Waypoint Kangaroo

by Curtis C. Chen

  I blink a couple of times as his words sink in. “Oh. Right. I can do that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Dejah Thoris—Exterior, amidships

  22 hours until we hit Mars

  Standing on Dejah Thoris’s hull is just as starkly beautiful as it was the first time, days ago, when I went for that unauthorized spacewalk. Before I met Jemison. Before the ship was hijacked.

  I don’t have time to appreciate the view now. I’m working.

  “All lifeboats are loaded,” Logan says, his image moving in one of the two vid feeds on my spacesuit helmet’s HUD. That camera is looking down on the briefing room table, where all the senior staff are gathered. The other feed shows Blevins and his security team standing outside the open doors of one lifeboat. “Ready when you are, Blevins.”

  “All passengers secured here. Deck ten, section twelve,” Blevins says. “We’re running one last hardware diagnostic now.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Blevins.” Santamaria looks up at the camera—at me. “Mr. Rogers, what’s your status?”

  “Detaching Echo Delta now,” I say. The last bolt whirs out of the hull, past the flange holding the dish down, and slips out of the front end of my multi-tool.

  I grab for the bolt, but it escapes the fat fingers of my spacesuit gloves and spins off into the void, falling at point-nine gee.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I mutter. I picture one side of a wrench and open the pocket on the far side of the bolt. It tumbles past the event horizon and into darkness.

  I close the pocket, then think of the other side of my imaginary wrench and open the pocket again, rotated. In through the front door, out through the back door. The bolt flies up out of the pocket, slowing at point nine gee. I catch it at the top of its arc, before it falls again, then tuck it inside my belt pouch.

  “Say again, Rogers?” Jemison’s voice sounds more shrill over the radio than in person.

  “Sorry, Chief,” I say, opening the pocket to a different location and stowing the radio dish. “Just packing up my tools. Moving to new location now. ETA five minutes.”

  I turn down the magnets in my boots so I can half-run across the hull, hanging off the safety line tethered to the airlock above me. The helmet HUD shows an overlay of my destination in green, plus a pulsing red circle in the black sky showing where I’m supposed to aim the dish: Mars Following Trojan, also known as Odyssey Base.

  Odyssey is the free-floating OSS station where the peace treaty ending the Independence War was signed. It sits at a “Trojan” point trailing Mars in its orbit—a gravitationally stable position balanced between that planet and the Sun—and is the only Earth outpost close enough to have any hope of sending spacecraft to intercept Dejah Thoris before we crash.

  The radio chatter continues as I get to the target location, open the pocket, and bolt down the Echo Delta again. More minutes pass while I program in the new sky coordinates and wait for the computer-controlled motors to re-aim the dish. This isn’t complicated work—with the HUD overlays, it’s pretty much paint-by-numbers. But I’m the only one who has the computer access codes for this equipment.

  “Echo Delta is re-pointing now,” I report. “Another minute and I can transmit.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rogers,” Santamaria says. “Do you have a visual on the first lifeboat?”

  I tap the wrist controls on my spacesuit, and the HUD lights up with a yellow cursor, pointing me toward deck ten, section twelve. “Affirmative. Sending now.” I open a live vid link back to the briefing room.

  “Link is good,” Jemison says.

  “Question for the room,” Santamaria says. “Have we thought of everything?”

  Nobody speaks for a moment. This is what we’re all afraid of: that we’ve missed something crucial, something that will endanger the thousands of civilians we’re about to launch into open space.

  “We ran full diagnostics on every lifeboat,” Jemison says. “All clear. The bad guys couldn’t have gotten to all of them unless they tampered with the firmware, and there’s no sign of that.”

  After a pause, Santamaria says, “Very well. Mr. Blevins, launch the first lifeboat.”

  “Launching now,” Blevins says. His tiny vid image turns to yell into the lifeboat: “Here we go, folks!”

  He flips open a control panel and presses his palm against it. An alarm sounds, a light flashes, and the lifeboat doors hiss shut. Another set of airtight doors closes over those, and I hear muffled cracks.

  Plumes of fire shoot up from the hull just before the vibration from the explosive bolts reaches me. The lifeboat tears free of its niche in the side of Dejah Thoris and sails up and away.

  Something moves on the hull. I tilt my head down to see what it is. Another lifeboat?

  Three bright lights flare up on the line separating the white hull and black space. The cloud of dust from the lifeboat launch glows with three sharp lines, lancing upward and converging on the lifeboat.

  The pod changes color, from dull off-white to red to orange to yellow. Then it explodes in complete silence.

  The shockwave taps the hull a second later. My boots vibrate again.

  The lights on the hull disappear. Inertia carries the lifeboat debris away from the ship. I’m thankful that I can only recognize a few human body parts in the wreckage.

  I hear Jemison screaming something, but I don’t know what it is. My brain is burning again. Someone else is sobbing.

  The radio crackles to life in my ear. “Chief! Egnor, deck three! My lifeboat doors just closed on their own! It’s launching itself!”

  Another tremor. I whip my head around, looking for the launch. It’s behind me—above me. My HUD marks it as deck three, section six.

  I turn off my mag-boots and pull myself up the tether as fast as I can. I need to get closer to use the pocket. I can open it fifteen meters wide. That’s big enough to catch the lifeboat. But I need to get closer.

  “It’s the hijacker,” Jemison says. Her voice echoes from the other vid feed. She must be broadcasting shipwide. “He’s launching the lifeboats into the navigational deflectors.”

  I guess we know what Wachlin reprogrammed with his software update.

  The second lifeboat disintegrates while I’m still half the ship away. I stop moving, reengage my mag-boots, and turn off my suit mic before screaming as loud as I can.

  “Clear the lifeboats,” Jemison says. “Get everybody out of the lifeboats. I repeat, clear the lifeboats. Clear the lifeboats! CLEAR THE LIFEBOATS!”

  Two more lifeboats launch at the same time. I can’t catch both of them. I change the helmet HUD to paint the navigational deflector mounts. A blue stain bulges from the hull ten meters ahead of me. I pull out the heaviest multi-tool from my belt and start toward it.

  The deflector mount is sturdier than I anticipated. It takes a good half dozen whacks with my multi-tool to smash the laser emitter. I don’t need to destroy it completely; I just need to stop it from firing.

  Another lifeboat launches and explodes while I run toward the next deflector mount. I’ll never get to them all in time. But I have to do something.

  I can hear people shouting and crying in the background as reports come in. Jemison must have patched in the common security channel. The voices overlap, and the numbers become meaningless after a while.

  “Deck ten, section one. All passengers cleared—”

  “Deck nine, section ten. Forty passengers cleared. Eight lost—”

  “Deck five, section four. All passengers cleared. If you can block the lifeboat doors, they won’t launch!”

  “Deck two, section twelve. All passengers cleared. Three injuries—”

  I don’t know how long it takes to account for all the passengers. The lifeboats never stop launching, with or without people in them.

  “All stations checked in,” Jemison says.

  I trudge toward another deflector. This multi-tool is heavy. These boots are heavy. I’m tired and angry.

  “How many?” Sant
amaria asks.

  “Ninety-three passengers unaccounted for,” says Jemison.

  Another lifeboat explodes. The deflector is already disabled, but I keep hammering at it until the multi-tool breaks in half. I think I’m screaming again.

  “That’s our last lifeboat,” Logan says quietly.

  The shattered multi-tool drifts out of my hands. I only smashed up four deflectors. I didn’t even slow them down.

  “Rogers, this is the captain,” Santamaria says.

  I spit out another curse, then turn on my microphone. “I’m here.”

  “Get back to the Echo Delta,” he says, “and send that SOS.”

  * * *

  Jemison meets me at the airlock. I’m a sweaty mess. She takes my helmet while I strip off the rest of the spacesuit. If she notices me slamming things around with more force than necessary, she doesn’t say anything.

  “Control link with the Echo Delta is good,” she says. “Erica’s working on contacting Mars now. Were you able to—”

  “Odyssey Base is scrambling an X-4 transport,” I say, yanking off my boots. “Twelve spacemen and a plasma beam cannon. ETA ten hours.”

  “That should do it,” Jemison says. A PBC is serious artillery. It’ll cut through the containment bulkhead in less than a minute. And the Outer Space Service’s Expeditionary Forces, nicknamed “X-4s,” are well known as the toughest bastards in the entire Solar System.

  She hands me a crew jumpsuit to change into, then updates me on the situation as we make our way back to the briefing room.

  Dr. Sawhney is treating the various injuries suffered while passengers scrambled to get out of their lifeboats. Logan and the rest of the crew are doing their best to keep the passengers under control. I don’t envy them that job. There are four thousand civilians on this ship, confused and scared, and we don’t have any good answers for them.

  I know how frustrating it is to feel helpless.

  Captain Santamaria and Commander Galbraith are in the briefing room, waiting for Chief Jemison and me. I repeat my report to them. The radio button on Jemison’s collar buzzes, and she answers it.

  “Chief, Blevins. We’ve rounded up twenty engineers and mechanics from the passengers. Logan’s cleared their background checks. We’re pulling together equipment now. We should be able to get to all the turrets at once. ETC is two hours.”

  “Thank you, Blevins. Carry on.” She closes the channel.

  “You’re disabling the navigational deflectors,” I say. “You don’t need fully qualified personnel because you just want to break the equipment.”

  “As you demonstrated earlier,” Santamaria says.

  “We don’t know what Wachlin did to the NAVDEF system,” Jemison says. “The only way we can be sure of disabling those lasers is by cutting their power.”

  “You want to make sure the X-4 transport can dock with us when it gets here,” I say.

  “Not just that,” Santamaria says. “Odyssey Base also relayed a message from Mars Orbital Authority.”

  “They’re sending six remote-controlled tugs to meet us,” Galbraith says.

  “Right,” I say. “We can’t use Dejah Thoris’s engines, so you’re borrowing someone else’s.” Tugboat drones are used at most outer space facilities, to help guide large spacecraft that may lack fine maneuvering thrusters.

  Galbraith nods. “The tugs aren’t big enough to slow us down, but they can thrust from the side and push us off course. Just enough so that we miss colliding with Mars.”

  “When do the tugs get here?”

  Santamaria looks at the clock on the wall. “Five hours. That gives us time to lock them down before the X-4s arrive.”

  We might actually be able to thwart this hijacking. Sakraida may have devised an elaborate scheme with multiple contingencies, but we have people and resources with which to improvise. Alan Wachlin is cut off now, completely on his own. He can’t be smarter than all of us combined. Can he?

  “The bad guys must have considered a lot of these scenarios already,” I say. “Wachlin’s got to be anticipating that we’ll try some of these things, and he must have some countermeasures prepared.”

  Santamaria nods. “Wachlin’s isolated. His handler’s dead, and he has to guard a hostage plus watch every engineering control station—”

  “If he still has a hostage,” Jemison says.

  “My point is, he’s already off-balance,” Santamaria says. “We just need to rattle him. Get him to make a mistake we can exploit.”

  “Is that wise?” Galbraith asks. “Chief Gavilán could still be alive. If whatever we try doesn’t work, Wachlin might react by doing something rash.”

  “The hijacker is executing a plan,” Santamaria says. “He’s not acting on impulse.”

  “But you’re talking about making him emotional,” Galbraith says.

  She and the captain continue talking at each other. It’s not quite an argument, and I know how it’ll end: Santamaria will either convince Galbraith he’s right, or order her to stand down. I tune them out and stare at the countdown clocks on the tabletop display.

  How do we make Wachlin uncomfortable? How do we distract him from whatever he’s doing? Especially if he’s doing it to Ellie?

  The agency teaches us some standard tactics for “disturbing” an enclosed space. Bad smells are a good way to get people to leave a room without arousing too much suspicion. Spiking the temperature is also effective. The problem is, we can’t get into this particular room to do any of these things.

  Or can we?

  “Excuse me,” I say, then wait for Santamaria and Galbraith to stop talking and ignore their dirty looks. “How thick is that containment bulkhead? The one in front of main engineering?”

  “Meter and a half,” Jemison says. “Titanium alloy. I thought you didn’t have any heavy cutting tools.”

  “I don’t.”

  But I have opened the pocket on the other side of a crowded plaza, nearly ten meters away. And I didn’t need line-of-sight to the portal. I estimated the distance from where I was standing to where I saw a grenade land, and I was able to suck it into the pocket before it exploded and killed dozens of people.

  Let’s hope my estimating skills are still that good.

  “I have another idea,” I say.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Dejah Thoris—Deck 20, engineering section

  20 hours until we either hit Mars or celebrate not dying horribly

  Even if I didn’t have second-degree burns throughout my left shoulder, it would be very uncomfortable in this maintenance crawlway.

  The circular shaft is barely big enough for me to fit inside to begin with, but I also need to move carefully to avoid dislodging the equipment I’m wearing. There’s a lot of shielding here around the ionwell, making wireless communication unreliable, so I have an audio pack strapped to the work belt around my crew coveralls. Power and data lines from that pack are wrapped around a spacewalk cable leading back down the shaft to the hatch where I entered. If I run into trouble—or when I finish this job, whichever comes first—Jemison and her security detail will drag me out backward. That’s something to look forward to.

  “It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic,” I say out loud.

  “Problem, Rogers?” Jemison’s voice buzzes in my left ear, coming through the wired earpiece stuck there.

  “I’m hot, sweaty, and I need to use the bathroom.” The throat-mic band is also very itchy.

  “Didn’t I tell you to go before you left?”

  “But you didn’t make me go,” I say. “So this is clearly your fault. I’m at section one alfa now.”

  “Just a few more meters,” Jemison says. “You can file a complaint when you get back.”

  The crawlway ends abruptly at the emergency bulkhead, which closed when Wachlin took over main engineering. I swivel my head, moving the spot of light cast by the lamp strapped to my forehead. There are no markings on the slab of titanium alloy, but according to the directi
ons Jemison gave me earlier and the location codes etched into the metal walls, this is the right place.

  “I’m at the bulkhead,” I say. “Seal is intact all the way around.”

  We spent nearly an hour working this out and practicing before I started my tunnel-rat impersonation. I don’t need to close my eyes, but I do it anyway. Looking won’t help me.

  The bulkhead is a hundred and fifty centimeters thick. I press my head up against it, visualize a black-and-red roulette wheel, and open the pocket two meters away from myself—I hope. I make the portal about the size of my palm, no barrier.

  “The pocket is open,” I say.

  There’s nothing keeping the air in the engineering section from rushing through to the pocket universe. The emergency bulkheads also sealed the ventilation system, so main engineering has been recirculating its air supply. With at most two people breathing in there, it would take several days for the oxygen content to become too low for life support.

  A ten-centimeter-wide hole into hard vacuum, on the other hand, will evacuate all the atmosphere in about two and a half minutes.

  I put a countdown timer in my left eye HUD to distract myself from the dry-mouthed tension I’m feeling. There’s a small chance that Alan Wachlin will look up at this corner of the engine room and see a wavy, disk-shaped mirror floating in mid-air, but even if he does, he can’t do anything to stop me.

  According to Jemison, a life support alarm will automatically sound when the passive sensors in main engineering detect less than twenty percent oxygen in the air, or atmospheric pressure below nine hundred millibars. We’re hoping Wachlin won’t know what the hell those lights and sounds mean at first, and will waste precious time panicking while Ellie—who will know exactly how long she has before she can’t breathe—can get free of whatever restraints he’s got her in and get to an emergency breather first.

  I imagine what will happen to Wachlin when all the air vanishes from his locked room. If he holds his breath, his lungs will explode from the pressure differential. Meanwhile, his mucus membranes and most exposed capillaries will also burst. He’ll be bleeding from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth before hypoxia renders him unconscious, fifteen seconds later. He’ll have suffocated by the time the X-4s arrive and cut through the bulkhead.