"All right!" Chief Weintraub's exclamation of triumph came over the com as the pod finally mated properly. The work crew stood back, clearing the rail safety perimeter, while Weintraub signaled Lieutenant Wolcott to run the pod in, and Ginger heard a chorus of tired cheers as it cycled smoothly back to its place in the launch queue.
"Only eight more to go, troops, and only two of 'em are ours." Weintraub used his suit thrusters to turn himself until he faced Ginger and waved a manipulator arm at her. "We've got our next baby coming along in about five minutes, Ging. Leave your people here to take a breather and go see how they're coming on the loading for Number Twenty-Four, would you?"
"No sweat, Chief." Ginger was technically senior to Weintraub, but he was the missile specialist BuWeaps had trained specifically to straw boss Rail Three, and this was his show. Besides, it gave her a chance to play with her SUT pack for the first time this shift. She waved back, walked to the lip of the cargo doors, and consulted the HUD projected on the inside of her helmet. Ah! There Number Twenty-Four was. Nine klicks out at zero-three-niner.
Ginger disengaged her boots from the hull and floated free for a moment, gazing down at the huge, blue-and-white marble of Sidemore. It sure is a pretty planet. Glad we could get it back for the people it belongs to. Then she looked out at the stars, and a familiar sense of awe filled her. Unlike some people, Ginger loved EVAs. The immensity of the universe didn't bother her; she found it cleansing and oddly soothing, a special feeling of privacy mixed with a wondering joy that God would allow her to glimpse His creation from His own magnificent vantage point.
But she wasn't here to admire the view. She centered the HUD reticle on Pod Twenty-Four's beacon, locking her vector into the automated guidance systems of the outsized Sustained Use Thruster pack strapped over her skinsuit. The SUT packs were designed for extended EVA use, with much greater endurance and power than the standard skinsuit thrusters, and Ginger loved her rare opportunities to play with them. Now she double-checked her vector, grinned in anticipation, and tapped the go button.
That was when it happened.
The second she enabled the thrusters, the entire system went mad. Instead of the gentle pressure she'd expected, the SUT went instantly to maximum power. It slammed her away from the ship under an acceleration intended only for emergency use, and she grunted in anguish, unable to cry out properly under the massive thrust. Her thumb reached frantically for the manual override, finding the button with the blind, unerring speed of relentless training, and jabbed sharply... and nothing happened at all.
Nor was that the worst of it. Her attitude thrusters were equally berserk, whipsawing her wildly and sending her pinwheeling insanely off into space. She lost all spatial reference in the first two seconds, and her inner ear went mad as she whirled crazily away from the ship. It was only God's good grace that she was headed away from the ship; her malfunctioning SUT could just as easily have turned her straight into the hull, with instantly lethal consequences.
But the consequences she had were bad enough. For the first time in her life, Ginger Lewis was hammered by the motion sickness which had always evoked amused sympathy when she saw it in others. She vomited helplessly, coughing and choking as the instinct-level responses her instructors had beaten into her fought to keep her airways clear. She'd never expected to need that training, she wasn't the sort to whoop her cookies over a little vacuum work!, but only the legacy of her merciless DIs kept her alive long enough to hit the vomit-slimed chin switch that dropped her com into Flight Ops' EVA guard frequency.
"Mayday! Mayday! Suit malfunction!" she gasped while her thrusters continued to bellow like maddened animals. "This..." She retched again, choking as dry heaves wracked her. "This is Blue Sixteen! I'm, God, I don't know where I am!" She heard the panic in her own voice, but she couldn't even see. The contents of her stomach coated the inside of her helmet, wiping away the stars, compounding her disorientation, and still the thrusters thundered without rhyme or reason! "Mayday!" she screamed into the com.
And no one answered at all.
"What the...?" Scotty Tremaine had just relieved Lieutenant Justice, LAC Two's ops officer, and settled into his chair in Flight Ops when he noticed the radar trace spearing away from the ship on an impossible vector.
He punched a query into the computers, but they didn't know what it was either, and he frowned. The guard frequency was silent, so it couldn't be somebody in trouble, but he couldn't think of what else it might be, either. He tapped a stylus to his display, painting the trace and dropping it onto the master plot in CIC, and then hit the all-hands transmit key.
"Flight Ops," he said crisply into his boom mike. "I have an unidentified bogey heading out at..." he checked the numbers "...thirty-five gees. All section leaders, check your sections. I want a headcount soonest!"
He sat back in his chair, gnawing his lip as reports started coming in. They rattled from the com with reassuring speed, and he checked each section leader off on his master list as he or she reported in. But then they stopped, and there was one section still unchecked.
"Blue Sixteen, Blue Sixteen!" he said into the mike. "Blue Sixteen, I need your count!" Only silence came back, and then someone else spoke.
"Flight, this is Yellow Three. I sent Blue Sixteen to check out Pod Two-Four three or four minutes ago."
Tremaines blood froze, and he shifted instantly to his link to Boat Bay One.
"Dutchman! Dutchman!" he barked. "Flight Ops is declaring a Dutchman! Get the ready pinnace out now!"
A startled acknowledgment came back, and he plugged into CIC.
"Ullerman, CIC," a voice said.
"Tremaine, Flight Ops," Scotty said urgently. "Listen up! I've got a Dutchman headed away from the ship at thirty-five gees. I painted the trace on your plot three minutes ago. Tie into the ready pinnace and guide them in on it, and for God's sake don't lose it!"
"Acknowledged," the voice snapped, and Tremaine turned back to his own radar. It was short-ranged and much less powerful than the main arrays, and the trace was already fading from his display. He saw the much larger radar signature of the ready pinnace, driving hard on reaction thrusters to clear the ship, and his lips moved as he whispered a silent prayer for whoever that disappearing trace was.
If the pinnace didn't get to him before Tracking lost him, the poor bastard would become a Flying Dutchman in truth.
"Are you positive, Harry?" Honor asked quietly.
"Absolutely," Lieutenant Commander Tschu grated. "Some sick son-of-a-bitch rigged her SUT, Skipper. He tried to make it look like a general system failure, but he got too cute when he set her com up to 'fail.' The com's not part of the SUT, and he had to interface her SUT computers with her skinny. That's not hard, but it doesn't happen by accident; someone has to make it, and someone damned well did. The SUT computers totally fried, and all his execution files were supposed to crash and burn with the rest of the system, but my data recovery people found a single line of code directing output to her com buried in the garbage. It's only a fragment, but it's also completely outside normal programming parameters, because there's not supposed to be a link from the SUT to her com. This wasn't a hardware failure, and it wasn't corrupted files. It took specifically planted files to make it all happen."