by Mel Keegan
But Dario’s dark head was shaking. “Wouldn’t make enough difference to be worth it – and the further it stands off, the longer it’ll take Roark and Mid to even get into the Ebrezjim. They’re going to be counting seconds by the time they’re done.”
“Armor, and thorough decontamination afterward,” Tor said grimly, “not just of them, but of the computer core as well. The AI itself is rad shielded, thank gods. The guys? We do the best we can.” He reached for a combug and slipped it into his ear. “Mark, we’re standing by. I’ll open up Decon 2, bring the drones online. Give us vidfeed from the armor, if you don’t mind, Roark.”
The display transferred from the workstations to the navtank. Not five minutes later, they saw a view of the suiting room, and Travers drew together with Marin, Vidal and Rabelais, watching as the jump bay opened to space.
The feed was from Hubler’s helmet camera. Kulich dove out a second before him, kicking off and augmenting that force with several jets from the thruster pack. Both his hands were full of equipment, and more was loaded into every cleat on the armor. Hubler was similarly loaded. Compressed gases streamed away into the blackness of the void, solidifying in the unspeakable cold and snowing back toward Hubler’s camera. They fogged the field of view for a moment before he was through the little snowstorm and racing after Kulich. Dario’s voice said quietly,
“The clock’s ticking, kids. Hustle!”
The wreck raced up fast – much faster than a sled would have made the crossing. Kulich braked down with tiny jets which stripped speed from him, let him tumble over to present the massive armored boots to the ruptured hull. He touched down soundlessly, adeptly. Aragos held him there while he stepped aside to make space for Hubler. Travers leaned forward, intent on the feed as Kulich unloaded his equipment and secured it to the hull. He helped Roark unload before they knelt by the fissure, and Midani dropped a pair of small, fist-sized worklights inside. He was absolutely professional – it was obvious he had done this kind of work many times before.
Dario whispered, “Four minutes.”
Upside down, helmet-first, Hubler fed himself in through the rip in the hull of the old ship, and the visual first blanked and then shifted into a nightmare fantasy of harsh shadows and drifting particulate sleet – ice crystals, some the size of a man’s thumb, others the size of a snowflake, hanging in zero-gee like a thin soup.
“Visuals are going to be dodgy,” Marin observed.
“And instruments aren’t much better.” Travers was peering at sensor data. “It’s sizzling already. No wonder comm’s been so busted up. Roark?”
“We’re in,” Hubler responded. “It’s a swamp in here. Ice, sheeted off the walls, it’s everywhere.”
“Problem, Major?” Rusch wondered.
“Nah. Just gotta be bloody damn’ careful.” Hubler’s voice distorted, broke up, righted itself. “Now, butt out and let us get this done,” he said sharply. “We’re starting to fry – got an eye on instruments, and it’s really fuckin’ nasty in here.”
He was making his way forward from the compartment into which the fissure opened, into the passage and forward to Ebrezjim Ops. The navtank seemed to be full of swirling snow through which the worklights appeared as sun-bright haloes. Visuals were so confusing, Travers looked away, but the sensory feed was dropping out as often as the audio. Drones would be worse than useless. He groaned, turned his back on the tank and looked up at Mark’s shadowed face.
“Have a little faith,” Mark said softly. “Michael tells me Roark Hubler is good, and I know for fact, Midani Kulich is just as skilled. They can do this.”
“But can they do it in time?” Leon Sherratt whispered. “Dario?”
“Six minutes,” Dario said grimly, “and I have no idea where they are or what they’re doing.”
“Christ on a freakin’ bicycle,” Bill Grant grumbled, “here we go a-bloody-gain. I’m going to go crank up the Infirmary. I better get myself into armor. If they come back fried to a crisp, I can start drug and nano therapy right there in Decon 2.”
“Yeah,” Tor said quietly, “I think you’d better.” He had two angles into the decontamination bay framed in a flatscreen, and was already working with a gantry crane, setting up a cradle to receive the salvage. “The AI core can stay in the same hangar while we get it warmed up.”
“How long?” Marin wondered.
“Two, maybe thee days,” Dario judged. “It has to be done slowly. Try to rush it, and it’s all been a waste of time and chromosomes. Then we can get it into the lab, see how much is viable.”
The visual was a mess of distortion. Travers saw bright and dark areas, shapes swimming inside and behind flurries of ice crystals. He thought he could make out a cylindrical something, blue-gray in the weird illumination, but every few seconds the image broke up, pixelized, danced sideways out of the navigation tank, blanked and reloaded. He barely had a chance to register what was before him before it was gone again.
“Seven minutes,” Dario reported. “Roark?” Nothing. He waited for a moment to give the comm time to clear. “Roark, you there?”
“Right here. One o– … –ot – jammed in place but we … –ndby,” Hubler’s voice said levelly.
“Something jammed?” Rabelais echoed.
Travers rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “I’m guessing one of the handling drones froze on.” He looked down into Tor’s clenched face. “Four of them to maneuver it, right? You left ’em grabbed on?”
“Not intentionally,” Tor groaned. “They were told to release.”
“Sounds like three did and one stuck,” Rusch whispered. “Too cold.”
Vidal looked at his chrono, where he was monitoring the elapsed time. “Take a deep breath, guys. Nothing ever goes by the book. They’ll break the drone free – they’ve got time.”
“Lai’a, can you do anything to boost this comm?” Mark asked.
“The comm is already boosted to maximum,” Lai’a said in the same calm tone it would have used to report routine ship data. “Three times, I warned about irradiation from the transspace drive.”
“And we heard you every time,” Dario admitted. “No one’s saying any of this is your responsibility, Lai’a.”
“Do you wish me to commence hyper-Weimann diagnostics?” it asked.
“Yes.” Mark slid a handy out of his pocket and frowned over it. “The moment the AI core is aboard, we’re delaying just long enough to say chelemlal over this tomb, and then we’re leaving.”
“Joss, call Captain Vaurien to Ops.” Travers thrust his hands into the hip pockets of his slacks.
The display in the navtank sheeted out to pure white and when the image reformed it was gray, uniform, no discernable image. “Nine minutes. And the feeds are gone.” Dario sat back and flexed his hands as if they were cramping.
“Gone?” Marin and Rusch echoed, almost at the same moment.
“I’m getting intermittent carrier wave,” Dario told them. “It’s not even enough to carry audio, let alone image or data. Lai’a?”
“Minor energy surges in the transspace drive are blanketing comm with interference,” Lai’a reported. “I am attempting to suppress them.”
“What’s causing them?” For the first time Tonio Teniko spoke up. He was standing out of the lights, hugging himself, and his voice was harsh.
Had Lai’a worked with him before? Travers wondered. The AI seemed to know him. “The energy surges are due to minor fluctuations in the containment fields, Doctor Teniko.”
“How minor?” Teniko insisted, “and caused by what?”
“Fluctuation to 0.008% of optimum,” Lai’a said mildly, “which in no way affects the safety or efficacy of this ship. However, it is certain that the fallout from such containment fluctuations will adversely affect local communications and datastream. I remind you that few experimental simulations were performed featuring crewmen working outside; and never a simulation featuring six hours of accumulated hyper-Weimann irradiation.”
>
Teniko glared at Mark. “No simulation?”
“No time, Tonio,” Mark said in a soft, dark voice. “We ran every simulation we could, until the moment of departure. Most were about navigation – keeping us out of gravity wells that can catch us and hold us in Elarne forever. The remainder were battlefield situations. We can expect to fight. We owe it to ourselves to be ready.”
For a moment it seemed Teniko was about to argue, as if he had been looking for something, anything, where the Resalq in general, and possibly Mark Sherratt in particular, might be found at fault. His mouth had opened to speak when Jazinsky stepped in, a pace ahead of Vaurien. Her voice overrode him completely, and he stepped back into the shadows.
“We’ve been watching this apology for a datastream, Mark,” she said levelly, ignoring Teniko. “Nothing’s happening that we didn’t actually expect. We always knew it’d be one bitch of a job to get the AI core out. We just slightly miscalculated the rate of increase in fallout off the drive.”
“Slightly?” Teniko echoed. “You got your arithmetic just slightly wrong – wrong enough to put human beings into a shitstorm of radiation, with comms gone whacko? What else have you miscalculated?”
She spun on him and clapped her hands to task a glowbot. It dove down where it was needed and Teniko’s dimness brightened. His face creased and he held up a hand as the light found his eyes. His pupils were vast, dark. “The numbers weren’t available to be any more exact,” she snarled. “And you bloody know it, Tonio. You could have done better, with the existing crap data we had? If you’re so goddamn’ clairvoyant, it was your freaking duty to be available, and check my ‘arithmetic,’ and tell me I’d gotten it wrong! You should’ve been where you were needed – and where were you? Skulled out, flying, high as a kite!” She turned her back on him and continued, to Vaurien, “And incidentally, the little ratshit’s dead wrong in any case. The data was too inconsistent. Mark and I ran the forecasts backwards and sideways. We were pretty sure we had a window of at least three more hours than we’re actually getting. Nothing Teniko could have added would’ve changed one damn’ thing.”
Vaurien held up both hands. “It’s all right, Barb. I know how iffy the data was. I asked Lai’a … it couldn’t make any firm estimate either.” As he spoke, Teniko had stepped back into the shadows but his mouth had opened to protest, or fight, and Vaurien angled one finger at him as if it were a gun barrel. “Drop it, kid. One more word, and I’ll ban you from Ops. You got something positive to contribute, play nice … you got nothing, keep the mouth shut.”
Mutinous expressions raced over Teniko’s face, but he was wise enough to be silent. Travers watched him retreat to the shadows, but the too-dark eyes remained on Richard, smoldering with something obsessive. Did Vaurien know he was watched? The taut line of his shoulders said he did, but he ignored Teniko as he skimmed the displays to catch up fast.
The clock counted through twelve minutes while the navtank flashed and stuttered with apparitions which, to Travers, meant nothing. He had just begun to listen to the drum of his own pulse when Lai’a said,
“Doctor Teniko, as you specified, I have located the cause of the fluctuations in the containment field. This region of the Ebrezjim Lagoon is currently experiencing intermittent and very faint charged particle showers, almost certainly emitted by a vessel in the last moments before its drive imploded. My hyper-Weimann containment field is slightly reactive to the particles. I have modified the field frequency, which may lessen or curtail the fluctuations.”
“You should have known the field would react to such a particle shower,” Teniko growled. The indictment was acid.
“Indeed, I should,” Lai’a agreed coolly. “This event has exposed a breach in my operational protocols, which has been repaired.”
“A breach in operational protocols,” Teniko echoed, mimicking the Resalq accent and cadence with brutal accuracy as he glared first at Mark and then at Jazinsky.
Her fists clenched till the knuckles were bone white. She turned to him slowly this time, but before she could speak Mark held up his hand to stop the impending tirade.
“We never claimed to have covered every last potential for incident, much less accident,” he said to Teniko, slow, measured. “Lai’a is not some database of categorized things. It’s growing, and even it must still learn. It learns the way we all do, Tonio, through its own experience and, sometimes, by making mistakes. Had we completed an absolutely exhaustive model of operational protocol, leaving no smallest potential to chance, we’d have been at Alshie’nya another ten months. The Deep Sky doesn’t have so much time. Or,” he added deliberately, bitingly, “we’d have needed another brilliant mind, to whom horizon dynamics and hyper-Weimann physics are poetry and art, to work around the clock alongside the rest of us.”
The condemnation was tacit but bitter. Teniko’s mouth opened to protest and then closed again. Travers discovered his lungs burning and realized he had been holding his breath. He released it as a sigh and met Mark’s wide, golden eyes as the Resalq turned back toward the navtank. “My apologies,” Mark said softly to the entire group. “Many, many times in the last half year, I’ve warned that there were too few of us, too much work, and too little time.”
“I said the same thing, I lost count of how many times.” Jazinsky set a hand on Mark’s arm. “Hey, this is a minor hiccup – they’re the ones that get overlooked. The truth is, you cover all the major cockups because they’re so obvious, they occur to you. Things like this? We’re learning, same as Lai’a.” She angled a hot, dark look at Teniko. “Well, some of us are.”
A flash from the navtank, and the image reappeared, shimmied, stabilized. The angle from Hubler’s helmet camera showed a closeup on a bulkhead, and then a quick upward tilt – right above was the fissure, a black gash in the hull, bleeding cables and broken conduit, half-seen through a whirlwind of ice crystals A blast of static white noise over the comm, and Hubler’s voice said distinctly,
“Get under it, Midani – no, other side. Quick! Catch it on the … yeah, you got it.”
They caught a glimpse of Kulich’s armored figure as he dove under the cylindrical mass to stop it drifting into the deck. “Whattahell happening to that Arago?” Midani huffed.
“It slipped,” Hubler said tersely. “Nothing, and I mean nothing, was ever invented that worked properly in this kinda cold. “Jesus, this whole place is cold as a superconductor coil.” The tone was labored; he was working hard.
“What is this thing, Jeezoh?” Kulich panted, rising back up into the pickup angle of Hubler’s camera. “Catch it! Gotta be turning … no, other way! Right … all got it okay now.”
The cylindrical mass was drifting this way and that. Each time they caught it, they shifted its direction of drift and sent it sailing toward another bulkhead, in a compartment where every wall was dangerously close.
“Shit,” Hubler wheezed, “that was close. Can you see the fissure?”
“Snowing storming.” Kulich paused, muttered in his native tongue. “Further – going on more – going right-right.”
“Sixteen minutes,” Dario warned. “Roark, watch your clock and your rad counters.”
“Can’t go no faster than we’re going,” Hubler growled, “not and get this thing out without beating it up.”
“It’s going to be tight,” Tor began.
“I fuckin’ know that, son!” Hubler snarled with the tone of a drill sergeant. “Standby Decontamination, and we’ll do the best we can.”
“Roark, Doctor Grant will be in armor,” Vidal said quietly.
“Yeah? Well, ’scuse me if I hope it’s a waste of his time and energy.”
“So do I,” Vidal agreed, “but he’ll be there in Decon 2 with you.”
“Well, fuckitall, don’t I feel safer already?” Hubler muttered, and then, “wait right where you are, Midani. I’m going topside. Doc Sherratt?”
“Yes,” Mark and Dario responded in unison. Mark added, “Which?”
&nb
sp; “Either.” Roark was huffing with effort. “I’m gonna sleeve the fissure with a rockwool insulating blanket. We left a winch drone up here, with a spool of cable. The plan is, I’ll drop down a cargo net. When she comes up, she’ll come through slow and steady with Midani underneath, pushing. Anything we oughtta know before we do this thing?”
For a moment Mark, Dario and Tor shared a silent conference before Mark said, “Nothing. You’re on time, on target, Hubler. You can make it back to Lai’a before your clock runs down.”
“Hallelujah. Here I go.” Hubler took an audible breath and bounced up through the rent.
The visual blanked as he went through, before the spectators recognized the eerie, cratered landscape of the Ebrezjim’s hull, and a small drone which had clamped on with Aragos, right by the hull breach that had killed this ship. Hubler did not pause for longer than it took to anchor himself to the surface and tumble over into a head-down attitude, from which he unrolled the layer of rockwool into the fissure.
The fabric was kevlex-titanium gossamer, and smart – Travers knew it well. Emergency services used it to patch hull damage on the fly in small ships, even gunships. It would fill a breach and a few meters of old fashioned duct tape would hold it in place securely enough to repressurize the compartment. He had used the stuff several times in reality and twenty more in simulation, and from the way Hubler handled it, he had done the same.
“Troop transport,” Vidal told him in a murmur. Travers looked over at him, through the wash of the threedee. Vidal’s brows quirked. “Me, Roark, Resa Carson, couple of newbies – coming back from a furlough, just got into the Fleet docks. We’d hitched a ride over from Borushek – the Hydralis militia hit the dock. We took a chunk of shrapnel like a guided missile … picked us up, threw us away. Killed the comm stone dead and chewed a chunk out of the hull.” He nodded into the navtank, where they were watching Hubler’s gauntlets swiftly shoving the rockwool blanket into place. “Quick hands, and we’re here to tell the tale.”
