Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  Again, Kim reached out a green-gloved hand.

  Faintly, the captain yelled, “Don’t touch it! That may not be modeling clay!”

  “What are you talking about?” Kim asked.

  “It might be C-4: a plastic explosive. See the black thimble pressed into it? If the clay is C-4 then that will be its detonator.”

  Kim pulled her hand back all the way to her shoulder and held it there, claw-like. Based on her head movements, Mike figured she was scrutinizing the engine and its pump for any other abnormalities. She found one. Mike saw it too. “Captain, there are words painted on the side of engine number two.”

  “Yes, I see them now.”

  The words were written in simple block letters with red spray paint on the engine’s otherwise clean stainless steel surface.

  If what all this means

  you cannot tell.

  Just understand this:

  payback is Hell!

  “Kim, what do you make of it?”

  “Well, as poetry, it’s pretty bad. As a message— Wait a minute: a little red light on the black thimble just started blinking.”

  The ship said, “Captain, I have just detected a coded radio transmission which was broadcast on seventeen frequencies simultaneously—apparently to make up for the fact that it was emitted at very low power. The frequencies involved were all illegally located between the com channels—probably to help keep the transmission hidden.”

  “Were you able to triangulate the location of the transmitter?”

  “No. By the time I discovered the nature of the transmission it ended. However, I am relatively certain that it came from within this ship.”

  The captain shifted in his seat. “Kim, the blinking red light may mean the detonator is armed. I want you to move away from it, slowly. See if you can put the bulk of engine number one between it and you.”

  “Aye, Captain. I’m mov—”

  A small explosion followed by a huge splashing jet of clear liquid struck one side of Kim’s faceplate. The force of the rushing liquid must have shoved her sideways. Mike saw her lose her grip on engine two’s structural steel supports and tumble out of control away from the ship. Six seconds later a powerful jerk spun her around to face the ship. It also stopped her tumbling and brought her to a dead stop. She’d reached the end of her safety tether.

  “Kim!” the captain shouted. “Kim, are you all right?”

  Green fingertips appeared at the right and left edges of her faceplate. She steadied her helmet with both hands. “Yeah, I think I’m OK. I’ve still got air pressure.” She flexed her arms and her legs too, probably: though they were not visible. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”

  “Good.” Some of the fear eased from the captain’s voice. “Ship, close engine number two’s motorized fuel cut-off valve.”

  “Motorized fuel cut-off valve number two does not respond,” the ship said. “It seems to be malfunctioning.”

  “Damn. Whoever planted the C-4 probably cut the valve’s wires. Kim, you’re going to have to close the manual valve.”

  Kim turned her head, and therefore her cameras, toward the spot from which she’d been shoved. Mike saw a thick spray of clear liquid—like water from a fire hose—shooting directly through that spot and out across a star-filled black sky. It was liquid hydrogen: the ship’s fuel.

  Two feet from the hole from which it escaped the clear stream became white as milk. Riddled with tiny frothy bubbles, it was boiling in the vacuum. The bubbles grew rapidly, and within a few feet the stream became bloated: fanning out, wider and wider.

  Ten feet from the hole the stream changed again. Having dropped its temperature by explosive evaporation in the vacuum all the liquid that had not boiled away to gas suddenly transformed into solid particles of brilliant white.

  Kim was engulfed in a great flurry of fragile snowflakes composed entirely of frozen hydrogen. Glistening pure and clean and beautiful in the bright sunlight, they reminded Mike of his childhood winters back in Wisconsin.

  “Kim,” said the captain, “do you think you can reach the valve without going through that spray?”

  Mike looked to the spray’s origin, and to the part boiling most violently. The worst of it stood between her and the manual fuel cut-off valve.

  “I’m not sure, Captain, but I don’t think so.”

  “We need you to try. But be careful. That liquid hydrogen you’re looking at is about 250 degrees below zero. It’ll suck the heat out of anything it touches. Your suit wasn’t designed for contact with liquids that cold. More than a few seconds of full contact might crack your Teflon air hose fittings or shatter your faceplate.”

  “Might?” she said. “Are you guessing?”

  “Ship?” the captain said.

  Mike waited, knowing the ship would understand that the captain was requesting confirmation, and that it would perform a search of the extensive resources of Corvus’s library computer for all engineering and scientific information that applied to the question at hand.

  Four full seconds passed before the ship reported its results. “No experiments have been conducted in which liquid hydrogen was poured or splashed directly onto a vacuum suit or its faceplate in a hard-vacuum environment, so I have looked up the engineering specifications of the various materials used in vacuum suit construction. Ms. Kirkland’s Teflon air hose fittings will remain safely strong and non-brittle far below liquid hydrogen temperatures, as will the tempered glass of her faceplate. Unfortunately, however, anything composed of elastomers—this includes Mylar, nylon, Viton A, GR-S, nitrile rubber and all natural rubbers—if brought into direct contact with liquid hydrogen will become either inconveniently stiff or dangerously brittle.”

  The captain said, “That’s gotta be half her suit!”

  Mike frowned. It didn’t sound good to him either.

  “Not half,” the ship said, “but it is substantial. The housings of the environmental controls on her chest and left forearm are made of nylon; as is the tool pack around her waist—though not the tools. Her electrical cables are insulated with GR-S; her umbilicals are mostly nitrile; and her suit’s thin outer covering is woven entirely of Mylar thread. This last item is not a serious problem since the outer layer does not maintain the suit’s air pressure, but only protects the fiberglass insulation batting underneath from getting snagged on sharp objects. By far the greatest danger is that all her suit’s gaskets and seals—those at the neck, wrists, ankles and waist—are composed of Viton A. If one of these were to become brittle and crack she would immediately begin to lose air. In that case she could easily lose consciousness and die before getting back inside an airlock.”

  “Kim, did you hear all that?”

  “Yes, Captain. I’ll just have to keep my seals dry.”

  “Check to see that all your seal cover flaps are in place and snapped shut,” he suggested. “They might help keep the hydrogen off. At least for a while.”

  “Captain,” the ship said, “the hydrogen spray from the leak is traveling away from the ship at very nearly a right angle compared to the engine’s normal direction of thrust.”

  “So?”

  “My inertial platform indicates the leak is causing the ship to tumble end-over-end.”

  “No kidding?” the captain said sarcastically.

  Mike could see that the ship’s tumbling was already producing a centrifugal effect that—weak as it was—could not possibly have escaped the captain’s notice. This force-like effect was attempting to push everything located at the far ends of the ship, outward, away from the ship’s center. Because of it, the captain’s arms were dangling lazily above his head and his entire body was being drawn gently upward toward the domed ceiling. Only the seat belt pressing softly against his waist kept him from falling slowly up and out of his command chair.

  “Try using the attitude jets to stop the tumbling.”

  “I am already doing that,” said the ship. “Their thrust is too feeble. We continue to tumb
le faster.”

  “Well, just do what you can with the attitude jets for the moment.”

  The captain frowned at the image coming in from Kim’s headset. Snowflakes drifted down from upper right as Kim’s hands strained to pull her, hand-over-hand, up the safety tether. The centrifugal effect had stretched the safety tether out to its full length and seemed to be trying to gently sling Kim off into space.

  The captain shifted his seat belt closer to his round little stomach, perhaps in an effort to find a more comfortable location. “What’s the g-force at the ends of the ship?”

  “Two tenths of a gee—twenty percent more than Lunar gravity. Captain, that passenger is calling again: Tina Bernadette.”

  “Great, just what I need.” He pulled his hands down and slid them under his thighs—to make sure they stayed down?—then cleared his throat and said, “Put her through.”

  What the hell is Larry doing talking to that stupid woman? He should tell her to go to—

  Tina’s image appeared on the dome. This time it did not cover the image coming in from Kim, and it was a wider shot than before. It showed Tina standing on the ceiling with her hands on her hips—a posture more defiant than seductive. She had changed her outfit, but once again was not smiling.

  “Captain Palmer here,” Larry said absently—apparently not noticing her flaming red miniskirt, the matching high heels or those long legs in between. “How may I help you?”

  “Captain,” she said with her unstoppably flirtatious southern accent, “I couldn’t help observing that we seem to be executing an odd series of maneuvers.” She used the back of one hand to toss her nonexistent long hair behind her shoulder. “My concern remains the same—a timely arrival at Von Braun—but I am now unsure whether I should be genuinely worried or simply curious about what is being done to get us there.”

  The captain was staring at the image coming in from Kim’s headset when his passenger stopped talking. He looked back at Tina with an expression Mike recognized immediately. The captain was trying to recall from his short-term memory something—or anything—that she had just said.

  “Captain,” Tina prompted, “is there some kind of problem?”

  He faked a cheerful tone, poorly. “Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. I’ve got my chief flight engineer working on it right now. She’ll get it straightened out. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to see how she’s doing. Thank you for calling.”

  “But I—”

  “Captain: out and clear.”

  Tina’s image disappeared from the dome.

  Mike, and the recorded image of the captain, both held their breath as they watched from Kim’s vantage point, her climbing along the four inch wide hydrogen fuel line between engine number two and its pump. Kim seemed awash in a blizzard of big fluffy snowflakes. The stainless steel fuel line was coated white with a growing layer of frost.

  “Things are getting slippery out here, Captain.”

  Slippery and dangerous! Mike thought. Why did Larry talk to that stupid—

  Kim’s right hand slipped off the fuel line and her headset’s image jerked several inches to one side. A metallic thump marked the moment the image stopped moving. It remained in that location for a few seconds.

  When Kim returned her right hand to the fuel line she surveyed her surroundings. Almost everything was thickly coated with frost now: the pump, the coolant lines, the valve actuator lines, the hydrogen pre-heat lines, and of course the I-beams and cross-braces of the engine mount. The only nearby objects to escape this chubby whiteness were those splashed directly by liquid hydrogen. Either the liquid was cleaning away the frost as it formed or preventing its accumulation in the first place.

  As Kim panned the area, Mike looked through the snowflakes blowing around her searching for their source. Most radiated from a spot where a ragged slow-moving portion of the spray slapped flat into a large diagonal cross brace—which was itself a part of engine number two’s mounting structure. The rapidly solidifying flakes were thus scattered in many directions at once.

  “Kim, as you pass the source of the spray stop a moment and look at the filter housing. I want to see the hole the bomb made.”

  “Aye, captain.”

  Thirty seconds of cautious climbing later she arrived at the source and examined the automobile-muffler-shaped filter housing. Mike was momentarily surprised by the fact that it had no covering of frost. He watched as big fluffy snowflakes landing on its shiny metal surface disappeared instantly; each evaporating directly into invisible hydrogen gas without bothering to pass through an intermediate liquid state first. He then remembered that the hydrogen rushing through the filter hadn’t yet lost its miniscule warmth by vacuum boiling and so kept the housing well above hydrogen’s freezing temperature.

  He studied the filter housing’s damage. It was broken on one side leaving a jagged hole as large as a man’s fist. Clear liquid sprayed furiously from that hole.

  The spray reminded him of the high-pressure fire hoses that riot police used to subdue unruly mobs back in the twentieth century. Based on old clips he’d seen, such a hose could throw a column of water powerful enough to knock an entire crowd off their feet. And that was in earth’s powerful one gee gravity.

  Staring at the splashing liquid hydrogen made Mike more and more nervous. He found it too easy to imagine a gush of the super-cold fluid forcing its way under the seal cover flaps at Kim’s wrists and the base of her helmet. Easier still to imagine half a dozen plumes of her precious breathing air shooting out of her suit from ruptured seals as she—beyond reach of any help—screamed and flailed in agony.

  In his entire spaceworking career, Mike had seen footage of only one person’s vacuum suit springing a leak. But even that one was far too many. It changed him. It changes everyone. That’s why it’s required viewing for vacuum suit certification.

  “The spray looks awfully big,” said the captain. “Do you think you can get past it from this direction?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m gonna’ try.” Shifting her position enough to free her right hand, she extended her arm to grab the fuel line ahead of her and continue her climb.

  “Kim, your arm!”

  She pointed her head directly at her right arm. The suit’s green detailing was white, the red and yellow safety markings were white, even her green glove was now wholly white.

  Kim made a fist and shook her arm. Crunchy white flakes a quarter of an inch thick and ranging in size from pennies to potato chips flew off in all directions. The frost, however, in the wrinkles of her elbow joint and wedged between her fingers refused to be tossed away so easily.

  She worked her arm in large circles to loosen the elbow material. This had little effect—except that it compacted the material into harder more stubborn impediments to her freedom of movement. In apparent frustration she raked the frost out with her other hand, then raked between her fingers.

  The image from her headset trembled briefly. Mike felt a sympathetic shiver crawl up the length of his own spine. A vacuum suit’s insulation was good, but it was no match for conditions like these. He knew she must be feeling the cold—especially at her hands, feet, knees and face.

  Kim looked down at her legs. She scraped frost from both her knees then kicked the fuel line several times to knock chunks from her boots.

  Again, she started climbing along the fuel line. Mike’s muscles flexed: trying to help. She leaned far to the left as she climbed, keeping her body out of the strongest part of the spray.

  Even so, a rain of clear droplets from the main spray’s ragged edge pelted her right arm and leg. As this liquid splashed and boiled across the surface of her suit, it peeled off long thick chunks of frost molded exactly to her suit’s shape which tumbled away into obscurity.

  Fighting to maintain her balance against the force of this spray, she moved her right leg too far and the spray caught her foot just below the ankle seal. The liquid’s mass shoved her foot sideways, forcing her entire body to swing
in that direction. Likewise rotating, her other foot slipped from its frosty I-beam. She struggled to hug the hydrogen fuel line tightly to her chest but as she swung around it she moved into the worst and most powerful part of the spray.

  High-speed liquid slammed square into her faceplate and shoved her backward harder even than before. In this gravity-like centrifugal situation, she dropped for several seconds before jerking to a stop at the end of her tether. She hung there, still and quiet.

  The captain yanked his armrests to pull himself forward in his command chair. “Kim!”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Ship! Give me visuals from all the aft cameras!”

  Four new images appeared on the bridge dome. All were wide angle and showed overlapping sections of the curved outer edge of the rad-shield and the black sky beyond.

  One image, however, contained an additional object: a person in a white and green vacuum suit half-covered with frost dangling at the far end of a red and yellow striped safety tether. The tether was pulled tight and the person was swinging back and forth very slowly, like a big dead pendulum—the centrifugal force had become that strong.

  “Kimberly!” the captain yelled. “Can you hear me?”

  “Quit yelling!” she croaked. “I’m not deaf!”

  “Are you OK?”

  “How would I know? I mean, probably. I think so.”

  You don’t sound OK to me, thought Mike.

  “I’m just dizzy. Got a face full of hydrogen. Slapped me around pretty good. Let me rest here for a minute.”

  “Yeah. Good idea.” The captain eased back into his chair, then turned his head slightly as though to speak to a different person. “Ship, how much fuel have we lost?”

  “Fourteen percent of what we had before the leak.”

  “How much can we lose and still make our docking window?”

  “Twenty-six percent.”

  “Damn. That’s not good.” He softened his voice enough to show sympathy for the danger Kim was in yet not so much that it stopped conveying the urgency of their situation. “Kim, do you still think you can get that leak stopped before we lose too much fuel to decelerate and make our window?”