Death Sentence (19 page)

She zipped both bags shut, then moved carefully back up to the nose hatch. She lined up the bag with the pressure suit and the survival gear in it, aimed it down the tunnel, and gave it a gentle shove. She felt mildly pleased with herself when she saw it sail smoothly down the centerline and clear into the
Sholto
.

In theory, she was at the point where she could return to the
Sholto
, repressurize the cabin, get Jamie out of the air lock and into the second suit, then depressurize again and have both of them go aboard the
Adler
. But Hannah doubted the time burned up in all that would be saved by having two people on the repair job. Besides, given what the docking systems and the hatches and associated equipment had been through already, she didn't want to cycle any of it more times than necessary. Every time she sealed a hatch might be the last time it would seal properly.

And though she wouldn't admit it unless pressed, she genuinely didn't like the idea of Jamie's slightly spacesick self working in a space suit in the dark in zero gee. Someday there would be enough time between missions to get him on a zero-gee acclimatization course. Until then, she didn't want to risk his pride, let alone his life, or the mission, if it wasn't utterly necessary.

Which left her to get on with the job. Still unsure whether there was sharp-edged debris floating in the darkness, she pulled worklights from the gear bag, clipped them to convenient handholds, and pointed them at the pilot's station and the viewports. The result was a vast improvement on the lighting provided by her helmet lights alone.

"Jamie, you there?" she called over the suit comm.

"Where else would I be, and how would I get there?"

"Yeah, you're there all right. I'm in the
Adler
without any problems. It's a mess in here, but it could be worse. Whatever they make those viewports out of is mighty tough stuff. The cable smashed into the starboard viewport and punched the whole thing, viewport, edging, and all, clear out of the frame. The cable end hit it more or less end on, somehow, and simply lodged in the transparent viewport material. The whole show slammed right into the headrest of the pilot's seat. If I'd been sitting there, I would have gotten my head sliced clean off before I even knew the cable had struck the viewport."

"Aren't you full of cheery thoughts," said Jamie.

"I am, actually. I was imagining the
Adler
's cabin full of shards of glass and the cable snaking and twisting everywhere. Instead, I've got one solid chunk of viewport and the cable just hanging there peacefully, sticking straight out the hole where the viewport used to be. It doesn't seem to have struck anything else or damaged the control panels or any of the electronic systems. All I have to do is rig some way to hold the cable motionless while I bring up the cutting laser, slice through it, shove it very carefully out the window--and I've got a nice clean hole to patch that shouldn't be too big for the patching equipment we jury-rigged."

She and Jamie had removed a couple of deckplates from the
Sholto
's lower deck and then used the
Sholto
's viewports as a sort of template to guide them in cutting the pieces into the right size and shape to give a rough fit over the viewport. They had cut two such patches in case Hannah needed more than one try to get it right, but at the moment the job looked a lot more straightforward than they had assumed. By combining the cut-down deckplating with all the patching material from both ships, they ought to be able to seal the hole. Hannah was very decidedly not all that happy about using all the patches on both ships. They'd be in big trouble if another leak developed. But they didn't have much choice. They'd need every square centimeter of patch they had for this job.

"Great," said Jamie. "So, what? I'll see you back over here in, say, five minutes?"

"It
might
take just a bit longer than that," she said. "But I'll keep you posted."

"No more than you have to," Jamie said. "I'm trying to catch up on my sleep."

"I'll bet you are," she said. "Wolfson out."

Jamie hoped his kidding around was enough to keep Hannah from worrying about him. She hadn't been joking about how hot it would get in the lock chamber. The air lock didn't really have an environmental system to speak of. No reason why it should have one. It had been designed as a way in and out of the ship, not as a place anyone would need to stay for hours on end. That was why they had had to bring in the air scrubber canisters to remove carbon dioxide from the air, and the breather mask and oxygen tanks.

By running the scrubber and keeping the breather mask on, he was able to keep the carbon dioxide level within safe ranges and also get enough oxy to breathe. But there was no way to get rid of the heat generated by his body, or the sweat that had nowhere to go in zero gee, or the water vapor he was exhaling. He had plenty of water to drink, if need be, but the climate in the lock was getting to be something close to a steam bath. He wasn't in much danger of drying out.

He was as physically miserable as he could remember being in a long time, enough so that he was glad to have the navigation problems to distract him. Not that he was doing the nav work on his own. It was more a question of setting up problems for the nav computer to solve and approving or rejecting the proposed solutions. The challenge was not in planning an efficient trajectory for the
Sholto
toward Metran. The trick was in setting up a flight plan that would put the energy plume of the
Sholto
directly between the planet Metran and the
Adler
, so that the
Adler
could perform her independent braking maneuver without being spotted by whatever high-powered detectors were on-planet.

Jamie was asking the computer to find flight plans that would allow the
Adler
to hide behind the
Sholto
's energy plume not only while they were inbound, but also during their exit from the Metran system. The further challenge was to avoid its
looking
like they were doing it. That meant that the
Sholto
had to fly as smooth and steady a flight path as possible while leaving the
Adler
to do the fancy maneuvers.

It was the sort of thing Jamie was good at, and he worked the system quickly, developing a dozen basic scenarios for both their inbound and outbound flights. When the time came, they would be able to pull up the scenario that was the closest fit to the real-life situation and tweak it a little, rather than being forced to develop the flight plan from scratch in the middle of whatever emergency might develop.

After a while Jamie recognized that he was reaching the point of diminishing returns, having developed so many variations that there was barely anything to pick between them. He shut down the system. All that was left would be to upload his work to the
Adler
's nav system once they had the other ship patched up and put back together.

Patched up.
The phrase reminded him of something that had been niggling at the corner of his mind. When they had been planning the repairs to the
Adler
's viewport, Hannah had mentioned that the hull patch kit aboard the
Adler
had only three of the circular twenty-centimeter patches left, instead of the four that should have been in the package. There certainly wasn't any chance they had overlooked a bright orange patch the size of a dinner plate slapped on the inside hull of the ship.

It didn't necessarily mean anything. Maybe some agent on a previous mission had had a big evidence bag split open and simply reached for whatever could seal it up fast. Maybe one of the patches had gone bad, the adhesive dried out or whatever, and been discarded. It should have been logged or reported, of course. A hull patch was an important piece of safety equipment. But not everything that
should
have been reported
was
reported.

But thoughts of the missing patch brought him back to the reason he was sealed inside an air lock, in zero gee, and floating in a film of his own sweat. He keyed on the comm loop. "What's the state of play, Hannah?" he asked.

"Well, I've got the cable cut, and I only nearly sliced through my own suit twice. I've managed to push the cable end back out of the hole where the viewport was. It was a little exciting when the broken cable started to tumble. It sort of scraped against the hull, but nowhere near fast enough to do any damage. It's drifted well clear of both ships now and shouldn't be hard for us to miss when we start maneuvering. I'm just starting to squeeze a line of sealant around the edge of our slice of deckplate. I did a test fit already, and it ought to go into place just fine. Then I can slap the four
Sholto
patches and the three
Adler
patches around the edges of the deckplate and hose the foam-up sealant over the whole mess."

"Good," Jamie said. "Report unto me when thy seventh seal is setteth in place."

"Don't go all biblical on me."

"Do you realize how long I've been waiting to use that line?"

"Yes, because I've been waiting just as long but you beat me to it. And besides, I don't think 'setteth' is a word. Wolfson out."

THIRTEEN

LOTS OF NOTHING

Hannah checked the pressure in the
Sholto
's main cabin, then wearily opened her suit helmet and felt her ears pop as the slight residual pressure differential adjusted itself. She pushed herself over to the air lock hatch and punched up the automatic controls. She was just too tired to open the hatch on manual.

The door swung open--and the blast of locker-room air that struck her in the face made her wish she had kept her helmet sealed just a bit longer. Jamie propelled himself out of the lock chamber and peeled off the breathing mask. All of his clothes were soaked through with sweat. The inside of the hatch and the interior walls of the air lock were coated with condensed moisture. A faint misty cloud appeared for a moment as the hot wet air of the lock chamber came in contact with the cooler, drier air in the cabin.

"I think I sweated off two kilos in there," he gasped.

"You ought to measure it in liters, not kilos," Hannah said. "I was going to say I get to use the shower first, but you take the prize."

"I'm not going to argue. So how's it look?"

"Better than we have any right to expect," Hannah said. "No significant damage to the
Adler
besides the viewport and the pilot's chair nearly getting sliced in half. I left the viewport wedged into the chair and the stub of the cable still lodged in the viewport transparency. Our patch is ugly as the devil, but seems to be holding pressure without problems. But we're going to play it very, very safe. We'll keep both ships on reduced pressure to lessen the strain on the patch, and we'll wear pressure suits with the helmets on and open whenever we're aboard the
Adler
. We're going to keep both nose hatches shut when we're in the
Sholto
in case the patch fails. And we're going to keep both hatches
open
whenever we're aboard the
Adler
, just in case the patch fails and we need to be able to get back into the
Sholto
fast."

"That's just about the rules that I was going to suggest," Jamie said. "What about the grav systems? Do we stay in zero gee or back to one gee on both ships, or what?"

"I haven't decided," Hannah admitted. "I don't think that it's going to make any difference to the patch over the missing viewport. The ships were designed to operate under gravity."

"Then if it's all the same to you, let's go with standard grav on both ships. Sitting still in zero gee was bad enough for my inner ears. I don't think I'd like to try moving around in a large space for hours on end. And besides, it's a
lot
easier to take a shower in gravity."

"Okay, you sold me right there. Gravity it is," said Hannah. "Now get yourself freshened up fast. I'm itching for my turn--and that's no figure of speech."

Twelve hours later, both of them were cleaned up and had managed to get at least some rest, if not much in the way of proper sleep, and they were back at it, searching the
Adler
.

The job was harder than it had been at first. Working in open pressure suits, however necessary, was awkward and uncomfortable. The ruined pilot's chair still had the smashed viewport panel and the stub of cable was still lodged in place. There was no sense wasting time or risking injury trying to repair the chair or remove the debris from it. But there were enough broken and sharp edges that they didn't want it around, either. They wound up removing it from the upper deck and stuffing it in the
Adler
's lower-deck air lock just to get it out of the way. It was a necessary job, but it cost them nearly an hour of time that neither of them much liked losing.

The other problem was that they weren't just
searching
the
Adler
. They had to inspect her as well, checking and double-checking to make sure that she had not suffered any other, hidden damage. That, of course, went beyond examining the accessible parts of the ship's interior. They went through the process of powering up the
Adler
's systems in the slowest, most careful and painstaking way they could manage, checking every subsystem and status display before going on to the next step.