by Peter Riva
The helmets all had VHF radios, line of sight simple jobs. Batteries were PERMA, so they were okay. Until activated, they were inert and as good as new. I had no idea how long they would last though, and there was no recharging them. Once on, they were on until failure. The helmet lights were also powered by PERMA batteries, so we scavenged the extra helmets’ lights and blue Loc’ed them on top as well, slightly angled outwards. It was sure to be damn dark out there. Light can make all the difference.
The suit tethers were industrial strength, out of keeping with the flimsy spacesuits. A maintenance man assured me they had a breaking strain in excess of twelve tonnes. Their clasps were click on, click off, easy to use. They would do fine.
However, in some of the suits, for there were three types left from construction, maybe fifty suits in all, there were oxygen cylinders maybe twelve centimeters long and five around. It was stamped with a date 120 years ago and the prophetic words, “Good for twenty minutes. Do Not Exceed.” Somehow, the maintenance people along with two engineers managed to pipe three of them together for four suits. The rest of the suits only had what was called an oxygen chemical bladder. Put the suit on, smack yourself in the chest, and mix the chemicals. You would have a slow chemical reaction making oxygen, heat, and a salt of some sort absorbing CO2. The salt stayed behind the membrane, the oxygen leaked into the suit, hopefully reaching your face. Instructions were to keep patting the suit envelope to make sure you didn’t get a CO2 dam in your helmet and asphyxiate.
The third type of suit was emergency only. Hold your breath, get rescued—five minutes, no more. Useless for this job and, I guessed, more of a placebo to the construction crews than any real effectiveness.
Cramer organized his away team volunteers. To be frank, I was surprised, they all volunteered eagerly, saying “Yes sir,” to Cramer at every utterance. A seven-year-old kid taking command. As I said, Cramer is a force of nature.
As we were down to only four multi-tank suits for EVA, I decided that I needed someone beefy with me on the long drop to attach my cable. Cramer said, “That’s Ernest here.” Ernest nodded. Everyone wanted to know what the plan was, but I put them off. I needed to know if we could even go at all as Aten still wasn’t back with the gyro.
Cramer and I got three more chemical suits ready for “the guys who will operate the hatch and be ready for a quick rescue, if needed, okay? You don the suits, do not, I repeat, do not smack the chest until you are needed and your helmets are on.” Again, that enthusiastic agreement from his men.
“Okay then,” I outlined the plan, such as it was, “I want you, Ernest, with me. We’ll push off and drift trailing a thin cable, I asked maintenance to find something suitable, something that will haul the heavy electrical cable down to us later. When we reach the motor and graphene coupling, if we’re still together, we’ll attach there and haul it up, down, whatever. Cramer, you and the other man …” Cramer pointed at a strong man with the name Sam on his tunic, “Okay, you and Sam have to feed the heavy cable to us. It must not kink, okay?”
Everyone nodded. Then Abadine said she’d feed it through the airlock. “But it’ll kink, snake like mad. We’ll need to have a plan to get it out there. It’ll take hours to feed it through the airlock …”
Cramer had other ideas. “Abadine, the cable you’re using, it’ll be in a spool?”
“No, it’s woven graphene impregnated with Toluene liquid metal, very thin particles, will carry up to ten thousand volts. It’s all coiled and weighs, hell I don’t know, about a tonne? It’s not big, thick that is, but it is dense.”
Cramer scowled. “Size? Can the coil fit through the airlock Simon will use?” Abadine said it would but didn’t know who could lift it to get it there. Cramer was not going to be pessimistic, “That airlock is in the Zero-G section. All we have to do it get it on to the flight deck, lower deck, right?” She nodded. “Okay, then where’s it stored?”
Abadine looked miserable. “In the maintenance supply area, all the way aft.”
Cramer smiled, “Ah, so it’s nearer the center of the ship, lower gravity, right?” Everyone nodded, “Okay then, we’ll hoist it into Zero-G and then pull it along the center, all the way, hand over hand until we get to the other end and the swivel connecting passage tube to the lower flight deck.”
I patted Cramer on the back, “Right, who do you need?”
“Me, only me.” We were all aghast. Here was a seven-year-old saying he’d hand maneuver a one tonne coil of cable three kilometers, hand over hand. Okay, it was Zero-G in the dead center, but move an inch off that center and the gravity will start to increase. Cramer saw what we were thinking. “Guys, think. There’s a rail up there, right? The one the light tube is anchored to, right? And I’ll hook it and me onto the rail, get it?” We all nodded in unison. “So all I need is to start from the front end,” he pointed toward the light deck, “with a very strong cord that you’ll belay out as I run all the way, down here, “he pointed at the ground and then toward aft section of the ship, “right down the central orange highway, right? And when I get to the other end, I’ll clamp on to the rail with a rappel roller we have for landfall, attach the coil, and you beefy lads can pull like hell to make me sail all the way back to the front.” He paused, “Deal?”
Of course, it wasn’t that easy. Every 400 meters, he had to unhook himself, re-hook the other side of a support pylon holding the rail, do the same for the almost weightless coil, and proceed. It took him almost four hours. When he arrived at the lower flight deck, he looked all in, spent, exhausted. Todd was there, gave him oxygen, and took vital signs. Todd shook his head, looking at me. My thought? Hell, if a seven-year-old can do that, a ten-year-old can do the rest.
I hoped.
12
THAT ASTEROID FEELING, AGAIN
Everything had gone as planned. Aten had, of course, come up with a coupled gyro, one inside the other, about the size of a helmet—actually mounted inside one of the space helmets we weren’t using, onto which she had blue Loc’ed handles either side.
The gyro? She had salvaged it from a hover car in the storage bay ready for later landfall. She attached a small PowerCube from a portable lantern that made the gyros, at ninety-degree angles to each other, whirl like mad. Power it up holding the helmet steady and they would twist in your hands if you tried to change course. There was a rheostat I could control with my thumb.
Aten explained the operation, “Short bursts Simon, there is no upper limit, you could keep it on full power, and the bearing may break apart. I got this from the only hover car that doesn’t use laser gyros. It’s a truck really, so it needs inertial navigation with more inertia than electro-servos will supply. Once these things spin up, they can break your wrists, so I suggest powering up slowly to find the limit of need.” I nodded, she had done great, and I told her so.
Meanwhile, the suits’ gloves were finished by Todd and his team of medical staff. Off we all trudged forward, climbing the ramps at the end of the ship, then the ladder to the swivel tube, accessing the lower flight deck and Zero-G.
Inside I saw that Abadine had, no surprise there, completed the electrical connections into the lower flight deck where the airlocks were. The four of us suited up, helmets off still, watching the other four fellows put on the almost useless chemical suits.
Being the person most used to Zero-G, I was holding still with just a finger grip onto an overhead pipe. Some of the men and women were using both hands and were still drifting and bumping each other. Cramer was in charge, “Now, listen, emergency crew, if you see anyone in trouble, through that porthole there, you lock your helmets on, smack your chests to activate the oxygen. Go through the airlock process and be ready to rescue. Tether up! Always! Is that clear?” They nodded, we all did. He turned to Sam, Ernest, and me, “Todd will sound the alarm, one blast when you have less than five minutes left and then every thirty seconds and then continual for the last thirty left, clear?” We all nodded, even the emergency crew. Todd said h
e’d keep careful monitor. Cramer turned to me, “Simon, over to you …”
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do. The airlock holds four, but not with the coil as well. So Ernest and I will go through first with the rope spool. It won’t reach all the way to the engines; well, it may if they are already canted over forty-five degrees and it looks like it out the porthole, but we’ll decide that once we’re out.”
Abadine interrupted, “You cannot make hand hold on the graphene cables attached to the hull or motors, the tethers are supercharged, you would be burned to a crisp instantly. That rope you’re towing would also be enough to carry the static discharge.”
“It’s okay, I have a plan for that; you’ll get the discharge back here, back-feed the Cube, okay?” She nodded looking worried, “It’ll work. Now, we need to reach the motor junction and power up the engines. Are the pilots and engine crew ready?” They called ready down the hatch to the lower flight deck. “Abadine, your relays ready?”
“As soon as the cable comes back through that gel airlock,” she pointed at a green ring with a blue-black liquid center. I assumed it was Ferrofluidics, held in place by strong magnets making a pass-through airlock. There was a hatch cover, inside portal open now, ready to close. She continued, “I’ll hook up the wires here and be ready to go on your command.”
“Right then,” I tried to sound cheery, “Ernest and me first with cord, spool clipped to my belt, Ernest and I tethered together, followed by Sam and Cramer with the coil of electrical cable. As soon as we’re outside, we’ll attach this end,” I held up the cord end that had a karabiner attached, “to the stanchion rail outside the airlock.” Abadine started to say something. I cut her off, “yes, I know, stay clear of the graphene tethers, got it.” She relaxed, “Then Ernest and I will push off, trailing the cord.” I looked around; everyone seemed to understand. “Cramer and Sam emerge, tethered to each other, and immediately tether to the same stanchion. They then pass one end of the coil back through the gel hatch to Abadine. After that, they attach the other end of the coil to the cord karabiner and wait for my signal to belay the coil, carefully, no kinks, no tangles. When it reaches us, we’ll attach it to the motor initiator that Aten has shown Ernest and me images of. But before that, I will be helping straighten out the tethers.”
Even Cramer looked at me as if I was nuts.
“Nope, I’m not going to touch them. All I need to do is have Abadine throw the relay when I touch one wire lead to one graphene tether and one to the other. As I command Abadine, you need to run positive and negative, all the power you have got. When I call for reverse polarity, don’t hesitate, I’ll be steering the brutes and may not have quite the delicate touch needed. Clear?”
“Mr. Simon, I see what you are going to try and do, but no one has ever attempted that before,” Abadine said.
Aten smiled, cut in, shaking her head and said, “Yes they have. I did the calculations and anyway Simon has sort of done this before, haven’t you Simon? Reverse polarity was one of your little tricks deep inside the System. Run the current one way and this graphene will tighten, run it the other and it will weaken. Right left, left right. Steering the engines away from the hull. I get it.” She paused, “It is dangerous. And foolish. And typical of you.”
Cramer agreed. “That’s your plan? Look, if the engines turn to face forwards again, we can back flush number one and the new matter they absorb will start them up, you don’t need …”
“Yes I do. The hull, my Angie, can’t take the blow if they make contact, let alone the discharge, and you can’t back flush number one safely until they are pointed more or less ahead and number two is running. Right?” The engineers nodded. “So, the engines need to face forward and number two has to be running. We’ll use the juice from Abadine to spin up their impellers or centrifuges in sequence so any matter inside or that we catch up to—remember we’re still at almost eighty of the speed of light, “everyone nodded, “So that will immediately cause that engine start. The only way to make them face forward is to tighten the tethers alternatively, clear the obstruction, and then worm them and this ship forward.”
It pretty much went as planned. Well, the cord we were using wasn’t really long enough to reach the base of the motors if the tethers had been straight, but as they were kinked over at more than thirty-five degrees now, Ernest and I were just able to shoot across the hypotenuse void. We aimed for the faint red glow, a heat signature we were told would be visible. It was. Trailing our little cord, about 350 meters of it, and using the helmet gyro to stabilize the route, we landed, feet first, upside down, looking up (down?) at the ship. Ernest said it was up, I said down. It was disorienting.
It was, however, glorious. The crew has turned on all the beacon lights on the hull. It made her flight deck look shiny, like new after more than 100 years. It was dark, of course, but her lights complimented the vast array of stars illuminating the background. Some of the starlight seemed streaked, and I remembered to take Doppler effect into account. Still, the cigar-shaped hull blacking out the stars seemed massive from out here. But I could sense the motors were drifting, closing the gap, we had maybe four hours left before we could do nothing but die, all of us.
Time to get to work. We radioed Cramer and the crew that we had arrived safely as Ernest and I attached our tethers to the clip-on points left over from the original construction beneath the exhaust ports of the motors. The exhaust manifolds were massive cavities, glowing red still. From the pilots’ last attempt to keep the motors ahead of the ship, the nacelles were canted far over, pointed straight at us puny humans tethered there. I radioed the pilots to straighten them out, just in case. They immediately responded and I knew the residual battery power inside the motor nacelles would be taxed. Still, I was relieved when we felt the power of the metal on metal movement through our feet as the nacelles moved away from our position. Ernest radioed, “That’s better.”
Next came the electric cable, carefully uncoiled by Cramer and Sam who we could just make out, looking like tiny dots on the hull of the lower deck, helmet lights on, silhouettes backlit through the observation porthole. As the coil made its way to us, I could see Ernest’s face in his visor, smiling. A good steady man to have nearby, perhaps better than me. I hated being alone in the vastness of space. And out here, with no sunlight anywhere, only the lights on top of our helmets and the seemingly tiny exterior navigation lights the crew had turned on for our benefit—well, it was pitch black. A blue darker than black, punctured only by stars’ pinprick radiation.
When the coil end arrived, I signaled Cramer that we had it. His response was terse, conveying his worry, “Tons of killing power there little guy, careful.” Little guy indeed.
“Ernest, I need to hold fast here.” Ernest tightened his ground tether and grabbed my flimsy suit with one hand, rock steady. I split the electrical cord and studied the two bare ends Abadine had prepared with soldered pointed tips. I radioed, “Nice job on the tips Abadine.” And heard two clicks telling me she heard.
The braided graphene tethers running from the motors to the ship were smaller than I had thought they would be. And dangerous now as I approached them. As Aten and I had studied, on the ship’s plans, they were about one and a half meters apart, mostly. In some places closer. I could not see, in the darkness, the middle of the arc going down to the ship. The fibers of the tethers glistened under my helmet light. I put one of Abadine’s pointed ends carefully on the nearest tether and immediately Abadine screamed into my helmet, “Getting huge discharge here!”
As I touched the other probe into the other tether, a purple glow of current, shaped like a wave donut, could be seen dissipating into the dark along the graphene. There were sparks about halfway to the ship, perhaps where the graphene tethers touched, and then the glow continued on its way. I radioed to Cramer, “Discharge coming your way. Stand clear.”
Cramer was not amused, “Gee thanks, a little late—the first shock struck the deck like lightening.”
Abadine radioed, “The bolt on the securing hatch for the pass-through is glowing red hot; if it fails, we’ll lose pressure.” An engineer could be heard over Abadine’s radio calling for an extinguisher, and then the sounds of discharge were heard. She continued, calmly, “Okay, it’s okay, we’re in balance now, careful Simon, it’s building another charge now …”
I called, “Full current, reversed. Now.” As she did as she was instructed, the graphene snake came alive, straightening, pulling away from its partner, moving suddenly toward Ernest. “Abadine, power off, reverse!” I withdrew the cable points. The tether movement instantly stopped and the graphene went slack. I turned to Ernest, spoke to Cramer, “Cramer, it’s too dangerous for two of us here. I am sending Ernest down the electrical cable, please catch him and tether him safely there.”
“Simon you cannot do this alone …”
“I know Cramer, you stay on that end and if I get into trouble, you can tether to the cable and come help.” I knew he’d have a response, felt one coming, and cut him off with, “Tag, Cramer, tag, remember? I’m it. My job, my responsibility, my way.” He did not reply except for two clicks of the radio to show he had heard me clearly.
Ernest didn’t need to be asked twice. He had seen the graphene approaching rapidly, and it made sense for him to get down the cable to relative safety. He asked if I was able to hold myself rigid without him, and I told him I was if he latched me up. He attached his second tether to my belt and to the latch point he had been using. Then he looped his primary tether around the cable and said “Hey, don’t let go of your end …” and pushed off toward what was, for him, home. Down or up, he made it in no time at all, maybe four minutes or so. Cramer had to arrest his fall as he was traveling at quite a clip by then. I heard the “Oof!’ from Cramer just as he has telling me that Ernest had made it back safely.