Her calculations showed that she’d be near enough to try to close the tender with suit thrusters if she could resolve the fore and aft running lights. Dead reckoning from her xel said that should happen in six minutes and she would reach the point of closest approach twenty-nine minutes, odd seconds later. But what really mattered was the last five minutes: at that range, she should be able to resolve all four running lights, and that would allow her to accurately guide herself in—if she was on the proper trajectory.
Of course, she wasn’t seeing her actual trajectory or the tender’s, but the mean plot of their respective error volumes. The only way she’d know if was she actually on an intercept trajectory was if the tender’s bearing didn’t change. Bearing rate was everything: if it was two degrees per minute or less at the point she could resolve the fore and aft running lights, she had a good chance, but it had to be ten degrees per minute or less when she could resolve all four. That’s when the sidearm came in: the total impulse from emptying the clip should give her an extra sixty-nine meters per second leeway in delta V, allowing for reasonable errors . . .
Reasonable errors. She’d been happy with her estimates when she’d constructed the algorithm, even a little proud: ninety seconds to measure the bearing rate to within half a degree per second; 10 seconds to slew and aim, 240 arcseconds pointing accuracy for each shot at a chosen guide-star; 0.3 seconds average reaction time to fire . . .
But now, after a twenty-three-hour drift—the idea that she’d be able to sleep through most of it was sheer fantasy—to be able to aim within a small faction of a degree? Time her shots within three tenths of second? Her shoulders were cramping; her fingers had long ago started to feel thick and numb . . .
What the fuck was she thinking . . .
The xel beeped, giving her the 30-second warning she’d asked for and put a red circle on her visor around the bearing where the tender should be. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed deep of the dregs of suit recycler’s remaining rancid air, opened them and tried to focus.
Yes, it was there. She could just make out the winking red and blue pinprick of light. The wave of relief made her dizzy. Shit! Focus, goddammit! Blinking, she zoomed the visor display to 13X magnification and aligned the reticule, then watched the countdown, waiting for the alert. It chimed and she zeroed the tick. Ninety seconds proceeded to crawl by at a glacial pace and the tiny point moved almost imperceptibly across the bearing rings. At a minute, it had moved over two degrees; when count ended, just under three and a half.
Not good. Maybe not fatally bad, but certainly not good. Kris entered the values into her xel. She had allowed a minute to input the bearing rate and angle and get back a guide star from her algorithm—another mistake; it took sixty-five seconds. Her xel highlighted the guide-star and she raised the gun, aimed and fired four shots at three-second intervals. The recoil felt gentle compared to what it would have been in a full gee, but the last one sent a spasm up her arms. She swore savagely at the pain as her xel computed the likely change in her trajectory and offered up new numbers. In three minutes and seventeen seconds, she’d do it all again.
Twenty-three minutes later, Kris was exhausted. She’d gotten through the last twenty minutes on pure adrenalin but it was failing now, leaving behind chills and a dangerous trembling in her extremities.
She’d also expended all but two rounds from her sidearm and seventy-five percent of her thruster capacity. That left her fifteen percent for her final approach maneuver and ten-percent reserve to match velocity when she got close. If she got close. The error volumes were shrinking and bearing rate was improving but the last three estimates had jumped around lot a more than she liked so there was still no way of knowing if it was enough. Another minute would tell her that . . .
The alarm sounded and she lined up the reticule on the tender and started her count. She could make out all four running lights now quite well at full magnification, which put the range on the near side of the estimates. The shorter range meant the upper limit on the maximum bearing rate would be higher; ten degrees per minute was nominal, but at the new estimated range, the value was closer to ten and a half.
The counter clicked through fifty seconds as the tender passed the 10-degree tick and her breath stilled. As the fifty-ninth second rolled over it touched twelve. Twelve degrees per minute. She dropped her reserve to five percent and ran a new estimate; dropped it to three percent and ran it again. Dropped it all the way to zero and assumed best case for everything just to make sure and . . .
I’m gonna die.
The thought seeped up like a memory from a nightmare, slowly overtaking her consciousness. She felt it tingle in her cheeks, gather in her chest and roll down to the pit of her stomach—a startling feeling: empty, hollow, cold . . .
Far off, the receding lights of the tender continued to blink—callously, monotonously—rushing towards its own oblivion.
Oblivion, eternity . . .
Thoughts leaking out to puddle in the vacancy inside her; a trickle at first—
Eternity: the length of time required for everything that was physically possible to happen at least once, according to her Academy physics instructor. What was his name? It was a joke—had to be a joke—eternity, infinity—the universe was finite, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t really drift forever—drift around what? What was she orbiting right now? Not close to any primary . . . The three-body problem: unsolvable, chaotic . . . but on what timescale? Should be Keplerian for at least . . .
Then in a rush—
Why hadn’t she kissed Huron sooner? Or Baz? Good kid, Baz . . . So he was in love with her—stupid, not his fault though—Shit . . . he’s gonna blame himself . . . He’d get over it—he’d better . . . Good kid but too nice, not killer enough—gonna get him in trouble . . . Huron, his asymmetric smile, the memory of their lips in contact—bright, immediate, tactile—like Mariwen’s laugh and the way she hugged . . . the scent of fresh-baked bread—how do I know that? She’d never had fresh-baked bread. Mariwen’s perfume—Mariwen in the hospital . . . oblivion—Trench—Stop! Fuckin’ stop! Hypoxia—signs of hypoxia: headache, cramps, dizziness, nausea, euphoria—the first round of pressure-chamber tests at the Academy—Tanner giggling insanely as the atmosphere dropped towards thirty percent, Minx on the edge of a freak-out until Baz jammed an oxygen mask over her face—death by hypoxia: edema, spasms in the chest muscles, tongue swelling, seizures . . .
Or the gun. Two rounds left. Solids—standard-issue sidearms didn’t fire the light-armor piercing explosive-tipped ammo assault weapons used. But they’d go through the side of a flight helmet okay—through one side. Probably fragment on impact with the other side—pieces bouncing around in her skull while her brains boiled out the entry hole under a full atmosphere of pressure. And then she’d drift and drift, surrounded by an ever expanding cloud of the frozen clots of her own intelligence until—
“I FUCKING HATE YOU!” The gun came up and she fired her next-to-last round at the escaping tender as the scream echoed in her ears. The echo died and everything seemed to go with it: a great searing silent rush and the tears at last began to well and her mouth was so dry the air rasped her throat and—
Don’t cry. You’re gonna freeze and what if they find you someday?
Why the fuck do you care how they find you?
I don’t know I just do . . . I just do . . .
One round left . . .
I can’t—I just can’t . . .
Almost two hours of oxygen left . . .
Don’t pop the visor—that’ll really hurt . . .
Two fuckin’ hours . . .
She shook her head angrily and the tears flew and spattered against the inside of the helmet; tiny globules ricocheting back into her face, her eyes. She blinked and blinked again and caught a glimpse of the tender’s running lights and they were . . . they were—upside down?
They couldn’t be upside down. She couldn’t be upside down either. What the hell?
I’m wrong . . . that’s the way they always were—must be—
And, as if in answer, the lights blinked on and off, with utmost deliberation, three times.
Four minutes later, the tender eased up alongside her with the wing hatches open and suited figure inside, faintly lit by the cockpit instruments. Basmartin’s voice came through her comm, shocking after so long with nothing to listen to but her own heartbeat. “Y’know, ma’am, this is shitty place to try to catch a ride.”
“Baz! What the hell are you doing here?” The shout made the helmet speaker crackle and he waved.
“Well, if you’re waiting for someone else, I guess I’ll just—”
“NO!” Her rational mind knew he was kidding, but it had a very tenuous hold right now. She realized how hard she was breathing and tried to stop. “I . . . I’m sorry. Sorry. Just—please—”
“Come aboard, Kris.” He popped the straps and pushed out of his seat on a tether. His outstretched glove caught her wrist and he pulled her inboard with a gentle tug. The hatches closed and sealed and she felt the umbilicals mate as she settled into the co-pilot’s chair.
“How much air you got left?” Baz asked has he engaged thrusters to turn them around.
She gripped the seat hard, feeding on the solidity. “An hour forty-five. Maybe two.”
“I’ll top you off. This thing’s kinda light on the environmentals, but we’ll be back in plenty of time.”
“Thanks.” She felt the acceleration press down on her as he fired the main engines and popped up the nav-display. His gloved fingers tapped rapidly across the console and their course appeared. “First hop in twenty. You okay?”
“Yeah.” Her fingers was starting to ache and she relaxed her grip, sliding her hands toward her lap. “Wh—what about Tanner?”
“Got ’im in the back—sleepin’. Y’know how he is.” He must’ve set his beacon on a delay timer and gone into hyper-sleep, Kris thought in some free-floating portion of her mind.
“Diego?”—with that same inner unconnectedness.
“No joy.”
The syllables, with their deliberate tonelessness, seem to fall between them. She hadn’t known Diego; she had known he was dead. So why did it make her gut lurch like that? Why was she surprised it did?
“So . . . how’d you do it?”
“Do what?” Baz leaned over and tweaked the sensor controls. “Didn’t notice any bad guys hereabouts, did ya?”
“How would I know if there were . . . But—I mean . . . How’d you . . . find me?”
“Well, it would have been a hell of a lot easier if you’d activated your suit beacon. There”—he pointed at the main ESM console—“keep an eye on that, will ya? It’d be bad if anyone sneaks up on us. This thing handles like a pig.”
“Where’s your fighter?”
“Ditched it. All that extra mass made things too dicey—not knowing how far I’d have to go exactly. They can fish for it if they want.”
“So how did you—”
“You had to be somewhere on this line—I just worked the problem backwards from what you told me—plotted out the volume where you’d have any chance of making intercept. Of course, it was about an hour and a half wide since I didn’t know how far you were gonna push things. I was afraid I’d sail right by, but I was hoping if you didn’t engage your beacon, I’d still be able to pick up your suit emissions.”
“So that was it?”
“Nope. Couldn’t get anything. Damn suits hardly bleed.”
“Then . . .”
“Your sidearm. When you fire those things, it produces a transient.”
“A transient?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t sure that’s what it was at first. Then I saw another some minutes later, figured it out and got a bearing. The third one allowed me to get a rough localization, but it was that last one that finally gave me a fix.”
“The last one . . .”
“Yep. Glad you didn’t give up on that idea.”
A violent shudder ran through Kris’s torso and she clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. “Yeah,” she said after a minute. “Me too.”
* * *
The console lights were swimming by the time they got the tender into the deck clamps; smears of color cavorting before her eyes, some blinking of their own accord, the rest just randomly fading in and out. Baz popped the hatch seal; air rushed in as the pressure equalized. She got her helmet off and was drinking deep of its sweetness as Warrant Officer Angel Moreno, the crew chief, stuck his jubilantly ugly round head in.
“You done for there, kid?”
“Fuck off, Chief,” Kris growled, fighting with the straps. The buckles were putting up a heroic resistance and her eyes stubbornly refused to focus but that didn’t give Marino the right to call her “kid.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Marino said, pushing her fumbling hands out of the way and expertly popping the releases. “Lemme give you a hand outta there.”
Kris nodded, gripped the thick, hard-calloused hand and pushed with her legs but they betrayed her as cramps bloomed through both of them. Her vision went from fuzzy to a startling nothingness in which her heartbeat was improbably loud although she could still hear people talking over it and there was a very strange sensation like swimming through something impossibly heavy and when her vision came back, it came back unevenly, full of dancing lights.
A medtech pulled back the light he’d been shining in her pupils and ripped a lead off the inside of her now exposed wrist—someone had removed her gloves. “She’s okay,” he said to the probable someone off to her right. “Just fatigue and dehydration. Hell of a swim and they didn’t figure on people riding in that tender. Damn long time to be living off suit environmentals.”
There was a sharp jab in her wrist where the patch had been. “Ow! What the hell?”
“Hydration pack,” the tech said with a grin, wrapping a length of bandage around her arm to keep it in place. “Give it a few minutes and it’ll fetch you around nicely.”
Kris became aware that she was sitting on a wing spar with Baz on one side and Marino on the other. Running a hand across her eyes, she asked, “Did I pass out?”
“Nope,” the tech said, snapping his case shut. “Just a brownout—that’s all. All good.”
It didn’t feel all good—it felt like warmed-over shit with a deep, hot tearing ache in her neck and shoulders, descending her spine and burning along the front of both thighs, flaring into her knees and spiking down her shins.
“Don’t try to get up for bit. Let the pack get a handle on those cramps. Just breath slow—it helps.” Kris did as she was told—it did help.
So how long’s a bit? she wondered as the tech stood and left. She didn’t want to sit here letting the pack get a handle on anything. She wanted out of the goddamned suit that was making her feel mummified, she wanted—well, a bath was out of the question, but at least a shower; she wanted . . .
“How long’s a bit?” she grumbled out loud this time, feeling for the nearest support—Marino’s brawny shoulder. “Help me up, dammit.” With Baz on her other side, they eased Kris to her feet.
“You got her there, sir?” Marino asked as she stood between them, wobbling.
“Got her, Chief,” Baz answered, and then to Kris, “How do you feel now?”
“Been worse.” She took an experimental step, staggered and he caught her. She straightened, her arms shifting around his shoulders, and dropped her face alongside his. “Look, Baz . . . sorry I sounded like such a bitch back there. Thank you. Thanks for comin’ back for me.”
“Don’t mention it, Kr—” But she covered his lips with hers and he stood there, suddenly frozen and his face going stiff. She broke the contact gently, pushing away half an arm’s length while his arms still supported her mechanically. No flush could show on his dark skin but his breathing was choppy as he said, “It’s okay—really.”
“I mean it,” Kris replied, low. “Really.”
“Yeah.” His mou
th twitched in an uncertain grin. “I—um—I should . . . Good morning, sir.”
This last was directed over her shoulder and Kris turned her head to see Commander Huron approaching, smiling with his hand held out. “That’s an damn fine thing you did, Basmartin. I’ll see that the CO hears about it and a copy of the report is attached to you file.”
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate that, sir.” Basmartin’s face went through a strange contortion as he tried to sort out the conflicting impulses to salute, hold up Kris, and shake the offered hand. Kris solved part of the problem by stepping back from between them, keeping one hand on Baz’s shoulder to steady herself. Huron solved the rest by taking Basmartin’s hesitant hand in his firm grip.
“There’ll be an ops briefing after chow at 1830,” Huron went on, stepping back a comfortable pace. “Go get some rest until then. You both deserve it.”
Kris detected a latent wink in Huron’s eye and a look of something almost like panic in Basmartin’s.
“Yessir,” Baz said hastily. “I—that is, I should really go explain about the bird first.” He nodded at Kris. “Would it be okay—that is, I think Ensign Kennakris could use some assistance, sir.”
The faint movement at the corner of his mouth told Kris that Huron was keeping a look of either surprise or amusement out of his expression. Maybe both. “Of course, Ensign. And no worries about the bird—taxpayers’ money never better spent. If someone makes a fuss, tell ’em to send the bill to me.”
“Yessir. Thank you again, sir.” He saluted as Huron stepped over to Kris and they watched his brisk retreat until he was lost from sight.
“He’s a good kid,” Huron said when they were out of earshot. “Didn’t scare him away, did I?”
“No. I think it was me that did.”
“So you two aren’t, um . . .”
“Nope. Would you gimme a little help? I want out of the this fucking suit. Like now.”
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 96