Days Until Home

by Mark Gardner

The Kerwood lurched to starboard, and an alarm indicator flashed on the engineering console.

  “CheEng,” Adelaide said into the 1MC, “I could use a hand in Engineering against those that wish to reacquire their men and matériel.”

  “I’m on my way, Adelaide,” Jeremy’s voice responded over the 1MC.

  Hurry up, old man, Adelaide thought as she entered a series of commands into her console.

  An alarm sounded, and a steady stream of data flashed across her screen. She scowled at what she saw. She punched an icon and the 1MC activated again. “Captain, the Matsue is launching kinetic charges at us. It’s slagging up our spin something fierce.”

  “We’re aware of that, MPA,” Captain Hayes responded. “They’re going to kill their own guys when they kill us.”

  “Skipper, have Femke stop our roll completely, they’re using a rotational algorithm to target only our thrusters.”

  “They don’t want to mess up the ones we borrowed,” Jeremy declared from the half-open hatch to Main Engineering.

  “ChEng,” Adelaide replied, “I need you to eyeball the EXT and the chemical thrusters while I get a surprise ready.”

  “Close the slagging channel, Bähr!” Captain Hayes yelled over the 1MC.

  Jeremy punched an icon on the panel that severed the connection to the rest of the ship. He grabbed the console with both hands as the Kerwood bucked again. “Our rotation is slowing,” Jeremy declared and flexed his knees. “Where are you going?” he demanded of his main propulsion assistant.

  Adelaide spun on her heel. “I have to do this by hand,” she spat. “This tub wasn’t designed to do what we’re going to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “The same thing that happened to Siebert and Bianconi.”

  “How’re you—?”

  “I’m going to manually disable the ion targeting apertures.”

  Jeremy stood straight up, his mouth agape. “That’s not a smart thing to do,” he declared.

  No slag, Sherlock, Adelaide thought. “It’s the only thing that’ll stop them from waltzing over to us and kicking our butts,” she said out loud to the Chief Engineer.

  “How long?” Jeremy asked.

  “Seven, maybe eight minutes,” she replied and punched a few icons on another console.

  Jeremy hit a button to reactivate the 1MC. “Skipper, we need the Matsue to catch up to us, but not actually catch us.”

  “Crazy Ivan?” Femke suggested over the 1MC.

  “Not with the EXT running,” Adelaide called out, half-buried under a removed bulkhead cover. She could only see the ChEng’s legs from her vantage point. She shimmied out from the port EXT access panel and stumbled to the starboard as the Kerwood shook again from another barrage from the Matsue. “Two Crazy Ivans in a row will tear out our maneuvering thrusters.”

  The 1MC remained open as Captain Hayes gave the orders. “Give me controlled bursts forward to slow us down.” Femke acknowledged the order and the Kerwood lurched forward.

  “They’ll be sniffing up our tailpipe in about five minutes, Skip,” Femke declared.

  “That do it for you, Jeremy?” Captain Hayes asked.

  Adelaide nodded as she extricated herself from the starboard EXT access panel. She ran to the back of Main Engineering, tore a deck plate up and disappeared below.

  “We’re about to find out,” Jeremy called out.

  Adelaide stretched to her full length and pulled matching fiber optic cables from the master control unit of the electrostatic xenon thruster assembly. She glanced at the gleaming wires for a moment before dropping them. The Kerwood shuddered again.

  “We should see the whites of their eyes,” Femke declared over the 1MC.

  “ChEng,” Adelaide screamed, “cycle the power grid, now!”

  The Chief Engineer must’ve obeyed Adelaide because the light on the fiber optic cables faded. She twisted two manual knobs and alarms shrieked all over main engineering. Matching alarms sounded over the 1MC as the bridge received the same alert.

  “What the Hades?” Captain Hayes’ befuddled voice had sounded over the 1MC before the entire ship went dark.

  Main engineering was eerily silent as the Kerwood literally rebooted.

  Come on, come on, thought Adelaide as she climbed out of the bowels of main engineering, stepping over covers and panels strewn about.

  “Ninety seconds,” Jeremy called out to Adelaide.

  The bridge was oblivious to what was going on. All the integrated electronics aboard the Kerwood went dark while everything power-cycled.

  “Sixty seconds,” whispered Jeremy.

  It was humorous to Adelaide that he whispered it as if the Matsue could hear him. Maybe they can, thought Adelaide, they spy on everyone on board, and they probably have fancy listening devices that can hear what happens on the Kerwood.

  “Thirty seconds,” Jeremy continued the countdown.

  This had better work, thought Adelaide.

  “This had better work,” declared Jeremy.

  Adelaide smiled and covered her ears with her hands. She couldn’t hear Jeremy’s countdown, but she watched his lips move.

  “Ten…”

  He covered his own ears, and Adelaide was confident he didn’t know why. He was just mimicking her.

  “Five…”

  Adelaide closed her eyes and mentally continued the countdown.

  Four…

  Three…

  Two…

  One…

  The 1MC came to life, and ear-splitting static sounded from every speaker at once on the Kerwood. Every LED on the ship shined brightly for a moment, and if anyone were aft of the EXTs, they received an unregulated dose of electrostatic noise. The Kerwood felt as if it were suddenly caught in a spider web, a spider web of ionic chains. The Kerwood propulsion computer tried to regulate and direct the steady stream of ions, but with the ion targeting apertures failing to initialize, the EXT just bled ions and electromagnetic interference in every direction, but mostly to the aft.

  No one would know if it worked unless they were to run to a portal and look back at the Matsue.

  The propulsion computer finally gave up and cycled into a diagnostic mode. The noise generated by the EXTs ceased the same as it started, but with the opposite extreme.

  Adelaide walked over to the primary thruster control panel, gripped the edge of the Plexiglas with both hands, and tore it loose. She reached in with one hand and grounded out the bridge override circuit.

  The noise of all four of Kerwood’s thrusters was deafening. She had been concerned for a moment that the chemical fuel regulators might not have cycled in time, but she wouldn’t be alive to regret that decision if it went tits up. She had no chance of staying upright as the Kerwood bucked and pushed everyone to the deck. The unregulated thrusters would burn their entire supply of fuel before flaring out.

  Maneuvering, even if they did reach Earth orbit, was now impossible, but the Matsue, at best, would be two minutes or more behind them. Adelaide wagered their entire supply of chemical propellant that the Matsue would be much more than two minutes it took to reboot a space-faring vessel. She smiled, imagining the time it would take for the Matsue to affect repairs. The Matsue still had their forward velocity, but with the extra boost from the thrusters, she would never overtake the Kerwood now.

  “…the Hades is going on down there?” Captain Hayes shouting over the now-functioning 1MC brought an even bigger smile to Adelaide’s face. She had cheated death once again.

  She mock saluted Jeremy and disappeared back into the Kerwood’s innards to repair and reboot the EXTs. As long as they didn’t starve or kill each other, they’d be home in less than four weeks.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Days Until Home: 82

  Viktor bent to pick up a crate of ore from the Kerwood hold while considering the question he’d been asked. When he turned around the Matsue worker, Harry, waited for an answer as if it were a question at all.

  “Yeah, it was bad,”
Viktor said over the suit comms. “The worst thing I have ever experienced.”

  Harry bobbed his helmeted head in agreement. “I mean, yeah, it had to have been, right? I saw the launch hallway. Hell of an explosion. Must’ve been quite the sight.”

  The third guy on the shift, who hadn’t bothered to volunteer his name to Viktor, stood in the corner taking a breather. He didn’t seem to care about the tragedy that had befallen the Kerwood beyond annoyance at needing to do work.

  Viktor only nodded at Harry and carried the crate toward the hatch of open black, his mag-boots clomping along with each step in the semi-gravity. They were bundling the crates into groups of four to later be moved and rearranged in the most efficient arrangement of mass according to the computer algorithms and laws of physics. For now, they just stacked them close to the ramp door.

  Viktor didn’t need to help, but he was sick of waiting around like a passenger. It felt good to work at something, even a job as monotonous as moving cubes of rocky money from one area to another. And the low-G work wasn’t so much hard as it was tedious. Even with his wounded arm unable to grip anything with real strength, he was able to move the heavy crates without issue.

  “Quite a sight,” Harry repeated, staring off at nothing. Viktor got the impression he was bored, and wanted some sort of excitement to break the dullness of spaceflight. It was the kind of restlessness that only came from youth, when one hadn’t experienced true tragedy yet. When one hadn’t learned that excitement was a bad thing out in the black. With some guidance and nurturing, that sentiment would be trained out of him, hopefully without any real crisis.

  For a brief, painful moment it made Viktor wish he and Helena had had children.

  He smiled sadly and said over the comms, “Stay sharp, Harry. The boots are tricky if you’re not paying attention.”

  Harry followed him to the edge of the cargo hold with his own crate. The kid’s steps slowed as he approached, his hesitation at nearing the black edge palpable in the airless air. Viktor kept his movements steady and confident to show him how it was done.

  “You want to stop at the edge, here,” Viktor said just as everything went wrong.

  Red and orange klaxon lights around the border of the bay flashed in warning. It must have scared Harry because he took a jerky step, one boot detaching from the ground, and then he tumbled through the vacuum.

  Over the comms, Harry screamed.

  Cursing, Viktor let go of his crate and moved to intercept him. He didn’t tumble through the space fast, but even still, when Viktor grabbed his leg, Harry’s momentum yanked him out toward the open expanse. Viktor loosened his calves and quads, allowing the muscles to absorb most of the whiplash, sending jolts of pain up his legs but lessening the force enough to keep his boots from unsnapping.

  Harry screamed and thrashed, ignoring Viktor’s calming words. The third man yelled, too, his words lost in the chaos.

  The twin horizontal doors began closing from either side, along with the ramp on the outside, which was all wrong. Proximity sensors should have detected them and ceased action unless they were manually shut in an emergency protocol. Which, again, was wrong, since the Kerwood was not even occupied. They wouldn’t have been able to do that even from the Matsue’s control room.

  “Harry,” Viktor said, alarm trickling into his voice as the doors neared. “Harry, stop squirming. I need to pull you in, but with you moving like that—”

  “Harry!” shouted the third man.

  He had no ears for their pleas and squirmed and wobbled Physics was a pain when it came to absorbing and shedding momentum. With only seconds until the doors cut them in half, Viktor tossed caution aside and swung the kid in an arc to bring him inside the hold, mag-boots tilting dangerously but mercifully remaining connected. The unnamed Matsue worker pulled Viktor the rest of the way inside.

  The doors closed shut on Viktor’s abandoned crate, bending the material as if it were cardboard. He imagined he could hear the doors groaning with the effort of unseen machinery. The crate bent, buckled, and then the doors won.

  The crate exploded in a shower of metal and rocky material. A shard of the crate missed Viktor’s face by centimeters and wedged into the internal bulkhead. Raw ore tumbled through the room, glistening like a curtain of uncut diamonds. Harmlessly, they pelted Viktor’s faceplate like frozen peas.

  Harry hyperventilated so loudly it sounded like static. The diagnostics panel on his suit showed everything was fine so Viktor led him into the adjacent hallway and cycled the air so he could take off the helmet. Harry’s face was red and puffy as he sucked in the fresh air eagerly.

  The other Matsue man took off his own helmet and lightly patted Harry in the face. “Calm down, buddy. Relax. Deep breaths. You’re okay.”

  “Excitement,” Viktor said with heavy meaning, “is not exciting.” He rose. “Stay here.”

  But when he went to exit into the main Kerwood corridor, the door beeped in denial. Viktor punched in his authorization code. Same thing.

  Over the next hour they tried their suit radio and ship-wide comms to no avail. A sound like banging hammers drifted through the ship, and at one point they began accelerating ever so slightly in one direction. Viktor thought he heard a shout, muffled through the dozens of metal layers.

  Something was happening in the ruins of the Kerwood.

  Eventually, the electronics went out and came back on, winking on control panels like stars. A system reboot. The door opened then, and Viktor marched toward the closest noise he heard.

  Days Until Home: 26

  The door to engineering slid open and the smell of barely-recycled air hit Viktor in the face, the result of overloaded scrubbers doing their best to clean the CO2 from the atmosphere. The few occupants ignored him, or didn’t see him in their focus, or both.

  “I have to do this by hand,” Adelaide spat. “This tub wasn’t designed to do what we’re going to do.”

  Viktor felt the door trying to close on him, so he stepped inside. A mixture of anger and foreignness swirled in his head with a healthy dose of nausea. Were they trying to move back onto the ship for the return journey instead of staying on the Matsue? It shouldn’t have mattered.

  “Crazy Ivan?” said someone.

  Adelaide spoke with her head inside a removed panel, muffled by all the wires. “Not with the EXT running. Two Crazy Ivans in a row will tear out our maneuvering thrusters.”

  Someone tried to move past Viktor, pushing him roughly. The miner sidestepped until he was against a wall, out of the way. He still wanted to yell, to cry out against the actions unfolding in front of him, but his voice found no strength. The crew moved like a machine, one with a single purpose well-practiced prior to execution.

  “Thirty seconds,” Jeremy called out. Viktor had missed what they were counting down toward. He felt like he was moving in slow motion relative to everyone else.

  “Ten seconds.” A pause. “Five. Four. Three, two, one…”

  Piercing static cut the air, sharp in Viktor’s ears and everyone else’s judging by the hasty hands covering ears. Lights flashed and screens flickered, and the Kerwood was alive.

  They weren’t moving back to the ship. They were taking the ship.

  I need to talk to Hayes.

  Viktor turned to leave. The hallway provided welcome solitude.

  He made it ten meters when the ground lurched and threw him into the wall like a loose crate of ore. He barely got his hands up in time to keep from splitting his skull and tumbled like that until he ran out of hallway.

  Viktor had been on a dozen mining crafts of all sizes. Three-man drifters with primitive pre-fabbed solid-fuel thrusters made for one-way journeys, all the way up to hundred-man longtails that could haul enough water ice from Enceladus’ geysers to quench the whole Luna population for months. He’d experienced every kind of thrust in every magnitude of delta-v humans could control, or enough that he felt comfortable enough boasting of the experience.

  The roar
and punch of chemical engines was unmistakable, and familiar. They were burning their chemical engines, and they were burning hard. Hard enough that Viktor was pinned to the corner between a hatch and the bulkhead, trapped as thoroughly as if an elephant sat on him. He remained there, cheek pressed against the cold steel for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only a minute.

  The thrust ceased as suddenly as it began. Over the 1MC the Captain’s voice demanded, “What the Hades is going on down there?”

  Nobody knows what’s going on. Ignoring his screaming joints and still tender arm, Viktor pushed to his feet, determined to find out.

  The bridge was once again a crowded place. The crew members there seemed relaxed, content with their mutinous actions. It filled Viktor with unease. This was planned. He found Hayes and went to him, feeling more and more like an outsider.

  “Captain,” Viktor began.

  Hayes cut him off with a relieved grin. “Smooth sailing from here on out. Couldn’t have asked for better execution.”

  So he had known. All of them had, and nobody had deigned to tell Viktor. “Captain. Why are we stealing—”

  “Stealing?” Hayes snapped. “We’re not stealing anything. It’s our ship.”

  It sounded like something he’d said several times already, either to convince others or himself. The stubbornness in each word gave Viktor pause, and he reconsidered his words.

  “When was this decided?” he asked instead. “To re-board the Kerwood and fly her home ourselves?”

  “There was never any other option,” Hayes said. “This was what we were always going to do, and damn the suits back home for thinking otherwise. We never needed any help, and if anyone had asked us we would have told them so. Is there a problem?”

  By the end, he squinted. A few other crew had turned in their seats to eye Viktor suspiciously.

  “I was not aware of the plan, is all,” Viktor said. “I was helping move supplies when it all happened.”

  The suspicious looks around him deepened. He saw something twinkle in Hayes’ eye, weighing and measuring what to say.

  “We knew you were down there. That’s why we timed it when we did, of course.”