by B. V. Larson
“They’re in here?” Jackie heard herself saying.
Sandeep nodded, putting a finger to his lips. For the next minute or so, the only sound was the hissing of their air hoses and their own rapid breathing.
The wheel began spinning open again slowly after a minute had passed.
Sandeep put his hands on the wheel, stopping it. “Brandt?” he called. “Is that you?”
“Negative, Sandeep. We’re having trouble at the entrance. We’ll be down to you as quickly as we can.”
“Hurry, I think one is trying to get into the engine room.”
Jackie admired his calm. She could see his hand on the wheel—it was trembling. He held it tightly, with both his gloved hands. For several moments, it didn’t move.
“Are they trying to open it?” she asked in a whisper.
“No. They tried, but now—” he stopped talking and gasped in surprise. The wheel in his hands began inching its way open once again.
Jackie gave a little shriek and lunged forward, gripping it with Sandeep. Together, they hung on for dear life.
Now that she had her hands intertwined with Sandeep’s, she could feel the tension of both sides, exerting their muscles to open the hatch. After several seconds, she felt the thing on the far side let go. They spun the wheel all the way back to center again, and leaned against it, panting.
Sandeep dared to smile at her. “One vote for Earth-trained muscles, eh?”
His relief was short-lived, however, as a moment later the wheel began spinning open again. They resisted it as desperately as they could, but Jackie could tell it was useless. Had the enemy put something on the far side that could force the issue? Had they somehow applied a lever or a tool to do the spinning for them?
It didn’t matter, because they were losing. She let go, and the spinning accelerated. Sandeep looked at her in wide-eyed panic.
She grabbed a wrench and jammed it into the wheel, getting under it and pushing upward. She used this as a lever and the movement finally halted.
It was perhaps a minute later that they heard the transmitted sounds of a struggle in their helmets. When this ended, someone began to open the door.
“Let me in, Sandeep.”
“Brandt?” he asked, opening the door with trepidation.
Brandt was in the hallway alone. At his feet was something large and shaggy. It looked like one of the aliens—but bigger.
“I came up behind it while it scratched at the door,” Brandt said, between breaths. “It looked like the biggest, weirdest wolf you’ve ever seen. The thin atmosphere in here helped. It didn’t hear me coming until the last minute. I stuck my blade into its back and then, well, I lived.”
Jackie looked at him. She’d always considered Brandt a dangerous hothead. But today she was glad he was what he was.
“We’re losing this,” Brandt said. “We had to retreat from the upper deck. This one got past us—I’m sorry about that. We welded a few doors shut, but they’ll dismantle the entire ship if they have to. They’re being gentle so far. I think they want to capture some of us alive, rather than tear us all apart.”
Jackie nodded. “Makes sense, unfortunately.”
“I’ve got to go up and review the situation,” Sandeep said, hurrying to the ladder and out of sight.
Jackie watched him go, then she turned back to Brandt. She was glad he was there, protecting her. “Any suggestions?”
“Yes,” he said. “We need to get this ship into the sky right now.”
She shook her head. “The containment field—I don’t know if it will hold. I don’t know how to bring it up gently.”
“Then just switch the damned thing on,” Brandt suggested.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “It might blow up the ship. At the very least, the radiation will kill everything down here.”
Brandt gave her an odd look. “You know my daughter, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“She liked you. She told me I should try to marry you. Did you know that?”
Despite everything, Jackie flushed. “This is hardly the time, Brandt—”
“I know,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that—because, you know, I’m probably not going to get another chance.”
“I feel the same way,” she said suddenly. “Like I wish we had more time.”
Jackie blinked after that. She’d surprised herself. Had she really had feelings for Brandt all along? He was so unlike the cerebral type of man she usually dated.
“Good,” he said, smiling at her. He then began gently shoving her out of the engine compartment.
“What are you doing?”
“Take care of Jenna for me,” he said, “if you do get home someday.”
The door slammed, and the wheel spun.
Jackie was stunned. She stared at the door, and her first urge was to grab the wheel again and open it.
But then it dawned on her what Brandt was going to do.
She knew she couldn’t stop him. All she could do was reach what might be a safe distance. She turned and ran. She threw herself at the ladder and hand-over-handed it to the top, then grabbed the next one. When she got to the top of that, she slammed down the hatch that sealed the lower two decks. She began to spin that closed when suddenly—
The ship lurched. It rolled over, then went into a slow tumble.
“Sandeep!” she screamed. “Brandt’s activated the drive! Get the helm under control or we’ll crash!”
Chapter 67
Jupiter Orbit, Aboard Troika
Starlight
Troika wasn’t in good condition. The ignition of the engine in the lower decks without a fully shielded power source caused a radiation surge. The effect was similar to turning on an extremely powerful microwave with no door—or walls. Brandt died in seconds. Many vulnerable surfaces melted or even burst into flame inside the lower compartments. Insulation curled to reveal hot wire. Tubes disconnected from ducts and gases flowed freely. A secondary explosion in the coolant room caused heat to roil up the passageways even after the coils had finally kicked in and sealed the core with a buzzing, flickering shield of weak electromagnetic force.
“Have we lifted off?” screamed Jackie over the com system, rushing from one bulkhead to another, sealing every hatch that hadn’t automatically sealed itself.
“Are you hurt?” asked a voice that sounded like Edwin.
“I might be dead in a week from radiation exposure,” she said, “but forget about that. We have to seal the lower decks and vent them into space to kill the fire.”
“I don’t think we’re even off the ground yet,” Edwin shouted. “I’m looking out the window—we’re still on the surface. The drive is firing without direction, melting the ice and even boiling it, but we’re going nowhere from what I can see.”
“What’s going on?” Sandeep demanded. “Who’s flying this thing?”
Despite the desperate nature of their situation, Jackie felt a fresh surge of fear. “Dyson is dead. No one is flying the ship!” She realized then that they were doomed. They had no pilot. The ship was out of control. “Who can pilot this thing?” she demanded. “Someone has to get to the cockpit.”
“Relax,” said another voice. Impossibly, he did sound relaxed.
“Perez?”
“Yes. I flew helicopters for years. How different can Troika be?”
There was a hint of sarcasm in his voice. In all the time she'd known him, she had never seen Perez get bent out of shape. Not even under these circumstances. She gave up sealing bulkheads and moved to the cockpit. The ship was still shaking, vibrating like a motorcycle revving up and down the scale.
Unlike a traditional rocket, Troika wasn’t built with a defined cone of exhaust and a propellant to be hurled in a single direction. The ship had several energy-release points, and they were all operating, but without coherent direction.
“Lev,” she said, “get to the cockpit. We need you to translate.”
&nbs
p; Breathing in gasps, her heart fluttering in her chest, she met Lev and Perez in the small cockpit. It was designed for two, a pilot and a co-pilot. But she squeezed in with them anyway.
“The ship is idling at high power,” she said. “The last configuration of the thrusters would have been for landing. That means they splayed the angle of the thrusters to slow down the ship, to let her down those final feet almost not moving at all. We’ve got them idling again, but they're directed at the wrong angles for takeoff, and we’re not standing flat on our tail to begin with.”
“Look. That's got to be our attitude indicator,” Perez said. “We’re a good thirty degrees off center.”
“Right,” she said. “Is that one airspeed?”
“In kilometers, yes. We’re not moving.”
Perez tentatively adjusted the controls, and the ship bucked under them.
“Lev?” he asked. “I’m not seeing a gyro here. Something to indicate our course.”
“What will it look like?” he asked.
“Like an airplane with a compass around it.”
Jackie fought to control a rising sense of panic. She had to control her mind enough to think clearly.
“It might not look like that,” she said, running her eyes over the instruments. “This whole thing looks like the inside of a Soyuz.”
“Makes sense,” Perez said. “We based ours on the shuttlecraft.”
The ship lurched again, and Jackie had to grab the back of the seats to stay standing.
“Are we moving?” asked Lev. “Here, this button says ‘external view’ in Russian. Shall I push it?”
She nodded worriedly.
There were no real windows in the cockpit, just screens. Projected on the screen of the forward walls of the compartment, the outside world appeared. Jupiter loomed overhead. The white walls of the crater formed a near horizon. Around them, much closer, was a smaller crater they were digging with their flaring thrusters.
“Maybe we should turn it off,” Perez said. “I think this will kill the engine.”
Jackie’s hand flew to land on his. “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t know if we can get the reaction running again. We have to fly this thing now.”
“If this was a helicopter,” Victor said, “I’d power up the main rotor and control it with the tail rotor, using flaps in midflight. But with this thing—I don’t know.”
“You don’t have that kind of control,” Jackie explained, talking in short, breathless bursts. “You have to find a way to tilt the exhaust ports. They all have to angle downward—toward the surface.”
“There are thrust levers here, and a joystick. You want me to try it?”
“Yes,” she said, biting her lip. “That stick might only control the attitude jets—but we have to try.”
Jackie braced herself as Perez pulled back on the joystick and simultaneously slid the thruster levers forward a few millimeters.
The ship vibrated harder, and the nose seemed to be lifting.
“Something’s holding us back,” Perez said. “I…I can feel it.”
“More tilt, more thrust,” Lev suggested. “You’re working the right controls.”
Perez’s calm had finally broken. He showed his teeth in a grimace, like a man who was about to do something very unpleasant. He applied more thrust and pulled harder on the stick.
Jackie looked around for something to hold onto—there was a jump seat folded up against a wall. She unfolded it and was in the middle of getting the straps around her body when the ship vaulted into the sky.
The ship broke free with shocking speed. Europa’s surface vanished under them, then the disk of Jupiter loomed—and slid away again.
“Ease off! Ease off!” Jackie shouted, clinging to the straps. “We’re in a spin!”
Perez reduced thrust and the vibration lessened. “I think we’re idling again. The Russian control system seems to be more refined than ours.”
“That’s because we didn’t simply steal it from the aliens,” Lev commented.
Jackie took in a deep breath. They were in a slow spin, but most of their momentum was carrying them upward. They were headed off-world in a hurry. Europa’s gravity was light, and the atmosphere was thin. It was relatively easy to get into orbit.
Sandeep came down a ladder to join them. He couldn’t fit into the cockpit so he stood in the doorway.
“Good job, new flight crew,” he said. “I’m glad someone with some knowledge of rocketry survived this long.”
He sounded depressed and bitter. Jackie realized he had every reason to be. By anyone’s standards, this entire trip had been a disaster for both the Americans and the Russians.
“We did pretty badly,” she said. “This was never a race for technology. We were in a first-contact situation, and we didn’t even know it.”
“What do you mean?” Lev asked.
“I’m talking about the aliens,” Jackie said. “We made contact with a new species, and we blew it. Earth blew it.”
Lev shrugged. “They attacked us. What could we do?”
“You’re going to blame this all on them?” she demanded. “Really? What did you do the first time saw one of them?”
Lev shrugged. “I shot at it.”
“Right. And before that, what did Troika do? Your ship bombarded this spot on the ice from space. You cracked the crust with projectiles of some kind.”
Lev smiled. “You knew about that?”
“We analyzed photos of the surface. It took us a while, but we figured out what you were doing. You burrowed halfway through the icy crust at this location.”
“It was much faster that way. The ice was too thick.”
“But think of how that must have seemed to the aliens. It was an attack.”
Lev sucked in a breath of air and moved in his seat. “You sound like Kira. She believed they were harmless fellows as well. She wanted to warn them we were coming.”
“Who’s Kira?” Sandeep asked.
“She’s a dead woman. A friend of mine.”
Jackie looked at him thoughtfully. They’d all lost friends on this trip. They were all exhausted and stressed. She hadn’t expected this journey to be so traumatic.
They spent the next hour stabilizing the ship’s flight path into a uniform orbit and killing all the fires by depressurizing the lower decks. Once they’d done that, they were able to seal the ship again and head down to the engine room.
The cowl was completely off the engine, and Jackie stopped anyone from going in or even looking inside, directly. She used a mirror attached to a pole to look.
“We can’t go in there. The core is stable, but see that bluish nimbus? It will melt down anyone in its direct path. These walls are lead-lined, but no one can take direct exposure.”
They backed away and retreated to the upper decks. Sandeep called a conference of the surviving six humans aboard. Everyone other than Sandeep, Jackie, Lev, Edwin, Yuki and Perez had perished at one point or another.
“Crew,” he said, “this voyage has been far from a stellar success. But we did survive. We have a great deal of critical information to relay to Earth. So far, our transmitter isn’t operating, but maybe we will get it working again. We have plenty of time to repair it as we limp home to our planet.”
“Doesn’t work, eh?” Lev questioned. “Are you sure? Or are you just unhappy because it will only transmit to Moscow?”
Sandeep looked at him coldly. “That is most certainly not what I meant.”
“There is another critical point,” Lev said. “Who made you captain? I’m the only member of this group who should be aboard this ship at all. You are not captain—I am captain. You are all guests aboard my ship.”
“Lev,” Jackie said. “We’re all in this together. We’re all just trying to survive and get home.”
“Do you want to kick us off your ship, Lev?” Perez asked. “You don’t even have a qualified pilot. I'm pretty sure you can't fly this thing.”
The Lieutenant eye
d each of them disdainfully, then grumbled something in Russian. “All right. We have to form a complete crew. That will take all of us. I will translate and work on the communications systems. Linscott and Tanaka, we need you the most. You can go over the ship and repair whatever you can find. The doctor can play doctor, Perez can pilot. And you,” he said, turning to Sandeep. “You can be the cook. We need a cook.”
Sandeep showed his teeth. Jackie could not recall having seen anything like a snarl on Sandeep’s face before.
“I’m not cooking anything for—”
“Guys,” Yuki said, “we have to pull our shit together. Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’re kick-starting the Cold War all over again. The second we’re not being eaten by aliens, you’re ready to fight among yourselves. The aliens are our enemy now, not Americans or Russians.”
“Maybe,” Lev said, crossing his arms. “Let’s talk about where we’re landing this ship.”
They all squirmed uncomfortably. Jackie could tell all her crewmates wanted to go straight home—but that hardly seemed fair. This was a Russian ship, and Lev was right, he was the only person who belonged aboard her.
“We’ll land in Russia,” she said. “Star City, if you like.”
He looked at her and nodded appreciatively. “I more than like that suggestion—I insist upon it.”
“All right,” Sandeep said. “Let’s do it that way. We’ll repair the communications system and beam all our findings to Earth—to both governments. Then we’ll land this ship in Russia, wherever they tell us to. Can we agree on that much?”
Everyone nodded, and even Lev seemed mollified. Everyone that was, except for Dr. Tanaka.
“Yuki?” Jackie said, prodding her. Tanaka was working a tablet and looking very focused. “What do you think?”
Yuki looked up, blinking. “I think we have a problem.”
“What?”
“The aliens—I think they’re beaming something into space. I’m reading a huge, focused surge of radiation.”
Worry swept through the group.
“Is it directed at this ship?” Lev demanded.
“Dr. Tanaka,” said Sandeep, “please tell me they can’t take over our engine and bring us back down again against our will.”
