Love and Other Metals

by K. P. Redmond

  The captain tilts her head. “I’m surprised. I don’t understand their motivation. Rendezvous with them would be a good way for them to rob us blind, if that’s what they’re trying to do.”

  “No ma’am, actually I came right out asked the guy point blank if they needed assistance. He said no. Acted like he didn’t know what I was asking at first.”

  The captain crinkles her eyebrows in puzzlement. “Well I don’t understand it either. I wish they would just be straight with us and stop playing games.” She sighs and shakes her head. “It didn’t used to be this way. We all worked together. Now everybody’s trying to cut the other guys throat. Sad.”

  I nod, as if she’s telling me something I don’t already know. What can I say to argue with that? It is cutthroat. And now I’m part of the game, spying for government. Living down to expectations. I offer up what little good news I can. “At least I recorded most of the conversation, so you can hear it if you want.”

  She considers that, then looks down at her pad. I know she has to provide a lot of information to the Consortium. They fund these missions and they want updates; she’s always fighting a deadline. She sighs and looks back up at me. “Here’s what I want you to do. Contact Doctor Kapoor again,” she consults her wristy and shakes her head, “although he’s possibly asleep now too. It doesn’t matter, you’re not going to be able to have a decent conversation with him anyway; we’re too far away by now. Just tell him what you told me in a video, attach the recording you made, and send it to him on the comm link. He’ll get it and reply when he can. Can you do that, Yuuta?”

  “Aye, captain, I believe I can. I learned how to use the comm after working with Katya last time. It should be pretty straightforward.”

  “Atta boy, Straker. You have your father’s brains after all.”

  I smile back at her, plant myself at Katya’s station and set to my task. You have your father’s brains after all, the captain had said. That rolls around in my brain while I am trying to work. It gives me an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach that I can’t shake. Yea, I have my father’s brains, all right. I’m a con man like him too. I work at being a quiet, unassuming kid but that’s been a survival skill for me—what else could I do? Having to depend on people that hate you for your very existence teaches you to swallow your pride and do what you need to do to survive. But I have a right to more and I don’t owe these people anything. This woman will not like me in the end. I remind myself to be prepared for that.

  Because I ain’t here for the Consortium and I ain’t going back to Shacktown, ever.

  * * * * *

  I am now formally on watch, headed aft. I had started out on the flight deck, where I sent off the video like the captain said and included the recording of the conversation I had with the weirdo from the other ship. Then I approached Nastez and volunteered to return to the redoubt. I said I needed to switch the network fibers back to their original configuration—the configuration they were in before we started the language lesson with the foreign ship. Actually, as it turns out, the whole strange business with the other ship has worked to my advantage. Had me some sneaking around to be done. I wasn’t sure how I could justify coming back here.

  So now here I am, once again pulling myself through the long, claustrophobic tunnel towards the ass end of the ship. The silence is complete; I can hear my own breath reverberating weirdly against the curved steel walls of the redoubt. Each exhalation fogs the air. At least I wore some extra layers this time, expecting the cold. I’ve strapped a headlamp onto my forehead against the dimly lit areas, knowing that I’ll need to see clearly during delicate procedure I’m about to perform.

  And I brought the meds bottle. The real reason I’m here is to connect the bottle into the network long enough to send my latest status report to the ProvGov people. I haven’t updated them since we left lunar orbit, and there’ a butt-load of new info to pass along, like as the nature of the target, its composition, and its orbital parameters. Stuff I pulled right off the ship’s servers.

  This is what Baumann’s instructions told me to do. I hope the transmission don’t get intercepted by Malapert. The laws governing possession of material mined from stroids are pretty crazy—I don’t understand them nor do I care to—not that Nifty Jim or Malapert go by the law anyways. Helping the government will help everybody in the hemisphere, keeping things square. We need good law and order between the towns. But helping Nifty Jim would be a different deal.

  And at this distance, nearly 18 million klicks already, the transmitter in the bottle is woefully inadequate to send a signal back to Luna. The only way to get the message that far is to package it in the main telemetry stream which is transmitted by the big laser at the ship’s stern. That means hijacking the network. Baumann told me the government engineers designed this thing in such a way that the hack won’t be noticed by Allgood’s crew. Something about inserting the ones and zeros of the message within unused protocol fields blah blah blah—but I don’t know about none of that; it’s all Mandarin Chinese to me. I just have to trust the marshal. Baumann better be right, because my butt is hanging out, way out, flapping like a rooster on his way to the chopper. Doing this don’t make me comfortable, but if I want my new life in Malapert, I gotta to take the risk.

  I’ve entered all the info I need to send into the meds bottle, so now it’s just a matter of hooking it in. Nastez is expecting a comm interruption when I disconnect and reconnect the fiber anyways. I’ll connect in the bottle, send the transmission, then disconnect and be all back to normal within two minutes. Maybe they’ll think the comm interruption lasted longer than it should have, but if they do I’ll just play dumb and say I had a hard time figuring out how to connect it back up. Nastez will believe that. Me, the new recruit, working way back here all by myself. I’m a victim of bad teaching. Course, if Nastez don’t believe me, maybe he’ll shove me out an airlock. I try not to think about that.

  It don’t take long to find the fiber junction I’m looking for. I wedge my legs against the hand-holds to leave my hands free and pull the meds bottle from my thigh pocket. A flick of my thumbnail and the fiber connector is exposed on the bottle. I say a silent prayer, disconnect the ship’s network and reconnect it through the bottle, quick as I can.

  Maybe I disconnected the fiber a little too quick. Maybe the bandage on my hand made me a little clumsy. Maybe there’s an invisible demon that follows me around and tries to screw up my life. A tiny plastic thingamajig breaks off of the connector. It’s floating aimlessly in front of my face, slowly flipping end over end. Dang. Not much I can do about that. I push the connector into the meds bottle and the tiny indicator glows green. I check my wristy—I need to leave it connected for about two minutes. The meds bottle starts transmitting the moment I connect the fiber. I release the bottle from my grip and let it hang there to finish its job. But the second I let go of the fiber, the green light goes out.

  I can’t believe this! The plastic piece that broke off held the connector in place. Without it, the fiber connector slides out of its mate. I push the fiber back in and the green light comes back on. The only thing I can do is hold it until the transmission is complete. Situation normal.

  So here I am, hanging in weightlessness, watching the wristy’s progress display, and I’m beginning to appreciate that two minutes is a very long time. Every few seconds I look past my legs down the long cylindrical space leading to the pivot room, checking if any crew members might be venturing back this way. Nobody so far. Check the time. Check my back. Still nobody. Check again. Check, check, and check, back and forth until my neck gets tired. I feel so exposed.

  If anybody catches me, I am so screwed. I turn my head back to the wristy and the motion flicks a blob of sweat free from the tip of my nose and floats out in front of my face. The sheet of sweat on my face has reached critical mass, releasing a steady procession of salty globules. Before long I have a collection of sweat balls dancing around my face like a happy little swarm of flies,
but with my left arm displaying the wristy and my right hand holding the meds bottle, I don’t have another hand to shoo them away. The redoubt is utterly silent—as silent as death itself—except for the guilty sounds of my throbbing heart and nervous frosty breath.

  Then, outa nowhere, the ship’s alarm gong sounds.

  The deafening sound of the alarm reverberates through the redoubt. I jump reflexively, slamming the top of my head against the unforgiving steel. There’s still nearly a minute to go with the transmission. Crap. I’m stuck here holding this incriminating bottle but if I disconnect it now the transmission will be trashed and I will have failed. I ain’t gonna get another chance at this. I try to estimate how many seconds it would take for somebody to get from the CM to the redoubt, but it’s gotta be less than the one minute I need.

  It takes only seconds for them to start coming. The circular hatch flings open and Nastez yanks himself in. He’s been manning the flight deck while I went to restore the network. He was relatively close so when the gong sounded it makes sense he would be the first to get here. The others will be coming up the spokes from the carousels, which will take a longer.

  The gong cuts off abruptly—thank God—but that just means there’s less to distract the crew from what I’m doing when they arrive. From the entrance to the redoubt, I am maybe 50 meters deep in—that’s where the fiber junction was located—so Nastez probably can’t see what I’m doing from the entry. Not yet anyways. I float my feet up to block his view of my hands—my guilty, shaking hands. I glance at the bottle; the lamp is still green. 50 seconds to go.

  “Hey Straker, did you hear the emergency signal back there?” he yells from the hatch. He’s got to be kidding—my ears are just about bleeding. Even his voice is loud back here. The redoubt is so quiet and the steel walls so hard that his voice is perfectly loud at this distance, like right-next-to-my-ear loud, but the walls also add a strange reverberation that distorts the sound, making him hard to understand.

  I look past my feet at him. “Yea, I heard it, really loud. But I’m already here, so I figured I’d stay where I am and finish the job I came here to do.”

  He nods and punches at the emergency console near the redoubt entrance. “It’s a micro-meteor strike. I saw a big cloud of particles coming at us so I hit the alarm. I think the anti-collision system saw it too, so I can’t be sure if it was me or the computer that sounded the alarm first. Coming in at about 17 kilometers per second, relative; cross-range, port side.”

  “How long till we’re hit?”

  “Well, it’s not a sure thing that we’ll be hit at all. But if we do get hit, it will be in about thirty seconds.”

  I glance furtively at my wristy. 45 seconds to go. The indicator on the bottle is still green.

  “Yuuta, have you finished with the network?” asks Nastez.

  “Um, no not yet, I was just about to when the gong sounded. I slipped and had to start over.”

  Within seconds, more company arrives. Katya comes through the hatch, then the captain, then Louis. The captain closes the hatch and dogs it down tightly behind her.

  “What are you doing way back there?” calls Katya.

  “Just putting the network back like it was,” I reply.

  “You could have left it the way it was; it wasn’t hurting anything.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

  Her head tilts—she’s getting curious. “Are you having trouble?” she asks. She kicks off and starts drifting towards me. I look at my wristy. 13 seconds to go. Katya moves much faster than I did. Her face is curious and she’s looming larger and larger…Boom. The whole ship jolts. We’ve been struck—hard. Louis spews out a few choice expletives; he and Nastez chatter loudly and nervously. Katya drops her gaze from me and looks back at them.

  I check my wristy. Transmission complete; the green light on the meds bottle has gone dark. I slip the meds bottle up the sleeve of my coveralls just as Katya turns her attention back to me. Another loud crack and the walls of the redoubt lurch to the side—we’ve been hit again. The redoubt reverberates from the impact like the biggest carillon bell anyone has ever heard--sound so low that my ears can’t hear it but so loud that it sets my teeth to chattering.

  “I hate this,” Katya says as she approaches. She stops her forward drift with a deft movement of her hand. “You never know how bad it’s going to get. A ship can end up like Swiss cheese after one of these things.” She looks at the connector in my hand and cocks her head. “So why don’t you reconnect that fiber and be done?”

  “Oh, well, it’s kind of embarrassing,” I say. “The little plastic thingy broke off. I don’t know what to do.

  She takes the connector from me and examines it, squinting at the tiny, jagged place where it broke. She don’t seem to notice my hand shaking. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says. “I break these things all the time.” She reaches into the left chest pocket, pulls out an identical piece, snaps it onto the connector, and plugs it back in to its proper port. She looks at me, shrugs and smiles. I nod, afraid to speak, certain that the quiver in my voice will betray me. I know my face is beet red and wet with sweat but hopefully the glare of my headlamp is hiding my emotions from her.

  Another hit—the ship kicks over even harder this time. The nauseating bell-from-hell sound is the worst part. This is what it must have felt like to be caught in a submarine during World War II, like when the British depth charged the German submarine in the movie Das Boot. Noise and chaos and the constant possibility of sudden death.

  We pull ourselves along to join the others, me following Katya, who moves as gracefully as a dolphin in the sea. I may be a sweat-drenched nervous wreck, but I ain’t so far gone that I don’t notice her gracefulness and dolphinlyness. Like a work of art, she is.

  We get peppered by more rocks. As we get close to the others, I switch off my headlamp. We cluster as a group, but in silence now, each crew member nursing his or her private terror. The earlier expletives are not repeated; now each has withdrawn within himself or herself, hoping and perhaps praying to live through the violent fusillade. Only the captain seems unaffected, her feet hooked expertly into a hand slot to hold herself still, examining her fingernails as if she’s impatient to be served at a slow restaurant. Nastez stays glued to the radar display on the console, eyes wide, staring wordlessly, stroking his chin.

  One of the impacts has caused damage. The ship is slowly rocking and turning—stabilizer system malfunction of some sort. Now we have to put up with seasickness on top of the noise. Can’t recall when I’ve felt more helpless or enjoyed life less. Everyone just waits, unsure what will be left once the storm is over. We’ve all heard the stories of the ships that never came back. One ship came home to Luna, neatly injected itself into lunar orbit, and remained there incommunicado. When a team got there to investigate, the entire crew was mummified on the flight deck. It had been a sudden, massive decompression from a micro-meteoroid strike.

  After a few interminable minutes, Nastez announces all clear. “Give us a damage assessment Katya,” says the captain.

  Katya floats over to the console as Nastez pushes over to the side, out of her way. The ship continues to oscillate strangely, rocking up and down and rolling side to side. Katya’s face is pale, her lips set in a grim line. She flips through screen after screen on the console. “We have an air leak,” she says, “somewhere in the CM. It also looks like a thruster pod has been hit—it’s the forward-most pod, starboard side. It’s affecting roll and pitch; thrusters are stuck on. The flight computer is fighting to compensate but it can’t shut down the broken thrusters. That’s what’s causing the instability.”

  The captain nods. “Well it could be worse. Nastez and I will work the air leak. Katya, you take Louis and Straker and work on the thruster pod—from the inside, if you can. Go EVA if you have to, but not Straker. Straker, your main job is to stay out of the way, watch, and learn.”

  “Fix the thruster pod, aye,” replies Katya, but her ey
es stay set on the console. She swipes right, then left, then right again. “Um…there’s something more…the port engine…it’s got a coolant flow problem.”

  “Oh God,” exclaims Nastez, his slender face turning white in the dim lighting of the redoubt.

  “How bad?” asks the captain.

  “Primary turbopump is down, must’ve gotten hit. Secondary is picking up the slack but it must be damaged too because its temperature is climbing.” The captain floats over to look over Katya’s shoulder at the displays while Katya points and describes the telemetry she’s seeing to the captain.

  I sidle up next to Louis. “What’s the deal?” I ask.

  He looks over at me. “You know we got nuke engines, right?”

  “Yup I knew that.”

  “The uranium gas inside them is really, really hot—hot enough to melt anything on the ship: steel, graphite, quartz, whatever. Plus, it’s at something like 500 standard atmospheres pressure.”

  “Oh,” I say. “That sounds bad. “So can it…blow up?”

  “Not like a fission explosion, no,” he replies. “But without coolant, it will melt its containment and burst just from the pressure. It’ll take out the other engine with it, and probably the whole stern of the ship.”

  “And then we’d be dead in the water?”

  “Yup. Dead in the water and just plain dead. No propulsion, no power, and surrounded by a radioactive cloud. No chance of rescue this far out.”

  I visualize that for a moment; the image gives me the shivers. I take a deep breath and nod. “OK, I get it now,” I say.

  * * * * *

  “One of us is going to have to go EVA,” says Katya to Louis.

  We’re floating in the weightless work chamber between the docking portal and the pivot room. It’s a large, doughnut-shaped space cluttered with stores cabinets, work surfaces, robotic arms, and tools held fast to the bulkheads. Katya, Louis and I are planted near the large engineering console that dominates one side of the chamber. There’s a noticeable breeze as all of the air in the ship slowly heads towards the hole in the CM. Katya’s long hair billows gently to one side as she speaks.