The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One

by James Wilks

  The disc that had been cut out of the hull was nestled against the side of the corridor, blocking the hallway that the pirates had used to access CB4. The piece of hull should have weighed over a thousand pounds under the effects of normal gravity. There were a variety of tasks that zero G made more difficult; fortunately, moving heavy objects was rendered quite the opposite. The two of them, through light applications of thrust, moved down the corridor and to what she hoped was their readymade patch. She gave a sigh of relief when she saw that the pirates had cut at an angle, aiming their cutting torches slightly out as they had carved their circle. The result was not a perfectly squat cylinder, but something that more closely resembled a large metallic peanut butter cup. The logic behind this was simple. Their attackers had planned to use it as a shield as they moved into the ship, and by cutting it in this shape it could only drift in, not out, of the hole they had made. It also had the benefit of making it very easy to hold in place while they welded it back into place.

  The effects of gravity might have been negated, but the rules of inertia remained, and it took both of them several minutes of pushing, pulling, and grunting to get the thing moving. The magnetic handles that the pirates had used to steer it had been left attached, and they were able to use these in conjunction with their jetpacks to drag the piece of hull back whence it had come. As they approached the hole, Dinah moved around to the back of the disc and pushed as best she could without a handle while Inboden pulled. As the makeshift bandage closed the last meter to the wound in the ship, the UteV’s lights were blocked and the hallway designated B17 on some designer’s schematic decades earlier became a bit darker. The conventional lights had blown when the air was sucked out of the hallway, but the emergency lights had kicked in, and they were designed to work in vacuum.

  It was the matter of another minute’s work to rotate the hull disc round until they could match it up perfectly to its original orientation, thus providing a tight seal. The cutters had carved the hole by hand, and though they clearly had been skilled, the disc was not a perfect circle. Once it was in place, Dinah slapped adhesive patches on the seams in various places to hold it. Outside, the mechanic did the same. John had come up behind him in the UteV, and he gently placed a capture claw around the handle on the back of Ian’s jetpack. Finally, it was time to begin the welding process. Dinah set her jetpack on .1 G constant thrust to keep her pressed to the wall, and used her arm and feet to brace and move herself. On the other side of the hull, Park was moving Inboden in a slow circle as he welded.

  “I feel like a paintbrush out here,” he muttered. Park and Templeton laughed audibly, and Dinah smiled.

  It took nearly fifteen minutes for them to melt the metal into a seal all around the disc, and when that was completed, the mechanic set about applying hull patches over the newly welded seam. Park used the craft’s other capture claw to pull them from the outboard storage crate and to hand them to him one by one. Finally, it was done.

  “Sir, are you there?” Dinah asked, glancing at the watch plastered to the inside of her helmet near her left ear.

  “Yep. You must be inside; I can hear you better.”

  “The seal is completed. You can try repressurizing B17.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Keep an eye out for leaks out there,” Dinah said to the repair crew on the other side of the freshly repaired hull.

  A few seconds later, the air level in the hallway started to rise. Dinah could neither hear nor see it, but the atmosphere gauge on her wrist told her it was increasing. As the air pressure grew, she held her breath, hoping the seal would hold. There was no reason it shouldn’t; they had been more than thorough, but then, it had not been a good day. The hallway, though not very large, took several minutes to repressurize. This was far more time than the cargo bay, but the cargo bay was designed to be depressurized and repressurized rapidly and regularly. The ship’s hallways were not.

  Once her gauge indicated that the atmosphere in the corridor was as normal as the rest of the ship, she spoke. “It looks like its holding in here. Do you see any atmosphere venting outside?” The question was a formality. The men would have told her if they had seen anything amiss.

  “Looks fine out here, chief,” Inboden said, his voice slightly laced with static.

  “All right then. You can come back inside now.”

  “Templeton?” It was Park’s voice.

  “Yeah, John. After you drop Ian off, you can go look for Yegor, but I don’t want you more than 2000 kilometers from the ship. You understand me?”

  “Loud and clear, Don.”

  Dinah looked once more at the gauge on her wrist, then reached up to undo the safety clamps and remove her helmet. The air filled her lungs easily, but it was bitterly cold. Her breath showed briefly in front of her face as she breathed out. The heaters were going to take a little while to warm the hallway, and she was glad that she was still in her suit. A light tap on the controls of her jetpack sent her back down the corridor to the door that she had ordered Parsells and Quinn to seal. It was odd seeing it from this side. She imagined Jang leaning out to shoot a rifle, imagined being the attacker pointing a stun pistol at him and shooting him in the head. Once she reached the branching hallway with the sealed door, she gripped a support bar and stopped herself. She reached down and opened the door. On the other side were Staples and the doctor.

  The captain shivered as the blast of cold air hit her in the face, and the doctor’s teeth chattered for a moment until he got them under control.

  “It is very cold in here, sir.” Dinah’s breath continued to mist as she spoke. “We can wait a few minutes if you’d like.”

  “No,” she shook her head, “we need to see to our passenger.” She produced a pair of gloves to protect her hands and slid them on, and the doctor did the same.

  A frigid minute later, they were in front of the door to CB4. It had auto-sealed when the hallway had depressurized, and it took Dinah only a few seconds to get it open. When the door swung in, there was no rush of air. The room might have been without air briefly, but once the door had closed, the air circulators had refilled it. Dinah moved in first, her captain and Jabir close behind. CB4 was a fairly large room, and like most on the ship, it was rectangular and ran perpendicular to the spine of the ship. The ventral and rear walls were covered in submerged hooks designed to hold cargo in place with the help of straps. Right now the room contained only two medium sized containers, each a meter square, and the stasis tube, a large letter B showing on the front. The docking node that had housed the other tube stood empty. None of this, however, demanded the three crew members’ attention so much as the massive convex dent in the top left corner of the room. It had evidently not caused a breach, but the hull was clearly quite damaged, and various electrical cables and even a support strut hung down brokenly.

  The stasis tube itself seemed undamaged, but there were several red lights blinking on its interface that had not been there when it had been wheeled past Staples on Mars. Dinah was already cruising over to it, having pushed herself off the doorway, and the captain and the doctor were right behind her. Dinah scanned the readout, then pulled off the gloves of her EVA suit and began typing on the screen.

  “It’s been damaged,” she said as she worked.

  “It doesn’t look damaged.” Staples countered, though as she said it, she knew it was absurd to contradict the woman.

  “It’s electrical damage. The supply sources were compromised. There was a power surge, and the tube was subjected to maybe a minute of vacuum.” Jabir approached and looked over Dinah’s shoulder, nodding as he read the display.

  “So what does that mean? Is the person,” she assumed it was Evelyn Schilling, but she was no longer certain, “in there alive? Are they all right?”

  “Yes, sir.” Dinah’s reply was immediate. “But I don’t know if they will continue to be. The tube needs repairs. I might be able to do it, but I really don’t want to operate on a stasis tube while
someone is inside.

  “I concur,” the doctor added.

  “So what do we do?”

  “The way I see it, we have two options, sir. We either leave it closed and hope for the best, or we open it and make up the guest room.”

  Staples looked at her overpriced and overqualified doctor. “Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” he nodded and continued in his richly accented voice. “There are procedures to follow, and while it is not something that I have done before, the procedure is fairly simple. Waking people from stasis is not nearly as complex as putting them into it. Tell me, does this constitute a breach of contract?”

  “I don’t much care at this point. Besides, I want answers. Herc was supposed to be in this tube. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if Evelyn is in here or not. This job has turned into a real mess, and whoever is in there, I’m hoping they can clear some things up.”

  “Very well,” he replied. “I could open the stasis tube here, but I prefer to do so in Medical.”

  “All right,” Staples said. “I’ll have Declan and Yoli move the tube down to Medical.” She shifted her focus to her chief engineer. “Can we detach the tube without causing any further damage?” Dinah nodded.

  “I’m afraid that Ms. Trujilo bruised her arm on a bulkhead in her attempt to rush to her quarters. Speed and zero-gravity travel rarely mix well.” The doctor’s tone made it clear that asking Yoli to help was out of the question.

  “I can do it, sir,” the other woman offered.

  “No, now that this is done, I want you in the ReC looking at the engines.” She thought for a minute. “Ian will just be getting back on the ship. You know what? Get Parsells and Quinn back here to help.”

  “As you wish, Captain. I’ll prepare Medical.” He pushed himself off from the tube and back towards the door.

  Chapter 11

  “All right, Captain, you can come in, but please keep the conversation light. I have informed Ms. Schilling of the broad details of the situation and of the death of Mr. Bauer. She is feeling somewhat fragile, as one would expect.” Doctor Iqbal stood in the doorway to Medical, quite decidedly in his captain’s path, until he was done speaking. She nodded her assent, and only after another moment did he reluctantly step aside and let her in. Setting foot in Medical after several days of weightlessness was both a relief and a burden. Her brain told her that things were normal again under the effects of the gravity plating she had paid a great deal to have installed, but her body almost immediately felt like a prison as her 135 pounds returned. The plating could be set to lower or higher percentages of gravity, but the doctor kept it at Earth normal: 9.81 meters per second per second. He maintained that it was necessary to not only help keep him healthy, but also to properly gauge his patients’ health. The human body had evolved to function at homeostasis under normal Earth gravity, and that was how he felt it should be evaluated. Staples secretly suspected him of cranking up the gravity when no one was around in order to use the space as a private workout room, but she had never caught him at it, nor would she blame him for doing so if she did.

  As she entered, she saw Evelyn Schilling lying on the same bed the doctor had put her on back on Mars. She was wearing a green hospital gown, and a pale blue sheet was pulled up to her waist. She had pinned her long flame colored hair back from her face. Though her eyes were puffy and somewhat reddened, she was not crying.

  Staples was again struck by the beauty of the woman, and wondered if she had had surgery. Plastic surgery to alter one’s appearance, more specifically to make oneself more attractive, was hardly uncommon, and if one had the money, the possible alterations were remarkable. Amongst the upper class, astounding transformations could be achieved. Of course, there was no accounting for taste, but over a hundred years of study of the science underlying attraction had shown that certain facial shapes, certain contours, and above all, symmetry were most universally appealing. If in fact the fair skinned woman in front of her had undergone surgery, the captain thought that her surgeon was to be commended.

  Staples, slightly unsteady on her heavy feet and trying her best to wear a sympathetic smile, walked across the room. She stopped a few feet short of the bed. “Evelyn. How are you?”

  Evelyn took a deep breath and then released it as a shuddering sigh, and for a second her lip trembled and Staples thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. “I’m okay. I won’t say I’m fine,” her eyes flicked to the doctor, “but I’ll manage. I just can’t believe this. I can’t believe your ship was attacked.” Her brows furrowed and her eyes glistened. “And I can’t believe you lost a crew member. Is it true that he died trying to save Herc?” Her husky voice was higher pitched than normal.

  Staples searched for an answer that was honest and that did not belie her doubts on the matter. “He was a very brave man.”

  “Poor Herc. I didn’t know him - I mean - not well, but he was a good man.” She nodded at her own statement as she spoke.

  “I only met him the once, but I thought he was too. Evelyn, I need to ask you some questions. Is that all right?” She closed the rest of the distance to the bed, unconsciously crossing her arms across her chest. The woman on the bed nodded. Jabir had walked around and was standing on the other side of his patient, ready to warn his captain off with a look if necessary. “My manifest said that you were in tube A, but we found you in tube B. Do you know why?”

  She nodded immediately. “Herc hurt his wrist after dinner. It was stupid, really. Some guy bumped into him and walked off, and then Herc realized that his wallet was missing. He chased after the guy and gave him a good tackle. He’s… he was a big guy. He got his wallet back, but he sprained his wrist. When we got to Stasis Solutions, they gave us a full examination,” she looked at the doctor a bit slyly, “and they decided to put a cast on it before they put him in stasis.” She finished her statement as though it had cleared everything up, but the look on Staples’ face said she clearly hadn’t.

  “Sorry. They had tube B all ready to go for him, but then it was going to take them a bit to put the cast on, so they said they would just put me in B and him in A. They said they’d change it in the manifest. I guess they forgot.”

  The blonde woman searched the engineer’s eyes, and though she was far from an expert, she saw nothing but open-faced honesty. She decided to accept it for now. “All right. Do you have any idea why someone would hire a crew of pirates to kidnap you?”

  “Me?” The lovely brown eyes widened incredulously. “You think they were after me?”

  Staples allowed some steel to creep into her voice. “I am absolutely sure of it.” She wasn’t one hundred percent sure this was true, but she wanted to push the woman to give any explanation she might have. Iqbal gave her a withering glance, but he did not interfere.

  “I…” she looked around the room as if for answers. “I have no idea. I mean, I’m a talented computer scientist. Maybe they needed one, but there have to be easier ways.”

  “Absolutely. I don’t know what your salary is, but I suspect that they could hire you ten times over for what that crew was likely paid to abduct you.”

  “I don’t hire myself out to pirates, not even for ten times regular pay, but I take your point. Okay. So it wasn’t about money.” Evelyn had taken on the look of a person attempting to solve a puzzle. “I was just hired by Libom Pangalactic; I’m certainly not party to any corporate secrets as yet. I’ve been head programmer at a few small firms, but nothing that I can imagine warranting abduction by pirates.” She smiled slightly, showing perfectly straight teeth. “It would sound exciting and romantic if the results hadn’t been so horrible.”

  “Maybe someone didn’t want you working for Libom. Maybe they were trying to keep Cronos Station from getting up to speed. I heard that the loss of their previous computer engineer was hurting production. Perhaps a rival energy company?”

  “I suppose that could be it,” Evelyn ruminated, then frowned. “But then why just me? Or why try
to take just me? Herc and I weren’t in exactly the same fields, but given what they told me about their issues, I think he would have done a fair job on his own.” She paused a moment, then added. “It should have been me. If Herc hadn’t hurt his wrist, I would be dead and he would be alive.”

  “You can’t drive yourself crazy with what ifs, Evelyn. This was nothing you did. They did it.” She gestured with her head towards the starboard side of the ship and the cloud of debris beyond.

  “Maybe they were going to take both tubes?” the doctor interjected in an effort to steer his patient away from survivor’s guilt.

  Staples shook her head. “If they had wanted both tubes, they would have taken them at the same time. They were smart and well planned. It would have made no sense to take one and then go back for the other. Too inefficient, too much time. No. They wanted you and you specifically. The question is why.” There was a moment of silence as they all pondered the question. “Is it possible that there’s something on you, maybe in you?”

  “What, like Stasis Solutions implanted some sub-dermal data chip carrying secret messages in my skin?” When she said it aloud, it did sound rather ridiculous, but the doctor was shaking his head.

  “Believe it or not, I checked. I scanned her body for anything non-organic when I brought her out of stasis.” Both women looked at him, surprised. He shrugged. “I read a lot of spy novels,” he offered by way of explanation.