Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (10 page)

Frank came into view. He was wearing a white vacuum
suit with yellow trim and walking upside-down across the ceiling almost
directly above the pod.

For a moment Mike was startled by this; until he
realized the camera providing this image was mounted securely to one of the
hangar walls, and so remained oriented such that the ceiling was up and the
floor was down. The pod had not fallen to the ceiling since it too was
anchored, in its case to the hangar floor by its docking grapples.

Frank walked out of the image, then returned carrying a
metal box painted bright red. He stepped onto a yellow plastic cargo crate
lying on the ceiling above the pod, and lifted the red box high over his head.
He had to stretch to get it down far enough to slide into the pod’s open rear
hatch. But having done that he stepped off the crate and back onto the ceiling,
then pushed the crate away with one good shove from his foot. Next, he grabbed
a chain ladder which dangled up to the ceiling from the pod’s hatch and used it
to climb up/down into the pod. Once inside, he pulled the ladder in after him
and closed the hatch.

Mike said, “Can you get me a visual from inside the
pod?”

“No,” the ship said. “Mister Walters has ordered the
pod’s computer not to comply with any instructions it receives from me.”

“That’s kind of…” Mike’s voice trailed off as his brain
struggled to change course in mid-thought. His voice returned with conviction.
“Frank’s abandoning ship!”

“Ridiculous,” the ship said. “That would be suicide.”

“Why? Why would it be suicide? The rat’s got all the
provisions he’ll need for weeks. Besides, if he’s not abandoning ship, what’s
he doing?”

“I do not know. That is, I—”

The image on Mike’s pocketsize showed the pod drop from
its docking grapples and fall up. It slammed into the metal reinforced ceiling
like a boulder. The thundering sound—most of which reached Mike through the
walls and floor and ceiling and not through his pocketsize’s tiny speakers—was
deafening. The impact shook Corvus so thoroughly that all the loose supplies
and consumables on deck six bounced three inches into the air.

And so did Mike. “Owww!”

In the image, the pod bounced once then rolled straight
out the hangar’s big open door into space.

“Gimme a visual from an external camera!” Mike yelled.

An image appeared of the pod against a black starry
sky. But in the image the sky and pod were both moving. Within one second the
pod slid off the edge of the screen. Another image appeared, but the pod
slipped out of it just as quickly. And another image appeared.

“I’m sorry,” the ship said. “We are tumbling so fast I
can’t pivot the external cameras rapidly enough to compensate. The best I can
do is keep switching cameras.”

Another image appeared. This time, before moving out of
view the pod’s four main engines—which flanked the rear entry hatch and were
recessed into the hull—ignited. The four nozzles projected parallel blue
flames: clean, smokeless, translucent, unwavering. The pod began to accelerate.

Mike asked, “Is he heading for Kim?”

The ship’s computer paused before answering—presumably
watching the pod to estimate its course. “No,” it said softly. “He seems to be
abandoning ship.”

Mike wasn’t sure what to say; or do; or even think.

“Michael McCormack,” the ship announced, “of the
employees of Hyperbolic Shipping remaining aboard this spacecraft you have both
the highest security clearance and the most seniority, consequently, I declare
that until further notice you are in command. Do you, Michael McCormack, wish
to terminate my orders from Mister Walters and listen to the message from Von
Braun now rather than wait the thirty-seven more minutes he instructed?”

“Huh? Um, yes. Yes, of course.”

“Very well. You will not enjoy it.”

The surface of Mike’s pocketsize went blank. The others
all gathered beside him, squeezing together and looking over his shoulders to
watch the message. There was nothing to see, however. It was voice-only.

The voice that emanated from the little red plastic
computer possessed the unmistakable tone of a career military man. It carried
confidence and authority the same way a thunderbolt carried electricity. “This
is an official emergency class-one message to Captain Lawrence Palmer of the
commercial transport Corvus. Message broadcast at 17:36 universal time; March
4, 2039. I am Captain Thomas Bolger of the SpaceGuard Cutter Mandela, currently
docked at Von Braun. Sorry for the delay in responding, but your situation has
generated a lot of discussion here as well as on the surface of the Earth and
Moon.

“Due to the technical nature of your problem we have
pulled together a team of scientists, technicians and engineers. They’ve run a
large number of computer simulation scenarios using the details of your
situation. Their results are as follows:

“Concerning the question of how to stop the leak from
your fuel filter: They see no way for you to approach it physically in order to
work on it and no way for you to stop it remotely, and therefore no way to stop
it short of waiting for the remainder of the fuel to leak out.

“Concerning the question of how to stop your ship’s
rotation: The team has so far been unable to devise a means of stopping it, or
even slowing it by more than just a few percent. They are still working on
this. They have, however, discovered a way to shift the rotation 90 degrees,
making the ship rotate around its long axis. But they have not put forth any
reason for you to do this. I should stress that if you change the rotation such
that the ship is spinning on its long axis, you would not gain physical access
to the bridge or the engines. This is because the conservation of angular
momentum would cause the ship to rotate almost eight times faster and produce
centrifugal forces near the ship’s hull as high as eleven gees. This would be
extremely dangerous; far worse than the rotation you are dealing with at the
moment.

“Concerning the question of a rendezvous: There are no
ships with a location and heading that will allow them to meet you before you
make your closest approach to the sun. Normally, this would not be a problem,
we would just have someone dock with you on the other side. However, because
your engines failed during the J-maneuver, your course will take you very close
to the sun. Too close, in fact.

“Our projections of your course indicate solar passage
proximity at just over one solar diameter—specifically: nine hundred and
eighty-one thousand miles. At that distance the radiant heat absorbed by your
ship will produce temperatures above 4000 degrees absolute. The ship’s hull,
which is composed primarily of foamed stainless steel, will melt, and
everything inside the ship will either melt, burn, or boil away to vapor.

“The technical team is still experimenting with
simulations of your ship and examining methods you can use to reduce damage
from extremely high solar energy influx. However, I feel I should stress that
they have yet to devise even one method that will allow you to survive the
event.

“Their work is further complicated by our uncertainty
over how long you will be able to receive our transmissions on your low gain
antenna. If they manage to develop a useful method of any sort, we will
transmit it immediately, regardless of our belief in your ability to receive
it.

“We will also send you regular transmissions every two hours,
even if we have nothing useful to report. The next message will be sent at
19:35 universal time. This is Captain Thomas Bolger of the SpaceGuard Cutter
Mandela: out and clear.”

The pocketsize, with its little blank screen, fell
silent; and for many long seconds the group too remained silent—until Tina
broke the spell. “That’s it?” she said. “We’re going to die?”

“We aren’t going to die,” Mike insisted. “We’ve still
got time to think of something. Ship, how long have we got?”

“Eight days and seven hours until perihelion, based on
Captain Bolger’s figures, but the hull should melt several hours before that.”

“When will the temperature get too hot?” Mike asked.
“So hot we can’t survive?”

“That is difficult to predict with precision.
Lifesupport can keep the inside of the ship comfortable even when the hull is
more than three hundred degrees above room temperature. At some point, however,
the cooling system will become overloaded and experience a catastrophic
failure. At that point the ship’s interior temperature will begin to match the
temperature of its exterior and Corvus will no longer be habitable.”

“Approximately, when will this catastrophic failure
occur?”

“Since most of the ship is covered with a highly
reflective mirror finish, this shouldn’t happen until we are well within the
orbit of the planet Mercury: about seven days from now.”

Tina said, “Then we have seven days until we die.”

“Will you stop saying that?” Mike said. “We have seven
days to think of a way to
live
. Ship, isn’t there another pod?”

“Yes, it’s in the other hangar.”

“Can’t we do what Frank did? Use it to escape?”

“I would not recommend it. Mister Walters seems to have
acted out of panic. I’ve been monitoring his pod’s acceleration. He has used
all his fuel to change his course so he will pass farther from the sun. But
because a pod is designed for close-order maneuvering, rather than traveling
great distances, the change he has made is small. He will pass approximately
one percent farther from the sun than Corvus. What’s worse, because the surface
of a pod is white instead of mirrored, and its lifesupport is less capable of
ridding itself of excess heat, he will overheat and die approximately one and a
half days sooner than… Well… Let us just say that his odds are far worse than
yours.”

“OK,” Mike said. “Escaping in a pod is out. We’ll just
have to keep thinking of ideas until we get one that’ll work.”

“If all those scientists and engineers can’t think of a
way,” Tina said, “what makes you think we can?”

“We have an advantage they don’t.”

“What’s that?”

“They don’t have our motivation.”

“Oh, that’s just great. Didn’t you pay attention to the
message? Didn’t you notice the one thing he didn’t say?”

“What?”

“That they’d send a ship to rendezvous with us on the
far side of the sun. Even if by some miracle we do survive the heat, we’ll just
keep right on going; past all the planets and out of the solar system. We’ll
starve to death and never be heard from again.”

“Good point,” Mike said. “Ship, I want you to send a
message to Captain Bolger of SpaceGuard.”

“It will have to be voice-only,” the ship said. “And I
would recommend you keep it short. Our rotation rate requires that I send it in
bursts of two seconds duration with gaps of three seconds in between.”

“No problem.”

“What’s the message?”

“Tell him we said to meet us on the other side.”

Chapter Six

Mike gripped the rough texture of the yellow nylon rope
and leaned far backward in the feeble gravity of deck ten. “Come on, pull!” he
said to those behind him. “This is the last load.” He was talking to Gideon,
Nikita and Zahid who—exhausted from hauling the seven previous loads up the
four floors from deck six to deck ten—were pulling with all that remained of
their strength. “As soon as we get this one up, we can all rest.”

The door to one of the vertical hallways was propped
open and the yellow rope stretched through it to a rung on the left side about
shoulder-high. The rope passed over the rung and extended downward four floors
to where it was tied to the top of load number eight.

Number eight was an assortment of food, toiletries and
bedding supplies stuffed into three thicknesses of the largest plastic garbage
bags they could find. The dangling load bounced gently against the vertical
hallway walls outside a similarly propped-open door on deck six.

The hauling project had proceeded much better than Mike
had expected. So much so that he’d even let Tina put that silly microwave oven
she’d wanted into this load. “Pull harder!” he said. “The harder you pull, the
sooner you rest!”

Zahid, huffing and puffing and bringing up the rear,
said “I’m pulling as hard as I—”

But Mike cut him off. “On the count! 1—2—Pull!”

They pulled in unison, then stepped back to take up the
slack they’d created.

“1—2—Pull!”

They pulled again and stepped back.

“Five or six more should do it! 1—2—Pull!”

They pulled again, but as Zahid stepped back he
stumbled over one of the bags brought up earlier. His legs shot out in front of
him and knocked Nikita’s feet out from under her too. With half the team down
and the remaining pullers hampered by the deck’s low gravity the load was too
heavy. Mike and Gideon began to slide toward the open door with Mike leading
the way.

“I can’t hold it back!” Gideon yelled.

“Then let go!” Mike said.

“OK! Look out below!” Gideon opened his hands.

Mike felt the rope yank his hands forward, but was
ready for it and opened his too. The end of the rope ran through the doorway,
slapped the far wall, whipped over the rung and disappeared downward. The room
echoed with the sound of a full bag of supplies being ripped apart by random
strikes against ladder rungs.

Hurrying to the door and peeking over the edge, Mike
saw the large black bag tumbling down the vertical hallway. Dozens of colorful
plastic food envelopes had already been thrown from a gaping rip in its side.
Hitting another rung reversed the bag’s rotation and scattered rolls of toilet
paper, which tumbled and bounced individually from wall to wall on their way to
the end of the hallway down—or
up
, technically—on deck one.

Half the toilet paper rolls trailed out long white
streamers; some straight and some curving; though two rapidly spinning rolls
threw out tightly spiraled coils that arched gracefully and hung in the air for
seconds before drifting into tangles.

The black bag made another sudden tumbling reversal,
punctuated by another flying flurry of food envelopes, which was then followed
by the final reverberating crescendo at the shaft’s bottom.

Mike yelled, “You guys all right down there?”

Tina leaned out and grabbed a rung to brace herself
before looking up. “We’re all right, but Akio is trembling badly. I think he
needs to rest a minute. He was looking up at the load when it started falling
and barely had time to pull his head back when it came crashing down.”

“OK, you two stay there for awhile. When Akio calms
down, come on back up.”

Nikita jumped to her feet and spun around to yell at
Zahid. “You stupid oaf! You could have gotten someone killed!”

“It was an accident,” he pleaded. “I tripped on the
supplies.”

She glared at him.

“It’s all right,” Mike said. “Nobody was hurt and we’ve
got plenty of everything we need. We can do without that stuff.” Though
secretly he wished the microwave oven hadn’t been lost. He could eat cold food
if he had to, but now that Tina had gotten him anticipating hot meals, he
realized he wasn’t going to like it.

_____

While the others rummaged through the bounty of plastic
food envelopes trying to decide what they’d like to eat, Mike sat alone, his
appetite not functioning. He opened his pocketsize and stared at the picture
that appeared on its surface: the picture he’d instructed it to always show
whenever he opened it.

Should I have gone after her?
He knew that was
impossible. He didn’t know how to pilot a pod; didn’t have the authority or
license or access codes. He wasn’t even sure how to power one up.
Should I
have done something different? And if so, what?

He stared at the picture.

I never even kissed her goodbye.

He studied the expression on her face and thought about
the party where the picture had been taken and the water-balloon fight that had
preceded it. He thought about other happy times they’d had, and then about the
happiness they might have shared through the rest of their lives. But that was
all gone. She was dead, and it was all gone.

I never even kissed her goodbye.

Mike hadn’t had any illusions about the hazards of
Kim’s profession. Anyone who’s work took them out into vacuum knew there was
always the danger of a suit rupture, a lifesupport failure, or any number of
other life-threatening surprises. But while the dangers were real, the odds
were good. It was easy to feel reasonably safe—until a catastrophe destroyed
your personal universe.

I should have asked her. Even if she’d turned me
down, at least I could tell myself that I had asked. Now I’ll never know.

He thought back to the last time he’d been with her:
twenty or thirty minutes before the crisis began. Everything had been so normal
then. It felt like days ago but it was only a few hours.

The ship’s engines had not yet gone into auto-shutdown,
so the ship was accelerating at full thrust. This produced one-tenth the
gravity a person would experience on the surface of the Earth, and was the only
form of occasional imitation gravity Corvus was designed to provide for its
passengers and crew.

Kim had been following Mike down the hall. Without
warning, he stopped abruptly at the door to the passenger’s lounge and spun
around to face her. He slapped her across the left cheek hard enough to turn
her head.

When her face returned her cheek had a lovely reddish
glow, exceeded only by the glowing rage in her eyes. With both hands she shoved
the center of his red and black plaid shirt. The force against his rib cage was
enough to bounce him against the wall behind him. Ship’s gravity was too feeble
for him to prevent this by shifting his weight onto his heels.

When he completed his bounce, and stood vertical again,
he planted his feet firmly on the floor and pushed her shoulder to knock her
off balance then bent down and grabbed both of her ankles. When he stood up
straight, he was holding her upside-down at arm’s length—another task made
possible by the weak gravity.

Kim’s blonde ponytail brushed vigorously across the
gray textured floor as she struggled to get loose. Three times she punched Mike
in the shins before he finally dropped her on her head.

“Enough!” She jumped up and stomped—as best she could
in the low gravity—into the passenger’s lounge. “Let’s do it!”

“You got it!” Mike said, and followed close on her
heels through the large room decorated with low comfortable furniture. The
walls to their right and left and rear displayed brightly colored tapestries
done in a Mexican-Indian motif, while the wall directly ahead was all windows
and displayed only the black sky and stars that surrounded the ship. The
stars—Mike reminded himself—had been stationary then.

As the two combatants marched through the room no eyes
looked up, no heads turned to watch, no conversations faltered in mid-sentence.
They were alone. The lounge was deserted.

Near the center of the room Kim rounded a low white
couch and headed for the room’s far left corner. There, flanked by tapestries
on one side and a starry sky on the other, was a small sidewalk-style cafe. She
plopped herself down at its nearest table, and on the simulated wood-grained
surface propped her elbow in the traditional pose. “Come on. Put-up or
shut-up!”

“I’m ready! More than ready!” Mike said as he sat down,
took hold of her hand and hooked his calves around two of the table’s simulated
wooden legs to anchor himself. He knew from experience that he’d better hang on
to something bolted to the floor. In this gravity any unsecured arm-wrestler
would get flipped like an oversized pancake.

“Go!” Kim said.

Their right arms shook with the force of opposing torques.
Various parts of their trembling hands quickly turned various shades of red and
yellow as blood was squeezed out of some tissues and concentrated in others.

For almost a minute the two forearms pointed straight
up. Mike couldn’t quite muster the power needed to push Kim’s arm backward. He
wasn’t surprised. He’d wrestled her before and knew those little arms were
stronger than they looked. But that didn’t mean he understood it. He did not.
Nearly a foot taller than her, he out-massed her by fifty pounds, and his arms
were at least twice as thick as hers. Exercise couldn’t be the answer: back
home in the City of Von Braun, he played several vigorous games of airball
every week—a popular version of soccer in which the players fly about freely
inside a large zero-g playing sphere using soft plastic wings strapped over
their arms. It occurred to him that she might be using some kind of superior
technique. Or maybe it was just that his arms were longer than hers and the
extra length put him at a disadvantage due to poor leverage. Surely, she
couldn’t be stronger than him? Could she?

He felt the back of his knees sliding slowly up the
table legs. They stopped when his thighs were pressed firmly against the table
top’s underside. His blood pressure was rising too. He could feel his pulse in
his left temple, as though someone were gently tapping on the side of his head
with an index finger.
Wish I’d worked up more anger before we started
,
he thought.
I’m not sure I’ve released enough adrenaline to outlast her.

This thought was interrupted not by a word or sound but
by an abrupt reduction in the background noise. The soft and distant rumbling
that had filled every corner of the big ship during the last few hours had
suddenly disappeared, and with it the feeling of one-tenth gravity. The
rumbling was replaced by silence; the one-tenth gravity by zero-g.

That’s when the crisis must have begun.

At the time it had seemed only a little strange. He’d
known the engines were supposed to run continuously for nearly three days and
that they had started just a few hours earlier. But strange as he’d known it to
be, he’d had no intention of letting a little distraction weaken his enthusiasm
for personal victory. It certainly didn’t seem to interfere with the amount of
force Kim was exerting against him.

From inside the breast pocket of Kim’s sky-blue flight
uniform the deeply resonant masculine voice of her pocketsize said, “Pardon the
interruption, but the captain is calling.”

Kim grunted through clenched teeth: “Put him through.”

The captain said, “Kim, there’s a problem with one of
the main engines. Engine two is working normally but engine one has failed to
maintain fusion so both went into auto-shutdown. I’ve attempted a re-start but
engine one fails in the hydrogen line purge cycle.”

Kim squeezed out another string of grunted words.
“Sounds like it’s not getting any fuel.”

“Yeah,” the captain said. “That’s what the diagnostics
say.”

“Could be the primary fuel pump,” Kim grunted.

“Or a clogged fuel filter,” the captain offered.

“I’d suspect the pump,” Kim said. “The liquid hydrogen
is filtered twice before it gets into the tanks so you can figure it’s pretty
clean. But the pump— Well, it’s got moving parts that can break or wear or
stick.”

“Are you all right?” the captain asked. “You sound— I
don’t know. Constipated.”

She made a clear effort to soften her grunting into a
more natural voice but since every muscle in her body was tightened to its
limit she failed miserably. “I’m fine,” she said, grinding her teeth together.
“Really, I’m fine.”

The captain hesitated for a moment, then—as though it
were some kind of verbal shrug—said, “OK.” He didn’t sound convinced but
apparently had decided not to pursue what might be a decidedly personal matter
and instead returned to the subject at hand. “I want you to go out and take a
look at engine number one.” He paused as if to verify something. “We’re
approaching the Moon at 177 miles per second. If we have to cancel the
twin-engine synchronous burn and finish our deceleration with only one engine
we’ll not only overshoot our docking window at Von Braun but we’ll pass right
through the Earth/Moon system altogether. We’ll end up wasting four extra days
slowing the ship to a dead stop in the middle of nowhere—probably half-way to
the orbit of Venus—and then have to waste another month or more limping back to
Von Braun on our puny auxiliary fuel reserves. If that happens the company’s
gonna’ have to answer to a lot of angry people, some of them powerful. The
handful on board now are nothing compared to the hundred and forty-six who’ve
already bought tickets for us to take them out to Huygens Colony.”

Mike—now winning the match by nearly fifteen degrees
thanks to the captain distracting Kim—strained to speak without losing any of
his hard-won angle. His voice was less grunt-like than Kim’s but still carried
a heavy load of physical tension. “Larry, how much downtime can we make up by
running both engines hot?”