Asimov's Science Fiction 12/01/10

by Dell Magazines

  =Moya radost, you know this isn’t what I wanted for us.= Natalya Volochkova was seated in a plastic chair in a spare room that was clearly not at their home in Haworth. The focus was tight, the light harsh. Mariska tried to zoom out but the feed refused her command. There was a stale papery smell to the room that made Mariska think that she might be looking at a museum or a library. Some kind of storage area. “You think you are doing what is right. Maybe, but where you are now is not where you will be when you grow up.”

  “I am grown up!” Of course, her mother couldn’t hear her.

  =I know you have been suffering, but things will get better.= There was a weight to her voice that Mariska had never heard before. =I promise.=

  “Just stop your interfering, bitch.”

  =I’m on Mars just now, but I won’t be staying. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’re commissioning a new starship, the Natividad.=

  Mariska felt her throat tightening.

  =It’s been more than a year since I’ve heard anything from you. I write, you are silent. At least I know that you are safe. I’m sorry if you’re unhappy.= She was shocked to see her mother’s eyes shine with tears. =I wish I knew what you’re thinking just now. But if you really want me out of your life, then I must accept that. I’ve been offered a place on the Natividad. I had hoped to bring you with me, but ...=

  “Go then.” Mariska closed her mind. The bare room and her sad mother disappeared. “Leave.” She deleted the feed.

  Mariska tried to relax into the delicate embrace of her closet’s sleep net but her thoughts kept tumbling over one another. Mariska wondered at how little she understood herself. This was exactly what she wanted. Natalya Volochkova was finally leaving her alone.

  So why did she feel betrayed?

  Glint’s scream shook the walls of Galley fifteen meters away. Mariska choked on a mouthful of butterscotch pudding. When she poked her head out of the hatch Beep almost tore it off as he shot upspine toward Command. She followed at a distance. Ahead she saw Richard desperately trying to pull Glint downspine. Glint flailed at him like a drowning swimmer.

  “What?” Beep shouted over her shrieking.

  “Seda ... tive,” said Richard. Glint spun in his grasp and they crashed against the deck of the spine. “Ooof. Glint, no.”

  “What?” said Beep.

  “Something about the ice.”

  It was a measure of Glint’s panic that she gave musclebound Richard all he could handle. But when he finally yanked her arms behind her back, she slumped forward. Her screams melted into sobs.

  “You.” Beep pushed Mariska at them. “Help.” He flew into Command.

  They wrangled her downspine to Health and strapped her to an examining table. Richard tried to comfort her while Mariska tapped at the med rack and charged a face mask with somapal. When Richard pressed it to her nose and mouth, Glint groaned and went limp.

  They stared at each other across the table. Richard was breathing hard enough for three people.

  “What about the ice?” said Mariska.

  “Don’t know.” He shook his head. “There wasn’t time.”

  “Let’s find out.” He followed her out.

  “Where?” Beep muttered to himself as his fingers danced over screens on the cargo rack. “Where, where, where?” He was barefoot and held himself still by curling his toes into the deck burrs. His hair was mussed. He looked like he had just woken up; she thought he might be twisted. “Damn it, where?” Mariska had never noticed how long Beep’s toes were. There was fine black hair on the joints.

  He stabbed at the rack. The screens that had been showing Banana’s view switched to Eye flying next to the Shining Legend. He panned up and down the ship. Mariska gasped when Eye looked past the porch on Storage D, where their reserves of treated ice were supposed to be.

  It was empty. Behind her, Richard made a strangled noise.

  “Come on. Where?” Now Beep turned Eye away from the ship to scan the nearby space.

  Mariska tore herself away from cargo to access the nav rack. “Time cluster,” she said.

  It was 04:33:04 on 15 July 2163. The mission was in its three hundred and nineteenth standard day. The ship had completed its mid-course switchover from acceleration and was now seven days, two hours, and eleven minutes into deceleration toward home. Acquisition of the approach signal for Sweetspot station would occur in one hundred and five days, eighteen hours, and twenty-one minutes.

  “There.”

  The ship’s reaction mass reserves of hydrogen would permit braking for just sixty-eight more days. The inventory of ice finished updating. It would be sufficient for forty-seven days of oxygen renewal. The screen began to flash red.

  Eyes wide with terror, Mariska glanced across Command at Eye’s view. Two blue-white blocks the size of lunar rovers were tumbling sedately away from them toward the blaze of stars.

  “The problem isn’t fuel,” said Mariska. “If they start a ship soon enough, it can match trajectories with us. Then we offload some replacement ice and finish our deceleration.”

  “Except there won’t be any we.” Glint looked hollow. “We’ll suffocate by then.”

  “Not necessarily.” Richard was trying to convince himself. “Not at all.”

  “We’ve got tons of ice back in the buckets,” said Didit. “Asteroid ice. Tons.”

  The four of them had gathered in Wardroom C while Beep was in Command talking to experts at Sweetspot station. No one wanted to be alone, but being together and seeing how scared they all were made waiting for Beep an agony. There were long silences, punctuated either by hopeful declarations or sniffles. They all cried some, Glint the most. Mariska was surprised at how little she cried. She was sure she was going to die.

  “Such an idiot,” Glint rubbed the heels of her hands against her temples. “The stupidest damn stupidhead in all of space.”

  Didit poked her listlessly. “Shut up, Glint.”

  “It’s my fault too,” said Richard, not for the first time. “Should’ve been watching you. That’s what backup is for. More eyes, no surprise.”

  Twenty hours before, while retrieving a block of treated ice, Glint had bumped the the Cherry crawler against the side of the open airlock. The ship’s computers had interpreted this as a potential failure and had triggered lockdown protocol. Glint hadn't wanted yet another screwup on her record, so she had gunned Cherry into the airlock just before the doors slid shut. Once it was safely inside, she had canceled the lockdown. It was, after all, a false alarm. The shipbrain would still record the incident, but an anomaly without consequences wouldn’t get Glint in any trouble.

  Only now the consequences were dire. Normally, Glint would have instructed Cherry just to drop the ice and leave the airlock. Then, after checking that the primary ice restraints on the storage porch had re-engaged, it would have resumed its automated search for micrometeorite damage. But the crawler was on the wrong side of the doors and its restraint routine had been interrupted by the lockdown. This wouldn’t have been a problem had not the secondary restraint, a sheet of nanofabric that covered the ice reserves, failed. The two remaining blocks had somehow nudged out from underneath and taken off. Simulations showed that some kind of vibration could have set the ice in motion. On a ship as old as the Shining Legend, shakes and rattles were to be expected.

  Mariska guessed that the ice had come loose when Richard banged the weight machine against the wall of Rec. From the way he avoided her gaze, she guessed he thought so too. Was that why he kept apologizing for leaving Glint to fetch the ice?

  What everyone was wondering, although no one dared say it aloud yet, was how Beep could have let Glint trash the safety protocols so totally. He’d told Richard that he’d watch her. Had he had his nose in a sniffer?

  “Here it is,” said Mariska. “That data feed I was looking for.”

  =Untreated water is a poor conductor of electricity, impeding the reaction in electrolytic cells so that the dissociation of hydrogen and o
xygen occurs very slowly. Typically the addition of salt electrolytes will increase the conductivity of water as much as a millionfold. Using water treated for enhanced conductivity enables SinoStar’s advanced electrolytic cells to achieve efficiencies of between 50 percent and 70 percent=

  “So salt.” Didit brightened. “We get ice from the buckets and just add salt.”

  “We don’t have that kind of salt,” Glint said wearily. “And we sure as hell don’t have enough of it.”

  “Hey, all the feed said was that the cells would be slow.” Didit wasn’t giving up. “Slow is better than nothing.” She looked to Mariska for confirmation.

  “Plus raw asteroid ice is full of dust and crap. It’ll just clog the cells.” Glint’s chin quivered but she held the tears back. “Face it, we’re slagged.”

  “Shut up, Glint.”

  “There’s a way,” said Richard. “There has got to be a way.”

  Nobody bothered to agree or disagree. The silence stretched.

  “Buck up, monkeys.” Beep appeared at the hatchway. “We haven’t fallen out of our tree yet. Everyone up to Command and I’ll tell you the plan.”

  The word plan seemed to lift the four teenagers. Didit reached over and gave Glint’s hair a sisterly pull. “Told you.” As they followed him upspine, Mariska caught herself grinning with relief. The brains at Sweetspot must have seen something she hadn’t.

  Beep waited until they had settled themselves around the cargo rack. One of the screens showed Banana crawler parked in front of Storage D. “So we use the crawlers to fetch raw ice from the buckets. We chip off chunks and boil all the impurities out.”

  Mariska knew that couldn’t be right. “How do we do that?” she said. “We have no way to capture—”

  “Volochkova, did I ask you to speak?”

  “No.”

  “No, what?” His voice was cutting.

  “No, sir.” She noticed that the skin of his face seemed stretched too tight.

  “Leave your ignorance in your pockets. All of you.” He let rebuke hang in the air for a long moment. “Next we start collecting leftover salts from the electrolytic cells and stop dumping the stuff into space. We add it to the purified water we’re going to make. They’re telling me that using fresh water slows down the electrolytic cells. It’s like watching toenails grow.”

  “We know that,” said Didit. “Mariska found a feed.”

  “We’ve got enough treated ice ...” he glanced over at the nav rack. “... for forty-seven days. Let’s see how much salt we can save by then. Okay, monkeys? Trouble is knocking but we’re not letting it in. I’ll suit up and ride Banana back to the buckets.

  “While the reactor is at cruising power?” Too late, Mariska realized that she had spoken without permission. This time Beep was more forgiving.

  “I’ve damped it down.” He nodded at the energy rack. “Besides, how else am I going to sort ice from ore?” His grin was bleak. “But thanks for your concern, young Volochkova. I do realize that radiation isn’t my friend.” Didit laughed nervously. The others glared at Mariska as if she were trying to kill them: They were fine with letting Beep risk the exposure. After all, he was senior monkey.

  “So, FiveFord and Glint, get Apple and Cherry started for the porch. Didit, lower the air pressure in the airlock to four tenths of a bar.” He pushed off and floated over them. “Young Volochkova, you come with me to Service and help prep the suit. That way you can wash all those worries about my safety.”

  On their way downspine, Beep caught himself at the hatch to Wardroom A. “I need my coolwear.” He waved her on. “Power my suit up and start the checklist. I’ll be down in two kicks.”

  There were a dozen spacesuits bungeed to the walls of Service. Most of them hadn’t been touched in years. As part of their cargo chores, however, Glint and Richard had powered five of them up regularly during the run to make sure they still worked. They were all low pressure, which meant Beep needed to prebreathe oxygen before the spacewalk to keep from getting the bends. Since Beep had been aboard the Shining Legend for more than a decade, he had a custom-fitted suit. Mariska opened it, plugged its battery cord into the fastcharge outlet, and started its power-on self test. She was moving through the rest of the checklist when Beep flew in.

  He had the hood of his coolwear pulled back, but otherwise it covered his entire body. The white of the fabric made the deep flush on Beep’s face stand out. When Richard exerted himself, he just turned red. Beep was practically purple and was sucking in huge gulps of air.

  Mariska could see beads of sweat at his hairline. “Beep,” she said, “tell me you’re not high.”

  “Borrowing some courage is all.” He landed in front of the oxygen bar. “And don’t be warming my ears about it.” He clapped the mask over his face, and glared at her.

  Back in Command, she had suspected that something was wrong with him. Now she was certain of it. But there was nothing she could do, so she went back to the checklist. After fifteen minutes, he pulled the mask away and thrust the override card at her. “Hold this while I suit up.”

  She took it and he raised his arms. Mariska grasped his waist. She could feel the pulse of the coolant in his coolwear, which was designed to keep the spacesuit from overheating. She raised him over her head and jiggled him through the suit’s opening.

  He fitted his arms into the sleeves but then paused. “How many oxygen bottles do I have?”

  “Two,” she said. “Checklist calls for two, primary and backup.” She didn’t understand why he was asking. Two four-thousand cubic centimeter bottles had been the standard design spec since before she was born.

  “How many are left?”

  She shrugged.

  “Go look.”

  Mystified, she opened the locker, counted thirty-seven filled and fourteen empty bottles. She reported this.

  “Worth knowing.” He finished sealing himself into the suit. “Worth remembering. So, let’s dance.”

  She handed him his helmet to carry, unbungeed him from the wall, and tugged on the suit’s tether. He bobbed behind her like a man-sized balloon as she pulled him downspine to Storage D.

  The air was already thinning in the airlock and it felt colder than it actually was. Beep turned on his boot magnets, enabling him to stand upright in front of her. She was expecting him to fit the helmet onto the suit’s collar so she could lock it down. He surprised her.

  “Not yet, young Volochkova. Time for a quick chat. You have the override?”

  She offered it to him. He shook his head.

  “I’m leaving it with you for now. That means you’re in charge in case anything spills. I am thinking that you can make the hard decisions. At least, Natalya could.”

  Mariska wasn’t her mother; for some reason Beep still wouldn’t accept that. “But Richard is senior to me. And Glint ...”

  He snorted. “FiveFord could drown in a glass of water. He should go back to Earth and dig holes with all those muscles. Only he’d probably fall in. And Glint ... poor Glint is broken.” He pointed at the override. “You show them the override and tell them I said.”

  “What is this, Beep?” She tucked it into the pocket of her coverall.

  “This?” He smirked. “Just a little walk. La-la-la. But before I go ... Remember the fakes I showed you? Ah, I thought you might. So that was just a little joke. The fakes never existed, or at least, you saw all there was of them. All that I made.”

  “You?”

  “I like to stir the soup, Natalya.” His laugh had a chemical edge. “The runs are so damn long, too damn boring. Hard to stay interested. So we play tricks. It’s tradition, how bucket monkeys keep from going crazy.”

  Mariska felt suddenly dizzy in the thin air, afraid to say what she was thinking. “Why tell me this now?”

  “I’d say it was conscience, if I had one.” His mouth tightened. He raised the helmet over his head and stared into it. “Time to go.”

  “Wait.” She caught at the front of his sui
t. “That was a lie about the raw ice, wasn’t it? And the leftover salt—that can’t possibly work. And you—you’re going to get a crazy dose of radiation....”

  “One less mouth to breathe.” Beep stuck his chin out at her. “You’ll know what to do when the time comes.” He lowered the helmet onto his head. She wanted to hammer on it, get him to stop, make all of this go away. Instead she locked it to his suit.

  By the time she got back to Command, Beep had already turned Banana downspine and was accelerating toward the buckets. The others watched the screen that showed the crawler’s camera, but Mariska was fixed on the overview that the Eye saw.

  “He’s going kind of fast.” Richard was beginning to suspect what Mariska already knew.

  “Then tell him to slow down,” said Didit.

  Beep must have turned his boot magnets off. On the Eye, she saw that they had come off the racing crawler and his only contact was the joystick which he grasped with both hands. His legs swung upward relative to the surface of the ship until he was upside down. He looked like a gymnast doing a handstand as the crawler hurtled toward the buckets.

  “Call him,” said Richard. “Glint?”

  “Doesn’t work.”

  “It’s dead. He must have disabled it.”

  Glint’s hand trembled as she pointed at the Eye’s screen. Didit was sobbing.

  “Override it.”

  “With what?”

  “Stop him.”

  At the exact moment the crawler crashed into the bucket, Beep released his hold. His momentum flung him clear of the Shining Legend, tumbling helmet over boot.

  They watched as he applied gas thrusters to correct his wild rotation.

  They watched him spread his arms to embrace the darkness as he shot away from the ship.

  They watched in shock as he faded to a speck of space debris and was gone.

  “Still, you could have stopped him,” said Richard.