If it had been me speaking, I might have left out the word slightly. We’re all somewhat antisocial or we wouldn’t take jobs that keep us alone for up to three years at a stretch. But Clay Reid was the archetypal loner. If he were the only one available to do a rescue, he would do it. Anyone out in the cloud knows how thin the thread of survival is, but Clay would not do it with grace. He disliked everyone.
“Well, we’ll worry about that when we have to,” I said. “Let’s make certain that you’re going to be in shape for that sort of work before we make offers.”
Getting to the shipwreck station was not just twenty-seven hours of eating, sleeping, and hanging around. No matter what Ebbie is doing, I have a full schedule, most of it involved in just keeping my body in condition. Long periods of weightlessness leach calcium from bones, endanger muscles, and play havoc with the circulatory and digestive systems. Granted, things aren’t as bad for me as they were for early space travelers. For one thing, I was born on Mars and grew up adapted to that much less gravity. And there is the physiological tampering they do on us, the scavenger cells—biological nanomachines—mucking about inside us trying to haul the calcium back where it belongs, and so forth. But we still need plenty of plain old sweat equity to keep the body in tiptop shape. No miner wants to spend two or three weeks rehabbing on Mars after a deep tour.
A berg is just a dark blob of matter. Without the beacon marking the shipwreck station there would have been nothing to distinguish that lump of ice and dust from millions of others in the halo that marks the edge of the Solar System. The beacon is electronic. A visible searchlight powerful enough to be seen at any distance would take far too much power to be practical—it would melt the berg it was mounted on. But as Ebbie maneuvered us in to dock, there were lights visible, small markers on Bartholomew’s Candle and on the station itself. I guess Angie wanted to make double certain that Ebbie saw Barta and didn’t plow into her.
Ebbie gave me several views of the damage to Barta. It was fairly obvious that Barta wasn’t going very far on her own power without a major overhaul. It might even be decertified for deep operations. The ship would likely not be scrapped though. There are uses for the most beat-up hulks. While Ebbie moved us up to a docking tube at the station, I got a good look at most of Barta’s hull. I could only recall seeing one candle beat up worse, and her pilot had not survived.
“Angie McBroom was one lucky miner,” I whispered.
“Luck may have had some part in it, but Barta is a good ship.” There was a hesitation before Ebbie added, “Or was.”
“I was thinking that too. Her long-haul days may be over.”
“Barta won’t like the alternatives,” Ebbie said.
I looked toward the speaker grille, as if I might see Ebbie in it. We had been together a long time, spent ages conversing when we had no one else to talk with. I did think of Ebbie as a person, but only to a point. There was always the distinction, finally, that she was still only a computer.
“She won’t like the alternatives?”
“The word was appropriate,” Ebbie replied, her voice matching mine closely in tone. “I wouldn’t either.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “I’m not sure how I’ll adjust when I’m not making long hauls any more myself.”
Ebbie had no response to that. She retreated to business.
“Twelve seconds to touch,” she informed me.
As usual, she performed the docking maneuver perfectly. It’s a big part of our business, and in this case she didn’t have to burn us part-way into the berg or calculate a balanced position so that we could boost it accurately home.
Angie McBroom was waiting when I cycled through the habitat’s airlock. She gave me a weak smile and a thumbs-up gesture while I climbed out of my pressure suit. The berg had just enough mass to give a slight feeling of weight, enough to keep me oriented and make it simple to slide the suit down so that I could step out without turning somersaults.
Angie was particularly tiny for Mars-born, but most miners are below average in size. Our candles don’t seem as cramped as they would if we were two meters tall. Angie had been at the business longer than I had. This was her seventh trip. According to rumors back at Lowell Port, she had the money to retire twice over, but kept going back out. I had known her, or known of her, for as long as I had been in the game. She was a legend in the Miners’ Guild. And we had talked by radio quite a few times.
Still, this was the first time I had ever laid eyes on her. She wasn’t nearly as old as I had expected. Everyone talked about her as “the old lady of the Oort.” Seven trips had to translate to at least twenty years, even if she had always dipped only into the very edge of the cloud and taken minimal stopovers on Mars. She had to be forty or more years old. But I would have guessed that she had to be under thirty-five, maybe only a year or two older than me. Her round face had tiny lines at the corners of her eyes, but many miners acquire those their first trip out. Her complexion was pale. There are no suntans in the Oort.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.
“Your eyes don’t look all that sore.” I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Angie asked.
“All of the times we’ve talked, and all I’ve heard about you, it just seems strange, meeting for the first time.”
She shrugged. “That’s the nature of the beast.”
“Ebbie gave me a good look at Barta. Looks like you’ve used up a couple of your spare lives on this trip.” I moved to one of the benches and sat, then stretched before I took the elastic band off of my ponytail. I start every long haul with my hair shaved to the scalp, but the next haircut has to wait until I get home. You don’t want hair clippings floating around inside your ship, getting into places where they might do harm before they can be sucked up. I don’t even shave aboard Ebbie. I glanced around the habitat. I might whack off my beard and some of the hair while I was in the station, if I could find the tools.
“It is bad,” she agreed. I might have imagined that I saw ghosts race across her eyes. “It’ll be the devil to fix.” She sat on the bench with me, but not too close.
“Ebbie says we’ll be able to fix her up good enough for the trip home, probably good enough to give you a push.” I know, I wasn’t going to say anything until I knew for certain that Ebbie would be in shape for that kind of work and that Clayton wouldn’t do something completely out of character and volunteer, but that haunted look on Angie’s face changed my mind.
“Thanks. I want to give Barta a closer look first, make certain that she can’t get home by herself.”
“You know that the station won’t support you until a relief ship can get out here to do the tow,” I said.
She hauled in a deep breath. “I know. Rotten luck, huh? The worst chain reaction since I’ve been in the business. I only know of one other case when three ships were damaged by the same event, and that was when I was a kid.”
“Two pilots didn’t make it back from that one. I guess that makes our luck pretty good by comparison, even Barta’s.”
“Nobody told me you’d become a chaplain.”
I laughed. “Clay Reid will do that before I will.”
She joined me in the laugh. “I am glad I’m not going to be stuck here alone with him. I’d want to sleep with a knife in my hand. I’ve met him a couple of times, back at Lowell Port.”
“How long before he gets in?”
“Three hours. He says he plans to be back out seven hours after that.”