by Bova, Ben
“Can you move your legs?” he asked Gaeta.
The suit creaked, its servomotors buzzed wearily. Gaeta’s right arm moved slowly, ice cracking off it and floating in weightless shards. He wiped at his visor.
“C‘mon,” Pancho’s voice called. “We’re headin’ straight into the ring. Get inside and hang on to somethin’.”
Like a statue slowly coming to life, Gaeta clumped over the hatch’s sill and into the cargo bay. Wanamaker didn’t bother to remove his nanosuit. Swiftly, he detached the sample boxes and put them carefully into the cryogenic freezer standing against the bulkhead. He heard the freezer’s interior mechanism sliding the boxes from the input slot to the liquid-helium-cooled storage compartment.
“Hang on,” Pancho called. “Ready or not, here we go.”
Turning back to Gaeta, Wanamaker saw that the cargo bay was misty, hazy. But he could see Gaeta’s face through his visor again.
“Ice melted off my suit,” Gaeta said. “And all my systems are back in the green. Whatever shorted them out, the systems have come back on.”
“Good. Stay inside the suit. You’ll be safer. We can vacuum the water out through the airlock once we’re clear of the ring.”
“Maybe Nadia’ll want us to keep it, take samples from it.”
Wanamaker felt his brows knitting. “We’ll have to figure out some way to store it in a bottle, I guess.”
In the cockpit Pancho paid scant attention to their conversation. “You two lugs tied down good? It’s gonna get bumpy in about half a minute.”
“I’m in foot loops,” Wanamaker answered. “Manny’s boots are too big for them.” Then he remembered that Gaeta’s boots were magnetic.
“Grab on to something and hang on. This might get rough.”
Pancho had cut off the outside comm circuit once Wunderly started making demands. Got enough to do in here without worrying about her samples, she told herself. Before her conscience could remind her, she added, I know. I know. The whole reason for this mission is the dratted samples. But now I gotta worry about three lives.
Gripping the T-shaped control stick on the instrument panel with her right hand, Pancho was unable to suppress a tight smile. Been a long time since you’ve had to do any real flying, she said to herself. Now we’re gonna see how good you still are.
In the observation port before her Pancho saw the B ring rushing toward her, interwoven braids of ice particles with some darker, sootier areas off to her left. With deft touches on the controls, she swung the spacecraft in the same direction that the ring particles were rotating. Less difference between their velocity and ours, the less chance of us getting banged up.
But she knew the craft was going to get hit. There’s a gazillion chunks of ice up there and we’ve got to push through ’em, like it or not. The spacecraft didn’t have enough thrust to completely reverse its course and avoid the ring altogether. The best Pancho could do was to slice through the ring at as steep an angle as possible, minimizing the time they spent in the ring.
The collision alarm pinged. Starting already, Pancho thought.
“Here we go,” she said, more to herself than the two men hanging on in the cargo bay.
It was like skydiving into a glacier, falling into an endless field of ice. But this glacier wasn’t solid, it was composed of countless myriads of ice particles.
Pancho goosed the main engines slightly and felt the push of thrust sway her backward a little. She remembered a crash on the Moon that had torn one of her foot loops right out of the deck and broken her leg. Nothing that bad now, she thought. Not yet, anyway.
The collision alarm’s chime was constant now, like a one-note music box gone wild. Pancho stabbed at the alarm’s control and shut it off. I know we’re getting peppered, she said silently. Nothing big enough to punch through the meteor shield, so far.
She realized she wasn’t in a suit. Stupid damn fool! If the cockpit gets punctured I’m dead.
No time for it now. She couldn’t leave the controls, not even for the few moments it would take to pull on a nanosuit.
Pancho tasted blood in her mouth and realized she had bitten her tongue. Dumbass broad, that’s what I am. Why the hell—
“Jake!” she called, surprised at how panicked her own voice sounded. “Get up here. Quick! And bring an air bottle.”
She saw a gleaming white boulder no more than a hundred meters to the ship’s right, rolling, tumbling along. And getting closer. A quick glance at the radar screen: nothing but hash, too many objects bouncing blips back at the receiver.
Gently, gently she eased the control stick left. The boulder drifted slightly away but tumbled along beside the ship as if accompanying her, waiting for Pancho to make the slightest mistake so it could plow into the spacecraft and demolish it.
Don’t let it mesmerize you, Pancho reminded herself, forcing her eyes off its gleaming bulk. You gotta look in all directions as once. She glanced its way again and it was noticeably smaller, falling away from her.
The collision monitor’s screen was blinking like the spasmodic eye of a lunatic. Pressure’s still holding, Pancho saw. We haven’t been punctured.
Wanamaker ducked into the cockpit, still in his nanosuit, his face white, eyes staring.
“You’re not suited up!”
“Take the controls,” Pancho said, grabbing the green cylinder of air from his gloved hands.
She swung weightlessly through the hatch with one hand, let the green bottle hang in midair as she frantically pulled a nanosuit from the storage locker and wormed her long legs into it.
The ship lurched and slammed her against the bulkhead.
“Sorry,” Wanamaker called from the cockpit.
Too busy to reply, Pancho pulled the suit on, attached the air bottle, and saw the hood inflate around her face. She breathed a sigh of canned air, then stepped back into the cockpit.
“Thanks, Jake,” she murmured as she took over the controls again.
“We’re almost out of it,” he said, pointing to the observation port. Pancho could see stars and even the crescent shape of a moon through the swarming ice particles. Must be Titan, she thought.
A sudden thump sent them both staggering. The cockpit hatch slammed shut and the life support monitor said with mechanical calm, “Pressure loss in cargo bay. Hull puncture in section six-a.”
Gripping the controls again, Pancho shouted, “Jake, you okay?”
“Okay,” Wanamaker answered shakily.
“Manny? Okay?”
“Yeah,” Gaeta’s voice came through the intercom. “Got banged around a little inside the suit.”
“But you’re okay?”
“Fine. All the water vapor’s siphoned out of the bay, though.”
“How big a hole we got there?”
A moment’s hesitation. “I can’t see any hole. Must be microscopic.”
“We got hit by something bigger’n microscopic,” Pancho said. “Maybe one of the sheepdog moonlets.”
Wanamaker said, “Whatever hit us must’ve expended most of its energy on the meteor shield and only blew a tiny hole through the hull.”
“Maybe,” Pancho conceded. She took a swift scan of the instruments. Pressure in the cargo bay down to nothing, but here in the cockpit we’re okay. Good thing I got into the suit, though. Collision rate’s dropping. We’re coming out of the ring. Good thing about the suit. If we’d’a been punctured here in the cockpit I’d be dead.
“We’re almost clear,” Wanamaker said, a smile breaking out on his weatherbeaten face.
Pancho reactivated the collision alarm’s chime. It was down to a lullaby.
“I think we made it,” she said to Wanamaker.
“I’ll go back to the bay and see how Manny’s getting along.”
“He’ll hafta stay inside the suit until we dock at the habitat. Cargo bay’s the only space big enough for him to climb outta the suit, and it’s open to vacuum now.”
“Right,” said Wanamaker, opening the hat
ch. The air pressure in the cockpit remained normal. Pancho realized the hatch of the cargo bay must also have closed automatically.
“Oh, Jake,” she called. “Check the freezer, make sure it isn’t damaged.”
“Aye, aye, captain,” Wanamaker said, grinning and tossing her a crisp salute.
Pancho grinned at him. But her face contorted in surprised terror as she turned back and saw an ice chunk big as an apartment building dead ahead. She yanked the controls and it dropped from her view.
Wanamaker and Gaeta both yelled in a fervent blend of Spanglish and seaman’s cursing.
“Sorry about that,” Pancho called to them, realizing they had nearly run smack into one of the shepherding moonlets that orbited just along the edge of the ring.
“For what it’s worth,” she added, her grin returning, “we’re in the clear now.”
12 APRIL 2096: RETURN
Kris Cardenas literally bumped into Wunderly as the two women ran down the passageway that opened onto the airlock area at the habitat’s endcap. Tavalera and Timoshenko were sprinting up ahead of them, almost at the airlock hatch. Timoshenko was pushing a small dolly.
“They’re okay, Kris,” Wunderly puffed. “I monitored their transmissions in my office. Manny’s okay.”
Cardenas nodded. “It was rough, though.”
“But they’re okay.” Wunderly smiled weakly as they slowed to a halt. “Nobody got hurt.” It was an apology, Cardenas understood.
But she was in no mood to accept an apology. “I hope your samples are what you wanted,” she said without even trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
Rolling the dolly he’d been pushing up to the much bigger flatbed cart for the excursion suit, which they’d left at the airlock, Timoshenko plugged a comm set into the bulkhead socket next to the heavy steel hatch, then held one hand over the earplug. “Okay,” he said into the pin mike at his lips. “Confirm docking.”
Tavalera turned to the two women. “They’re docked,” he said, unsmiling.
Cardenas waited for what seemed like hours, watching the airlock hatch, waiting for it to swing open, waiting for Manny to return to her. She couldn’t help glancing at Wunderly; Nadia seemed just as eager, just as impatient. Her precious samples, Cardenas grumbled to herself. Manny and Pancho and Jake damn near got killed so she could get her ice flakes.
But beneath her seething emotions, Cardenas knew she could not stay angry at her friend. They got back all right, nobody got killed, all’s well that ends well, she told herself. I can’t be mad at you, Nadia, I understand you too well.
“Gaeta’s in the airlock,” Timoshenko announced, his hand still pressed against the comm plug in his ear. “He’s opening the inner hatch.”
Watching Wunderly’s expectant face, eyes wide, lips apart in anticipation, the last remnants of Cardenas’s anger melted. She slid an arm around Wunderly’s shoulders and said softly, “I really hope they’ve brought the proof you need, Nadia.”
Wunderly’s eyes misted over. “Thanks, Kris. Thanks for everything. I know you didn’t want Manny to go. I know you—”
The inner hatch clicked and swung slowly outward like the massive door of a bank vault. Gaeta clumped over the sill in the bulky excursion suit. Tavalera and Timoshenko immediately went to his sides, instinctively offering to help him.
“I can walk by myself,” Gaeta’s voice boomed from the suit’s speakers.
Cardenas thought he sounded tired, spent.
While the airlock door swung shut again, Tavalera went behind Gaeta’s suit and began unsealing its hatch. Cardenas went back with him.
“The samples?” Wunderly asked, her voice pitched high.
“In the cryo unit,” Gaeta said. “Pancho and Jake are bringin’ it out.”
As if on cue, the airlock hatch swung open again; Pancho and Wanamaker stepped carefully through, carrying the freezer unit like a miniature coffin. Cardenas paid no attention to them. She went around to the back of the big suit and watched as Manny ducked through the hatch and, a little wobbly, set his softbooted feet on the deck.
“You’re bleeding!” Cardenas blurted.
“I am?”
“Your nose.” She rushed to him, put her arms around him. “Are you all right?”
“I am now.” He smiled and touched his nose gingerly with a fingertip. It came away bloody. “Must’ve bumped it. It was a little rough for a while.”
“But you’re all right?” Cardenas repeated.
The smaller dolly was for the cryo unit, Cardenas realized. The instant Pancho and Wanamaker loaded it onto the little cart Wunderly grabbed the control bar and started pushing it up the passageway at a trot.
Pancho chuckled. “Somebody oughtta tell her that rig has an electric motor on it. She can ride it back to her lab.”
“Let her push,” Cardenas said, also smiling. “The exercise will do her good.”
13 APRIL 2096: THE MORNING AFTER
Nadia Wunderly had not slept at all. She spent the entire night alone in the biology laboratory, studying the samples of ice particles Gaeta had brought back to her. For weeks she had annoyed the biologists by borrowing, cadging, jury-rigging equipment from them to build a completely self-contained cryogenic analysis apparatus. About the size of a tabletop microwave oven, it was physically separated from the rest of the lab by miniature airlocks and biohazard screens to prevent contamination of the return samples; the gleaming white apparatus was also thickly insulated to keep the ice particles at nearly the same temperature they existed at in the rings themselves. Most of the work she had done herself; only rarely could she cajole a technician to help her. Even then they joked about “Wunderly’s icebox.”
Now she sat in front of a display screen that showed one of her precious ice particles. Her tests had proven that the six-centimeter-wide chip consisted of amorphous ice: not the crystalline type of ice that was normal on Earth, but a form that was structurally more like a fluid in which molecules could flow and interact. Like glass, she told herself. Glass is liquid in structure, it just happens to be solid at normal terrestrial temperatures. Amorphous ice is solid at nearly two hundred below zero, but its structure isn’t rigid; the molecules aren’t locked in place, they can move around and combine with one another. Chemistry can take place inside amorphous ice.
Wearily, Nadia rubbed at her eyes. It’s amorphous ice, all right. And there are microbe-sized particles inside it. But are they alive? They’re not doing anything. They’re just sitting inside the ice chip, as inert as specks of dust.
She pushed herself up from her chair, every muscle in her body complaining. I need a biologist, Wunderly said to herself. Who can I recruit from the staff to help me?
“It was terrible, Panch,” Holly was saying to her sister over morning coffee. “He wiped the floor with me.”
“It couldn’t’ve been that bad,” Pancho said soothingly.
“Worse.”
Pancho had come to her sister’s apartment for breakfast after Holly had called her in the middle of a strenuous bout of morning lovemaking with Wanamaker. “Let it ring,” Wanamaker had puffed. Once he’d gone in for a shower Pancho had checked the phone’s messages, then called Holly to tell her she’d be over in an hour or less.
Pancho had never seen her sister look so glum. This election means a lot to her, she realized. Holly’s found something that’s important to her.
“Look,” she said to Holly. “First thing to do is call Nadia and see if she’s really found living critters in the samples. Everything hangs on that.”
Wunderly was neither in her home, her office nor her laboratory. She was in the cafeteria having breakfast with Da’ud Habib and Yolonda Negroponte. Wunderly had called Habib the night before, once she realized she needed a biologist to help her analyze the ring particles.
“Yolanda is the best on our biology team,” Habib had said by way of introduction.
But Wunderly was getting distinctly hostile vibrations from Negroponte. The woman was much
taller than she, full-figured with long blonde hair and a face that wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but very attractive. Full lips, strong cheekbones and jaw, eyes brimming with suspicion.
Habib must have felt the tension between the two women, too, because he excused himself after taking hardly a bite from his breakfast muffin and a sip of black coffee.
“I have a meeting with the chief of the maintenance department,” he said, almost apologetically. As he got up from the table and picked up his barely touched tray he added, “I seem to be a popular fellow this morning.”
And he scuttled away. Wunderly thought he looked relieved to be rid of the two of them.
Negroponte watched him for a moment, then turned back to Wunderly, her eyes focusing like x-ray lasers.
“You’re the one Da’ud took to the New Year’s Eve party,” she said, almost accusingly.
“That’s right,” said Wunderly. “Who did you go with?”
The biologist almost smiled. “I was interested in Da’ud, but he was too concentrated on Urbain’s lost little tractor to catch my signals.”
“Oh. I see.” Wunderly decided to be straightforward. She needed this woman’s help, not her animosity. “I didn’t send any signals. I just asked him if he’d like to go to the party with me.”
Negroponte’s ashen eyebrows rose in surprise. “Just like that?”
“Just like that. I’ve never learned how to be subtle, how to send out signals.”
“Really?”
“With your looks, it must come pretty naturally. I mean, men must chase after you all the time.”
“Well … not chase, exactly.”
“I’ve always been kind of dumpy and mousy,” Wunderly confessed. “Nobody’s ever come panting after me.”
Negroponte’s expression softened a bit. “I was always taller than most of the boys in school. But worse, they get frightened when they realize you’re smarter than they are. Men want to be dominant, even the weak ones.” Before Wunderly could think of what to answer, she added, “Especially the weak ones.”
