Origin - Season Two Read Online Free PDF

getting on?” Heinz asked.
    A black woman with a full head of afro hair shrugged and said, “We just sent another batch through to Watkins. Justin’s on camera duty. I’m taking over in a minute. Not much else to report, really.”
    “If it’s alright,” Mitch said, “We’ll get back to our exercise in frustration.”
    “By all means,” Heinz said. “I need to have a word with the captain. I’ll be back in an hour.”
    Mitch and Naoko just stood there for a moment looking at the ship.
    “It looks like the Millennium Falcon’s fat little brother, doesn’t it?” Mitch said.
    Naoko laughed. “And that would make you what, Han Solo?”
    “Actually, I’ve always thought of myself as more of a Luke.”
    “You know,” Naoko said, “I keep asking myself if these people were really just like us.”
    “What to do you mean?”
    “I mean, as messed up in the head as we are. To get this far, to travel beyond their own solar system. We’re pretty good at making movies about it, but we’d have no chance of getting there on our own.”
    Mitch considered this. “No, I guess we wouldn’t. But you know what scares me even more than our ignorance?”
    “What?” Naoko said.
    “Our complacency,” Mitch said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “We’ve been working on this for what, a year now?”
    “Almost, yeah.”
    “And we already take it for granted,” Mitch said. “It’s a fucking spaceship from another solar system and we walk around as if it was just another machine. Watkins was at the meeting today. You know what he said?”
    “What?”
    “These people found a formerly inhabited planet on their way here.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. And guess what, it had been nuked into dust millions of years ago by God only knows who.”
    “Holy shit,” Naoko said, “that’s crazy.”
    “Yeah, it is. And I sat there thinking ‘wow, this should be blowing my mind.’ But it wasn’t. Not really. You know a year from now, when we’ve read the logs and everything else, we’ll just take all that for granted too. It’s like we’ve reached the end of our capacity for incredulity. Next week Watkins’ll probably tell us he knows where God is and we’ll sit there and go ‘great, well that’s another question answered. Now what the hell do we do?’”
    Naoko began to laugh again. “Jesus Mitch, I never realized you were so pessimistic. Speak for yourself, I still get a weak bladder every time I step onto that thing.”
    “Forget it,” Mitch said. “I’m just in a bad mood.”
    “Sarah?”
    Mitch nodded. “I keep telling her she should come out here, but she won’t. She likes her job too much.”
    “It’s none of my business,” Naoko said, “but isn’t that a bit hypocritical?”
    Mitch glanced at him, amused. “I don’t know, Don Juan, is it?”
    “I’m just saying—”
    “I know what you’re saying,” Mitch said. “I was kidding. Never mind, let’s get back to work. You need to take a leak before we step back into the belly of the beast?”
    “Very funny.”
    They walked to the ship and up the retracting gangway leading to the bridge. For its size, RP One had relatively little room inside. Most of it was taken up by what they had taken to calling the ‘anti-gravity drive’, a large magnetic disk inside the ship that spun at several hundred thousand revolutions per minute and extracted the current it needed from the ionosphere through eight shafts that ran straight through the hull. The system provided enough power to slow the descent of the ship, but not to hold it, and nowhere near enough to reverse the descent. At least that had been the theory until that morning, when Watkins had informed them that RP One had been used on several surface landings before.
    The bridge, like the ship itself, was round, measuring just over thirty feet across and eight feet high. When they had first entered it everything had been covered in a thick layer of dust. On examination most of it turned out to be the