“Yes, of course I can see it. There's nothing else out here. It must be snagged inside the airlock."
David groaned. Just what they needed—a jammed windlass. Fifteen minutes for her to return to the airlock, ten minutes to repressurize, then twenty-five more to pump the lock out again and return to the magbeam harness. Fifty minutes wasted, plus however long it took him to fix the windlass. Too long. He took a deep breath.
“Victoria, your tether's stuck. You'll have to cast yourself loose."
The shriek in the earpiece nearly deafened him. “What? Do you think I'm a lunatic? I'm not about to cast off my safety line!"
“We're out of time and out of options. Either you unclip the tether, or we die a hundred million kilometers beyond the asteroid belt.” The alarm buzzed indistinctly, barely audible over Porter's protestations. David pushed off for the engineering section. Maybe the life support systems were tripping an atmospheric sensor. His handheld sensor hovered between green and yellow.
“Look, Victoria, the suit has thrusters built in. If you lose your grip on the handholds, you can use them to push you back to the ship, just like I explained to you. You're safer than walking down the street in D.C. Get yourself back to the handholds, unclip your tether, and pull yourself on to the magnet."
More curses, then, “All right, I'll do it."
David grinned. “Atagirl. You'll be fine, I promise."
The radio crackled in his ear. “Longrie, what's that noise?"
The alarm stopped, and David looked around intently, trying to imagine what it could have been. He shook his head. “Nothing important. Just my radio. Banged it and got some feedback going."
“Well, don't do it again. I nearly jumped out of my skin.” Porter's voice eased, and a few minutes of silence passed. “I'm at the magnet now. How much time do we have?"
David looked at his watch. “You're doing fine. Just make sure you get the converter securely attached as quickly as you can."
He continued trekking through the engineering spaces, checking subsystems and sensors. Nothing registered an alarm. Porter's scream stiffened every muscle in his body. “Victoria, are you all right? What happened? Victoria?"
“Damn! The converter is drifting away! I just let it go for a second to get a tool out. I can't reach it!"
He stifled a curse. “How far away is it?"
“Two meters. I can't reach it from the handholds. It's getting farther away all the time."
David took a breath. “Victoria, let go of the handhold and use your suit thrusters to reach the converter before it goes any farther."
“I can't."
He heard her sob, pictured tears welling in her eyes. That she'd gotten this far was nearly miraculous, but if she let the converter get away, it would all be for nothing. “You can, Victoria. You can do this. It'll be just like when you were on the tether. Use the thrusters to go to the converter, clip it onto your belt again, then head back to the ship."
Sheer terror swelled her voice. “No, I can't. What if the suit thrusters run out of gas? I'll be stuck out here, falling forever."
David thought about how he'd handled young boxers afraid to fight on after a knockdown. His watch showed less than two hours to go, and the job of bolting the converter in place wasn't even begun. They were in the final round and needed to deliver the knockout blow, but the clock was ticking down towards the bell—a bell that would signal their deaths, as well as those of Beaume and God knew how many colonists.
“You're not falling, Victoria. You're swimming—swimming between the stars. There's no place to fall to, no planets to suck you down to their surface. Think about swimming, Victoria. You're not afraid of falling when you swim, are you?"
She sniffed, and then answered in a small voice. “No, I don't fall when I'm in the water."
“And you aren't falling now; you're floating. Use the thrusters to help you swim to the converter. Think of it as a life buoy. Swim to the life buoy and bring it back to the ship. Do it now, Victoria, before the life buoy is too far away."
She sniffed again and hiccupped. He thought he detected the sound of teeth grinding. After several minutes of heavy breathing, she reported she'd retrieved the converter. David gave a silent prayer of thanks. “Well done, Victoria. Now go back to the magnets and secure it. We don't have much time."
“We've done it, David. We've done it! The converter's in place!"
Porter beamed as David helped her out of the airlock. Fatigue lined her face, and her hands shook as she removed the outer shell of the spacesuit, but her eyes were wide and her voice slurred as if she was high on drugs. David admitted to himself that the clinging undergarment looked a lot better on her than it did on him, as did the crazy grin they shared. No sooner was she free of the spacesuit than she threw her arms around him, the strength of her embrace pleasantly surprising, her lips close to his. To look at her, she could have been through a war, but new confidence gleamed in her eyes. He hugged her tightly, and she squeezed his shoulder, feeling the muscle, looking at him with lips slightly parted.
“You did great, Porter. I'm proud of you."
She kissed his cheek. “Vicky,” she whispered. “My friends call me Vicky."
“Vicky.” He tried the name for size, and found it fitted her. “Well, Vicky, I think you've done enough to deserve a little prize."
She looked up at him from under long eyelashes. “And just what did you have in mind?” Her fingers touched his earlobe, stroking gently.
David felt his face redden, and fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out the lump of chocolate handed out by Ellen at their abortive celebration, and proffered it to Porter with an apologetic smile. “I tried to get something better, but the confectioners don't deliver this far."
The fragment was gone from his hand before he saw her move, and suddenly he was pressed back against the wall with her legs braced against him and her fist twisted in the front of his shirt. “You've been hiding this from me all this time?” she demanded, her face savage. “All this time?"
David recoiled from her fury, then jerked in surprise as she burst out laughing.
“Fooled you!” She broke the bar into two pieces and held a fragment up to his mouth with delicate fingers. With a pang of guilt about how it would have looked to Gin, he let her feed him the piece of cheap chocolate. Ecstasy overtook her face as she consumed the other, and she pressed herself against him harder, then licked her fingers lasciviously clean, one by one, right in front of his face.
She gave a rapturous smile. “Not bad, but shouldn't you have ordered Mars bars?"
He kissed her. There didn't seem to be any other response. He meant it to be momentary, but her arms locked around his neck and held him until they were both out of breath. They only parted when his watch let out a beep. She looked at him in gentle query.
“Five minutes until beam pickup,” he explained, regretfully. “It's game time. You remembered to switch on the power supply to the separators, didn't you?"
She flicked his ear. “I'm not incompetent, David."
He smiled. “No, Vicky, you're not.” He pushed off for the engineering section, trying hard to forget the taste of chocolate on her lips.
Porter trailed along behind him, and bounced to a halt as he stopped at a voltmeter attached to one of the battery panels. “When will we know if this converter of yours worked?"
“If we don't explode in the first seconds, we'll know when this little gizmo bleeps at us."
“Explode! You never said anything about an explosion!” She grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.
There was no point in deceiving her any longer. “If Mars didn't get our message, and picks us up with a full power beam, the batteries'll get a high voltage spike before the converter melts. It could trigger an explosion. I don't know about you, but I'd rather go quickly than starve to death in the outer reaches. Nothing I could do about it, so I didn't think you needed to know."
She swelled up in anger, then just as abruptly deflated.
“Thanks, but I'd rather have known."
David shrugged, and took her proffered hand. “One minute.” They clung to each other, staring at the voltmeter, lying blank and silent as the time ticked down.
“Thirty seconds,” David said. “Fifteen. Ten. Five. Time."
Silence. No explosion, no sound from the voltmeter.
“Time plus five. Time plus ten. Plus twenty.” He looked down at the frightened woman clutching him. “I'm sorry, Vicky. I'm truly—” The ventilation fans sputtered, then sped up, pushing cool cabin air over them both. David opened his mouth just as the voltmeter sounded. Its electronic bleep could have been a siren's song for the effect it had on them. Porter whooped like a cheerleader, and David threw back his head, roaring in triumph.
“That one's for you, Christa!” he shouted, then turned to kiss Porter again, who grinned like a fool. “It's working, Vicky,” he said. “We just scored our first knockdown. Let's make sure the bastard doesn't stand back up again."
* * * *
“Yes! Now we're motoring!"
Porter stumbled into the cockpit, no longer submerged in Stygian gloom, but filled with bright lights and video displays. Above the viewscreen, the mission clock announced the beam pickup was fifty-three minutes old, while another ticked down towards zero, marking the time when they would begin decelerating. “What's up?"
David gestured to a tiny video screen. Columns of numbers propped up the title InsertionCourse1. “Navigation came back online. We won't have to manually steer the insertion course; we can let the microchips do the thinking."
“What about the other systems?"
“I've just asked the computer to run a full diagnostic; the results'll be back any second. Damn, but this beats digging around with a voltage probe.” The biggest video screen lit up, rows of numbers cascading down it. David touched a control and the avalanche froze.
“Let's see now,” he said. “Attitude thrusters operational. Deceleration magnets operational. Liquid recycling and cargo heaters down. Food refrigeration down, cabin temperature sensors busted. None of those matter. Propellant feed, power couplings, heat shield sensors, landing parachutes: all operational. The radio's still down, but we're broadcasting position telemetry again."
Porter grinned. “We have what we need, then? We're good to go. Aren't we?"
David scrolled through the diagnostic screens. “We're—” He stopped, his mouth hanging open. “Oh, shit."
“What? What isn't working?"
“It's the inductor coils for the magbeam harness."
“The whats?"
“Little gizmos that fire the explosive bolts to break the contacts between the magbeam harness and the hull. They must have burnt out when the batteries discharged. We'll have to replace them."
“Why not just leave the harness in place?"
David shook his head. “Can't. It'd make us aerodynamically unstable. We'd burn up in the atmosphere. The coils've gotta be replaced."
“How long will that take?"
He frowned. “I don't know. I've never done it before."
“What? I thought you knew this ship!"
“This ship has over a million working parts. Those coils are about the least important of them."
“Not right now, they're not. Right now I'd say they're pretty damn vital. What are you going to do?"
“I'll have to get a look at one of the original coils, and help you make some new ones to match them."
“You want me to make them?"
“No choice. I can't do delicate work with my hand. But we're only talking about half a dozen metal coils, about the size of your finger. We've got three hours to replace them."
“What if I had a better idea?"
“Like what?"
“Screw landing on Mars. Set a course to dock with the platform instead."
David's teeth clenched. “We can't get to the surface from the platform. I can't fly their lander, and Beaume's in no state to do it for us. The sick people are on Mars. The medicine to save them is on this ship. We're going to Mars."
“You're going to risk crashing into the surface when we could dock safely with the station?” Panic tinged Porter's voice, and her eyes implored him. “At least dock for a few days to fix things. Then, if you're still bent on this kamikaze mission to the surface, you'd have a fighting chance."
“Their medical supplies have already run out. I'm not letting anyone else die waiting for us.” He reached for her. “Vicky—"
She wrenched away from him. “Don't you dare call me that. You're going to get us both killed. We've got three hours, but what if we started on an insertion course and it turned out we couldn't fix the coils? We wouldn't be able to change course to dock with the platform, would we?"
She read the answer from his face.
“So, we'd be plunging down toward Mars, knowing we were going to burn up and not a damn thing we could do about it. Right?"
“Six little coils, Porter. Will you let them say we were beaten by six little lengths of wire? That we gave up after coming this far?” He nodded at the mission clock. “Three minutes until deceleration starts. Time to make a choice. Are you going to go for the knockout?"
She paused, frowning at the navigation computer. He could see the play of emotions across her face.
“I'll make your damn coils,” she snapped, and stormed out of the cockpit.
Stifling a smile, David punched the Execute key to start the insertion program and trailed her back through the ship.
He felt weight return as the deceleration began, and for the first time in a month, “up” and “down” meant something again. At first he felt crushed, even though it was barely a quarter of what he carried every day of his life. After so much time watching Porter fumble around in weightlessness, it was a surprise to recall how gracefully she moved with gravity on her side.
He levered the access panel open. The metal tunnel beyond was barely wide enough for his shoulders, and with only one hand, he needed Porter's help to pull himself into it. He pushed a flashlight between his teeth, and crawled.
Fifteen minutes later, he dropped a melted and blackened wire coil onto the galley table. “We need to make six copies of this. It's just a copper coil with connections soldered on, but the dimensions need to be just right. The problem will be reinstalling them; we'll have to fit three each to save time. They're tricky to get at, along tunnels around the ship's perimeter."
“How do I find them?"
“I marked up the first tunnel with tape arrows while I was fetching this; the others are all the same. But let's get started making the coils; I'll explain as we work."
Porter proved adept at twisting the copper wire into the correct spiral shape, but the connections were fiddly and intricate, and her soldering needed constant supervision. After an hour, they were only onto the third coil.
“Hold the iron to the wire for a few seconds first,” David said. “The solder'll flow better when you—” He stopped as the buzz of an alarm reached his ears. “Damn thing,” he said. “It went off while you were on EVA. It kept stopping whenever I tried to find it. See—it's stopped already. Can't be anything important."
Porter swore as the alarm went off again, making her slip. This time it didn't stop, but kept sounding insistently. With a horrifying jolt, David realized at last where it was coming from.
The alarm blared as Beaume's cabin door slid open, and a red light pulsed on top of the medical monitoring unit. The EKG trace should have shown its distinctive pattern of dips and spikes separated by long flat stretches. Instead, a continuous ripple played across the monitor. Other indicators told a story of failing respiration and blood pressure. Beaume must have been teetering on the edge of cardiac arrest for hours, tripping the alarm for a few seconds at a time. He lay on his pallet like a corpse, muscled chest sunken and unmoving, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
David seized the med kit and unpacked the defibrillator, then thrust an ampoule of epinephrine at Porter.
“Add that to his IV line and open the pump wide."
While she injected the drug into the line, he pulled the defibrillator paddles from the charge unit and ripped open a package of conductive gel with his teeth. Porter stepped in and squeezed the gel onto one of the paddles. The defibrillator beeped, signaling its readiness. David spread the gel on both surfaces, then forced them against Beaume's chest and punched the buttons in the handles. Beaume jerked violently, his massive shoulders gouging at the pallet, but only flat red lines trailed across the monitor. Porter strapped a respirator mask over Beaume's face and squeezed the bag, forcing air into the pilot's lungs.
When the defibrillator beeped its ready signal again, David traded places with Porter and sent another shock through Beaume's body. This time his heart sputtered back to life, showing regular beats interspersed with erratic ones. The blood pressure reading climbed slowly and shallow breathing registered on the monitor. David sagged, feeling suddenly old and tired.
* * * *
Beaume went into arrest twice more during the fabrication of the coils, and each time he was harder to resuscitate, wasting precious minutes. David brushed sweat from his brow and glanced at his watch every few seconds.
Porter put down the soldering iron. “That's the last coil. How long have we got to install them?"
“Forty minutes. We'll have to hurry."
The medical monitor sounded again. Racing to the cabin, David arrived to see the heartbeat indicator jump, squiggle, and flatten. Porter loaded another ampoule of epinephrine in the IV line while he flipped on the defibrillator. As soon as it charged, he applied the paddles to Beaume. No luck. Blood pressure and respiration fell off the chart. Porter cursed as she struggled with the respirator. David added his own litany of malediction under his breath. On the cabin wall, the clock ticked ever closer to atmospheric contact.
David grabbed Porter's arm. “We've got to stop."
She shook her head. “We can still save him."
“There's no time."
“I'll stay with him."
Analog SFF, June 2006 Page 6