Overload Flux

by Carol Van Natta

  According to the ship’s clock, they should have just started feeling the effects of the nitrogen narcosis, had they not isolated the shipcomp virus. Luka, having secured the xeno kit, headed to the nav pod to ask Haberville if the hull scan found anything, when he felt the ship shudder.

  He took another step and the ship shuddered again. Gravity fluctuated, then stabilized. Luka yelled for DeBayaud and Adams while launching into a run. His forward momentum slammed him into the door jam. He tumbled inside the nav pod and landed on his knees next to the med kit, behind the co-pilot chair. Haberville was snarling curses at the nav interface as she worked it, fingers flying.

  A sharp, horrendous sound of metal groaning assaulted his ears, and lighting and gravity failed as the floor shuddered and tilted under him. The pressure in the pod suddenly popped his ears, and he realized the pod was self-sealing to maintain atmosphere. He fumbled with the neck controls on his exosuit to get the containment working. His hands were now sealed, too, at the cost of some dexterity. Worry and fear for Mairwen flooded him, even though he knew the engine pod was also self-sealing, and she wasn’t inclined toward panic. He hoped Adams and DeBayaud made it in with her, because he didn’t want to imagine what was going on with the rest of the ship, where poor Ta’foulou was.

  Emergency lighting came on. With great clumsiness, he secured the med kit to a hold-down, then maneuvered himself into the co-pilot chair and strapped in. He could see Haberville’s lips moving, but he couldn’t hear anything. He finally remembered to switch on the exosuit’s heads-up display. The audio came through loud and clear, but no projected images. He didn’t know if his suit had that, or if it just wasn’t working.

  “...at a time. Adams, sit rep and injury status.” Haberville had the calm, no-nonsense tone of the Space Div pilot she’d been before contracting with La Plata.

  “The exercise room and pilot staterooms are gone. I can see black space. Zero atmosphere, zero gravity. I’m in the kitchen, and I have some lights.” Adams’ voice sounded breathy, but not panicked. “I’m concussed but functional.”

  “Adams, find a hold-fast and tie in. How’s your exosuit?”

  “I’m already anchored. Display says nine hours of air at average exertion rate, sixteen hours of heat, twenty hours of fluids.”

  Luka pictured the layout of the ship in his head. “Adams, if the autodoc survived, it should have at least five hours breathing mix, and maybe self-contained heat packs.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good,” said Haberville. “DeBayaud?”

  There was no answer.

  After a long pause, Adams said, “Last I saw, he was headed toward the staterooms to get Ta’foulou. That part of the ship is gone.” There was a forlorn quality to his voice.

  “Understood,” said Haberville. “Morganthur, report.”

  Luka hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until he heard Mairwen’s slightly raspy voice. “Engine pod sealed, engines undamaged. Full atmosphere, full heat, full charge capacity, zero gravity. I am functional.” He would have felt better if he could see for himself what she meant by “functional,” considering her loose definition of the word “fine.” She didn’t seem to worry about herself as much as he did.

  “Haberville,” he said, “can we can get Adams into one of the sealed pods?”

  “Not without losing all atmosphere,” she said. “We’re going to have to try to land this clusterbucket and pray to the Baby Jesus it will hold together.”

  * * * * *

  Mairwen unsealed her exosuit to save its breathing mix for later, then strapped herself to the bench facing the display. The engine pod was mostly dark, even to her extended visual range. She’d been lucky to escape with only bruises, though some of them were likely to be lingering. According to the engine comp, the pod had thirty days of breathing mix and longer than that for heat. Haberville had said she expected to have them down on the planet within the next five hours.

  Trackers were trained in zero-G, but Mairwen had never had any assignments that required her to function in it. The lack of gravity was playing havoc with her stomach, making her nauseated, as if she’d ingested caffeine. She was glad her high metabolism meant she didn’t have much left in her stomach to throw up if it came to that.

  There was little else to do besides wait and think. She selfishly wished Luka were in the engine pod with her, where she could see he was safe, but knew it was better that he was in the nav pod where he could direct Haberville as needed.

  The sabotage, she decided, had been effective but generic. She was uncertain as to whether their ship, specifically, had been expected to approach the Insche 255 system, or if they’d simply been caught by a signature-based security protocol protecting approaches to the system.

  If Insche 255C was indeed a hybrid planet, there would definitely be an in-system perimeter, but it would have to be well camouflaged to hide it from casual observers. If she were designing it, she’d have passive telltales that automatically reported any visitors via packet, the way the Berjalan’s distress call had gone out. All surveyed systems in the Concordance, habitable or not, had a comm relay, which couldn’t be destroyed without bringing a military crew to investigate and replace it. But comm relays could be subverted...

  Mairwen brought up the specs for the engine and the spare parts inventory for the engine pod, then asked Haberville if she could provide directions for building an exploration-style comm relay.

  “Why?” Haberville sounded impatient.

  “To improve the chances our distress message will get to its intended destination,” Mairwen said.

  “The system’s comm relay is working fine. There’s no need.” The tone was snappish.

  Mairwen considered how to explain it, but Luka jumped in first. “If I were hiding a hybrid planet, I’d find a way to read or delay any outgoing packets that didn’t come from my people.”

  “You mean like jack crews do?” Accusation colored Haberville’s tone.

  Mairwen sighed. She’d never been part of a jack crew, but the CPS had been happy to incorporate their techniques into the official paracommando pathfinder curriculum. It wasn’t ideal that Haberville now thought she was hiding a criminal past, but it might save some explanations later.

  Luka’s voice had a sharp command edge. “Can you help Morganthur or not?” Mairwen guessed he was feeling protective of her, since she often felt that way about him. It was unexpectedly comforting.

  Haberville’s “Yes, sir” had more than a hint of disrespect in it, but the instructions appeared on the engine pod console.

  Mairwen spent the next two and a half hours fashioning the rudimentary comm relay. It would have gone a lot faster if she’d been in full gravity, and she wouldn’t have lost so many bolts and fasteners that would undoubtedly get in her way later. The trickiest part was launching it away from their damaged ship, the planet, its single moon, and anything else it could run into. Fortunately, Haberville was cooperative and they got it deployed and the repeating distress call transmitted.

  Luka periodically asked Adams to do trivial things and report back, which Mairwen thought was odd, until she realized he was trying to keep Adams from worrying or drifting off to sleep. Mairwen liked hearing the sound of Luka’s voice, and regretted she’d never told him so.

  She stayed as still as possible, resting as best she could in zero-G, knowing she’d be grateful for it later. Haberville’s voice woke her from a semi-doze.

  “If it’s any consolation, ladies and gentlemen, Insche 255C is definitely not a dead, poisoned planet like Concordance records say it is. Morganthur, check your console. Adams, I sent the scans to the shipcomp, if you’ve got a working display.”

  Mairwen found the feed and opened it. Temperature and gas composition values suggested a hot, steamy, high-oxygen but breathable atmosphere, and a wide swathe of green that expanded far above and below the equatorial zone. There were no oceans in the section they’d scanned, but many big lakes. Haberville pointed out
several energy concentrations that she said meant tech was in use, and said she planned to try to land near one of them.

  “I’d like to be more precise than that, but I won’t know how bad off the ship is until I try to land it. We’ll hit exosphere margin in ten minutes. Seal up your suits.”

  Adams reported that he’d crammed himself, exosuit and all, into the autodoc unit that was installed in the ship wall next to the engine pod. It was the best of a bad lot of options for surviving the descent.

  “If I don’t make it, and any of you do, would you please tell my daughter I love her? I didn’t record a last-chance packet for her this trip like I usually do.”

  “Goddamn it, Adams, don’t talk like that…” began Haberville angrily.

  “Yes, we’ll tell her,” said Luka, overriding whatever else Haberville was going to say. “What’s her name?” Mairwen knew Luka’s voice well enough to hear the compassion and guilt behind his words.

  “Peregrine, but I call her Pico,” said Adams. “She lives with her mother on Vaylamoinen. La Plata has the coordinates.”

  Mairwen didn’t know the words for what she felt, but it hurt to think Adams might not see his daughter again. Somehow, over little more than a few shared meals, Adams had become a friend. If they lived through the landing, Mairwen was determined to protect Adams, too, if only so Luka wouldn’t take on the added burden of Adams’s death.

  Before she’d met Luka, she wouldn’t have had friends to worry about, but no one would have cared whether she lived or died, either. Like everything else worth having, being a normal human had a price.

  CHAPTER 15

  * Planet: Insche 255C * GDAT 3237.041*

  The landing, when it came, was beyond the worst Mairwen had imagined. Noise and lights assaulted her senses. Each bone-jarring impact did more damage to the engine pod’s skin, and the ship tumbled and felt like it was shaking apart plate by plate. She’d have been bounced and broken if she hadn’t been strapped in. The fasteners she’d lost while making the comm relay became tiny missiles that threatened to pierce her exosuit.

  It felt like hours, but her time sense told her it was only eighteen minutes from the first turbulence to gliding through the troposphere, if a ripped-apart mass of incalloy could be said to glide, and another seven minutes until her pod came to a jolting, lurching stop.

  She was in total darkness in the pod, the display having died in the last big shuddering flip once it hit the stratosphere. She was hanging from the pilot bench, which was sticking out perpendicular to what was now down.

  Luckily, her exosuit’s interior display was still working. She had a few new bruises, but no significant damage. The flexin armor she wore inside the suit had done its job distributing the kinetic energy of the impacts.

  “Adams? Foxe? Haberville?” she called as she released the straps and cautiously stretched her feet to the wall that had become her floor.

  No answer.

  She pushed her worry and dread into a tight cube in her mind and sealed it.

  She flipped on the hand light zip-tied to the wrist of her exosuit. The pod looked surprisingly intact, but the water creeping under her feet told her it was no longer sealed. When she directed her light to the entry door, she could see muddy water flowing in where the frame had warped. She sloshed over to the other side of the pod, where the built-in tool bin lay submerged under her feet. She wrestled it open and fished out the manual crank and the meter-length bent alloy bar. She tried vocal pings again and got no answers.

  Her exosuit would protect her from the inevitable flood of water, but would also impair her mobility and leverage. She concentrated on the task of prying open the door, and not thinking about the dark and heavy water above her that might soon swallow her whole.

  Her fear of large bodies of water was instinctive, possibly from some childhood trauma she had no memory of, thanks to the CPS. She pushed her fear aside and focused on escape.

  She dropped into half-tracker mode to power her muscles, knowing she had to get out to stay alive, and hoped that the ship landed close enough to a shore for them to swim. Slowly, reluctantly, the door slid up into its pocket, and water poured in, but equalized when the water level was just above her knees. After one last push using her leg and back muscles, the opening was wide enough for her to slip through underwater in her exosuit.

  She stood up in the hall and shined her hand light around. The hall’s intact walls angled up to the right to where the nav pod should be, and there was a glimmer of emergency lighting in that direction. To her left, against the outer wall of the engine pod, the battered autodoc unit was miraculously intact, powered, and still sealed.

  She climbed up on its rounded end and pointed her light in the transparent view window. All she could see were exosuit boots, so Adams’s head would unfortunately be below water when she got the autodoc’s clamshell lid open. She stuck her head underwater and turned the light on what should be Adams’s head, but the light died almost instantly. From the glimpse she got, she didn’t know if he was conscious or not, but at least water wasn’t leaking in. The unit’s external controls were submerged and nonfunctional.

  Next, she waded around the wall of the angled nav pod until she got to the pod’s door, which unlike hers, was at least two meters up from the waterline and looked deformed in the middle. Water wouldn’t be a problem at that height, but the deformed door would be a lot harder to get open. She stretched up and grabbed the doorframe with one hand, then pulled herself up high enough to bang three times on the door as hard as she could with the pry bar. She hung on and waited, cursing the sound impedance caused by the exosuit. After thirty of the longest seconds of her life, she heard three muffled answering thuds. It didn’t mean that Luka was alive or uninjured, but it was a start. She dropped back to the flooded floor.

  She needed a way to create leverage if she was going to get the door open. She made herself go back underwater through the engine pod door and retrieve the repositionable panel lift handles, then used some plastic sheeting to wrap them up, hopefully keeping them dry enough to stick to the wall surface. She found some flexline and wrapped it around her torso and shoulders to create a temporary sling for the pry bar.

  Back at the nav pod doorway, she pulled herself up far enough to slap two lift handles onto the wall. They proved sturdy enough to handle her weight, and she hoped they could handle more. Using them, she raised her feet, wedged them into the doorframe, and pulled her body up. The door and frame definitely bowed in toward the pod. She slid the edge of the pry bar around the inside edges of the frame, hoping she’d find a place where she could jam the bar in and start working the door open. Just when she was afraid she’d have to try something else, the bar caught. The angle was awkward, but by moving the lift handles, she was able to use her leverage to rock the bar in, bit by bit, until at last she saw a puff of dust move and knew she’d broken the seal.

  She badly wanted to call out for Luka, but she couldn’t risk opening her exosuit for that unless there was enough oxygen in the trapped atmosphere to breathe. She used more half-tracker mode strength to make lurching but steady progress on getting the door open. When she had it open about a quarter of the way, she rested, and noticed the pod interior still had emergency lighting. Encouraged, she kept prying until she had it open half way and her muscles were screaming for relief. She turned off her awareness of the pain, not caring that she’d be paying for it later. She slid the pry bar into the makeshift sling on her back and poked her head into the pod.

  About two meters below, she saw an inert-looking Haberville still strapped into her chair but hanging sideways, and next to her was Luka, standing, looking up at Mairwen. His smile was visible through the faceplate. All the fear for him that she’d been suppressing suddenly dissipated, making her shudder in relief, and she barely managed to hang onto the lift handles. When she could finally drag her eyes away from him, she saw he’d tied electrical conduit around Haberville’s torso and legs in the form of a harness, from whi
ch Mairwen inferred that Haberville was still alive but incapacitated.

  Thinking a moment, she signaled to Luka that she’d be back. She dropped back into the ruined corridor and returned to the engine pod, where she cobbled together a five-meter line made of short lengths of braided wire, fiber cable, and miscellaneous equipment straps, then secured metal pipe elbows to each end to act as weights. She counted seconds in her head to stave off her flaring emotions, none of which would be useful to her now. On the way back to the nav pod door, she checked on Adams again, but couldn’t tell if anything had changed.

  At the top of the nav pod, she wedged a length of heavy pipe as a cross brace, then draped the line over it and dropped both ends down to Luka. Clever man that he was, he figured out what she intended and was soon pulling on one end to lift Haberville up with the other. The makeshift line was holding, but she didn’t trust it. As soon as Haberville was in range, Mairwen hauled her up and rested her on the door ledge. Close up, Mairwen could see Haberville was groggy and marginally responsive. At least her exosuit looked to be intact. As gently as she could, Mairwen lowered Haberville down into the water. She was mostly submerged but didn’t quite sink to the bottom. Mairwen jumped down herself and untied the line so she could send it back down to Luka. He insisted on sending up the medical kit first before using the line to haul himself free of the nav pod. Mairwen pulled Haberville into a half sitting position in the water as he climbed down and joined them in the hall.

  When he was finally standing next to her, knee-deep in water, he pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her. The exosuit prevented any body contact, and the transit vibration dampeners prevented contact communication, but she clung anyway and let the comfort it provided wash over her for an uncounted number of seconds.

  She stepped back and pulled him toward the autodoc unit. In clumsy sign language, and hindered by the poor lighting, she tried to indicate that Adams was upside down in the unit and she needed Luka’s help getting him out.