“I guess it is for me, too,” Sandy acknowledged.
“You think I don’t know that? I knew that about you the day after we first met. The other women on the team made sure I knew about you. You think you don’t have a reputation that precedes you?”
“Ummm, I don’t think about it.”
Becca sighed. Guys! “I’m sorry. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about and I’m not trying to put you on the defensive. It’s just . . .”
Becca took a deep breath. I’m finally getting to the point, she thought.
“It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just I don’t exactly know what that is. I’m not sure there’s a future.”
“If this is about us breaking up . . .”
“What? No! No, no, no! I mean, I’m really enjoying this. Whatever it is.”
Deep breaths, just breathe, she thought. Damn, I hate Talks.
Engineering pinged.
“Hold on,” Becca said, “Wendy’s calling. Back to you in a minute.”
Becca opened the two-way comm to Engineering. “How’s it going, guys? I’m seeing temperature fluctuations in Exchanger 1. Anything I need to worry about?”
Greenberg came back: “Becca, it doesn’t look like much from here. We’re getting a few hiccups in a couple of the heater coils. Minor current spikes. We’ll stamp ’em out.”
“Okay, Wendy, but sooner rather than later, okay? Turnaround’s enough work without distractions. Let’s kill this one, pronto.”
“Sure thing, boss. I’ll ramp up the damping algorithms another notch. That oughta do it.”
“Good. Stay on top of it.”
Becca switched two-way back to Sandy. “Hey, you listen in on that?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Not much, some rattles in the gears. Do me a favor, though, feed me an external shot of Slot Nozzle 1, the outboard half? IR, false color mapping, like you did back when we were doing the Earth-orbit tests? Can you do that?”
Sandy was a few hundred meters away: “No problem, I’ve had an IR camera running. Just let me switch to wide-angle”—there was a pause—“Okay, should be getting the IR feed on screen four”—another pause—“Okay, I just kicked in the color thermal map post-process on the vid. You seeing that?”
“Yeah, it’s good. I’m copying Engineering in on this.” Becca opened a conference channel back to Engineering. “Wendy, I’m feeding you Darlington’s IR view of Nozzle 1. See that hot spot between Plates 87 and 91, about seventy percent out from the mast? I think that’s where the fluctuations originate. Try dialing back the heaters around there.”
“I agree. We’ve already been focusing on that section,” Greenberg said. “We’ll sweat the small stuff, doncha worry.” Wendy clicked off.
Becca switched back to the private link with Sandy.
“What was I saying? Oh yeah. I’m liking this. A whole lot. I think you are, too. You’re sticking around, anyway. It’s just that . . . when we get back, I expect I’m gonna go home to Minnesota and you’ll be going back to Pasadena. That whole shipboard romance thing, and that’ll be it.
“I’m really not sure I want that to be it. I’m still working on it. But I’d really like to know how you feel about this . . . ‘thing’ . . . between the two of us. You ever thought about moving to Minnesota? Okay, not much to surfing there, but at least we’re not topping fifty degrees in the summer.” Becca took a deep breath. “Okay. That’s your cue. I’m done. You’ve got the floor.”
Sandy was silent.
“Sandy? What’s on your mind?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“Well, maybe it’s time!” Becca blurted exasperatedly. Damn, this mattered. She was surprised by that.
Another ping: “Wait one, Wendy’s pinging me again.” Becca went back to the engineering channel.
“What’s up?”
“We sent a power-back command, but Heater 1-89’s still pumping out full heat. What do you rec—”
34.
And then the engineering operation stopped being routine, and turned into a nightmare, a train wreck. Everything happened in a fraction of a second, but Sandy’s combat-trained brain played it out in slow motion, so he wouldn’t miss any of the uglier details.
The radiator boom-wall ruptured right next to the hot spot his IR camera had highlighted. Molten radiator metal poured out of the breach, a surreal liquid explosion of silvery blobs moving at different speeds. One droplet of spray, traveling at over one hundred kilometers per second, pinged on the large front port. He instinctively recoiled—sniper! Then his explosion reflexes kicked in. Look for bricks coming down.
He leaned on the joystick, realizing in the first second that he would be hit. The bigger blobs moved more slowly, like oncoming cars, but there was no hole in the spray he could duck into. He couldn’t move the egg fast enough to avoid all of the molten metal. A major hit on that big Leica-glass window would be very bad. He needed to rotate the pod to get the window out of the line of fire. The egg’s least sensitive equipment was located in the bottom, where the heavy mechanicals were, and Martinez had given him the good training. He started spinning the egg so the bottom would take the impact.
He didn’t quite make it, but it was good enough. The impact came a second later, on the corner of the utility cradle, below his seat. It felt like the rubbery impacts of a bumper car at a carnival, but a lot harder, but that was okay, because it came through his butt. If he’d taken it on the face, even if the window had held, which was doubtful, he’d be looking at a fractured vertebra.
Then the electronics started screeching at him, and the life-support indicators went to a screaming yellow. And though he was upside down to Becca, he saw a barrel-sized slug of molten metal slam into her egg at head-on-auto-collision speed.
No sound, other than his own electronic warnings: he was locked on Becca’s channel but heard not a word or a scream, the vid was down, nothing but the sight of the egg getting hit, and the egg flying off, tumbling, at ten, twenty, thirty meters per second. He wasn’t sure. His own egg was rotating, and she’d passed out of his field of view.
“Becca’s hit, oh fuck oh fuck, Becca’s hit, I’m going that way, I’m going that way . . .” He slammed over the joystick.
Nothing happened.
He slammed it again.
Nothing happened.
Martinez: “I’m coming, I’m coming . . .”
—
Sandy called Becca once, twice, three times, got nothing back.
One of the techs called from the egg base: “Sandy, your egg’s screwed. Stay off the electronics . . . stay off the electronics . . .”
“Becca’s hit, you gotta—”
His microphone shut down—Martinez could do that from his command egg—and Martinez said, “Shut up and listen. I’m in my egg, but it’s gonna take a couple minutes to get out there. The data feeds say you’ve got a fire in the R-Box, you’ve got to pull the flush ring for R. Can you pull the ring?”
The emergency panel was overhead and Sandy swatted the cover away, saw the red flush ring for R, and pulled it.
“R ring pulled. Joe, you gotta move. She was hit hard. Jesus, she was hit, I can’t see her, my maneuvering gear is all red—”
“Sandy, I’m losing your data feeds, I don’t know if it’s the fire, I think that’s gone but it’s possible the metal is still hot and is reigniting, but the feeds are going down one by one.”
“What about Becca? You gotta get going . . . you gotta go—”
“Do you have a status on your air?”
“No, not anymore. I’m dead in the water, man, all the vids are going out, they went yellow and then red and now they’re going out. The LEDs are still powered, but they’re going to red, too, I’m not gonna be any help.”
“Listen. Did you take that bag of co
okies with you?”
“What? What? Cookies . . .”
“Listen to me, man. The cookies. Did you eat the cookies?”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Joe? Are you out—”
Martinez’s voice was cool, but sharp: “Sandy, this is important. Did you eat those cookies?”
“No, no . . . I . . .”
“Look at the bag. Is the bag normal, or is it all puffed up? Is it fat?”
Sandy looked at the lunch box—the container where they kept the food, picked up the bag of cookies. It looked like somebody had been pumping air into it.
“It’s fat. It’s like a ball.”
“Goddamnit. You’re leaking air, your pressure is dropping. Hold real still, spit a little, just easy, small drops of spit . . . see which way the spit drops drift . . .”
“Tell me about Becca . . .”
“Becca’s a separate problem and we’re working on it,” Martinez said. “We’ve also got to work on your problem. Spit.”
Sandy spit, and the tiny drops of saliva hovered in front of his face for a second, then another, and then they began drifting down to his right. As he did that, he heard Martinez shouting over the open link, “Elroy! Elroy! Call Butler and see what the situation is with the other eggs,” and “Sandy, what happened with the spit?”
“They’re drifting down to my right, not outward . . . it’s not centrifugal force . . . they’re going down behind the seat, I can’t see . . . Joe, I think if there’s a crack, it’s probably in the bottom of the interior shell. I can’t reach it.”
“Shit. You smell anything?”
“No, I—”
Sandy’s microphone went dead, and so did the sound feed coming in; a new red LED light began blinking up and to his left. Now he really was dead in the water, and not only that, he was isolated from the others.
He couldn’t see the ship itself, but he could see one section of the radiators, which seemed to be moving along in a smooth flow. It had been the other one where the problem occurred, he thought.
The interior lights flickered, and another LED popped up: the lights had gone to emergency battery power, and the emergency batteries were in the ceiling, away from the impact zone. He should have light.
Anything he could do to help himself? Nothing came to mind. He looked up at the emergency box, and a half-dozen additional flush rings. Couldn’t hurt to pull them, he thought: they were basically fire extinguishers, mechanically operated, and the egg was dead, anyway. He pulled them all, one at a time.
His egg continued its slow tumble, the ship was now below his feet. Then he picked up Becca’s egg. He almost missed it: it looked like a large dim star, and he wouldn’t have noticed it at all except that it was moving. Maybe three or four kilometers away, he thought, though he didn’t know for sure.
Nothing, nobody was going after it.
He screamed at it: “Becca! Becca!”
35.
Captain Fang-Castro sucked thoughtfully on her second bulb of pouchong of this watch. The delicate tea soothed her nerves and gave her something to do with her hands. Bridge watch was uneventful on the Nixon, and thank God for that. Still, it meant the officer of the watch mostly had little to do but sit in the big chair and look, well, watchful.
Fang-Castro liked to keep busy. Doing nothing, even watchfully, made her fidgety, and a fidgety commander was not good for morale. Consequently, tea was usually in hand.
The crew was excited about midcourse turnaround. It was the first tangible evidence of progress since they’d completed their slingshot pass of the sun, and it meant they were more than halfway to Saturn.
They were two and a half hours into restart and the engines were up to three-quarters thrust. Fang-Castro was finishing her tea when the faintest of shudders rippled through the bridge.
“Nav, what was that!” she snapped. “Comm, give me Engineering and patch Mr. Martinez in.”
Navigation came back instantly: “Command: we experienced a lateral impulse, ship’s aft. It turned us slightly off course. Attitude control is bringing us back on heading.” A second later, “Our acceleration is dropping rapidly. It looks like the engines are shutting down.”
“An impact?”
“Don’t know, ma’am, we’re inquiring.”
Frank LaFarge, who was on engineering watch, spoke up. “I’m not seeing damage indicators commensurate with an impact big enough to shift our heading.”
Comm spoke up: “Engineering’s on.”
“Dr. Johansson, what just happened?” Fang-Castro kept her voice calm and level, belying her twitching gut.
“Captain, Greenberg here. Becca’s on EVA, observing the radiator ramp-up. We’ve lost contact with her. Radiator Boom 1 experienced a blowout. We don’t know how serious it is, but we’re hemorrhaging radiator melt. I’ve initiated rapid shutdown and containment procedures on the damage.”
“Are we in any immediate danger, Dr. Greenberg?”
“I don’t believe so, Captain.”
Nav came back: “Command, we’re accessing the fore cameras, we’ll have them up in a few seconds.”
Comm: “We have Mr. Martinez on—”
Fang-Castro: “Nav, hold the pictures. Comm, show me Joe: Joe, what happened?”
“I’m really busy right now, ma’am, so I gotta be short.” Martinez was buckled into his egg. “We blew a radiator, looks like, some of the melt hit Becca’s and Sandy’s eggs. Sandy’s damaged but I think recoverable if I can get out there, but my best bet now is that Becca’s gone.”
“Gone? You mean . . .”
“Dead. The monitoring vid showed her getting hit by a wad of metal the size of a chair. Hit hard, head-on. The shell’s intact . . . maybe . . . but the cradle, power system, propulsion, they’re trashed. Her egg’s been hurled away from us. I gotta go, I gotta go, if I can get the goddamn garage door open, I gotta go . . .” Fang-Casto heard him shouting at somebody, “Get off the line: get off the fuckin’ line, get off the fuckin’ line and get me out there . . .”
Fang-Castro: “Keep me informed when you can, Joe.”
“Yeah, I will, ma’am. Sandy’s losing power, we’re losing his data feeds, get me out there, you motherfuckers, I don’t care about that, use the crank, use the fuckin’ crank if you have to and get into suits. I’ll bring Sandy back into Bay 12.”
The captain went back to Comm: “Get me the command link to Dr. Johansson’s service egg.”
Two seconds passed. “Now, Comm.”
“I’m trying, Captain, but I’m not getting a ping back.”
“Pull up the last feed you have. Ten seconds’ worth.”
Two more seconds passed and the main screen lit up, showing the vid from the egg’s internal safety monitor camera. For three seconds, it was just Dr. Johansson peering intently through the main port. Then sudden darkness on the port, interior lights coming up instantly and Dr. Johansson’s head slamming into the inside of the port hard, very hard, and her head snapping back, as the vid feed dropped off-line.
Comm spoke, barely audibly. “After that we just have maybe three seconds of low-grade telemetry, but it’s showing cascading failures, one subsystem after another. Environmental’s out, atmosphere toxin levels skyrocketing, there’s a breach somewhere, the egg is losing pressure fast. . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Shit. Double-shit, thought Fang-Castro. “Get me any of the other working channels. Try Mr. Darlington’s egg.”
“Trying all channels.”
A moment later, she heard what sounded like breathing. “Mr. Darlington?”
“Yes. Yes. Jesus, who is this?”
“Fang-Castro. Are you injured?”
“No. Becca’s been hit, hard. I can see her egg some of the time, I’m rotating, can’t stop it, but she’s way out there. You don’t have much time. I think she’s taken a lot of damage.
I don’t see anybody after her. You gotta get going—”
“We’ve got everything under way, Mr. Darlington. You hold on tight there. Joe, Mr. Martinez, is on the way out. . . . I don’t see you on my screen.”
“I don’t see you, either. All the vid and all the audio channels seem to be out, except this one. I can’t reach Becca. Joe oughta go after her, if he can. She’s gonna need air, for sure, and probably power, her heater could be down.”
“Mr. Martinez is coming up on you,” Fang-Castro said. “Get ready for recovery. And I’ll say again we’re on top of the situation.”
She clicked away and said, to Navigation, “Get the aft view on my screen.”
The aft view came up.
“Spot Dr. Johansson’s service egg.”
That took a few seconds, but the camera finally locked on the egg and began zooming. There was nothing but empty space between the excellent lens and the egg, no heat ripples, no dust, no humidity, and when the camera got out to full zoom, and a further digital zoom was applied, they could see that the egg had been totally disabled. The metal slug that had hit it had taken out power, propulsion, comm. The shell looked intact, but it was splattered with now-frozen radiator metal. There was a crack in the view glass behind which Johansson had been sitting, visible between splashes of metal.
Somebody on the bridge said, “Oh, my God.”
Fang-Castro said, “Comm. Get me Mr. Martinez if he’ll take the call.”
Martinez came up: “I’m closing on Sandy’s egg.”
“Yes. I can get him on the command channel, I’ve spoken to him. He knows you’re about to do the recovery. Your assessment of the impact on Dr. Johansson’s egg is correct. I’m afraid there’s no prospect that Dr. Johansson has survived.”
“Okay. Listen, Sandy can be a handful. If you’d get the people he talks to—Fiorella, Crow, and get Dr. Ang for sure—get them down to egg operations to meet him when he gets out of his egg. I don’t know whether he’s physically injured—”
“He says not.”
“Okay, but his head’s gonna be seriously messed up. I don’t know if you’re aware of his relationship with Dr. Johansson . . .”
Saturn Run Page 26