[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult Read Free Page B

out some time? In fact – officer – I think it would be a CRIME not to!!!
    ‘Oh god,’ whispered Misha under his breath. ‘Oh
good god
.’ He started again.
    Hey there. Wasn’t it the ancient philosopher Melvyn Bragg who said…
    Two hours later – after deleting a draft which began
‘Whoop! Is that the sound of the police?’
and then went on to feature an elaborate ASCII picture of a plant-pig doing a thumbs up – Misha logged out. He sighed, reached under his pillow, pulled out his notebook, the one with ‘LET’S HAVE AN INNOVATION JAM’ printed on the cover, flipped to the page marked
Misha’s Achievement List
, and found where he’d written the word ‘Phoebe’. He carefully wrote the words ‘STILL PENDING’ next to it. The item after ‘Phoebe’ was ‘Malkovich – Important Health & Safety Check.’ He would do that right now because regardless of what his dad said he was a dynamic and proactive individual. He looked at the clock in the corner of his retina-overlay: Three minutes past nine. It might be an idea, Misha reasoned proactively, to start work
on the hour
, with a nice round number. That would be a cleaner mental space. He flipped on the entertainment channel. It was enough time for one quick game of Cliff Ganymede’s
Mission: Thargoid Kill-Punch
.
    When Misha next noticed the clock he saw it had somehow crept to ten past ten, so, still keen to start work exactly on the hour, he decided to go on playing for a little while longer. Thirty minutes later he dutifully logged off, and went to make a thermos of coffee. Then he got sidetracked into staring out of the kitchen window for a while. Once he’d stopped doing that he realised it was now six minutes past eleven, which kind of messed up his plans. If he was going to start work on the hour he’d have to wait until midnight. Better, perhaps, to write it off as a bad job for this evening and punch some more Thargoids. Get it out of his system. That way he could wake up early tomorrow, do the health and safety check, and then, with the wind in his sails, he would be bound to have a really productive day. He resolved to put the new deadline in his notebook. He would use extra heavy lettering, and underline it twice. And this time he would definitely, finally, send his message to Phoebe Clag.

Chapter Two
    Construction had started on the space station
Jim Bergerac
a few months before Gippsworld’s rich natural resources turned out to be worth bupkis, so half of it was what
Architectural Exercises In Narcissism
’s
presenter would term ‘radical froufrou’, with mock Greek columns in the corridors and coolant pipes that didn’t drip everywhere and nice scatter cushions, and half of it was built out of paste and packing crates and chunks of old satellites mashed together with whatever other space flotsam had come to hand. In the shabbier section of the huge creaking doughnut, under a dirty plexiglass dome, a young police officer ate some synthetic noodles out of a pot.
    The best thing about the
Jim Bergerac
’s observation deck, in Phoebe’s opinion, was that the view was poor. Nobody ever stopped by to marvel at the unimposing grey lump that was Gippsworld spinning away in the void, or at the ugly, floating black rectangle that was the planet’s unused advertising hoarding. This meant she could spend her entire lunch break stretched out on a row of seats undisturbed, and watch the rolling news blather away across the display beamed out from the pea-sized projector implanted in her eyebrow. The headline had been the same all afternoon.
    CLIFF GANYMEDE:
    AUTHOR, ACTOR, GURU, BELOVED BY MILLIONS – MURDERED!
    •
Life-coach Cliff Ganymede, 112, found dead in his hotel room.
    •
‘I’ll miss his elaborate beehive metaphors the most,’ says agent who found body.
    •
Our hardworking boys and girls in blue chasing up leads.
    Concern grew for Ganymede after he failed to turn up for the latest leg of a nine-planet book tour, scheduled to