Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  They spent the next hour together in the commons, discussing options. They didn’t have a spare suspension, but Bruce figured he could rig a way to fix and reattach the broken one—except that they didn’t have a jack that would lift the loaded trailer. They rejected the idea of dropping the trailer and driving back to the colony without it, even though they might eventually be forced to do just that.

  “We’re out of range of the MPVs,” Bruce said. “So they can’t mount a rescue that way. They’re sure not going to want to pay the science geeks at Shackleton for roadside assistance, so unless they can fix up Rocky right quick, my guess is they’ll order us back. That’d be cheaper than having one of the AC’s asteroid ferries come back out of cycle and flying it down here with a big jack.”

  “And some oxygen,” Stormie said. The CO2 filters in their truck were still in decent shape, but if they didn’t get moving in the next twelve hours, by the time they reached the colony their air would be very stale and the oxygen level dangerously thin.

  Bruce typed up the mayday message and put it in the queue. Stormie checked the satellite coverage chart: the message would go out almost immediately. The colony and Consortium bosses would decide whether to mount a rescue or tell them to high-tail it back immediately. She hated the idea of leaving the cargo behind. They all hated that idea.

  “Now that we’ve got nothing to do but wait,” Bruce said, “Karl, you mind telling me why you were driving? By my clock, we were almost an hour into Stormie’s shift.”

  Stormie leaned back into the corner; she didn’t want to get into a big fight right now. Later, when she was rested—

  “Come on,” Bruce continued. “What about it? You never stopped. You never called. Stormie had to go forward, I guess to wake you up—”

  “Yeah, she came forward,” Capell said. “I was trying to give her a little extra rest, but she comes up and distracts me.”

  Stormie tensed. I’m too tired for this. She started to speak up, but Bruce was already talking.

  “I don’t buy that for a second. But you must be confident to say it with her sitting right here. So what’s the story, Stormie? Did you distract him?”

  She sighed. “If him turning around to talk to me counts as a distraction, then I guess so.”

  “Huh. How long were you turned around, Karl? How far off the path did the truck get while you weren’t watching?”

  “Come on, Bruce, that’s not fair,” Capell said. He fidgeted with the straps on his suit. “She already said she distracted me.”

  “In a way, she did. But she said you were talking to her. What was so important that it rated higher than watching the road?”

  Capell stopped fidgeting and folded his arms. Gabe looked up from his reading. Bruce cocked his head. Capell looked from one to the other, skipping past Stormie without meeting her eyes. Suddenly he flung his arms as wide as the confined space allowed. “What difference does it make? You’ve already decided this is my fault, and the Nubian queen can do no wrong.”

  The Turtle fell deathly quiet, despite the ambient noise of a circulating pump and a couple of fans.

  Stormie shook her head, at first amused that Frank’s “King of Nubia” remark had become lunar legend and made her the defacto queen. Then she replayed Capell’s words and their hateful tone, and clenched her fists. Heat built up in her back, as if she could feel adrenaline pumping, flooding through ducts she could not shut down. She closed her eyes and tried to regulate her breathing, tried to match it to the rhythm of the air circulation fan.

  “So that’s what this is all about?” she said.

  “No,” Capell said. He held his hands up, palms out.

  “Sure it is. You disguise it well, most of the time, but I get it now. You drag your heels on your design work, ’cause you don’t want me to be the one who checks over it. You complain about me getting more bonus money, not because you’re mad that your little union’s not getting its cut from us, but because you don’t think I deserve it.” Behind the adrenaline a wave of pain crested over her, with heat like the decaying nuclei in the Turtle’s ARG, but she fought it with a low laugh. “I bet you wanted to run me over the other day.”

  “No, no—”

  “Oh? You just wanted to scare me?”

  “Hell, no,” Capell said. He waved his hands to ward off her attack. “Look, I’m sorry. We’re all a little stressed. Sometimes under stress you say things you don’t really mean.”

  “And sometimes you say things you do mean,” Stormie said.

  The fan motor wound down and the silence deepened. Stormie looked away from Capell, at the cool green interior of the Turtle, at her own dark hands. She remembered some lines her brother Erick had written when they were very young, only a few months before he died,

  I am the color of the earth—

  Not the slimy clay of Southern hills

  Or the weak and lifeless brown of desert sands,

  I am the rich, deep dark of living lands,

  The strong black coal that drives the rotten mills,

  The secret, inside, hidden, buried worth

  Of all the world.

  She remembered his haunted, soulful eyes, and the look of surprise and shock and fear as the water took him. She hadn’t thought of that day in years, but now she could picture the grey, heavy clouds and the rain that obscured almost all vision except the thing she least wanted to see; the rain that fell in heavy drops like her tears that smeared those agonizing, determined words on the paper.

  She laughed again, on purpose now, to keep from crying. She could let herself cry later, alone or maybe with Frank, but not here. Not in front of these men—

  Gabe cleared his throat and said, “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but this isn’t really solving our problem.”

  He was right, and the fact that he was right irritated Stormie all the more. She forced her hands to unclench—when had she clenched them?—and rubbed them on her thighs. Bruce was berating Capell but she couldn’t hear what he was saying for the blood pounding in her head. She wanted to pace, to walk off the anger, but there was nowhere to walk—only this tiny room and the smaller cab, a miniscule island of life on the barren face of a huge dead rock.

  The adrenaline rush faded. The pain stayed behind, but a duller ache than before; it suffused her and left her more tired than ever. She rubbed her eyes and the bridge of her nose, and gradually released some of the anger and tension. She exhaled a long breath, careful not to whistle like Mother Mac’s old tea kettle.

  It came to her.

  “Bruce,” she said, “all we have is a mechanical jack, right?”

  Bruce looked up from whatever he had been saying to Capell. He shook his head, but said, “Right, but it won’t lift the trailer when it’s loaded. It’s for the Turtle, since its legs articulate.”

  “I know, but how high do we have to lift the trailer? If we had some bracing to hold it up?”

  “Not much.” He backed away from Capell and held his hands in front of him, moving them in odd patterns—obviously trying to visualize the problem. “A few inches ought to do it. What’ve you got in mind?”

  Stormie let herself grin, a little. Bruce must be tired if he’d reverted to using English units. In the old days when space commerce went international with U.S.-Russian partnerships, even U.S. space companies went metric and the Consortium, formed with international partners, naturally followed suit.

  “Do we have anything we could use as a piston and cylinder?”

  “I don’t know. What would we use for a working fluid?”

  “Steam,” Stormie said. “Put some ice in a gastight box or something, with a line to a cylinder underneath the trailer. Keep the box shaded until we’re ready, then concentrate enough sunlight on it to heat the ice and drive it to steam. If we rig it right, the steam should lift the trailer enough to get the brace in place.”

  Gabe said, “You going to use mirrors? Sounds like Archimedes at Syracuse.”

  “Whatever,” Bruce sai
d.

  Capell said, “A piston and cylinder? You’d blow out the seals.”

  “Shut up, Karl,” Bruce said. “It only has to hold for a few seconds. Unless you’ve got a better idea.”

  Capell shrugged. “If you think holding the pressure in isn’t a problem, why bother with making steam? We’ve got pressurized gas on board.”

  “We’re breathing that gas,” Stormie said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice.

  “Okay, then, why not heat up some water with the generator?”

  Bruce answered before Stormie. “No way to run water through it. Even if we could do it, it’s a long way to run the steam lines back to the trailer.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” Capell said. “Set up a separate heater and run power cables out the back.”

  “Maybe, if we had cables that long. But you know how hot it gets in the sunlight here. Seems easier to use that, if it’ll work.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then we see what we can do differently before we head back.”

  The two of them fell into a two-way debate about what could be used to build the contraption. Stormie was glad to stay out of it, and noted that Gabe had steered clear of most of the arguing. Very diplomatic, Mr. Morera. She was surprised to see that for once Gabe wasn’t hiding behind whatever book he was reading on his datapad; he was unwrapping a small block of the processed cheese everyone loved so much.

  Gabe broke off a bit of cheese and ate it, but Stormie kept her attention focused on the wrapper. Capell was right about the cylinder idea: it wouldn’t hold enough pressure to lift the trailer. She hated to admit it, but now she had another idea.

  “Bruce,” she said. The others looked at her. “It kills me to say this, but Karl’s got a point. If we can’t keep the pressure in, we won’t get any lift.”

  “You got a better idea now?” Bruce said.

  Stormie took the wrapper from Gabe. She folded it and blew air into it. “We need an airbag,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Ice Jack

  Saturday, 19 January 2036

  Bruce typed and queued another message while everyone suited up. He divided duties among them, including Capell, who seemed sullen but cooperative.

  Stormie’s first task was to find a suitable mirror. She walked all around the Turtle and examined it closely, but all the curved metal pieces—headlight reflectors and so forth—would have too short a focal length. Even their little parabolic antenna looked too deep to serve as a good reflector. She needed something with a slight curve, or something that could be bent, and decided to take a closer look at the solar panels on the back of the Turtle’s shell.

  She climbed up next to the ARG, careful to make sure she was braced well; Van Richards’ tale of derring-do had been repeated too many times for her not to think of the consequences of tumbling off the back of the big truck. Most of the panels were flat, as expected, but the ones at the edges were curved like the panels she’d seen on pictures of old-time Hughes satellites. She guessed curving a few good-sized panels so they’d continue producing power as the Sun tracked over them must’ve been cheaper than assembling a bunch of smaller, flat panels, but she didn’t waste too much time wondering about it. She disconnected a single panel in the right rear section of the truck, without asking Bruce’s permission first; that panel wouldn’t see much sunlight during the last days of their trip. The worst that should happen, if they missed that panel’s output, would be that they might have to eat a couple of cold meals.

  “Just got an answer from Central,” Bruce said over the radio. “They want us to drop the trailer and come back now.”

  Gabe said, “So are we?”

  Bruce said, “Not yet. My second message went up when that message downlinked from the satellite. It’ll be a while before they even know what we’re doing.”

  Stormie carefully pried the photovoltaic substrate from the solar panel and laid it on the trailer bed. She used an aluminized sheet on the curved cover glass to complete her mirror. It wasn’t a perfect mirror: the glass was curved axially, like a funhouse mirror, instead of having a single focus like a parabolic dish, and she couldn’t smooth all the crinkles out of the Mylar. She hoped it would be good enough. She shone it on some nearby rocks until she found the focus and satisfied herself that she could aim it. Then she carried it around to the side of the trailer to see everyone else’s progress.

  Bruce and Capell were still fashioning the jack, so Stormie went to help Gabe. He had staged bracing under the trailer that would hold it up for repairs. Then he’d attached a cable and come-along to the rock that caused all the trouble in the first place, anchored the other end to a boulder several meters off the path, and dug a small trench from the rock to the side of the path. Once the trailer was lifted and braced, he and Stormie would pull the rock out of the way while Bruce and Capell saw to the suspension. Stormie helped him dig out the last few meters of the trench, then they shifted some ice blocks away from the left side of the trailer while the other two completed their task.

  “Okay, Stormie,” Bruce radioed, “want to take a look at your ice jack?”

  They had rigged one of the empty gas-tight transit cases with a pressure transducer and a relief valve that they scavenged off who-knew-what. Inlet and outlet lines, each with control valves, ran from that transit case to another underneath the trailer. “We took a bladder from inside one of our spent water tanks,” Bruce said, “and put it in that case there. The bag should expand and push the top of the box into the bottom of the trailer. The idea is that the box’ll keep the bag from getting cut on the trailer. So long as the box itself doesn’t cut it.”

  “So it’s ready to go?” Stormie asked.

  “Pretty much. There’s a metal box inside this transfer case here. You and Gabe take it and put a block of ice in it while Karl and I get the jack in place.”

  They took the smaller box—it looked like a Christmas present wrapped in aluminum foil—under the tarp to the ice storage. By the time they had it loaded with ice and back inside the bigger box, the others had the jack ready.

  “Pull the lid off the little box now,” Bruce said.

  Stormie handed the lid to Gabe, who stepped aside to make room for Bruce. “Help me get good contact between the two boxes. Okay, hang on one second.” He stepped away and came back with what looked like a small scissor-jack; he held it up, compressed it and let it go: it expanded to its original size. “Need a spring to keep the ice in contact with the wall as it melts, else we won’t get decent heat transfer,” he said. It took a few seconds to install the device. “Okay, we’ll seal the big box now. Stormie, grab your mirror. Karl, you got that monkey shit?”

  Stormie stood still for a second. Bruce was referring to the two-part RTV sealant in Capell’s hand, but after the argument in the truck she bristled at the common nickname.

  Get a hold of yourself, Stormie. She bounced away to get the mirror.

  When he had the ice case sealed, Bruce said, “Gabe, got the brace?”

  “Roger.”

  “Okay. Let’s give that RTV a minute to set, if it’s going to.” Bruce went over the plan. He would work the valves to the airbag. Capell’s job was to watch the pressure and open the relief valve if it got too high, while Gabe braced the trailer from underneath. When it was clear that everyone understood their roles, he said, “Stormie, whenever you’re ready.”

  Stormie aimed the mirror at the dark area on the side of the box. It took her a few tries to find the right pitch angle, but then a bright line of light fell on her target. Seconds flashed away in the chronometer display inside her helmet.

  Work, damn it.

  “Got a little pressure,” Capell said slowly. “Building up now.” He twisted the box a little so it caught the light more directly. “Almost there. Okay, Bruce, open your valve.”

  A tiny jet of steam escaped the box. It didn’t billow like steam in an atmosphere, it just shot out toward the trailer. It look
ed like a fire hydrant shooting a spray of pure snow—only without the accompanying sound.

  Bruce asked, “What can you see, Gabe?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Pressure still rising,” Capell said.

  Gabe called, “Got some movement now. Bag’s pushing the box up. One centimeter. Two. Four. Almost there. Okay, it’s contacted the trailer.”

  Another jet of steam started pouring from the corner of the box; Stormie held the mirror steady and hoped the steam wouldn’t diffuse the light too much.

  “Bag’s bulging out the sides now,” Gabe said. “Wait, I’ve got movement on the trailer. Up, two, three centimeters. Keep it coming, a little more, a little more … okay, brace is in—”

  “Closing the fill valve,” Bruce said. “Wait just a second to make sure it holds.” The flow of steam out of the box continued.

  “She’s settling back down now,” Gabe said. “Brace seems to be holding.”

  “Great. Karl, how’s the pressure—”

  The side of the transit case opened up and a much larger jet of silent steam, bright with reflected sunlight, came straight at Stormie.

  The jet of steam hit Stormie full in the facemask. She jerked back reflexively, and her helmet rang like a thick plastic bell as something struck it. Her mind conjured another sound—a rushing sound like being under a waterfall—to go along with what her vision told her. Maybe it was the blood in her ears, but it didn’t drown out the reverberating pop of whatever hit her helmet.

  The steam was gone in an instant. Her suit was made to withstand the lunar temperature extremes, and a little cold steam couldn’t really hurt it. The steam left behind a collection of condensed droplets on her faceplate that disappeared almost immediately.

  Except for one spot.