Grantville Gazette Volume 93

by Bjorn Hasseler

  The stairwell was behind an emergency bulkhead. "We're in position," Larrok radioed.

  Behind them, another emergency bulkhead descended. That improvised airlock—no matter how primitive, no matter the unavoidable air loss whenever they cycled it—expended less energy than would an air-curtain field.

  What was that disturbing Earth expression? Humans had so many. Then she had it: choose your poison.

  A muffled thunk announced they had been sealed away from the others. "Ready."

  "Be careful," Bolbon answered.

  With a whoosh, the front emergency bulkhead began to rise. Even as out-rushing air tugged at her, the sound faded. Magnets held her to the deck.

  They tromped aft. Methodically (because so it had to be), slowly (because she could manage no better), Larrok did her inspection. Teljod, when requested, retrieved and put away tools. Bolbon, from time to time, checked on them.

  That systems kept failing in no way surprised Larrok. She encountered failures whenever she looked. At least, since the last inspection, no system had broken entirely.

  But the carbon-dioxide scrubber had gotten far out of kilter. In temporary compensation, until she might complete a deeper analysis, Larrok increased oxygen flow. She began electrolyzing water, replenishing oxygen in the habitable area while she still could. Within days—she no longer trusted internal sensors to be any more precise than that—their final dregs of deuterium would be spent. And as she set to work determining what ailed in the scrubber—

  Bolbon radioed, "Are you ready for some good news?"

  "You need to ask?" Teljod offered.

  "Any news," Larrok said, "though I prefer the good kind."

  "Oh, this is," Bolbon continued. "I think, quite good. The humans just radioed. Their vessel Andrew Carnegie will rendezvous with us in just under two Earth days."

  ****

  Three of them sat at the tiny fold-down table of the wee dayroom/galley/gym/laundry, to the patter (it being Carlotta's turn to choose) of Broadway show tunes, doing their homework. So, anyway, Carlotta dubbed their task. Bud, less charitably, called it busywork.

  What about me? Liam wondered. What would I call it? And settled upon useless bullshit. He was past bored with endless streams of unsolicited advice. Perhaps not every foreign ministry, sociologist, curious engineer, and conspiracy theorist on Earth had access to a powerful transmitter. It had felt that way since Interplanetary Mining Company disclosed Andy's position—crowing about IPMCo's prospects of pulling off a daring rescue.

  As though the company's independent stream—more like a Mississippi—of encrypted advice and edicts weren't excessive enough.

  The catsup-on-cardboard-quality, shelf-stable pizza the three of them nibbled (while trying not to taste) did nothing for Liam beyond bringing to mind some ancient sitcom.

  He stood, yawned, and took his datasheet to the stationary bike. Andy's deceleration was at the awkward-to-walk-even-with-Velcro-slippers level without reaching the safe-to-pedal-without-bungee-cording-himself threshold.

  At the end of a (skimmed) seventeen-page, unsolicited epistle, he summarized, "Who knew, people? We should be tactful."

  Bud, stroking week-old stubble, grumbled, "This one advises, don't piss off the aliens." Mere grumbling by this point rated as cheerful for him. They all had cabin fever, but Bud had it, mixed metaphors be damned, in spades.

  Carlotta glanced up from her reading. "Because they're more advanced than us?"

  Bud shrugged. "Doesn't say. Maybe just because."

  Carlotta tapped her datasheet. "This snooze-fest at first seemed to be saying, don't be nosy. Reading between the lines, it's more like don't seem to be nosy. With truly wild speculation, the author then hypothesizes what tech we can unnosily discover to share with the world."

  Whereas at least every other missive from Gita Patel, IPMCo CEO, amounted to, "Find out all you can and don't tell anyone"—apart from her, it was understood—"anything you learn."

  With a sigh, Liam quit pedaling, dismounted, and stood by the bridge. He gazed through the hatch, over the pilot's chair, and beyond the canopy to where they had been. At millions of kilometers of . . . nothing. Stars and planets were there; he just couldn't see them. The canopy's anti-reflective coating dispersed ambient light, but it did nothing for his lack of night vision.

  Unending blackness matched his foreboding.

  They had been radioing ahead for days, since Andy had slammed on its brakes. The same message—basically, "We're coming"—transmitted every hour. The computer-generated ETA changed. The silence in return had not.

  Liam cleared his throat. "Any word from Greater Good?"

  "You have good timing." Delivered by a disembodied voice.

  From where he stood, velcroed to the deck, the pilot's chair gave no evidence of occupancy. But whatever Mia lacked in height, she more than compensated for with spunk, savvy, and (to the extent he was qualified to judge) piloting skill.

  "Oh? What's the word?"

  "No word." She unbuckled, to stand and stretch beside the chair. Of the four crew, only Mia could stand beneath the sharply sloped canopy. She looked . . . pensive? No, worried. Sad. "We were tagged on radar just before you checked in. A single ping. I assume it's them, at last acknowledging our message. I pinged back, to confirm their current position and let them know we'd heard. I'd hoped they'd re-re-ping to close the loop, but they haven't."

  "One ping. That's all?"

  "That's all."

  Behind him, speakers belted out a duet from (if memory served) West Side Story. No way could Bud or Carlotta have overheard the bridge conversation.

  Liam envied their blissful ignorance. "I see only one reason for the aliens to be so terse."

  "Yeah. Any longer response would've taken more power than they could spare."

  Sure of the answer, he asked anyway. "Can we rendezvous with them any faster?"

  Looking sadder still, Mia shook her head.

  ****

  Andrew Carnegie had arrived.

  Larrok studied it, overwhelmed by relief, disbelief, and nonspecific dread. On the unlit bridge, she shivered even more than usual. In the group cabin, at least, they shared body heat. But the bridge had a viewport.

  Face to face, what would the humans be like? A natural question, perhaps, but nowhere among the most pressing. Such as, however belated the introspection, who was she to lead a first contact? Could these humans provide enough power to make a difference? In accepting their assistance, could she hide technologies the natives were too immature to control? And most urgent among her worries: could that puny, rickety, primitive craft be trusted to cause no further harm to her ship?

  Even as her thoughts churned, the human ship vanished from view. Again. Some disappearances stemmed from her vessel's steadily worsening pitch, yaw, and roll. But beyond those motions, the humans appeared to be circling.

  "Ship, when you can"—because just then its radio antenna lacked a line of sight to the humans—"ask when we should expect them and the portable power source aboard."

  "Excellent," Bolbon called across the bridge. "This is why you're captain. I'd have asked why they're sightseeing."

  "I thought it."

  Linguistics and language processing were sufficiently basic functions to have copied over intact from Station's self-aware quantum mind. But while the immature AI bud they called Ship remained far from growing into sentience, even its limited capabilities were essential. As, just then, in translating and transmitting Larrok's query.

  "They answered, ‘It depends,' " Ship said. "If Greater Good stops tumbling, the transfer will come sooner and be safer. If not, much longer." It converted human estimates for both scenarios into Doltan units.

  "Can we stabilize this ship?" she asked Bolbon.

  He checked his console, then nodded. "Our attitude thrusters have the fuel for that. Barely. Without a new power source, we won't be able to refill them."

  "Do it." Because without a new power source, they would be dead withi
n two days. Conserving fuel for attitude thrusters was the least of her concerns. "Ship, tell them we will."

  As the little human ship once more zipped in and out of view, Bolbon muttered, "What are they doing? Besides scanning us, over and over, with radar."

  Larrok had wondered, too. "Ship, ask what they're doing."

  Ship answered, "Characterizing our hull, as a step toward designing a docking cradle. Locating weak areas."

  At that demonstration of forethought, Larrok relaxed ever so slightly. Struggling into her vacuum gear, she as quickly tensed up.

  Ready or not, she would soon meet humans.

  ****

  Liam wasn't enjoying the déjà done.

  Once again, he found himself shifting pallets in Andy's doughnut-shaped cargo module. (Or annular, as ship's specs and company engineers described that unit. They weren't doughnut-deprived.) On the one hand, months into this already interminable flight, almost two pallets of consumables had been, well, consumed. As much more was newly crammed into their coffin-like sleeping compartments. So, this round of cargo Tetris had begun in circumstances marginally less challenging than the first time.

  On the other hand, this time he toiled in a hard-shell suit, helmet and all. Because, long before he finished, metastasizing clutter—in the cargo module, the dayroom, and the short corridor between—would make wrestling into vacuum gear impossible. Because, if cargo whack-a-mole ever ended, he and Bud (likewise already in his hard-shell suit, manhandling into the dayroom whatever Liam shifted into the corridor) would immediately head for the other ship.

  Of course the reactor and its integrated electrical generator, so desperately needed by the aliens, were as inaccessible as possible. More than behind a few rows of other cargo, they sat 180 degrees around from the hatch into Andy proper. There was no reason to need them before Nugget.

  Until there was.

  At least magnetic boots anchored him to the deck, which was useful given that most items massed more than him. Shifting a man-tall spool of power cable behind a miniaturized smelter, opening a gap into which to tuck a water-heater-sized roll of solar-cell sheets, he decided: Tetris was the wrong metaphor. By no clever reconfiguration could he make obstacles flash and disappear, even temporarily. This was like what his parents, from an era before self-driving cars, dubbed playing parking-lot attendant. Except the dumbest of cars was at least self-propelled. And didn't require bungee-cording after each move, less it float away. And weren't stacked two, three, or even four units high. Not to mention that parking lots didn't buck and arc and spin—as Andy, on its interminable reconnoiter, did—like some demented Tilt-A-Whirl.

  Setting aside all that, what valet ever imperiled the lives of desperate refugees by working too slowly?

  As he struggled with a crated robot, denting a hard-shell shin in the process, Mia radioed. "Survey complete. Bottom-lining it, their hull has taken a pounding. I wouldn't try docking just yet even if Larrok were okay with it. Which, I hasten to add, she's not. But the upside, such as there is, is this. With recon done, we can drift for now. It should make stevedoring a little easier."

  "Acknowledged." As good news went, Liam had to agree, it was minimal—like every step in this crazy endeavor. Still, any help was cheerfully accepted. He turned his attention to the next crate between himself and his objective. Then the next. Then the one after that . . ..

  "You taking a snooze in there?" Bud crabbed.

  Groaning, Liam heisted a bundle of metal struts into a newly formed, deep, narrow niche. "I wish." He toted a crate labeled OXYACETYLENE TORCHES a third of the way around the cargo module, setting it into the corridor for Bud to add to the dayroom chaos.

  "Just so you know," Mia offered from the bridge, "our friends have pretty much arrested their tumbling. Near the landing-strut end of Greater Good, I assume that's aft, they've opened a big external hatch. Two spacesuited figures are standing inside, in what looks to me like an empty cargo hold. I sense impatience."

  Liam translated impatience to desperation.

  Between a shrink-wrapped pallet piled high with miscellany and another of heavy-duty drill bits, the nuke beckoned. Inside it lurked 400-plus kilos of fuel: a low-enriched-uranium alloy. (In idle mode, the reactor was as inert as could be. He could, with impunity, curl up around it for days.) Factor in its lead shielding and other components, and the damned thing massed a bit over 2000 kilos. Two metric tons.

  "Almost . . . got it," he huffed. An exhausting few minutes later, after a final examination of the narrow, angled pathway he had excavated, Liam added, "Done . . . digging."

  "Corridor is clear," Bud reported. "Stuff in the dayroom is battened down, with even a skinny passage through said dayroom. Mark me down as all set."

  "Hold a sec." Liam took several deep, wheezing breaths. "Okay. Now, I'm ready."

  "Acknowledged," Mia said. "Carlotta, Hammy, and I are cozy." As in, shoehorned onto the bridge, behind a closed hatch. As in, wearing skintight, counterpressure suits, just in case. (Well, less so for Hammy Two, the hamster. If worse came to worst, all they could do for Bud's pet was seal his cage in a plastic bag.) Petite Mia alone in a hard-shell suit would scarcely have fit onto the bridge. No way could she have flown Andy that way. "Pumping out air . . . now."

  Because a hard-shell suit and the reactor wouldn't fit together inside the airlock—they'd need both hatches open. Had Andy flown as planned to Nugget, the last cargo offloaded would have been this reactor. Two of their robots, uncrated and assembled in a hold by then all but emptied, their batteries recharged by plugging into Andy's own reactor, would have done the schlepping while crew waited out of the way.

  Hints of wind ebbed into a shrill whistle. The whistle faded to silence.

  "Shifting the beast, starting . . . now."

  Teeth gritted, Liam gave the reactor's handles a firm yank. He moved; the reactor, as far as he could judge, stayed put. The damned reactor out-massed him many times over. Bracing himself against a nearby pallet, he really, truly heaved. Glacially, the reactor came toward him.

  Shuffling backward, tugging all the while, he guided his burden—never mind the occasional scraping against other cargo to one side or the other—along the path. He had tunneled, as best he could, in short, straight shots. Only best wasn't good enough: every few meters, with (silent) crunching and careening along the way, he had to navigate a shallow bend.

  Past the final corner, he released his burden to scurry into a shallow recess near the cargo-module hatch. The reactor glided past him. Emerging behind it, he grabbed hold again, now struggling to slow it down. "Coming out, Bud. Brace yourself."

  Standing in the corridor, Bud halted the reactor with a growled, "Careful!" Followed, in a stage whisper, by, "Here I thought being a linebacker was brutal."

  Mia said, "Maybe you girls should stop yapping and be on your way."

  Now why didn't I think of that? Liam wondered. "We're working on it."

  In what only seemed like geological time, the men maneuvered the reactor along the short corridor into the dayroom. Bud stepped into the gaping air lock. The reactor and Liam waited behind.

  Tether reels, bulging satchels (of hand tools, portable instruments, and folded datasheets to display reactor and generator manuals), and two gas pistols apiece had been pre-positioned in the air lock. In a clanking, contortionist act, they holstered pistols, slung satchels across their chests, and tethered themselves to the reactor and the hull. Sweaty and wilting, his helmet's water reservoir approaching half-empty, Liam radioed, "Ready for our little excursion."

  "Copy that." With the gentlest of nudges from attitude thrusters, Mia eased Andy closer. "We're in a hover, separated by ten meters"—not coincidentally, almost the full length of their safety tethers—"our hatch facing theirs. That's as near as I feel it's safe to come."

  She cycled open the air lock's outer hatch. . . .

  ****

  Among the myriad ways they were unprepared, no one aboard Andy had trained for spacewalks, much less f
or making ship-to-ship transfers. Sure, they had prepped to work in vacuum on Nugget—tethered all the while to Andy, or to guide wires running piton to piton across the asteroid's surface. Still, lest some klutz launch himself into space, Nugget's gravity being less than negligible, they had practiced a bit—it seemed eons ago—getting around with gas pistols. And Liam had been outside, for a short while, anyway, back when he and Carlotta reconfigured the ship for its desperate diversion to the Belt.

  Bud had no such recent experience.

  "Ready," Liam radioed. Continuing, in his head, as I'll ever be.

  Bud transferred their tethers from rings inside the air lock to rings on the hull, then demagnetized his boots. "Let's do it."

  Mia acknowledged, ending with, "Streaming to you . . . now."

  Basic medical telemetry—surprise: his heart rate was elevated—receded from a major chunk of Liam's heads-up display to a postage-stamp corner. Range and velocity data from Andy's radar took over the vacated space. The alien vessel was 10.2 meters distant, separating at about 0.1 meter per second. A leisurely crawl.

  "Now that we're here," Bud said, "and actually doing this? I gotta say, it's kind of crazy."

  "Just kind of?" Carlotta shot back.

  "Stow it," Mia ordered. "Being on the private channel doesn't mean squat. Every radio telescope in the Solar System is listening. Sooner than later, everything said will get decrypted."

  With boot magnets switched off and a firm push, Liam wafted them out the airlock. Interminable seconds later, his HUD updated to the ship's radar reporting about him. Distance: 9.9 meters. Closing velocity: 0.05 meters/second. If at a pace to embarrass an arthritic caterpillar, he was moving in the right direction.

  Taking a good, long look at Greater Good, he shuddered.

  Nothing better described the spherical vessel than a rubber balloon weeks after the party. Or God's own grape, aspiring to become a raisin. Wrinkled. Shrunken in on itself. Surely, its hull was rigid. It couldn't have contracted. So what . . .?