To a casual observer, the way we kept switching positions might seem inefficient. Clearly we were best able to do our own jobs. However, it’s important to remember that on deepspace missions we were out there for long stretches. We swapped jobs for a few hours at a time, partly due to boredom, but mainly as a two-fold safety measure.
First, boredom breeds complacency. It’s easy to lose focus or even fall asleep when someone is bored to tears. That can get people killed. Although each of us was capable of filling in for anyone else temporarily, we never quite felt as comfortable as we did at our own posts. Not to mention that no one wanted to be the butt of everyone else’s good-natured jokes after messing up! This tended to keep us alert.
Second, as I’ve said before, we were a small crew. If each of us limited himself to only his specific job, and one of us were incapacitated or killed, we’d be in big trouble. What if Cap were killed—how would we get home if no one else could fly the ship? The autopilot could do only so much by itself. It was because of this risk that we exchanged at least one shift a week with another crewman.
A third, though less important, reason for doing this was that it let each of us get a turn outside. Shamu felt closed in at times. None of us was claustrophobic or we would have been weeded out during the crew selection process. But it sure was nice, from time to time, to see something in front of us that was more than a few meters away.
At the risk of slipping into eloquence, it does the human soul good to look upon the naked beauty of the cosmos. The view of the heavens from Earth is the palest imitation of the wonders to behold when there’s no atmosphere, or city lights, or pollution to obscure the full effect. Stepping onto an asteroid and looking up into the infinite depth of space is like a drowning man taking that first breath of life-giving air.
There are no words that can do justice to that feeling of fulfillment, the feeling that you were born to be there. No matter how many times someone steps outside, it’s impossible to become jaded by the view.
* * * *
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP
I looked up, startled. It took me a moment to recognize the source of the noise as the proximity alarm. I checked the sensor display. There was something heading right for us: a rogue—a ‘roid knocked out of its orbit by collision with something else.
“Cap,” I shouted into the radio. I had to talk fast. “We’ve got a rogue incoming at over 1,900 KPH! I can’t quite be sure yet if it’ll hit the ship, but it’s definitely headed toward the asteroid. ETA 49 seconds. It’s too big and too fast for the shield to stop it!”
Cap didn’t mince words. “No time for us to get back to Shamu. Guido, get my ship out of there! Emergency procedure Delta!”
“Aye, Cap!”
Guido was trained well enough not to waste time arguing with a direct order. Besides, we all knew there was nothing we could to do for Cap and Sparks in the time we had left. Their fate was beyond our control.
“Hunker down, Cap. We’ll be back for you two as soon as we can.” Guido’s fingers were already dancing over the controls.
“Roger. Now get going!”
I glanced at the viewscreen and watched Cap and Sparks, as seen by the other’s respective helmet cams, prepare for impact.
The computer was programmed with various emergency procedures. Delta was specifically designed for evading meteoroids. It slaved the navigational program to the sensors. That allowed the autopilot to maneuver in response to the direction of the incoming rock.
First, the autopilot detached the flexible conveyor conduit from the ship.
“ETA 25 seconds,” I reported. “Sealing all airtight hatches.”
I pressed the appropriate control. The hatch leading from the bridge sighed as it slid securely shut. Now that I knew what I had to do, the initial moment of panic had passed, replaced by icy calm.
Next, the computer blew the explosive bolts that held the anchor cables to the hull. Those cables were what secured Shamu to the asteroid at a distance of seventy meters. Then it triggered the port thruster at minimal power to push us far enough away from the asteroid that we wouldn’t hurt anyone “below.”
“Twenty seconds.” Guido and I secured our safety harnesses.
Finally, both thrusters ignited at full acceleration, parallel to the long axis of the asteroid. It took several seconds for Shamu to begin moving, due to all the inertia.
“Ten seconds….nine….eight….”
It seemed to take forever, but Shamu finally cleared the asteroid, which wasn’t much longer than Shamu herself.
“Five seconds, Cap! Hang on!” I gripped the console in front of me so tightly I was afraid I might break it.
The rock, larger than a groundcar and moving at nearly two thousand KPH, struck the ‘roid near the far end, opposite from where Shamu was heading, and glanced off away from Shamu. The force of the impact shattered the tip of the rock and started the asteroid tumbling and spinning—pitching and rolling, in pilots’ terminology. Chunks of rock flew off in every direction. Some of the pieces struck Shamu’s shield; fortunately they were traveling too slowly to break through and were deflected away.
“Cap! Are you all right?” I called. “Cap! Sparks! Come in!” Nothing but silence. “Guido, get us back there—pronto! Their helmet cams both stopped transmitting!”
“Where did you think I was going?” he said, through clenched teeth. “To get my nails done?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s going to be tough to match up with that ‘roid again. I could probably match either the pitch or the roll by myself, but not both at once. I’ll have to leave it up to the autopilot. It may take a few minutes.” His features were a study in deep concentration.
“They may not have a few minutes down there, damn it—if they’re even still on the rock.”
“Don’t you think I know that? But I can’t go any faster. It wouldn’t do them any good if we splatter ourselves all over the ‘roidscape, now would it?”
“You’re right, you’re right. I’m just worried.” I gnawed on my lower lip.
“You and me both, amigo.”
“Hang on, Guido. I’ve got a better idea. Tom,” I called on the intercom, “meet me in the pod bay. We need to launch pronto.”
“The pod—of course!” Guido exclaimed. “Why didn’t I think of that? It makes a lot more sense. Swede, I’ll have the computer work out a trajectory for the pod while you’re on your way to the pod bay.”
“Makes sense to me,” Tom replied from Engineering. “Swede, I’m closer to the bay, so I’ll start the prelaunch when I get there.”
“On my way!”
When I arrived, Tom was already halfway through the checklist. I jumped in the passenger seat and buckled in. We were still in our suits, of course, but now we sealed them.
Tom finished the checklist and called Guido. “All buttoned up down here. Ready for depressurization.”
The pods are nonpressurized, to minimize weight and size. There are no air tanks and no pressure seals or reinforcing structures to keep the air in and the vacuum of space out. Guido couldn’t open the bay to vacuum until we told him we were all sealed up in our suits and ready to go. The procedure took only a couple of minutes, but it seemed like forever. Who knew what might have happened down there?
For more than six years we’d been a family. We’d eaten together, worked together, and lived together. Cap was a father figure to the rest of us, even to Sparks, who was less than a decade Cap’s junior. If anything had happened to either of them….
With depressurization completed, Guido opened the outer bay door. “You’re good to go, Pod 2.”
“Roger, Shamu. Exiting the bay,” Tom reported. And a moment later, “We’re clear.”
“Roger Pod 2. Good luck!”
“Thanks. Let’s hope we don’t need it.”
We were only a few hundred meters from the asteroid when we left the ship. It didn’t take long to close in on A159. The ‘roid was shaped remarkably like a baked potat
o, even to the longitudinal split down the middle, as if it had been cut open. All it lacked was some fluffy white snow to take the place of sour cream. We headed for the end where Cap and Sparks had been working. We couldn’t land there, but the ravine would give us a direct path to follow back to the work site after we passed it and landed.
Another advantage of using the pod to effect the rescue, besides its agility, was that it eliminated the risk to Shamu. We were slaved to the ship’s more powerful computer, which greatly simplified our task, but Tom still had to land safely. There was no telling what the condition of Pod 1 might be, and we were going to need some way of getting back to the ship. We couldn’t afford to crack up Pod 2.
We decided to try to match the pitch first, the head-over-heels tumble. Essentially we would perform a loop-the-loop around the asteroid, circumnavigating from pole-to-pole as it were, trying to stay in the same relative position, just off the end of the rock—like a fly trying to stay in front of one gondola on a revolving Ferris wheel, only faster. Once we had mastered that trick, our next stunt would be to spin, or roll, the pod at exactly the same rotational rate as the asteroid. If successful, we would be able to glide in along the ravine that ran the length of the ‘roid and set down safely near the center of the rock. Leaving looked to be a lot simpler. All we would have to do is rocket straight off the side of the asteroid. As long as we were fast enough to avoid being swatted as the ‘roid twirled “beneath” us we’d be home free.
Of course, we had some work to do before we were ready to leave—namely, landing safely and finding and bringing back Cap and Sparks.
Assuming they were still on the rock.
* * * *
“Approaching the ravine, Shamu.”
“Roger, Pod 2. Initiating slave program.”
“Watch out for that spur, Tom!” I pointed to my right.
“I see it, I see it. Hold on!” He oscillated wildly, first left then right, and missed the outcropping by mere meters. My knuckles turned white where I gripped the “Jesus handle” over the door to my right. I had to bite my lip to keep quiet myself.
The handle had acquired that moniker decades ago when a politician looking for a holo-op had cried “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” as he hung onto one during a simulated emergency maneuver. The nickname stuck, both to the handle and to the esteemed senator, forever after known as “Jesus Jerry” among his nonfans.
I don’t know how, but between the ship’s computer plotting the flight path and Tom’s lightning-fast reflexes avoiding the outcroppings, we somehow managed to set down in one piece. Tom worked the attitude controls like a fighter pilot instead of a cargo jockey as he inserted Pod 2 into the asteroid’s crevasse as near to its axial center as possible. Finally, he triggered the control that fired anchors into the surface of the asteroid. Without anchors and cables to secure the pod tightly to the rock, the centrifugal force from the asteroid’s gyrations would have sent us careening into space. There simply wasn’t enough gravity to hold the pod, or us, securely to the asteroid under these conditions. We landed near the “equator” of the ‘roid, to minimize the effects of the tumbling. But we were off-center laterally—the ravine tended to snake from side to side—meaning that we still had the roll to contend with. Plus, the nearer we got to the end of the asteroid where Cap and Sparks were, the worse the pitch would be. It meant we couldn’t just get out and walk to them.
It certainly wasn’t the first time a ship had had to land on an asteroid with a crazy motion like this one had, which is why we carried the equipment for it—something like mountain climbing gear. It wasn’t a fun way to get around, but it was manageable.
Tom was first out the pod door, after clipping one end of his suit’s tether to a cleat on the side of the pod just outside the door. In his hand was a compressed-air gun with a modified piton sticking out of the end of it, trailing a thin cable that fed from a spool on the gun.
“Guido,” I called out, ignoring radio protocol. “Have you heard a peep out of Cap or Sparks?”
“Nothing. If I were you, I wouldn’t dawdle down there.”
“Roger.”
Tom braced himself against the pod. “Here goes nothing.”
He took aim and fired in the direction of a chunk of “hillside” forty or fifty meters away. The explosive projectile blew a small hole in the rock and embedded itself firmly via extensible spines. I tied off the other end of the cable to the same cleat that Tom was hooked to. Tom clipped his tether clip to the cable and took off, hand over hand toward the piton. I followed close behind. The wild motion of the asteroid didn’t exactly make it easy for us to pull ourselves along.
When we reached the first piton, we repeated the procedure with another one fired at the next mound of stone, and so on. This allowed us to zigzag across the face of the asteroid in the direction of the extraction site until we reached it, more than an hour later. It was one of the longest hours of my life.
The extraction site wasn’t pretty. Pod 1 was gone. Much of the small equipment was smashed or missing and most of the conveyor conduit was ripped away. The remainder, still connected to the extractor—which fortunately was securely anchored—was whipsawing in a sort of mad spiral dictated by the motion of the asteroid.
“I see one of them, at ten o’clock!” Tom shouted. He pointed to his left.
“There’s the other one, at three o’clock!” I responded.
“Thank goodness for that,” Guido radioed. “Can you tell if they’re alive?”
“Not from here,” I replied. “We’re checking now.”
The men were twelve meters apart, each attached to the rock by three tethers—two is standard operating procedure, but apparently they’d had the time, and the sense, to anchor the additional tethers before the meteoroid hit. It appeared that neither man was conscious, as they lolled loosely at the ends of their tethers. The one on the right was closer, so Tom fired another piton and we headed in his direction first.
It was Cap. There was no way to tell whether he was alive. However, when we “reeled him in” we saw that his suit was still airtight. That was always a good sign. Not so good was the large dent in the back of his helmet. We clipped one of his tethers to our cable and unhooked the others from the anchors. Then we zigzagged over to Sparks and likewise hooked him to the cable. He had blood on his right cheek and around his mouth. More worrisome was the spray of blood on the inside of his faceplate. Sparks looked in worse shape than Cap, but, again, there was no easy way to tell if he was still alive.
Tom fired a piton in the direction of the extractor.
“Where the hell are you going?” I yelled. I couldn’t believe that Tom was ignoring the danger to his friends. “We need to get Sparks and Cap back to the ship, ASAP!”
“I’ll just be a sec. Start heading back with Sparks, while I check the extractor. It’s too valuable to leave behind.”
“And so is Cap! What if he dies while you’re screwing around with the extractor?”
“I’ll be right behind you. If you don’t hurry up, I’ll run you over on the way back.” I saw worry lines on his face that I’d never seen before. He clearly wasn’t taking the situation lightly. Tom turned and began hand-over-handing his way to the extractor.
There was nothing I could do to stop him that wouldn’t delay Cap’s rescue even longer so, reluctantly, I clipped Sparks’ tether to my belt so I would have both hands free to pull us along the cable. I turned and headed for the pod, dragging Sparks behind me. The spiraling motion of the ‘roid complicated things. Sparks was twisting and flopping on the end of his tether like a prize marlin fighting for his freedom. More than once I lost my grip on the cable. The first time my heart almost stopped, until my tether pulled me up short. I had another flashback to my nightmare of weeks earlier.
The two of us must have looked comical, like a string of balloons tied to a rock on a breezy day, but it didn’t seem all that funny at the time. I reeled myself back in and continued on toward the pod.
�
�Guido,” I heard Tom call, “I’m releasing the extractor. Follow its trajectory so we can retrieve it later.”
“Roger.”
I looked over my shoulder to see Tom trigger the extractor’s anchor release. The groundcar-sized machine was hurled into space by the asteroid’s centrifugal force, narrowly missing being smashed as the ‘roid whirled crazily.
True to his word, Tom came up fast behind me, towing Cap after him. I redoubled my efforts and before I knew it, we had reached the pod. The capacity of the pod wasn’t a problem, because it was designed to haul cargo; but it had only two seats up front and no bunks or benches in the back. Sparks appeared the most injured, so I pulled him into the cargo hold first and strapped him to the deck as securely as I could. (Fortunately, there are all sorts of cleats and straps in the hold for securing the extraction gear.) Then I did the same for Cap. Both men were conscious by then, thank goodness. At least they were alive. Sparks coughed once and covered the inside of his faceplate with blood again. That was a scary moment. There was no telling how bad his internal injuries were.
I was especially concerned about the possibility of spinal damage to the two men from all the flailing about they’d endured, but there wasn’t much I could do about it in the pod. Strapping them securely to the deck was as close to a cervical brace as I could manage under the circumstances. At least their helmet bladders cradled their heads.
“Where…where are we?” Cap seemed to be having trouble focusing, as I secured the final strap.
“Hold on you two, we’ll have you safely back on Shamu in just a minute.” I looked over at Tom hopefully. He merely shrugged.
The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative Page 44