‘Well, we’re down,’ sighed Gates.
Dallas picked himself up off the floor.
‘What kind of an astroliner pilot were you anyway?’ he asked.
‘Whaddya want? Dinner and a movie?’ Gates nodded. ‘You want to know the definition of a good flight? One you can walk away from. That’s what you’ve got, so don’t complain.’ Adjusting his tone to ask a leading question of the people below him on the mid-deck, he said, ‘Sorry about the rough landing, folks. Is everyone okay?’
‘Negative,’ said Prevezer. ‘We have one injury down here.’
‘Descartes, this is Mariner. We’re on the ground.’
‘We copy you on the ground, Mariner. Please advise if you need medical assistance.’
‘Thank you, Descartes. Please stand by for my report.’ Gates switched off the open communications channel and looked across the flight deck at Dallas. ‘You’ve given this computer a very bad press, Dallas. He’s a more helpful son-of-a-bitch than you led us to believe.’
‘All it’s doing is offering us the medical facilities of the landing site,’ said Dallas. ‘There’s a small emergency station immediately to the east of us, with some repair equipment and first-aid items. No blood, of course.’
Dallas approached the controls at the back of the flight deck to operate the payload-bay doors and the remote manipulator system. He said, ‘One good thing about that landing, though.’
‘Just one? We’re here, aren’t we?’
‘The impact managed to reboot all our computers. I don’t know how we’d have managed without that robot arm to deploy the space fridge.’
When the space fridge was deployed, Dallas followed Gates downstairs onto mid-deck. With the environmental control systems back on-line, the atmosphere throughout the RLV had been restored, and Ronica had already climbed out of her space suit and was lying down on a hammock in preparation for her blood transfusion.
‘I hope you appreciate this, Dallas,’ she said as she connected herself to the trans-infusion machine. ‘The way I’m prepared to shed my blood for you. It’s not everyone I’d do this for, you know.’ The machine made its own tourniquet, swabbed the skin on her arm, and then inserted the needle.
Dallas took hold of her hand and then kissed it, even as the blood started to flow through the cannula. ‘I know.’
‘Simou?’ said Gates. ‘I want to know what caused that oxygen cylinder to explode. And what is the status of our fuel cells?’
‘Some kind of electrical short circuit inside the liquid oxygen tank, I think,’ answered Simou, starting to check through his computerized electrical gauges. ‘A thousand-to-one chance, but it happened. And after that everything else was predictable. The fuel cells mix hydrogen and oxygen to produce water and, as a by-product of their reaction, electricity. So when we lost one of the liquid oxygen cylinders, some of the fuel cells were effectively asphyxiated.’ He ran his eyes over the fuel cell gauges. ‘Looks like we’ve still got ten out of twelve working okay.’
‘Fifteen percent,’ Dallas told Ronica. ‘This machine’s slower than it was in the simulation.’
‘Real life can be a little like that,’ she sighed.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Same as the first time I met you. Light-headed, weak at the knees, butterflies in my chest.’
Dallas held her hand tighter, and scrutinized her transfusion rate.
‘Dallas? That’s my hand,’ she told him gently. ‘Not an orange. Squeezing it won’t make the blood flow out any quicker.’
He slackened his grip. Her blood was collecting in a large plastic bag that was attached to the back of the machine, while the computerized display was providing a host of details about its constitution: the type, the temperature, the red-cell concentrations, the plasma content, the pH, the adenosine triphosphate levels, and even the antibodies that were present in the component.
‘You’re doing fine,’ he told her. ‘Twenty-five percent of your blood has now been removed. Not long to go now.’
Simou, still running a diagnostic check on the fuel cells, looked around for Gates. ‘Correction,’ he said. ‘Cell number ten’s looking a bit low all of a sudden. Probably the computer just registering the change in chemical mixture, now that it’s back on-line. It’s not about to close down, but I’m going to override that one and do it manually, just in case.’
‘Wait a second,’ said Cavor. ‘Where’s the power for the transfusion machine coming from?’
‘One fuel cell fails, the next one down the line takes up the load,’ explained Simou. ‘It’s number nine.’
‘Thirty percent,’ said Dallas.
‘Not feeling so good now,’ said Ronica, shivering a little. ‘Feel sick. Like I’m going to puke.’
‘How much power is in number nine?’ inquired Cavor.
‘Relax, will you? Nine’s fine. Nine is fully charged. We can run the whole ship on just three of these cells if we have to. System’s like a bus station. One goes out, one comes in. But there’s always going to be a bus around, okay?’
Ronica’s eyes flickered. She was going into hemorrhagic shock. Forty percent of her blood had now been removed. It was time to speak to Descartes. Dallas stopped the transfusion machine and then turned to the communications panel, to open a channel.
‘Descartes, this is Mariner.’
‘What is your status please, Mariner?’
‘Switching from cell ten to cell nine,’ said Simou, pressing a button on his computer.
‘Our computers have rebooted, Descartes. However, one of my crew has been injured,’ reported Dallas. ‘During the landing. She’s lost a great deal of blood and urgently requires some RES Class One whole component.’
‘You’re aware that this is not a drawing bank,’ said Descartes, ‘but a federal reserve. In emergencies I am authorized to make withdrawals; however, blood units are deep-frozen. I have no facilities for component recovery.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Dallas. ‘We have someone qualified on board ship.’
‘I shall need to verify her vital signs for myself. Then, provided you can give me an authorized autologous donation code, I will send you the components you need. Please submit both sets of data for my scrutiny.’
‘Right away,’ said Dallas, relieved that this was proceeding more quickly than he had anticipated. He quickly dispatched the information to Descartes and took hold of the machine, waiting for an approval that would let him put the trans-infusion pump into reverse. The sooner he could return Ronica’s blood to her, the more comfortable he would feel about what she was doing. This felt very different from the simulation. It wasn’t that he hadn’t cared about her before; it was just that now the transfusion procedure was happening for real, he could properly appreciate the essential meaning of losing her.
‘If cell number ten’s been running on near empty levels...,’ mused Cavor.
‘I have your data,’ reported Descartes. ‘Your crew member is type O, genotype OO, phenotype O, showing H-substance redcell antigens, and all normal plasma antibodies.’ It was the Descartes computer’s ability to test for antibodies that stopped them from also getting blood for Lenina, who was type AB. As soon as Descartes saw the hematological hallmarks of her P2 infection, it would have guessed something was wrong. ‘I’m sending you three units.’