Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space (7 page)

He faked a cheerful tone, poorly. “Oh, it’s nothing to
worry about. I’ve got my chief flight engineer working on it right now. She’ll
get it straightened out. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to see how she’s
doing. Thank you for calling.”

“But I—”

“Captain: out and clear.”

Tina’s image disappeared from the dome.

Mike, and the recorded image of the captain, both held
their breath as they watched from Kim’s vantage point, her climbing along the
four inch wide hydrogen fuel line between engine number two and its pump. Kim
seemed awash in a blizzard of big fluffy snowflakes. The stainless steel fuel
line was coated white with a growing layer of frost.

“Things are getting slippery out here, Captain.”

Slippery and dangerous!
Mike thought.
Why did
Larry talk to that stupid—

Kim’s right hand slipped off the fuel line and her
headset’s image jerked several inches to one side. A metallic thump marked the
moment the image stopped moving. It remained in that location for a few
seconds.

When Kim returned her right hand to the fuel line she
surveyed her surroundings. Almost everything was thickly coated with frost now:
the pump, the coolant lines, the valve actuator lines, the hydrogen pre-heat
lines, and of course the I-beams and cross-braces of the engine mount. The only
nearby objects to escape this chubby whiteness were those splashed directly by
liquid hydrogen. Either the liquid was cleaning away the frost as it formed or
preventing its accumulation in the first place.

As Kim panned the area, Mike looked through the
snowflakes blowing around her searching for their source. Most radiated from a
spot where a ragged slow-moving portion of the spray slapped flat into a large
diagonal cross brace—which was itself a part of engine number two’s mounting
structure. The rapidly solidifying flakes were thus scattered in many
directions at once.

“Kim, as you pass the source of the spray stop a moment
and look at the filter housing. I want to see the hole the bomb made.”

“Aye, captain.”

Thirty seconds of cautious climbing later she arrived
at the source and examined the automobile-muffler-shaped filter housing. Mike
was momentarily surprised by the fact that it had no covering of frost. He
watched as big fluffy snowflakes landing on its shiny metal surface disappeared
instantly; each evaporating directly into invisible hydrogen gas without
bothering to pass through an intermediate liquid state first. He then
remembered that the hydrogen rushing through the filter hadn’t yet lost its
miniscule warmth by vacuum boiling and so kept the housing well above
hydrogen’s freezing temperature.

He studied the filter housing’s damage. It was broken
on one side leaving a jagged hole as large as a man’s fist. Clear liquid
sprayed furiously from that hole.

The spray reminded him of the high-pressure fire hoses
that riot police used to subdue unruly mobs back in the twentieth century.
Based on old clips he’d seen, such a hose could throw a column of water
powerful enough to knock an entire crowd off their feet. And that was in
earth’s powerful one gee gravity.

Staring at the splashing liquid hydrogen made Mike more
and more nervous. He found it too easy to imagine a gush of the super-cold
fluid forcing its way under the seal cover flaps at Kim’s wrists and the base
of her helmet. Easier still to imagine half a dozen plumes of her precious
breathing air shooting out of her suit from ruptured seals as she—beyond reach
of any help—screamed and flailed in agony.

In his entire spaceworking career, Mike had seen
footage of only one person’s vacuum suit springing a leak. But even that one
was far too many. It changed him. It changes everyone. That’s why it’s required
viewing for vacuum suit certification.

“The spray looks awfully big,” said the captain. “Do
you think you can get past it from this direction?”

“I don’t know, but I’m gonna’ try.” Shifting her
position enough to free her right hand, she extended her arm to grab the fuel
line ahead of her and continue her climb.

“Kim, your arm!”

She pointed her head directly at her right arm. The
suit’s green detailing was white, the red and yellow safety markings were
white, even her green glove was now wholly white.

Kim made a fist and shook her arm. Crunchy white flakes
a quarter of an inch thick and ranging in size from pennies to potato chips
flew off in all directions. The frost, however, in the wrinkles of her elbow
joint and wedged between her fingers refused to be tossed away so easily.

She worked her arm in large circles to loosen the elbow
material. This had little effect—except that it compacted the material into
harder more stubborn impediments to her freedom of movement. In apparent
frustration she raked the frost out with her other hand, then raked between her
fingers.

The image from her headset trembled briefly. Mike felt
a sympathetic shiver crawl up the length of his own spine. A vacuum suit’s
insulation was good, but it was no match for conditions like these. He knew she
must be feeling the cold—especially at her hands, feet, knees and face.

Kim looked down at her legs. She scraped frost from
both her knees then kicked the fuel line several times to knock chunks from her
boots.

Again, she started climbing along the fuel line. Mike’s
muscles flexed: trying to help. She leaned far to the left as she climbed,
keeping her body out of the strongest part of the spray.

Even so, a rain of clear droplets from the main spray’s
ragged edge pelted her right arm and leg. As this liquid splashed and boiled
across the surface of her suit, it peeled off long thick chunks of frost molded
exactly to her suit’s shape which tumbled away into obscurity.

Fighting to maintain her balance against the force of
this spray, she moved her right leg too far and the spray caught her foot just
below the ankle seal. The liquid’s mass shoved her foot sideways, forcing her
entire body to swing in that direction. Likewise rotating, her other foot
slipped from its frosty I-beam. She struggled to hug the hydrogen fuel line
tightly to her chest but as she swung around it she moved into the worst and
most powerful part of the spray.

High-speed liquid slammed square into her faceplate and
shoved her backward harder even than before. In this gravity-like centrifugal
situation, she dropped for several seconds before jerking to a stop at the end
of her tether. She hung there, still and quiet.

The captain yanked his armrests to pull himself forward
in his command chair. “Kim!”

She didn’t respond.

“Ship! Give me visuals from all the aft cameras!”

Four new images appeared on the bridge dome. All were
wide angle and showed overlapping sections of the curved outer edge of the
rad-shield and the black sky beyond.

One image, however, contained an additional object: a
person in a white and green vacuum suit half-covered with frost dangling at the
far end of a red and yellow striped safety tether. The tether was pulled tight
and the person was swinging back and forth very slowly, like a big dead
pendulum—the centrifugal force had become that strong.

“Kimberly!” the captain yelled. “Can you hear me?”

“Quit yelling!” she croaked. “I’m not deaf!”

“Are you OK?”

“How would I know? I mean, probably. I think so.”

You don’t sound OK to me,
thought Mike.

“I’m just dizzy. Got a face full of hydrogen. Slapped
me around pretty good. Let me rest here for a minute.”

“Yeah. Good idea.” The captain eased back into his
chair, then turned his head slightly as though to speak to a different person.
“Ship, how much fuel have we lost?”

“Fourteen percent of what we had before the leak.”

“How much can we lose and still make our docking
window?”

“Twenty-six percent.”

“Damn. That’s not good.” He softened his voice enough
to show sympathy for the danger Kim was in yet not so much that it stopped
conveying the urgency of their situation. “Kim, do you still think you can get
that leak stopped before we lose too much fuel to decelerate and make our
window?”

“Aye, Captain. But can you do something about this
centrifugal force? It’s not making my job any easier.”

“Maybe. At least I’ve got an idea. Ship?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Instead of using the attitude jets to oppose the
thrust of the leak, I want you to use them to rotate the ship 180 degrees
around its long axis. By pointing the leak in the opposite direction we can use
the thrust of the leak itself to slow the ship’s tumbling.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“Kim, I want you to try—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” the ship said, “but I have
detected another coded radio transmission. It is similar to the first, and
appears to—”

A tight barrage of loud bangs reverberated through the
walls of the bridge. The captain jerked to attention, straining against the
confinement of his seat belt. “Were those gunshots?”

The ship said, “I’m not sure what they— Captain, the
attitude jets are inoperative.”

“What?”

“I believe those noises were a series of detonations
designed to disable the attitude jets, and that the coded transmission
triggered them. Our saboteur would seem to be thorough.”

“He also seems to be eavesdropping on everything we
say.” The captain tugged on his ear a few times before continuing. “I want you
to scramble the com channel I’m using with Kim. Scramble both video and audio
and change the scramble pattern every ten seconds.”

“Aye, aye. Scramble mode is now engaged on com channel
seven. Captain, Tina Bernadette is calling again.”

“No calls! At least not from her. Were you able to
triangulate the transmitter’s location this time?”

“It came from somewhere in the passenger and crew
decks.”

“That only excludes Kim and me.” The captain grimaced
as he squirmed in his command chair. He tugged at his seat belt as if it might
be digging into his hip bones. “What’s the g-force at the ends of the ship?”

“Nine tenths of a gee.”

More than five times lunar,
Mike thought.

The captain began to ramble—clearly thinking aloud.
“The main engines pivot hydraulically so as long as they’re running we can
control our attitude by tilting them. If Kim can stop the leak and fix or
bypass that ruptured fuel filter—and if there are no more hairs in the fuel
itself—we might still be able to make our docking window. Maybe!” Again, he
adjusted his seat belt. “How much fuel have we lost?”

“Nineteen percent.”

“How long ‘til too much?”

“Three minutes, twenty seconds.”

“Kim, I’m sorry but it looks like I can’t slow the
tumbling and you’ve only got three and a quarter minutes to get that valve
closed.”

“Aye, Captain.” Kim’s breathing had become heavy. “I’m
climbing a different route. Be there in about two minutes.”

A wave of cold sweat spread across Mike’s chest at the
sound of her heavy breathing. Val’s respiration had been running fast when he’d
found her.
Is that why Kim fell? She was poisoned?
Mike listened as it
got progressively worse and began breaking her sentences into chunks.

“Kim,” the captain said, “why are you breathing so
hard?”

“The g-force,” She stopped to breathe. “is getting
strong.” She did it again. “I couldn’t get through from that other direction.”
There was a longer pause. “So I’m having to climb—” Again she took a deep
breath. “through the structural steelwork—” And again. “of engine two’s mount.”
She took three breaths. “This is hard work!”

Nervously, Mike rubbed his mouth and both cheeks with
the palm of one hand. Though why he should feel relieved that Kim wasn’t
poisoned was a mystery even to him. After all, dead is dead.

Maybe I’m hoping she died instantly; that she died
without suffering.
He thought about this for a moment, then realized the
truth. That wasn’t it at all. He’d been deceiving himself. He was actually
hoping to see something the captain had overlooked. He was hoping to discover
that Kim wasn’t really dead—that by some fluke of chance the captain had been
mistaken; that somehow she’d secretly survived.

“Ship, how much time?”

“Two minutes, five seconds. Michael McCormack is
calling.”

Mike jerked to attention.
That’s when I called to
ask why the ship was spinning!

The captain shook his head. “Can’t talk to him now.
Kim, you’ve got two minutes until we lose our window.”

“Almost there.” She scraped a half-inch layer of frost
from a section of I-beam before grasping it. The image shook steadily from her
shivering.

She must be cold all over,
Mike thought.
Her
hands would be the worst. Suits have the least insulation there.
She paused
long enough to rake frost from the back of her right glove and wrist, then
climbed on.

Frost had so far not managed to cling to her faceplate.
This wasn’t surprising, a faceplate is just a curved sheet of glass. Sure it’s
tempered, laminated and treated with high-tech optical coatings, but it’s not
insulated; warmth seeping through from inside would quickly melt any frozen
hydrogen that touched it. But now loose flakes accumulated at its edges like
the windblown snow captured on terrestrial window panes, and the view through
it was getting foggy.

“Kim, is your faceplate frosting over?”

Her half-frosted green-gloved hand shivered badly as it
wiped across glass. This removed most of the snow from around the faceplate’s
edges but did nothing to improve the fogginess of her view. “It’s not on the
outside. The moisture from my breath is condensing and freezing on the inside
surface. I can’t wipe it off.” She exhaled and the fog became worse. “If this
keeps up, I’ll be as good as blind in a couple of minutes!”

The captain ran his thick fingers through his white
hair. “If you can get that valve closed you should be able to hold your
position and wait for the frost around you to melt in the sunshine. Then your
suit will warm up enough for your view to clear.”