I just patted her hand. “Getting lost from reality for even a few minutes is a help to us all at times. It’s why they send couples, remember?” I kissed her lightly. The noises in the back calmed and I think they were asleep.
I had no idea where we were. The captain made random changes and jumps when the big ships locked onto us, but they managed to follow us through each one. We were in a huge asteroid belt, but there was a system near, we saw its sun peak through the rocks once in awhile, bright and inviting. Our computer was trying to find star chart matches, but nothing yet. We needed to know where we were to even think about which way to go, but I felt we should head toward the star we could see, if for nothing else, to charge up, if we could get moving in the first place.
Finally, we woke Bill; he apologized for the long nap, but I told him we totally understood. He and Mary had been hooked up together a long time. They were part of the original crew that was to meet the aliens but were bumped off at the last minute to allow the president’s scientists to get aboard. Lucky them. Bill got her up and within an hour he was suited and out the hatch. His EVA suit was specially made to fit him. His first comment was the ship looked more like a large piece of scrap that had been used for target practice. He took along his little thermal containers and moved about the asteroids in the area around the ship, searching, a little chip here, a rock there. Two patches of ice frost in a crater on one of them. In an hour he was back aboard and Mary had the samples up and running.
“No hydrogen. Methane gas and a little nitrogen in the ice. Be okay for use in the attitude jets. All the rocks are mostly nickel iron and a few trace elements. This small rock is mostly granite, with a small fossil in it. This was a planet with life at one time. Means if the atmosphere wasn’t all lost from whatever hit it, there will be frozen water and oxygen someplace in that mess,” Mary finished.
“So there is hope?” I asked.
“Yes. If we can get enough of anything from the ice, we have the ability to charge the attitude jet tanks. If we have a close enough supply we could, in theory, use a small heater and create a cover and vent it to the chem Gen to spin it up and charge the capacitor as well.”
“Comp, how far from the ship is the max for the emergency generator to charge efficiently?” I asked
“Efficient energy transfer is good to three-hundred and eighty feet at maximum output from the generator,” it said.
“Okay Bill, find a large source of ice within that range, set it all up and get it going. Then find enough heavy hydrogen for the F/F and water to drink, of course. Get that done within an hour and come back, I’ll give you some more to do.” I laughed.
“On it, boss,” was all he said, but all three laughed.
Mary said, “Its called deuterium if you didn’t know.”
“Oh, okay,” we both said to her.
He recharged his jet pack, and said, “We do need the gas for the attitude jets. I took almost half of what is left.” He was out the hatch again and out of sight for a long time. We could almost track him, but the iron in the asteroids made his tracking dot bounce all over the scope.
At just about the maximum time allotted to his EVA oxygen supply, he was back. I don’t remember what EVA means. An Environmental suit for Vacuum something or other, and something with Attachments, that was shortened before I was born to simply EVA, our one true space suit. Out of curiosity I asked the computer.
It said, “No, Extra-Vehicular Activity suit.”
As we watched from the external cams he was unrolling a thin wire from his spool. It was the strongest material known to humankind that can be pliable in space. A mix of hull metal and several synthetic molecular compounds used to create flexible binding agents even in the cold of space. He had anchored the cable to an asteroid out of sight of the ship then attached the spool to the hull with magnets, and shot inside. He cut it close.
Once inside he said, “If we can do it, that should be sufficient to fit our needs.” He asked Sylvia to handle the delicate part—he wanted one of the robots to take up the reel and pull with enough force to move a large mass of ice, but not break the tether, nor get the mass moving so fast the asteroid we were resting against could not stop it.
Mary asked, “Uh, what are we talking about, Bill? We cannot see anything from here.”
Bill said, “Well it is a bit large. I would say, about a mile long, half that wide and high. It is a few hundred yards beyond this asteroid.”
Sylvia asked, “How big?” Bill grinned. “You’re crazy you know.”
The robots were already on the way to the tether from the back.
“Not really,” I said. “I assume it is mostly ice and moving at about the same speed we are. I don’t know the calculations but I suspect the mass would be less than this asteroid we are resting against. We just need to nudge it a hair to bring it closer. As long as it does not push us against another asteroid, it could move us toward the belt edge as we charge up. Worth a shot, just be hard to determine when it actually starts to move.”
“I put a sensor on it. I think we can find it even in the iron field. If the comp can get a lock we will know.”
“Robots on station, you know it is possible it will pull us toward it instead, or we both move and collide,” Sylvia said.
“A few hours ago we all knew we were dead anyway. Why the concern now? Do it and lets see what shakes,” Mary said.
“Do it,” I said.
After a time at her console, Sylvia said, “Reel is picked up and engaged, robots are hooked together. They are maintaining one half the maximum tensile strength of the cable.” She hooked the two robots together to increase the magnetic link on the hull.
“Mary, you and Bill work on getting a track,” I said. “Sylvia and I will retire for a while. 12/12 shifts for now. We will adjust. Anyone available anytime if needed, of course.
I assume he brought samples you are testing?” I asked.
Mary nodded.
“Then see you later,” and I drifted to the rear.
We made sure our curtains were completely secured and put on some music. We were in the bunk under the thermal blankets, top and bottom, and a light web over the top to keep us in place. Almost like the pouch but the straps were on a slide system built into all four corners, so you could go from crash tight to float around in comfort free fall. Another reason they picked couples was sex was good exercise and reduced the required time on the exercise machines to try and maintain muscle mass. Always a known concern on long flights. It meant less time doing ISO straining. Never heard any complaints about the concept either.
“I never asked—did you love Charlotte?” She watched my eyes.
“No, just the requirement for getting the flight. You?”
“Gilbert was fun to be around, but no, the same as you. Still, I miss him,” she said.
“I know, they were both good spacers.”
We slept some, listened to music, and talked. She would remote the vid panel to the ship to check the robots and I would check over equipment and supply consumption. The real difference between on and off duty was you were visually out of each team member’s hair. That was supposed to be important, according to the big psychobabble brains. Last I remembered we had about four hours to shift change.
Mary came on the com. “Wake up sleepy heads, you have the bridge in five minutes.”
“Roger,” I said, and gently woke Sylvia. We were up, suited and were on deck in four minutes.
“Bill has a weak lock on the sensor. So far nothing is moving. No status changes, nothing on any of our communications bands. As far as the universe is concerned, we don’t exist,” Mary said, as she headed to the rear. They also took the extra time to close everything up tight.
Sylvia checked the robots and said she needed to tighten up a little. I asked why and she said the force on the line had backed off a bit and she wanted to bring it back to the half.
The mind went ‘click’. “No, if it is less keep an eye on it. If it continu
es to reduce, then release tension on the cable and just take up slack. It means something is moving!”
If we could get everything set to go as soon as it was close. If we could find a way to operate the generator. If we could funnel the gases from the gen exhaust to the shipboard compressor at the tanks. They are right, ‘if’ is such a huge word.
By the next shift we were sure that it was moving toward us. Mary said, “The small samples Bill brought back are done. Want the breakdown?”
I nodded.
“No deuterium, some water, a lot of nitrogen, a few other gases. Some free oxygen.”
Over the next several days we found that by measuring how much slack in the cable was taken up, the distance to the ice was easily tracked. When ready, Bill would take all but the smallest amount of our attitude gas. I knew if we needed to, we could tap a little off the oxygen tank as a last resort.
Mary and Sylvia had used the days designing a cover to fit over the ice and hook to the spent chemical generator. The shattered motor and casings where our main source of usable metal and the robots were able to bend and shape it with little trouble. A standard service hose from the maintenance locker was hooked to the exhaust port on the generator, and the spare electrical heater tapes we carried to keep the water melted for drinking were placed in the cover and along the exhaust port to stop the gases from freezing right back up again. We wrapped the entire hose in the thermal wrap we had, and used old fashion wire twist ties snipped by the robots from scrap motor cover metal. This was connected to the ship’s external compressor connection and coiled, magnetic clamps held it all to the ship ready for use. I felt we were as ready as we could get. We just needed to wait until it was in range.
Bill needed to do several things. He had to get it all into place and anchored, then when all set, he needed to start the reaction by melting enough ice to get the gases moving to start the spin up of the generator which would then create enough juice to power the heaters and continue the process, we hoped. In theory, the entire system would run off the strongest energy supply source—that would be the ship at first then the addition of the generator’s output.
Sylvia took the power pack from one robot and, with a little help from the other robot; we got it hooked to a thin piece of cutup motor metal. When we were ready Bill would short the metal across the power pack under the cover and slam it down. He made the resistance calculations and trimmed and shortened the metal strip to the proper size, then formed it into a half-loop. The theory Mary came up with indicated the heat from the short would generate enough gas to start up the generator. If the power supply didn’t explode from too much electrical resistance, it might work. We knew it was pretty much do or die. If we could get this rig up and running we had the power to process the gases through separators and even make water.
I could just see the ice chunk starting to peek from behind the edge of the asteroid we were parked against. To ensure a bump didn’t accidentally free us I had Bill sink anchors into the rock and secure the ship to it. Mary helped Bill get suited; Sylvia had the robot move the equipment as close to the hatch as possible.
“Time,” Mary said, and gave Bill a kiss as he locked on his helmet.
Bill went out the hatch and took the rig from the robot. He slowly played out the hose mess, making sure there were no kinks. He headed toward the ice at what seemed like an agonizingly slow pace. His onboard signals to the com and cam were not blocked now. We saw him land on the ice and it was huge. He let the gen float as he cleared a flat spot with his little pick and fired anchor bolts deep into the ice. He set the gen in place and checked the hose all the way back to the ship.
I could here him sigh. “Ready as ever gonna be,” he said.
“Do it,” I said.
He lifted up the makeshift gen cover and set the power supply and metal strip under it.
“On three,” he said. His first word was, “Three,” and slapped the switch and closed the cover. He had jammed his small pick in the ice to pull against as he held the cover down and waited.
“It’s turning up,” he said.
Sylvia was watching the power panel.
She suddenly hollered, “Kill the exhaust heater, now!”
No hesitation on his part. You heard the gen wind up and the sizzling increase through his com off the vibrations coming through his suit.
“Okay, turn it on and off, feel the vibration from the load, keep doing it until the load doesn’t stop it turning up higher. Try to balance it with ice building at the exhaust port; don’t let it choke off no matter what,” she said.
Bill was out there until he was only a few minutes from dying without oxygen. He took the tether from the ice block, hooked it to himself, and kept working the gen on/off switch. When he was being affected from oxygen starvation, he flipped it on. Sylvia hit the highest speed retract the robot had and Bill literally shot toward the hatch, which was open. He banged his leg as he popped in, but never felt it—he was already passed out as we cycled the hatch. Mary and I ripped off the helmet. You could hear him gasping air. He was alive anyway.
Sylvia kept saying, “Come on, come on damn it, spin.”
She was watching the power output. After what seemed like hours, but was closer to a few minutes, she almost screamed, “Yes!”
She looked up and said, “We have power up. Starting the compressor to see if we can still get gases through it.”
I heard it start and whine, then a kind of scream, a loud bang, and it settled down to a slow popping rhythm.
I looked at Sylvia who looked to Mary.
She left Bill and checked her panels. “We are getting gases. I think the bang was the ice that formed from the off cycling. No apparent damage.”
As the generator hit the top end of its speed Sylvia had to get me suited up. I got Bill out and recharged the suit. He was coming around, but we could not wait. I just fit in it, it was a scrunch of the helmet on top of my head, and it was an inch and a half shorter than I was. Luckily Bill had big feet.
I went out the hatch and hooked the tether to the ship.
Sylvia wound out slack in the cable to the robot until I was by the generator on the ice. She said, “Ready?”
I said, “Ready,” and she released the magnetic field that held the robot to the ship’s hull. I pulled it toward the ice. I maneuvered it alongside the generator. Bill had already sunk the two explosive anchors required deep into the ice, one on each side of the generator. I hooked the robot’s spool to one of the anchor wires and released the one from the ship. I slipped the other tether through the hole in the robot’s spool as well. Sylvia slowly took up the slack. I picked the robot up and set it on the plate we welded to the top of the makeshift cover we had over the generator. Sylvia turned the magnets back on and slowly put tension on the cables. The amount of sizzle felt outside, and the vapors boiling from under the cover, reduced to almost nothing as the tension sealed the cover tight against the ice.
The robot was the only thing able to take up tension with directions from inside. As the gen melted into the ice a small current was being routed in small amounts to the cables to melt the ice around the wires.
I went back inside. So far, all went well, which always scared me. A small video cam on the robot let us monitor how far it sank. Once we had enough power back in the cap we could, if needed, move the gen around and stop, and start it off the ship capacitor’s stored power.
~~~
Far away, a commander was given credit for an enemy kill, which made him quite happy. He was then put out an airlock without a suit for failing to recover the little ship as ordered, which probably didn’t.
~~~
For hours we all watched the generator screaming along as the big general-purpose tank filled with some pressure. Mary worried over every bit of it. Finally she had enough power to start some gas separation processes. The ships were designed to be able to explore any planetary environment as long as the atmosphere was not highly corrosive, even if it would not su
pport life. She cooled the gases, which in space was a lot easier. Everything froze back to ice, and she slowly moved the tank temperature up, collecting each gas as it vaporized from the ice. Nitrogen was the main haul, it only took a few hours to fill the attitude jets tank, and the excess was being vented.
I had to explain to Sylvia not to be fooled with the idea the generator produced all the power and that we defeated the laws of physics. The robot’s battery and resistor was the main source of heat to keep it all running. Our solar panels added a bit more. We were producing about 90% as much overall energy as we consumed, but in a usable form.
Sylvia said the generator was slowing, due to exhaust blockage, she thought. Bill was back in form and fully charged up, so he went out and started flexing the hose. He found and broke up the ice blockage in the tube, in two spots. One had been a slip in the insulator wrap allowing it to slowly build up ice in that one spot. A little wire tying fixed it. The other was a few feet before the ship, the heat loss was just enough to start it frosting closed.
Mary took one of the survival pouches and modified it by tearing it down both sides. She then added the battery charger adapter from the dead robot to the hookup for the pouch coils, and Bill wrapped it around the pipe as far up as it would go and plugged it in to the external robot charging station, and they carefully applied just enough power to the heater coils to keep the ice off the hose. Mary separated the gases and Bill watched the generator sink. In another day, he would have to move the whole setup and shorten the hose, as the island of ice came closer. There was a slight bump felt as the ice tapped our asteroid.
The cap was up to 24% from 9% in sixteen hours of running. If all went at the current rate we’d be ready to move in a week or less. Seems Mary ran into a few radicals during her separation process. They were collected for the F/F—if we could just collect enough to even get a startup.
Sylvia and I went off shift; we even slept some.
The next few days we rotated. Sylvia, Mary, and I separated gases. Bill moved and anchored the generator as needed.
Blood Sabers Page 4