The Petrovski Effect: A Tess Novel

by Randy Moffat

  “You, you and you!” Bear pointed at several people randomly. “Let’s go!” Bear said and tried to run forward, only to find he was very light and running consisted of bouncing too high and pinging off the “ceiling,” then repeating it on the floor—like a super ball in a sewer pipe.

  He persisted in this approximation of a pounding run forward, trying to get his space legs and heard echoing metallic clangs and curses behind as the other designees followed him and mimicked his technique. It took some getting used to.

  He and his stampede passed through two watertight doors, he heaved them open in solid displays of upper body strength. The third door resisted his efforts and both Killien and Pinta piled onto it too, trying to get a grip and levering against the wall with their legs. The three of them pooled their collective testosterone and forced it open despite a marked resistance. As it came open they felt the cold and heard the whistling breeze that chilled their hearts to the temperature of the coldness prevailing outdoors. The former floor of the compartment had a sheet of ice on it, seawater that had entered the hole after the hull was breached and then frozen in the rapidly falling temperature. Bear looked around desperately. Pinta interpreted the look and snatched a mattress still velcroed on a bunk on the wall and rushed ahead of Bear. The direction of his rush followed the rush of air whistling from the ship just below the forward bow plane that had been shredded by at least one of the explosions aimed at them by the pursing speed boat. As soon as the chief got close to the hole the suction drew him onward faster and faster and almost shoved him and the mattress out of the biggest gaping hole, but Bear hooked a leg around the stub of a pipe and grabbed Pinta’s belt while the Chief tried to line up the square mattress to the jagged round hole. Pinta smacked it roughly onto the center point of leakage identified by the sharp intake of celestial breath through the lips of the mouth in the steel. It sealed with a satisfying slurp like entropy’s straw hitting the bottom of a big gulp glass and the mattress went concave at the center but held. The venting of air almost ceased, but two smaller holes nearby still made a counterpoint two octaves higher to the tune that had just stopped. They could feel their ears popping. Killian waded quickly in with a pair of pillows that soon put paid to the lesser leaks for the moment.

  Bear grinned at them both and clapped the chief on the shoulder.

  “Nice work, Chief. New name! We shall call that the Pinta posture-pedic emergency procedure in the ship’s manual . . . .”

  “When we write it . . .” Pinta grinned back. He was cool, and not just from exposure to space. He was enjoying the action. He blew on his hands and shoved them into his armpits, the temperature in the compartment was well below freezing.

  “This is great shit, Bear . . . Admiral . . . sir! Which of us gets to go outside and make repairs?”

  Bear laughed and slapped his thigh.

  “Put your suits on and try it from inside the ship before you try outside, none of us are expert at space walks and I can’t spare the time to chase you to the sun. Use Diaz . . . she is pretty handy with a welding torch and for heaven’s sake don’t burn a hole in your suits or let the torch set off the suit oxygen supply so it blows a new hole or something else silly . . . .”

  Pinta looked dissatisfied, disappointed at the denial of his chance for a Buck Rogers climb on the outer hull but nodded his agreement with the essential safety message. He was like the RCA dog acknowledging if not enjoying his master’s voice.

  The ship’s spin slowed quickly and then stopped and they all felt themselves go light on their feet again—at least until their feet left the “down” and they dove to grab something to hold onto.

  Bear happened to be looking at Rivera who looked suddenly stricken. Bear read the coming eruption, snatched a t-shirt that was suddenly floating free and shoved off a wall so that he just reached her in time as she retched out her lunch into the room. He caught most of the goo before it floated free into droplets, wrapping the rag around it, making a face where some hit him and clung to his clothes, but patting her shoulder sympathetically.

  He left her clutching the rag to her mouth and drifted in the sort of slow motion way that weightlessness gives you to a com panel, stabbing the call button forcefully and clinging with one hand on the deck and a foot on the ceiling to keep his lips next to the mike.

  “Admiral Wong! What happened to our spin?”

  “Had to take it off, boss!” Wong’s tinny answer came back. “We are trying to start the nuclear pile for non-battery power and it seems the coolant tanks are screwed up somehow. My best guess at this point is that two of them are installed upside down. As they sit now the Pumps are on the inside of the tanks close to the hull and when we have spin on it moves the water away from them so the pumps suck dry and get only air. It means the atomic pile hasn’t got enough coolant to fire it up. Is Pinta down there? I want to send him out with Gaston and flip the damn things around outside. We will have to figure out some kind of heated piping to run around the tank and back to the intake so the pumps work right.”

  Bear cursed in three languages under his breath and then spoke with the voice of command reason. Bear glanced at Pinta who was grinning in delight at the prospect of his space walk now being reinstated.

  “Our quality assurance is a little short of ISO standard, XO.” Bear commented dryly.

  “You ain’t kidden . . . I got four more . . . no I lie . . . five more lights on up here on the control consoles—pretty ones too! All X-masy in red, green and yellow. Send Killen up too when you can . . . only half the lights are labeled and we have no idea what they mean and need someone who can guess better than us.”

  “Trade you! Send down Diaz—tell her to bring a welding torch and some of the spare hull plates in engineering for welding. We’ll need her to seal up a few holes in the hull of the old torpedo room before we are all breathing vacuum. You should send Johnson with her to supervise the strength of the repair and tell them to bring their space suits. We are blocking most of the air loss, but to patch it they will have to expose themselves to space for short periods. While you are at it, tell Feathersgait he is our medic now. I need him here to put Rivera to bed and give her some Dramamine, she is puking her guts out—the new television advertisement for space sick! There is nothing like stomach contents outside their home in weightlessness to give you an appetite.” He added absently as he watched with the dispassion of the well as she put his words into action for the third time, looking haggard and with a greenish tinge especially around the gills. Luckily, there was little left in her gut to come up which made the display this time look more painful, but less disgusting.

  “Rog-Rog!” Wong replied with enviable brevity and entirely too much happiness in his voice. Busyness became him.

  Bear followed his companions to the bridge at a leisurely pace after Feathersgait came and took Rivera away and Bear had shown Diaz and Johnson exactly where the problem was that they had come to solve.

  The was a great deal of racing about—or more technically floating about, accompanied by oaths, yells and advice mostly shared at the top of people’s voices. They were short handed . . . two more people were space-sick. People drifted hither and yon, each on errands required by Bear or the XO. Within minutes there were no people left in the command area and lots still to do—even Pinta had gotten his wish and was outdoors cavorting in his spacesuit and happily flipping multi-ton di-hydrogen oxide tanks around with one arm. By that time Bear no longer worried about him. Bear was himself stripped to his underpants to allow him to wriggle further and still further under panels and trace wires without the clothes catching on protrusions and tangling in cable tie ends. He had a walkie-talkie duct taped to his ear, a little tool kit jammed under his neck and a flashlight gripped in his teeth and was straining to reach wire strippers deep into the upper assembly.

  Whatever dignitas Admiral MacKinnon might have commanded on his new service’s
first mission in its first ship would had been hopelessly compromised by his spread legs scissoring so that anyone could see all the way up his Y fronts to Tierra Del Fuego. No one noticed . . . The whole crew was engaged in repairing similar problems throughout the hull. TESS’ chief executive might be covered in dust-bunnies and un-cleaned construction grime and floating in his skivvies; but there was no other place else in the universe such a job could be done by humans and Bear’s face was suffused with what looked a lot like happiness . . . . until he remembered the fuzzy dice and realized what was going on . . .

  She floated in the void, swimming in her unnatural element and Bear woke up inside her and continued lying in his bunk, a picture of lassitude—a rest much coveted after so many days of intense activity. She needed a name he realized. Her submarine name would simply not do for the flagship of the TESS’ space fleet no matter what kind of jury rigged pile of crap she represented. Q-Kink had been working non-stop to repair her little quirks and foibles with mixed results since fleeing the bandits who’d been bent on sending her to Davie Jones back Earth-side.

  Of course, ‘swimming’ implied a coordinated muscular action and she not so much swam as made spasmodic twitches through space—tumbling and bumbling along. Stopping and starting like a student driver in heavy traffic. In a fine bit of cosmic irony the highly experimental Petrovski/MacMoran drive system meant to power her for long distances and based on heretofore theoretical physics, was the one system that seemed to be working fairly flawlessly. It was the mundane technology that had chosen to go wrong. Pinta had returned from his space walk out to flip the massive water tanks to reveal that one of them had a fine stitching of machine gun bullet holes in it—sealed temporarily by the water inside freezing into icy erections in the cold of space, but requiring more permanent repair. The maneuvering thruster squirt bottle system had suffered three entire unit failures requiring additional space walks to repair them. Her atmospheric cleansing machinery built for underwater use had failed no less than six separate times in outer space, which would have made it a contender for the most ornamental functionless functional system ever built, and would have been the team’s most serious problem if it had not had competition from the ship’s hull which leaked constantly and in unexpected places. Holes in it appeared everywhere . . . even where there were fuzzy dice. Bear had paused in his work for fifteen minutes yesterday to eat a power bar, only to see the wrapper float over and adhere to the hull, a sure sign of an air leak. When he stood up to go fix it, he could not feel a small spot on his buttock and found he had been sitting on yet another hole in the hull, which had made a patch of his bottom flesh insensible from the cold. By now the ship was beginning to have a sense of being a thousand patches held together by bit of hull. Bear was mentally composing a personal love letter to the inventor of Goop—the all purpose plastic adhesive which now plugged or held patches on the hull basically over the length and breadth of the entire space frame. Every crew member carried a tube on them at all times for repairs. Q Kink had been splicing, patching and stringing wires for most of week and only now was the whole mess showing anything like moderate reliability. Bear had not wanted to get too far from Earth orbit until she showed some kind of stability and his instincts had been good.

  Today was the first day he thought she had a chance to go further. He unfastened his safety harness and pulled himself into the center of the room. Their artificial gravity spin was still working poorly which Bear embraced as a good sign since it meant that it was working at all. They had been turning it on and off like a blinker bulb to get at one problem or other. Harnesses on ship’s bunks had become necessary since they had lost spin five times in the last four days and two people had been found floating, dead asleep from exhaustion, down the corridors. Pinta had made the unfortunate decision to sleep au natural and some wags had festooned him with improvised tinsel and one of the girls had painted a smiley face on the head of his Johnson before Wong took pity on him and woke him up by poking him repeatedly in his hairy thigh. The XO was afraid to touch anything else.

  One good thing, everyone was now an expert in the ship’s construction and operation since they had all been involved in some aspect of repair work of one kind or another. TESS’ mother ship had repeatedly earned the sobriquet ‘mother’ honestly from those who flew in her. The word that accompanied the nickname was less polite. Bear had despaired briefly that she had taken on the aspect of the talking dog, the miracle was not that it talked well, but that it talked at all. Still, nothing is permanent, even inoperability—studious perseverance in fixing her ills had placed her into the enviable position today of being more likely to work than to not work. Much of the fear and apprehension with which the Q-Kink team had felt in the first hours of finding themselves in space aboard a huge flying lemon, had given way at first to exhaustion, and lately to a kind of dogged determination to beat the damn thing into submission. Their repairs had roughly followed Mazlow’s hierarchy of need. First fixing the systems to meet the need to breath, then the need to drink, then to eat, then to sleep with some kind of assurance and in the last day or so had focused on high level morale welfare things like having a ship with a power plant that worked all the time and consistently working toilets.

  Late last night, they felt they actually had gotten the maneuvering jets steadily operational for short maneuvers. Today—they might actually take a jump using the Petrovski/MacMoran rig see if its repeated use broke anything else. Bear stretched and looked longingly at the special vacuum shower, but decided against trying it. He stank, as did most of the ship just now, but the last person who had tried to shower, had ended up with their quarters full for floating water globules. O’Hara had told him about it; she knew because it had been her. At the time she had been flying around her room, trying to mop up the water globules from the shower whose vacuum had crashed in mid-wash up; when the spin came back unannounced and she hit the deck, along with a rain of moisture which went all over everything including her lingerie drawer which was open a crack at the time. She had coyly invited him to see just how wet her knickers were, but the dark shadows under her eyes told him clearly that it was a game chicken effort rather than a sincere desire backed by the necessary energy to follow through. He politely declined, but promised a rain check. They had both giggled over that like school kids the rest of the day which showed just how punchy they really were.

  Bear actually was still very tired and had forgotten where his closet was located. He was poking at walls to find it. The quarters were shipboard rooms, like a very compact hotel room—but offered vast elbow room compared to what ocean going submariners got planet-side where the crew actually ‘hot bunked’, sharing the same sleeping space watch on watch and staying away when it was not your eight hours to sleep. Of course, those subs had a crew of over three hundred . . . . Bear figured on a final crew for the spacecraft version of between 30 to 45—so some of the ridiculously tight former crew bunk spaces had been turned into rooms like these with a fair amount of room and secured cabinets all over the walls. In weightless conditions it was hard to remember which wall was which and he longed for the time to label everything. The ship was not up to full compliment—and Bear knew that heavy recruiting lay in his future. For now though Bear felt a modest sense of triumph when he found the hidden door latch, put on some clothes and space walked into the command center. The first man he saw was Feathersgait.

  “How is Rivera?” He was concerned. She was their last space sickness case. All the others had gotten over it within forty eight hours, but hers lingered on.

  Feathersgait shrugged. He was an indifferent doctor; he thought the squalidness of illness too ordinary for his great mind, but he had performed adequately at being thrust into the role in holding bags for people’s gags, strapping in green-gilled patients and issuing sea sick pills by the bucketful.

  “I just got off the phone with that NASA doctor you promised an enormous fee to for information. He tells me
there has never been a case of someone not getting over space sickness. We are doing the right things. Keep doing them and he thinks she will come out of it in time. The Russian doc agrees.”

  “Thinks?”

  Feathersgait shrugged.

  “The human genome is wide and broad. The space program has not been. Astronauts and Cosmonauts were largely chosen from the gene pool for strength, STEM mental skills and stamina. It is just possible Rivera is the exception that has not been to space until now. For all I know she may puke her guts out until she dies. She has taken no solid food for three days, but put the spin on and keep it on, and it may help. It’s possible it is the yo-yo changes that are getting to her now rather than the actual weightlessness.”

  Bear nodded.

  “Fair enough—we might be in luck there. Let me have the phone I loaned you. You look tired, get some sleep.” He finished kindly.

  Feathersgait put the satellite cell in his hand and headed off to his bunk without argument.

  At the last minute Bear had thought to buy three satellite phones on the off chance they might prove useful. It was one of the better things he had done. They worked great here in close earth orbit, patching through the satellites and into the phone networks all over the planet. The crew had been using them to make hundreds of morale and business calls. He called Craig who answered.

  “Yo!”

  “This is Bear.”

  “Yeh.” The buoyant Craig of the day of the attacks was gone. He was once again his usual taciturn dour self.

  “Anything new?”

  “Nah. They ain’t that stupid. I think them hitting us that way was a one off.”

  The men who had attacked all three TESS installations had been beaten back in all cases. Most were dead or retreated into bolt holes, but there were at least a half dozen prisoners in various degrees of wholeness. Several had been questioned by the FBI, CIA and a variety of other organizations gifted by the Americans with an acronym. Bear had called most of those organizations and been stonewalled as an interloping outsider even though they had been his installations being targeted. Bear ignored the insult and made back door inquiries through Dyer. Dyer gave him some answers. Several of the men were mercenaries, only just a cut above ‘Soldier of Fortune’ magazine level. There was one, however, who had made him think. He was pretty chewed up, but the FBI suspected him of being a member of the Chinese intelligence.