“Think?” She wasn’t sure if she heard scorn or genuine amusement in the major’s voice. Or something else.
“Thinking is good, Suiza. Now the first thing you do, is tell the chief to get his crew the hell away from Wraith. Then you get your sorry tail back out there and get some decent vidscan of this putative mine. I hope you have enough air . . .”
“Uh . . . yes, sir,” Esmay said, after a quick glance at her gauges.
“That’s reassuring.” A long pause, during which Esmay wondered if she was supposed to cut the connection and go. But Pitak wasn’t quite through. “Now I’ll go tell our captain to tell Wraith’s captain that a totally inexperienced junior officer on her first real EVA thinks she saw an enemy mine stuck to his ship and while she didn’t get any good pictures the first time, she is now taking pictures which, if the mine doesn’t blow her up, may show us whether she’s right. And give us a clue how to do something about it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That did not require an acknowledgement, Suiza. Can you think of any mistake you haven’t made yet?”
“I didn’t set it off,” Esmay said, before she could stop herself. A harsh bark of laughter came over the com.
“All right, Suiza . . . send the crew home and go bring me some decent pictures. I’ll see what I can do to scare up a bomb squad.”
The scaffolding chief was quite willing to take the orders of a junior officer; he scarcely bothered to utter a ritual grumble. Esmay didn’t wait for the crew to leave. She fished out stickpatches for her boots, checking twice to be sure she had the kind that would not adhere permanently. She didn’t want to be stuck there like an ornament. Then she used one of her safety lines and extra clips to sling the big vidscan on her back.
This time the trip was easier, with the pins already in place, and the grip of her boots on Wraith’s hull. She could walk part of the way between the pins, paying out line to herself from the clip before . . . it was easy to see, from this position, that she had not laid a straight course in the first place. She had angled across the bulge, rather than taking the shorter route straight forward. She didn’t look at anything but the pins, the clips, the line itself, until she was almost at the twentieth pin. Then light flooded over her from behind, washing out the fainter light from her helmet, and she missed the pin. When she turned to look, her helmet visor darkened automatically; she could see that one of Koskiusko’s big lights had turned away from the hull breach to search along the bows. Evidently Major Pitak had reached the captain. . . .
She reached again for the pin, and clipped into it safely. In the brighter light, the edges of the shattered shield nodes cast jagged shadows that striped the hull’s dull black. Things looked different now . . . she couldn’t see the mine, but it had to be close. Another pin, and another, and another . . .
EEEEERRRRP! Esmay jerked to a halt, and slammed her feet into the hull. The whiny, irritable, noise demanded her attention. A light flashed red in front of her . . . emergency . . . oh. She leaned her chin on the comunit switch.
“Don’t move,” a voice said in her ear. “Look down, knee level, 10 o’clock . . . but don’t move.” Esmay looked down, half her gaze cut off by the helmet. Something . . . something moved. Something small, perhaps the size of her ungloved fist, dark and glossy, rising on a thin wire stalk that gleamed in the searchlight . . . she wanted to tip her head and see where it was coming from, though she knew without seeing. “Just don’t move,” the voice said again. “With any luck it will think you’re part of the ship.”
Just as she opened her mouth to ask, the voice added, “And don’t talk. We don’t know what its sensor characteristics are.”
The little black ovoid on its wire—the programmable sensor pod of a smart mine—rose higher . . . she could see it clearly now, and presumably it could see her. Sweat sprang out on her whole body at once; it tickled abominably as it rolled down her ribs, down her belly . . . she wanted to scratch. Not as bad as she wanted to run.
She was part of the ship. She was a . . . an automatic repair mechanism. Turned off at the moment, nonfunctional . . . she tried not to breathe as the sensor swayed nearer, sweeping in a conical pattern dictated by the stiffness of its wire stalk and the vibrations induced at its source. She had been in scan herself; she knew what such a small package might contain. It could already have matched her thermal profile to that of “human in EVA suit” if that was part of its programming. It could have recorded her skeletal density, her respiratory rate, even her eye color.
And if it had done all that, she was already dead, she just hadn’t been killed yet.
The little pod on its stalk continued to revolve . . . but it was lower again. She didn’t know what that meant. Would a smart mine bother to retract its sensor array before blowing up? She could barely see it now, above the sight rim of her helmet. Then it was below her vision . . . she was not tempted to bend over and look more closely.
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” came the voice in her ear again. “Our searchlight brought your shadow up past its threshold. But you were dead right—it’s definitely a mine, and definitely an enemy weapon.”
Dead right . . . she didn’t like that at all.
“We’ve got a hazardous equipment assessment team on the way,” the voice went on. “Just don’t move.”
She had no intention of moving; she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to move again. A few moments later, the tremors began, behind her knees; she struggled to control them. How sensitive was the sensor pod? Which little twitch might set it off? Reason suggested that she’d been moving more before, and it hadn’t reacted . . . but reason had no control over her hindbrain, where panic danced its jig on her spine.
She was very bored with being that scared by the time the voice spoke again.
“You put down a good line, Lieutenant. Don’t move . . . we’re at the next pin, we can see you clearly.”
She wanted to turn and see them, see something friendly, even if that was the last thing she saw . . . but she did not move.
“We’re afraid if we douse the spotlight, that’ll trigger another search sequence, and we don’t know how it’s programmed.”
The voice didn’t have to say more; she remembered that some mines were set to go after a specific number of searches had been triggered, even if they didn’t find anything. She might have triggered an earlier search, when she first flung herself away from the thing.
“If we’re lucky, it’s looking for a match to something specific, which we don’t resemble, but . . .”
She wished the voice would shut up now . . . what if the mine reacted to minute vibrations carried through someone’s suit? Even hers. Surely they had someone watching it . . . surely they had a plan. . . .
“Wraith’s given us an update on what’s beyond the hull breach—they’re evacuating personnel now.” A pause; she tried not to think. Then, “How’s your suit air? Give me a one-letter answer: A for ample, S for short, C for critical, then a number for minutes remaining.”
Esmay looked, and was startled to see how far down the gauge had gone. “S,” she said. “Sixteen.”
“I’d call that critical, myself,” the voice said. “Here’s what we’ll do. Someone’s going to come up behind you, trying to match your profile and cast the same shadow, and pop on an external reserve. Don’t move. He’ll do all the hooking up from his end.”
“Yes, sir,” Esmay said. Her eyes had locked onto the air gauge; the number flicked down to fifteen, and it was definitely in the red zone.
“Breathe slowly,” the voice said. “You’re not doing any work; you may have longer than that.”
Fear burns oxygen. She remembered that, along with other pithy sayings. It was amazingly hard to breathe slowly because you needed to save oxygen . . . she tried thinking of other things. Would she feel the vibration of the person coming up behind her? Would the mine’s sensor pod notice it? That kind of thought didn’t help her take slow breaths. She tried to send her mind back to her valley, that favorite and reliable relaxation exercise, but when the gauge flicked to fourteen, she gasped anyway. Don’t gasp. Don’t look at the gauge. It will either go down to zero, or it won’t.