"Slept right through them," Chippawa said cheerfully. "Don't worry, you'll get to see them again on the way up."

"Right," Faraday muttered, trying not to think about the hairline cracks the techs had found in Keefer and O'Reilly's probe after their dive. "I'll look forward to it."

He went through the unnecessarily complicated routine of drawing a cup of coffee from the zero-gee pot into his zero-gee mug. Another supreme nuisance, but one they also had no choice but to put up with. The Jovian atmosphere was about as calm and peaceful as one of the Five Hundred's budgeting sessions, and the pixel-pickers on Jupiter Prime got very upset when their glorified babysitters spilled coffee on expensive electronics.

Especially given the current funding battles the Jupiter Sector was having back on Earth. The Five Hundred, that oligarchy of the rich and powerful who effectively ran the Solar System, were constantly pushing humanity's boundaries outward, pressing on to new frontiers almost before the homesteading stakes had been driven into the ground of the last hard-fought conquest. With their attention now turned to new colonization efforts on Saturn's moons, Jupiter's interests and struggles were starting to get lost in the shuffle.

"By the way, Prime won't like it if they find out you shaved an hour off your sleep period,"

Chippawa commented. "They're very strict about the eight-hour rule."

"What was I supposed to do?" Faraday countered, sipping carefully at the brew. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot even Chippawa could do to ruin instant coffee. "Just lie there and stare at the ceiling?"

"Sure," Chippawa said with a power-assisted shrug. "That's what the rest of us do."

Faraday sniffed. "I guess I'm just too young and idealistic to sluff off that way when there's work to be done."

"Of course," Chippawa said. "I keep forgetting."

"It's that old-age thing," Faraday added soothingly. Chippawa was, after all, nearly fifty. "Memory always goes first."