She left the big vidscan behind, without admitting to herself the reason. She didn’t intend to come loose and drift away; it was just good sense to leave the vidscan where it would be easily found. The one built into her helmet would do well enough for this short excursion. She clipped the end of one of her long lines into the ten-meter safety ring, then edged along the scaffolding line to the hull itself. Her short safety line slid along the scaffolding line on its ring. The scaffolding line was anchored with a double pin—and-patch. She ran her long line through the ring that attached there, which took longer than simply clipping in, but was more secure.
She put a boot on the hull and tested. Nothing. She had halfway hoped that Wraith’s internal artificial gravity would give some adhesion, but it might not even be functioning. She could put short-stick patches on her boots, or she could just go on . . . it would be easier to go on, and she could always put the patches on if she couldn’t make progress.
She fished a stickpatch out of her toolband with her right hand, positioned it on the end of her gloved middle finger and gave the slightest push with her left hand. She slid to the end of her safety line, slowly. Reaching out cautiously, she touched the stickpatch to the hull; it adhered just as it was supposed to. Now she could stick a pin to the patch . . . she hoped. She left her right hand on the stickpatch, and fumbled for a pin. There it was. When she reached over slowly, her safety line tugged at her waist. She had definitely gone as far as she could go with that on. She got the pin stuck to the stickpatch with its own quick-setting backing, then opened a connecting ring, locked her long line into it, and clipped the ring into the pin’s opening.
The next move had a certain finality—when she unhooked her safety line from the scaffolding cable, she was depending on her own ability to set patches and pins. Caution reminded her that she was not a specialist in EVA work . . . that she would not have the right reactions if something went wrong. Esmay grinned at caution, alone inside her helmet. She had listened to caution and what good had it done her? First they thought she was dull, and then they thought she was a wild radical.
It wasn’t that different from climbing the rocks at the head of her valley, or the exercise wall in the Kos. Reach, place a stickpatch, a pin, clip into the pin, move past that protection to the next. Twenty pins along, and she was beyond the bulge of damage . . . though the bow shield outlet access points, which should have been smooth glossy nubs protruding a few centimeters from the hull surface, were instead jagged-edged holes. Esmay turned up the light on her helmet vidscan to examine them more closely. Something glinted, ahead of her. More debris—and surely Major Pitak would want a picture of it. She placed another pin, clipped in carefully and finger-walked herself nearer.
Then tried to push herself back, and made a move violent enough to fling her off the hull, to hit the end of her line. She tried to swim herself into a position where she could see, where she wouldn’t be flung back into the hull . . . what if there were two of them?
Was she even sure of what it was? And even if it was, it could be the Wraith’s own weapons, by chance stuck to its own hull by . . . by some reaction Esmay couldn’t begin to understand. She forced herself to breathe slowly. Mine. It was a mine, exactly like the ones in the handbooks of enemy weaponry she’d been looking at in the supply ship on the way to Sierra Station.
Meanwhile, she reeled herself in, hand over hand, coming in too fast to her last clip; she bumped the hull with bruising force, and would have bounced free except that she grabbed the pin and outward line in one hand and the inward line with the other and let her arms take the strain. Now she wished she had stickpatches on her boots—it seemed she hung there a very long time, bouncing back and forth. Finally the oscillations died down. With great care, she reached inward for the next clip, then unclipped from that pin. Twenty . . . twenty-two . . . twenty-seven pins in all, each requiring slow, careful movement to pass. She thought several times of using her suit comunit—but was that mine an emergency now? If no one else approached it before she warned them—and the scaffolding crew was still setting up their workspaces in the hull breach.
When she made it back to the scaffolding cable and clipped on her safety line, she felt it must have taken a half-shift at least. But her chronometer didn’t agree. Barely an hour had passed. She retrieved the big vidscan, and looked around for the scaffolding chief. She couldn’t go back to the Koskiusko without warning someone here. She spotted him at last, and edged from line to line until she could tap his shoulder, and then the message board he carried. His helmet nodded. Quickly, Esmay drew a clumsy sketch of the bow—the bulge, then the location of the mine. MINE she printed in careful letters.
He shook his head. Esmay nodded. He pointed to the big vidscan and drew a question mark. She had to shake her head, and point to the scan lens in her helmet. FOLLOW he signed, and led her along the scaffolding to a com nexus. While she was gone, they’d strung a direct line from ship to ship, and passed a wire into Wraith, so that the ships could talk without unshielded transmission. Esmay and the scaffolding chief both hooked their suits to the nexus.
“What do you mean, mine?” the chief asked. “And what were you doing that far up the bow, anyway? Your safety line isn’t that long.”
“You saw the bulge of damaged frame,” Esmay said. “I went to scan it for Major Pitak. I put out stickpatch pins and clipped in. And when I got beyond the bulge, I was scanning damaged shield nodes . . . turned up my suit scan lights . . . and there it was.”
“A mine, you say.” He sounded unconvinced.
“It looks like the illustrations in the handbooks. Not one of ours, either. A Smettig Series G, is what it looked like to me.”
“What kind of fuse, did you see that?”
“No.” She didn’t want to say it, but she couldn’t leave it at that. “I tried to jump back and . . . lost contact with the hull.”
“So . . . you don’t have full documentation?”
“No.” She didn’t even know how much of the mine her scan had picked up. How long had she looked at it before panicking?
“If it is a mine . . .” He sighed, the exasperated sigh of someone who does not want one more complication in a day already stuffed with complications. “Well . . . hell. I see you have to report it, and if it is a mine we’ll have to do something . . .” His voice trailed off, someone who didn’t know what to do next. He looked at her, and her intention to say anything vanished. She was an officer; it was her job to make decisions. This is what came of ignoring caution, she thought bitterly, as she tried to think who to report this to, aboard Koskiusko. The simple answer was Major Pitak, but an enemy mine stuck aboard a ship under repair wasn’t simple.
Pitak’s reaction, when Esmay finally got her on the other end of the connection, was hardly reassuring. “You think you saw a mine . . . an enemy mine.” Flat, almost monotone. “And you may or may not have gotten it on the vid . . . ?”
“Yes, sir. I . . . pushed off too hard. I was afraid . . .”
“I should hope so.” That with more energy. “You know, Suiza, you do have an instinct for drama. An enemy mine. Not everyone would think of that.”