Of course, to use the spin drives at all, I had to take us out of centrifuge mode.

Rocky and I float in the control room, he in his ceiling bulb and me in the pilot’s seat. I watch the camera-feed screen with a stupid grin on my face.

I’m at another planet! I shouldn’t be this excited. I’ve been at another star for the past several weeks. But that’s kind of esoteric. Tau Ceti is pretty much like the sun. It’s bright, you can’t get too close to it, and it even emits the same general range of frequencies. For some reason, being at a new planet is much more exciting.

The wispy clouds of Adrian coast by beneath us. Or, more accurately, the wispy clouds barely move at all and we zoom by overhead. Adrian has a higher gravity than Earth, so our orbital velocity is just over 12kilometers per second—far more than what’s needed to orbit Earth.

The pale-green planet that I’ve been watching for eleven days has a lot more detail now that we’re on top of it. It’s not just green. There are dark and light bands of green wrapping around it. Just like Jupiter and Saturn. But unlike those two gas-giant leviathans, Adrian is a rocky world. Thanks to Rocky’s notes, we know the radius and mass, which means we know its density. And it’s far too dense to be just gas. There’s a surface down there, I just can’t see it.

Man, what I wouldn’t give for a lander!

Realistically, it wouldn’t do me any good. Even if I had some way of landing on Adrian, the atmosphere would crush me dead. It’d be like landing on Venus. Or Erid, for that matter. Heck, in that case, I wish Rocky had a lander. The pressure down there might not be too much for an Eridian.

Speaking of Erid, Rocky’s calibrating some kind of device in his control-room bubble. It looks almost like a gun. I don’t think we’ve started a space war, so I assume it’s something else.

He holds the device with one hand, taps it with another, and uses two more to hold a rectangular panel that is connected to the device by a short cable. He uses his remaining hand to anchor himself at a handhold.

He makes some more adjustments to the device with what looks like a screwdriver, and suddenly the panel springs to life. It was completely flat, but now has a texture to it. He waves the gun part left and right and the patterns on the screen move left and right.

“Success! It functions!”

I lean over the edge of the pilot’s seat for a better look. “What’s that?”