“According to my sensors, nobody’s conscious. But there might be—”
“Stop being so reassuring,” she said facetiously. “Have you got a medical team ready?”
“We were just getting to know each other,” he said regretfully.
Channa paused, caught by the emotion in his voice. “You are the most manipulative creature it has ever been my misfortune to meet,” she said coldly, clipping a reel of optical fiber to her suit. Simeon sighed. “Look, I’m not a total idiot. The tug will shield me on one side, and I’m only two strides away from the hatch.”
“Me? Manipulative? I’m supposed to keep my brawn from risking its fluffy little tail.”
Carefully breaking boot contact, she took the first step to the hatch, and the second. Then clipped both feet free and floated neatly to the opening to examine it more closely. The magnetic grapple built into the left forearm of her suit twitched, with a feeling like a light push. The contact disk flicked out, trailing braided monofilament, and impacted on the door of the bay. She activated the switch that reeled her in. Patsy followed with an expert somersault leap that landed her less than an arm’s length from her friend.
“Showoff,” Channa said.
“You ain’t the only one with walk experience,” Patsy said. Her voice was light, but the arc pistol was ready as she peered within the half-open hatch. “Coburn to rescue squad. We’re about to enter the Hulk. Stand by.”
Channa licked dry lips. It’s the suit air, she told herself firmly. Always too dry. She spoke aloud to Simeon. “You’re just jealous of me, Bellona Rockjaw, heroine of the space frontier.”
“I’m right there with you, Channa,” Simeon said with a trace of wistfulness in his voice.
“Hmmph.”
She struggled to get through the narrow opening, grunting with effort.
“Do not get stuck,” he advised her.
Channa started to giggle. “Do not make me laugh,” she admonished. “And stop reading my mind.”
With the unpleasant sensation of metal and plastic scraping against each other, she pushed through at last. The chamber had held maintenance equipment of some sort long ago; there were feeds and racks for EVA suits, and empty toolholders. Only a single strip lit the dim interior. On the hullside wall was a massive, clumsy-looking airlock, and a blinking row of readouts beside it.
“Some systems still active,” she said. “Patsy, prop yourself against the frame and see if you can’t push the hatch door open.”
“Nevah get through iffen I doan,” the older woman muttered. “Makes me wish I were flat-chested, too.”
“She is not,” Simeon replied vehemently.
Channa grinned, but Patsy Sue was busy getting herself into position in the hatchway, attaching her filament to the inside of the hatch before she grabbed the top of the frame with both hands and gave a mighty heave. The hatch did not so much as budge a millimeter.
“No, it’s jammed tighter’n . . . nemmind. You got a polarizin‘ faceplate?” Patsy asked.
“Standard.”
“Okay. I’ll try somethin‘ subtle.”
Coburn stepped back, raised the arc pistol and fired four times. The bar of actinic blue-white light was soundless in vacuum, but a fog of metal particles exploded outward like glittering donuts centered on the aiming points. Patsy nodded in satisfaction and twisted herself around to brace her feet on the hatch and grip two handhold loops on the hull nearby. Channa could hear her give a grunt of effort, and the hatchway flipped out into space, tumbling end-over-end.
“Nice brand of subtle you wield,” Channa said.
“Think nothin‘ of it,” Patsy said, pretending to blow smoke off the arc pistol’s barrel. “Any luck?”
Channa bent over the touchpad beside the airlock. “Not much. Ah, that’s got it. Simeon, how’s the transmission holding up?”
“Loud and clear, since Patsy got the door out of the way. I may lose Patsy’s signal further inside. Maybe you should wait? There’re four more tugs closing in on your position.”
Channa ignored the pleading note, not without a pang of guilt. But what the hell, the situation is irresistible, she admitted. She had been trained as an administrator-partner-troubleshooter, but most of the time, circumstances were fairly conventional. Not boring; she wouldn’t have made it through brawn training if she were bored with it. On the other hand, she wouldn’t have been picked if there weren’t an element of the adventurer in her psychological profile.
“String this, would you, Patsy?” she said, passing over the reel. The optical fiber was encased in woven tungsten-filament, with receptor-booster chips at intervals. Barely thicker than thread, it had a breaking strain of several tons. Tacked to the wall behind them, neither her implants nor Patsy’s suit communits could fade out. Patsy welded the outer end to the hull beside the hatch, using the spot heater in her construction suit’s gauntlet.
“Ready?” Channa said, taking a deep breath.
“Surely am.” Patsy came up behind her, arc pistol ready.
“Standing by,” Simeon said.
The keypad lights blinked green and amber. “I think it’s saying there’s some doubt about the atmosphere,” Channa said. “It’s definitely pressurized in there.” She attached a sensor line to the surface.
“They’re in trouble,” Simeon said. “Hear that whining?” Channa shook her head, and felt him boost the audio pickups of her helmet. A faint tooth-grating sound came through.
“What is that?”
“That’s the main internal drive cores,” Simeon replied grimly. “The powerplant’s down, but they’re still superconducting. The alloys they used back then were tough. They built ‘em more redundant then, too.”
“Which means?”
“Which means . . . to stop this thing, the pilot put everything the powerplant had into the drive. The exterior coils blew before it could go all out. Now the internal coil’s going to go.”
“Bad news,” Patsy said.
“It’s going to blow?” Channa asked apprehensively. The energies needed to move megatons between stars were immense.
Simeon listened. “Not just yet, but soon. Building, but the noise will be considerably more audible before I’d panic. Get that inner hatch open, woman! I’ll send the troops. You’ve got about thirty minutes before you have to be off.”
The interior airlock slid open. The two women kept their helmets firmly on as it slid down again and the air hissed in. Channa looked down at the readouts on her sleeve and punched for analysis.
“Oxygen’s down, CO2‘s way up,” she said grimly. “Necrotic ketones, or so it says—decay products. I’d hate to have to breathe this stuff. Could anyone breath it and live?”
“Depends on natural tolerances,” Patsy replied. “And it might not be bad further in.” Being an environmental maintenance specialist, she knew the parameters. “From the volume of n.k.‘s, their scrubbers must have been down for a while.”
The inner hatch of the airlock slid open. Now that they were no longer in a soundless vacuum, the exterior pickups of their suits relayed the hiss. Unfortunately, a high-pitched whine was now equally audible: the kind that made the hair on your arms lift up. Channa looked down the long corridor, shabby with age and dim with the emergency glowstrips’ ghostly blue light.
Flies buzzed around them. Patsy slapped one against the wall.
“Blowflies,” she said after a good look. There was a faint quaver in her voice. “Had ‘em on the ranch.”
“Sound pickup says there are live ones down there,” Channa said. “Let’s go.”
Doctor Chaundra’s hands flew over his keypad as he made notes. He was a smallish brown-skinned man with delicate bones and a precise, scholarly manner.
“Fifty maximum, you say?”
Simeon switched back to the implant data filling another part of his consciousness. Channa’s breathing sounded ragged; her heartbeat was elevated, and the stomach-acid level indicated suppressed nausea. Simeon wasn’t surprised. T
he things she was seeing made him feel a little sick in an entirely nonphysical way that was still highly unpleasant.
“Short-term, improvised attempt at coldsleep,” she said, voice struggling for the objectivity of a report. He looked at the tangle of cobbled-together equipment around living and dead. “Probably to cut down on air consumption. Heavy equipment failures.”
The latest chamber held mostly dead ones, eyes fallen in and dried lips shrunk back over grinning teeth. Maggots, too. Some of the corpses were children, dead children nestled against dead mothers. In a few, the maggots gave a ghastly semblance of life, moving the swollen, blackened limbs. About the only mercy was the elastic nets that held living and dead down to the pallets on the deck or to the bunks. Evidently someone had foreseen that the interior gravity fields might go. Simeon imagined walking into one of those chambers and finding the putrefying bodies floating loose. . . .
“This one—” Channa began, swallowing and bending over a body that was either still alive or only recently dead. Drifting maggots brushed the surface of her faceplate and clung wetly, writhing. She retched, then forced herself to brush them away.
A chunngggg sound echoed through the still air. “What was that?”
Simeon split his viewpoint yet again. The rescue ship hovering off the side of the hulk had launched a missile carrying a large-diameter hose and attached to a pumping system: a force-deck system which punched through the hull and sealed itself.
“Air harpoon,” he said. “We’ll be pumping in a second.”
“I kin hear it,” Patsy said from the corridor. Her arc gun crashed, opening a sealed door. “More in heah. ‘Bout the same.”
“With fifty living, we should have no trouble,” the doctor was saying to Simeon in the safe, clean sickbay office. Chaundra tapped for a closeup on one of the recordings, looking at the life-signs readouts beside the wasted face of a refugee. “Coldsleep dosed, the old partial method; very unsafe dosage, and oxygen deprivation. Dehydration, starvation, but mostly inadequate air. Hmm.”
He blinked. “Physical type? Sometimes there is genetic divergence on isolated colonies. I must check. These look to be of sudeuropan race—archaic type, very pure. We should evacuate them as soon as possible.”
“I’m working on it,” Simeon said with controlled passion. I’m never going to look at battlefield reconstructions quite the same way again, he thought.
Through Channa’s ears, he heard feet clacking in the corridor outside, stickfields in the suit shoes substituting for gravity. The volunteers came in briskly enough, inflatable rescue bubbles in their hands, then halted in disbelief. One tried to control his retching for a moment and then went into an excruciating and dangerous fit of vomiting inside a closed helmet. His squadmates removed it, only to have his paroxysm grow worse as the stink hit his nostrils. The luckless volunteer went into the first of the bubbles.
“Get moving!” Channa ordered. Only Simeon could hear the tremors in her voice beyond the range of normal ears. “The living ones are marked with a slash of yellow from a cargo checker. Use plasma feeds, the emergency antidotes, and get them out of here. These people belong in regeneration. Now!”
Raggedly, then with gathering speed, the stationers moved to their work. Channa escaped back into the corridor, exhaling a breath she had not been conscious of holding. Simeon was profoundly thankful she had not tried cracking her suit seals when the air hose went in. It would take months of vacuum to get the stink out of this ship. Much more time than the vessel had. The final fire of the interior coils would at least cleanse it.
“How long?” she asked.
“Not less than an hour, not more than three,” he replied. “I think the pirate hypothesis is out.”
Channa nodded jerkily; too many families and children. Pirates were much more common in fiction than in fact, anyway. Bodies floated in the next chamber down, and medics working over the three living before transferring them to life bubbles.
“Ms. Hap, I’m !Tez Kle.” The Sendee wore a medical assistant’s arm-flash on his suit.
Channa glanced at him in surprise. Not many aliens chose to specialize in Terran medicine. Of course, Sondee were rather humanoid, if you managed to ignore the four eyes—two large and golden about where eyes should be, and two more above the whorled ridges that served as ears; you could not sneak up on a Sendee—and the lack of any facial features apart from a nostril slit and round suckerlike mouth. They had lovely voices, with far more vocal range and control than a human.
She came up beside the bubbles. “You’re in charge?” He nodded. “Let me give you a hand,” she said.
The first figure she turned to had reddish-black hair, a short muscular man with a square face. She released his restraints and lifted him, then gave him a gentle shove into the body-length sack, sealed it and activated it. His color seemed to improve immediately. She turned to his companion and froze.
“Channa, your vital signs just did the strangest little jig. What’s the problem?” Simeon asked.
This young man was tall, close to two meters, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, shapely and muscular as an athlete. He had a clean, classically perfect profile, with firmly molded chin and sensitive mouth. His delicately curving cheekbones were brushed by long dark lashes, the corners of his eyes tilted upwards. His long hair was blue-black, curling back from his high intelligent forehead to fall almost to his shoulders.
Channa sighed in admiration, then caught herself. This stud is so handsome even being sick makes him look good.
“Oh ho,” Simeon crowed. “Very nice, Channa, but if you don’t put Adonis there in his sack, he’s going to go a very unflattering shade of blue.”
“Em . . . right.” She unbuckled the man and sealed him in his sack, connecting the two bags together. Then she tugged them behind her to the lock where she turned them over to the waiting med-techs. The goods-transporter’s hold was filled with floating, jostling sacks while Channa and the med-tech chief stood in the lock, checking their sensors for heart-beats.
“Guess we got them all,” !Tez Kle said. “But I don’t think we can save them all. We left those we were certain we couldn’t help,” he said apologetically.
“Nothing else you could do,” Channa told him. “We don’t have time for anything else. Go,” she said, and slapped his shoulder. “I’ve got a tug outside.” She sealed the end of the caterpillar lock behind him and waited impatiently for the pilot to retract it. “Damn, I wish we could have gotten to the bridge.”
“You and Patsy give it a try,” Simeon answered. “Every bit of data will help, but we’re cutting it a little close. I’m positioning tugs to push that wreck away from the station and soon.”
Channa looked up sharply. “It’s still a danger to you?”
“Nothing this brain can’t handle,” Simeon said blithely. “You do what you can, brawn.”
She looked down at the notescreen tethered at her waist, studying the map of the ship’s interior which she had managed to acquire from its own data banks, archaic as they were.
“I’ll try through here,” she said, struggling with the toggles of the hatch. “It’d be the more direct route, if it’s open. If it isn’t, I’ll rendezvous with Patsy immediately.”
“I need some people for tug and detonations work,” Simeon announced. “It’s going to be dicey.”
The assembly room beneath the south-polar docking bay was full of second-wave volunteers, those not needed or qualified for the emergency medical work. Every single one stepped forward. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Simeon found time for a grim internal smile. That old line’s worked its challenge since Gilgamesh, he thought, proving that even the oldest books on military psychology were right. People were very reluctant to appear frightened in front of others, especially their friends. He called the roll of those he needed. They were already suited up, helmets under their arms. Gus, of course, and six of the more experienced tug pilots, with six of the mining explosives experts who had been taking R
& R on the SSS. “Thank you and I thank all the rest of you, too.”
As soon as the room emptied of all but the participants, he began the briefing with the truth.
“That ship is going to blow. The engines, by the sound of them, are critically unbalanced, redlining far off scale. We’ve got the survivors off her. But we’ve got to get her far enough from the station so that when she goes, she won’t take us with her. That’s not the only problem. We’ve got to be sure she’ll break into the smallest possible fragments and that they are thrown in a favorable dispersal pattern.”
The explosives men grinned at each other. “Easiest thing in the world, Simeon,” their spokesman said with a rakish smile. “If you know what you’re doing.”
“We do,” one of the others said, thumping the spokesman jovially on the back. The man didn’t so much as rock on his toes.
“That’s good to know, guys! Can you tug pilots match their skill by redlining your engines a little to pull her as far away from us as you can?”
“Hell, Simeon,” Gus said, “you oughta know we’d have no trouble doing that little thing for you.”
“I’ll be monitoring and should be able to give you fair warning to get yourselves clear.” He paused a moment, anxious despite their obvious disregard for the inherent dangers. “Have I made the situation clear?”
Gus grinned. “Couldn’t be clearer, station man,” he said, giving his broad shoulders a preparatory twitch in response to the challenge. “And we don’t have much time for further chatter!”
Another voice broke in: Patsy’s. Simeon keyed her visual transmission to one of the ready-room screens; she was back in the control seat of her tug.
“My, ain’t the machismo level high around here? You got one tug already in place, Simeon—mine. Count me in, too.”
Gus winced. “Look, Patsy, we’re in very deep, ah—”
“Very deep shit,” she finished, grinning at him. “Ah know the words, Gus.”