by M. D. Cooper
‘Lock Closed’
Tanis steered her boat toward a quay and looked for the ideal route down to the base of the pontoon strut.
BACKUP
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, Hyperion Service Yard 17-32
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Connie ground her teeth as she thought of—and discarded—half a dozen choice replies. She finally settled on,
The tank scraped against the opening in the side of the Kirby Jones, sending a shrieking vibration through the vessel.
“Why, that motherfucking bitch!” Connie bellowed, storming out of the engineering bay where she’d been watching the process on the feeds, headed for the EV suits racked near the lower airlock.
“What in the stars is this woman’s problem?” Connie muttered as she reached the EV suits and pulled one off the rack.
Lovell spoke into Connie’s mind.
Connie snorted as she pulled on her helmet. Once it was secure, she reached into a cabinet and keyed in the code for the emergency nanofilament electron beam cutter.
* * * * *
Tanis stood in a service bay near the city’s outer hull. She looked at the crawler bot and suddenly had a very strong feeling that she needed to find a better way down the strut to the maintenance bay near the pontoon.
The service bot bore an uncanny resemblance to a centipede. It had a four-meter-long body and twenty legs, as well as several longer appendages. Each of the legs ended in a specialized hook that fit into slots on the exterior of the city—or so Tanis hoped.
She couldn’t see how else the bot would keep from being blown off by Saturn’s howling winds.
After a final check of her EV suit, Tanis knelt down on the back of the bot’s body. She clipped her suit’s emergency tethers to the machine, and then wrapped a high-stress cargo tether around her calves and the body of the machine.
Giving it a few good tugs, she laid down and repeated the process around her waist, and then once more under her armpits.
The bot skittered forward into a narrow tube that sealed behind them. At this altitude, Saturn’s atmosphere was only a little denser than New Amsterdam’s, and Tanis didn’t even feel the pressure change as the outer door opened.
She did hear the change, though.
The relative silence of the tube was replaced with the unrelenting howl of the winds whipping around the city.
She gritted her teeth as the bot left the tube and began to crawl—scary fast—across the side of the city. Before Tanis could get her bearings, they came around the edge, and were hanging upside down over thousands of kilometers of ‘down’.
Tanis nodded in response. She couldn’t see a thing around them—other than clouds of ammonia whipping by—and decided that closing her eyes was the best route.
A minute later, the feeling of the winds buffeting her body ceased, and she cracked an eye open to see that the walls of a meter-deep trench were around them.
She tried not to think about the fact that she was strapped to the back of a bot that was climbing on the underside of a structure hanging over what might as well be a black hole.
If the bot let go, that was it. She was done. There would be no time to rescue her, no search party. Just a rapid descent and then being crushed to death.
Happy thoughts, Tanis, happy thoughts. Swimming with the dolphins on Mars, nothing but clear skies overhead. No wind, just chittering laughter and Peter by your side.
She held onto those thoughts for a few minutes, slowly calming herself down until the bot suddenly twisted and began moving down.
“Fuck!” Tanis cried out, opening her eyes to see the machine’s back and a few undulating legs.
This was the part that Tanis had been trying not to think about. It was three hundred kilometers down to where the pontoon floated on the liquid-ish layers at the base of Saturn’s clouds.
Never before had Tanis wanted to give up on something as much as she did right then.
She pursed h
er lips and tried to slow her breathing and heart rate as the bot slotted its legs onto the rail.
Then the bot dropped.
* * * * *
“We’re here, we’re here!” the corporal shouted as she bounded into the Kirby Jones’s skiff with Yves at her side.
Connie glanced back and saw the pair closing the hatch in the thirteen-meter-long craft’s rear compartment, and she glanced at Jeannie. “Let’s go, Lieutenant.”
“Pulling off,” Jeannie replied as she reached out and hit the disconnects for the skiff.
The craft eased out of the recessed section on the Kirby Jones’s belly, and then Jeannie adjusted her vector and applied carefully moderated thrust to clear the Jones.
“What the hell are you doing?” Connie asked. “Pour it on! We have to go!”
Jeannie glanced at her. “We’ll scorch the Jones…”
“It’s ablative plating. That’s what it’s there for, to ablate! Punch it, Lieutenant!”
“Aye, ma’am—uh, I mean yes, Chief.”
Jeannie powered up the skiff’s thrusters to their full burn, and the small craft leapt away from the Jones.
“We cleared to do this?” Jeannie asked, giving Connie a sidelong glance. “Portmaster’s gonna be pissed at us boosting like this through the service yard.”
“You let me worry about that,” Connie said with far more certainty than she felt. “Tanis gave me approvals, and she told me she had things cleared with the STC.”
“We know how well that can go,” Jeannie muttered.
Just then, the board lit up with a call from the Port Control Tower, and Connie shunted it to a private channel.
She transmitted the authorization tokens that Tanis had given her some months ago, ones in the ‘use only in case of emergency’ group, and held her breath, doing her best to ignore the concerned looks Jeannie kept sending her way.
The other side cut the connection first, and she glanced over at Jeannie.
“Balls to the wall, Lieutenant, we got places to be.”
* * * * *
Tanis was doing her damnedest not to scream, but as the winds picked up, and the bot began to shudder more and more on the rail, she couldn’t help letting out a small shriek every time they hit a bump.
So much for me being a tough SOB, she thought derisively.
Her HUD read a speed of just over four hundred kilometers per hour, and she took small comfort in the knowledge that the increase in atmospheric pressure was beginning to slow them down.
Their destination was an airlock another thirty kilometers down the strut. She was starting to worry that they’d pass right by it, when the bot began to apply its magnetic brakes to slow down.
Their speed crept down toward three hundred kilometers per hour, then two hundred. Just as they crossed below one ninety, the bot began to shudder.
Tanis only nodded silently, marveling at how there could be ice on the track when the watery clouds around them were close to boiling.
She wrapped her arms even tighter around the body of the bot, when suddenly she felt something like a spring breaking. An even stronger vibration shook the bot, and then the shaking ceased entirely.
Opening her eyes, Tanis saw the side of the pontoon strut drifting away, and raw terror tore through her as she realized that the bot had somehow broken free of the track. They began to pick up speed once more, and then a gust of wind surged past, and the strut rushed back toward them.
The bot slammed into it with a bone-jarring crunch, and Tanis struggled to catch her breath, a voice in her head repeating,
Focus, Tanis!
Suddenly she understood what Darla was saying. She reached under the bot and pulled the first cargo strap free, and then twisted to release the next one. Once those were taken care of, she released the EV suit’s tethers that were also connected to the bot, only to feel the winds clawing at her, trying to tear her away and out into the darkness surrounding her.
A dim light illuminated a large ring on the side of the strut, and Tanis stretched up and clipped one of the cargo straps to it and connected the other end to one of the safety hooks on her waist. She was about to attach the other strap, when the bot shifted, several of its arms losing their grip.
Here goes…
She detached the strap, feeling the relentless storm tearing at her, hungry to pull her down into Saturn’s eternal darkness and add her to the flotsam and jetsam at its core.
Not. Going. To. Happen, Tanis thought as she hooked an arm from around one of the bot’s legs and reached the other for the cargo strap’s clasp.
Her fingers stretched to their limit, and then caught on the release. She flipped the cover up and pulled the release tab. The strap came free, and the winds tore at her legs, nearly pulling her off the bot.
Clenching her teeth so hard she thought they’d shatter, Tanis pulled herself up the bot, reaching for the cargo strap that she’d clipped to the safety ring.
Her hand was almost on it when the bot began to shift further. Knowing that hesitation would be the death of her—literally—Tanis lunged for the strap and grasped it in her hand, pulling herself up bodily and finally clipping it to her waist.
The bot suddenly shuddered and let go of the side of the pontoon strut, its four-meter length sliding past Tanis. One of its spasming utility arms nearly hit her, and she pulled herself away, but not far enough. The arm straightened and caught on the leg of her EV suit.
Tanis groaned as the full weight of the bot pulled at her, the waist ring digging painfully into her side. Then with a rip she felt more than heard, the bot’s arm tore a long gash in the leg of her suit before coming free and falling into the hungry abyss.
The pain was immediate, and Tanis suspected that it wasn’t the cut, but rather the scalding heat and incredible pressure at this depth. The suit began to seal up with emergency foam, but her leg still burned like she’d drawn her electron beam across her thigh.
Tanis groaned as she clung to the cargo strap and looked up at the smooth surface of the pontoon strut.
It might as well have been a kilometer.
COMING IN HOT
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Interplanetary pinnace, New Amsterdam
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The colonel shook her head.
Leona chuckled and sent a countdown to the team as she streaked over the rings toward Saturn.
“Crap!” she muttered.
She stopped herself. If she gave the NASTC operator any clues, it could start a panic, and that would cost them time when it came to stopping the saboteurs.
