Dead Men Flying

by Bill Patterson

  “Eighty-one. Right. But stowing it is a problem, Scott.”

  “Nope. How about this: we connect the cables at dead center of the ring. Then we run them out to the ring itself, but we take a couple of turns around the ring before we continue out to the ship. We use the steel safety bars as spacers. That way, if something shears one cable, the second one is at least not rubbing right up next to it.”

  “I'll have to think about that. I'm not keen on loading the ring that way—those turns will couple the ring to the tensile forces acting on the cable, compressing the ring. Not good.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean, Scott. Damn.”

  “Why don't you just lay the ring atop the cables and lash the ring to them with a couple of turns of wire?” said Mickey. “It keeps the ring in place, but without any stress transfer. That means you can put the steel bars wherever they would separate the cables the most, instead of being at the ring itself.”

  “Man's got a point,” said Scott.

  “When we get in, we'll run the calcs. I am three meters from closing.”

  “Me too. Let's finish this.”

  The sections came together, and it took a bit of manhandling to ensure that the two halves of the ships merged. They then entered the engine sections through airlocks and worked on linking up the structural members and enough electrical connections for minimal control by the Command Deck in the life section.

  Later, in the Bradbury spacesuit changeout room, Ragesh sat on the bench and shook slightly. Scott noticed it, but said nothing. He felt a sense of relief himself. So many things could have gone wrong out there, but didn't. At that moment, he felt kinship with the radioman.

  Sure, he was more scared than I was. But if bravery is doing your duty in spite of your fears, and I have less fear than he, does that mean he is braver than I? Scott shook his head. Too complex to worry about right now. Better get started on those ring calculations.

  ***

  The ring remained attached to the Burroughs and Bradbury, but not at the life sections. The designers were faced with a dilemma——they had to keep the ring for the return journey for the same reasons they used it on the way out. But it was a decided pain in the rear to burden one ship with it, and it was dangerous to link both ships together via the ring while trying to coordinate the twin ships' thrust.

  In the end, the simplest solution was also the obvious one: lash the two ships together, incorporating the ring at the bottom of the engine section before the engine bells. At the same time, thinner cables reached from the life section attachment points to the far circumference of the rings to points one-third of the way around the ring from the bottom. From the side, it looked like a pie cut in thirds. From an engineering point of view, it ensured that the ring would not be lost during thrusting, while bracing the ring against any off-axis maneuvers.

  Jeff Gatson and Scott Acevedo were exhausted, grimy, but triumphant when, a full seven days before their time was up, they pronounced their ships ready for the flyby.

  Flyby

  Mars Expedition, Vicinity of Mars, April 18 2083, 0730 GMT

  The best thing about lashing the ships together for joint operations during fly-by was the flexible tubes that linked airlocks with each other. The crew mingled in a way that they hadn't since they were in the boarding spaces aboard the Chaffee before the Expedition launch. Ragesh and Mickey were finally able to chew the fat, face-to-face. Jeff and Scott, predictably, were going over engineering plans. Everyone mingled. Everyone pulled out their favorite adult beverage to share with a counterpart from the other vessel. And the Commanders sat down for some one-on-one time.

  “Before we get into things, Mike, I've got a little something here.” Roger presented a pair of large-bore syringes and a heavily padded glass bottle of Irish Whiskey. Roger filled a syringe, passed it to Michael, then filled a second before closing the bottle.

  “To Commander Jeng, that he may pull through and live, and for the soul of Lieutenant Commander Greeley, may he rest in peace.”

  The two of them raised their tubes of liquor with just a trace of self-consciousness, and squirted a healthy amount in their mouths.

  Roger coughed slightly. “Man, this stuff sure tastes different in freefall.”

  Michael swallowed convulsively. “It gets to burn the entire digestive tract, not just the stomach. Still, damn fine stuff. Thanks, Roger.”

  Roger handed Michael a squeeze bulb. “Water. Anything else just seems wrong.”

  “My thoughts exactly. I sure hope Jeng pulls through.” He squeezed a dollop of water into his mouth, swallowed, and sighed. “Okay, Roger, what's on your mind?”

  ***

  The information exchange continued until four hours before flyby, when the airlock doors on both ships were shut and hatch wheels spun until the seals were fully engaged. The Commanders didn't want the risk of a transfer tunnel breach with an airlock door open while under thrust.

  The engines of both ships were given a preliminary test. Every crew member practiced their flyby position, fully belted in and with all conditions the same, for the test. The countdown proceeded, and the coordinated firings occurred within three milliseconds of each other. Jeff Gatson called it a success.

  “T minus four hours,” Roger Smithson called out over the combined ships’ intercom. “All stations report.”

  “Burroughs Engineering. All systems nominal.”

  “Bradbury Engineering. All systems nominal.”

  It seemed to take forever, but it was merely twelve stations that reported. A number of the normal Earth-launch stations were missing—there was no range safety, for instance. But others were added—hydroponics was a prominently featured station in both ships.

  “All stations reporting completed,” Michael Standish concluded. “We are go for Mars flyby and change-of-plane firing.”

  ***

  Ragesh fretted at his radio console. The UHF signal from Earth never resumed contact since their final transmission with the Director-General of UNESCO, Mrs. vanDeHoog. But Ragesh hoped against hope that the mother planet would still want to talk with them, not just write them off. By standing order, they were broadcasting their latest daily status report on a continuous loop, but there was never any reply.

  The Moon, though, replied often via encrypted photophone. The news of the Mars Expedition was something of a break in the monotony of survival for the Moondogs. The delicate aiming of the ultraviolet laser towards the Moon was a matter for the precision micromotors guiding the three-axis orientation of the transmission mirror. The laser itself was located inside the life section of the ship, racked solidly in its own immovable bracket. The beam of highly-collimated ultraviolet light was fired towards the Moon through an optical window of fused quartz gasketed to the skin of each ship.

  The laser used a frequency that could not penetrate Earth's atmosphere, ensuring that UNSOC could not eavesdrop on their conversations with the Moon.

  It made for a somewhat schizophrenic radio engineer, since Ragesh’s job consisted of reading the official version of events over the radio to JPL and the real deal to the Moon.

  Ragesh sat and watched his radio board, expecting absolutely nothing to happen. The carrier wave from incoming laser light from the Collins was absent during the fly-by of Mars, blocked by the Earth. The link light on the laser control panel was dark and would remain so for the next eighteen hours. The audio from the UHF receiver was empty of content, the white noise hiss of static absent behind a carefully-modulated level of squelch.

  “Good luck, Burroughs and Bradbury!”

  Ragesh would not have been more shocked if Ray Bradbury himself materialized behind him and shouted in his ear.

  He turned off the squelch and the roar of random noise cascaded into his headphones. He rapidly scrolled through the contact log. Yup, there it was, ten seconds ago. A clear signal from Earth. He hammered at the computer. The NASA Deep Space Network was the only available asset that would be able to transmit to them. But the DSN was u
nder UN control!

  “Commander, I have an anomaly not affecting burn,” he reported.

  Michael Standish turned to look at him, raising one eyebrow.

  “I got a clear audio transmission, wishing us luck. No identification. Should I reply to it?”

  Michael Standish thought hard. It was almost certainly a rogue transmission. If it was a UN employee, then calling attention to it with a reply would merely call attention to the infraction. If some other means were used to transmit the signal, such as hacking into the DSN, then acknowledging the hail would also result in heat to their unknown friend on the Earth.

  “No reply, Ragesh. Let Donovan know, as well. All we'll do is irritate UNSOC and burn this 'friend'. We might need them on the return journey.”

  Ragesh nodded back to the Commander. “Hey, Mickey. Did you hear that 'good luck' message about thirty seconds ago? Standish says 'no reply'. I agree with him—it sounds like we have a friend, and we don't want to burn them.”

  Donovan replied, “Agreed. It's a shame, though, that we can't let them know that they succeeded.”

  “That's okay, we'll figure out something to slip into status report. Maybe using the word luck might do it. Let's get past flyby and we'll work on it.”

  “T minus three hours, thirty minutes to closest approach,” said Commander Smithson. “The countdown will now transfer to Benjamin Zabor, who will be Controller for this event.

  ***

  “At T minus thirty minutes, seventeen minutes, three point seven seconds, the engines will fire at ten percent thrust, throttling up to full thrust over a period of one minute. They will continue to burn for an equivalent amount of time past Martian perigee. We will now switch to an F timescale for this event, with F zero as ignition,” said Benjamin. “We are currently at F minus two hours, forty-six minutes......mark.”

  “And now we wait, watch, and worry,” said Jeff Gatson. Each of the crew communicated over a sophisticated multichannel intercom system that was capable of playing different channels into the left or right ear. The microphone only worked on one channel or the other. Jeff and Scott immediately reserved one channel for their own personal use, leaving the general channel open.

  “I can't think of a thing we've left undone, Jeff,” said Scott. “We've spent a week going over the engine sections of both ships with a fine-toothed comb. The test firing went well. The reactors are humming along. Stop stressing, man, I don't want to have to do CPR in freefall.”

  “Funny guy. It's just that I never completely relax until a maneuver is over, even if it's a simple midcourse correction. Remember the broomstick?”

  “Yeah. I can see where that will leave an impression. I read the official report. Anything else you want to add? Come on, we've got an hour or so to kill before we start our own checklist.”

  Jeff sat back and frowned. “I shouldn't have brought it up.”

  “Ah, but you did because you've been thinking about it. Go ahead, let it out. Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something.”

  Jeff blew out a lungful of air. “You might have a point. My brain is like that—thanks for reminding me. Okay, the broomstick.

  “I was in high orbit, out of the way of the LEO traffic lanes but not so high that I was glowing from the Van Allen Belts. I had graduated tops in UNSOC Ground School, so they made me class leader for Orbit School. We had done the usual things on the Chaffee, you know the drill.”

  “Heh. Oh, yeah. Some bastard taped a picture of an explosive decompression casualty over my porthole when I was asleep. Woke up in the morning, flicked on the light, and about crapped myself.”

  “Standard hazing. We had someone in our class just like Celine Greenfield. Very attractive and very tired of getting hit on—treated the rest of the guys like dirt, but then again, they had it coming to them. She stalked out of her bunk and punched the first laughing guy she ran across right in the balls. They left her alone after that.” Jeff chuckled at the memory. “What a woman!”

  “Yeah, I've heard of Celine,” said Scott. “Nerves of steel, LOX in her veins. She piloted down one of the ERVs, I heard. Anyway, you were on the Chaffee.”

  “Right. We were taking two OTVs up to do some practice work on stationary targets with broomsticks. Very preliminary stuff. We had just done classwork, and some practice in that big open space, The Factory, on the Chaffee, but that's totally different than flying across a few hundred meters of open space with the Earth ready to crush you, know what I mean?”

  “Damn near filled my shorts the first time I stepped out of the airlock. Oh, yeah.”

  Jeff snorted. “Everyone had to clean out their own suit that evening. Some actually did fill their shorts. I had wondered why they put us in diapers before we were allowed out.

  “Anyway, they got us out in the dark, lined us up, and had a pair of broomsticks on each OTV. We were to jet from one OTV to the other, passing each other at more than double arms' length, flip, retrofire, and dock at the other OTV. First time, instructors took us across. Just a lot of waiting, followed by another diaper-filling experience, then more waiting.”

  Scott chuckled. “Damn near used the diaper, our class was out there so long. Good thing I looked at the schedule and hit the head before we went out. Didn't touch the water nipple, either, unless I needed it.”

  “Right. So, we did this whole class, went back inside. Next day, one of those guys was next to me in the OTV—you know, the ones whose dick is larger than their brain? So, this guy was bitching about how long the class was the day before, and there was no way he was going to be one of those slowpokes. I got a bad feeling about him, and made sure I was nowhere near him.”

  “Hey, you never told me this part,” said Scott. He glanced at his monitors. It was an action as automatic as breathing. “You knew something was going to happen?”

  “No, I didn't. This guy, no, I won't identify him, was always like that—trying to impress the ladies. Especially Ms. Smokin’ Hot.”

  “Oh, dayam, I can see where that would just make him worse.”

  Jeff snorted. “It was like a red flag before a bull. The worst possible thing happened.”

  “Wait a minute. All you ever said was that you were involved in a broomstick malfunction and had to rescue someone. This guy hit you when you crossed?”

  “No. Because I wasn't on the other broomstick. I flew over to the other OTV—Betsy it was. That hippie was flying it—Zanger. I wanted to get Dickus Maxiumus behind me. So I pulled prerogative, went over first, and made sure he wasn't behind me. He wasn't. Ms. Hot was. I got to Betsy, and Zanger looked at the broomstick and downchecked me. Low on LOX, he said, giving me grief because I hadn't checked. Before I could verify, he had a hose from his LOX tank hooked up and was refilling the tank.”

  “F minus two hours and fifteen minutes before engine ignition,” said Benjamin on the common channel.

  “I'll wrap this up. While this was happening, Ms. Hot, who was even more competent than she was beautiful, flew over, contacted Betsy with scarcely a bump, then moved over to the launch point, jumping over me. They had pulled a third broomstick out of the other OTV and the next student was getting on it.”

  Scott broke in. “Let me guess, Mr. Genitals.”

  “Of course. He and Hot launched opposite each other, three hundred meters of space in between them, then they did their midcourse flip. He executed a little lateral move—the films showed it clearly—probably so that he could slap her on the butt or something stupid like that. She saw the move, and executed one of her own, so he never got close to her. He never returned to his original line of flight, either.”

  Jeff's voice assumed a dream-like quality. “I was there, my broomstick still hooked into the LOX supply. Zanger was in Betsy for some reason. I saw this ass headed my way, and no retrofire on the stick. The instructors were screaming at him to thrust, but he was not responding. I was present at the inquest, and Hot said he was staring at her, mouth moving, but they weren’t on the same channel. He
gave her the finger, looked behind him, and reached for the throttle control. He managed to miss Betsy somehow, but when he hit the throttle, he overdid it. His harness held, but the attachments to the frame broke and the broomstick blasted off to parts unknown. He was tumbling head over heels. As the closest one with a functioning broomstick—remember, Hot had not yet docked—I went after him.

  “The instructors were yelling at me, but I had one goal—save the bastard. They say I said something about my man-my mission, but I don't remember that. When I got close, I knew he was dead—the suit was loose and wrinkled. I grabbed him and draped him across my lap, and jetted back to the OTVs.”

  Scott was silent for a moment. “The report says you were pretty far away.”

  “About fifteen hundred meters. Only reason I made it? That extra LOX Zanger put in the tank. I made sure my buddies downstairs bought him a couple of rounds.”

  “Wait, how did you get back? OTVs had to be like dots at that distance.”

  Jeff leaned over to tap the keyboard. “The instructors gave Chaffee TRAFCON my freak—they guided me in. Took about thirty minutes. I got a letter of commendation and a reprimand in my folder downstairs about it.”

  Scott gave a short laugh. “Typical UNSOC. Any juice with The Hot One?”

  “No. I didn't save her life or anything like that. She did talk to me after we testified at the inquest. Something about throwing a good life after a bad one. I took it as a compliment. She's a smoking hot woman, I tell you, but I've known a couple like that, and to them, beauty is a curse. I told her that she did nothing wrong, it was all on him, and it was pretty damn good flying out there she did to avoid a collision.” Jeff hummed quietly. “He smashed his faceplate on the strut holding the tank. There were smears of aluminum on one of the faceplate shards embedded in his forehead.”