The slight gravity of the ice moon could be harder to work in than zero G. Things stayed put if you didn't push on them in zero G, but fell but here in slow motion. You couldn't get enough traction to really walk or even hop well. It was borderline whether you could jump off the ice ball, but for sure you could throw something over the escape velocity.
Harold unclipped his safety line from the closest brace that ran down into the ice for the ion engine mount. It should have then been clipped over the line to the ship, but he elected instead to clip the end to his suit and let it trail behind him. You had to pay attention and keep it sliding freely on the line or it jammed and brought you up short now and then. Harold started back to the ship along the line hand over hand. It wasn't that dangerous but it wasn't by the book either.
Barak stopped and let Harold get ahead a bit, taking the moment to look at Jupiter. It still took his breath away filling half the sky. He didn't hink he'd ever get used to it. Then he reclipped his tether on the line and followed Harold. Barak said nothing about Harold's tether, following Deloris' advice.
When they got to the ship Harold waved him past. It was a work rule the supervisor came in last, responsible for knowing he'd brought all his crew in. Harold had ignored the rule as silly for just a two man crew, feeling it was intended for a group big enough to require a head count, but been reminded of it by the captain, so he was diligent about that one point now. He'd accept instruction from Captain Jaabir, if not graciously.
Harold grabbed the line post below the lock again to knock the last of the ice off his boots. It had a bit of ammonia and other compounds dissolved in it, which was a bonus for value, but when it melted in the lock it stank like a wet dog and Harold hated it.
Barak leaned around him and got a good grip on the line strung down from the lock to the first post before unclipping and reattaching to it. He had to push off crooked to get around Harold and then pulled himself back on course for the lock with the taut line. The hatch was open to facilitate quick entry from their side if there was an emergency. He grabbed the take-hold beside the opening where the line terminated and twisted to rotate in. There was a brief loud noise on the radio like somebody blowing on a microphone to test it. He transferred his grip to the inside take-hold and leaned out to unfasten the safety line so Harold could follow him in and they could close the hatch. When he looked down Harold wasn't there.
He looked along the safety line running back to the engine they'd just finished working on, thinking maybe he went back alone to retrieve something forgotten. That would be stupid to do without telling Barak, but only too believable. The line was visible and taut, the posts on both ends secure. There was no sign of him along the line or at the engine sixty meters away. He leaned out and looked to each side... nothing. He called on his suit radio. "Harold? Where are you? What are you doing?"
The bridge monitored their suit radios, so Captain Jaabir came on com and inquired, "Is there a problem?"
"Possibly. We returned to the airlock and I entered. When I turned around and looked back out Mr. Hanson is not in sight, and he doesn't answer a radio call either."
"Well then I suggest you go back out and look for him," the man said, like it was obvious.
"I will, when somebody suits up to go back out with me. You don't send somebody out alone if there is anybody at all available to partner with them. That's basic rule number one."
"Yes, but Mr. Hanson is partnering with you," Jaabir insisted.
"Not any more he isn't since he disappeared. I have no idea where the hell he went, but I'm not going to descend to the ice without a partner in the airlock ready to drag me back in on the end of a safety line if whatever befell him gets me."
"Why isn't Mr. Hanson on a safety line for you to pull back inside?"
"Because he unclips himself any old time he feels like it and flaunts the rules. He unclipped at the engine a few minutes ago and came back to the ship hand over hand untethered. He does it all the time and I gave up telling him about it because he's the supervisor and he got all crappy about me telling him what to do. When he started saying 'Yes, Mother' in a sarcastic voice I stopped telling him anything."
Jaabir didn't say anything for a moment. Barak was waiting to hear him challenge that, but he didn't. "Nevertheless, I'd like you to go back out and look," he insisted. "I don't have a camera that can see in close to the anchored nose of the ship."
And why didn't you set one up on one of the drives looking back at the ship? Barak wondered, but didn't say it.
"I'm sure tormented souls in hell would like raspberry ice cream too, but they're not going to get it."
"Are you refusing my direct order?" Jaabir asked.
"Damn right. You are master, but we're not under military discipline. Nor are we underway. You are ordering me to take actions off your vessel and in violation of established safety rules. You can order me to take my helmet off and breath vacuum right now too, with as much chance I'll do it."
"Some would argue the entire snowball became my vessel when we outfitted it with the means to move it."
"Then fire it up and move it," Barak challenged. "Demonstrate you are underway and declare an emergency and I'll consider it." It wasn't actually ready just yet and Jaabir damn well knew it. His silence spoke volumes. Also if they were accelerating outside the hatch would be up to the surface. The ship would have to fire it's engines when they left to keep it nose to the ice. There was nothing rigged to climb back to the ice under thrust and if Hanson was loose out there he'd fall off. Jaabir was silent.
"If there is an inquiry later and you are asked if you know the safety rules for vacuum work and why you failed to monitor and see they were followed it will be bad enough. If you actually order them to be ignored it isn't just passive neglect, it's actual felonious breach of duty. I'm not going to give them two dead crewmen to charge you over. One is quite sufficient."
"You... do not know Mr. Hanson is dead," Jaabir said. But his voice was very unsteady.
"Missing in vacuum and doesn't answer the radio? I'll bet you three Solars at even odds he's dead."
"It's unseemly to make bets over a man's life," Jaabir protested. "I have the watch and can't leave to suit up. I'll have Ms. Keynes suit up and join you," he said, singing a different tune now.
"Do you have somebody to run a suit check on her?" Barak asked, knowing the answer coming.
"No, everyone has vital duty." He didn't reveal what his XO was doing or why he didn't pick Deloris.
"Then tell Alice I'm going to pressurize the lock and she can join me. I'll do an external suit inspection on her while we are pumping down and then I'll go out."
"She's on her way," Jaabir said.
Barak used the time waiting for her to unclip the line hanging out the hatch, flood the airlock at a normal pace and record his radio log for the whole shift on a private memory stick. He had his whole log on it from day one. He didn't trust the ship's log and archives wouldn't have a catastrophic failure. Happy Lewis had told him that beam dogs knew from long experience that official video and radio logs seemed to be subject to sudden failure. "Probably due to being provided by the low bidder," he'd said with a very insincere wink.
Alice looked grim when she came in the lock. She went through the check list with him confirming air and battery charge and turned and twisted in the cramped lock to let him examine every joint, seal and pressure port, skipping nothing.
"You check out," Barak verbally confirmed. They were done well before the pressure pumped down to a dangerous level. That was technically a violation right there, but a common one.
"What happened?" she asked. "The Captain informed me Harold is missing. Where the hell can you go missing on a snowball no bigger than some buildings back home?"
"Well the horizon is really close. I'd guess not much more than a hundred meters on the end here. I suppose if he jumped he could be somewhere on the ice still. Or if he jumped straight up hard enough he'd take a long time to come back down. I didn
't look up. In this suit I'd have had to lay on my back with my helmet hanging out the hatch to do that. Even then he might not come back down straight. It would be easy to land beyond our horizon or even do a short orbit or two before hitting ice again."
"I don't see Harold for a jumper. He might push you, but he had entirely too good an opinion of himself to ever be self-destructive. Captain, you on circuit?" Alice asked.
"Yes Ms. Keynes, of course."
"Is it possible to check with the radar and see if Harold is nearby but off the snowball?" Alice asked.
"No, I'm sorry but with the nose of the ship anchored we can't use it and it is integrated into the ship so thoroughly it was deemed impractical to remove. It has insufficient range to of use navigating so they decided not to provide an auxiliary system," Jaabir said.
"OK, thank you. It was just a thought."
"You want me to go down or watch over you?" Alice asked Barak.
"I'm used to the surface here. I know how the ice is supposed to look. Just monitor my radio and watch out the hatch so you can haul me back in by my line if I get in trouble. I may go out of sight. The line is long enough to go around to the far side of the ship. But if I do I'll keep up radio chatter so you know what's going on," Barak said.
"OK, Your rebreather numbers all check good?" she asked. There was no external monitor for that unless she jacked in. The bridge had telemetry, but she wasn't counting on that. Barak appreciated it.
"Numbers all good. I have a week before I need new packs. I'm purging at ninety five percent pump-down," Barak announced.
There was no objection from the bridge. They had a huge margin on air supply and could make more.
The ice under the lock was packed hard from their foot traffic. Barak didn't expect to see any marks or debris there and there wasn't anything. He turned and scanned all around slowly, looking hardest where he couldn't see from up in the lock hatch.
"There's something under the overhang," Barak told Alice. "I'll be out of sight just a few seconds."
"Oh shit! " Barak exclaimed, and then silence.
"You OK? You need reeled in?" Alice asked, worried at his silence.
"Sorry to worry you. I'm just fine. Coming back in sight soon. I have retrieved the... object. I'm sorry but Harold is dead," Barak told Alice.
Jaabir on the bridge didn't have to be told. He had the camera feed from Barak's suit helmet.
Barak pulled himself back up the line and swung in the lock. He handed Alice the boot from Harold's suit. Not the insulated over-boot but the pressure boot. The flange with locking lugs was fractured half way around and the one lug that was not cracked bent over when the pressure blew it off. The suit would have emptied itself in a heartbeat and propelled Harold off the surface like a rocket.
"What a horrible way to go," Alice said.
"There isn't any good way to go," Barak insisted. "I can't blame the suit maker. Harold has been kicking the ice off his boots for the last two weeks. Space suits are not designed to kick things. Cold metal gets brittle and this was simply abused until it failed. If you made a suit you could treat like that the miserable thing would weigh as much as a ground car and be impossible to move in."
"If he's been tethered he'd still be dead," Alice pointed out.
Barak thought about that a moment. Harold would have jetted to the end of his safety line but still been clipped on the post below. Barak would have needed to clip on, descend to the post below and change Harold's line over to the lock riser or his own suit, go back up to the lock pulling the extra line along, reel Harold in, maneuver Harold in his suit through the hatch, unclip both their lines, close the hatch and pressurize the lock. There was no way to do all those things fast enough to save him.
"We'd have been able to recover his body, but it wasn't survivable," Barak agreed.
"Why don't you come in and de-suit," Jaabir said. "I'm going to declare everybody take a rest day to recover from this... shock. We'll discuss how this affects us and what accommodations we'll have to make later. I'll send word back in the daily report."
"Alright," Barak agreed. "There wasn't anything else visible out there. It wouldn't really make any difference if I found anything now. We are bringing pressure back up in the lock and will help each other unsuit. If you need any details not in the radio log let me know. If I'm to be off duty for a full shift I'd like to have a drink and sit and decompress a bit. But if you think I'll need to suit back up and go out I won't drink anything."
"No, no. Feel free. I may have a medicinal dose too," Jaabir said, although it wasn't his custom. "After I review the log and write a report."
Barak guessed there was little chance he'd be asked for a formal report or written response. Jaabir was going to be happy to do the whole thing, putting himself in as positive a light as possible. Fact was, even if he'd been much more of a stickler for rules and rode Harold hard, the captain always caught some of the blame when things went this badly wrong.
When they were out of their suits, with no com feed to the bridge, and everything stowed properly, including the lone boot, Alice turned and hugged him hard. She was shaking a little bit.
"Do you think Jaabir will tell Deloris?" she asked him.
"Jaabir isn't thinking about anything but covering Jaabir's butt right now," Barak said.
"Then I'd like to come tell Deloris with you and stay with you guys tonight," Alice asked.
"Of course," he agreed. They had rigged a double mattress extension some time ago to let the three of them all fit in one bunk. A single bunk wasn't even comfortable for two. Three was flat out impossible. They wouldn't trust it under heavy acceleration, but that wasn't going to happen again until after they cut the Yuki-onna loose of the ice-ball back home. They stood there silently holding each other for a moment, drained, before they let go. Neither wanted to clean up and change in the suiting room. They just wore suit liners back to his cabin.
It was a good thing the motors were all in place before this happened. Barak would have dreaded working with Jaabir or one of the women to try to drive anchors and position them. Harold hadn't been his favorite person but he was fairly big and strong enough to handle pushing the massive machinery around. It would have seemed a pointless and selfish thing to say out loud so he never really considered it. But he'd bring it up to anyone who wanted an after action report. Six people were just not enough for this deep a voyage he decided. It was going to still be a hardship going back shorthanded. He'd talk about that later between just the three of them before having to hear Jaabir's take on it. Not tonight, he decided. So soon he might still say things to Jaabir he'd regret.
* * *
It was late, past midnight. Gunny was in his room sleeping. For a wonder April wasn't hungry. She just wasn't sleepy. That didn't mean she wanted to study or actually work. Everyone she knew well followed a day schedule and couldn't be called this late. She had music on low so she wouldn't disturb Gunny. She probably should not have had quite so much coffee after supper.
It was always amusing to see what the Earthies were doing. She was ready to look at the news again. This afternoon she'd have said she was never going to look at the stupid crud again. M3 or Home ran on North American Pacific time so their news was probably pretty dead and just repeating stories from the previous day since it was their night too. Asia didn't interest her as much as Europe so she checked their news feeds, scrolling until she found something Italian. Her friend, Lin, the captain of the boat they sometimes hired worked out of Italy, so the news had some actual relevance to her life.
The European News Feed showed a man in robes speaking behind a lectern. He was speaking Italian so she picked the translate to English captions option. It was outside in bright sunlight but fairly early in the morning by the angle. There was a stone building behind him. You couldn't see much of it but April got the impression it was old.
"The Holy Father is not ill," the Vatican spokesman insisted. "I have spoken with him recently and he's quite robust for a
man of his years. He has set aside some personal time from Church business for reflection and spiritual retreat. He has been complaining for some time that the pace of modern life is not conducive to quiet Christian meditation and has decided to apply the needed adjustment in his own life first, delegating some of the oversight of the Holy See to trusted advisors. In time he shall return refreshed. He is certainly not obligated to trot out on your whim. The faithful are urged to reexamine his letter of last November and see if they can't apply the same principals in their own lives."
"What of the others?" the journalist from the "The Rome Daily Blog of Faith" asked. "There are almost two dozen very senior churchmen here and in other European states who have not been seen in public for some months. This is in the same time frame in which the King and Queen of Spain withdrew from public life and several members of their charities and government bureaus have been missing. Is all this coincidence?"
"You have found us out," the spox admitted, throwing his hands up in mock despair. "They are all in conference, where various flying saucers have gathered them to the Mother ship. But the meeting was delayed, just as you suspected, by illness. The main speaker Elvis Presley is not well at all."
"It is not fitting to mock a serious inquiry from the press," the fellow insisted. "What goes around comes around."
"You do not have a press," the spox pointed out. "I doubt you even have an office. I'd be shocked if you don't work solely from your phone."
The man couldn't reply over the razzing and laughter from his fellow reporters and journalists.
April switched news feeds. Was that as crazy as it came across, or was the auto-translate influencing it? She knew that there was something happening with the Spanish royal family and a bunch of church officials. She and Gunny suspected they got infected with some virus made to do life extension therapy. She even strongly suspected who messed up and transmitted it. She's had some modifications done the same way, but had been very careful to quarantine herself.
April 6: And What Goes Around Page 4