The Serrano Connection

by Elizabeth Moon

  And was it better to know when your oxygen was out? She shied away from that to a consideration of the suit comm failure. Lights and comm worked fine inside ships in FTL flight . . . why not here, if they were inside the shields?

  If they weren't inside the shields . . .

  A low moan came through the suit earphones, dragging on and on like a lost cow on a spring night. Esmay couldn't figure out what it was, until it ended in a long hiss. Her mind put the sounds together like pieces of a puzzle: it could have been a word, slowed down. She struggled, trying to imagine what word it could have been, but a piercing jitter followed. She nudged the suit controls, damping the sound—at least that worked. But if the suit coms didn't work, they could all get lost . . .

  Something bumped the back of her helmet; she turned cautiously. It had to be one of the others. It bumped again. Now she could hear someone's voice—Seska's—as well as a faint gritty noise where their helmets rubbed together.

  "Radios don't work. Have to touch heads. Hook in." He tapped her arm, and she remembered her safety line. Of course.

  Esmay switched on her helmet light, and watched in amazement as the light reached slowly—slowly—down like the extrusion of a semisolid adhesive from its tube. When it reached the hull, the edges of the shape it made rippled uneasily, the edges a moire pattern of odd colors. Unfortunately, it illuminated no helpful markers, nothing to suggest which way an airlock might be.

  "—Suiza?"

  If the light moved slowly, so might comm, the radio waves distorted by whatever the FTL drive did to space and time. Esmay had a sense of waking up from some kindred slowness, as if part of her body were keyed to the velocity of light itself, and lagged far behind them.

  "Here," she said to Seska. She dipped her head; the bar of light from her helmet bent slowly, undulating with the movement. She handed the end of her line to the gloved hand that appeared in the light.

  "—know someone who would take one look at that and spend the next month in a trance of math, trying to explain it." That was another voice, fainter, and she worked out that it must be transmitted helmet to helmet, from the other side of Seska. "Frees linked. Bowry linked."

  "—airlock? Clock's not working." Of course they had figured out the implications of that for themselves. Where was the nearest airlock? She stared into the darkness, trying to picture this part of the ship, to build up the model from her first days aboard when she studied Kos. There was an airlock for the emergency evacuation of bridge crew at the base of the dome, across from T-1, which meant on their present path and perhaps a quarter hour's careful traverse. In the dark she was not sure what their former path had been, but the leakage of the gravity unit helped her find downslope.

  "Follow me," she said, and pointed her helmet downslope. The light beam bent, kinked like water from a moving hose, and rippled off in the approximate direction. Esmay started after it, uneasily aware that she could catch up with her own light source. Just like the idiot captains they taught about in the Academy, who had microjumped their ships out in front of their own beam weapons, and fried themselves. She glanced sideways without moving her head, and saw other streams of light like her own but slightly different in color . . . felt a touch on her back.

  "—Follow you," Seska said. "Stay in direct contact."

  She felt her way cautiously from one grabbable protuberance to another. It was like climbing boulders in the dark, which she'd done only that one time because it was such a stupid way to get hurt, hanging out over a dark place feeling for nubs and not knowing how far down . . . .

  Here down was a meaningless concept, and she had no idea what would happen if she lost contact with the hull. There was no sensation of external pressure, as there would be from speed in an atmosphere, with wind battering. No, but from deep inside came another pressure, as one body cavity after another insisted that things were wrong, were bad, and shouldn't be moving this way. The worst of the vibration had evened out, it should have been better. Instead, she felt growing pressure in her skull; she could feel the roots of her teeth tickling her sinuses; her eyes wanted to pop out to escape the swelling.

  She paused as she felt a tug on the line connecting her to the others. A helmet tapped hers, then steadied.

  "—think maybe we're not inside the FTL shielding," Frees said. "Just the collision shields."

  Of course. Her memory unreeled the correct reference this time, showing the FTL shield generators affecting a network of spacers set just under the hull covering. Of course the outer hull could not be shielded from FTL influences—it had to travel there.

  It was hard not to overrun her light, but she finally figured out just how to position her head and move, so that she could see possible handholds and clip points coming up just out of reach. She passed a communications array, and remembered that it was only a few meters from the airlock entrance. But which way? And exactly how many? She paused there, wrapped her line around the base of the array (and why hadn't it snapped off when they went through the jump point?)

  "It's nearby," she told the others when they'd caught up and touched helmets, for all the world like cows touching noses. "Wait—I'm going to look."

  A pause. "—Shine in different directions. Might help." It would. She watched as the two beams she could see looped out on either side of hers. She gave herself five or six meters of line, and scooted out to the end of it, then began circling.

  The airlock, when she found it, had a viewport beside the control panel. She clipped in to the bar meant for that purpose, peeked through, and saw only more dark. She didn't want to try turning on the interior lights—why announce to the Bloodhorde commandos where they were?

  She tugged a signal on her line, and wrestled with the control panel as she waited for them to catch up. She had trouble making her light stay on the controls while she tried to operate them. The safety panel slid at last, and she looked at the directions. It had been designed for emergency exit, not entrance, so the entrance instructions were full of cautions and sequences intended to keep some idiot from blowing the pressure in neighboring compartments.

  She punched the sequence that should work. Nothing happened. She looked at the instructions again. First lock the inner hatch, the button marked inner hatch, then the close switch. Then check the pressurization, test pressure. She went that far then read and completed the rest of the sequence. But the lights did not turn green, and the airlock did not open.

  "—Have a manual override?" Seska asked. She had not even noticed his approach, or the touch of the helmet.

  She looked, and saw nothing she recognized. "Didn't find one—I tried the auto sequence twice." She moved aside.

  Frees found the override, beneath a separate cover panel, with its own instructions. It was mechanical, requiring a hard shove clockwise, which freed a set of dials that had to be rotated into the number sequence printed on the inside of the cover. Seska and Frees struggled with the lever. She could imagine what they were saying. Fighting with the lever would use oxygen fast.

  Esmay stared at the instructions for the automatic sequence, wondering why it wasn't working. Lock inner hatch, test pressurization, enter number of personnel coming in, key in opening sequence for outer lock. She'd done that. She went on reading, past the warnings against unauthorized use, down to the fine print, hoping to find something she'd missed that would get it open.

  In that fine print, down at the bottom, the final word was no: note: external airlocks cannot be used during ftl flight. In even finer print: This constraint poses no risk to personnel as personnel are not engaged in EVA activities during FTL flight.

  She leaned over and put her helmet against Seska's. "Some fool must have painted this thing shut," he was saying.

  "No," Esmay said. "It won't work in FTL flight. It says that at the bottom." The others stopped struggling.

  "So it does," Frees said, leaning into her helmet. "On this panel too. Says we don't need it because of course we aren't out here in FTL. Silly us, being impo
ssible."

  "Wish they were right," Bowry said. "All right, Suiza—now what?"

  Esmay opened her mouth to protest that—they outranked her; they were supposed to make the decisions—and shut it again, thinking. The oxygen running out, at a rate they could not determine. Time passing . . . somewhere, at least inside the ship, time was passing. Could they make it to their original goal before the oxygen ran out? Could they get in if they did? If all the airlocks were inoperable in FTL flight, they could at least use the air outlets in the repair bays . . . if those worked.

  Then it occurred to her that maybe this airlock had an external oxygen feed too . . . some airlocks did, for the use of personnel stacked up waiting to use the lock. She turned back to the control panel and looked. There: traditional green nipple fitting, though only one at this lock. Would it work or was it too automatically shut off because no one would use it during FTL flight?

  "Oxygen outlet," she said, and tapped Bowry, next to her, on the shoulder. He looked, nodded, and turned. She found the recharge hose on the back of his suit, and unclipped it for him.

  The oxygen flowlight came on when he plugged in, so at least the ship's system thought it was supplying oxygen.

  "Gauge still stuck," Bowry said. Which was going to make it hard, if not impossible to figure out when the suit tanks were recharged. "Counting pulse," he said then. "Don't interrupt."

  Esmay had no faith that her own pulse was anything like normal, nor did she know how long it would take to replace an unknown consumption, even if she could use her pulse to determine duration. They crouched what seemed like a long time in silence, until Bowry said, "There. Should do it." He unplugged from the access, and said, "Your turn. If you know your heart rate, give it three minutes. Otherwise I can count for you."

  "Others first," Esmay said. "They were wrestling with that lever."

  "Don't be too noble, Lieutenant; we might think you were bucking for promotion." Seska moved over and plugged in, then Frees, and finally Esmay.

  "Why three minutes?" Frees asked, while Esmay was still hooked up.

  "Because—if I can just get it out—I've got a test that doesn't depend on the suit's internal clock. We'll need more, but I figured three minutes would give us a margin of fifteen, at least. My suit stopped registering at 1 hour, 58.3 minutes. Is that in the range for the rest of you?" It was, and just as Esmay had counted not her pulse but seconds, Bowry said "Aha!" in a pleased voice.

  "It works?"

  "I think so. It would help if we could rig some way of getting us all hooked up at once, though, because calculating the differentials for the waiting periods is a bit tricky."

  "Give us an estimate; it'd take too long and we don't have tools—"

  "All right. Suiza, you're still hooked up—you'll need the longest time on, then it goes down. I'll count it off for you."

  Esmay wondered what kind of gauge Bowry thought he'd worked out, and how long it was going to be, but she didn't want to interrupt his count. She felt vaguely silly, hanging there in the dark and silence, waiting to be told it was time to unhook herself from the oxygen supply, but tried to tell herself it was better than being dead. Finally—she could not guess how long it had been—Bowry said, "Time's up. Next?"

  When they had all tanked up by Bowry's count, which Esmay could only hope bore some relation to reality, they still had to decide what to do next.

  Seska took the lead. "Suiza—do you know where all the airlocks are?"

  "I studied it for Major Pitak's exam when I first came aboard, but I don't really know . . . there are some I do remember. On each deck, between T-3 and T-4, for instance. Once we're on T-3, there are airlocks both inside the repair bay, and opening on the outer face toward T-4."

  "We could just stay here," Frees said. "We know where this oxygen is."

  "If we knew how long the jump transit was . . . if it's anything more than a day or so, we've got other suit limitations."

  "I don't suppose you know a handy external source of snacks, water, and powerpacks?"

  "And toilets?"

  Esmay surprised herself with a snort of laughter. "Sorry," she said. "I believe all those substances are restricted to the interior of the ship during FTL flight."

  "Then we'd better head toward the next oxygen access, and hope that we find a way inside before . . . we have to."

  Navigation was going to be their worst problem. Although Kos's hull was studded with more protuberances than Esmay had expected, it was still mostly matte black and unmarked. Creeping, feeling her way, across that great black expanse, she felt like a deep-sea creature, one of those her aunt had shown her pictures of. Some of those, she recalled, clustered around deep-ocean vents that provided warmth and nutrients. How did they find their way? Chemotaxis . . . however that worked. She couldn't figure out an equivalent for it on the hull of a ship in hyperspace, so just kept moving.

  An abrupt change in the topography she could see signaled the dropoff, as it were, into the gulf between T-3 and T-4. Esmay struggled to think which direction to move next. Down toward the lower decks in the crease between T-3 and the core? Along the top of T-3? She didn't even know if the great clamshell gantry supports were closed around Wraith, or if they'd gone into jump with the repair bay open to the dark.

  As if in answer to her question, light reappeared in the outer dark. At least, she supposed it was light, because her eyes reacted to it, and her brain, trying to make what she saw into the shapes she expected. It looked strange, and more like pale smoke blowing than light, thick streams fraying to looser strands as she watched, but it gave an impression of some angular bulk just off to her left, with towering plumes above. Far away, a tumbled trail of light, a badly ploughed furrow, receded redly into the distance.

  They had all paused, and moved into the helmet-touching huddle. "If I were a physicist," Seska said, "I just might go crazy. Most of what we've seen since jump hasn't fit most of what I learned about FTL flight. But since I'm a mere ship's captain, I say it's beautiful."

  "The gantries are up," Esmay said. "Repair bay's unsealed. If it doesn't have some kind of barrier I don't know about, we should be able to get in that way."

  "Why'd they turn the lights on now?" asked Frees.

  "Just got the separate power supply hooked up," Esmay said. "The Bloodhorde's got the bridge—they probably cut power to the wings, maybe even life support, but each wing actually has its own ship support capability."

  "So we just walk over and hop down one of those openings?"

  "Only if we want to hit sixteen or seventeen decks down after a 1-G acceleration. We might be able to climb down the gantry legs . . ." She'd never actually been on the gantries, but she'd seen others up there. The problem was . . . would their friends shoot them first, or give them time to explain who they were?

  "Our suitcoms should work in there," Seska said. "And maybe they won't see us right away."

  The walk along the topside of T-3 to the first of the openings was easier than the final traverse of the dome, but fraught with its own difficulties. The unhappy light streaming away from the openings illuminated nothing in their path, and a lot was in their path. The sheared roots of the materials transport track supports . . . cables set to brace the clamshells, counterweights for the mechanisms that raised and lowered them . . . at least something was always near at hand to clip the lines to.

  Personnel access in normal operations was on the center of curved openings, now clearly downlight of the arching supports themselves. They edged along the opening, and the light changed color as they moved beside it. Even those few tens of meters of uplight . . . were too blue, and a turn of the head made it red.

  The personnel lift shaft was where Esmay had remembered it should be. Far, far below, its controls locked down. She could see a section of Wraith with her skin off and a crowd of workers in EVA gear clustered around a bundle of crystals that ran out of sight fore and aft.

  There was, at least, the comfort of a niche below the hull line, a
platform large enough for twenty or more workers to stand waiting for the personnel lift. Esmay started down the ten mesh steps that led down to it. On the second step, ship's gravity caught her feet; she felt glued to the step. By the time she got to the platform, she felt the drag of gravity through every bone, but her head felt clearer. Inside, the light looked normal, if less bright than usual. She glanced around. Only some of the lights were on, spotlighting the workers. Of course—on internal power, they'd conserve where they could.

  The others came down, one by one, carefully; none spoke until they reached the platform. Esmay glanced around. Oxy supply lines in the bulkhead . . . a real bulkhead, with the green triangle for oxygen access painted on it. A water tap. Even a suit relief valve . . . suit maintenance really hated people who turned in soiled suits. A movement in her helmet caught her attention—her suit's internal clock was working again, and the oxygen gauge squirted up, then dropped, then rose again slowly to indicate that she had 35 percent of her supply left, one hour and eighteen minutes at current usage.

  She started to speak, then realized that if the suitcoms were working properly they could be overheard. And why wasn't she hearing the others. Different circuits?

  She found the controls in her suit and switched around the dial.

  "—Gimme one—just one—now half . . ."

  Back to the other channel, the one they'd used into the jump into FTL. "They're on a different setting, at least some of 'em are."

  "Makes sense." Seska was peering over the rail at his ship. "How do we get down?"