Analog SFF, September 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Quin remembered something else from that Wednesday lecture too. In the event of a small puncture, your secondary oxygen pack is designed to maintain pressure in your mission suit long enough for you to get inside to safety. So there had to be time to rescue her. No, that was the wrong way to approach this. There would be time to save her. He would do everything just right. He could do this.

  He tapped the joystick and came to rest next to Zoe. Just on the mark.

  "I've got you, Zoe,” he said.

  "Good,” she said, almost whispering. “I want to go home."

  * * * *

  Home had set there, two hundred miles below Quin Torres, forever turning against the deep black curtain of space. He was convinced that Earth was God's masterpiece of performance art played out just for him to the metered sigh of oxygen and framed within the polished plastic faceplate of his helmet in all the sweet colors of life.

  "Are you ready, Quin?” Zoe Fraser asked, over the team's band.

  Quin flinched. He had been caught gawking again.

  He glanced to where Zoe floated, waiting for him. Her white mission suit glistened, as if it were a beacon he could never reach. Quin envied Zoe. She was always focused, always ready and able to handle any situation. She never let passions get in the way of what needed to be done. That was why she wore red chevrons on her mission suit, identifying her as team leader, while Quin wore the green slashes that marked him as a newbie.

  He took a slow, cleansing breath. It was time to focus, to get to work.

  "I'm moving into place now, Mary Shelley,” he said.

  "About time, Junior,” Jill Papadopoulos said.

  Jill was the team's pilot. She was Zoe's opposite, boisterous and profane. Always ready to laugh at the world around her or to poke fun. But in her own way she was just as competent as Zoe, and it seemed to Quin that she delighted in pointing out his low status and his incompetence. Still, every word out of her might be some sort of jape aimed at him, but Zoe's quiet disdain stung even worse.

  Quin thumbed the joystick and began to glide toward Zoe, who was already in position a meter ahead of the debris that was today's prize. It had taken hours, riding the slow pulse of Mary Shelley's fuel-efficient ion engines, to match orbit with the loose field of aluminum bits.

  The field was the size of a misshapen beach ball, and each piece within the field tumbled in its own eccentric way, all moving along an ever-curving path, together in a complicated orbital dance. A file in some distant data bank kept track of what the debris had been. Perhaps a panel from a defunct satellite or a section of discarded solar array.

  Quin itched to know its history, but that didn't seem to matter to Jill and Zoe. To them it was just one more thing the corporation paid to have swept up and thrown away. Three days after boarding Mary Shelley, during a meal break, Quin had tried to express the excitement he felt working in space for the first time. Jill had laughed.

  "Hell,” she said. “We aren't anything but trash haulers, plain and simple."

  "Well-paid trash haulers, though,” Zoe added.

  Jill laughed again and ran her fingertip across the knuckles of Zoe's hand.

  "Amen to that, babe,” Jill said.

  Gossip was a game that everybody played at Cayley Station, so Quin knew Jill and Zoe were a couple when he accepted assignment to the Mary Shelley team, but he hadn't expected that they would tease him with their coupling. From the first second they met him at the airlock, holding hands, it seemed to him they were saying that he didn't belong and never would.

  * * * *

  Zoe tried to help pull them into the airlock, but her movements were feeble and erratic.

  For one awful moment, Quin was certain that his efforts wouldn't be good enough, but then Zoe's shoulders popped through the open maw and the next instant they were both within the lock. Quin punched the control sequence, the gauges turned green, and Jill was there, taking Zoe into her arms.

  "We've got to get her out of that damned suit!” Jill said.

  Her words were brittle and her voice too loud. Zoe's hands slipped from her leg as Jill pulled at her. Fat deep-red globules pumped from a dark spot on the left thigh of the mission suit and swirled through the air to splatter against Jill's face and upper torso.

  "God damn it!” Jill said. Her voice rattled Quin's headset. “Help me!"

  "Me first, Jill,” Quin said, working to keep his own voice calm. “Get me out first."

  Jill stared at him, her eyes unblinking. Then she nodded, as if they just had met, and she pushed herself forward, reaching for his helmet ring. She worked with furious purpose. Only the nine-millimeter-thick toughness of the suit prevented her from destroying it. Soon Quin kicked free of the last piece and the scattered segments drifted about the module, to be dealt with later.

  Together, they attacked Zoe's suit. Jill ripped at the clasps of the life-support pack while Quin worked the ringed system that held the helmet in place. There was a sigh of air when the seal broke. That was a good sign. With the helmet off, Quin tugged Zoe's snoopy cap and communications gear clear and then touched fingertips to her throat, feeling for a pulse.

  It was there, weak and thready, but there.

  "I'm getting a pulse,” he said.

  Jill didn't respond. She had moved on to the gloves, going after them with the same intensity she had applied to undressing Quin. Zoe moaned when Quin touched her again. Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked up at him. Her voice cracked as she spoke.

  "I can't feel my leg.” She sounded as if she had just awakened from a nap.

  "You're going to be all right, Zoe,” Quin said. “I got you back inside."

  * * * *

  "Pay attention, Quin,” Jill had said. “So you can get your asses back inside."

  Quin ignored her. He activated the automatic inertial attitude lock and reached back to the IMU frame for one of the collecting-foam cans tethered there. He fumbled the first attempt, and Zoe waited, not saying a word, as he juggled the can into place. At last, he rolled the red arrow stenciled on the yellow can's side into line with an identical mark on the can she held.

  "Mary Shelley,” Zoe said. “We're setting the cans."

  The cans touched and both arrows faded to yellow, signaling a successful link. The science behind it was more than Quin cared to ponder, and explanations involving self-bonding polymers and shifting absorption spectra just made it sound like magic. All he cared about was that the cans stuck to each other or to adhesive from the pressurized dispenser stashed in an insulated mission suit pocket. He had been told that the bond would never fail, short of total destruction.

  Jill called it “better living through chemistry.” She collected ancient advertising slogans like that, the way other folks accumulated political campaign buttons or china dolls. Her hand-made signs were plastered upon every free surface within the Mary Shelley crew quarters.

  "We have adhesion,” Zoe said. “Push the button."

  A dot glowed red on each can and neon-orange bubbles popped into being at the trailing faces. The thermosetting-polymerfoam bubbles swelled until they touched and flowed together, forming a globe a meter across. Zoe touched her joystick and began to drift away. Quin followed suit.

  "We are clear, Mary Shelley,” Zoe said.

  Solid-fuel rocket cells on each can flared, and the debris field gained upon the bubble. The gap closed and the leading debris fragment sank into the foam. Second by second, piece by piece, the field was absorbed into the still-reactive plastic mass.

  "That's a sweep,” Jill said at last. “The screen is green."

  Working in tandem, Zoe and Quin set two larger degradable solid-fuel rocket cells into place. Jill did her little timing speech, the new cells flared, and the bubble fell away. The change in its velocity would hurry orbital decay and it would soon plummet to Earth.

  Station Manager Marg Dierker claimed Cayley's vacuum smelting operation would be operating by year's end and collection teams would be required then to ferry c
ollected debris to the station so that the scrap could be salvaged and refined.

  "Just more corporate bullshit,” Jill had said, the first time Quin mentioned it. “Word is that station managers have been saying the same thing since the station opened. Six years, Zoe?"

  "No,” Zoe said. “Five years. March 5, 2024."

  "Hell, junior," Jill continued. “AshCor can't meet a schedule any better than the other big boys. Me and Zoe will be living on Rising Sea, sipping Hatuey beer and watching launches off the coast of French Guiana, before anyone hauls this stuff in."

  Rising Sea was the forty-two-foot Hunter sailing yacht Jill and Zoe were paying for with their high-risk salaries. Jill called that a-good-chance-of-dying pay. Within a week, Quin was calling it that too. Truth was, it was business as usual, even if they were in orbit. The hardened bubbles of orange collecting-foam would continue to burn to cinder as they tumbled through the atmosphere and what was left would disappear into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

  * * * *

  Almost an hour gone by since the collision, and Quin spent every second of it outside examining the Mary Shelley systems module. Whatever hit them had been small, not even the size of the pieces in the debris cloud he and Zoe had collected earlier. Even so, damage was extensive.

  Both nearside solar arrays had been pulverized in passing, and the outer skin of the equipment module was shredded from initial impact, leaving a hole big enough for Quin to crawl through, even wrapped in the cumbersome layers of the mission suit. From outside, he could see the twisted guts of the ion propulsion units beneath the gaping wound.

  There had been an explosion within the equipment module, as well, large enough to blow out the away side of the cylinder and send bits of metal and plastic shrapnel spewing into space. The other two solar arrays on the far side of Mary Shelley were chewed to pieces by that new debris, and a piece of it had struck Zoe.

  When Quin returned from his inspection, Jill handed over a plastic sample tube. The aluminum bead she had found floated inside. It was melted by the impact and formed by the absence of gravity into a perfect little sphere not much larger than a pinhead.

  "Had to cut her suit apart,” Jill said. “Found the damned thing wedged in the Kevlar layer of her insulated undersuit."

  "Is that all it was?"

  "It's enough."

  The salty copper scent of blood filled the crew compartment of Mary Shelley, and dulled red splotches mottled every surface. Zoe was strapped into her bunk, nodding in and out of consciousness. Jill had cleaned the wound as best limited medical supplies aboard Mary Shelley would allow and sheathed Zoe's left leg from knee to hip in compression bandages.

  She lingered now beside the bunk, pushing a squeeze bottle at Zoe from time to time, forcing her to take liquids. Across the compartment, Quin settled upon a saddle stool and tucked his toes behind restraint bars. He watched the two of them for a time.

  "It could have been worse,” he said at last. It didn't seem as if Jill even heard him.

  "She's lost a lot of blood,” Jill said. “And all I can manage here is first aid. We've got to get her to Cayley's sick bay soon or she may die."

  "How do you figure to do that?” Quin asked.

  Jill turned to him and Quin was certain for a moment that she would launch herself across the compartment to tear him to pieces.

  "No!” she said. “How do you figure to do it?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You're the damned hotshot mechanic, aren't you? That's the line Dierker handed us when she pulled Jen and stuck us with you. But I haven't seen you do squat since you came on board except screw up every little thing you touch. You figure how the hell to get us moving or I swear I will haunt you to your grave. Pull your weight, goddamn it!"

  "That's not—” The speaker system crackled.

  "Mary Shelley." Quin recognized the voice. It was Marg Dierker.

  "Mary Shelley, do you copy?"

  Quin turned away from Jill's anger and kicked himself out of his saddle. Three weeks’ practice hadn't given him much grace, but it had taught him accuracy. He caught a handhold as he approached the far wall of the cylinder and pulled himself to the communications panel.

  "This is Torres, Cayley Station,” he said.

  "Sorry I've been delayed, Mary Shelley," Dierker said. Her voice was corporate cool, but Quin could hear nervous conversation rolling in the background, under the operations manager's thick German accent. “I was on a conference call with home office. What is the situation there?"

  Quin glanced toward Jill. She still looked upset and distracted, still ready to chew off his ears. This was his to handle, whether he was ready to do so or not.

  "We've finished initial inspection, ma'am,” he said. “We might not be able to get back to you on our own."

  * * * *

  Quin might as well have been on his own aboard Mary Shelley.

  The work schedule was four weeks out and then two or three days off duty at Cayley Station before starting the cycle all over again first of the month. If these first weeks were any indication, it would be a long and lonely six-month tour.

  He had been told his whole life that he had an easy way with people, but try as he might, he couldn't win Zoe and Jill over. He always seemed to be in the way, and while they didn't ignore him or keep important information from him, Zoe remained distant and judgmental while Jill picked at him over little things he could never fix. He was clumsy. He was slow. He smelled wrong, for God's sake. Not bad—wrong.

  The two women hated his music too. So his off-duty time passed on the stationary bike, logging required hours of exercise, or in his bunk. Ear buds in place, he composed his own music on the SoundStik that had taken up most of his personal-allowance weight, or listened to recorded music on his audio pod.

  Quin loved the old-gold rock his father had played while working in the family's auto- repair shop in Key West, and his favorites were by a bunch of Brit rockers known as Queen. He spent hours in his bunk whispering the words of “We Will Rock You” or “Fat Bottomed Girls” along with lead singer Freddy Mercury.

  But his love for music wouldn't be enough to carry him through six months. He would go crazy if something didn't change; Quin knew that. Even so, he had no idea what he would have to do to make that happen.

  * * * *

  Marg Dierker was all business and never asked about Zoe's condition or how Quin and Jill were holding up. All she wanted to know about was damage sustained to Mary Shelley. Quin reported his findings, sending video data via microwave uplink as he spoke.

  "What do you think, Cayley Station?” Jill asked.

  Silence.

  "Cayley, are you still there?"

  "Here.” It was Emil Teague, the station's maintenance chief. “Marg got called away again on other business."

  "Typical,” Jill muttered. She brushed loose hairs from Zoe's forehead and offered up the squeeze bottle once again.

  "How bad is it, Emil?” Quin asked.

  "I had hoped for better news."

  "Oh?"

  "We've been studying the equipment telemetry. Your visuals confirm our data. I can try to talk you through repairs to the ion engines, but I don't think there's much hope."

  "Can't you send another ship?” Quin asked.

  "Edwin Abbott is preparing now to initiate first burn on a Hohmann transfer orbit."

  "How soon will they be here?” Jill asked.

  There was no response. Jill pushed away from Zoe's bunk and caught a handhold on the fly, pulling herself into position next to Quin.

  "Answer me, Emil! How soon?"

  "Without the engines, you can't start home,” he replied at last. “If you can't change your own orbit, there's no way they can rendezvous with you in less than fifty hours."

  "Zoe can't make it that long!"

  "That's not our first concern,” Emil said.

  "What do you mean?” Jill demanded.

  She was inches from the comm panel speaker now, ready to w
rap her fingers around Emil's throat. He was silent again. When he spoke, his voice was hushed and conspiratorial.

  "I shouldn't tell you this. If Marg finds out, she'll chew on me until I'm raw. She's been talking to the bean counters back on Earth."

  "So?” Quin asked.

  "They may decide to abort the rescue effort. Marg told them you'll be dead before Edwin Abbott can reach you."

  "God damn it!” Jill said. “Why would she say that?” She was crying in her rage. Quin pushed close and put his arm around her. She didn't pull away.

  "Look, your electrical system is on battery standby now,” Emil said. “And your engines are just so much scrap metal."

  "I can replace the solar arrays,” Quin said.

  "You can replace one of them,” Emil said. “That's all you have on board. Any more just wouldn't have been cost-effective. One array can't generate enough electricity."

  "The initial data said breathable atmosphere was good for seventy-two hours!"

  "It will be,” Emil said.

  "Well—” Quin began.

  "Emil?” It was Zoe. Her voice lacked volume, but it was steady. “What don't we know?"

  Jill launched herself away from the comm panel in an instant. She was clutching Zoe's hand before the answer came.

  "There were cost-cutting measures implemented when the work vehicles were built.” Emil sounded defensive. “The electronics always overgenerate heat. Insulation was reduced to allow the heat-dispersal system to be downsized."

  "It doesn't matter how much air we have, does it?” Jill said. Her voice was icy calm now. “With only one collector we'll have to shut down a lot of equipment. It's going to get damned cold in here."

  "No one considered this sort of contingency,” Emil said.

  "How long?” Quin asked.

  "Within thirty hours it will be one hundred below in there."

  * * * *

  Another six hours passed. Quin installed the spare solar collector and then moved on to the engines. Emil had been right. Even with the engineer looking over Quin's shoulder via video camera, pouring all his technological expertise through Quin's headset, it was beyond what the two of them could manage. At last, they were forced to admit defeat.