The scanner in Desai’s hand shed green light on Will’s crushed arm, piercing the skinsuit and displaying the injury overhead. Desai gave up on trying to eject Rahiti from the cubicle and instead spoke quickly into a transcriber. Rahiti didn’t understand all the words – distal radius, proximal something, perfusion? The med tech watched with frank interest from a corner.
Desai put a patch on Will’s shoulder. “Here’s the really good stuff. When it kicks in, you won’t feel anything below your shoulder for twelve hours or so. Surgery’s up next.”
“Surgery?” Rahiti asked, the word a rock in his throat. “How long?”
Will protested, “I can’t have surgery. We’re leaving in an hour. Driving to NPS.”
The med tech blurted out, “That’s you? The Crazy Samoan?”
Rahiti’s face flushed. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Anumati!” Desai said sternly. The girl looked away. Desai said, “The surgery will take an hour or two, then we have to monitor the perfusion to make certain you don’t lose your arm. You’ll be in a splint for at least three weeks. No skinsuits.”
Will banged his head against the exam table. “I’m sorry, Ra. Damn.”
Rahiti didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t quite sure what he felt, either, except that it was a lot like free-fall, sickening and plunging with no end in sight.
“It’s okay,” he said, in a voice that sounded as distant as Javinta on her beach. “I’ll do it alone.”
“You better do it soon,” Desai said. Her gaze was focused solely on her patient. “An accident like this means an incident report. The safety team’s going to want to interview any witnesses. That could take all day.”
Rahiti’s free-fall came to a sudden slamming halt.
“If I were you,” she continued, “I might think about leaving here through the freight lift. Take a right over there, second hatch.”
Rahiti didn’t thank her. He didn’t even say goodbye to Will, or wish him luck. When he was inside the lift, black rage rose up and made him kick the bulkhead. Damn, damn, damn. Hundreds of hours of planning, thousands of hours of worrying, his tiny living cube overflowing with schedules, maps and supply lists, and he’d never considered what he would do if his co-driver got himself crushed by a crate.
Just before the doors closed, Anu slid her boot between them.
“I can help you,” she announced. “Take me.”
Rahiti didn’t even stop to think about his reply. “Absolutely not.”
She gave him a pleading look. “My boyfriend works at NPS. We’ve been z-mailing for months. I left college to come out here to see him, but I ran out of money. You need someone to help you on this trip, and I can do it.”
He kicked her foot free. “I don’t need you.”
The lift doors slid closed, blocking her unhappy face.
When he reached the interior docks, he saw two people in Asterius white-and-red safety suits talking to Hal Carpenter, that son of a bitch. Carpenter had a direct line-of-sight on the flex tunnel leading to his snowcat. But Rahiti still had his skinsuit on, still had his helmet. He could go out the aux lock, come up underneath the cat, board out of sight of the cameras. More precious time ticking on the clock. He backtracked, got his helmet on, and went downladder to the auxiliary locks. The minute he opened one, Carpenter would notice. He needed some kind of diversion –
A shrill alarm cut through his headset. Fire drill. Rahiti winced and slapped at the volume and thanked whoever had probably set the thing off by accident.
Outside, approaching the cat with two easy bounds, he eyed the extra tanks carrying hydrogen and oxygen for the fuel cells. The vehicle looked ungainly with all the added weight, but they were necessary for the trip up and back, and for extra mass to give more weight and traction. The dozen sleds lined up behind the cat were twice as many as Rahiti had ever hauled before. Without the extra weight, his treads would spin uselessly on the ice instead of pulling the load.
Crazy plan, yeah. But he’d done the math a dozen times, had convinced himself that the loaded cat could drag three thousand tons of payload, and had won the contract fair and square.
He had eighty-five hours – one Europa day – to either earn five years’ pay or put himself into horrible debt, probably forever.
Rahiti climbed into the cat’s cabin. The thunk of the airlock closing was like the last drop of a guillotine blade. As the fuel cells powered up, the triple beams of the headlights cut across Europa’s bleak landscape. He tapped Javinta’s picture, mounted below the radio. Her smile was sweet and shy, her dimples deep enough to fall into.
“Wish me luck,” he said. And then, over the radio, he said, “Snowcat 89-4A, checklist complete, I’m leaving for NPS.”
Carpenter’s voice was slow and lazy. “Oh, that’s a negative, 89-A. You’ve got some folks here from Safety who need to talk to you about your partner’s accident.”
“I already recorded my statement,” Rahiti said. “It’s in their z-box. Asterius regulation 1732.a, a video statement can suffice for personnel not in the immediate vicinity.”
A pause. “But you are in the immediate vicinity, Ochoa. I’m looking at you through my window.”
Rahiti resisted the urge to lift his hand and give Carpenter an obscene gesture.
“Asterius regulation 1732.a (3), no definition provided for ‘immediate,’” he said. “Wish us luck. 89 out.”
His contract was with Asterius, but he’d had to rent everything except the cargo from his own employer, Orbital. Part of the contract was that Orbital could distribute footage once the operation was completed. The bastards didn’t want him to succeed, but they’d certainly exploit him if he did. Rahiti ran the cells up to maximum, generating excess water that vented as steam through the top of the snowcat. Wasteful, but dramatic. On the cams it looked like an old-style steam locomotive chugging out of the station. He wished his job was as easy as a train driver; how damned convenient, following miles and miles of track someone else had already put down through the wilderness.
Slowly he engaged the motors. Too much power and the treads would slip; too little and the sleds wouldn’t move. The trick was to get each sled moving and sliding before the slack was taken up. Soon three thousand tons of mass payload were following the cat on the road to Conamara. The payload took its own sweet time, however. Even running the fuel cells at maximum, Rahiti barely achieved fifty kilometres an hour.
Still, he was on his way.
No partner, no back-up, no one to talk to for the next eighty-five hours, but he was on his way. Score one for the Crazy Samoan.
He settled into his chair, piped some island music in over the speakers, and downed more coffee. Six hours later, dawn arrived. A triangle of faint Zodiacal light pointed to the rising sun just before it peeked above the hills behind Conamara. The bright limb of the sun overwhelmed the glow from the full Jupiter behind him. Ten minutes later he passed Conamara’s buried domes, gave a status update, and turned onto Agave Linea. Now half of Jupiter painted the horizon. Europa’s shadow crawled below the Great Red Spot, and would for the next three hours.
Pretty, he thought to himself. If you liked that sort of thing. If you ever saw it, instead of spending all of your time working or sleeping or drinking in grey rooms under artificial lights.
No wonder Javinta had stayed on Earth.
Rahiti shook off his gloom and poured more coffee. Everything from here out was new ground, literally. The entire moon was just one giant frozen sea. The lines formed natural roads of fresh ice in a criss-cross maze, with hidden obstacles and freshly opened cracks between him and the pole. As long as he could stay awake, stay alert, and stay on schedule, he’d be fine. The extra eight hours in the schedule gave him time to catnap, and he could trust the autopilot as long as the way was steady and straight.
Two hundred kilometres later, a liquid sound burbled in the access tube to the sleepsled.
What the fuck?
He checked the path ahead and enabled the
autopilot. Four low-gravity hand pulls brought him to the tube. Six crawls through the tube and he was in the dim sled, where the colder temperature made his breath frost.
Anu was sitting on the lone bunk. Meekly, she said, “I had to use the bathroom.”
Rahiti’s vision darkened. His hands fisted, anger flooding up. It took everything he had not to kick at something or punch the bulkhead. “What the hell are you doing here? How did you get in?”
She cringed. “I pulled the fire alarm so everyone was distracted. I have to see Ted. Mom won’t pay, so this is the only way.”
He didn’t believe her. It was more likely that someone had planted her here the same way they had arranged for Will’s accident. For a brief, hot moment he contemplated throwing her out the airlock.
But then he asked, “Your mom?”
“Dr. Desai,” she said.
That did it. He punched the bulkhead and was rewarded with bright hot pain in all his fingers.
Quickly Anu said, “I won’t be any trouble! I can keep you company, maybe even drive. You said you needed help.”
Rahiti shook his head. “You think you can just drive a rig, no experience? I’m going to have to take you back to Conamara. My whole schedule – Jesus. What you’ve done to me. You don’t even know.”
The sleepsled jerked violently. The snowcat gave off a sharp peal, like a bell being run, as it struck and broke through something on their path. But the cat didn’t stop. It continued to bounce and surge forward. Anu yelped in surprise, started asking questions, but Rahiti was too busy racing back through the tube to care about her curiosity.
He was halfway back to his seat when the cat slammed to a halt with terrible metal shrieks. He couldn’t grab a handhold in time. Momentum slammed him face first into the front console, right below the picture of Javinta.
The last thing he saw was her bright eyes, full of reproach: Crazy Samoan.
HE WASN’T OUT long. Maybe a few seconds. The blare of alarms dragged him back, accompanied by the whine of engines. The autopilot kicked in, shut them down. Lights flickered in his face, bright and annoying, but nothing he could clearly focus on.
“Mr. Ochoa!” Anu’s voice was frantic.”Are you okay?”
Rahiti wiped blood away from his face. His nose was a bright flare of pain. Warm liquid and debris were floating in his mouth. Blood. Broken teeth. He spat out as much as he could. He was dizzy and breathless and maybe even dying.
“Mr. Ochoa? Here, sit down.”
Anu helped him to the driver’s seat. Rahiti thought to ask, “Are you hurt?” but then had to cough out more blood and only caught part of her answer.
“– and my knee, I think. What happened?”
“What do you think?” he snapped. “We hit something.”
Something the autopilot hadn’t seen. A ridge hidden by snow? He should have been at the controls, not babysitting this schoolgirl.
“You’re a mess,” she said. “Medical emergency, first aid program.”
The computer answered. “Hi. How may I help?”
Anu talked to the program. Rahiti tried peering at the sensors, but his eyes were getting worse. He was reasonably sure now that he wasn’t dying, but maybe death would be easier than complete and utter failure. Easier than facing the shame. People like Hal Carpenter would mock him for years to come over this. Couldn’t even follow a straight line.
Despair pulsed through him as his eyes swelled shut. Blind, broken nose, the snowcat jammed –
Uncertainly Anu said, “That’s all I can do for now. Do you want to lie down?”
“No,” he ground out. “Emergency doctor off.”
The speaker went silent. The cockpit consoles were still making small alarmed noises, but Rahiti ignored them. “Did we lose the sleds?”
“I don’t know. How can I tell?”
“Look at the panel lights on the left upper bulkhead.”
Silence for a moment. Then, “They’re all green. That’s good, right?”
Rahiti tried to think clearly. The taste of blood was making him sick.
Anu’s voice was thin. “Can I call anyone for help?”
“We’re out of radio range.”
“They’ll come looking for us, right? Eventually?”
He didn’t answer. Yes, eventually Orbital would come for them. And charge him for the rescue and recovery. Technically he was using his vacation time for these eight-five hours; they’d probably find a way to charge him for any medical treatment he needed, claiming that he wasn’t on duty and therefore not insured. Years and years more work added to his contract, more steel chains of days wrapped around his legs and wrists. But there was one way to avoid it. One way out.
“You’re going to have to drive,” he said.
“What?” she squeaked. “You said I can’t! It’s too hard.”
Rahiti spat out another wad of blood. “If we don’t make it to NPS, I lose all the money I borrowed to rent this equipment and buy fuel. I’ll never be able to go home. I’ll never see my wife again. And you won’t see your boyfriend.”
She was silent. Thinking, fearing, setting herself up for failure. He knew what that was like.
“Okay, so it’s not like driving on Earth,” he admitted. “It’s like a tank pulling a train, just faster and more complicated. But the route is mostly a bunch of straight lines. If you can steer, I can keep us moving.”
“I guess I can try,” she said doubtfully.
“Computer, audio mode,” Rahiti said. “Report configuration changes since departure.”
“Zero configuration changes.” Which was good. All the sleds were still attached.
“Report significant anomalies, priority order.”
“Emergency brakes deployed on all sleds. Tractor is tilted left at 82 degrees to the horizon. Sleeping sled is tilted left at 25 degrees to the horizon. Shock sensors tripped. Fuel feed safety disconnect activated. Autopilot disabled. Satellite telemetry inoperative. No response for medical emergency distress call. Headlamp 1 inoperative. Cameras 1, 3, and 5 disabled or blind.”
“That sounds bad,” Anu said, her voice small.
“Most of those are emergency reflexes. They’ll clear when we flip the right switches. The telemetry and tilt are bad. We’ll check the cameras once we’re outside.”
Now her tone shifted to disbelief. “You can’t go outside! Maybe you didn’t notice your severe facial injuries –”
“Stop talking and help me,” he said.
The easy part was having her bandage his eyes. The hard part was struggling into the skinsuit’s tight confines in his personal total darkness, acutely aware of being naked in front of her, not knowing what she was looking at. It took twice as long as normal. Anu hadn’t brought a skinsuit, of course, and had to use the emergency one. And of course she’d never put one on before. He had to instruct her, several times, to make sure she did it right. The last thing he needed was for her to die out there due to cold or oxygen loss.
Once they were outside, Anu tethered Rahiti to the sled so he wouldn’t wander off blindly. He didn’t like that, but then again, he didn’t like any of this. She reported, “The cargo sleds are upright, in a kind of wavy line. The left cameras and headlamps are all smashed up.”
“What about the antenna? It’s on top, dead centre.”
“There’s just some twisted metal.”
“Check out the sleds and tell me if anything shifted. While you’re at it, rewind the grapples. There’s one on each side of the back of every sled. They’re our emergency brakes. It should be easy. The feed button lets out the cable, then you pull the grapple out of the ice, and then flip the retract button. Just keep the points of the grapple facing upward.”
“You’re kind of bossy,” Anu said.
“Do you want out of here or don’t you?”
She went to work.”Why’d you decide to do this, anyway?”
“Profit.”
“I guessed that.”
“Asterius owns all the bases and
outposts on Europa, but Orbital operates most of the shipping contracts. To get stuff to NPS they launch a payload into polar orbit, cancel its angular momentum, then de-orbit and land. That all takes fuel, thousands of tons of it. Very expensive, but it’s passed along to Asterius. I told Asterius that I can deliver the same load a lot cheaper, just by pulling sleds. So this is my one chance to prove it.”
“If it’s so easy, why hasn’t anyone ever done it before?” Anu asked.
“Because I thought of it first.”
“And because everyone else thought it was crazy?”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you been here, anyway?”
He knew the answer down to the hour, but all he said was, “Six years.”
It took two hours to inspect the sleds and retract the grapples. Another three hours to drive the loader to the snowcat, tow it out of the ridge, shove it in line with the sleds, and stow the loader again. Anu was a quick learner, but the crash had rattled her, and she was young, and everything was new to her. Every step went slower than Rahiti wanted. Here he was, barely five hundred kilometres into the three-thousand-kilometre trip, and his contingency time was rapidly dwindling. Pain and fear gnawed at him.
Back inside, stripped out of their skinsuits again, Anu asked, “Do you want to sleep for awhile? Then we can go?”
Yes he wanted to sleep. No, he didn’t dare it. “I’ll get us moving, you drive, then we’ll see,” he said.
He started the snowcat’s engine. It made a protesting noise or two, but settled down quickly. It took him several minutes of working by touch and instinct to get the sleds moving again. Anu read out their bearing and the autopilot suggested it take over.
“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Anu said.
Rahiti said, “It drove us right into that snowbank.”
She was quiet for a moment. “On purpose? Like, sabotage?”
He didn’t want to say yes. No use both of them being paranoid. But he couldn’t honestly tell her no. He thought about Hal Carpenter sneaking into the snowcat while he was in the infirmary with Will and making just a few little changes to the program.
Edge of Infinity Page 9
