“I wait until you reach the target and send a hand signal confirming that you have made rendezvous and that I am cleared to remotely stabilize the line. I then jump over using a line-lanyard. I maintain radio silence throughout, to be violated only in the event of emergency or upon your initiation of broadcast.”
“How much time do we have to make our jump?”
“One minute each. Any longer and our cumulative radiation exposure becomes—er, unpromising.”
Trevor nodded behind his visor. “Okay, let’s go.” He turned to face the door, opened an access panel, depressed a red handle, held it there.
The red lights flashed rapidly for three seconds and then the door started to move aside noiselessly, as if presaging the strange, ghostly silence of outer space. Or of death. Caine bit his savaged lip, used the pain to control his nerves. A widening slice of blackness and stars opened before them. Trevor drew the Unitech ten-millimeter, attached its lanyard to a ring on his utility harness, and leaned forward, allowing his feet to rise behind him. When his soles met the interior hatch at their backs, he reached out with both hands, braced himself against the edges of the now-fully open outer hatch. He contracted backward into a squatting position, legs gathered under him as he attached his tether to a mooring ring on the airlock wall. If Trevor mistimed his jump, then he’d have problems landing on the bow module, which would mean more exposure. Which in turn would mean—Caine decided not to pursue that line of thought any further.
Trevor kicked off from the inner hatch and into open space, the line unfurling in his wake. Caine moved to a position near the door to get a better view.
Trevor was already fifteen meters away and had rolled over on his back, pistol in hand. He aimed back along the path of his jump, then shifted his aim slightly above the rim of the auxiliary command module. Caine saw the muzzle flash briefly, followed immediately by a noticeable increase in the speed with which Trevor was moving away.
His course-corrective shot had apparently been a good one; he was now headed directly for the enemy craft. He somersaulted very slowly to face in that direction, his legs out in front of him. The slack eased out of the tether as Trevor passed the halfway mark—and as Caine’s heads-up display painted the now-familiar trefoil radiation symbol above the scene.
Trevor’s forward progress started to diminish, suggesting that he had now fired the ten-millimeter to both kill his forward tumble and counteraccelerate, easing himself into a slower approach. Caine checked the small green chrono at the extreme left of his HUD. Elapsed time: fifteen seconds. Coming up on five REM whole body exposure for Trevor, probably about a third that for himself.
Trevor drifted closer to the wreck as the broad top of the prow began rolling around toward him once again. He had uncoupled from the tether: dangerous but necessary. Landing on the rolling hull with the tether firmly attached would have snapped the line like desiccated string and sent Trevor spinning off into space.
Trevor aimed behind, fired two last times, pushing him forward as the command section’s wider aftward surfaces rotated under him. It was a tricky maneuver. If he fired too soon, one of the sharp angles of the prow might slam into him as it completed its arc, doing so with enough force to shatter every bone in his body. Coming in late wasn’t quite so bad; in that event, Trevor would land a few meters off-center and aft of the command section, but that also meant a few more seconds of exposure. Caine squinted. The whiteness of Trevor’s suit had blended with the whiteness of the spinning wreck, obscuring the outcome of his final approach to contact.
But just before the top surface of the prow rolled out of sight, Caine glimpsed a flash of movement on its surface: two quick, wide-armed waves. The first confirmed that Trevor was safely down on the wreck; the second meant that it was now Caine’s turn to jump.
Caine clipped a waiting electric lead onto the end of the tether. He thumbed a stud on the lead’s handgrip. A short burst of high-voltage current coursed through the reactive-composite tether, converting its malleable pith into a rigid core. He looped his suit’s mooring lanyard about the now-stiff line, clipped the end of the lanyard to a ring on his own utility harness, and exhaled. Time to go.
He leaned forward, pushed his feet back against the interior hatch, aligned himself so as to be parallel to the tether. Space loomed large above his head. He bit his lip hard and kicked.
The airlock walls rushed past and were gone. In their place was blackness and slowly wheeling stars—which were all at once directly overhead yet also beneath him. All at once, both he and the universe were tumbling uncontrollably. He tried to focus on the one object with a constant relative bearing: the enemy wreck. However, he was approaching it too swiftly according to his inner ear, even though he was closing far too slowly according to his dosimeter. The radiation icon became red.
He inadvertently blinked. When he reopened his eyes, it now appeared that the wreck was rolling toward him. The sudden change in perception brought up a swirl of nausea-inducing vertigo, just as the wreck’s cockpit blister started coming around again. But still no sign of Trevor. Caine closed his eyes and bit down harder on his lip.
When he opened his eyes, he forced himself to see the wreck as stationary and himself as approaching—and discovered that he was more than halfway down the tether. And had still not initiated the one-hundred-eighty-degree tumble which would position him for a feet-first landing upon the wreck. Trevor was rising into sight again, making fast, angry circles with his hand, meaning turn, turn!
Caine kicked forward slightly, felt his body begin to rotate backward, watched as the wreck seemed to fall down, beneath his feet—and was distracted by a glimmer of light just above his field of vision. He craned his neck to get a look at the source of brightness.
Caine started. A titanic hemisphere of white, ochre, and pale blue striations wheeled, wobbly, above his head. Whereas the slow rotation of the starfield had been modestly disorienting, the drunken oscillations of Barnard’s Star II were stupefying. The gas giant brushed the stars aside, half-filled his visor, seemed ready to swallow the module he’d jumped from like a whale’s maw poised to swallow a lone krill. The mammoth planet’s atmospheric turbulence sent whorls and spirals streaming into each other in slow motion, murky fractals eternally evolving. Silvery flickers backlit the clouds, telltale signs of lightning storms more extensive than the entirety of the Eurasian landmass. Caine swallowed, fought through a rush of vertigo so powerful that he felt he might spin down into a single, contracting point and vanish—
“Caine! Grab the tether! NOW!”
Caine started violently as Trevor’s voice blasted out of his radio receiver. He looked down past his feet. Only six meters below, the aft end of the wreck’s prow was rolling past. He choked down a rush of bitter vomit, grabbed at the tether, lost his grip, grabbed again, caught it only a palm’s width from the end. At this close range, the wreck’s roll rate seemed to have increased, with Trevor rotating closer at a fearsome speed—
—But I don’t have time to fear, or even think. I have to act.
Time slowed and the gargantuan emptiness of the universe seemed to shrink back—enough so that Caine could assess how much sway his frantic motions had imparted to the tether, could watch Trevor rotate past underneath him, and could gauge the best moment to “jump down” to the wreck. He felt more than calculated that moment and pushed off the end of the tether, bending and relaxing his knees, eyes riveted down between his feet.
Four meters, two. He kept his focus on the closest part of the wreck, scanned peripherally. There was a small angular protuberance rotating past, just to the right of him.