have affected their progress. Erebus is an inhospitable planet at the best of times, and again, another factor is that we don’t know if and how badly any of the observation team were injured.”

Fletcher regarded the troops. None of them had said anything, and when he paused in his briefing, they all turned to look at him.

“Your landing zone is marked by the blue cross,” he went on. “You will see it’s right at the heart of the white sphere, on the edge of the red radius. You will take one of the station’s re-entry vehicles. I trust one of you can fly it?”

“I am a pilot,” one said, the first he’d heard speak.

“And I am his co-pilot,” another added.

“Good.” Fletcher rubbed the length of his arm, trying to think of anything else, and then he remembered the most important part of all:

“Just in case I need to remind you,” he said. “When you’re planet-side, you are all bound by the Io Accord. You know the nature of the planet. You can only engage in combat in self-defence; only if you are attacked first.”

None of them looked particularly worried.

“All right,” Fletcher said. “I think that’s it. Any questions?”

There weren’t. He licked his lips again.

“Well, then.” He sighed. “I’ll leave you to it.”

As Fletcher headed back to the elevator, he walked past similar bays with the same Beta signifier, some he had been in, some he had not. He had a peculiar feeling as he entered the empty elevator car. Usually he felt a pang of regret when he was cornered into doing the military’s dirty work. But today he felt nothing.

One of the rooms in the reserved military section of the Titan Orbital that Commandant Fletcher had never been into was E38-Beta. It was a small cargo bay near the bottom of the space-station, and it was empty but for two large rectangular crates standing on end, one on each side of the room.

It was dark in the bay and there was nobody there to see it, but out of nowhere there gradually faded into existence a third box identical in size to those on either side of it. This one was a dirty, uneven blue, and had narrow windows and doors.

Above the doors, lit from behind, there were four words:

Police Public Call Box.

NOTES:
I did a recent tally of complete "Doctor Who" stories I remember having seen, and reckon that until I started getting into the DVDs, I had read more novelisations of the show than I had actually seen episodes. I learnt the word 'incongruous' and 'materialise' from former "Doctor Who" script editor Terrance Dicks' many Target novelisations, as in the line he used in every one of his books: "The incongruous shape of a blue police box materialised in the room." I was going to use it myself as a homage, but then completely forgot about it.

Originally Connor was called Cooper, named after a character in "Dog Soldiers" (which I rewatched the day before I wrote this chapter). Later that name came to me again when I'd forgotten its appearence in this chapter, but I decided to change it here instead. Fletcher just popped into my head, as did Io, though I believe that is a moon of Jupiter's. But then, I think Titan is too, which might be confusing, seeing as Erebus (I think that's a river of the underworld) is meant to be in deep space. I lifted the 'orbital' part of the Titan Orbital from the 'Culture' novels of Iain M Banks. My 'orbital' is just a bog-standard space-station rather than a Niven-esque 'ringworld', however.