THEY PASSED THROUGH a circular air lock and arrived on the middeck. There was a line of white lockers in front of them, three sleeping berths on the right with a small galley on the side. On the left was a toilet and access hatch for the decks above and below.
In the remaining space, three men waited in T-shirts and shorts.
Yukari and Akane took off their helmets and held them at their sides.
A cheer went up. They always got this reaction when they took off their helmets in front of men—something about it was particularly enchanting, apparently, though Yukari had never figured out exactly what.
“Welcome to shuttle Atlantis,” the captain said, extending his hand. He was in his early fifties, with a long face and rough whiskers on his chin. Yukari would have taken him for a British gentleman on his day off, but seeing as how he was a shuttle captain, he was most likely a former U.S. military test pilot or of similar stock.
“Excellent work out there,” he said. “You did in five minutes what we couldn’t do in five days. My hat’s off to you.”
“Not at all,” Yukari said pleasantly, “but I will say I was impressed by my mission specialist’s work. Allow me to introduce our new rookie at SSA, Akane Miura.”
“No, really, it was nothing,” Akane blurted as she shook each of the men’s hands in turn.
Next it was the shuttle crew’s turn to introduce themselves.
The pilot, Luis, was thirty-seven years old, ex-Air Force. Something about his eyebrows made him look a bit like the actor Koji Ishizaka, and one of the first things he asked them was which anime was the most popular right now in Japan.
Akane had no idea, and when Yukari suggested Chimaera Ball Z off-the-cuff, he informed her that it had already been canceled.
Gordon, the shuttle MS, was thirty-one years old, an aerospace engineer for an airline company who’d switched over to NASA. He was a handsome fellow with blond hair and an anxious look in his eye, despite his relief that the valve assembly had been retrieved. It was his mishap with the RMA that had lost it in the first place.
The two girls were offered juice in tubes, biscuits, and freeze-dried ice cream. A couple of the men offered them gum and chocolate out of their personal lockers. Nothing up here was particularly tasty, but the variety was welcome.