Shock Diamonds

by E. R. Mason

  “I think we get the point, R.J.”

  “It has to be fixed.”

  “In space?”

  “You should not enter the Mu Arae system without it.”

  “Can we even fix it on an EVA?”

  “The most likely problem is that one of the transducers or emitters is loose inside the vertical stabilizer. It’s moving around, reflecting off stuff, and interfering with all the other sending units. Most likely, you’ll open the port center panel, find the thing out of place, reinstall it, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Boy, I hate stopping midway.”

  “You’ll hate flying blind where we’re going even worse.”

  I considered the dilemma. “If someone was following us, we probably wouldn’t see them, would we?”

  “Not like we are,” replied R.J.

  Wilson said, “It’s an easy job, if that’s what it is, Adrian. Anyway, it’s my turn to go outside.”

  Danica keyed her intercom. “Adrian…”

  “No. Danica. I want to go out with him myself.”

  The intercom turned a sulky silent.

  It took us a day and a half to go through the ship’s schematics and find all the tools called out in the procedures. EVAs are best done after a sleep period, so we set up and left everything until the next morning. I had just a touch of trouble getting to sleep. EVAs are wonderful things to behold. At the same time, I knew Wilson was probably snoring away, without a care in the world, except maybe Jeannie.

  As we were finishing breakfast, a sudden irresponsible whim came over me. I looked at Catherine and my mouth moved without my brain’s consent. “Cath, you want to go outside with us?”

  Wilson was in the aft airlock getting ready. R.J. was setting up the A-station for EVA monitoring. He heard me and bent over backwards to peer through the forward airlock with concerns.

  “Are you kidding? Where do I sign up?” she replied.

  “Wilson’s back there already. Ask him to fit a suit to you.”

  “I’m going before you change your mind.”

  As she hurried aft, R.J. came back and leaned against the table. “You sure you really want to do that?”

  “I doubt she’ll ever get another chance.”

  “She doesn’t have a single certification.”

  “Not a one.”

  “She’s never even seen the inside of a spacesuit.”

  “Wilson or I will be within reach at all times. If she goes into the panicking-swimmer mode, we’ll push her back into the airlock and lock her in the docking station, but she won’t. I know her.”

  “Hyperventilation?”

  “We can manage that with the mixture. It won’t happen.”

  “Can she maneuver?”

  “We’ll bring out the backpack control arms for her. She’s better with a joystick than anyone I know.”

  “Is that a carnal joke?”

  “No. I mean a real joystick.”

  “You know this is against every statute in the books.”

  “I wasn’t planning on entering it in any of the logs.”

  “Well, I guess it’s been too long since you did something like this. Adrian Tarn, breaker of rules, rescuer of fair maidens in distress. You wouldn’t want your reputation slipping.”

  “If you stay in her ear for me, it’ll be just fine.”

  “You can bet I’ll keep a close eye on the helmet cams and the suit readouts.”

  We waited patiently as Danica idled the stellar drives, reversed them, and bled off all that incredible speed to stop us and bring us to park in deep space. I was afraid she might not be speaking to me, but bringing the spacecraft out of light forced her back into pilot mode.

  We dressed Catherine in spaceman white, suited up each other, then stepped up into our docking stands. Wilson considered the Catherine indiscretion as fun, of course. With the airlock depressurized, the three of us hung in our suit docking stations waiting for green lights from the suit bio-acclimation readouts. Though the intercoms were active, everyone waited quietly. After fifteen minutes I could not resist a coded question to R.J. as he sat up front monitoring us.

  “R.J., specs on red unit?”

  There was a short scoff, then, “125 and 83. 78, normal aspiration.”

  Catherine’s haughty voice broke in. “What’d you expect, Adrian?”

  A flush of irritation annoyed me. Catherine was in the suit with red trim. R.J. was telling me her blood pressure was 125/83, pulse 78 bpm, and her breathing normal. Here she was about to journey outside a spacecraft for the first time, and her vital signs were less than if she was shopping at Macy’s. There was just no way to get to this woman. There had to be ice water in her veins.

  “Hey, Adrian, this is gonna be cool. Instead of floating to the door and out, we’re gonna walk up to the door and fall out,” said Wilson.

  I looked around the silver environment of the airlock and realized that wasn’t the only thing new. Usually the place was filled with floating cables, hoses, and cover flaps. This time, everything was hanging in place as though we were on the ground. It felt like something wasn’t ready, or like this was a ground rehearsal. The air in our suits smelled slightly odd, just as it should, and as the suit automatically varied the mixture to our dropping pressures, the curious flavor of chemicals became even more apparent. As always, the inside temperature was almost uncomfortably cold as the suit environmental controls caught up.

  With the airlock and suit indicators finally green, and a verbal blessing from R.J., we watched the oval hatch slide open to black nothingness. The well-lit airlock seemed to have a hole in it. Wilson and I stepped down from our docking stations. As Wilson turned to wrestle with the tool pouch, I rocked around to face Catherine and held out a fat, doughboy arm to steady her. She stepped down and we stared at each other for a few seconds through untinted visors. I expected the wide-eyed look. Instead, I got back an "I trust you" stare.

  Wilson was the first to the door. He let out a muted “Yah-hoo” and stepped into a float. His control arms were immediately brought down and he jetted around to face us, then backed away to give us room.

  Catherine looked at me with a furrowed brow. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Alice. You go through that door over there and you become very, very small.”

  She gave a half smile, took her first step, and quickly became serious about the spacesuit weight.

  “Don’t worry. Just a few steps and it will weigh nothing at all.”

  She rocked along quite adequately and stopped at the open hatch, with me holding her backpack from behind. She leaned partway out the opening and for the first time I heard Catherine-awe. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”

  “I heard someone else describe it that way once,” I said.

  “I’ll fall forever down there.”

  “No, you won’t fall at all.”

  “My mind is certain of it.”

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “It feels funny.”

  “Yes, you’re not only weightless out there, you’re weightless inside your suit also, so you bump around a little bit. That’s normal.”

  “Maybe just one step.”

  And she did. The momentum brought the rest of her out the door, one hand still clinging to the side of it like a sky diver changing his mind. Her feet came up behind her until she was horizontal to me, but she rotated sideways so she could still see me. I could hear R.J. thinking, “I knew this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Let go, Alice. The Mad Hatter has you by the foot.”

  Wilson had jetted up behind her and was pushing her into an upright position. She let go and he turned her to face him. As I launched myself out, he pulled down her control arms and smiled reassuringly. “Just like I showed you, Cath. You twist or push the left-hand joystick to face a certain way, then the right-hand joystick will drive you forward, sideways, or back. I’m going to back away. You come forward and follow me.”

  A dance in emptines
s ensued. With the first thrust from the right-hand joystick, Catherine instantly became a master. Something in her mind clicked. There was no learning curve. While following Wilson away from the ship, she turned herself 360 degrees without slowing her forward motion, like a ballerina in space. She stopped without bumping him and turned back to face the ship.

  “My god, the ship is so beautiful. The light from the airlock is like the sun.”

  “Not too many people get to see this,” remarked Wilson.

  “I’ve got to take up space medicine.”

  “Uh-oh, another life ruined, Adrian,” said Wilson.

  “There are so many stars!”

  “There’s no ship window to interrupt your field of vision,” replied Wilson.

  I jetted over to the two of them. “Cath, you’re going to want to roam. You can’t do that. You must stay within arm's length of us. You’re not trained in emergency procedures. You understand?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s head aft and remove cover plates.”

  We made a slow cruise back to the tail section and climbed to the port side of the vertical stabilizer. The access panel was a large, four-foot-high, two-foot-wide section of reinforced carbon-carbon composite. There were no good clip-on hooks so the suits had to be left in micro-station parking, leaving us to frequently correct for drift. It also made removal of the fasteners tedious, since there was no easy way to put pressure on the removal tool. Wilson and I braced each other and patiently worked on each fastener, while Catherine kept herself close by, as promised. Though she was very prudent about it, she could not resist rotating her attitude for different looks at the stars and the ship. At one point I heard Wilson blurt out a quick laugh when he looked back to find Catherine’s upside down butt an inch from his visor.

  As the panel gave free and floated out, we put her to work holding it, while the two of us beamed our headlamps into the transducer assembly mounting area in search of something amiss. The open panel was a very neat layout of chilled tubing and shielded cables. Starting at the top, there were transducers and emitters cascading down, one for each kind of radar or scanning system. We didn’t see anything out of place. There was nothing hanging down or out of place.

  “Jeez, Adrian. I don’t see anything.”

  “Crap. Nothing’s ever easy. There’s got to be something in here.”

  “It could be something in one of the core crystals. Maybe one of them is cracked and we can’t see it and it’s throwing radiation everywhere even though it looks fine.”

  “But we’d see one particular system consistently bad, wouldn’t we? Catherine, stop bumping me, please.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t. I just don’t see anything physically wrong in here like we expected.”

  “I’m gonna see if any of them are loose. Brace me.”

  “Be careful. You get one of them out of alignment and it’ll be a real bitch trying to readjust it in space.”

  I began with the uppermost emitter head, carefully grabbing it with my right glove while holding on to the back of the vertical stabilizer. It felt solid as a rock. It was the same with the next three down. By the time I reached the second to the last transducer, I was starting to lose hope. Then, as I twisted the very bottom unit, something fearful happened. The entire softball-sized unit came right off in my hand.

  “Oh, shit!” exclaimed Wilson.

  “Oh, crap,” I agreed.

  R.J. cut in on the intercom. “Gentleman, something is very odd here.”

  “No kidding, Sherlock,” replied Wilson. “We just broke a transducer right off the mount! Now we’re really screwed.”

  R.J. ignored the sarcasm. “Adrian, that was the eighth transducer, correct?”

  “Yeah, R.J.”

  “You are still looking at seven in the compartment, correct?”

  “Wait… Yeah, the other seven are still fine.”

  “My circuit layout here says there is only supposed to be seven emitters and transducers.”

  We hung there in the silent cold of space, staring at the dark amber, dome-shaped lens in my gloved hand.

  “Well, what the hell, then?” said Wilson.

  “We got outdated drawings on the Griffin?” I asked.

  Danica cut in from the pilot seat. “No, Adrian. Everything we have is from the final Rev date, unless something was added afterward, that is. But that would have to be noted in the drawings database and there is no flag.”

  “It wasn’t connected by anything, either. It was like a magnetic mount.”

  “Oh, that is so weird,” said Wilson.

  R.J. cut in. “You’re going to have to close up that access panel and bring it in here, Adrian, so we can take a good look at it. Even if you have to go back out to replace it, there’s no choice.”

  After trading Catherine the lens for the access panel, Wilson and I went about reinstalling the fasteners with the annoying thought we might be doing it all again in an hour or two. With the vertical stabilizer closed up, we jetted our merry way back to the airlock and stepped through the open hatch into gravity, changing from graceful seahorse people to bludgeoning heavy monsters in white.

  We helped Catherine into her docking port, and after closing the outer door, stepped up to ours. As soon as the airlock was pressurized, the inner door slid open and R.J. came scurrying in. We were expecting him to help us de-suit. Instead, he rifled through Wilson’s pack, pulled out the mysterious transducer, and dashed away toward the science lab without saying a word.

  Wilson looked across the airlock at me with a wry expression. “No tip for him.”

  “That’s going on his permanent record,” I added.

  “Wow! The water from this drinking tube is nice and cold,” said Catherine.

  So when recomp time had passed, we helped each other out of our suits. I stood in front of Catherine, turned her helmet, and lifted it off. She smiled a bigger smile than I had ever seen.

  “That’s one for you, Tarn. I will never, ever forget. Nothing will ever top it.”

  “Don’t think twice. I owed you for the Daytona experience.”

  “I really am going to look into space science.”

  “It’s a lot of time away from home,” I said, as I twisted off her gloves.

  “Already do that. I’m qualified.”

  “Careful what you wish for.”

  We stripped naked out of our suit liners and pulled on flight coveralls without giving it a second thought, though Wilson couldn’t help but steal a few quick glances at the good Doctor. We found R.J. in the science lab, looking like an Emmett "Doc" Brown as he hung over the errant transducer. He looked up at us, but it took a moment for his brain to switch into social mode.

  “Adrian, we’ve got to open this thing up.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  Wilson cut in. “It will decertify the thing! We won’t be able to use it.”

  “That’s a bad thing, R.J.”

  “I don’t think we have been using it. It’s like a placebo transducer.”

  Catherine joined in. “Why would you have fake equipment on a ship?”

  R.J. became earnest. “It should not have been installed in the tail. It serves no useful purpose that I can find. In fact, I think the outer case is just a disguise to hide something. There are no manufacturer markings of any kind on it, but scanners show there is something inside. The material used on the fake lens cover won’t allow a good interior scan. We need to open it.”

  “Is it pressurized?” asked Wilson.

  R.J. sounded reluctant, as though that might ruin his chances. “Yes.”

  Wilson persisted. “What kind of gas was used to pressurize it?”

  “Well, I can’t tell.”

  “Well, you can’t just open it without knowing what gases you’re releasing into the ship’s atmosphere.”

  “I’ll use the science lab’s vacuum chamber.”

  “Still, it could be explosive.”

/>   “There’s definitely something in there. Not much free space is left. There can’t be much gas volume. There’s too little to be dangerous. We need to know what’s inside this thing.”

  The four of us stood in silent standoff.

  Catherine broke the impasse. “Are there any other options besides opening it?”

  R.J. was adamant. “No, I’ve tried everything.”

  “Could there be just as much danger if you do not open it?”

  “Possibly,” replied R.J.

  “Not if we chuck it out into space,” said Wilson.

  I shook my head. “We can’t do that. Somehow that thing was put in the tail. That’s not an easy thing to do. We’ve got to know by who and why. Ditching the thing is not an option.”

  “Then since there is a possibility of danger whether you open it or not, your only option is to open it as safely as possible,” said Catherine.

  R.J. smiled. “You know, I like her.”

  I looked at Wilson. Neither he nor I could argue with the Doctor’s logic.

  “Crap. Okay, R.J. Open it.”

  Chapter 11

  The three of us jockeyed for space as R.J. sealed the vacuum chamber and inserted his arms into the flex sleeves. Danica remained on the flight deck watching the proceedings on a monitor.

  Wilson said, “I already know what it is.”

  We all stopped and looked at him.

  “It’s some kind of tracking device Blackwell’s henchmen somehow planted on the Griffin to track Danica’s movements. It’s got to be. It’s the only answer.”

  R.J. disagreed. “A long-range tracking device that does not require external power? It had to be something installed by the Enuro technicians to support the artificial gravity system. They’re the only ones who were removing panels on the Griffin.”

  Wilson was not swayed. “We’re not floating R.J. Gravity’s still turned on. Couldn’t have been anything to do with that. Plus, they would’ve told us about it. It’s not on any of their diagrams.”

  R.J. turned back to the task at hand. “There is no way to disassemble it. Somehow the lens is bonded to the base. The only way in is to cut the lens around the base and lift it off.”

  “Destructive disassembly. We may be creating more problems than we’re solving,” said Wilson.