The cleaner was as helpless as she was in zero gravity. That realization emboldened her. The robot needed leverage. Jasmine maneuvered herself around behind the cleaner and took hold of its frame from the rear before it could get hold of one of the headrests. The claws couldn’t reach her. By holding the back of the robot, its claws couldn’t reach the hull. It was just another piece of floating metal like the panels she’d removed from the command console.
“Very clever. So what are you going to do now, Jazz?”
“Oh, no,” Jasmine replied. “Not again. You’re not drawing me into some other ruse.”
Jasmine understood she had to disable the cleaner. Eventually, if she didn’t, it would drift to one side or the other and get close enough to grab hold of the hull again. Once it did, it could terrorize her with its acrobatics. She had to think. She had to be resourceful, to use whatever was around her to defend herself. That she would be dead within half an hour from a lack of oxygen was irrelevant. For now, she had to destroy this cleaner. She had to destroy Jason.
One of the panels on the cleaner had been pried open in its battle with Chuck. Beyond the robot, Jasmine could see the bathroom. The door to the shower had been knocked off its tracks and Jasmine realized she had a weapon against this robotic threat. What better to destroy electronics than water?
Carefully, she pushed off, keeping the cleaner well away from her as she soared over to the bathroom. To avoid giving the cleaner any chance at escape, she turned her back, colliding gently with the shower cubicle. The pinchers on the cleaner grabbed at the door, gaining some leverage, and the robot spun around to grab at her mask, but Jasmine was quicker. She pulled the shower-head down and turned the tap.
Water burst forth, spraying out around her. She shoved the shower-head into the loose panel as water seethed and boiled away in the vacuum. Being recycled grey water, a thin, scum-like residue remained. The cleaner grabbed her mask, its claw poised to tear the mask from her face when it stopped abruptly. It wasn’t that the mechanical arm had seized, but that the electronics had short-circuited.
Jasmine sighed, prying the metal arm loose and pushing the dead robot away from her. She turned off the water and floated there for a few seconds, trying to compose herself, trying to think about what she could do next.
A series of lights on the command deck sprang to life. Consoles lit up. An image appeared of a faint glow coming from within the engine bell.
“What now?” Jasmine asked.
“Oh, this has nothing to do with you,” Jason replied. “This is a course correction to stop us from colliding with Bestla.”
Was he lying? Was this another trick?
“No,” Jasmine said. She turned the water back on and grabbed at the hose, wrenching it from its plastic socket and pulling hard to extend it as far as possible.
“What are you doing?” Jason asked.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she replied, using her legs to push off the wall and pull more of the hose free. A plastic panel came loose, allowing the hose to unravel. Water sprayed around her, evaporating rapidly in the vacuum, turning into what looked like steam. Jasmine sailed away from the bathroom with the hose trailing behind her. She could just reach the navigation console with her jet of seething water. Hanging onto the console, she shoved the hose into the computer circuitry. Water bubbled and boiled without the need for heat, leaving a fine residue of salts and scum on the circuit boards.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Jason yelled. “Don’t you understand? If we don’t change our trajectory, we’ll collide with Bestla.”
Jasmine spoke with cool deliberation. “What’s the matter, Jason? Are you frightened?”
“No! No! No!” Jason repeated as Jasmine turned the hose on the command console. With the panels removed, the stream of water could just reach the exposed computer systems as it began boiling and evaporating. She laughed at the insanity of what she was doing in destroying the Copernicus.
“But you’ll die,” Jason cried.
“I’m dead anyway, remember?” she said from beneath her gas mask.
Jasmine relished the sight of the computer screens failing. The lights on the bridge flickered.
“Don’t do this,” Jason cried. “I’m not a machine. I’m like you. I’m alive. Please, you can’t do this.”
“Jason. Don’t you know? Don’t you understand? Everyone dies on Bestla.”
“You need me, Jazz. You need—”
Jasmine wasn’t sure whether the sudden silence meant she’d got to Jason or if it was merely that he was cut off and could no longer talk to her. She suspected the latter.
Jasmine accepted that she was going to die, but at least the deaths of her crew mates would be avenged by Jason’s death. The Copernicus was on a collision course with Bestla, but after all she’d been through, Jasmine didn’t care.
Chapter 11: Satan
Jasmine had no idea what she’d done from a technical perspective, but that the Copernicus was dead was plain to see. Emergency lighting cast a red glow around the bridge.
She had to see Bestla for herself. If she was going to die, she had to at least see this alien artifact. Jason had told her it was the size of a moon. She couldn’t remember how big it was, but she knew it dwarfed the Copernicus. The images Chuck had shown them had revealed a pockmarked, cratered surface not unlike that of an asteroid. Had it not been for the symmetry of its design and a number of spherical shapes protruding from the body of the craft, it would have been indistinguishable from anything in the asteroid belt. Would the Copernicus be traveling fast enough to cause a crater? Or would it simply crumple and bounce off the massive craft, careering into space?
Jasmine cranked the handle on the airlock. Without main power, the process was laborious. She closed the lock behind her and worked herself into a spacesuit, recalling the steps from her time in the lock with Nadir. Jasmine couldn’t bring herself to look Chuck in the eye.
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” she whispered into her mask as she locked the upper torso of the spacesuit to the bottom leggings. Ordinarily, she’d have a minute or so of air once she put on her helmet, giving her plenty of time to hook up to a life-support system backpack, but in a vacuum, such a process was fraught with difficulty. Jasmine had already experienced what had happened when her mask came loose. The thought of air rushing from her lungs again terrified her, but there was no other way.
She positioned herself in front of the backpack. Holding her helmet in one gloved hand, ready to slip it over her head, it still took her a few minutes to drum up the courage to remove her gas mask. She hyperventilated, not intentionally, but at the thought of oxygen being ripped from her lungs.
“I’ve got to do this,” she whispered. “I’ve got to. There’s no other way. I’ve got to.”
Jasmine stopped the flow of oxygen from the cylinder and held her breath as she removed her mask, but holding her breath was a mistake. She clenched her mouth, trying to hold what little, precious air she had, only the pressure difference caused the gas in her lungs to expand. With nowhere to go, the oxygen expanded within her sponge-like lung bronchi, rupturing the fragile tissue. The searing pain in her chest overwhelmed her and she exhaled, but the damage had been done. Blood began seeping into her lower, left lung.
Again, saliva churned in her mouth, boiling on her tongue. Frost formed around her lips as moisture evaporated and cooled her skin. Dots appeared before her eyes. Jasmine was terrified by how quickly she lost her vision. To her, the Copernicus had been plunged into an inky black darkness. She struggled with her helmet. The thick gloves didn’t help, making it difficult to determine whether she had seated the helmet in the collar ring correctly.
A red light blinked to life on the HUD, the heads-up display projected onto the glass of her helmet. There were words on the screen. They were flashing, but she couldn’t focus on them. She had no idea what the computerized life-support system was trying to tell her.
She gasped, but there was no air. In seconds, she’
d be dead, and she panicked, trying to wrench the helmet into place, but force was no use. Precision was needed, not panic. There was no time for precision. She blinked and the wash of moisture from her eyelids soothed her eyes for barely a second before they again felt cool and dry.
The helmet tilted and slipped off the track. With her hands on either side of the smooth outer shell, Jasmine twisted the faceplate away from her and felt the locking collar slip into place. Her hands were shaking. She wrenched the helmet back so the glass visor sat in front of her and she felt the screw thread tighten and lock.
Air.
She needed oxygen. She still had to clip into the backpack. With her boots, she pushed backwards, but it was too late, she lost consciousness. Her back nudged against the life-support pack. Clips and locks whirred into life automatically, but Jasmine could barely feel them. Her body went limp as the darkness crept over her.
When she awoke, she was floating against the ceiling of the airlock, facing down. Her joints ached. Spasms and cramps seized her legs, shocking her into consciousness.
She screamed, arching her body and fighting against the cramp in her right thigh. Inside the thick spacesuit, there was nothing she could do but ride out the excruciating pain.
Jasmine fought with the lever to open the outer hatch. Her gloves felt clumsy, much like her father's old leather welding gloves. With fat fingers, she gripped the lever with one hand and a handle beside the hatch with the other and pulled. The lever must have connected with a series of gears as once the lever was in motion, drawing it down toward the floor of the airlock was easy. The hatch opened outward, before sliding into a rail that allowed the thick metal door to move to one side. Jasmine kept a firm grip on the handle beside the hatch and pushed on the door until she felt it lock into place just as it had for Nadir.
Her heart was racing. Her breathing was painful. She coughed and a fine splattering of blood sprayed across the lower portion of her glass faceplate. The bulky spacesuit restricted her motion, encasing her and robbing her of the freedom she'd enjoyed within the Copernicus.
From the airlock, she could see Saturn. She was surprised by how much it looked like Earth's Moon. There were no craters on Saturn, and numerous thin bands of clouds stretched around the gas giant, marking different latitudes, but the planet appeared small, no larger than the Moon, and like the Moon, Saturn formed a crescent of brilliant white light. The rings of Saturn stretched out into space, tilting at an angle, crowning the planet like a celestial rainbow. Saturn was beautiful. If she died right then and there, Jasmine would have been content. To see such a wonder firsthand was electrifying, dulling the pain in her aching body.
She moved slowly. There was no rush. Stars flecked the eternal night, tiny pin-pricks of light fighting off the blackness. They defied the darkness—raging furnaces warming the bitter cold of space.
Jasmine turned, looking for Bestla. A dark shadow loomed in the distance, blotting out the stars and her heart raced.
The heads-up display within her helmet chimed into life, apparently detecting the asteroid or moon or alien craft or whatever it was. A thin red line projected onto the glass, marking the outline of Bestla. The readout displayed above Bestla read: Delta-V 278m/s.
“What the hell is that in yards?”
Mentally, she converted from metric to US measurements.
“Damn, that’s easily 300 yards per second. Three goddamn football fields racing past every second!”
The dawning realization of just how fast she was going relative to Bestla was alarming.
“Fender bender, my ass,” she muttered to herself, recalling Chuck's description. At this speed, she’d be nothing but a bloody smear on the surface of the alien moon.
The Copernicus had been tasked with a fly-by of Bestla rather than a landing, but the course correction and the explosion in the science lab had nudged the craft onto a collision course. Jasmine did the math. Nine hundred feet per second, that was roughly ten miles every minute. She was racing toward Bestla at over six hundred miles an hour. By astronomical standards, it was a relatively slow, lazy pace, but for the fragile human body, it would be fatal.
“Please let me be wrong,” she mumbled.
She went back through the calculation, double checking her multiplication. Meters were slightly longer than a yard, there was no mistake.
“Two hundred and seventy eight meters per second,” she said, looking at the Manned Maneuvering Unit mounted beside the exit to the airlock. “How much fuel have you got? How fast can you go?”
Jasmine may not have understood too much about space travel, but she knew delta-v reigned supreme. She had to reduce the relative speed between her and Bestla. At the moment, she was in free-fall, like a cannonball shot over the parapets, but she could change that. She could shed at least some of her speed with the MMU.
Jasmine realized she could use the MMU to travel laterally and possibly avoid a collision, but she had no idea how wide Bestla was, or which way to go. She could inadvertently make things worse and still collide with the alien craft at a fatal speed. No, she thought, her best option was to reduce her approach speed and hopefully come to a halt relative to the alien structure. Besides, she wanted to see the alien craft for herself. Jasmine understood she was going to die out here, and the thought of sailing past Bestla only to die in the lonely, dark void of space was depressing. This was First Contact. She would die, but she would be the first person to experience the awe and wonder of encountering an alien artifact.
Slowly, she backed into the MMU, feeling her bulky life-support pack bumping clumsily against the frame of the jetpack.
“Come on, baby. Come on,” she whispered, grabbing at the armrests on the MMU as she nudged herself into the frame. Through the thick material in her spacesuit and her rigid backpack, she felt a series of clamps automatically aligning her for the final few inches, drawing her into place.
Dim LED lights lit up on the arm rest. Cautiously, Jasmine positioned her hands behind the joysticks on either metal arm rest. Her heads-up display changed, synchronizing with the computer built into the MMU and bringing up a series of numbers that were meaningless to her. At the bottom of her faceplate, two digital depictions of the joysticks appeared. They were semitransparent. Gently, Jasmine eased both hands forward, pressing the joysticks momentarily and then releasing. The MMU responded instantly, easing forward. Much like her movement within the Copernicus, Jasmine quickly realized she'd have to arrest any motion and she pulled back on the joysticks gently, aligning herself with the center of the hatch. A gentle nudge to the side on one of the sticks allowed her to rotate.
“I could get used to this,” she said, waiting until she was aligned with the open hatch before bringing her rotation to a halt.
“Nice slow motions,” she whispered. “Nothing fancy.”
Jasmine eased out of the airlock. Vertigo swept over her as the hull of the Copernicus disappeared beneath her. The tingling in her feet was overwhelming, as though she were dangling over the edge of a skyscraper. Jasmine pursed her lips, slowing her breathing.
“Relax,” she told herself, fighting off a panic attack. “Just a walk in the park.”
Oh, a park. What a thought. Green grass between her toes, warm sunshine on her face, the smell of flowers, the sound of dogs barking as they chase a Frisbee. Anything but the bitter black darkness and the lonely specks of distant stars.
Jasmine rotated the MMU. She was still drifting away from the Copernicus, but now she was facing the craft. This was the first time she'd seen the Copernicus as a whole. She wasn't sure what she expected to see, perhaps something like the Apollo craft, with its shiny chrome exterior, its tubular shell and tiny maneuvering jets. Instead, the Copernicus looked like something from a junk yard. There were no aesthetics, no aerodynamics, not that any were needed, but there was no coherent design. The Copernicus looked motley, like a collection of smaller craft bolted together. As she drifted further away, she could see the communications boom where Nadi
r and Mike had fought. From the airlock, the boom had looked so large. Out here in space, it looked small and insignificant.
Dark burn marks marred the hull where the explosion in the science lab had ruptured the outer hull. There had to have been some kind of automatic sealant plugging the breach as they hadn't lost pressure at that point. Had Jason intended the fire to be so devastating? She doubted it. He wanted to kill the crew, but perhaps even he couldn't anticipate how severe the fire would be.
“Lost connection,” flashed before her on her display as she drifted several hundred meters from the Copernicus. “Seeking... Seeking... AR47 booster found. Do you wish to connect to subnet AR47? Yes/No.”
Jasmine stabbed at the trackpad on her arm, pushing, “Yes.” Her onboard computer must have lost its connection with the Copernicus and had routed her communications through the booster satellite Chuck had launched to ensure messages made it to Earth.
“Signal strength: Good,” read the information displayed on her HUD. “Transmitting…”
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
There was silence.
How far was Saturn from Earth? Jasmine quickly realized any communication would take hours to complete, depending on where the two planets were in their race-track like orbits of the Sun. There would be no reply, not for some time, but a series of tiny bars in the top left of her HUD showed she was connected. Someone somewhere had to be monitoring the signal booster. They would see the loss of signal from the Copernicus and then her transmission. She had to tell them what had happened.
“They're all dead,” she blurted out, choking with those words, unsure what else to say. She was babbling. This isn't what those back on Earth were waiting for. These weren't the august words they expected on such an historic occasion, but she didn't know what else to say. “I'm sorry. Everyone's dead. The Copernicus is dead.”
My Sweet Satan Page 23
