“But when you went down on Mars, you figured all that shit out. I could never plan anything like that!”
“Plan? What plan? All I did was make a bunch of wild ass guesses. I just flew by the seat of my pants, and most of the time I was pretty sure I was dead, so there wasn’t much to lose. I could have hooked those power units to my suit and blew every circuit and been dead faster, but I got lucky. I might not have had any oh two tanks, but I got lucky. If we had unsuited and I was in the cabin, all of us would be dead, but I got lucky and the commander decided to not unsuit to save time. It was all luck Joan, no planning, and no heroics; just blind dumb luck.”
She looked at him a long time. He could tell she was looking for the right thing to say. “It may have been luck sir, but somehow you always got the job done. You didn’t panic and you used your head and maybe there was some luck there, but I think there was a hell of a lot of skill too.” She got up from the desk and walked around to face him. She took his hands and pulled them up and placed them on her jump suit covered breasts. “I know you have a rule about having sex with subordinates, but I just really need to feel you in me again.”
“I don’t think this is the place or the time.” Matt said quietly after she leaned forward and kissed him sensuously.
“I know exactly where to go.” She said huskily pulling him by the hand. He stood up and followed her as she led him down the corridors to the zero g gyms and opened the lock to the first one after unsealing the security tape. Once inside she closed the door on them and turned to face him. “I know that once we slow down a bit more I won’t have the guts to do this anymore,” she said, “and I really, really want this.” She finished as she set the controls to zero g and stepped into Matt’s arms, drawing him into the most seductive kiss she knew how to give. Matt felt them float from the floor as the gravity bled off, both of their hands roaming over each other, gently and slowly working each other out of their jump suit, while trying not to break their kiss. Eventually their jump suits and underwear were floating off to one end of the lock while their naked bodies floated, intertwined, in slow motion. Joan was far from quiet as she reached the peak she was looking for. Being forced to do everything in slow motion, using only your partners body for leverage caused the sensations to last longer, dragging that magic moment out slow and long. Finally they fell into a cuddling embrace, slowly floating from wall to wall as they caught their breath.
“Now all we have to do is get out again.” Matt said as they dressed. He enjoyed watching her dress in zero g, her large breasts being uncooperative as she tried to put her bra back on to contain them.
“You’re having fun watching me aren’t you?
“Yep.”
“You never could resist a huge pair of hooters, could you?”
“I can if I have to, but I do enjoy looking at them.” Matt replied with a grin.
“So all I have to do is flash the beasties and I can have you?”
“'Fraid not.”
“Oh phoo.” She said with a mock pout.
“Come on; let’s get you dressed so we can get out of here.” He said, pushing off the wall and sailing over to her. He caught her in a leg lock around the waist and pulled her to him, and then held her bra out so she could use his body as leverage to work the stretchy material over her head and down her body. He reached down and cupped each massive breast gently and pressed it up under the bottom of the bra, pulling it down, making sure each side was comfortably nestled inside.
“That was nice. I should let a guy help me dress a lot more often.” She said as she ran her hands over his midsection and down to the bulge that still existed in his jump suit.
“Sorry, I only do this on a regular basis to my wife. This is a onetime only gig Joan.”
“What a spoil sport.” She said as she zipped her jump suit while Matt turned the gravity back up. Matt hit the controls to open the door once normal gravity had returned, but nothing happened.
“Oh shit.” Matt said
“What’s the matter?”
“Door won’t open. Kevin said they were having trouble with them.”
“Oh crap. We’re stuck in here?”
“You could say that.” Matt said, working the controls.
“Oh shit. Everyone is going to know what we were doing in here.”
“Yes they will.” Matt said quietly. “Why does that bother you all of a sudden? A few minutes ago you couldn’t wait to be naked with me in the office.”
“I wasn’t thinking then. Damn.”
“Not a big problem.” Matt said as he unclipped his comm. unit from his belt. “Lieutenant Molter to communications.”
“Communications, go ahead.”
“Locate Mister Ridel and have him meet me at the lock to zero g gym one please.”
“Aye sir. Stand by.” The communications officer responded. Matt waited nearly a minute for the reply. “Mister Ridel is on his way sir.”
“Thank you, Molter out.” Matt said before clicking off and returning the comm. to his belt. “Rank does have some privilege.” He said with a wink. They waited for several minutes before Matt turned on the intercom with the outside. “Kevin, are you there?”
“I’m here Matt, you in there?”
“‘Fraid so. Can you hit the security override and get us out please?”
“Sure, stand by.” Matt waited just a few moments and then the door slid open to reveal Kevin, grinning ear to ear. “Well Lieutenant, I wouldn’t have expected you to pull a stunt like that.”
“Like what? Ensign Light is getting ready to go out and do the refuel and I wanted to show her how to use her body for more leverage in zero g.”
“Sure.” Kevin said with a grin. “You sticking to that story? I mean the lock smells like sex.”
“Honest.” Matt said with a grin. “Would I ever lie to a buddy like you?”
Kevin looked at him, still grinning. “How do you explain the fact that it smells like sex?”
Matt answered back. “Oh that’s easy. We didn’t want to get our jump suits all sweaty, so we took them off first.”
Kevin stood shaking his head. “I have to admit sir, that is an exactly honest answer that tells anything but the truth. But I will log it in my report exactly as you said it.”
“Thanks Kevin. I knew I could count on you.” Matt said patting him on the shoulder.
“You know, I gotta figure out what it is about you that gets all them women for the next time we do a high v transit.” Kevin said.
Joan stepped over next to him and put an arm around his neck and pulled him close to her, squishing her huge breasts against his chest. “It’s not that hard. Be gentle and give them what they want, how they want and they’ll follow you anywhere.” She whispered before letting go of him. “See you later Lieutenant.” She said as she headed off down the corridor.
“Damn Matt, how you do that I don’t know.” Kevin said shaking his head as he watched her walk away.
“If you want her, all you have to do is what she just said. Be nice to her, invite her someplace and figure out how she wants it and give it to her that way. Women talk, and once word gets around that you know how to please them it’s hard to keep them away.”
“So how did you get started?”
“That’s easy. Some asshole tried to screw me by releasing a video of me having zero g sex. You on the other hand just got a gold plated invitation.”
“Oh yeah, Pete. Guess he did you a favor huh?”
“Personally, it was too much attention. I found what I want with Jenny and if that’s all I ever got I’d be happy as a hog. The rest of the attention I get is more of a distraction than anything else.”
“You know, I never hear of sex being called a distraction. By the way, I heard that the Captain tried to jump your bones.”
“Where did you hear that?” Matt snapped.
“Hey easy buddy… It’s just in the rumor mill”
“Well, I can tell you that all we did was sit and talk. Ther
e was nothing that happened that shouldn’t have, but if you hear it again, squash it. She doesn’t deserve that kind of a bum rap.”
“I hear ya. I like the Cap’n.”
“I better head up to the office and get to work on the paperwork.”
“Sounds like a lot of fun.”
“Not hardly… If anyone asks, the burden of command is from the mountain of paperwork they try to burry you in. Reports, forms, evaluations, equipment inventories…. It never ends.” Matt said shaking his head.
“Well, I haven’t gotten to that elevated rank yet.” Kevin said with a grin. “You have fun teaching the Ensign.”
“Not me, but if you’re smart you will look her up real soon.” Matt said as he headed off down the corridor.
Chapter 16 – The wake of Mercury
The next four days passed quietly, the women getting more and more normal as the speed fell off. Matt was actually relieved to not be accosted for sex every time he was alone with a woman for any reason. He also enjoyed getting to know Jenny with a more normal hormone level. He was pleased to find that her sexual appetite for him had done anything but diminish. She enjoyed both prolonged emotional love making and exciting lust charged quickies in a variety of locations, including the infirmary and armory. The days turned into a normal routine as they approached the refueling point, home drawing closer all the time.
“Lieutenant, is your team ready to go?” The captain asked from her perch on the bridge.
“Yes ma’am. The EVA team is suited and ready.” Matt replied from his position standing behind the weapons station.
“Very well. Send them out.” She said.
“Yes ma’am. Communications, would you give them the go ahead?”
“Aye sir.” The young Lieutenant JG sitting at communications said before she turned to her console.
In the suit room Ensign Light waited impatiently for clearance to begin, her team of five suited and cleared into the air lock nearly five minutes before.
“Command to EVA you are cleared to begin according to the submitted EVA plan.”
“Roger, cleared out.” She replied to command over her radio before changing to her intersuit frequency. “Ok Master Chief, Let’s go gas this pig.”
“With pleasure ma’am.” He responded, hitting the controls to bleed off the remaining gravity and then opening the outer door. “Tasha, Denner, take the tanker end of the lines, I’ll take the ship end with Jenkins. Let’s get at it.”
“Aye Master Chief.” Jenkins responded.
“Tasha.”
“Denner”
Ensign Light floated out of the lock with her team, watching how they moved and worked as a team. She felt like a fifth wheel, wondering if she should have tasked herself as one of the four. She floated up away from the teams working the hoses, getting far enough away to be able to see the whole process at once. Things seemed to go very smoothly connecting the lines, the team members having executed this evolution a number of times in the past.
“EVA one to command. Lines connected and ready to transfer fuel.”
“Roger, ready to transfer fuel.” The communications officer responded.
Joan watched the lines twitch and then wiggle like a pair of snakes as the fuel began to transfer between the two vessels. Fifteen minutes felt like a long time when you were floating in space not doing anything. The sun was bright this close, but not nearly what it had been before the orbit changes. In this case they chose to make the transfer on the shadow side of Mercury, giving the transfer team optimum conditions, instead of having to work with the darker shields. As she watched she wondered what the entity was doing, if it was still out there circling, apparently feeding on what the sun was expelling. As she watched a single wisp of vapor appeared near the tanker around the A connection. It caught her attention and she swiveled to look closer at it. As she watched the wisp grew in size to a steady jet of gas shooting out of the side of the hose. “EMERGENCY DISCONNECT!” She shouted into the radio, hitting the intersuit and command frequencies at the same time.
“Copy, emergency disconnect!” She heard the communications officer respond crisply as she watched the four suited members of the team hit emergency thrust. There was no coordination which way they went, their job was to clear the datum as fast as possible and pick up the pieces later. She hit her braking thrusters, sending her accelerating back away from the hose area. As she watched the hoses disconnected from the Saint Claire and the ship seemed to jump away from the tanker as all docking thrusters on that side of the ship began spewing white jets of exhaust. The two now free ends of the hoses snaked away from the ship, the jet of white vapor still streaming from the tanker end of the one hose. As she watched the vapor grew to a cloud enveloping the entire hose coupling area. The cloud started as all white, but changed in color to a dark orange as Joan watched the disaster expand in slow motion. The highly volatile cloud of fuel ignited from some source, a simple static spark, a hot connection, they would probably never know, but the ignition started the process, nature and chemistry took care of the rest. The now orange cloud of gas expanded as the products of combustion mushroomed out, unconstrained by gravity or atmosphere. The growing cloud carried more than just products of combustion, it also carried a pressure wave. It wasn’t that the pressure was really that large, but it was the fact that it existed at all. The refueling apparatus, designed for use in space with hard vacuum on the outside, wasn’t able to handle the pressure wave that hit it, rupturing the A hose the rest of the way, adding the fuel trapped between the cutoff valves installed in each end of the hose to the growing conflagration.
As the cloud expanded its next victim was the B hose, the quickly vaporizing oxidizer not only adding to the fire, but multiplying its rate of burning by several factors. The pressure wave that was a minor inconvenience for the tanker became a pressure spike that was well beyond what the outer skin was designed to take. The breach in the hull was the beginning of the death of the tanker, allowing the pressure spike to penetrate through the outer spaces, slicing through the auxiliary life support room and breaching into the first of ten fuel cells that were an integral part of the structure of the ship. The breached tank began venting the contents of its oxidizer load in a few fractions of a second, the sudden pressure drop of the oxidizer allowed the liquid to suddenly boil into vapor. If the vapor had exited out the hull breach the ship may have survived, but the tanker simply wasn’t that lucky.
The vapor expanded, its pressure cloud taking up seventeen hundred times the volume of the liquid. This kind of expansion would create a tremendous pressure wave in open space, but confined inside the hull of the ship it had no place to go but to breach into adjacent spaces, trying to find a way out of the ship. The failure of the next compartment, primary electrical was probably the worst luck the ship could have. Once the oxidizer found its first spark, the combustion of the oxidizer increased that already seventeen hundred times expansion to an incredible eighty five hundred times, generating an increased pressure wave that sliced through the ship as though it were tissue paper. The ships spine broke in half, allowing two more tanks to rupture, adding to the conflagration.
Within three seconds of the ignition of the initial jet of gas, the tanker was nothing more than an expanding field of debris and burning vapor. Space can be an unforgiving and hostile environment, but the one thing friendly is that it is a lot of nothing. That nothingness, the lack of air, lack of atoms of any kind to transfer energy, allows an expanding energy cloud to lose its punch in a hurry. Of course the down side is that there is nothing to slow anything down. In this case the approximately spherical expanding cloud of gasses and debris had lost a significant amount of its energy before it enveloped the Saint Claire. The worst of the damage to the ship was from debris traveling at several hundred meters per second. The outer shell of the Saint Claire was designed to stop small meteorites without significant damage to the ship or its systems, so the small pieces were of little consequence. The larger, mor
e massive pieces were more of a problem, impacting the ship with significant energy, denting and in some places breaching the outer hull. Thankfully few of these breaches extended into the inner hull, being contained to the engineering spaces designed to be a buffer between the two hull layers. The ship didn’t withstand any damage that couldn’t be easily repaired. The five space suited figures trying to outrun the oncoming debris were not designed to withstand the kind of carnage that was headed toward them. The first to be enveloped was Specialist Denner. She was unlucky enough to be caught by an electrical generator weighing several tons. It smashed into her thruster pack instantly accelerating her from thirty meters per second, to several hundred meters per second, turning her thruster pack into a pancake and breaking her back before impacting with an air scrubber unit the size of a small land transport. Mercifully it occurred quickly enough that she never even felt what hit her. Specialist Tasha had made it a bit farther away and had the luck to have the largest part of the flight deck whip past her, missing her by a few meters. The smaller pieces of debris sliced through her pack and suit as if it weren’t there, leaving her pack leaking its vital contents into space and her suit having a half a dozen punctures in her left side to begin venting her precious air into space. As well as losing energy as the cloud expanded, the debris field expanded as the cloud stretched outward from the point of origin, making the distance between the individual pieces of debris grow exponentially. By the time the field got to Petty Officer Jenkins the field had thinned to the point that she was pelted with only three pieces of the high velocity debris. Two sliced through the left arm of her suit, entering through one side, proceeding to penetrate through the relatively nonresistant flesh of her arm, and continuing out the other side, continuing on into space with a much lower level of energy. The third piece hit her high on the left shoulder of her suit, cracking the hard carbon fiber material before deflecting off her helmet and back into space at a significantly different angle. Other than the two punctures through her arm, and the beginning of loss of blood from those injuries, the impact with her shoulder caused the reasonably delicate bones in her shoulder to be crushed, which was mercifully not long before the rebounding piece of debris knocked her unconscious in her suit. Master Chief Wallace nearly made it to safety, experience telling him to head the same way as the ship, trying to get over its effective horizon. All that remained exposed to the direct line of sight of the disaster were his legs. One of the couplings, from the fuel hoses, impacted his left leg, crushing the outer shell of the suit as well as the leg it contained, and sending him into an uncontrolled spin. The last of the suited figures to feel the effects of the explosion was Ensign Light. In many ways she was luckier than the rest. From the different height with respect to the others, and the direction of the majority of the debris, she managed to miss the bulk of the debris. One piece sliced through the outer shell of her hard suit, embedding itself into her upper thigh, the long section of control rod continuing through her leg until she was pierced as if by an arrow, the debris remaining embedded in both her suit and her leg. A second, smaller piece of debris passed through the chest of her suit, giving up most of its energy in the passage through the tough material, coming to rest embedded in her chest cavity, missing her heart by mere millimeters.
Fleet Academy Page 45