Melissa Sleeman started. “Major, that — I’m sorry. That’s crazy. No matter the scenario, we should be heading planetside to find the rest of the legation as soon as we can.”
Rulaine leaned back. “And then what?”
Sleeman blinked. “Why, we boost back up to orbit, or find whoever’s in charge on Disparity, or—”
But Karam was shaking his head. “That won’t happen.” Seeing the growing outrage on her face, he rephrased: “That can’t happen.”
She frowned. “Why not?”
It was Phil Friel who answered her. “The hull damage. Specifically, the gouge that damned penetrator rod carved into our belly.”
“But we — you — can weld that, right?” Rulaine had never heard Melissa sound confused before this moment.
This time Tina answered. “Oh, we can weld it. And it will hold air and be fine for spaceside operations. But reentry? Phew.” She shook her head dubiously. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Unfortunately, that’s only half the problem,” Karam sighed. “I might—might—be able to get this bird down. Mostly because she’s a solid military hull, tough as nails, and has plenty of redundancy. But even if we go in turned turtle, it’s a one-way trip. If we go down, we’re not getting back up without full repairs.”
Morgan Lymbery nodded. “It is due to the coolant line damage,” he explained. “During routine descents, and even more so during ascents, the engines are frequently at maximum thrust. But with a damaged craft, the pilot”—he nodded respectfully at Karam—“will have to push the engines and power plants beyond their rated limits.
“Puller’s hull damage and compromised aerodynamics ruin her airflow characteristics. That requires compensatory and corrective thrust. Each time Mr. Tsaami applies that extra thrust, we will be living on borrowed time, hoping the coolant pressures don’t cause the distributor to finally give out.” He threw up one hopeless hand. “Once that happens, we’re done. We’d be lucky to get to the ground in one piece before the engine dies. Or explodes.”
The bridge was silent for several long seconds before Peter Wu cleared his throat. “I grew up speaking English as well as Mandarin, but”—he turned toward Karam—“what do you mean by saying that the ship would descend while it was ‘turned turtle’?”
Karam smiled ruefully. “‘Turned turtle’ means ‘on your back.’” When he saw confused, and some disbelieving, looks around the bridge, he explicated. “That belly weld won’t take the brunt of reentry superheating. If it splits, or even flakes a bit, the underplating will burn through in less than a minute and we’ll come apart like a model airplane hit with a sledgehammer.” Several of the surrounding faces grew pale. “But our dorsal surface is pretty much pristine. So we’ll go in on our backs.”
Whereas many others looked pale, Phil Friel looked intrigued. “Can it take that? I thought that there were special alloys layered into the ventral surface to absorb and diffuse reentry heat.”
The answer came from Lymbery. “Not to worry, lad. Puller is up to the task.”
“With respect, Mr. Lymbery, why are you so sure?” Friel smiled. “You didn’t design this ship too, did you?”
Lymbery did not smile. “No, I didn’t. I was merely the independent inspector who signed off on the design.”
Friel’s mouth made a round, soundless, “Oh.”
Rulaine smothered his own incipient grin and, pulling against his finger-hold on the sensor console, tugged himself back into a fully upright position. “So we can fix this ship, but not like new. If we head planetside, it’s a one-way trip. And we only take that trip if it looks like the bad guys have decided to go hunting our friends. Then, we’re the equalizers.”
“If we make it down alive,” Karam grumbled.
“Always the optimist,” drawled Tina Melah.
“Bah humbug,” Karam replied. “I’ll have you know that I am optimist enough to have already run multiple computer simulations of how to get Puller out of her three-axis tumble when the time comes for us to straighten out and get moving.”
“Is our tumble really that bad?” asked Melissa Sleeman, who’d spent most of her days manning the passive sensors, both those observing the planet beneath them and the dangerous vastness of space behind them.
Tygg leaned toward her; she leaned towards him. “Have you looked out a window?” he asked gently.
She frowned slightly. “No.”
“Don’t,” he urged her.
“Make you puke, fer sure,” Tina added.
Bannor nodded at Karam’s piloting console. “How long from the time you start firing the attitude control thrusters until we’re out of the tumble?”
“Thirty-one seconds.”
“That’s impossible. No one could do that.” O’Garran’s blunt assertion bordered on truculence.
“Watch your tongue, Stretch,” Karam countered. “And I didn’t say I was doing it.” He patted the console. “The computer will handle it. I ran the sims until I got it optimized, then recorded the sequence. When it comes time for us to move, I hit the right button and the show begins. But, fair warning: be strapped in. And try not to eat anything heavy beforehand; correcting this tumble in thirty seconds means a lot of hard thrusting along sharply opposed vectors. It will not be a pleasant ride.”
“Damn,” answered O’Garran with nod and a frown. “That’s pretty impressive.”
“Yeah,” Trent agreed. “But why wait? If you did it now, it would make the welders’ EVAs a lot less disorienting, wouldn’t it?”
Karam nodded. “Yes. But it would also get us killed.” He pointed out beyond the bulkhead. “Remember all that talk about the bad people who might be out there? The ones who’ve already tried to kill us?”
Trent shrugged. “Yeah, but we know they’re not running active sensors, so they can’t know what our tumble-pattern is, not enough to determine that it’s changed.”
Karam sighed, his eyes were shuttered. “Listen, greenhorn. A lot of space combat is nothing but our computers and sensors dueling with their computers and sensors. But there’s also a common-sense side. First, anyone watching us from a passive posture will measure our reflected light: how much, which wavelengths, and most important, when do we shine and how long? Variations in the first two variables can be altered by other elements: the position and angle of the ship relative to the sun, a solar flare, or if any dust is moving in or out of the radiant path from the primary to Disparity.
“But any alteration in the latter two variables — the timing of our reflection — tells them that we’ve changed our tumble. And that means they’ll come after us. So we stay as we are until we’re ready to fire up the engines.”
“Can’t happen soon enough,” O’Garran opined brusquely, turned to Bannor to look for the “dismissed” nod.
“Actually,” Rulaine commented, “we need every calm minute we can get, Miles.”
“That may be, Major, but I doubt those minutes are being very friendly to the captain and the others. I’m just worried that Disparity might be finishing the job that the enemy started. Sir.”
Bannor nodded sadly. O’Garran was correct in all but one particular. The force that had brought all this misery to pass wasn’t simply “the enemy,” wasn’t simply “the threat force.” They were assassins.