He heaved again on the wheel. Sweating. Grunting. Gloves slipping. Why hadn’t he worked harder to stay fit when he had the chance?
The damn thing didn’t move a centimeter.
He sank back into the service module. Frost-coated supplies and survival crap drifted around his ankles, lit by the weak beam of his helmet lamp. All this Chinese shit. There might be an emergency radio beacon in here and he wouldn’t even know it.
He reached into his spacesuit’s thigh pocket and brought out the modified Glock the NXC had given him. Its bullets would go through a spacesuit, allegedly. Would they go through an airlock? No. They were frangible bullets, designed not to hole a spacecraft.
He slid back through the hatch to Meili. He turned her right way over, so she was kind of lying on the tilted consoles. The blood smeared on her faceplate hid the wreck of her face. There were strands of hair caught in the blood. He remembered touching her hair. The sweet human smell of it.
I love you. That’s what she’d said to him, as the Shenzhou topped out and began to fall back towards Europa. He’d said it to her, too. I love you.
Momentary madness, a natural reaction to the nearness of death, but there had been truth in it. There was truth in it. Skyler’s heart belonged to Hannah, but he had loved Meili, too. Shipmate, companion, gardener, electronics expert, pilot. Cute as hell, incidentally. And now … dead.
The first human being to walk on Europa had become the first human being to die on it.
“Oh, hell,” Skyler said. “Oh, Meili, honey. It’s not fucking fair.”
He perched on the claw-like mounting of her seat and sobbed like a child. Tears melted the sticky stuff on his eyelashes, washing it down his cheeks. Snot coursed from his nose and coated his lips and chin.
As he wept, he heard a voice in his head. It sounded like Lance Garner’s.
Get your shit together, man. What are you, a fudgin’ pussy? You just gonna sit there and CRY?
Skyler answered, in his head, But she’s dead. And I’m going to die, too.
And whose fault is that, huh?
Seeking the answer to that, Skyler remembered more details from the moments before the crash. Meili had kept talking about the APU. She’d assumed he must have accidentally switched the heater off. Had he? No, he couldn’t have. This couldn’t all be his fault.
He must have been right to begin with.
The malware.
It didn’t exactly make sense that the Chinese would blow up their own lander, but who said the malware was Chinese, anyway? Meili hadn’t known anything about it.
Skyler suddenly remembered Alexei pointing a crowbar or some shit at his face, smiling like a wolf.
BANG.
Letting Skyler know what lay in store for him.
BANG.
“Oh, you bastard,” Skyler whispered. The realization stung all the worse because it came too late. Alexei had won. Skyler was stuck in a wrecked spacecraft, and he was going to die when his air ran out.
He picked Meili up and shook her frantically, willing her to be alive. Her head bobbled against the inside of her faceplate. He glimpsed a crushed eyeball, shattered teeth.
Dropping the corpse in revulsion, he saw something flutter down from the open hatch above him. He snatched it out of the air.
A piece of laminated cardboard, coated with frost.
An airline safety card?!?
Cartoon drawings. Blocks of Chinese text.
Skyler stared hungrily at the drawings.
It absolutely was a safety card.
In case of emergency …
Oh my God.
He leapt back into the service module, scrambled into the airlock chamber, and located the emergency release handle for the outer hatch. He pulled it in the direction shown in the drawing on the safety card.
Now, when he put his shoulder to the wheel, it spun smoothly, and the hatch popped up. The scant volume of air that remained in the Shenzhou gusted past Skyler and away.
He put his head and shoulders out.
The view was sobering.
He gazed down at Europa’s icy terrain. The Shenzhou had melted out a hole where it crashed. It now sat in a frozen hollow, tilted at an angle that made the Leaning Tower of Pisa look like a plumb line.
The ice had refrozen around the bottom of the Shenzhou, and the craft’s shadow hid that side of it. Peering down at the other side, Skyler saw that the engine bell was just … gone. Strewn in smithereens far and wide, presumably. The extra-long tank had split along one side like a banana, and crumpled like the hood of a car that hit an overpass.
Frozen billows of what looked like sea foam cascaded from the rupture in the water tank. The LOX and LH2 from the Shenzhou’s own reactant tanks must have vaporized on contact with the vacuum, and the volatile gases had met the water as it gushed out, filling it with bubbles.
That was a stroke of luck. If the reactants had caught fire, instead of getting dispersed in the frozen foam, he’d be dead.
He looked up. He saw Jupiter. He looked north and south. He saw ice. West. Ice. He looked east.
He saw a spike on the horizon.
Blink.
Still there.
A spike like a church steeple, white against the black sky.
The Dragon. In this featureless wasteland, that could only be the Dragon, parked on its landing jacks, sticking up over the horizon!
Of course, of course—the Shenzhou had gone almost straight up, aiming for the SoD, and had come straight down!
Hope rushed in. Jack and Alexei would rescue him …
… um, no. If they had purposely schemed to kill him, rescuing him would be the last thing on their minds.
They’d be investigating the alien artifact Kate had found. Maybe even talking with the aliens.
His and Meili’s aliens.
“Oh, you just wait,” Skyler muttered. “You’re not as smart as you think you are, assholes.”
He closed the hatch and descended into the service module. His mind was firing on all cylinders now. If five minutes ago he’d been weeping in despair, determination now energized him.
Don’t count the USA out just yet, bub.
He pressed his gloves together in a prayer-like attitude, thinking hard.
The big problem—the biggest obstacle to his survival—was the radiation.
Average radiation dose when you get a CT scan: 10 milliSieverts.
Amount of radiation you’d soak up in six months on the ISS: 160 mSv.
Maximum radiation level recorded at Fukushima: 400 mSv per hour.
Average radiation dose absorbed by Chernobyl workers who died within a month: 6,000 mSv.
Effective radiation level on Europa’s surface: 200 mSv per hour.
Skyler knew these figures off the top of his head, because he had taken an intense personal interest in finding out what this trip would cost him in terms of health. Bottom line, he was going to die of cancer. Even before he set foot on Europa, he’d soaked up a quarter of a Chernobyl dose. The whole crew had, just from travelling on the SoD for two years.
So—fuck the future. He had no expectations of a healthy retirement at this point, anyway. All he needed to do was stay alive, mobile, and capable of pulling the trigger for …
… how long?
How far was it to the Dragon?
“Come on,” he muttered to himself. “You’re an astrophysicist.”
My height above ground will intercept cue-ball-smooth Europa at a given distance X. The Dragon also intercepts the horizon at a distance Y. Since the horizon intercept is a third point on a chord that connects the two heights, you add X and Y, and hey presto, you get your total distance …
40 kilometers.
Oh, shit.
That’s five hours of walking, at 200 milliSieverts an hour.
I have six hours of air. Twice that much, if I take one of the spares. Air is not a problem. But the rems are.
OK. OK, it’s the Bremsstrahlung we’re most worried about. High-ener
gy beta particles hit dense materials and produce electromagnetic radiation. We need to slow those particles down, disperse them …
Skyler foraged through the frost-coated supplies drifting around his feet. He sorted out five sheets of aluminum, 60cm x 60cm each, and five sheets of low-temperature plastic, the same size.
He layered the metal and plastic sheets alternately, and wrapped duct tape around the whole sandwich.
When he’d done that, he laughed. Shook his head. So this is what that Ph.D was good for …
With the sandwich under his arm, he exited the airlock hatch and jumped to the ground. On the way down, he crashed through the edge of the frozen wave of H2O foam. It shattered around him in white pumice-like shards.
He remembered Meili’s historic jump to the surface. Wo dao le! she’d screamed, spinning round and round. I am the first human being to walk on Europa!
Tears welled up in Skyler’s eyes again. “They’ll pay for this,” he muttered. “I’ll make them fucking pay. I promise you, honey, they will not get away with this.”
He used the rest of the duct tape to fasten the sandwich on top of his helmet, like a giant coolie hat. It blocked out Jupiter, and he hoped it would at least partially block out the lethal hail of charged particles from the sky.
He started to walk. In this gravity, it wasn’t really walking, but skipping. Lou, lou, skip to my lou …
His breath sighed like the sea in a shell.
In, out.
Lou, lou …
In, out.
Skip to my lou …
He felt so tiny in the empty plain, it hardly seemed like he was moving. When he glanced back, the Shenzhou had shrunk to a pimple. But the Dragon did not seem to have come any closer at all.
CHAPTER 23
Kate settled herself astride the broomstick. Giles wrapped his arms around her waist, and she twisted the throttle.
The broomstick puttered away from the SoD, bucking a couple of times before the fuel settled.
She hadn’t done this in a long time. Had spacewalked regularly, to keep her hand in. But setting off from the SoD without a tether introduced an element of madness into a situation already fraught with known and unknown risks.
When the excrement hits the ventilator, what do you do? They’d put her through numerous apocalyptic scenarios before the SoD departed from Earth. Of course, none of those scenarios came close to the reality. Four crew members down. Jesus. But one core principle of leadership still applied. Don’t just sit around chewing your fingernails. Act.
So that’s what she was doing.
She felt uneasy about leaving Hannah on board by herself. Hannah—great girl, but an alcoholic. You cannot trust an alcoholic, end of story. Now that Kate no longer needed to butter Hannah up, she’d have to put her foot down about the still. But that was if they survived. Obtaining the water they needed to get home came first.
The MOAD loomed ahead, blocking out Jupiter and the stars. Kate flew the broomstick along the sunlit side of the gargantuan alien spaceship. Honestly? This may have been her duty, but she wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
An alien spaceship! Son of a bitch!
Thrusters the size of aircraft carriers bulged out of the steel cliff that hung to their left. You could fly the whole SoD into one of those maws, without clipping the sides.
“C’est fantastique!” Giles breathed. “It is real?”
“You bet your sweet fanny it is,” Kate said, amused.
“Where do you think they have the water tanks?”
“If these are the thrusters for their in-system drive, the water tanks must be near the thrusters.”
The broomstick flew slowly with two of them on board. Spitting wisps of gas, they dawdled towards the MOAD’s midsection. The hull must have been five feet thick. Extruded forms stood like cottages on a metal prairie, connected by a network of pipes. Tiny craters testified to micro-impacts over the years. Some of the craters had craters. How long had this thing been flying, before it reached our solar system?
“How shall we get inside?” Giles said.
“My plan,” Kate said, “is to gain access through the gigantic fucking hole in the side.”
The hole came into view as she spoke. She swooped the broomstick towards it, rotating at the same time. Giles gulped. Now they seemed to be flying over the MOAD, with the sun above them.
The cratered ‘landscape’ of the hull ended in a cliff. The edge of the cliff swooped up towards them in twisted points and rags of metal. They flew on over the hole. Sunlight shone on twisted metal at the bottom.
“An explosion inside the MOAD,” Kate speculated. “Ripped that hull like cloth. Must have been some explosion.”
She shifted her weight forward, altering the broomstick’s center of mass.
They dived into the hole.
Down, down, down.
Partition walls stuck up like roofless houses in a bombed city, marking the edge of the blast zone.
She executed a flat 180° spin—Giles clung to her for dear life—and used the broomstick’s thrust to decelerate.
“Whee! That was fun,” she said brightly, cutting the thrust and stepping off. The broomstick had its own tether. She used it to tie the little vehicle to a support pillar that no longer supported anything.
Giles breathed heavily over the radio.
They floated between walls torn off at different heights. Sunlight came down at an angle, leaving the floor in shadow. The darkness cut them off at the thighs. A short way away, impenetrable shadow fell like a curtain over the roofless corridor.
Kate removed her belt tether. She attached it to the end of Giles’s tether, and tied the other end to the pillar, giving them twice the range of a single tether. “Hold my hand, Hansel,” she said. “Let’s not get lost.”
Giles laughed, weakly. But as they floated towards the shadow, he freed his glove from hers and darted ahead. His head lamp bobbed like a firefly in the darkness ahead. “I have found writing!” he exclaimed. Kate had never heard such joy in his voice.
She joined him. He was gloating over a seven-sided plaque on the wall. Traces of paint adhered to it. To Kate, the marks looked like chicken-scratches. “It probably just says ‘No Smoking,’” she commented. “Famous last words. Giles, we’re looking for water, not hieroglyphics.”
Exploring the MOAD with Giles was like navigating Toys ‘R’ Us with her nephews. He could not stay on mission. Whenever he saw a sign, he had to photograph it. They ventured through the dark, roofless corridors to the full length of their double tether, then returned to the broomstick and set off in a different direction. Kate sucked her teeth. 43 minutes had already elapsed since they reached the MOAD. They were exposed to space here. Exposed to Jupiter’s radiation. And Giles insisted on dicking around, analyzing alien signage …
“We’ll have to take the broomstick and fly into the undamaged regions of the ship,” she said abruptly. “We’re just wasting time here.”
They retraced their steps. Giles mumbled to himself about grammatical typology and Rosetta stones.
The broomstick was gone.
The loose end of its tether had been neatly tied to the support pillar.
Kate instinctively pushed Giles behind her. Her glove scuffed the place on her hip where her service weapon should be. How deep these instincts ran.
But here, her instincts were useless. No gun. And nothing to shoot. Just the loop of the broomstick’s tether, undulating in the vacuum.
“They took it,” she said thickly, aware that she was echoing Skyler. Poor, dead Skyler. “The fuckers fucking took it.”
She jerked on the tether. It stayed tied in a nice, neat clove hitch. A Navy rating couldn’t do better.
“Makes you think about all the things that are the same,” she said, tightly. Her rage was incandescent. “No matter where in the fucking galaxy you come from, there’s only one way to tie a clove hitch. I guess that also goes for the things you were talking about. Syntax and that shit.”
Giles did not answer.
She spun around.
“Giles?”
He was gone.
CHAPTER 24
“It’s all bullshit,” Alexei said, walking across the manufacturing floor with his arm around Jack’s neck. He had seen Jack get carried away before, and sometimes that was a good thing, but it was never a good thing to trust without verifying. And that’s what Jack was doing. He was buying everything that the rriksti were selling, like a typical gullible Westerner.
“How is it bullshit?” Jack said crossly.
Alexei glanced back at the alien shuttle. The rriksti called Keelraiser stood on the wing. Alexei could feel it watching them all the way from here.
“I am trying to work out what type of drive the MOAD uses,” he said.
Jack interrupted, “We already know it’s a water plasma drive, just like ours.”
“They didn’t come all the way from Proxima b burning water. They must get up to a significant percent of light speed. So they need an interstellar drive.”
“I think that’s obvious, yes. The MPD drive is for in-system deceleration. It’s a giant brake.”
“So what type of interstellar drive do they use? FTL? A warp drive?”
“We can ask them later.” Jack twisted out from under his arm. “Jesus, Alexei, we’re being really rude.”
Alexei almost laughed. Jack was concerned with being polite! To aliens! “I already did ask them. After you left the combustion chamber—”
“Yeah, the combustion chamber!” Jack’s eyes lit up. “Wasn’t that flipping amazing? We were in there with a star!”
Alexei wanted to shake him. “I asked them,” he repeated, “about their interstellar drive, and they described it to me. The engine is a scaled-up version of the muon-catalyzed fusion drive. It is fed by magnetic field generators. A scoop, formed from these magnetic fields, thousands of kilometers across, collects interstellar hydrogen for propellant.”
“It’s a Bussard ramscoop.”
“Yes, they invented the same concept. There are only a limited number of ways to do these things.”
“So what?” Jack said. “They use a magnetic ramscoop, so what? Once you’ve got fusion drives, you’re going to the stars one way or another.” His eyes were soft, dreamy.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 17