Days Until Home

by Mark Gardner

  “What the slag have you all done to my ship?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Days Until Home: UNKNOWN

  “What the slag have you all done to my ship?”

  “Skipper, it’s good to see that you’re still with us,” Jeremy responded as a silence fell on the rest of the survivors in the Kerwood’s escape trunk. Most of them looked as if they’d gotten caught trying to steal one more cookie from the cookie jar. Jeremy turned away from the fuming captain. Jessica and Old Vicky were tethered to the hatch bulkhead with Siebert clucking over them like a mother hen.

  Adelaide frowned at a flashing indicator light on the jury-rigged panel. She pushed off the bulkhead, ignoring Captain Hayes in his silent raging impotence. “ChEng,” she called out, “come look at this.”

  Jeremy floated to Adelaide as she worked the controls. It amazed him that she seemed to have more access to the system than she was supposed to. He decided that, in her own words, he should just, “Stow that slag.”

  “Someone is popping hatches and moving atmosphere around this boat,” Adelaide commented.

  “Look at the ship’s attitude,” Jeremy countered.

  “Who the hell—?”

  “Report!” Captain Hayes barked next to the duo.

  Adelaide rolled her eyes and looked to Jeremy.

  “Well…” Jeremy began. “Miss Bähr will explain…”

  “Someone is opening and closing outer hatches and allowing decompression to slow the ship’s roll.” Adelaide shook her head. “Each time the two remaining atmospheric thrusters are pointed at Egeria-13, they are firing.” She frowned. “Short bursts,” she closed her eyes and appeared to do some calculations in her head. “They’re pushing us into a trajectory back to Earth orbit, but—”

  “But what?” inquired Jeremy.

  “Well, the trajectory has us shooting well to the side of the Earth. We’ll miss it.”

  Captain Hayes steel eyes didn’t betray what he was thinking. “Gauge,” he declared.

  The two engineers stared at him.

  “That’s why Gauge is my navigator, and you two are grease monkeys.”

  Adelaide’s eyes narrowed, but she remained silent.

  Captain Hayes brushed an invisible imperfection from the front of his suit. He narrowed his eyes and looked at the two senior engineers as if they were children answering classroom questions – cute, but utterly worthless. “Gauge is pointing us to where the Earth is going to be, not where it is right now.”

  “What transit time is he figuring?” Adelaide asked.

  “Let’s ask him,” Captain Hayes replied and returned his helmet to his head. “Gauge, you reading me?”

  Adelaide smirked and crossed her arms with a smugness Jeremy recognized from when she was training some new hotshot engineer. They were all thrust and no course correction, Jeremy thought. Adelaide was notorious for breaking their spirit before she molded them into what she thought an engineer should be. It was a constant complaint. The engineers that followed her example got new contracts. And the ones that didn’t? Well, they tried their luck with Matsue or Everest.

  “Gauge?” Captain Hayes repeated.

  “Captain,” Adelaide overemphasized the honorific to mean something along the lines of you donkey.

  “Gau—” Captain Hayes fell silent.

  Jeremy couldn’t hide his smile.

  “Captain,” Adelaide repeated, “the bulkheads in this escape trunk are reinforced for direct exposure to space and solar radiation. They’re shielded to prevent EMI, and a varied spectrum of signals including—”

  Captain Hayes frowned. “Communications,” he declared.

  Adelaide turned to Jeremy. “That line you have wrecking the seal on that hatch, is it a K-114 line?”

  Jeremy ignored the sudden attention Siebert gave him and floated between the jumpy miner and his MPA. “Yeah, why?”

  Adelaide smiled again. The smile made Jeremy uncomfortable. It was as if she were evaluating his worth.

  “We can piggyback comms on the grounding wires to get it out of this space.”

  Jeremy looked at the multi-wired, multi-colored cable. “Without disrupting the data?” he asked, “or grounding out?”

  Adelaide nodded. “Sixteen through thirty-six are all ground. I can separate about four conductors and use that. EW only need one end disconnected to break the ground loop isolation. It’ll make the entire circuit act as an antenna.”

  “Do it,” Jeremy and Captain Hayes ordered at the same time.

  Adelaide pulled off her gloves and brandished the copper shears. She opened them to their widest bite and used the edge like a makeshift scalpel. She went to work separating several of the strands, and everyone watched with fascination as she stripped, cut, and pinched the wires.

  When she was done, she returned the copper shears to her pocket and grabbed Captain Hayes’ arm.

  “What gives?” the captain sounded out.

  Adel rolled her eyes. “You’re on a separate circuit to Gauge, right?”

  Captain Hayes nodded.

  “Then I have to patch your suit comms into this.”

  Captain Hayes looked from Adelaide to his Chief Engineer and back. He cradled his forearm cluster protectively.

  Adelaide scoffed. “He doesn’t trust me,” she declared. She pushed off of his arm, and they floated apart.

  Captain Hayes bounced lightly off the bulkhead.

  “If you didn’t trust me to do this,” Adelaide demanded, “why did I waste my time with the K-114? You could’ve just as easily gone out into the airlock to talk to Gauge.”

  “Would you’ve let him back in?” William “Telly” Tell Bianconi retorted.

  “Look!” Adelaide shouted, and all eyes turned to her. “We’re all stuck together. Together. It’s us versus the black. We’ve probably got like twenty people left out of the eighty we started with. We’ve got no idea if the EXT will work, and we’ve got maybe four or five weeks of food. And that assumes—”

  “Two,” a small strained voice sounded out.

  Everyone turned to Old Vicky. His swarthy hair was floating like Medusa coils from his head. His lids were heavy but, under his dark eyebrows, his eyes met each face looking back at him. He cleared his throat, reached for the bulkhead and spun himself to the same orientation as the rest of the people in the escape trunk.

  He faced Captain Hayes. “You cut the return rations.” It wasn’t accusatory, just a statement of fact.

  Captain Hayes wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Captain?” Adelaide asked, her hands on her hips.

  “Adel—” Jeremy started to say.

  Captain Hayes waved his Chief Engineer off. “We discovered some sort of bacteria had spoiled most of our return rations.” He looked toward Telly.

  “It’s true,” Telly said. “We had to jettison six crates. We couldn’t risk it contaminating more of our return stock.”

  Captain Hayes nodded. “We cut rations down to five-hundred calories. Almost all of our real—” he made air quotes with his gloved fingers, “food was lost except—”

  “Except what?” Adelaide demanded.

  “Well…” Captain Hayes mumbled.

  Telly cleared his throat. “We were approached by another conglomerate.” He brought out the canvas bag he had protected since the disaster. “They wanted to do a test on potatoes and microgravity.”

  No one interrupted him, so he continued, “These potatoes have been growing in a nutrient paste and without proper gravity.” He reached into the bag and pulled out a potato larger than a Terran football. “They’ve been tethered to the fore antenna cluster in a specially designed oxygen-rich container. This is uh…” He released the football-spud and reached into the bag. “This is the harvest.” He pulled out five like-sized potatoes and let them float. They lazily bounced off each other and floated around Telly.

  “We’ve already been paid for the experiment,” Captain Hayes took over the narrative. “We didn’t have enough credits
to procure proper candles for Egeria-13. The Matsue Conglomerate did the original Egeria-13 survey. The topography and core samples were uh, misrepresented on the report. They offered to provide the candles in exchange for the potato experiment. We picked up the contract based solely on the report, but before verifying the results with our own probe…” Captain Hayes voice trailed off, and he snapped a gloved finger. The resulting weak sound did nothing to exemplify his sudden insight.

  “The probe,” Adelaide whispered.

  Captain Hayes nodded. “The probe,” he confirmed.

  Old Vicky floated closer. “What about it?”

  Jeremy smiled. “As per SOP, we retrieved the probe before we landed on Egeria-13. It’s in a crate in the hold with our minerals.”

  Adelaide took over. “The telemetry module is the same as the Kerwood.”

  Captain Hayes attempted to pat the Kerwood. “This old gal still has some fight left in her.” He held his arm out to Adelaide, and she removed one of the wired connections that attached his cluster to his forearm.

  “I need someone to sacrifice their forearm cluster,” she announced.

  Everyone looked at each other and shifted uncomfortably.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” Adelaide muttered and removed her own cluster. She pulled out her copper shears and cut the cluster in half. After she had pulled the unit apart, she unraveled the wires that seated the connectors to the unit. She procured about six inches of each end and returned to her handiwork on the K-114 cable. She wove the new cable into the old and twisted exposed wires together.

  “Okay, this might be intermittent, and you’ll need your collar locked so the COMs contacts in the helmet are overridden by the suit cluster.” She muscled him closer to the K-114 wire and plugged each end of the re-purposed wire into both ends of the detached cluster.

  Captain Hayes nodded, returned his helmet to his head, and rotated the collar. Jeremy could see his lips moving through the Lexan, but they heard only muffled noise in the trunk. Jeremy watched Captain Hayes’ sudden grin fall and his features pinch. Whatever he and Gauge were talking about, it didn’t make the captain happy.

  The one thing they did hear clearly was the captain’s expletive before he rotated his collar, breaking his contact to Gauge on the wrecked bridge.

  Captain Hayes sighed. “Well, the good news is that the EXT is green across the board. Without kinetic assist, we’re twelve weeks from home.”

  “And the bad?” Jeremy inquired.

  Captain Hayes scoffed. “The EXT interface panel and support arm on the bridge are crushed.”

  “Auxiliary is destroyed,” Adelaide announced. “So is damage control.”

  “As is the launch hallway,” Jeremy said.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Adelaide said. “Even if we could fire off the EXT, it’s still four weeks to speed without chemical or kinetic assistance, four weeks of travel time, and four weeks of deceleration. We’ll starve before this tub is even up to speed.”

  Captain Hayes appeared to blanch at Adelaide insulting the Kerwood.

  Jeremy smiled on the inside. Adelaide had been with the Kerwood since she graduated from the conglomerate training academy. Not all of the Kerwood crew could make that claim. If a miner didn’t manage a subsequent contract due to one not being offered, or the Kerwood filled its billet, the miners would try one of the other conglomerates. They were always sniping each other’s miners. Old Vicky was the steal of a lifetime back in the day. These shifting loyalties made the regular crew suspicious of the miners, and the miners wary of anyone who continually got their contract renewed.

  “All right,” Adelaide announced and clapped her hands. “ChEng, Captain, I want you to find that probe and pull the telemetry module. We have to hope someone can hear our distress beacon before we starve to death. Vicky and Jimmy, you’re gonna clear the path from this trunk to medical. Dejoseph, I need you to coordinate this space with Gauge on the bridge. Bianconi…”

  “Telly, please,” Telly interrupted.

  “Telly, you and Erika get Jessica to the infirmary. Siebert, you and I are going to see if we can get the EXT to light off.” She turned to Captain Hayes. “Are we even pointed in the right direction?”

  Captain Hayes nodded. “Gauge says we’ll need to course correct manually, but we’re mostly pointed to where we need to be in twelve weeks.”

  Jeremy interjected. “Even if we miss, there’ll be enough traffic around the Earth, someone will notice us. I just hope that they rescue a crew that’s still alive. It would suck to make it home just to be buried.” He sighed. “Maybe if we can get communication back up, the Kerwood Corporation can send someone to rescue us.”

  Adelaide’s eyebrows lifted. “Will they?”

  “Don’t believe what you hear on the net,” Captain Hayes replied. “This ship, the cargo in the hold and we people are commodities to them. Valuable commodities,” he emphasized. “Communication has to be the priority.”

  Old Vicky snorted. “How long does it take for a message to get back to Earth?”

  Adelaide ignored the old miner’s question. “Let’s check in every four hours for progress reports,” she ordered.

  Everyone looked to Jeremy and the captain as the two most senior on the ship. Jeremy met Captain Hayes’ eyes, willing him to go with the flow for once.

  “You heard the MPA,” Captain Hayes announced. “Let’s get to our jobs.”

  Days Until Home: 85

  Old Vicky and Jimmy donned electromagnets to their suit boots. Jimmy held up one of the contraptions and raised an inquisitive eyebrow, but Erika shook her head no.

  “We could’ve had Siebert cut part of that bracket off you,” Jimmy declared after he was attached to the deck. Large flat buttons connected to the magnetron were positioned at the toes and the heel. The forearm cluster could tell if someone was trying to step off because there would be more pressure on the toe sensor. It would shift the magnetic field, and turn it off until the heel sensor felt enough pressure. Then it would re-engage the magnetic field.

  When they worked, they worked wonderfully. Newer models were sleeker, and there was an AI built into the magnetron that interfaced directly with the forearm cluster. You could actually run in them, Erika thought. The ones that the Kerwood had? Erika blew a raspberry. They did add three inches to your height and, for that, Erika was grateful. They were also garbage. The Kerwood only used them when they needed hull maintenance performed, and only if they were underway and under contract.

  “That would’ve likely burned her arm and sent her into shock,” Telly replied. The derision was evident in his voice.

  “Good call,” Jimmy quipped. “Then we would’ve had to carry her.” He turned to Erika and waggled his eyebrows.

  She rolled her eyes, and Telly pulled on a tether that was looped through her eyelet and connected to Jessica’s. Erika could maintain her balance and even assist the Telly by pushing off various obstacles that Jimmy and Viktor had yet to clear. They could all talk to each other on one frequency, but didn’t have access to the special channel the captain had set up with Gauge, so Gauge switched to the common channel.

  “Some atmosphere would be nice,” Jimmy groused. “Working in these suits is hard work!”

  “Please keep the chatter to a minimum,” Gauge’s voice sounded in Erika’s ear. “Are you checking for breaches?”

  “Damn right we are,” replied Jimmy. “The more of this ship we can flood with that delicious, low-calorie, life-giving oxygen, the sooner we can get out of these pajamas.”

  Erika giggle-snorted. “After today, I’ll carry an extra suit with me, just in case.” Whatever had affected her attitude the previous night had mostly faded, and she couldn’t imagine laughing again until she was back on Earth, but sometimes she just had to laugh. Otherwise, she would cry.

  “I’ll happily give you my suit,” Jimmy retorted. “Let’s just find a room with some atmosphere, and we can strip down.”

  Erika reached down with th
e arm still bifurcated by the bracket and pressed a rubberized button on her pilfered up-side-down cluster forcing the comms to reboot and blast everyone within a ninety-foot radius with static.

  “Ow!” Jimmy said when the comms finished rebooting and reestablished the common channel. “A simple no would’ve sufficed.”

  “I had to make sure you were receiving me five by five.”

  “Didn’t I say to cut the chatter?” Gauge complained.

  “Relax,” Erika said. “Don’t muss your pretty blues by getting all butt-hurt.”

  Before Gauge could reply, or Jimmy could laugh, Erika continued. “We’re at the infirmary airlock. How about you let us in so someone can fix my arm.” She paused and looked over her shoulder. “And Jessica.”

  The outer door to the sphere that was the medical bay retracted into the bulkhead so Telly and his charges could step through.

  Days Until Home: 85

  Adelaide reached behind the access panel she had removed only moments before. The intricate pneumatics and computer components were too delicate to operate with the thick mining gloves on. Fortunately, the large gear that opened and closed the door to Main Engineering was easily accessible and manipulated. Or, more precisely, the aluminum rod that prevented the gear from turning was. She pulled the servo that controlled the gear away from its housing and maneuvered the arresting rod into the release position.

  She couldn’t hear the door clunk through her helmet, but she knew that that was the result. A gush of atmosphere forced its way out of the airlock, and the door opened a few inches.

  “Will we lose the atmosphere that was in there?” Siebert asked over the common channel.

  “Not really,” Adelaide replied. “We checked this passageway for breaches on our way here.” She pulled on the door with both hands, and one of her magnetrons decided to fail at that moment. She lost her leverage, but the door remained partway open. If she weren’t concerned about damaging her suit, she might’ve been able to squeeze through.

  “Siebert,” she ordered, “get ready to pull on this door, I can’t get enough leverage with only one boot working.”