When Maria looked like she'd settled into the idea of actually being a part of this and doing a mission with one of those Longknifes, Kris unbuckled herself from her chair.
“Folks, the sooner we do this, the sooner we get home. Anyone have a reason we shouldn't do this today?”
No one did. Quickly, they all followed her lead, unbuckled, and pushed off for the drop bay.
There, Kris discovered that Nelly and several others, including Chief Beni, had been making preparations for some time. The Smart Metal
TM
from the
Wasp
's protective shield had been drawn in and apportioned among the three launches that the chief in charge of boat maintenance assured Kris were in the best shape.
“No water weeds sucked up into any of these, ma'am,” he assured her with a nasty look at one of the bosun's mates flying the mission.
The 1/c bosun took the ribbing with a good-natured but determined smile. He might have made a mistake on Kaskatos, but he was one of the five pilots chosen to keep the
Wasp
from being left a derelict in space.
Kris would have a copilot riding on her right hand, and three brains strapped in behind her. Chief Beni had specially rigged helmets for the brain-to-computer connections for those, unlike Kris, who did not have their computers plugged directly into their brains. The brain sensors that gave the computer access to its human, and let the human communicate with its computer, had been soldered directly into the helmet. And while the computers usually communicated on Nelly net, today they were hardwired into the Smart Metal
TM
cable, and a comm line was included in that as well. All of the computers as well as the launches would be able to communicate by line as well as net.
“Don't know if the static of us passing through all that gas will kill our wireless net,” Chief Beni said. “With this hard connection, it won't matter.”
“Belt and suspenders,” Professor Scrounger said. “Good idea. Might have saved one or two of my marriages if I'd worn suspenders as well as a belt,” he muttered only half to himself.
Cara got the giggles at the image. Maria blushed.
Kris cleared her throat, and said, “Excuse me, I've got a preflight to do,” and headed for her launch.
It was Launch 1, the lander that had sucked up water weeds on Kaskatos and changed Kris's whole order of the day by not letting her run away from a fight. Everything had worked out in the end, but at the time, it had not been funny.
The bosun 1/c joined her as she walked around the bird. Everything that could come loose showed itself tight to her pull. The collar of Smart Metal
TM
was attached where the forward and aft sections of the shuttle were welded together, giving a strong bulkhead for the attachment. If any location on the launch could take the strain, that spot should.
Reaction mass was being pumped aboard as Kris watched.
“That's the last water we got,” the chief in charge of the launches told Kris. “No showers until you get back. Not sure we can even flush the head, ma'am.”
“We'll be back in a couple of hours,” Kris assured him.
As Kris boarded the launch, she made a final check of the engines. The antimatter containment pod had been attached as usual. Now it was held in place by steel cables that were welded to the aft bulkhead. That puppy was not going anywhere, no matter how much bounce was in the ride the planet below gave them.
Everything that could be done had been done. Now all that remained was for six pilots to do some of that fancy flying they boasted about at every opportunity. If Kris pulled this off, all those skiff race championships would be taking a backseat to this story.
A way-back seat.
“First, girl, you got to pull this off,” she muttered to herself.
“You say something, ma'am?” her copilot asked.
“Let's get this show on the road,” she said, and shared a high five with him.
Jack, Penny, and Maria were already in their seats right behind the flight deck. Jack was on one side of the aisle, Maria and Penny on the other. The young petty officer seemed lost in thought as she and her computer hurried through the interface process. All aboard wore space suits with their own oxygen supply. The launch was pressurized, but no one was betting that that would last the entire flight.
Kris strapped in tight and began the preflight check with her copilot. The bosun 1/c knew his stuff, and the check went smooth and fast. When it came to a radio check, Kris found that Jack, Penny, and Maria, along with their computers Sal, Mimzy, and Sheri, were on the same circuit as the flight deck.
“We will be talking to the other launches by landline,” Nelly said. “Captain Drago wants to hold radio communications to a minimum. He doesn't care what Ron says about the Iteeche not using this system. He insists it's better to be safe than sorry.”
“Smart man,” Kris said.
“So we'll establish a Smart Metal
TM
link to each craft and the balloot just as soon as we launch. We can use wire after that.”
“We can do better than that,” Kris said. “Launch 2 and 3, you will fly wing on with the balloot. Two, you have the planet side. Three, you get the deep-space side. I'll cover the low end. Let's see if we can match up with the balloot and not break Captain Drago's radio silence.”
With that, all preparations were done. Kris pressurized the launch, brought the engines up to idle power, and made her final check.
“Launch 1, requesting clearance for launch.”
“Launch 1, cleared for launch, and Godspeed,” came back in the skipper's own voice. It was unusual for him to approve launching a longboat, but then, there was nothing usual about this mission.
Kris let the launcher shove her away from the
Wasp
before she applied any power to her boat. Using as little reaction mass as possible, she edged away from the
Wasp
. The other two boats followed her until they were drifting in echelon.
Several sailors were out, loosening the balloot from its lockdowns on the underside of the
Wasp
. The balloot looked for all the world like a butterfly net Kris had used to catch flutter-bys, then release them, for a summer before she lost Eddy and everything lovely disappeared from her life.
The balloot narrowed aft until it hooked into a feed line into the reaction-storage intake. For today's mission, that aft end would be locked down. It widened gradually before it reached a shoulder well forward, then tapered a bit toward the mouth. During a refueling flight, the forward end would dilate open to swallow up the available gas.
Somewhere out of sight was supposed to be some kind of tongue arrangement that assured that whatever went in stayed in.
As the balloot drifted free of the
Wasp
, Launches 2 and 3 maneuvered to latch onto the shoulder. Wisps of Smart Metal
TM
reached out from the collar on the launches to catch on the shoulder collar of the balloot. The connection made, the two boats guided the balloot away from the
Wasp
. Kris brought her boat back into formation, taking the lower slot, and Nelly guided Launch 1's Smart Metal
TM
connection up to the balloot.
“We're all attached,” Nelly reported on the wire net. On the instrument panel before Kris, a flight path opened up on the central screen.
“If you pilots will fly this course,” Nelly said, “it will keep us together, and we should be able to fill the tank. We computers will do our best to adjust the cable so that it isn't too long or too short, no matter where you are.”
Kris eyed her flight path. It showed as a crosshair in the middle of a wide red circle. “I assume if we get too rowdy and fall out of the red, we lose the connection?”
“That is correct, Kris.”
“Does this assume that we're only using the Smart Metal
TM
we have on each boat?” Kris asked. “Have you made any arrangements for robbing Peter to stretch out Paul's line?”
That brought a pause. A longer one than Kris would have expected.
“You are correct, Kris, we should be able to move some metal around the collar from one line to another one. We had not made allowances for that option. Please wait while we adjust our subroutines.”
Kris and the rest of the boats waited.
While she waited, Kris eyed the triangular arrangement. “Nelly, did you consider flying the mission with only two boats? Two seem sufficient to hold the balloot between them.”
“We did consider that, Kris,” sounded kind of dry for a computer. “Our simulations showed a good chance that without the pull from below, the mouth of the balloot would close up. It wasn't absolute, but the probability was there. Kris, we're using just about the last drop of the
Wasp
's reaction mass. There was no guarantee that we could try the mission with two boats, then redo it with three if we had to.”
“Thank you very much, Nelly. We'll do it with three just fine.”
KRIS, YOU KNOW THE ODDS ON US PULLING THIS OFF STILL AREN'T BETTER THAN FIFTY-FIFTY.
NELLY, I FIGURED THEY WERE WORSE. IF YOU AND YOUR KIDS HADN'T DONE ALL YOUR WORK ON THIS, I EXPECT IT WOULD BE WORSE.
THANK YOU, KRIS, FROM ALL OF US. I KNOW YOU HAD TO SAY THOSE ENCOURAGING WORDS FOR THE HUMANS, BUT WE COMPUTERS KNOW THIS COULD BE OUR LAST FEW MINUTES OF EXISTENCE. I WANT YOU TO KNOW, WE THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU'VE GIVEN US.
AND I THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU'VE GIVEN ME, NELLY.
On net, Kris took in a deep breath. “All hands, and that includes you computers. It has been an honor serving with you. You know how much the rest are counting on us. Let's go bring home the bacon.”
Some Marines sent back an Ooo-Rah to Kris. Cara said, “Oh, let's,” and others answered, “We're with you,” or the like.
The screen in front of Kris showed a five-second countdown to a retro burn. Kris followed the countdown to zero and kicked in the engines.
Live or die, they were committed.
56
As Kris guided the boat through its entry to the ice giant's atmosphere, the thought crossed her mind. “Nelly, did you consider you computers flying this mission on your own?”
“This is one hell of a time to think about that,” Jack muttered,
“Yes, Kris, I considered that option, but rough weather flying is as much an art as a science. You can fly by the seat of your pants. I don't have any seat for my pants.”
“Good point, Nelly. Now you do your job, and I'll do mine.”
And Nelly had cut out a job for her and her kids that left plenty to do. Once the entry burns were done, the boats needed to turn around to face the coming atmosphere. Kris did it carefully enough while Nelly and her team rearranged the Smart Metal
TM
cables so nothing got fouled in the process.
Kris had had some experience with the programmable matter that Grampa Al had patented as Smart Metal
TM
. She knew that each molecule of matter could be designed specifically to meet a particular need. However, unlike a normal molecule that was attached to its neighbor by a chemical bond, the programmable matter held on to the next molecule as if it were an atomic bond at the electron level. That made for one tight handhold.
Of course when you split an atom, you got a serious boom.
NELLY, HAS ANYONE SPLIT THE BOND BETWEEN TWO SMART METAL
TM
ATOMS?
I DON'T THINK SO, KRIS. ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I'M NOW THINKING?
COULD WE END UP WITH A MAJOR EXPLOSION HERE?
I DON'T THINK SO, KRIS, BUT IT'S NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO SEE THAT IT DOESN'T HAPPEN HERE.
GOOD IDEA, NELLY.
Kris went back to worrying about keeping her boat's course right down the middle of the path Nelly wanted.
It was getting seriously difficult to do.
The upper atmosphere of a gas giant promised only light hydrogen and helium. They had gotten lucky; this was an ice giant, not a bigger gas giant. It held heavier water, ammonia, and methane for them to collect. That didn't mean things were any easier.
Kris had been warned to expect winds of as much as nine hundred kilometers an hour and a lot of bounce. It looked like this ice giant was at a point in its orbit that put it closest to its sun. That meant much of the solids were liquid or gas for the moment . . . and available to be gathered into the balloot.
They were also rather rambunctious in those states.
The ride got rough.
Then it got worse.
Kris found her target pipper jumping all over the place, though she managed, just barely several times, to keep it inside the circle.
Inside her head, she could almost hear Nelly shouting orders to her kids.
That couldn't be true; it had to be her imagination.
Kris had always considered Nelly an adjunct to her own thinking. Now she realized that Nelly was using her in a manner that Kris had no idea of, or control over, to help her communicate, or organize, or do something.
Kris struggled to keep her hands and feet working the controls as her mind merged with the boat. She felt more than experienced each jump, each knock, each bounce up and down. Around her, the boat's structure complained as it was twisted and pulled. She could feel each complaint, each scream as composite and metal were pushed to their limits, then left to fall back as the air they swam through forgot about the intruder for a moment and did something else instead.
Kris felt her brain settle into a trance. She and the boat were one and the same, going through this together, no break between where one ended and the other began.
Behind her, someone lost their lunch. She doubted it was Jack, but she had no time to check. Her eyes were on the instruments, taking their feed in, passing it though her brain and out to her feet and hands with nothing more than a hint of direct processing.