Days Until Home

by Mark Gardner

  Adelaide looked around main engineering, and once again to the passageway outside the space. “There’s a reason why the Kerwood has a predominantly female crew in an occupation that is usually a total sausage fest.”

  “Showers?” Jeremy demanded.

  “Well, there are a few of us that leverage a portion of contract credits to offset the cost of—”

  “Are you slagging telling me that you sell these showers?”

  Adelaide shrugged. “It’s not like we get paid well on this tin can.”

  “If you wanted a slagging shower, why didn’t you join the Matsue or Everest Conglomerates?”

  “Come on, ChEng,” Adelaide retorted, “I’d never be an MPA on one of those boats.” She stood from the tech bench and stared at Jeremy. “Let alone the possibility of me being a chief engineer.” She looked around at the patchwork of metal and plastic in main engineering. “Although, that ain’t gonna happen now.”

  Jeremy seized the contraption on the tech bench and waved it at Adelaide. “How about you focus your attention on decelerating us into Earth orbit instead of extorting credits from your crewmates?”

  Adelaide blew a raspberry. “That’s easy,” she retorted. “We blow the Matsue’s thrusters.” She stepped forward and relieved Jeremy of the device. “And you’re trying to break the one thing that can make that happen.”

  Jeremy stared at Crazy Ade for a long, hard moment. “Explain.”

  “We take all our LOX and LH2 and we burn it.”

  “That’ll strip off the outer hull,” Jeremy pointed out. “And we won’t survive the deceleration,” he concluded.

  “We will if the cargo bay is flooded and we go for a swim in the hybrid suits.”

  Jeremy closed his eyes and imagined the logistics of flooding the cargo bay. Everything would need to be preprogramed. If her plan worked, the Kerwood wouldn’t be space-worthy, but it was unlikely the Kerwood would end up anything other than scrap anyway. The core of the ship would be salvageable, main engineering, sickbay, and some of the spaces in between would survive. Some of them would even still hold an atmosphere.

  “It’s crazy.” He said after he opened his eyes and locked them on his MPA.

  “Look, ChEng, we have to start decelerating in four days. Four days. Two weeks of deceleration in a tin can that has barely half a week of food left. If my plan works, we come in hotter’n hot. Slag decelerating for two weeks. We can do an assisted brake in the atmosphere and cut our deceleration from two weeks to about a day and a half. Do you want to be home in eighteen days, or eight?”

  “If we even survive your crazy plan.”

  “ChEng.” Adelaide sighed. “We run out of food in three days. We can stretch that to seven or eight if we starve ourselves. The human body can subsist for what, two weeks without food? We make it home in a metal coffin full of dead bodies. The Kerwood Corporation salvages the boat, sells the rock and the metal and offers our families a pittance as a death benefit.” Adelaide took a deep breath. “Some of us don’t even have a family! Cha-ching! More profit for Kerwood. I didn’t risk my ass stealing this hunk of junk just to die as I round third base on my way to home plate.”

  “Really?” Jeremy sighed, “A sports metaphor?”

  Adelaide stuck her tongue out.

  Jeremy held up a finger. “We could get assistance from someone once we’re closer to Earth.”

  “What? Someone like the Matsue Conglomerate? That worked out real well the last time. Besides, we’re not going to the Earth.”

  Jeremy stepped back from Adelaide. “We’re not?”

  “Come on, ChEng, you of all people know there’re too many variables to aerobrake in the atmosphere. We’d likely just bounce off, or get shot down. And even if we did manage it, we’d probably kill ourselves and anyone unfortunate to be in our LZ.”

  “The Earth is mostly water. Water landings have been used since the space program was founded.”

  “It’d probably be easier to bleed off our acceleration in Earth’s atmosphere and pick a final destination less likely to cause a panic if it all goes sideways.”

  “Where else could we go? There’re only two targets, the Earth, and the Luna Five station.”

  “We could land on Luna,” Adelaide replied, her eyes blazed with intensity. She continued in a lower tone, “I have some friends on Luna that could help us out.”

  “Who?” Jeremy demanded.

  Adelaide walked to the comms console and entered a key sequence. Alarms intoned as the communications system failed, and the Kerwood computer tried to reestablish the appropriate circuits. “I wasn’t born on the Earth,” she confessed.

  “You’re a—” Jeremy gasped. “You’re a lunar baby?”

  “That’s offensive,” Adelaide replied through gritted teeth. “I sure as slag ain’t no alien, if that’s what you think.”

  Jeremy held up his hands in a placating manner. “I’m not insinuating anything, you just caught me off guard, that’s all.”

  Adelaide sneered.

  “Huh,” Jeremy mumbled after a few brief seconds of silence.

  Adelaide rolled her eyes. “What?”

  “You’re rather tall, Adelaide,” Jeremy offered. “For a woman,” he clarified. “I guess being born on Luna would explain that.”

  “Cute, Lieutenant. It’s a good thing you survived Lone Pine to deliver that wonderful insight so many years later.”

  Jeremy blinked. That was the second time that Adelaide Bähr had left him speechless in such a short amount of time. “How did you—?”

  “You’re not the only one aboard the Kerwood with secrets, ChEng,” Adelaide replied with a smirk.

  Jeremy looked around for something to defend himself with. There was a hard look in her eyes he had all but forgotten since his days in the Australian Defense Force. His eyes darted around main engineering and settled on his main propulsion assistant. Adelaide smiled, oblivious to the roiling thoughts behind the stoic mask of a former drunkard ADF veteran. Her eyes twinkled, and she tilted her head. A wave of déjà vu washed over Jeremy. He strained to place the familiar situation.

  “Relax, ChEng,” Adelaide declared. “My sister told me about you before I signed on the Kerwood as an engineer.”

  “Your sister?”

  “The woman who recruited you? Sapphire Sullivan.”

  “Your sister?” Jeremy sputtered again.

  Adelaide’s eyes widened. “You didn’t know…” she said, and her voice trailed off.

  Jeremy looked at the woman standing in front of him. He had only met Sapphire the one time when she recruited him. He was considerably inebriated when that happened. He racked his brain to summon the brunette in the blue dress. That was an expensive hangover, he thought. He remembered escorting Sapphire to her suite at the hotel, and her inviting him in. Even though, back then, the Kerwood Corporation was in a better place financially, Sapphire’s hotel room was opulent. He had remembered flashes of their liaison the following morning, but Sapphire was gone, only the lingering scent of her vanilla perfume proved that the encounter had actually happened. Well, that and the enormous bill for the room and the bottle of the single cask at the bar. He was forced to accept the position with the Kerwood Corporation when they offered to cover his expenses that night.

  He never saw Sapphire again, and Adelaide signed on about a year and a half later. The similarities between the women were now apparent. He might’ve been able to piece it together when Adelaide first joined the crew. She had been promoted rapidly, but he was so wrapped up in his new position as chief engineer. He barely had time to notice any of the engineers, let alone one that looked so much like her sister that he had only met once.

  Jeremy breathed in deep, remembering the smell of… What the Hades, he thought. He detected a faint smell of vanilla from Adelaide under the overt smell of engine grease and sweat. His eyes snapped open and locked on the wide face of his MPA. A question tried to wriggle out from the tip of his tongue, his better angels demanding that h
e not. Fortunately, a chime on the 1MC stayed his question.

  “Bähr!” Captain Hayes voice demanded over the communication circuit. “What the Hades happened to my comms?”

  Their eye contact terminated, and Adelaide turned to a speaker hidden in the overhead. Not really hidden, Jeremy thought. The flat duplex speaker hung down from the overhead with a ribbon cable preventing it from succumbing to the artificial gravity the Kerwood’s spin generated.

  “Sorry, Skipper,” Adelaide replied in a sickeningly saccharin voice. “It’s just a bear keeping all the systems up.” She fixed Jeremy with an icy glare. “It was pooh’d for a moment there, but I think we have it under control now.”

  “Acknowledged, Hayes out.”

  Jeremy watched an indicator on the comms panel blink out as the temporary connection to the bridge ceased. He turned to Adelaide, who looked at him the way a hawk might watch a mouse out for a morning forage. “What happened to Sapphire?” he asked.

  Adelaide’s face fell. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Fine, then we can return to your clandestine water manufacturing scheme.”

  Adelaide smiled and placed her contraption back on the tech bench.

  “Will burning our atmosphere even work?” Jeremy asked.

  “It won’t matter unless we can flood the main cargo bay, the ancillary passageway, and both airlocks.”

  Jeremy looked again at the device she worked on. “Can’t we just mix our LOX and LH2?”

  Adelaide sighed. “Just mixing the gasses together isn’t enough. We have to do something to get the chemical reaction started. The problem is that mixing LOX and LH2 directly creates an explosion.” Adelaide clapped her hands. “Poof, no more atmosphere.”

  Jeremy nodded.

  “This,” she declared, “siphons the LH2 and mixes it with atmospheric oxygen, using Xenon as an intermediary. That mixture is run alongside a catalyst and electrified. Instant H2O. It’s like twenty times faster and more efficient over burning hydrogen, then collecting the water vapor.”

  Jeremy narrowed his eyes. “How safe is it?”

  Adelaide rearranged the tools on the tech bench.

  “Adelaide?” Jeremy insisted.

  “Remember that breach in the aft Xenon tank we repaired?”

  Jeremy gaped. “The crack in the half-inch thick Nano carbon weave?”

  Adelaide sat back down at the tech bench. “Yeah, that one.”

  “This thing,” he pointed at the device in front of her, “caused that breach?”

  “That’s the idea behind it, ChEng. It can only siphon off so much LH2 and allow it to expand before the chemical process starts. That keeps the LH2 supply safe from backflow. Works the same way our thrusters do.”

  “Do you know what caused the thruster explosion?”

  “Fatigue,” Adelaide declared.

  “From you or it?”

  “Well, Erika did our light-off thruster inspection, and uh, well, we’re kind of an item.”

  “I thought you were with Jessica.”

  Adelaide winked, “Her too.”

  Jeremy sighed, stared up into the overhead, and shook his head. “Continue your story,” he demanded.

  “I’m not entirely sure, but I think her oxygenator or something malfunctioned. She was giddy just before launch.”

  “I saw her laughing it up in the passageway.”

  “But, you know, ChEng, that’s not what she’s all about. When have you ever known Erika to not be perfectly paranoid before a launch?”

  Jeremy nodded. “It did seem out of character. She almost seemed drunk.” Jeremy paused and looked at Adelaide. “You’re not running a distillery somewhere on the ship, are you?”

  Adelaide scoffed. “Alcohol makes people stupid. And in the black, stupid means dead. It was as if she was suffering from inert gas narcosis or something.”

  “The bends?” Jeremy asked. Adelaide refused to meet his eyes. Jeremy had a sixth sense when someone lied through omission. It had made him an excellent officer in the ADF, and even better as the chief engineer of the Kerwood. He could spot slackers and malingerers a mile away. He turned to Adelaide and placed his hand over her gloved one. “What is it, Adelaide?”

  “I checked the logs from the Matsue diagnostic module we kept, and the thrusters were in a diagnostic loop before the explosion.”

  “If they were in a loop, then we wouldn’t’ve been able to launch from Egeria-13.”

  “ChEng, you know as well as I do that a good engineer can make this tub do much more than she’s supposed to be able to do. I seem to remember someone engaging the EXT without the ion targeting aperture functioning. That person saved our bacon last week. Who was that masked engineer?”

  Jeremy rolled his eyes. “What modifications would’ve been needed to launch with the thrusters locked in diag?”

  Adelaide frowned. “The RL10 valves would’ve needed to be welded open, and the TEMS sensor would need to be overridden.”

  “The thruster engine monitoring system is checked and rechecked before launch. Kind of what it’s there for.”

  Adelaide met his eyes. “Yes, checked by Erika. And she has access to chemical welders that operate in a zero-oxygen environment.”

  “Like the one Siebert always carries around with him?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to verify the TEMS and sign off on it?”

  Adelaide shuffled on her stool. “I met with Erika before launch, and I uh, didn’t actually do the verification. Pooh Bear moved up the launch, and I ran out of time.”

  “Adelaide!” Jeremy fought to control his anger. “If what you’re saying is true, that one procedure could’ve detected the sabotage and prevented everything that has happened since. When did you discover this?”

  “While operation homeward bound was under way,” she admitted.

  “Then what the slag was that nonsense with that Rebecca woman?”

  “I was trying to get corroborating evidence.” Adelaide looked away. “Maybe she had a Matsue accomplice?” she offered.

  “Unacceptable!” hollered Jeremy. “Did you pull up transponder movements?”

  Adelaide sighed. “ChEng, we’ve been masking our transponders for two years now to keep the shower a secret. Doing the same to hide that she’s been somewhere she shouldn’t is a walk in the park.”

  Jeremy ran his palms down his face. “What can you tell from her movements?”

  Adelaide mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I think she could be our saboteur.”

  “So now we have a suspected saboteur loose on our ship?”

  “She’s hardly loose,” Adelaide made air quotes around the word. “She’s missing a hand, irradiated, and blind. I don’t think she’s a threat anymore.”

  “Unless Gauge is in on it, too,” Jeremy said.

  “We barely have proof that she’s done anything. Pooh Bear and the bridge monkeys think Old Vicky’s the one to blame.”

  “Regardless, she needs to answer for her crimes.” He held up his hand to placate his odd engineer. “She may not be able to see, but she can probably hear us talk about her.” He pointed at the device in front of Adelaide. “You get that thing working, and I’ll personally share your findings with Captain Hayes.”

  Adelaide returned to her task, and Jeremy hustled out of Main Engineering. They had less than four days left to decide on and execute a plan.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Days Until Home: 18

  “A mutiny is not what I am suggesting,” Viktor said.

  “Then what are you saying?”

  Viktor took a sip of coffee to give himself a moment to think. It tasted like water scooped up from the bottom of a muddy hill. The five miners arrayed around him, well, four miners and Rebecca, weren’t getting it.

  “I am saying tensions are high right now, and people are becoming suspicious of one another. It is dangerous. We all need to carry protection, just in cas
e.” He hefted the heavy wrench to give the others an idea.

  Jessica frowned, the skin on her forehead moving the white bandages of her head. “Won’t carrying weapons escalate the issue?”

  Viktor nodded. “Which is why we need a simultaneous show of good faith. To help everyone relax.”

  “Like, backrubs or somethin’?” Jimmy said. Nobody laughed. Viktor let the silence stretch a moment before continuing.

  “I am going to surrender my personal encryption key to the captain. I have nothing to hide. Let him see the communication logs with my wife on Luna, all personal computer activity, everything. It’s the only way to set their minds at ease. I think all of you should do the same.”

  “Like slag I’m doin’ that,” Jimmy said. “I don’t need Hayes creepin’ through my net logs. A man’s search history is between him and God.”

  Viktor ignored him and focused on the others. Siebert, ever the follower, nodded immediately. It might make him uncomfortable, but he’d do it if everyone else did. Jessica took longer. She stared off at nothing for a long thirty seconds. For a while, Viktor considered saying something, to make sure she wasn’t still showing symptoms of her concussion.

  “Yeah,” she finally said, closing her eyes. “I don’t have a better idea, and I’d prefer Hayes probing my history instead of my physical body.”

  Viktor gave her a thank you smile, then used a wall handle to spin himself around in the microgravity to face Jimmy.

  “Aww, hell, if I’m the only one who doesn’t do it I’ll look guilty by default,” he said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps you’d throw me to Hayes to save the rest of your skins? After all we’ve been through, Vicky?”

  Viktor spread his hands in as reasonable a gesture as he knew. “Hayes is already losing his mind. We’re trying to do whatever we can to defuse it.”

  Jimmy looked around the room for support. Jessica and Siebert stared back expectantly. Knowing Jimmy was the kind of kid to react unpredictably when backed against the wall, Viktor said to the others, “Give us a minute. I’ll meet you in the galley.”

  Siebert immediately pushed off the nearest wall and swam up the hatch. Jessica lingered a few seconds longer before departing. Viktor gave Rebecca a pointed look, which she either didn’t understand or chose to ignore. She floated over to the corner and began picking her nails.