We were silent for a moment. I could hear Zak breathing into his mike. “Hey, look,” he said awkwardly. “What was it some philosopher said?—‘Self knowledge is usually bad news.’ But that’s not necessarily so.”
I nodded. “Right. Right. Now that I see it. I think I can deal with it. I’m scared of going Earthside. I like it out here. It’s safe.” I laughed recklessly. “No schoolyards for the big kids to beat me up in.”
“I figure you’ll make it, Matt,” Zak said warmly. “I really do.”
“I’d better.” My sudden elation fizzled out. “Aarons will ship me Earthside for sure.”
“Huh? Why?”
“I went berserk. Zak. Crazy. Unstable. I swiped this shuttle, risked my life, broke regs, beat up Yuri… God, that felt good…”
“I see your point.” Zak said sadly. “I know you’ll be okay now, but Aarons doesn’t have any choice.”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked down at Jupiter, endlessly spinning, and felt a bone-deep weariness. “I’m washed up, Zak. This time I’m really finished.”
“Matt?”
“Huh?” I felt drowsy. “Yes?”
“We’ve got trouble.” It was Dad.
“I’m only thirty-three minutes from ETA. What could—”
“That’s the point. We’ve just picked up a big flare on the south pole. Some extraordinary activity.”
“Meaning—?”
“Looks like a burst of high energy stuff, headed out along the magnetic field lines. The whole Jovian magnetosphere is alive with radio noise. And higher than the normal radiation flux, of course.”
“Will it catch me?”
“Looks like it.”
“Damn.” I bit my lip.
“Your fuel is—”
“I’ve already checked. Just enough to brake, maybe a fraction over.”
“I see.” A silence.
I frowned, calculating. I gave the idea about five seconds of solid thought, and then I knew: “Give me a new orbit, Dad. I’m firing along my present trajectory, as of—” I punched the stud—“now.”
A solid kick in the small of my back.
“Wait, Matt, we haven’t computed—”
“Doesn’t matter. Sooner I get going, the more seconds I’ll shave off my arrival time.”
“Well…yes.” Dad said slowly.
I held my thumb on the button, eyeing my fuel tank. Burn, baby. Go! But not too much—
I raised my thumb. The pressure at my back abruptly lifted. “What’s my mid-course correction?” I barked.
“We—we plot you into a delta-vee of zero point three seven at five minutes, forty-three seconds from now.” Dad’s voice was clipped and official. “Transmitting to your inboard on the signal.”
I heard the beep a second later. I was on my way. The new course correction would bring me into the Can with minimum time.
“How much did I pick up?”
“I make it seven, no, seven point four minutes.”
“That enough?”
“It’s close. Damned close.”
“Better than frying.”
“Yes, but…”
“Yeah. I know. What’s my reserve?”
“None.”
“What?”
“None. It will take just about every gram of fuel to get you to the top of the Can, instead of flying by at several klicks further out. You may have a few seconds of juice left at the bottom of the tank, but it can’t be more than a small fraction of what you need.”
“Geez.”
“Son. you’ll come into the top pancake.”
“With no brakes.”
“Right.”
“Damned magnetosphere. What’s causing all this, Dad? I mean—” I pounded my gloves on the steering column—“why in hell does the solar flux have to stack up on us just when Jupiter is throwing out this crap? What’s happening at the poles?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never seen—”
“I know that. But, but—” Then I shut up. I was just whining, and I knew it. The universe plays for keeps. It doesn’t give a damn if you’re a screwed-up kid who has gone off on a dumb stunt. Whining wouldn’t help.
The minutes crawled by I made the course correction and watched the Can grow from a bright dot into a slowly spinning target. I fidgeted. I planned. I talked to Dad, but there wasn’t much to say.
I had somewhere between zero and maybe ten seconds of burn time left. Not enough to slow me down much.
I climbed over the rig, detaching every unit and pouch and box that I could shove overboard. The less mass I had, the more braking I could get out of those few seconds of impulse.
I took the Faraday cup and put it in my carry-bag, tucked on the inside of my left leg so nothing could easily bump it. They’re mechanically pretty strong, anyway.
Then I looked at the stars for a moment, trying to think. I had to stay calm and I would have to move fast. I kept thinking that there had to be some way out of this.
The bridge was sending a team out to help. There wasn’t much they could do, of course. There wasn’t much time to deploy a shuttle and boost it out to meet me, match velocities and make a pickup.
The Can arced across from my left, swelling. I swung my scope forward. I could make out the pancake. I was coming in almost edge-on. Were those specks moving? Maybe they were the team that was waiting for me. Or maybe just my imagination.
“Thirty seconds.” Dad’s voice was stiff, tight.
The silvery skin of the Can looked like a Christmas tree ornament. Funny, how I’d never noticed that before. The big cylinder grew and grew against the flat black of space. Stars beamed silently at me. The pancake was spinning serenely, faster than the Can. It was just a big bag of water, but at these speeds—
I saw the idea at the last possible moment. If I ran into the right side of the pancake, its spin angular momentum would be directed against me. But on the left side, the spin would be with me. The relative velocity between Roadhog and the pancake would be less. So if I could—
I spun the attitude jets to the right. The pancake was growing, dead ahead. How much should I give it?
Too much and I’d miss entirely. Miss, and shoot past the Can. And the radiation would fry me. When they finally fetched me back home and cracked my suit, I’d look like a potato chip.
But if I gave it too little, the shock of impact would shatter Roadhog and me along with it.
I fired the jets. One second, two, three—
I cut it off. We glided leftward. The pancake was a huge spinning sack of water, and I was flying toward it and now laterally across it, closing fast—
—too fast—
I saw specks of light. People. Waving. The pancake became a vast spinning plain. I came shooting toward the edge of it. I could see the thick organiform skin sliding away below me, moving the same direction as Roadhog, but slower. We were vectoring down into the plane, like a needle falling toward a spinning record—
There was shouting in my suit phones. I ignored it. I had been so worried about hitting the pancake, but now I wanted to hit it, wanted it so bad I could taste it.
I had the engine into braking mode already. But when should I fire? Distances were hard to judge. I could see stenciling on the pancake’s skin now, numbers shooting by below. Closer. Closer—
I jammed a thumb down on the firing stud. One, two…five seconds. The silvery wall of the pancake edge rose up before me. blotting out the stars. Seven—Eight—
Dead. The engine gurgled to a stop.
The pancake was turning, sliding away. But I was catching up with it. And suddenly I saw that the physics wasn’t as simple as I thought. Once I hit the organiform, what would keep me there? There was no gravity. I would rebound from the pancake and go tumbling off into—