Excerpt:

"Though there is something… I dunno, sort of fishy about this whole thing, isn’t there?”

“Everything seems fishy to you, Mark,” came the reply.

“Well, there are a lot of fishy things in the universe! I’m just pointing them out. It’s not my fault.”

Tom chuckled. “Alright, so what’s fishy about this?”

“I dunno. I guess it’s just… too easy, in a way. Here we are, finding exactly what we expected to find. What we hoped to find. It’s fishy.” Holding the cluster of loose fragments up, he opened his gloved hand, allowing the rocks to float freely in front of him as he examined them.

“Sometimes things work out that way. And it’s not like we just speculated at random that these asteroids might have this composition. It was based on a lot of research on the D-Day meteorites. And besides, you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Bizarre expression, that.”

“And saying something is ‘fishy’ when you mean suspicious or unusual isn’t?”

Mark laughed as he looked at the rocks in front of him. “You have a point.” At first, he simply studied them with his eyes, looking for… well, he didn’t really know what he was looking for, specifically; anything out of the ordinary. Nothing presented itself, at first, then something occurred to him. Not enough sunlight here… The Earth, off in the distance, was mostly eclipsing the sun, as was the asteroid itself, to some degree. Looking up, he could see that farther along the asteroids surface, the lighting improved slightly. Grabbing the fragments again, he opened one of the sample pouches on his suit, stuffing them inside. He then began to climb along the asteroid’s surface, continuing to use his hands to pull himself along. Slowly, he clambered up the side of a steep incline, until he stood on top of it. Almost immediately, he floated forward in the almost zero-g environment, carried by his momentum, but he activated the maneuvering thrusters built into the large backpack attached to his suit, propelling himself straight up at an angle away from the asteroid.

“Where are you going?” Tom asked in surprise.

“Just getting a better view,” Mark answered, as he cut the jets, letting his momentum carry him further up and away from the asteroid. Slowly, the light from the sun became more intense, if only by a small amount. But it should be enough. He began slowing down after several seconds, and he fired one burst from his jets in the opposite direction, ensuring he wouldn’t float too far away. He reached into the pouch, pulling out the two largest fragments, along with several smaller pieces. He held up his hand, and released them, letting them float out of his hand as he had done before. Studying them intently, he began to make out small, silvery glints of light on the fragments, bits of metal catching the light of the distant sun. “Interesting,” he said quietly.

“What is?”

“Oh, nothing… just looking at these rocks.”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?”

Mark shook his head as he replied. “Not like this… I wanted to take a moment, to just look at them.” He watched the fragments for a moment longer, as they slowly moved away from him, before reaching out and taking hold of them once again. The two large pieces were easy to grasp, but a few of the smaller, marble-sized fragments slipped past his gloves, beginning to move away. Deciding it wasn’t worth chasing after them, he put those pieces he had re-collected back into the pouch, and looked back down toward the asteroid. “Alright, I’m heading back down.”

“Ok… you’ll need to change the scanner to sample mode in about… “ Tom paused, consulting his computer. “Two minutes.”

“Copy that,” Mark replied, activating his jets once again, propelling himself back toward the huge, floating mass of rock, leaving the handful of small fragments adrift.