Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (6 page)

The captain scowled. “Did you say
hair
?”

“Yeah, but what would hair be doing in a liquid
hydrogen tank? It couldn’t possibly get in there by accident.”

The captain started rubbing his elbow again. “Is it the
same color as Mike’s hair?”

“Yeah, about the same. Why?”

The captain leaned back in his command chair and folded
his arms across his chest. His voice became artificially calm, as though trying
to make something sound normal that he knew full-well wasn’t. “Is there a note
stuck in there?”

“A note? Like on a piece of paper? Why would there be a
note?”

Mike heard what he thought was an odd edge to Larry’s
voice; an edge that seemed to indicated he was forcing his voice to remain calm
and pleasant. “Just look in the filter and see if you find one.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

The captain released his anger and let it flow into his
voice. “Do it!”

“All right. All right. I’m looking. I’m looking.” Kim
placed her helmet’s glass faceplate almost in contact with the open filter
housing and looked around inside. “I don’t see a note, Captain.”

“Good.” His voice returned to normal. “How long until
you can have the filter cleaned out and put back together?”

“About fifteen minutes. But if the rest of the liquid
hydrogen in the tank has hairs floating in it the filter will just clog again
in an hour or so and the engines will go into auto-shutdown again.”

The captain spoke slowly and deliberately. “If the
thing clogs every hour we’ll just have to clean it every hour. We have no
choice. Let me know when you’ve got it back together.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Kim scraped all the hair out of the filter housing and
started putting the unit back together. Then—for some reason Mike was not privy
to—she glanced across at the identical filter housing on engine number two.
“Captain, someone has stuck a small ring of modeling clay to the side of engine
number two’s filter housing.”

In the image from her headset, Mike saw it too: bright
yellow clay with large finger-shaped dimples around its entire length. Every
dimple displayed an imprinted pattern of wavy lines—the uniform fingerprint of
a standard vacuum suit’s glove.

Kim climbed across the structural steel from one engine
mount to the other. As she did so, the ring of clay grew larger within the
image.

Memories floated up to Mike from his past. Memories of
how he and Richard and other lunar prospectors had searched for fields of
frozen comet-ice buried under the soil in deep mountain valleys near the Moon’s
south pole where sunlight had not imparted its warmth for millions—perhaps
billions—of years. They had sometimes used a similar clay-like substance, but
this clay was the wrong color. He stared at the irregular yellow ring.
It
is
the wrong color… isn’t it?
When he saw Kim begin to reach for it he decided
he didn’t care what color it was. He and the captain shouted almost in unison:
“Don’t touch it!”

Tina looked up from her nails. “Don’t touch what?”

Mike turned around nearly far enough to glance at her.
“Never mind. I was talking to my pocketsize.”

“You’re yelling for your computer to not touch something?
Are you crazy?”

He turned back to his pocketsize, hiding it from Tina
with his body. “It was nothing. Forget about it.” He expected her to pester him
with more questions. He was as surprised as relieved when she let it pass. He
raised the pocketsize to his mouth and whispered, “I missed some. Go back to
where Kim reached for the yellow clay. And cut the volume by half.”

Again, Kim reached out a green-gloved hand.

Faintly, the captain yelled, “Don’t touch it! That may
not be modeling clay!”

“What are you talking about?” Kim asked.

“It might be C-4: a plastic explosive. See the black
thimble pressed into it? If the clay is C-4 then that will be its detonator.”

Kim pulled her hand back all the way to her shoulder
and held it there, claw-like. Based on her head movements, Mike figured she was
scrutinizing the engine and its pump for any other abnormalities. She found
one. Mike saw it too. “Captain, there are words painted on the side of engine
number two.”

“Yes, I see them now.”

The words were written in simple block letters with red
spray paint on the engine’s otherwise clean stainless steel surface.

If what all this means

you cannot tell.

Just understand this:

payback is Hell!

“Kim, what do you make of it?”

“Well, as poetry, it’s pretty bad. As a message— Wait a
minute: a little red light on the black thimble just started blinking.”

The ship said, “Captain, I have just detected a coded
radio transmission which was broadcast on seventeen frequencies
simultaneously—apparently to make up for the fact that it was emitted at very
low power. The frequencies involved were all illegally located between the com
channels—probably to help keep the transmission hidden.”

“Were you able to triangulate the location of the
transmitter?”

“No. By the time I discovered the nature of the
transmission it ended. However, I am relatively certain that it came from
within this ship.”

The captain shifted in his seat. “Kim, the blinking red
light may mean the detonator is armed. I want you to move away from it, slowly.
See if you can put the bulk of engine number one between it and you.”

“Aye, Captain. I’m mov—”

A small explosion followed by a huge splashing jet of
clear liquid struck one side of Kim’s faceplate. The force of the rushing
liquid must have shoved her sideways. Mike saw her lose her grip on engine
two’s structural steel supports and tumble out of control away from the ship.
Six seconds later a powerful jerk spun her around to face the ship. It also
stopped her tumbling and brought her to a dead stop. She’d reached the end of
her safety tether.

“Kim!” the captain shouted. “Kim, are you all right?”

Green fingertips appeared at the right and left edges
of her faceplate. She steadied her helmet with both hands. “Yeah, I think I’m
OK. I’ve still got air pressure.” She flexed her arms and her legs too,
probably: though they were not visible. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”

“Good.” Some of the fear eased from the captain’s
voice. “Ship, close engine number two’s motorized fuel cut-off valve.”

“Motorized fuel cut-off valve number two does not
respond,” the ship said. “It seems to be malfunctioning.”

“Damn. Whoever planted the C-4 probably cut the valve’s
wires. Kim, you’re going to have to close the
manual
valve.”

Kim turned her head, and therefore her cameras, toward
the spot from which she’d been shoved. Mike saw a thick spray of clear
liquid—like water from a fire hose—shooting directly through that spot and out
across a star-filled black sky. It was liquid hydrogen: the ship’s fuel.

Two feet from the hole from which it escaped the clear
stream became white as milk. Riddled with tiny frothy bubbles, it was boiling
in the vacuum. The bubbles grew rapidly, and within a few feet the stream
became bloated: fanning out, wider and wider.

Ten feet from the hole the stream changed again. Having
dropped its temperature by explosive evaporation in the vacuum all the liquid
that had not boiled away to gas suddenly transformed into solid particles of
brilliant white.

Kim was engulfed in a great flurry of fragile
snowflakes composed entirely of frozen hydrogen. Glistening pure and clean and
beautiful in the bright sunlight, they reminded Mike of his childhood winters
back in Wisconsin.

“Kim,” said the captain, “do you think you can reach
the valve without going through that spray?”

Mike looked to the spray’s origin, and to the part
boiling most violently. The worst of it stood between her and the manual fuel
cut-off valve.

“I’m not sure, Captain, but I don’t think so.”

“We need you to try. But be careful. That liquid
hydrogen you’re looking at is about 250 degrees below zero. It’ll suck the heat
out of anything it touches. Your suit wasn’t designed for contact with liquids
that cold. More than a few seconds of full contact might crack your Teflon air
hose fittings or shatter your faceplate.”

“Might?” she said. “Are you guessing?”

“Ship?” the captain said.

Mike waited, knowing the ship would understand that the
captain was requesting confirmation, and that it would perform a search of the
extensive resources of Corvus’s library computer for all engineering and
scientific information that applied to the question at hand.

Four full seconds passed before the ship reported its
results. “No experiments have been conducted in which liquid hydrogen was
poured or splashed directly onto a vacuum suit or its faceplate in a
hard-vacuum environment, so I have looked up the engineering specifications of
the various materials used in vacuum suit construction. Ms. Kirkland’s Teflon
air hose fittings will remain safely strong and non-brittle far below liquid
hydrogen temperatures, as will the tempered glass of her faceplate.
Unfortunately, however, anything composed of elastomers—this includes Mylar,
nylon, Viton A, GR-S, nitrile rubber and all natural rubbers—if brought into
direct contact with liquid hydrogen will become either inconveniently stiff or
dangerously brittle.”

The captain said, “That’s gotta be half her suit!”

Mike frowned. It didn’t sound good to him either.

“Not half,” the ship said, “but it is substantial. The
housings of the environmental controls on her chest and left forearm are made
of nylon; as is the tool pack around her waist—though not the tools. Her
electrical cables are insulated with GR-S; her umbilicals are mostly nitrile;
and her suit’s thin outer covering is woven entirely of Mylar thread. This last
item is not a serious problem since the outer layer does not maintain the
suit’s air pressure, but only protects the fiberglass insulation batting
underneath from getting snagged on sharp objects. By far the greatest danger is
that all her suit’s gaskets and seals—those at the neck, wrists, ankles and
waist—are composed of Viton A. If one of these were to become brittle and crack
she would immediately begin to lose air. In that case she could easily lose
consciousness and die before getting back inside an airlock.”

“Kim, did you hear all that?”

“Yes, Captain. I’ll just have to keep my seals dry.”

“Check to see that all your seal cover flaps are in
place and snapped shut,” he suggested. “They might help keep the hydrogen off.
At least for a while.”

“Captain,” the ship said, “the hydrogen spray from the
leak is traveling away from the ship at very nearly a right angle compared to
the engine’s normal direction of thrust.”

“So?”

“My inertial platform indicates the leak is causing the
ship to tumble end-over-end.”

“No kidding?” the captain said sarcastically.

Mike could see that the ship’s tumbling was already
producing a centrifugal effect that—weak as it was—could not possibly have
escaped the captain’s notice. This force-like effect was attempting to push
everything located at the far ends of the ship, outward, away from the ship’s
center. Because of it, the captain’s arms were dangling lazily above his head
and his entire body was being drawn gently upward toward the domed ceiling.
Only the seat belt pressing softly against his waist kept him from falling
slowly up and out of his command chair.

“Try using the attitude jets to stop the tumbling.”

“I am already doing that,” said the ship. “Their thrust
is too feeble. We continue to tumble faster.”

“Well, just do what you can with the attitude jets for
the moment.”

The captain frowned at the image coming in from Kim’s
headset. Snowflakes drifted down from upper right as Kim’s hands strained to
pull her, hand-over-hand, up the safety tether. The centrifugal effect had
stretched the safety tether out to its full length and seemed to be trying to
gently sling Kim off into space.

The captain shifted his seat belt closer to his round
little stomach, perhaps in an effort to find a more comfortable location. “What’s
the g-force at the ends of the ship?”

“Two tenths of a gee—twenty percent more than Lunar
gravity. Captain, that passenger is calling again: Tina Bernadette.”

“Great, just what I need.” He pulled his hands down and
slid them under his thighs—to make sure they stayed down?—then cleared his
throat and said, “Put her through.”

What the hell is Larry doing talking to that stupid
woman? He should tell her to go to—

Tina’s image appeared on the dome. This time it did not
cover the image coming in from Kim, and it was a wider shot than before. It
showed Tina standing on the ceiling with her hands on her hips—a posture more
defiant than seductive. She had changed her outfit, but once again was not
smiling.

“Captain Palmer here,” Larry said absently—apparently
not noticing her flaming red miniskirt, the matching high heels or those long
legs in between. “How may I help you?”

“Captain,” she said with her unstoppably flirtatious
southern accent, “I couldn’t help observing that we seem to be executing an odd
series of maneuvers.” She used the back of one hand to toss her nonexistent
long hair behind her shoulder. “My concern remains the same—a timely arrival at
Von Braun—but I am now unsure whether I should be genuinely worried or simply
curious about what is being done to get us there.”

The captain was staring at the image coming in from
Kim’s headset when his passenger stopped talking. He looked back at Tina with
an expression Mike recognized immediately. The captain was trying to recall
from his short-term memory something—or anything—that she had just said.

“Captain,” Tina prompted, “is there some kind of
problem?”