The top of the permod swung open and Wally Sturgis sat up, feeling more than a little pleased with himself. He knew for damned sure that you weren’t supposed to be able to open the things from the inside. He counted the fact that he had managed it as a major victory.
His head felt a little funny, unaccustomed to any sort of movement after three days in the mod. He felt his stomach lurch just a bit as well, as he found out the hard way that sudden movement in a micro-gravity environment could be most disorienting. About a hundredth of a gee this close to the axis. Enough to tell him which way was down, more or less, but not much else. Welcome to NaPurHab, he told himself.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, and thus got a lungful of air that did not smell like Walter J. Sturgis, another novel experience after the last three days.
That led him to realize precisely what flavor Walter J. Sturgis had become in the last seventy-two hours. Perhaps a shower might be in order. Wally set to work detaching himself from the permod’s plumbing attachments, and got out of the permod, moving very carefully.
“Hey! You there guy! Get outta that mod now-right!”
Wally looked around to see who was calling to him.
A small, peppery-looking woman bounced up to an overhead guideway about twenty meters away. She was dressed in rather grubby-looking purple-and-orange pants and a torn pullover with a tiger-stripe pattern. Her hair was shaved in a tonsure, and her skin was dyed, not purple, but a rather striking shade of yellow. “Get outta that thing!” she said again, pulling herself along on the overhead stanchions.
“I’m getting, I’m getting,” Wally said, scrambling out of the mod, feeling more than a bit woozy.
“Those supplies are everybody’s, buddy,” the woman shouted, hurrying over, swinging along, arm over arm. “Cargo headhoncho don’t want no lib’rating without his okay…” Her voice trailed off as she got close enough to get a whiff of permod. She looked down into the permod, took another look at Wally, and said, “Oh.” She let go of her stanchion and drifted slowly down to floor level, landing after a leisurely five-second fall.
“You been in that thing?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” Wally said.
“Not sposed to be outgetting alone,” she pointed out in a rather accusing tone, but with something less than crystalline clarity as to what she was accusing him of. Was she saying it wasn’t allowed? Or unsafe? Or commenting on the fact that it was supposed to be impossible?
“Sorry,” Wally said. “Should I get back in until you’re ready?”
Twenty
Blood in the Sky
“There’s an ancient, ancient joke in which a man has made a hash of his business and is being interviewed in the aftermath. ‘Have you learned from your mistakes?’ the man is asked. ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘I’m sure I could repeat them exactly.’
“This, when applied to the Charonians, sums up their response to our tactical and strategic failures— and successes. They will do tomorrow what they did yesterday. So long as they continue to follow this practice, we will have at least some whisper of hope.”
Slowly, slowly, the big ship moved in toward Moonpoint.
Dianne Steiger sucked on her bulb of coffee and considered just how much she hated zero gee. Not for herself, mind. After an adult lifetime spent in spacecraft of one sort or another, a shift from this gravity to that meant little to her. The medical problems caused by zero gee were no great challenge, either, if people paid attention and took care of themselves—and she made quite certain that everybody on a ship of hers took care of themselves. Zero-gee debilitation was to spaceflight as scurvy had been to sea travel five or six hundred years before—completely preventable, and fatal all the same, for anyone fool enough not to take precautions.
It was the headaches that zero gee caused in managing the ship. Terra Nova had been designed for operation either in zero gee or in roll mode, rotating along her long axis to produce artificial gravity via the centrifugal effect. The TN could function either way, but roll mode was preferred for almost everything on board, from drinking coffee to flushing the toilets, from pumping coolant to controlling the ship’s thermal load. There were ways to do everything in no-grav, but most of them were awkward and inconvenient, work-arounds rather than straightforward procedures.
To make it harder, they were trying to operate at minimal power.
Every use of electric power, by definition, generated electromagnetic radiation of one sort or another, including radio emissions—not good around things like COREs, designed and built to detect radio frequencies.
So no hot food, no hot showers. Large areas of the ship were in darkness, while sections in active use were using half their normal lighting. It was getting damned depressing.
Nor did she greatly enjoy standing four-eight-four-eight watches, but she didn’t see much choice in that matter, either. There just weren’t enough command and ops personnel available to keep the ship running on alert status any other way. Four hours of general supervision where needed in the ship, eight hours on bridge duty, then four hours of dealing with whatever low-priority matters and office work had cropped up during the day. Then—in theory—eight hours to eat at least one decent meal, wash, and grab some kind of sleep before starting it all over again. Not that she had gotten eight hours of downtime since they had started the approach to Earth.
Something always came up. Last night, for example, she had spent half the time she was supposed to be sleeping sweating out the closest approach of CORE 219.
Terra Nova‘s course had taken her within six thousand kilometers of the CORE at one point. But the CORE had done nothing, and Terra Nova had drifted past it in the darkness of space.
All in all, a lot of trouble just to get the two surviving MRI specialists—assuming they did survive—and Terra Nova‘s share of the supplies sent from Earth.
Ah, well. Back to business. Dianne started checking the repeater displays, in effect looking over the shoulder of her crew.
“Oh, hell.” Dianne spotted something on her small repeater screens. “Tracking officer! What the hell is going on with CORE 219? I show a shift in aspect ratio.”
“Wha—huh? What’s the… just, just a moment, ma’am.” Dianne looked over at the young officer. Who was it? Hamato. Dead flat tired, like everyone else. Exhaustion was getting to be at least as great a danger as the COREs. At least he was coming awake once she gave him a poke. “Ah, ma’am,” he said. “Confirming aspect ratio shift. I read CORE 219 coming about, presenting itself broadside to us—”
An alarm sounded, and Hamato, now very much awake and alert, slapped at the cut-off button. “CORE 219 redirecting its radar, tight beam on Terra Nova.”
“Battle stations!” Dianne shouted. “Stand by for evasive action.”
“Trajectory change for CORE 219—219 coming out of previous patrol orbit. Turning toward Terra Nova.”