Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  He hauled Tawny onto his lap. She burrowed in between the Gonzo suit and the chair arm. And he realized why she was doing it: To prevent herself from floating away.

  She pressed her head against him.

  Hutchins’s voice broke through: “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “You’re going to have to put her down.”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “Jake, you don’t have a choice.”

  “Would you be quiet for a minute?” He looked around the cabin. Stared at the bunks. There had to be a way. “Hutch, how close can you get? To the airlock?”

  “With the Copperhead? Maybe eighty meters. The telescope’s in the way.”

  “I know. How about with the lander?”

  “I can slide in a bit closer, but you’ve still got those towers.”

  “You should be able to get within forty, right?”

  She thought about it. “Yes. Why? What difference does it make?”

  “I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.”

  He looked in the compartments. Each bunk had two sheets. He removed them. Then he searched through the cabinets and collected ten more. They were seven feet long, almost three meters crosswise from corner to corner.

  He carried the sheets back into the lounge, folded them, and put them in a pile. “Hutch,” he said. “We might be able to do this.”

  “How?”

  “I’m coming back over. I’ll explain when I get there.”

  He picked up the stack of sheets, opened the inner hatch, and looked back at Tawny. He thought she appeared frightened. But it was probably only his imagination. Amazing how we project our feelings onto pets.

  He closed the hatch, and minutes later stepped out between the towers and the telescope. He took aim at the Copperhead and launched. This time he was off target and had to use the jetpack to home in on his ship’s airlock. Hutch was waiting when he came through into the cabin. Her eyes went wide when she saw the sheets.

  “What’s going on, Jake?”

  He held them out for her. “Here. Take some of these down to the lander.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll be with you in a second. I have to check something.” He went into his own compartment and lifted the padding from the bed. With a zero-gee environment, a bed didn’t really need much padding. He released the clips that held everything together, and lifted the pads. Beneath was a frame. He removed it and carried it out the door.

  Hutch and the sheets were gone. Jake took the bed frame down to the cargo deck, got some cable out of storage, and lashed it vertically to the rounded prow of the lander.

  She watched him, puzzled.

  “Okay,” he said when he’d finished, “we now have a flat nose.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It’s critical.”

  “Why?”

  “Trust me.”

  They added their own sheets to the stack, and tied them together into a line approximately sixty meters long. When they’d finished, he asked Hutch to go up to the galley and get a small piece of the turkey they’d had for dinner the previous evening. She looked surprised and then nodded. “Right,” she said.

  While she was gone, Jake tied one end of the line of sheets to his belt. She came back with the meat wrapped in a cloth napkin. Jake slipped the napkin inside the suit.

  “We ready?” asked Hutch.

  “Good luck to us,” he said.

  She nodded and climbed into the lander. He closed the hatch behind her, put his helmet back on, and started to depressurize the cargo deck. “Hutch,” he said, “can you hear me okay?”

  “I read you fine. Jake, you know this is crazy, right?”

  “Relax. It’ll work.”

  He rolled the line of sheets into a loop so he could carry them, tying the loose end to the right tread. “All set, Hutch,” he said.

  “I’m wondering what they’re going to say to me when I go back with a cat and you’re missing.”

  “I’ll be there, kid. Don’t worry.”

  He took his position on the tread. He thought about the cat, and the comments that Irasco would have if this didn’t work out. Though his mother would think him a hero.

  The green light went on. Depressurization complete. The launch doors opened. “Ready?” asked Hutch,

  “Go,” he said.

  The cradle moved the lander into the open doorway and released the vehicle. Hutch started the engine and eased the vehicle clear of the Copperhead.

  Jake looked over at Oscillation’s long crowded hull. The main telescope overwhelmed everything. They moved slowly in its direction. “Good luck, Jake.”

  The pulses swept across the scope, and across the towers. At their base, the access hatch was lost in churning shadows. “They don’t make it any easier, do they?” he said.

  “The lights?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess.” Her voice had grown cold.

  “Hutch?”

  “Yes, Jake?”

  “Listen, I know you didn’t have to agree to do this. That you feel you’re taking a chance.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I wanted you to know that I’ve logged the fact that you are proceeding under direct orders, and that you’re doing it under protest.”

  She thought a long time before replying. “Thanks, Jake,” she said finally. “I hope it won’t matter.”

  “So do I.”

  He used the jetpack to navigate down between the towers. He drifted in beside the hatch. The line of sheets was still intact, connecting him to the lander, which was floating overhead, not moving. “Perfect,” he told Hutch.

  “Well, yeah. I didn’t want to be dragging you all over the sky, Jake.”

  He opened the outer hatch and entered the lock, still trailing the sheet. He pulled several feet of it in with him, then pressed the section that crossed the entrance as flat as he could and touched the control pad. The inner door slid down. He held his breath, waiting for an alarm lamp to turn on, but it didn’t happen. The sheet had cleared.

  He opened the inner door, and left it open. Tawny was waiting for him. She was perched on the deck, her tail swishing back and forth.

  “You have a pal,” said Hutch.

  “If you think so, you don’t know too much about cats.” He removed the helmet and jetpack and climbed out of the suit. The Gonzo was a back hatch design, meaning it opened in the rear. Jake laid it face down on the deck, leaving it open. Then he picked up the cat. He petted her and, when she seemed perfectly at ease, placed her within the suit. But before he could close the locks she squirmed back out.

  He waited a few minutes, pretending to be at leisure. Then he took the napkin from his pocket, showed Tawny the turkey, and put it down inside the suit, holding it in place with his fingers.

  The cat came back, pushed his hand aside, and began gnawing on one of the pieces. Jake raised the two sides of the suit and, slowly, closed it over her head. She didn’t resist this time. He used the control to lock the sides together. Then, while the cat still showed no sign of resistance inside, he put the helmet on. “Done,” he said.

  “Like a pro,” said Hutch.

  He picked up the suit, leaving the jetpack, and carried it into the airlock. Tawny was moving around inside. “You’ll be out of here in a little while,” he told her.

  He heard something that sounded like a whimper.

  He let go of the suit. Watched it float toward one of the bulkheads. He checked the sheet to reassure himself it was still securely fastened to the belt. Then he withdrew back into the station, closed the inner hatch, and started depressurization.

  Draining the air out of the lock required two and a half minutes. But it seemed much longer. He sat down in one of the chairs and fastened the belt to keep himself from drifting away. He was accustomed to zero-gee. But at the moment he was tired of it.

  He wondered what the conversations had been like in the lounge, whether they’d actually
sat here and talked after a long day. Tawny had belonged to the wife, but he couldn’t remember her name.

  Leia. Lara. Something like that. She’d been good-looking, personable, though he’d not seen much of her. They’d all been working, except Hal, the whole time he’d been here. But Tawny had spent time with Jake and Hal.

  The green lamp blinked on. Procedure complete. He opened the outer door. “Okay, Hutch, she’s all yours.”

  “Underway,” said Hutch.

  He imagined the line of sheets straightening. Pulling the suit out of the airlock.

  “Jake, this is going to take a while.”

  “No hurry.”

  The ship would now be drawing the cat up gradually past the towers. Past the telescope.

  “The NFPA will make you Man of the Year, Jake.”

  “What’s the NFPA?”

  “National Feline Protective Association.”

  “I didn’t know there was any such organization.”

  “Probably isn’t. I’m going to launch it when we get home.”

  “You need a better approach angle,” Benny told Hutch. “I’m going to back off.”

  “Jake,” said Hutch, “You heard?”

  “I heard.”

  “Benny is going to reposition.”

  “How far out will he be?”

  “At about three hundred meters.”

  Tawny was traveling at ten meters per minute. That should be slow enough to avoid damage either to her or to the suit. But it meant that moving the cat to the ship would require a half hour. Well, whatever.

  The air was getting worse, but it would be okay. As long as the operation went according to plan. And after all, what could go wrong?

  Now that everything was out of his hands, he wondered whether he’d lost his mind.

  He wished he’d brought something to read. He decided to try Oscillation’s central library, but he didn’t expect to have any luck with it. The fact that the AI was inoperative suggested it would be down, but that, remarkably, turned out not to be true. He looked through the files and selected Biases by Gregory MacAllister.

  MacAllister was one of Jake’s favorite writers. He didn’t like anyone. He poked fun at college professors, Boy Scouts, clerics, politicians, other writers, pretty much everybody. He thought women were smarter than men, that marriage was a tactic by women to rob men of their independence, and on and on. Jake found almost nothing in MacAllister that he agreed with. But nobody could insult people the way he did. He was the funniest guy on Earth.

  Just what he needed at the moment.

  “We’re one minute from the Copperhead, Jake.”

  “Okay, Hutch. You’re still on target?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry. This is the easy—” She stopped. Hadn’t meant to say that. But it was too late. “—the easy way.”

  It made no sense. She’d been about to say “the easy part.”

  “Good,” he said. “Okay.”

  The Copperhead’s launch doors would be wide open. He could imagine Hutch making her final approach, turning the lander sidewise, and drifting slowly into the launch bay. At the end of the long white tail attached to the right tread, the Gonzo suit would keep coming.

  “Hutch.” Benny’s voice. “It’s a bit high. I’m going to take it up.”

  “Okay, Benny. Whenever you’re ready.”

  Tawny, caught in the confines of the Gonzo suit, was probably not happy.

  “Jake, we have her lined up. She’s coming in fine. The sheets are all over the place.”

  “Don’t worry about the sheets. Just don’t let them get tangled in the launch doors.”

  “Jake, you worry too much.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, here she comes.”

  “She going to be all right?”

  “Right down the middle, Jake.”

  He heard her moving around inside the lander. Then: “Okay, we have her.”

  “Soft landing?”

  “Absolutely.” Then she was talking to the AI: “Okay, Benny, close the doors.”

  “Complying.”

  “Where is she now?” Jake asked.

  “Back near the storage cabinets. I’ll get her as soon as I can.”

  He looked at the cat’s food and water dispensers. He should try to take them back with him.

  “Doors are closed, Jake. Benny, give me some air pressure.”

  “Hutch, can you tell if she’s moving around in there?”

  “The material isn’t exactly flexible, Jake. You could put a moose in there and I don’t think you’d be able to tell.”

  Restoring air pressure in the launch bay normally took only a few minutes. But this time the process seemed to drag on and on. Eventually Hutchins reported that she had a green light. He heard her switch off the Flickinger field, which she’d kept on as a precaution while in the lander. He then heard her go through the lander’s airlock. And finally: “I’ve got her. And she seems to be moving around in there okay.”

  “Don’t let her out in cargo,” Jake said, suddenly aware of what could happen if the cat got loose on the launch deck.

  “Of course not,” she said. More hatches opened and closed. “Okay. I’m in the passenger cabin and am about to release your critter.”

  “Good.”

  He heard the clips let go. Then there was a growl.

  “I don’t think she’s happy,” Hutchins said.

  Hutchins gave her more turkey, and then provided a blob of water. “I’m glad you decided to save her.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “Okay. We ready for phase two?”

  “Yes. By all means. Let’s go.”

  She said, “Back in a little while.” She was apparently talking to Tawny.

  Hutchins returned to the cargo deck. “We lost most of the sheets. A lot of them never made it inside. I had to cut them loose.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We don’t need them now.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Why don’t we need them?”

  “They’d just get in the way. Getting the suit into the airlock over here isn’t like getting it past the launch doors. Keep the sheets tied to the suit and when you deliver it, they’d probably get tangled with the hatch. Then we’d have a problem. Let’s just not worry about it. If the suit bounces off the airlock, all you have to do is chase it down and try again.”

  “Okay. But hang on. I need a minute.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No. I just want to check into the washroom before we do this next round.”

  She needed more than a minute. Or maybe it was just his nerves again. Everything seemed drawn out since he’d sealed himself in the lounge. But the rest of the procedure should be simple enough.

  Hutch would tie five or six sheets together. She’d loop them around the suit, using them to hold it in place against the bed frame that was mounted on the lander’s nose. But she wouldn’t tie the two ends of the sheets to anything on the outside of the lander. Instead, she’d bring them into the vehicle’s airlock, secure one end to the handrail, and leave the other loose, but still keep it inside the lock. Then she’d close the outer hatch.

  He listened to her working.

  “What’s holding things up, Hutch?”

  “Going fast as I can, boss.”

  “The air’s not real good over here.”

  “Hang on. It’ll only be a few more minutes.”

  A few more minutes. What the hell was she doing over there?

  “Okay, Jake,” she said, finally. “We’re ready to go.”

  “About time.”

  She was flicking switches inside the lander. “Benny, depressurize the launch deck.”

  “Decompression begun, Hutch.”

  “It’ll be good to have you back, Jake,” she said. “It gets lonely over here.”

  “You ought to try a couple of hours in this place.”

  While they waited, they made small talk. Hutch asked whether things like this happened very often. (They didn’t.) Jak
e asked why she wanted to be a pilot for the Academy. “You’d make a lot more money hauling cargo for TransWorld.”

  “If I were out for money,” she said, “I’d have gone into banking.”

  “Any other pilots in your family, Hutch?”

  “No. My father’s an astronomer. My mother thinks I’m deranged.”

  “I hope she isn’t right.”

  She laughed. Then Benny broke in: “Decompression complete.”

  “Open the launch doors, Benny.”

  She started the engines.

  The problem with this part of the plan was that they didn’t have enough certainty. Benny would control everything, but he had no way of knowing what the precise arrangement of the Gonzo suit was on the bed frame. But it should work.

  “Okay, Jake. We are approaching Oscillation. Slowly. Barely moving, in fact. I could walk faster.”

  “Okay,” he said. It was the right tactic, but he was tired of waiting.

  “I’m aimed directly at your airlock.”

  “How far out are you?”

  “About two hundred meters. I can see where the airlock is. But it’s hard to get a good look. The outer door is open, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. I just wanted to be sure.”

  The air was becoming increasingly oppressive. The cat had survived here a couple of days, and might have gotten two or three more. But Jake was using more oxygen than Tawny did.

  Benny’s voice: “Hutch, get ready to release the suit.”

  “Whenever you say, Benny.”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  “Okay.” He heard her get out of her seat. “Just a little while longer, Jake.”

  He tried again to look at the MacAllister book. Something about critics going happily berserk over superficial plays. The drum-thumpers, as he called them, were led by Johnson Howard, “who had the brains of a philosophy professor or a backwoods yoyo.”

  “Let it go, Hutch,” said Benny.

  She would be touching the control pad, opening the outer door of the airlock. That would free the loose end of the tied sheets.

  She’d begin to brake. Very slowly. The suit would continue at its present velocity while the lander and the sheets dropped behind. That would leave the suit on course for the airlock.