by Paul Preuss
“Has anyone been here since McNeil was taken off the ship?” Sparta asked the guards.
They glanced at each other and shook their heads. “No, Inspector.” “No one, Inspector.” They betrayed it in their voices and they smelled of it: they were lying.
“Good,” she said. “I want you to report to me or Inspector Proboda if anyone attempts to get past you. Anyone at all, even someone from our office. Understood?”
“Right, Inspector.”
“Certainly, Inspector. You bet.”
Sparta went into the boarding tube. The red plastic seal was still in place over the rim of the hatch. She laid her hand over it and leaned close to it.
The plastic seal was little more than it seemed, an adhesive patch. It concealed no microcircuitry, although its conducting polymers were sensitive to electric fields and preserved the patterns of any that had recently been applied. By placing her hand over the patch, by leaning close to it and inhaling its odor, Sparta learned what she needed.
The field detectors under her palm picked up the strongly impressed pattern of a diagnostic device—someone had passed a field detector of their own over the plastic, hoping to discover its secrets. Doubtless they had learned that it had no secrets. Then they’d grown bold enough to handle the seal, presumably with gloves. The inquisitive one had left no fingerprints, but from the odor that clung to the surface of the plastic, Sparta had no difficulty identifying who had been there.
Each person’s skin exudes oils and perspiration that contain a blend of chemicals, especially amino acids, in a combination as unique as the pattern of the iris. When Sparta inhaled these chemicals she instantly analyzed them. She could call the specific chemical formulas into consciousness or, more usefully, match them to patterns she had already stored. She routinely stored the amino acid signatures of most people she met, eventually discarding those of no interest.
Two hours ago she had stored the amino acid signature of Kara Antreen. She was not surprised to recognize it here. Nor could she blame the guards for lying to her. They’d been told to keep quiet; and they’d have to live with Antreen long after Sparta had gone back to Earth.
Sparta couldn’t blame Antreen for her curiosity, either. She’d examined the seal, but there was no evidence she had opened the hatch. The only other entrance to the ship was through the midships airlock aft of the cargo holds, and Sparta doubted she’d used that. Antreen would have been in full view of a hundred controllers and dockside workers had she donned a spacesuit and gone into the ship that way.
Viktor arrived, pulling the tool bag and a suit for her—a blue one, the uniform suit of the local law. He’d already climbed into his own suit; his gold badge was blazoned on his shoulder.
Minutes later they were drifting close to the spotlit hull of Star Queen, their attention concentrated on a small round hole in a metal plate.
Behind them in the cavernous docking bay great metal clamps clashed, shackling craft to the station, and self-guiding hoses and cables snaked out from the refueling manifolds, seeking the orifices of fuel tanks and capacitors. Tugs and tenders were arriving and launching from the bay, sliding in and out of the huge bay doors open to the stars. All this activity took place in the dead silence of vacuum. The Space Board cutter was moored next to Star Queen in the security sector. A launch stood by at the commercial lock across the way, fueled and ready to bring passengers into the station when the liner Helios arrived. Over the whole scene the clear dome of Traffic Control presided.
They’d gone through one of the worker’s locks, dragging the translucent nylon bag of tools, tethered to Proboda’s wrist, behind them. Sparta had carefully worked her way around the superconducting coils of the radiation shield that looped in a lacy hemisphere over the top of Star Queen’s crew module, keeping a respectful distance. If Proboda wondered why, he said nothing, and she didn’t care to explain what she’d learned through unsettling personal experience, that strong electric and magnetic fields were dangerous to her in intimate ways that other people could not sense: induced currents in the implanted metal elements next to her skeleton were disorienting and, in extremis, threatening to her vital organs.
But she maneuvered to hull plate L-43 without difficulty. It was not easily accessible for even one person in a spacesuit, since it was tucked away on the underside of the crew module just above the convex end of the long cylinder of Hold C.
“I’ll take a look,” she said, squeezing close. “Here, put this someplace else.” She popped the crablike robot eye off the hull where it perched over the hole and handed it to Proboda; the magnetic rollers on the ends of its legs were whirring as it searched for a grip. Proboda put it up higher on the module and it scurried away toward its home hatch.
Sparta got her head up next to the damaged plate and focused her right eye upon the hole. She zoomed in and examined it in microscopic detail.
“Doesn’t look like much from here,” Proboda’s voice said from the commlink in her right ear.
“Wait ’til you see inside. But let me get a picture of this first,” she murmured. She snapped it with the ordinary photogram camera looped around her left wrist.
What Sparta could see on the outside of the hull, even at a magnification that would have astonished Proboda, corresponded to just what she would have expected from the collision with the hull plate of a one-gram meteoroid traveling at forty kilometers per second—a hole the size of a BB, in the center of a small circle of gleaming smooth metal that had melted and recrystallized.
The damage done to a ship’s hull by a meteoroid travelling at typical interplanetary velocities approximates what happens when, say, a hypervelocity missile strikes armor. The indentation on the outside of the plate may be modest in itself, but the deposited energy creates a cone shaped shock wave travelling inward that spalls a wide circle of material off the inside of the plate. This molten material keeps on moving and does its own damage; meanwhile, if the interior of the hull is filled with air, the shock wave quickly expands, producing overpressures which are intensely destructive near the hole, although they fall off rapidly with distance.
“Is that one of the ones that comes off easily?” Proboda asked.
“We’re not quite that lucky,” she said. “Want to hand me that wrench and a standard Philips?”
Almost a third of the surface area of the life support deck consisted of removable panels, and L-43 was one of these—not, unfortunately, a door that conveniently swung open like others nearby, but a plate that could be removed by patiently unscrewing some fifty flathead bolts around its edges. Proboda took a power drill from the nylon tool bag and fixed a bit to it. “Here,” he said, handing it to her, “anything I can do to help?”
“Catch these damn little screws.” It took her almost ten minutes to remove the bolts. He plucked them from the vacuum and corralled them in a plastic bag.
“Let’s try the limpet now.”
He handed her a small, massive electromagnet and she set it against the painted yellow triangle in the center of the plate, which marked the presence of a ferrous laminate hardpoint. She flipped the magnet’s switch and tugged hard. The magnet stuck fast to the hardpoint, but—
“That’s what I was afraid of. Can you get your feet on something? Then tug on my legs.” He braced himself and grabbed her feet. He tugged on her and she tugged on the plate, but the plate was stuck fast in the hull.
“We’ll have to set up the grip rig.”
Proboda reached into the tool bag and withdrew a set of steel rods with sliding couplings. He fed her the pieces one by one, and in a few minutes she had rigged a bridge of parallel rods over the recalcitrant hull plate, set against the hull to either side on gimbaled feet. She mounted a worm gear in a heavy bracket in the center of the bridge. She fitted a crossbar handle to its top; its lower end rotated in a joint on the back of the magnet. When Sparta twisted the crossbars the worm gear turned and began to exert an inexorable pull. After three complete turns the bulging plate, like a st
iff cork sliding out of a bottle, popped free.
“This is what was holding it.” She showed him the inside of the plate. “Sealant all over the place.”
Blobs of hardened yellow plastic had held the plate tight, plastic foam that had spewed from emergency canisters inside the deck. Some of it had been carried by the outrush of air into the meteoroid hole, where it congealed and sealed the leak as it was designed to; the rest had simply made a mess.
Sparta inspected the inner side of the plate and the hard dark mound of plastic that covered the hole. She photogrammed it, then peered back over her shoulder. “Let me see that knife kit.” He held it out and she took a curved, thin-bladed knife from the set. “And give me some of those little bags.” She carefully worked the edge of the blade under the brittle plastic. She began peeling back the plastic, which came away in thin layers like sediment, like wood grain.
“What are you doing that for?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not destroying any evidence.” She saved the shavings in a clear bag. “I want to see what the hole looks like under the goop.” Beneath the plastic was the wide side of the conical hole, as big as a nickel, surrounded by an aureole of bright recrystallized metal. “Well, that’s certainly by the book.” She photogrammed it again, then passed him the hull plate. “Let’s put all this in the sack.”
Sparta shone her hand-lamp into the blackened interior of the life support deck. In her private way she spent a moment studying what she saw. Then she took more photograms. “Can you get your head in here, Viktor? I want you to see this.”
He squeezed his helmet in close beside hers, so that they were touching. “What a mess.” His voice was as loud by conduction through their helmets as it was by commlink.
Everything within two meters of the point of the hole in the hull was severely damaged. Pipes writhed crazily and ended in jagged mouths, like frozen benthic worms.
“Both oxygen tanks in one whack. Hardly a more vulnerable spot in the whole ship.” One oxygen sphere was torn open, while another lay in shards like a broken egg shell. Fragments of the shattered fuel cell still floated near the ceiling, where they had collected under the gentle deceleration of docking. “ ’Scuse me a minute, I’ve got to get my arm in there.” Sparta reached up and gathered glittering bits of debris from the ceiling. She carefully placed these and other samples in plastic bags. She took a final look around inside the ravaged deck, then withdrew.
They replaced the tools and the evidence they had gathered in the net bag. “That should do it here.”
“Did you find what you expected?”
“Maybe. We’ll have to wait for the analysis. Before we go back let’s have a peek inside the ship.”
They pulled themselves along the bulging cylinder of Hold C, tugging themselves from one handhold to the next, until they reached Star Queen’s midships airlock.
The midships airlock was set into the long central shaft that separated Star Queen’s fuel tanks and nuclear engines from the holds and the crew module, just aft of the holds themselves. Sparta manipulated the external controls that opened the hatch—controls that by law were standardized on all spacecraft—then entered the cramped space. Proboda squeezed in behind her, towing the tool bag.
She closed the outer hatch. From inside she could pressurize the lock, if there were no overriding commands from inside the spacecraft. But a big red sign lit up beside the inner hatch wheel: WARNING. VACUUM.
“I’m going to pressurize,” she said. “This won’t smell too good.”
“Why don’t we just stay suited?”
“We’ve got to face it sooner or later, Viktor. Keep your helmet on, if you want.”
He didn’t discuss it with her, but he did keep his helmet on. She didn’t let him see her grin. He had delicate feelings for a man of his size and profession.
She used the controls to pressurize the interior of the ship’s central shaft. After a few moments the warning indicator shifted from red to green—“Atmospheric pressure equalized”—but she did not yet open the inner hatch. First she pulled off her helmet.
Crashing into Sparta’s brain came the smell of sweat, stale food, cigarette smoke, spilled wine, ozone, new paint, machine oil, grease, human waste … and above it all, carbon dioxide. The air was not nearly as bad as it had been for McNeil in those final days, for it had already mingled with fresh air from the station, but it was bad enough; Sparta needed a moment of conscious effort to clear her head.
What she didn’t tell Proboda was that she wasn’t doing this for the sake of torturing herself.
Eventually she could not only directly sense the chemical constituents of her surroundings, but evaluate and bring to consciousness what she sensed. She had an urgent question to ask here, before going inside: had anyone used this lock during the voyage? The main airlock was not a problem. If either Grant or McNeil had left the ship through it during the flight, the other man would have known about it—until they went through it the last time together, of course, and only McNeil returned. But this airlock was another matter. Conceivably one of them might have snuck outside the ship through this secondary airlock while the other slept or was busy elsewhere. The question had recently assumed new importance.
The smell of the place answered her question.
“Okay, I think I can take it now.” She grinned at Proboda, who looked at her dubiously from within the safety of his helmet.
She twisted the wheel, opened the inner hatch, and entered the central corridor. For a moment the experience was profoundly disorienting: she was in a narrow shaft a hundred meters long, a constricted polished tube so straight that it seemed to vanish aft to a black point. For a moment she had the unsettling sensation of staring into a rifle barrel.
“Anything wrong?” Proboda’s voice was loud in her commlink.
“No… I’m fine.” She looked “up,” toward the bow of the ship, to the hatch of the hold airlock a few meters overhead. Above that hatch was access to the cargo hold, and then to the crew module itself.
The light beside it was green: “Atmospheric pressure equalized.” She turned the wheel, lifted the hatch, and entered the large airlock that segregated the huge detachable holds—each of which had its own airlock—from the crew module. The outer hatches of the four hold airlocks surrounded her: bright red signs gleamed on three of them. DANGER. VACUUM.
The notice beside the hatch to Hold A, however, glowed a less frantic yellow: “Unauthorized entry strictly forbidden.”
All of them were of the standard design, heavy-duty wide spoked wheels in the midst of circular, hinged steel doors. Anyone who could strike the correct combination of numbers into the pad beside the wheel would gain quick entry.
She took a moment to bend her head close to each in turn, before Proboda clambered up from below with his bag of tools. Holds B and D hadn’t been touched in weeks, but Hold A’s keyboard and wheel showed expected signs of handling. So, less expectedly, did Hold C’s.
“A’s the only one that’s locked, Viktor,” as he climbed up beside her. “We’ll have to retrieve the combination later, or force it. Want to look in B? I’ll check out C.”
“Sure,” he said. He punched buttons to pressurize B’s airlock. She latched her helmet and entered Hold C. The ritual of closing the outer hatch behind her, evacuating the lock, and opening the inner hatch to the airless hold—restraining any temptation to impatience—had to be performed carefully. Then she was inside.
It was a steel cylinder as big as a grain silo, dark but for a worklight beside the airlock. In the dim green work-light the metal monsters, each almost six metric tons in mass, stood against the wall like a zaftig chorus line. They were all strongly shackled to the hold’s steel-alloy ribs and stringers. In the shadows they seemed to expand as she approached them, and their compound eyes of diamond seemed to follow her like the eyes in trompe l’oeil portraits.
They were nothing but inert machines, of course. Without their fissile fuel rods, stacked nearby within shi
elding assemblies of graphite, the huge robots could not move a millimeter. Yet Sparta could not deny the impression they made upon her, their segmented titanium bodies made to withstand furnace temperatures, their insectlike legs made for negotiating the most abrupt terrain, their diamond-edged mouth parts and claws made for shredding the most recalcitrant natural matrices…
And those glittering diamond eyes.
As Sparta floated closer to the nearest robot she felt a tingling in her inner ear. She paused a moment before recognizing the effects of latent radioactivity, recognizable by the same sort of induction currents—minute, in this case—that she had feared from the ship’s radiation shield. A glance at the machine’s serial number confirmed that it was the one Sondra Sylvester had had tried at the Salisbury proving grounds three weeks before it was loaded aboard Star Queen.
She cautiously moved past the first robot and inspected the others, one by one, peering at their erect and fearsome heads. All but the first were cold as stones.
Back in the hold access, with the airlock sealed behind her, Sparta waited for Proboda to climb out of Hold D. Apparently he had satisfied himself with whatever he saw in B and had gone on into the remaining vacuum hold while she was still admiring the robots. The top of his head stuck out of the hatch, his helmet looking like an ant’s head. She tapped his blue plastic noggin. “Why don’t you take that thing off?” she said. “The stink won’t kill you.”
He looked at her and twisted the helmet off his head. He got one whiff and his bold Slavic nose wrinkled all the way up into his forehead. “He lived in this for a week,” he said.
She thought maybe the smell gave him a little better appreciation of McNeil, if not more respect for him. “Viktor, I want you to do something for me. It means us splitting up for a few minutes.”
“Before we’re finished in here? We still have to check on McNeil’s story.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve already got the important stuff. I want you to get this evidence to the lab.”
