“On three, pull your other hand back.” Tom was all business. There was no panic in his voice, thank goodness. I was panicking enough for the both of us. “One…two…three!”
I yanked my hand away and it couldn’t have been more than a tenth of a second before he had the patch on. Tom punched in the code on his wristpad that sent the radio signal to trigger a chemical reaction in the patch. In less than a second, the patch was permanently sealed to my suit.
I may have lost most of my suit air before Tom got the rip sealed but, fortunately, my tanks were mostly full when the accident occurred. The suit’s airflow regulator was designed to automatically increase the rate of output to compensate for a loss of pressure, so the lost air was replenished in seconds.
“Thanks, Tom.” My voice was raspy from the cold. “I owe you one. Maybe two.” I held out my right hand and Tom grasped it tightly.
“Hey, no problema, mi amigo. We’re all in this together.” He winked at me. Then he spoke up for the benefit of those listening. “Crisis averted, Shamu. We’re coming home.” Cheers blared from the other end of the radio link as Tom and I turned back toward the pod bay.
I couldn’t have agreed more.
* * * *
“How’s the second set of sims coming, Swede?” Cap inquired. I’d been back aboard Shamu for twenty minutes and we were in Engineering. Sure, I would rather have settled my nerves with a shot or three of Scotch, but we had neither the booze nor the time to waste.
“Not so good. I’ve been through dozens of scenarios with the computer so far. We fall short in every one of them. But some get us a lot closer to what we need than others, so there’s still a chance I’ll find a combination that’ll get us there in time. Working around this unbalanced thrust is a bitch, though.”
I was feeling a lot better at this point. My only injury was a bit of “freezer burn” where my wrist was exposed to near vacuum. That was easily remedied with a salve that Guido provided.
“Keep on it. We have to pick one of the scenarios soon, while we’re still far enough away from the asteroid for it to matter.”
“I know, Cap. I’m almost out of combinations to try. I’ll know something in another ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Good. Keep me apprised.”
Trying to fly a ship with three thrusters is harder than it sounds. The two existing thrusters were on the port and starboard sides of the ship. If they were “east” and “west”, the third was to be installed in the “north” compass position. Fortunately the thrusters were omnidirectional. This allowed us to aim them as required to compensate for the missing “south” thruster. If necessary, they could even pivot continuously to make adjustments on-the-fly. Or the thrusters could be set to pulse in a rotating sequence, each burn being of a different duration to compensate—whatever it would take to come up with the optimum flight plan.
We needed to determine which option gained us the most speed—ideally without consuming all the fuel. If we did get out of this alive, we wanted to have enough fuel left over to be able to continue prospecting. If we headed home with our tails between our legs we knew we’d never hear the end of it from the other spacers. That concern, naturally, was secondary to simply surviving.
To complicate matters, the two original drives would already be running at full thrust when the third came online. I knew that if we simply turned it on full, two things might happen: 1) the sudden shear-force could tear the temporary mount from the ship, and with it the thruster and our hopes for survival; or 2) the ship would instantly be thrown off course by the unbalanced thrust. That would require more time and fuel to get back on course.
Controlling continually variable thrust for three separate engines is a task best left to computers. We needed to know ahead of time how to throttle down the other two thrusters to compensate for the third as we gradually brought it up to speed. The sims would provide the best thruster settings for the autopilot to follow.
At first glance, it might appear that adding a third thruster would increase our speed by fifty percent. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. If Shamu had been designed to support three evenly spaced thrusters, the third one would have increased our acceleration by fifty percent, which might eventually have translated into a fifty percent speed increase—if we had enough fuel and time.
But the ship wasn’t designed to operate that way, and it was likely the temporary hardpoint wouldn’t be up to the stresses of a thruster running at full power. So we were going to have to throttle back all three thrusters, or only fire them intermittently. This meant we’d get less than full acceleration out of the thrusters. It was likely that we wouldn’t be able to average the 107.2 KPH we needed to reach the asteroid in time. But, we’d be a lot closer to it than if we stayed with only two thrusters.
These were all problems that we had to solve in the sims before we could use the third thruster. On the other hand, we couldn’t take forever running every possible sim. The longer we waited before we lit thruster number three, the less time we’d have to take advantage of it.
No matter what we did, it looked like it would be a close call whether we could get to the asteroid, extract enough hematite, and process it before we ran out of oxygen.
Cap had Sparks tie a counter into the sensors, to give us a running estimate of the time remaining until all oxygen was depleted, including our suit tanks. (Tom and I had topped off our suit tanks when we returned to the ship.)
Every console display had blinking red numbers ticking off the hours, minutes, and seconds left in our lives. They were supposed to keep us focused, but as I waited for the computer to finish processing the sims, I found myself staring at the flashing numbers for minutes at a time, mesmerized.
61:14:02. Sixty-one hours, fourteen minutes, and two seconds. Did the two seconds really matter? It appeared we’d find out in another sixty-one hours and fourteen minutes.
CHAPTER 6
60:43:50
The ship was on autopilot, steaming full speed ahead for the asteroid—well, okay, crawling—programmed with all the parameters for thrust and firing sequence that came out of the sims.
“Cap, we might just make it!” Sparks said. Cap had just arrived in Engineering to check on our progress. “The guys did a great job building and mounting the hardpoint. The stresses are less than what we programmed into the sims. We should be able to eke a tad more power out of the thrusters without shaking ourselves to pieces.”
“That’s welcome news. How much more?”
“Swede? What are the latest numbers?” Sparks turned in my direction.
“Assuming everything holds together for the entire trip, it looks like we can manage 119.6 KPH the rest of the way.”
“That’s great!” Cap replied. “But is it enough?”
“It’s still too close to call,” I said. “Because of the hours it took to get everything assembled, installed and running, it looks like the best average speed we can manage for the entire trip is 107.0 KPH. Almost the 107.2 we were trying for, but not quite.”
“That’s a darn sight better than what we were looking at before. How much time will that point-two shortfall cost us?”
I paused to calculate. “Best estimate is about 36 minutes.”
“Bollox! We need to find a way to make up that time somehow. That 64-hour estimate was a worst-case scenario!” Cap snapped at no one in particular. “We’ll be on suit tanks by then and it’ll be hours after that before we get the ore refined to release the oxygen. Either we need to goose the thrusters to give us a bit more speed or we have to find a way to speed up the extraction process on the asteroid or the refining process. We will not be defeated by 36 minutes of oxygen!” Cap grimaced and shook his head in frustration. “There just has to be a solution.”
* * * *
60:07:21
The thrusters were still going, but without the starflight drive running, and without the ever-present gurgles, whooshes and other assorted sounds a functioning life support system normally
makes, it was eerily quiet aboard ship. I gradually became aware that the crew seemed unconsciously to be trying to fill the void. Wherever I turned, I heard Guido humming or Sparks drumming his fingers or Tom singing softly to himself. I must admit, I caught myself doing much the same from time to time.
A ship as old as Shamu is prone to various creaks and groans. They mostly go unnoticed under normal circumstances. But now they began to sound like the moans of a wounded animal. I know it sounds silly, but after awhile a ship begins to take on a personality unlike that of any other. Her crew learns her every foible: which hatches stick, how to coax a balky valve by smacking it in just the right place, the rumble in the shower a split second before the hot water is replaced by an icy blast when someone flushes—and all the other things that made Shamu unique. In many ways, a ship begins to seem like another member of the crew. As RCO, I did most of the engine repairs, and when Shamu was ailing I got as antsy as a parent nursing a sick child.
As odd as it sounds, I wondered what would become of her if we all died in the next sixty hours.
I was growing maudlin. I knew I had to find something constructive to do before I started singing the blues. That wouldn’t have been good for morale—I can’t carry a tune in two buckets, let alone one.
* * * *
56:18:59
The hours seemed on one hand to drag on interminably, as we worried whether we’d reach the asteroid in time. Yet, perversely, the closer we got to what might be the last few hours of our lives, the faster the minutes flew by. I had a hard time concentrating on the refinery procedures I had to work out. They were critical to keeping us alive, but I kept being distracted by thoughts of suffocating to death only minutes before the life-saving oxygen began to flow from the refinery. One minute I was racing to get everything done in time and the next I was drained of any will to continue, telling myself that it was all a colossal waste of time and we were going to die no matter what.
Of course, somehow the good guys always manage to win in the end—don’t they? At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.
* * * *
47:14:23
Guido was still hard at work on the scrubber. Sparks and Tom were busy repairing one of the pods. Without it we wouldn’t be able to get the extractor down to the asteroid in time to do us any good. On the other hand, there was nothing Cap and I could do to help them. It was mainly a matter of waiting for the fabricator to finish making the next part and then installing it.
As it was, all of us but Guido had a lot of time on our hands. Cap had virtually nothing to do but sit in the pilot’s chair and watch for debris in our path. (He had the sensors tuned to their maximum sensitivity, to give us an extra few seconds warning and the best chance to lumber out of the way of a speeding rock.) I was down to minor tweaking of the refinery, yet there were still nearly two days left before we could do anything more to save ourselves. We tried watching holos to fill the time, but we were too jittery to sit still for long. Likewise, reading was impossible. So, mainly we fiddled with gear that didn’t need it, just to stay busy.
Finally, Tom and Sparks had had enough of sitting and waiting. Tom was the first to speak. “Guido, is there anything we can do to help?”
“Yeah,” Sparks added, “If you need a second—”
“Or third—”
“…pair of hands, we’d be glad to help. There must be something you need help with.”
“You want to help?” Guido asked.
“Yeah,” Tom replied.
“You really want to help?”
“Yes, damn it, we really want to help!”
“Good. Then get the hell out of my face and let me do my job! I’ll be done that much sooner.”
Yeah, we were a close-knit crew.
* * * *
39:22:30
That night I dreamt of Helga. We were walking along the lake near her flat, holding hands and talking. I turned to caress her strawberry-blonde hair and give her a kiss, when suddenly we were wearing EVA suits.
She began gasping for air and pleading for me to help her, but there was nothing I could do. I was out of air myself and suffocating. I looked up and there was an air canister, floating on an asteroid orbiting overhead. I jumped and jumped, but no matter how high I leaped the asteroid was always just out of reach.
Helga’s lips gradually turned blue. I kissed them one last time when our EVA suits vanished, and then she died in my arms.
I awoke drenched in a cold sweat, my heart pounding. There was no hope of getting back to sleep. But that was fine with me. Another…what?…thirty-nine hours?, and I’d have all the sleep I wanted—and then some.
* * * *
34:38:56
“Everyone hang on, we’re about to begin decelerating,” Cap announced over the intercom.
The jolt, with its accompanying creaks and groans were more pronounced this time than when we first fired up the thrusters to accelerate, but the result was the same. Shamu came through it like a champ.
Another advantage of omnidirectional thrusters was that we were spared the complication of having to flip the ship to decelerate. They worked just as well with the ship facing forward, and it simplified traversing the asteroid belt. As tricky as maneuvering through a belt can be under normal circumstances, imagine trying it flying backwards!
“We’re halfway there, gentlemen,” Cap continued. “We’re still alive and kicking. Have faith in the Man Upstairs. Or if you can’t manage that, have faith in each other. Together we will make it!”
* * * *
28:44:18
We’d been decelerating for hours and Tom was wearing a groove in the durasteel deck in Engineering, molecule by molecule, from pacing. He couldn’t seem to sit still anymore, violating Guido’s admonition that everyone conserve oxygen: “Don’t walk or talk unless you have to. Don’t sit or stand if you can lie down. Relax as much as possible. Sleep if you can.” But relaxing was the hardest thing of all.
“It feels perverse to be slowing down when my gut tells me we should be speeding up to reach the asteroid faster,” Tom muttered.
“I know what you mean,” I replied. “Unfortunately, physics disagrees with your gut. It won’t do us any good to get there sooner if we just shoot past the ‘roid instead of stopping.”
Tom nodded. “I know, I know. My head understands, but tell that to my stomach. Even if we survive this, I don’t think I’ll have any stomach lining left.”
“You and me both, brother.”
* * * *
24:02:00
One day of life left. Was this how someone on Death Row feels? My stomach was doing flip-flops and my hands trembled because I had nothing to do to keep them busy. Like condemned inmates, we faced certain death in twenty-four hours unless someone came through with a reprieve. In this case, it wasn’t a phone call we were waiting for, but a metallic asteroid, of all things, thousands of kilometers away. Observed on the holoscreen, it looked close enough to touch—almost like in my nightmare, but forever just out of reach. It seemed ridiculous that a misshapen lump of rock should hold five men’s lives in its figurative hands.
With the pod still inoperable, would we be able to do anything with the asteroid once we arrived? Would Tom and Sparks have the pod ready in time?
This would certainly be a story to tell Helga—if I lived through it.
* * * *
19:29:22
I called the bridge. “Cap, the refinery’s as ready as it’s gonna get.”
“Good work, Swede. We’ll take it from here.”
At that point, all I could do was sit on my hands and wait. That was the worst part of all this. If we were going to die, I would have much preferred to get it over with quickly. The endless waiting and worrying were going to kill me before the lack of oxygen did.
Meanwhile, the air grew fouler by the minute. Carbon dioxide levels were increasing, none of us were bathing, air circulation with only the generator running was minimal, and oxygen levels were being depleted. N
ormal shallow breaths were no longer enough to get sufficient oxygen. That required deeper-than-normal breathing, which in turn required a conscious effort. As a result, we all had a constant pounding headache.
* * * *
17:04:01
The five of us grabbed a quick bite to eat in the Commons while we reviewed our status. Forget keeping to a day/night cycle or sleeping. We were up until we got some fresh air or died trying.
“Guido,” Cap asked, “How’s the scrubber coming?”
“It’s trickier than I expected, but I think I’ve nearly got it figured out. We didn’t have all the materials I needed, so I’ve had to improvise. It shouldn’t be more than a few hours, as long as I don’t hit any more snags.”
“Good. Keep work—”
Everything went black. Not nighttime black, which is moderated by starlight and maybe streetlights in the distance. This was sealed-inside-a-tomb black. This was claustrophobia-inducing black. This was we’re-all-gonna-die black. The cessation of the air circulators and other equipment suddenly made the Commons as silent as a tomb, too.
A moment later our helmet lights came on automatically and illuminated five frightened faces.
“Hell,” Sparks growled. “Now what?”
“The generator!” I shouted, wide-eyed, and took off for Engineering. With the starflight drive out, the generator was all that stood between us and death. Never mind the lights—the generator powered the heaters that kept us from freezing to death and the computers that controlled the thrusters that were decelerating the ship. When Guido finished his air scrubber, it too would be powered by the generator.
“Go help him, Sparks!” I heard Cap call behind me.
The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative Page 39
