Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (25 page)

Ben gave him a look that told him he wasn’t getting anywhere.

Carl sighed. “Fine! I’ll go do it myself. Monitor comms while I’m out.”

Ben looked at him. “The detonator switch stays inside.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna have my hands full out there.” He turned to leave, then paused and turned back. “Captain, your daughter asked how you’re doing. Seems like everytime she sends a message something goes to shit. She’s like a curse.”

Ben growled at him as Carl floated down to the equipment section. He prepped to climb into his suit, stripping off his jacket, boots, and outer clothes down to his liner.

He slipped into his suit’s legs then raised his arms and pulled the torso down over his head. The bulky backpack with his rebreather and air tanks shifting his center of balance in the microgravity of the equipment room. He grabbed the rails and pushed his feet into his boots, then bent over and locked the seals. Last, he pulled his helmet out of its bag and put it on. Stepping off the rack, he turned and pushed his hands into his gloves, locking them in.

He double-checked his suit seals, checked the O2 levels, then clicked into the thrust harness. He made a couple of careful jumps in the equipment room, checking his range of motion in the suit by waving his arms around, crouching into a ball and flexing his waist.

All good.

“This really should be a two-man job.” He spoke into the radio, mostly to himself, but hoped Ben could hear him. He’d left their short-range radio turned on in the cockpit.

Carl gathered his tools, his welder and some scraps of metal. He fired it all into a heavy duffel bag and threw it over his shoulder. He checked his glue gun and tether line on his belt. This was going to be a quick and dirty job.

“Last chance to help.” He didn’t expect a response.

Carl climbed into the airlock. The feeder bomb squatted on the floor, a block with a big tube running back into itself, held in place by a pair of carabiners and steel cabling. He unhooked the tethers and it floated free into the cramped space. Carl put a gloved hand on it, keeping it steady.

“I’m going out, Ben.” Carl waited as the airlock cycled. No response came from above.

The light turned red. Hard vacuum. He opened the outer door to the vast emptiness of space.

He took a breath. The inside of his helmet smelled like plastic and sweat. He bent down and attached the feeder into his maneuvering harness. The usual bindings had to be augmented with thick nylon straps after their modifications and he tied these down, cinching them tight. The block was only about a meter on each side, but it was dense. He couldn’t fit his arms all the way around it, but it was secure. He checked that it wasn’t going to shift around too much on him while maneuvering.

No way to climb out on the ladder with this thing on his chest. He’d have to boost. He checked his harness, verifying his controls all worked, then hit the throttle and boosted gently outside, away from the safety of the airlock. With the controls on his right hand, he fired his jets, rotating him about then firing his thrusters bringing himself to a stop two meters outside the door.

The ship’s ventral camera showed Carl hanging in space, three meters away from the airlock. He was already breathing hard. Nervous. He felt like he was forgetting something. He adjusted the duffel on his shoulder, took a deep breath and pitched himself up towards the front of the ship, along the topside of the crew section where the Pup was docked.

Carl boosted forward smoothly along the spine of the hull. Gentle motion, he reminded himself. Don’t make too many adjustments. He slid over the Pup docked in its moorings on the back of the ship below him. “I’m over the target,” he announced to Ben and nobody.

He pitched himself in towards the ship and away from his direction of travel, lowering himself towards the Pup and the ship, his momentum carrying him forward still at one and a half meters per second. Too fast.

The unfamiliar mass of the feeder bomb touched the Pup first before he could get a hand on it and he bounced off the curved fuselage. Carl tried to grab hold, frantically reaching for one of the struts with his gloved hand.

He slipped. Unable to get a grip on it through the cumbersome glove, his forward momentum dragging him away.

Carl rolled around the outside of the Pup, breathing heavily, his face mask fogging up, still attached to the feeder bomb via the harness. He wasn’t used to maneuvering with the feeder block. It shifted his center of gravity forward and was messing up his balance. The duffel flopping on his shoulder made it worse.

“Trig!”

Silence.

Carl was tumbling, the ship rotating around on his right, slipping away from his grasp. It came back into view on his left and he applied some thrust, attempting to slow his rotation, desperately trying to get close enough to the ship to grab hold of something. He applied some of the make-shift thrust on the feeder they’d built from the spare suit but didn’t get anything. He hit it again. Nothing. Was it connected?

Why hadn’t he tethered?

He was breathing harder. Nearing hyperventilation. His mask fogged up more blurring his vision outside. His suit’s compressor wasn’t working? No time to check it.

The ship continued to rotate past him as he fell through space. He hit the thrust on his pack again hoping to push him towards the ship. Too much. He struck the curved surface of the starboard fuel pod with his shoulder and helmet at nearly 2 meters per second, a loud crack inside his helmet from the collision shook his head, splitting his lip on the chin guard. He bounced away adding a new rotational component to his tumble, unable to grab anything on the surface.

Panic. Vertigo. Got to get loose. He fumbled for the straps on his harness to detach the feeder bomb that was causing his imbalance. He struggled with the clips but they weren’t a quick release anymore. The manual belts he’d cinched and tied onto the thruster pack himself held it to him securely.

Still in a tumble, he reached down to his belt and brought his knife out. Carl started sawing at one of the ballistic nylon straps attaching the feeder to his harness. “Come on you piece of shit.” His helmet still fogged as he breathed, his mouth felt wet and swollen where he’d split his lip. He sliced through the first of the straps and the feeder let go on his right side.

He saw the ship flash by, getting smaller as he fell away from it and dabbed his thruster control, slowing his tumble. The feeder still attached around his waist continued to roll and pulled him forward slipping off his left shoulder and into his legs.

Carl watched his knife float away, flipping out of his gloved hand as he struggled to maintain his balance with the blocky machine. He juiced his thrusters again, his center of gravity now below his waist and spun backwards around the feeder like a pinwheel.

Carl screamed.
 

067

Making Time.

Jerem was eating a ration packet, sitting in the cockpit beside his father. They watched the telemetry from Calypso zoomed in on the nav board approaching the edge of the event bubble. Pixels on a screen representing 40 million kilometers ahead and above their position, the gap between them increasing every second with Calypso’s greater velocity.

Making Time was still adrift, still hoping to be of some use. Her crew waiting and watching.

An hour ago he’d heard the request for the unlock codes come in from Carl. The station hadn’t responded, at least not openly to them. Something was not right.

Jerem put away his empty ration packet in the bag beside his seat making crinkling sounds in the quiet cockpit. “Dad, what do you think’s going on?”

“Don’t know, son.” Hal stared ahead at the screen, his arms folded across his chest, legs crossed in front of him. He had some thoughts about what might be happening on board Calypso but he didn’t want to voice them. None of them were good.

The comm link crackled. “MSS18 Calypso, this is Control. Chief Engineer Greta Patrick here. Sending unlock codes on secure side-channel. Please prep for reception. Over.”

Hal nodded. “Good.” Patrick was a capable engineer. Oversaw most of the refit operations on the station. She knew these ships about as well as any captain. Better still, she knew the quirks of each of the ships. Maybe not all of Making Time’s secrets – Hal kept a few of them for himself – but most.

They waited. Another blip from the object appeared on screen.

“There it is!” Jerem pointed at the screen even though they were both looking at it.

It was closing in. Less than a million kilometers now. The two ships converging at a combined velocity of nearly five hundred thousand kilometers per hour. Calypso’s heavy burns had accelerated her to close to ten times the speed of Mars’ orbit and she was falling fast into the system. The object was on a line right for them.

“Do you think they’ll be able to get their engines online?”

“Don’t know, Son.”

Jerem realized he was holding his breath. He forced himself to breathe normally, and now that he was aware of it, realized he was thinking about his breathing. He hated that.
 

068

The Terror.

Reggie climbed down the last rung and reached out for the railing inside the airlock. Winston grabbed his arm and pulled him in the rest of the way. Once inside he punched the button closing the outer door. The interior began pressurizing.

They watched the red light above the door in silence.

Green light.

Safe pressure.

They turned and opened the door to the equipment room and floated in, unlocking their helmet seals and glove rings.

Francine’s voice announced over the speakers and their headsets from the cockpit: “Suits stay on. We’re still in a debris field.”

Reggie swore into his helmet and redid his seals. He took a sip of warm water from his tube and floated towards his locker. Then he remembered he was still wearing his thruster harness and backed into the locker with it, unlatching it from his suit.

“Good work out there, guys. Looks like the leak’s plugged. I’m going to turn the ship to see if we can get signal from Mars. Hang tight.”

Winston hooked his arm around the ladder while Reggie grabbed onto the rail on his locker as the ship spun about them. Reggie mumbled into his helmet that it was nice to be inside for one of the maneuvers but consciously didn’t have his mic turned on. There was a brief pause and then Vanessa hollered over their headsets, her mic overdriven into distortion. “We got signal!”

Suit-encumbered, zero-gee high fives in the equipment locker were dispensed. Reggie and Winston whooped at each other through their heavy helmets, barely audible to one another.

Transmission noise. Crackling, squelchy radio from an improperly aimed antenna. “MS.18 Cal…, this is .trol. Ch.f Engineer Gr.ta Pat* … casting unlock cod… secure * channel. … prep for recept.n. Over.”

Winston looked at Reggie. “That doesn’t sound too good.”

Reggie scrunched up his face in concern. “Drop-outs.”

Up on the bridge, Francine and Vanessa exchanged a glance. Vanessa quizzically mouthed “unlock?”. Francine shook her head and shrugged in her suit.

“Vanessa, bring Spot back aboard, let’s get out of here while we still can. We can tune the antenna later.”

“Aye, mam.” Vanessa dropped her inner visor and shifted back into drone space. She boosted the Pup back over the ship, pirouetting before coming to a relative stop. She did one more pitched roll, recording a view of the exterior of the ship before reseting the orientation and using the tiny attitude thrusters to lower the Pup into its dock.

Once over the clamps, she hit the lockdown button and the Pup was secured into place on the ship’s spine.

“All secure, mam.” Vanessa detached the control link to her suit from her console and brought up the navigation screen. She began overlaying the data she’d retrieved from the Pup on top of her nav console.

“All crew, maneuvers in five, four, …” Francine spun the ship back up and in above the Sun. “Commencing 1.5G burn in five, four, three, …”

The engine fired up and the crew were pressed into their seats, inflated suits squeezing in around them.
 

069

Tharsis Tunnels. Depth: 37km.

The train rumbled along its track, the compartment shifting and rocking side to side.

Greg Pohl was crammed into a seat, and had been for the last two hours. He was wearing a modified space suit, the shoulders, arms and legs reinforced with plates of carbon armor. The suit had a number of other attachments he wasn’t familiar with on the arms and chest pieces.

He looked down at the helmet resting in his lap. It was covered with more of the carbon armor containing an array of lights. The suit was a fair bit heavier than the one he’d tested in. They used these for a different application than space travel.

He looked up, Dante was still staring at him. He had been for the last two hours.

“What?” Greg looked for any sign of acknowledgement on his face. He just stared back blankly. Greg shivered and looked away.

The man beside him give him an elbow, barely registering through the layers of suit. “Ah, don’t give him any mind, he just thinks you’re cute.” He blew Greg a kiss.