by James Wilks
Just as the structure of the Yoo-lin mark VII satellite was starting to buckle from the opposing forces, and just as the drone was achieving maximum thrust, Dinah let go.
The drone rocketed away at what she estimated must be six Gs of thrust. At the same time, the Gringolet grew immeasurably closer in her forward view, blotting out the stars as Bethany brought it thrusting back. Just as they had planned, the drone flew squarely into the rear of the ship before the drone’s pilot on the Doris Day knew what was happening. The drone was crushed between the satellite and the engine housing, and small pieces of it and the satellite itself broke off and floated in various directions. Dinah worked the controls to reverse her movement away from the ship and her prize.
She allowed herself a dignified grin, and said, “Exactly as planned, sir. The drone looks to be non-functional and the package is mostly intact. If you could move free of the area, I’ll reacquire in just a few minutes. And please thank Bethany for not crushing me too.”
“Copy that,” her captain’s voice came through her EVA earpiece. “We’re moving.” Dinah began pushing the UteV back towards the satellite, using the capture claws to push aside the larger stray pieces of debris.
Suddenly, Templeton’s voice came through the earpiece. “Dinah, we’ve got two more drones headed your way! We can’t stop them. Tell me you have another amazing plan.”
She considered for a moment before replying. “Will a crazy one do, sir?”
A minute later, the two drones flew silently around Gringolet, one above, one below, and barreled towards her small metal can. She had just secured another hold on the satellite, but the safety of her home ship was now two hundred kilometers away. There was no way she would make it before the drones pried the satellite away from her. Dinah double-checked her craft’s hold on the target and looked quickly up and down at the incoming drones. She doubted they would play as nice this time. She looked over her calculations on the screen in front of her and the flashing execute button. She shook her head to clear it, wishing she could wipe sweat off her brow in an EVA suit, and then took a deep breath. Her eyes closed for a second, then opened.
“Now, sir,” she said, and pressed the button. Responding exactly as programmed, the UteV redirected all of its available thrust through the forward ventral and rear dorsal thrusters. Safety lights immediately blazed and klaxons sounded, but she silenced them with the flip of a switch. The craft quickly began spinning end over end like a runaway Ferris wheel, and Dinah Hazra was subjected to upwards of seven Gs. The sensation was one of falling forward and down, perhaps curving unceasingly around the outside loop of a roller coaster, but much, much more unpleasant.
Black motes flooded her vision and the sounds in the craft grew distant. She knew that she was close to passing out. The UteV was spinning end over end, taking the satellite with it. The drones paused, their retro jets firing and their pilots unsure of what to do with the situation they faced. At the precise moment she had programmed the computer to do so, knowing that she was incapable of the split-second timing necessary to aim precisely, the capture claws released and the satellite went careening off towards her home ship. The drones, once their pilots had finally grasped what had happened, gave pursuit, but it was too late. Bethany was already bringing the ship around, and Templeton was opening the shuttle bay door. The small pilot, her eyes darting back and forth from her control panel to the window, aligned the ship, and the satellite flew into the bay and crunched against the back wall.
“Dinah, are you okay?” Templeton asked, the alarm in his voice quite clear.
After a few seconds, her voice came through the speakers. “Bit dizzy, sir. Otherwise okay.”
“That was a hell of a move. Christ. Nice throw.”
“Nice catch, sir.”
“Yeah, thank Bethany for that. You’d better-“
“Missile!” Charis shouted. “There’s a tac missile following the same trajectory as the first drone. It’s looking to pass us!” The desperation in Charis’ voice was infectious. Templeton turned to launch intercept chaff, even as he knew that it wouldn’t help if the missile wasn’t targeted on them. Bethany fought the urge to put the ship between the missile and the woman in the UteV.
“Open coms to the ‘Day!’” the captain said, her voice nearly a shout. “Now!”
Yegor tapped a few buttons and nodded quickly, indicating that he had opened a channel to the other vessel.
“Logan, what the hell do you think you’re doing? You lost. You don’t need to hurt my crew.”
There was an agonizing moment of silence while Vey took his time replying. When he did, his voice dripped with condescension. “You need to learn what happens when you keep me from my toys, Clea.”
Templeton’s communications ceased abruptly. As the small craft stabilized and her vision cleared, Dinah looked through the window towards the ship. She breathed deeply and sighed, smiling despite her pounding headache, content to wait for the first mate to reestablish contact. Her hands were trembling from the experience and she was sweating more than ever, but she was all right. She watched the two drones move off and back to their home vessel; there was no point in them troubling her now. Suddenly she spied the telltale glow of an incoming hostile projectile. She squinted at the missile, trying to identify its make and tonnage, another part of her mind calmly trying to tell her how irrelevant that information was.
It took her about two seconds to run through all of her options. There weren’t any. Gringolet couldn’t save her, not at this point, and the small craft she currently inhabited was incapable of outrunning or outmaneuvering a tac missile. She could eject; the EVA suit would sustain her for several hours in space, but the shrapnel from the explosion would undoubtedly kill her. She had no jetpack to gain distance she would need to have a chance of survival anyway.
“Huh,” she said. There was nothing to do but wait; she estimated perhaps four seconds. The missile flew straight and true, descending towards the aft dorsal section of the utility vehicle. With an audible thunk, it bounced off the back of her little metal can, sending it into a lazy spin. Realization of her survival dawned. She immediately dismissed the possibility of a malfunction as too remote to consider. After snorting laughter for a second or two, she breathed a sigh of deep relief and hit the coms button.
“It wasn’t armed, sir. Warning shot, I make it.” A mixture of cheers and sighs floated to her across the vacuum of space. She closed her eyes and let the craft drift for a few minutes more.
“Or what can happen,” Vey’s voice mocked the crew from the cockpit speakers. “Let’s not do this again.”
“Logan, you’re a son of a bitch,” Staples replied, and cut coms.
Chapter 4
Once the UteV was secured in the shuttle bay and the bay was safely repressurized, Dinah climbed out of the vehicle. She pushed her way across the back of the cavernous room, floating over to the elevator. The lift carried her up to the EVA prep room, and along the way she removed her helmet. As she exited, she found several members of the crew waiting for her, the captain in front. Behind her floated Donovan Templeton, navigator Charis MacDonnell, Charis’ husband and Dinah’s right-hand man, John Park, communications expert Yegor Durin, Doctor Jabir Iqbal, and even the cook, Piotr Kondratyev.
“Hey!” shouted Templeton. “The lady of the hour!” He clapped twice in excitement and appreciation.
“I would think that would buy me at least the day, sir,” Dinah responded, pulling off her thick-fingered gloves. Templeton pushed off a wall handle and came forward to help her disengage the back piece from the suit. She allowed him to render his assistance.
“Really fantastic work, Dinah,” Staples stated, pushing herself forward and offering her hand. The chief engineer shook it and nodded somewhat gravely at the compliment.
“Just doing my job, sir.”
“Nonsense,” Staples replied immediately. “You did outstanding work,” her tone turned somewhat scolding, “but you were less careful with your life than I l
ike my crew to be, especially my one-of-a-kind, jack-of-all-trades engineer. We could have just let them have it.”
At this point the crew members had surrounded her in a rough half circle, floating somewhat awkwardly and touching each others’ shoulders to stay in place and upright. Dinah looked her captain in the eye as she released her hand and casually said, “I never judged myself to be in any real danger, sir. I hope this doesn’t mean you’re losing faith in my abilities.”
Staples broke into a wide and toothy grin, many of the surrounding people laughed, and even Dinah smiled briefly.
“She’d be a fool to!” Templeton declared loudly. The statement fell flat, and Staples shot him a sideways glance. He shrugged awkwardly and apologetically, still laughing.
After the other crew had congratulated her and the back patting had subsided, the doctor addressed her in his rich voice. “I’d like to see you in Medical once you get changed, Ms. Hazra. You subjected your body to, what did they tell me, seven gravities? How do you feel?” His eyes moved over her face, assessing, looking for signs of stress, pain, or discomfort.
“It was barely six,” she responded, “and I feel fine.”
“Nonetheless. Doctor’s orders,” Iqbal replied with some flair. “Shall we say Medical, twenty minutes?”
The captain spoke up before Dinah could reply. “My orders too. I want you checked out and with a clean bill of health. You went through quite an ordeal out there, whether you admit it or not.”
“I’ll choose ‘not,’ sir,” she replied, “but I’ll be there.”
Staples nodded. “Good. I think we can have a family dinner after all that, once we get under way. I don’t know about you all, but I’d rather have gravity when I eat.”
There was a general chorus of agreements.
Nineteen minutes later, the ship was moving towards Mars again under a single G of thrust. John was manning the ReC. Dinah Hazra opened the door into the Medical bay. The bay was a high ceilinged rectangular room over fifteen meters in length. It was half again as wide, and one wall was layered with hinged, pull-down beds. Stretchers stood in storage, strapped into wall cradles next to the door, and magnetic medical trays sat at strategic positions along the wall opposite the beds. At the far end, Dinah could see the doctor’s private office, the windows currently transparent to the rest of the bay. While the majority of the ship was stark, gunmetal grey, the walls and ceiling of the Medical bay were tinged blue, adding to its general air of sterility. The floors were different from the usual deck grating. Medical was the only room in the ship that had been outfitted with the recently invented, cutting edge, and highly expensive artificial gravity floor panels.
As Dinah poked her head through the door, the doctor looked up from his surface and smiled at her in welcome. From her perspective, the man appeared to be standing on the wall. The effect was disconcerting to most of the crew members, but they all appreciated their captain’s extravagant expenditure on the artificial gravity. Altering the Medical bay whenever they entered atmosphere would be work intensive and problematic, and a shift from gravity to weightlessness or vice versa could be deadly if it came in the middle of a delicate medical procedure. Feeling for all the world like Fred Astaire, she climbed through the door, somewhat awkwardly altering her orientation to the doctor’s version of up.
“Dinah Hazra, reporting as ordered, sir,” she said, finding her footing.
“Ahlan wa sahlan, Lieutenant,” the doctor replied. Dinah blinked several times, taken aback. “If one is going to act like they are still in the military, one should not be surprised when they are addressed as such. I am not a sir,” he continued, not unkindly.
“I’m not in the military anymore. And I don’t particularly like being reminded that I was, Doctor.” She took several steps towards one of the hinged beds on the wall, her voice demonstrating slight irritation.
“That is fair,” he replied, “but I hope you don’t think you’re fooling anyone aboard this ship about how you spent your formative years.”
She sighed and cast her eyes downward. “No, I suppose not, but it’s also not something I like to advertise.” A thought occurred to her, and she looked up sharply at him.
As if reading her mind, he raised his hands, palms outward, in a gesture of peace. “As your doctor, I may have read your rather lengthy and impressive military record, Ms. Hazra, but as your doctor, I am also obliged to maintain confidentiality.” He gestured to the table she had approached, and the woman turned and hopped up on it, her legs dangling a few inches off the flooring. He was wearing pale blue scrubs and a white lab coat, and when he hung a stethoscope around his neck, the stereotypical image was complete. He came around in front of her and added, “And as your friend, Dinah, I am honor bound to keep your secrets.” She looked at him steadily and without comment, but he could detect gratitude in her eyes.
“So,” he said, a little too loudly and dramatically, signaling the transition from friend to physician. “How are you feeling?”
“Just fine,” she said for what she felt was the tenth time since she had tossed the satellite at the ship.
He proceeded with his check up, exploring the glands in her neck with his firm fingers, prodding her back, measuring her breath with the stethoscope, and testing her reflexes. He asked her to hold out her hands, and they exhibited a slight tremor despite her efforts to hold them still.
“That’s not unusual,” he commented somewhat dismissively after regarding them for several seconds. “Did you lose consciousness?”
“Almost,” she answered reluctantly.
He sat back against the lowered bed opposite her and nodded. “Other common side effects of exposure to high G acceleration include black motes, temporary loss of vision, tunnel hearing, temporary loss of hearing, changes in blood pressure, muscle cramping, damage to vision, even brain damage if the brain is robbed of blood, and consequently oxygen for long enough. Tell me, how long were you putting your body under the strain of ‘barely six’ gravities?”
“Less than thirty seconds,” she replied.
“Ah. I think we can rule out brain damage, then, though I’m going to have a careful look at your eyes.” He took up the ophthalmoscope next to him from one of the magnetic trays and then paused. “Cervical acceleration-deceleration, also known as whiplash, can also be common, depending on the direction which the body is accelerated. Tell me, which direction were you accelerating?”
Dinah leaned forward, putting her head nearly between her knees for a moment. “Like this.”
“Ah, counted on your headrest to save your neck, did you? Very clever, especially considering the stresses of your situation.” He smiled in approval.
She shrugged. “If I remember my training correctly, ‘eyes-in’ is also the least likely to be damaging to the retinas.”
“Yes, well, let’s see if those drill instructors had it right, shall we?” He leaned forward and brought the ophthalmoscope to bear on her right eye.
Once her eyes were checked, her blood pressure taken, and even her blood sugar measured, Iqbal leaned back against the opposing bed again. “It seems you came through, as you said, ‘just fine.’ You may experience some light-headedness and trembling for the next few days, but that should pass. Your eyes are fine. Seven gravities of acceleration is rarely permanently damaging to people in short doses, especially those with prior exposure to its effects, but there is no harm in being cautious. An ounce of prevention, as they say.” He paused a moment and took a breath. “Tell me, how is the prosthesis treating you? Would you mind if I examined it?”
After a few seconds, Dinah nodded and replied, “Yes, that’s fine.”
“It’s the left, correct?” She was tempted to be annoyed with him. She didn’t quite walk with a limp, but her slightly irregular gait betrayed the existence of the prosthetic to anyone looking. She decided to let it pass; he was just trying to be polite, even if she felt as if he were coddling her. She nodded again.
The doctor knelt do
wn in front of her and gently rolled up her left pant leg. The combat boot ended where her mid-calf would have been, and from out of the boot the artificial leg rose up to cup her flesh and blood knee. Two small black cords, one emerging from either side of the prosthesis, connected to nodes imbedded in the flesh on the sides of her knee. He unlaced her boot and pulled it off. The haptic sensors in the artificial foot and calf sent signals to the nodes which sent signals to the nerves in her knee which sent signals to her brain telling her that someone was taking off her shoe. The sensation was oddly distant, however, not unlike people’s descriptions of their limbs when under the effects of morphine or hallucinogens.
With the boot off and placed on the gravity flooring, the doctor regarded the prosthetic, a mechanical device encased in plastic that mimicked the shape of her other leg almost precisely. “Can you arch your foot for me?” She did so, suppressing her objection to the possessive. It was only as much her foot as her boot was. “Rotate your ankle.” She complied. He produced his reflex hammer and ran it under the arch of the foot, and she shivered. “How does that feel?” The sensation her brain received told her that it should be ticklish, but she had not been ticklish since childhood, and so the conflicting information left her feeling confused and uneasy.
“Unpleasant,” she stated flatly.
“Sorry,” he said, as a matter of reflex, continuing his evaluation. Finally he stood and handed her the boot. “How is running with it?”
“Hurts a little bit.”
He took this to mean that it hurt a fair amount. “If you want, I can disable the limb’s haptic feedback.”
“No thanks. It’s worse wearing it when I can’t feel anything.” She set about lacing up her boot.
“As you wish. Tell me, do you sleep with it on?” He leaned back on his table again.
“No,” she admitted.
“It’s okay,” he assured her, “it’s only recommended, not required. The idea is that constant feedback will trick the brain into forgetting that the limb is artificial.”