Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “Yes… yes, of course. If there is anything, that is, if I can help in-”

  “Do you have any kind of maneuvering unit, a suit jet or a low-powered rocket unit we could use for an EVA if we can find-”

  “Pardon me… what is this EVA?”

  “Extra-Vehicular Activity-one of those NASA jawbreakers, this one means stepping outside the ship for a bit.”

  “Yes, we have such a device, and I would be happy to give you one.”

  “Can we go get it? Now? Time is critical.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Crew, I hope to lift from here in no more than one hour. Batten down all the hatches, secure everything, you know the drill. Captain Xu, let’s go.”

  “I can get Blue Thunder stowed away in about an hour, Cap…” Dak saw the sad look on Travis’s face, and the air went out of him. “Sorry, Captain, I wasn’t thinking. I just hate to abandon her. Captain Xu, you’re welcome to use her when we’ve left.”

  “Drive it about half a mile away and leave the keys in it, Dak,” Travis [358] said. He was kidding about the keys. “We’ll come back in a few months and pick her up.”

  Dak brightened at that thought, and joined Travis and Xu on the way to the lock.

  DAK CAME BACK in a foul mood.

  “One of the electric blanket connections was loose,” he said. “One of the tires turned into black confetti. She’s not going to be any use to Captain Xu or anybody else, and I didn’t bring a spare.” He kicked a chair in his frustration.

  Travis and Xu came back with the space propulsion device.

  “Somebody at NASA or some branch of government figured out we were the only possible hope for the Ares Seven,” he said. “So they sent the last telemetry from the ship to Captain Xu. It’ll give me a pretty good idea where to look for them.” He held up a silvery DVD. “Thanks, Captain.”

  “I was glad to help. But I must mention another problem.” It took him a while to get going, and I could only imagine how much this was costing him in face.

  “Comrade Chun has… has suffered a mental breakdown. We received orders not to pass this information on to you. I felt the origin of the orders was dubious, not through the proper chain of command of the space agency. Chun ordered me to… to destroy your ship, or disable it in some way. He became violent, and had to be restrained.”

  He looked down at his feet for a long time, and none of us said anything. Destroy our ship? Had they brought explosives along? Then I remembered that part of that day’s agenda was to set off charges and study the seismic vibrations, like wildcatters did when searching for oil. Red Thunder was tough, probably tougher than those Chinese murderers back in Beijing realized, but like any ship there were vulnerable places, and it wouldn’t take much of a charge to weaken or destroy them. That son of a bitch!

  “We face a very long sojourn here on Mars,” Xu finally went on. “I was wondering if it was at all possible… to… for you to carry [359] Comrade Chun back with you and hand him over to the authorities, or to your Chinese embassy. I… I don’t know how we are going to guard him and restrain him during all that time. And since you will be back on Earth in just a few days…” He seemed unable to go on.

  Travis put his hand on Xu’s shoulder, looked into his eyes, and shook his head.

  “Can’t do it, friend. I’m not going to have my people guard him twenty-four hours a day, no matter how short the trip is.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sure I’d feel the same way. Then, failing that… do you have anything aboard ship that would be helpful in restraining him? It appears that we left Earth without a single pair of handcuffs.” His small smile was ironic.

  “That, we can do. Though we somehow forgot the handcuffs, too.”

  We gave him half a dozen rolls of duct tape and a spare coil of poly rope. They hadn’t brought any duct tape, believe it or not. One good rule for living, in my opinion, is to never go beyond the city limits of your hometown without a roll of duct tape in the trunk and a Swiss Army knife in the glove box.

  “I don’t think you’ll have to sweat out the whole time here, though,” Travis said. “Plenty of others ought to show up in the coming months. Hell, I’ll come back and get you myself if no one else will.” He paused a moment. “I don’t know how much hot water you’re going to be in over this business, Captain Xu, but if I come get you, I’ll take you back to wherever you want to go on Earth. You know what I’m saying? Anywhere.”

  Xu smiled. “I understand perfectly, and thank you. Unfortunately, I have a very large family, many relatives, and could not go abroad without them. And, I must say, I love my country, though not always those who govern it.”

  “Well said. I’ve enjoyed knowing you. Give my love to Mei-Ling and Dr. Li.”

  We all seconded that, and shook his hand.

  Fifteen minutes later, just long enough for Xu to get out of the way, we raised ship for an unknown destination.

  * * *

  [360] WE BOOSTED FOR about four hours. Turnaround-and, hallelujah! I didn’t feel half bad-then boost again for another four hours. Then weightlessness.

  Dak was still sick. I wasn’t tempted to giggle, not even for a second.

  I don’t know how to describe the problem Travis had to solve for us to have any hope of finding the Ares Seven.

  Up until she blew, she was continuously sending back information as to her position, and we had the last seconds of that. She had slowed down below solar escape velocity so, undisturbed, she would swing way, way out into the cometary zone and return to the inner solar system in about a thousand years.

  But the explosion itself would certainly have provided enough energy to alter her course. All Travis could do was to try to bring Red Thunder to rest in the area where she should be if we extended her orbital parameters from the time of the explosion.

  We had good orbital mechanics software. We had middling-to-poor navigation optics to tell us our precise position. We had good data from Earth. We had poor-to-bad radar for the final stage of the intercept. Good news, bad news, good news, bad news.

  But in the good news column I would put the fact that Travis Broussard had proved himself to be the best seat-of-the-pants spaceship pilot in the history of man in space. If anyone could get us there, if anyone could find that ship, I was betting on Travis.

  He brought us to what seemed the most likely area and velocity. We set up, and we waited, like a traffic cop waiting for a speeder to come by. But we couldn’t wait for too long, the situation was too dynamic.

  Casting around for a sighting involved a lot of starting and stopping. As time wore on Travis grew less gentle with us, going from weightlessness to three gees, the maximum Travis felt he dared subject Red Thunder to. It got to where I was looking forward to free fall, at least it afforded ten minutes of stability. Dak was still very sick, trying to ignore it, and even Kelly started to look a little green.

  We did this for two hours. Travis seemed ready to go on with it until [361] hell froze over or we ran out of gas. The rest of us grew increasingly discouraged. We realized Travis was, too, when he started shouting down to us, asking if we saw anything, when he had to know that if we did we’d shout it out instantly.

  Normally I was in charge of the radar. I still was, but we had the radar display up on all four of our screens. What else was there to do? We stared at our screens until our eyes hurt, and saw nothing at all.

  Then, on the thirteenth stop, just as Travis was about to boost again, I thought I caught a flicker on the edge of my screen, from the corner of my eye. Could it have been the ship, or a piece of it, drawing the shallowest possible chord through the spherical volume of space we were searching?

  “Did anybody else see that?” I asked.

  “See what?” Travis bellowed from above.

  “I thought there was a flicker,” I said. “Nobody else saw it.”

  “Heading! Give me a heading!”

  I gave it to him, and instantly the ship started turning to point to it. Th
en three gees smashed into us again. Dak groaned, and couldn’t get the barf bag to his mouth with arms suddenly turned to lead, but it didn’t matter, he didn’t have anything to bring up.

  “I see it again!” I sang out. There it was, flickering… and another, and another.

  “Four… no, five blips.”

  “I see seven,” Alicia called out.

  “It’s the debris field,” Travis shouted down to us. “Now we have to figure out which ones are worthless.”

  We wanted to find big chunks, but the biggest might not be the prize we were looking for. It all depended on the size and shape of the explosion, and where people were when it happened. The first three objects we found turned out to be heavy parts of the engine.

  “Stands to reason those would be thrown the farthest, right?” Travis said. Nobody responded. “Well, anybody have any better theory?”

  “Sounds good to me, Captain,” I said. I was staring at a screen with maybe a hundred twinkling blips, some of them flashing every second or two, some waxing and waning over a period of minutes as they [362] rotated. Red Thunder was drifting through the debris field. It was dangerous to go through it any other way. Already we’d heard two loud clangs as fist-sized hunks of stuff hit us.

  After spotting and rejecting a few dozen objects Travis was getting frustrated again. “Can anybody help me out here? Anybody got any ideas? Crazy ideas, stupid ideas, out-of-left-field ideas… any idea at all. I promise I won’t laugh.”

  Nobody had one. But I was studying one blip we were slowly moving away from. Actually, I was wondering if it might be more than one blip, connected in some way, from the way the reflection changed. Stupid idea? Well, he asked for it.

  “Travis, I’ve got something interesting,” I said, and gave him the position of the triad of blips. Instantly Red Thunder began to rotate again.

  “I don’t see it,” Kelly said, softly enough that Travis wouldn’t hear. I moved the cursor over the trio and highlighted it in red. Kelly chewed her lip. “Might be something. Can’t hurt to go look.”

  “Bingo!” Travis called out two minutes later. “Manny, come look.”

  I unbuckled and floated up to the cockpit. Out the window I could see the object, about three miles away. Actually, three objects of various sizes, all rotating around a common center of gravity. I couldn’t see what was holding them together.

  “Wires,” Travis said, reading my mind. “Unless I’m mistaken, two of those- chunks are parts of the living quarters. Those two are worth a look, don’t you think?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Okay, go below and strap in again, I’m going to get us to about a hundred yards, more or less. Take me about five minutes.”

  I knew that was headlong speed in space, where it typically took a VStar several hours to close the last few hundred yards with a space station. I also knew Red Thunder was not famous for fine control. The Squeezer engines were great for raw power, but it was hard to release just enough energy to get you where you’re going without getting yourself into trouble. But once again, I’d bet on Travis.

  And because I knew Travis all too well by this time, the first thing I did when I got to the control deck, even before strapping in, was to [363] incite the crew to mutiny. I quickly determined they were all with me, so I strapped in and sat tight.

  As soon as we were where Travis wanted us to be, he called out.

  “Dak, I flipped a coin and you’re it, in control until I get back.”

  “I don’t think so, Captain,” he said. Travis stuck his head down through the access hole and frowned at Dak.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “This isn’t right, Travis,” I said. “You shouldn’t be going over there.”

  “I’ve got more suit hours than-”

  “We know that. And if something happened to you, we might as well just open the hatches and suck vacuum,” Dak said. “You’re the only one can fly this thing, probably, and the only one who can land her, for sure.”

  “What is this? Are you saying you won’t take control?”

  “If you order me to, I will. But we want you to see you shouldn’t give the order.”

  “This is what you all think?” He got nods from all four of us. For just a moment I thought he was going to dig in his heels, but then he swung himself down to the control deck and hung there, and rubbed his face with his hands. He was probably feeling as tired as I was, and I was exhausted.

  “All right, I’m trapped. I think I’d rather cut off my right arm than send one of you kids out there to handle this… but I guess it’s what I signed up for when I raised ship without a trained copilot aboard. Alicia, you suit up, the sooner the better.”

  “Right, Captain,” she said, and started unbuckling.

  “Hey, wait a-”

  “Sorry, Dak, you asked for it. You’re still far too sick to go, under any circumstances. My intention was to have Alicia go with me. Whatever we decide, Alicia has to go. It’s what she trained for. If anybody’s hurt over there, there’s not much I can do for them. But Alicia can. And because of the buddy system we started this morning, Kelly goes with her.”

  Kelly was way ahead of him, already unbuckling. And now it was my turn to squawk. Travis cut me off just as abruptly.

  “I probably like it even less than you guys do. My generation, we [364] were taught that it’s always a man who goes into the dangerous situation. You mean to tell me. twenty-first-century men are still over-protective of their women?”

  Neither of us had anything to say in our defense. Yes, I did feel protective of Kelly, and Alicia too, for that matter. But Travis had us trapped. It was true, Alicia had to go. It was true, Kelly was the only possible buddy, as Dak and I were still far from sure of our ability to do the job without filling our helmets with vomit, though I was doing a lot better than Dak was by then.

  We all followed the girls onto the suit deck. Dak and I helped them get suited up, Travis carefully keeping his back to us. He was putting together a tool kit with some of the things they might need, just a heavy-duty canvas bag with a drawstring.

  “For once in my life, I’m not sure I want to be a feminist,” Kelly whispered. “Manny, I’m real scared.”

  “Just say the word, and you don’t have to go,” I said, meaning it. I’d fight Travis with my fists, if I had to.

  “You wouldn’t say the word, would you? Be honest.”

  “No. No I wouldn’t.”

  “And you’d probably be almost as scared as I am.”

  “Probably more.”

  I noticed that Travis was suiting up, too. He smiled at me.

  “Somebody has to go outside to help them with the crossing,” he said, “and I don’t figure that’ll be too dangerous. But I want both of you to suit up, too, all but the helmets, and keep those with you. Should have thought of it before, there’s too much stuff flying around out there, we could get a puncture.”

  And with that, the three of them put on their helmets-a last kiss from me to Kelly-and entered the air lock.

  Dak and I watched it cycle as we suited up, then hurried up to the cockpit. We got there in time to see the three of them float up to the portholes, tethered together and also tied to a safety line that was attached to one of many hooks welded to Red Thunder’s side for that very purpose.

  [365] “Kelly, you go first. I’m going to be here to belay you when you get there. You see that shred of aluminum about twenty feet from the biggest piece?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “That looks like the center of gravity. You get to that, you can hook your line and not start spinning. Then I’ll send Alicia over. Now, this dingus right here.”

  He was holding the Space Maneuvering Unit Captain Xu had loaned us. It looked like bicycle handlebars with a big thermos attached.

  “You’re going to start off with just a simple kick against the side of the ship. You hold the SMU like this. See? Over your head. Hang on to it, but do not use it to speed up or slow down.
Use it for course corrections only. You hit this button with your thumb. Don’t hold it down, or I’ll reel you back in and have you do it again. Okay?”

  Kelly nodded. I figured she was too scared to talk.

  Travis tied the SMU to Kelly’s suit so it wouldn’t be lost, tied the tool kit around her waist, then he picked her up and swung her into a position about six feet from the side of the ship. She flailed around in panic for a second and my heart leaped into my throat. Then she settled down, facing Travis, and he put her through a series of familiarization drills. At first she held the control down too long and shot out to the length of her safety tether, which was about twenty feet long. Travis pulled her back, talking softly and calmly the whole time, and positioned her again. She quickly learned how to point the thing to get to where she wanted to go.

  “I never felt so useless, man,” Dak said, and I could only agree. How did this happen? Kelly and Alicia had never dreamed of space, like Dak and I had. So why were our girlfriends out there, and us in here?

  After about twenty minutes of drills, Travis judged Kelly as ready as she’d ever be. So he positioned her with her feet against the side of Red Thunder and told her to jump. She jumped.

  At first it looked good, she seemed to be headed right toward the center of gravity of the Ares Seven wreckage. But Travis, who had a better line of sight, told her she was bearing off to her right, and Kelly [366] tried to correct. She held the button down too long, and it looked like it twisted in her hands. Whatever happened, she lost the SMU and began flailing around again.

  “Oh God, oh God,” she was whispering.

  “Kelly, get the SMU back. Just pull in your left arm. That’s right. Now you’ve got it. Now aim it directly away from your chest and just touch the button.”

  She was still swinging out in such a way that she’d eventually wrap herself all around Red Thunder, but more slowly.

  “Do that again. That’s right. And again. Once more.”

  Now she hovered motionless at the end of her tether. I checked something I hadn’t remembered up to now, which was the telemetry from her suit. Her heart and breathing rates were way up. The heart rate slowed some as Travis pulled her slowly back to us. I could hear her sigh as her boots touched the hull again.