“Okay, now what? Go out there and fix it?”
Matt shook his head. “Protocol is to try to torque it loose. Loosen the other two cables and hope that winch three releases.”
“Jesus,” said Serena. “That sounds dangerous.”
“Not as dangerous as suiting up and trying to un-jam it with a crowbar.” He tapped a series of commands into the keyboard, overriding the dynamic tensioning system and letting cables one and two go slack. Then he entered the thrust vectors Serena had sent him minutes earlier. At present, there was minimal tension on cable three because it and the Morgana were in free-fall, but when Serena’s thrust schedule kicked in, the Morgana would begin a series of accelerations that would adjust its path to allow them to slingshot around Jupiter and back toward Earth. Hopefully the acceleration would be enough to un-jam the winch – but not enough to tear the piton free from the rock.
“When’s the next thrust?” Serena asked.
“No time for that,” Matt said, winking at her. It was an obvious joke, but he knew she’d have been disappointed if he hadn’t taken advantage of the setup.
“Ha, ha,” said Serena dutifully. “Seriously, when?”
“Thirty-eight minutes. We’ll know soon enough.”
They waited in silence.
Matt and Serena had gotten married two years and 364 days earlier. They were the first husband-and-wife extraterrestrial mining crew in history – but if all went well, they would likely not be the last. Originally these asteroid-retrieval expeditions had been designed as one-person operations, and in truth there was no technical reason to have two crew members aboard. But CMS altered its methodology when it lost its second miner to suicide. Both had been driven insane by the solitude and gone out the airlock – the latter one sans pressure suit. Cynics argued that CMS’s change in attitude had more to do with the fact that the second suicide also cost them a ten-billion-dollar spacecraft than concern about their crewmembers.
Whatever the rationale, CMS was ultimately forced to redesign its vessels to accommodate two crew members, in order to ward against the loneliness and depression that went with extended space travel. They spent a small fortune trying to devise a scientific model of the perfect two-person mining team only to come to the obvious conclusion that the best possible team was a happily married couple. And just like that, Matt and Serena Edlund – an unexceptional air force test pilot and a computer scientist toiling away on CMS’s navigation software, respectively—vaulted to the top of the list of candidates to man the first two-person mining mission in CMS’s history. There had been three other couples under consideration (two male-female teams and a lesbian couple), but Matt and Serena had outscored all of them on both individual psychological tests and cooperative problem-solving exercises. They were, as far as CMS was concerned, the perfect team.
“Here we go,” said Matt, as the thrusters fired. Gravity suddenly pulled him down into his chair. On the monitor in front of him was Olive. Three barely perceptible silver lines – the tethering cables – began at the bottom of the screen, disappearing after a few inches into the shadow of the asteroid.
A minute jolt shuddered through the craft.
“What the hell was that?” Serena asked.
Matt bit his lip. “Hopefully, the winch letting go. Otherwise…”
Something was off about one of the lines on the bottom of the screen: its angle had changed slightly. That could only mean one thing.
“Oh, fuck,” said Matt. “Hold on.”
The number three piton had snapped, and now the loose end of the cable was recoiling toward the Morgana. There was a flash at the bottom of the screen as the remnant of the drilling assembly caught the sunlight, and then it disappeared from sight. Half a second later, there was another jolt, this one bigger than the first. The crunch of metal reverberated through the cabin. The warning chimes sounded and red lights blinked furiously.
“No loss of pressure,” said Serena.
“Thank God,” replied Matt. “Hopefully it didn’t… ah, shit. The oxygen plant is reporting severe damage. It’s completely offline.”
Matt power-cycled the plant, but there was no response. “Can we get it on one of the cams?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Serena. “Number fourteen, I think.”
Matt switched his display to show the input from camera fourteen. The view wasn’t pretty.
“No way we’re fixing that,” said Matt grimly.
The Morgana was a monstrous assembly of preassembled modules, stacked like a tower of Lego bricks. One of these was the oxygen generation plant. It would have made more sense with a ship of the Morgana’s size to use two smaller oxygen plants, but the manufacturer only made the modules in one size, and redundancy wasn’t cost-effective. A consequence of this design was that if the oxygen plant got knocked out, the crew of the Morgana was in deep shit. And what they saw on the monitor was a gaping hole in the side of the oxygen generation module.
“So what do we do?” Serena asked. But she knew the answer. There was nothing to do. They couldn’t even radio CMS for help because they were on the far side of Jupiter.
“Better refigure the oxygen usage calculations,” Matt said. “Assume zero output from the OGM. Maybe…” His voice trailed off. He couldn’t make himself complete the thought, because he knew it was a lie. Maybe we can both make it home….
Matt sat in silence while Serena re-worked the calculations. As he sat watching her work, he felt completely helpless—the same way he felt when he sat with her in the hospital after the accident. That was nearly two years ago, before they had been selected as the crew of the Morgana. They had been on their way to a Halloween party, Matt dressed as a pirate and Serena dressed as a mermaid. Matt had swerved to avoid a stray cat in the road and skidded sideways into a telephone pole. Serena’s head had crashed through the passenger’s side window and slammed into the pole. The doctors had kept her in a coma for three weeks to control the swelling of her brain. Matt had stayed with her in the hospital, leaving her side only for a few minutes at a time. The thought of losing her was more than he could stand. He had barely slept and lost over twenty pounds from his already wiry frame.
At last she had regained consciousness and began to show steady improvement. Within another three weeks, she had made a near-complete recovery. Only a few days later, they got the call from CMS, asking whether they would be interested in trying out for a spot on the mining crew rotation. It was an opportunity that neither of them had dared dream of. In the span of a few months, Matt had gone from the depths of despair to the highest heights known to humankind.
And now it was over. At least one of them would die before reaching Earth. Matt found himself hoping that there was no possibility of even one of them making it, so that they wouldn’t have to make the decision that he dreaded.
The grimace on Serena’s face told him that his hope would be unfulfilled.
“We have, maybe, just enough oxygen for one of us to make it back,” she said bluntly. “Sedation would help. If we put everything on automatic, and try to sleep as much as possible….”
“It has to be you,” said Matt.
“No,” said Serena.
“Serena, listen to me. You’re the brains of this operation. You can manage the nav system if you need to, but I can’t do the thrust vector calculations.”
“You could, Matt. It’s not as hard as you –”
“Okay, sure. I could do it, but it will take me five times as long. That means I’d have to spend more time awake than you. And as you say, whoever…stays…has to sleep as much as possible, to minimize oxygen use. In any case, you’re smaller. You only use about seventy-five percent as much oxygen as I do.”
Serena shook her head. “I don’t think I can do it, Matt.”
“You’ll be fine,” Matt said. “You’re strong than I am. When you were in the coma, I fell apart. I couldn’t even muster the strength to feed myself. No way I’m piloting this ship back home in that condition. You’re not like that
. You’re stronger than you realize. You’ll carry on.”
“Matt, no!” Serena cried, horrified. “I can’t! You don’t understand. I can’t make it without you!”
“Serena, goddammit! Don’t you think I know how hard this is? But there’s really no choice. It has to be you. If you leave me, then we’re both dead. You have to be the one to bring the Morgana home.”
Serena closed her eyes and tears streamed down her face. She unbuckled her harness and moved toward Matt to embrace him.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said. “There just isn’t any other way.”
“Don’t say you’re sorry!” Serena said. “You’re the one who’s….” She trailed off.
For several minutes, they held each other in silence.
At last, Serena spoke again. She was doing her best to resume her mathematician’s demeanor. “How are you going to do it?”
“I’ll…go out the airlock. Otherwise you’d have to….”
Serena nodded. There was no need to explain: obviously there was no room on the Morgana for a decaying corpse.
“I’ll take some painkillers before I eject myself. With any luck I’ll be stoned out of my mind before I run out of air.”
Serena tightened her embrace. A tear drop floated in front of Matt’s eyes.
“Okay, let’s get to work,” Matt said, a bit too tersely. His bravado was pointless; Serena could see right through him. But for some reason he felt compelled to put up a brave front. Something hard-wired into the XY chromosome, he thought. “One final systems check, and then we’ll have our last supper. Break out those beef burgundy packets we’ve been saving.”
Serena nodded and did her best to smile. “Okay. Meet you back here at sixteen hundred.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Matt, and unsnapped his harness. He pushed himself toward the opening opposite the one he had arrived from earlier. Every day they went through a standard check of all the Morgana’s systems; he could do his part in his sleep. Of course, after today, Serena would have to do both parts. He considered suggesting that they trade, but that would be pointless. She’d have to learn on her own, either way. In any case, he had no doubt she’d figure it out.
The prescribed order for the tests didn’t make much sense on paper— the nav system was to be checked before the electrical system, for example—but the rationale became clear once you were inside the Morgana. The tests were ordered by proximity, from the two ends of the ship to the center. Usable space was at a premium in these ships; there simply wasn’t enough room for two people carrying toolboxes to pass each other in the narrow shaft that ran the length of the Morgana. Despite the retrofit, the quarters were still cramped—even for a married couple.
Still, it was better than being alone. The sanity of even the most well-adjusted astronaut was strained by six months in space. Real-time communication with Earth was impossible after the initial burst of thrust, leaving the occupants of the craft in near total isolation only three weeks after takeoff. And once you were behind Jupiter, all communications were cut off, leaving nothing but the crushing boredom of deep space.
There was no technical reason for the Morgana to have two crew members, but it was clear after Cam LeFevre took his little spacewalk wearing nothing but his coveralls that the basic human need for social contact wasn’t going to bow to technical requirements. Human beings just weren’t designed to be alone for six months at a time.
At first, CMS, beholden to its shareholders, tried to take the cheap way out. Rather than redesign the ship’s hardware to accommodate two passengers, they tried to solve the problem with software. The idea was to design a computer program that could mimic human interaction. They called it Sidekick. When the programmers finished it, they locked up a few test subjects with only Sidekick to talk to. Unfortunately, CMS had to cut the experiment short after three weeks because the instance of psychosis was higher with Sidekick than without. Prisoners in solitary confinement fared better than the poor bastards who were subjected to Sidekick.
On the other hand, a single astronaut would never have had to face the choice that had been forced upon Matt and Serena. He told himself that he had made the right call: it had to be Serena who lived. She had a better chance of making it home.
Matt had just reached the fore end of the ship when an alarm sounded. His mouth went dry and his stomach tightened. He knew that sound: Serena had opened the inner airlock door.
Matt latched his toolkit to one of the rungs that lined the interior of the Morgana and tucked himself into a ball, pushing against the rung to send himself spinning head-for-feet. Reaching out again in a practiced motion, he braked himself against the rung, forcing himself to come to a complete stop, then pushed off down the shaft. The fastest way to get to the airlock was with a single, well-aimed jump, but in his haste Matt badly misjudged and ended up crashing into the side of the shaft some ten meters down. Bouncing off the panel, he came to a halt when his head struck one of the rungs. Matt cursed, took a deep breath, and jumped again. This time he sailed straight down the shaft, not stopping until he grabbed a rung across from the airlock door.
Matt turned just in time to see the airlock status monitor display:
DE-PRESSURIZATION COMPLETE
Above this message was an image of Serena, standing in the airlock, smiling placidly at him. She wasn’t wearing a pressure suit.
The display now read:
OPENING EXTERNAL DOOR
“No!” Matt screamed. “Serena, stop! What are you doing?”
The door slid open, revealing the dark of deep space and a smattering of stars.
Serena pantomimed blowing a kiss to him. Then she turned and launched herself into the blackness.
As her figure grew smaller, Matt stared in disbelief. Why would she do this? It made no sense. They had agreed, for Christ’s sake. She was supposed to be the one to pilot the Morgana home.
Her words echoed in Matt’s brain: I can’t! You don’t understand. I can’t make it without you!
Disbelief was followed by waves of anger and grief – and then self-pity. Well, he thought. Now we’re both fucked.
Serena’s limp body drifted away as if pulled by the darkness of space.
To Matt’s credit, he didn’t bother to entertain vain hopes of rescuing her. She’d asphyxiate before he even had his suit on. He watched her float away until she was a tiny white speck in the blackness, and then kept watching for what might well have been hours. There was nothing else for him to do.
He hadn’t been exaggerating when he told her he was incapable of navigating the Morgana back to Earth. It would have been a challenge for him even if he had a full supply of oxygen, and with his already barely adequate intellect compromised by grief and oxygen deprivation, he didn’t have a chance.
At last he looked away, and the reality of the situation hit him: he was alone. As alone as anyone had ever been, 300 million kilometers from the nearest human being. 300 million kilometers. Another meaningless number. What mattered was that Serena was gone, her frozen body drifting slowly into deep space.
Matt dragged himself numbly to the control center, strapping himself into his chair. He tapped in the thrust vectors Serena had given him earlier, and then activated the Morgana’s distress beacon. Serena’s vectors would get the Morgana around Jupiter and headed roughly in the direction of Earth. CMS would pick up the distress call, run a remote diagnostic, and discover that both crew members were dead. They would then send a salvage mission to retrieve the Morgana and its haul. The job would get done, even though the crew wouldn’t be around to see it.
Matt mechanically unstrapped himself and navigated toward the medical locker. He swallowed a handful of narcotics and then made his way back to the airlock and began donning his space suit. He was under no illusion about his own gallantry; following Serena into the void fully conscious and sans space suit was probably the romantic thing to do, but Matt had no desire to die of a pulmonary embolism, exploding lungs, or any of the other condition
s that ultimately led to death in a vacuum. No, he would stick to the plan, even if Serena hadn’t: he would launch himself into space and drift into a narcotic slumber, dying peacefully when his thirty-minute oxygen supply gave out.
As he sealed his helmet, he began to worry that the narcotics wouldn’t take effect in time, and that he would feel his lungs burning from oxygen deprivation for several minutes before passing out. But then the drugs hit him like a hammer to the back of his head, and his anxiety spun 180 degrees: would he even get out of the airlock before he lost consciousness?
The helmet was on; the last thing to do was to don his gloves and seal them. This was really a two person job under ideal circumstances, and with Matt’s brain entering a narcotic haze, he found the task nearly impossible. His fingers felt like sausages dangling from his hands.
“Goddamn it,” Matt sighed, as his vision blurred. “I’m sorry, Serena. I’m a moron. I can’t even fucking…”
• • •
Matt awoke strapped into his cot. Serena was leaning over him. “Good morning,” she said with a smile. There was a note of worry in her voice.
“What…” Matt started, groggily. “Serena! How did you…?”
“How did I what?” she asked. “I got us past Jupiter, if that’s what you’re wondering. I just pushed the numbers into the fancy computer thingy. I can manage some things on my own, you know.”
“No,” Matt said. “I meant, how did you survive…the airlock? You weren’t wearing….”
Serena’s brow furrowed as she regarded him sympathetically. “I’m sorry, Matt,” she said. “I don’t understand. I think you may still be a little confused from the drugs.”
“The drugs,” Matt repeated. “Shit, I took….”
“You took enough painkillers to kill… well, not a horse. Maybe a donkey. Get it? Because you’re an ass. What the hell were you thinking, Matt?”
“I thought you were dead,” said Matt.
“Dead?” replied Serena, shocked. “Why would I be dead?
At the Helm: A Sci-Fi Bridge Anthology (Volume 1) Page 16
