Puncher's Chance by James Grayson & Kathy Ferguson
Sometimes playing it safe is not an option.... 
* * * *

* * * *
Illustrated by William R. Warren, Jr. 
* * * *
David gazed out the station window, searching for a glint of sunlight off the Low-Earth-Orbit MagBeam platform. It was impossible to spot from this distance, especially against the mottled blue and white backdrop of the Earth, but he searched nonetheless. He made out the shape of North America through murky clouds. Three years before, on a day much like this, his father had perished down there, an infinitesimal speck of humanity buried under a mountain of volcanic ash. He turned to see Gin Fukazawa's face appear on his desk monitor. He grinned at the sight of the Space Transit System's LEO supervisor, twenty years his junior, and shuffled through the piles of tools on his desk for the connection switch.
"Hey, Gin, couldn't wait four more hours to see me?"
"You wish. Looks like three weeks before our paths cross again."
David sighed. "Let me guess. Your boss wants some Martian ice to cool wine at a political function?"
"We all have to please our masters, which is why today you'll be pleasing me by conducting an inspection tour of the High-Earth-Orbit MagBeam platform with a top official from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy." She wagged a finger at him. "And you'll be on your best behavior."
David groaned. "Another VIP shuffling through? Do I kiss his shoes first, or curtsy? I never remember."
"I'm serious, David."
"So am I. How often do I get real space work these days? I signed up as an engineer, not a desk jockey or nursemaid. At least give me something worth doing while I'm up here."
"Well, I'm very sorry your work's not all fun and games, David, but this is important. This woman wants to tank the appropriation budget for the new colonization shuttles and shut down the Mars colony. Why else the surprise visit? She appeared out of nowhere, stuck her nose into every nook and cranny, requisitioned our manifests and incident reports. She's looking for trouble--and the way she's looking, she'll find it."
Gin's serious brown eyes glowered at him from the monitor. She never looked better than when she scolded him. The prospect of weeks away from her made him frown. Soon enough, her promotion to Mars Colony Coordinator would take her from him permanently. David didn't want to think about spending his retirement on Earth without her.
"You run a tight ship, Gin. I'd sail anywhere with you."
Gin frowned. "If today is any indication, we're all about to drown."
"What's up?"
"The incoming transport is having computer trouble, so we're bumping the McAuliffe from the maintenance schedule." Gin raised a hand to stop his protest. "It's not like the old boat doesn't get regular maintenance. You spend half your time on platform tinkering with it."
"Gin, this is the third time! What's the point of having an emergency rescue ship and then letting her rot? Tinkering's one thing, but she needs proper maintenance. Surely the transport can wait a day while the McAuliffe gets a thorough overhaul?"
"No can do. I need to turn it around pronto. Your VIP should just squeeze in before all hell breaks loose. There's been a little accident on Mars."
"The control room crew doesn't need me there to run the magbeam. Or for much else, either. What's the matter on Mars, anyway?"
"A check valve malfunctioned, and some hydroponic fungicide siphoned into the water supply. A couple of the colonists bathed in it."
"With what effects?"
"Just irritation and rashes so far, but we're concerned about long-term health consequences if they're left untreated. We're shipping antidote immediately. The sooner they get treatment, the less likelihood they'll suffer any permanent damage. If we wait a day now, it'll cost us a week in arrival time."
"Thank you, Gin. I think I remember reading something similar in Orbital Mechanics for Dummies. All right, the McAuliffe can get her makeover another time. God forbid I should prevent the colonists getting their aspirin."
Gin's shoulders slumped. "Sorry you won't make it to LEO today. I had a bottle of wine cooling." She sighed. "Run along now; your VIP will arrive in about two hours." She cut the connection.
David left his office and tramped along looping metal corridors. Outside, the Earth and stars wheeled dizzyingly as the station's gravity centrifuge revolved slowly. David ignored them. His inspection produced its usual array of irritations, bugs, and blemishes, but nothing dangerous. The whole station needed an overhaul, but with space-hating bureaucrats like Gin's woman from OSTP sniffing everywhere, no one dared put their head above the parapet to request a budget increase, leaving David to waste his few precious days in space on janitor's work. His father would laugh; he'd left the old man's wrecking yard behind for the thrill of space exploration.
He caught sight of a young woman poking inside a wall panel with a voltage probe.
"Ellen! Anything going on I should know about?"
Ellen Francis smiled at her supervisor. Almost impossibly beautiful, but seemingly unaware of it, the redheaded engineer left lovestruck astronauts in her wake wherever she went. David smiled paternally.
"Hi, David. No, just glitches. Nothing worth bothering Maintenance about."
"Glitches?"
Ellen proffered him her portable toolkit. "The flammable gas sensor flatlines over point four percent concentration. It's not really a problem: point four percent's well past the alarm concentration."
David poked around inside a maze of wires. "Had the same problem with these things in F-15 engines in Saudi a thousand years ago," he said. "Turned out to be sand contamination of the pellistor sensors. Chances are something's got in and decatalyzed it." He kept probing around, occasionally holding out a hand for a new tool.
"So how did Timmy Weaver get along last night? It was his title fight, wasn't it?"
David nodded. "Yeah. Wyoming Junior Light-Flyweight Championship. I haven't checked in at the gym, but he ought to have walked it. Kid's got talent like you wouldn't believe."
"Better than you?"
"Way better. Big and strong was plenty in the Air Force championship, but Timmy's got such fast hands, and instincts to go with it. Pride of the gym, he is."
"All thanks to you," Ellen said, with an exaggerated flutter of her eyelashes.
David fixed her with a look. "That's very nearly insubordination, Ellen. No, I like helping those kids. I don't know teaching them to box does much good, but anything must be better than spending all day in an orphanage, right?"
Ellen said nothing. Her thoughts were clear enough, though: Aren't you an orphan of Yellowstone, too?
Delicately holding a pasta-spoonful of tangled wires aside, David extracted a tiny ceramic bulb. "Christ on his cross!"
"What?"
"Serial number 223-BR2Z. No wonder it's flaky; these sensors were discontinued in 2011. Ten bucks they cost, but the government still gives us equipment nearly fifteen years out of date."
Ellen yawned and massaged the back of her neck.
"You're on the mission crew for this medicine run to Mars, aren't you?" David said.
She nodded.
"Well, go get some sleep, for God's sake. I'll finish the maintenance checks."
"It's all right, really--"
He cut her off. "Don't make me order you, Ellen. It makes me twitch. Go catch some Zs."
She scurried off. David shook his head. More work he'd bought himself. Still, at least it wasn't paperwork, and at least the outgoing shuttle would have someone competent and wakeful on board during acceleration. He pushed the toolkit into his pocket and continued his inspection, wondering how much of his time this VIP would demand.
* * * *
David tried to mask his exasperation. He'd shown Gin's bureaucrat around the platform and been as polite as possible. In return, she'd spoken barely two words, spending their meeting alternately nodding and snorting at his explanations of how things worked, and taking notes on a handheld computer. Not even the magnificent spacescape from David's office window served to soften her, since she refused to look at anything except her handheld display. After five hours, David could feel a headache building.
Her name was Dr. Victoria Porter. A severe bun of dark hair gave her an older, all-business air, but only the tiniest of lines showed at the corners of her large, dark eyes and pouty mouth, and David guessed she might be in her mid-forties. High cheekbones and an aristocratic nose echoed a tall, willowy figure. With different hair, David could even have thought her attractive--until she'd spoken. Now he only thought her a nuisance. A malignant nuisance. He'd rather have been helping repair the Mars shuttle, not stuck in an office with a bureaucrat firing pedantic questions at him.
"Dr. Porter, occasional minor discrepancies in bookkeeping are unavoidable in any large organization. I can't tell you why July's LEO manifest differs from what was loaded onto the Mars pod, but most likely a breakage occurred and the schedule didn't allow time for a replacement. It's not economically viable to replace non-vital equipment on an emergency basis."
A message alert flashed on David's monitor. Porter made no move to leave, but continued scowling at her handheld screen.
David keyed the message. Gin's face appeared, worry lines creasing her brow. "Gin, good to hear from you. I'm with Dr. Porter. What can I do for you?"
Her expression tightened. "David, the Mars shuttle has an intermittent short in its navigation system. The technicians are swapping out parts to nail down the faulty component."
David whistled. "A sequential fault check could take days. No other indication of the origin?"
Gin shook her head.
David understood her frustration. A few days' delay launching would mean arriving almost two weeks late. "Looks like someone else will have to take the colonists their aspirin. What's your plan?"
"We've no choice. The only other suitable shuttle is twenty days away. We're sending the McAuliffe."
"Wait a minute. Six hours ago you bumped the McAuliffe from the maintenance roster, and now you want to send her on an emergency mission? What's wrong with this picture?"
"Come on, David, this isn't an emergency, but we can't afford several days' delay. The McAuliffe's in shape, isn't she?"
David snorted. "No thanks to Maintenance. Who's going to fly her?"
"We're transferring the command crew from the Mars shuttle, along with a replacement lander pilot. Karl Masters'll be flying the front chair."
"Masters?" David exclaimed. "Give me a break. Just because he's good in transit shuttles doesn't mean he can fly an old tub like the McAuliffe. At least send someone qualified."
Gin's brow creased further. "I've contacted Earth. Ben's down with the flu, and Seamus just left on vacation. As soon as they locate him, they'll send him up to take the McAuliffe out. I'd like you to get her ready to fly."
"Seamus O'Brien? A man who once quit a vacation on Easter Island because it was too crowded? If he's vacationing within a thousand miles of a launch site, it'll be the first time. Why not let me take the McAuliffe over to Mars? I'm the best qualified, and I can have her space-worthy inside two hours."
"David, is that sensible? How many flight hours have you logged since your last assessment?"
"I designed half the ship, Gin. Do you think I've forgotten how to fly her? Come on, it's a milk run. The planetary alignment couldn't be better, so every minute waiting for Seamus is about three lost at Mars." David glanced up at Dr. Porter, and leaned close to his monitor. "Let me do some real work for once. May be my last chance."
Gin threw up her hands. "All right, you've convinced me. I'll change the crew roster, but you be careful."
"I'm sorry, Gin, okay? But you did say it was important, right?"
She nodded. "Go on, get to work. Here's the Mars incident report. I'll see you on the return run." She gave a weary smile and vanished, replaced on-screen by a document.
David scanned it. "Dr. Porter, I must apologize, but a situation has arisen requiring my attention. We can continue at a later date, or you can address the remainder of your questions to one of my colleagues. If you wish to leave immediately, we can beam your shuttle down to the LEO Platform before accelerating the McAuliffe. Otherwise, you'll have a four hour delay before the beam is available again."
She set down her computer. "Mr. Longrie, has the White House been informed of this 'little problem' on Mars?"
"Dr. Porter, my understanding is that someone in the colony has spilled a drink, and they need us to deliver them some paper towels, nothing more."
"I'm sure the director could give me a more detailed explanation. It may have some bearing on my overall evaluation of the program."
David sighed. "There's been a minor chemical leak; just the kind of incident you could encounter in any lab. Some fungicide siphoned into the water supply, and a few people bathed in it. A couple of the scientists have a rash, and the colony medical center doesn't have the medication it needs, so we're shipping some over. It's just a routine supply mission with a tight time-limit, so if you'll excuse me--"
David keyed the number for the shuttle crew station. Ellen Francis' Botticelli countenance appeared on-screen. "Ellen, you've heard the news?"
She smiled. "I've always liked riding in vintage cars. I didn't realize we were getting a vintage driver as well."
"Thanks a lot. You'll be hearing about that one in your APR. Look, we launch in three hours, so can you get over to the McAuliffe and start packing her up? The cargo came with the maintenance crew, along with some lander pilot. You can rope him in to help. I've got to go through the preflight checklist, so I'll see you at the loading bay. Okay?"
Ellen nodded. "Sure. I didn't plan on spending this run in a flying toolbox; I'd better be getting time-and-a-half. You must be mad as a snake."
David glanced aside as Porter looked pointedly at her wristwatch. "Yeah, of course. I've gotta go; see you in a few." He cut the connection. He wanted to call the gym to check on Timmy's fight, and he knew he should apologize to Anna for missing the birth of his first grandchild, but he couldn't spare the time.
* * * *
When David arrived at the docking bay an hour later, his hackles rose. Gin hadn't mentioned the name of the lander pilot. Threading between jumbled piles of net bags holding everything from circuit boards to dehydrated fruit juice, and crates of medical supplies, he made his way to the McAuliffe's loading bay doors. Ellen, her arms full of bags, frowned up at another man dressed in a flight suit with US Navy pilot's wings on the collar. A shock of blond hair topped over six feet of muscle and sinew, and a pungent cologne pricked David's nostrils.
Ellen set down her bags. "David Longrie, this is Captain Xavier Beaume--"
"Yes, thanks, Ellen. The captain and I have already met." Neither man extended a hand. David swept an arm around the chaotic bay. "What is this?"
"We're loading the supplies," Beaume replied.
"Loading? It looks like my room in college. Why aren't you using the pre-packed pallets?"
"They don't fit on this archaic rust bucket," Beaume said. "Worthless piece of trash should have been scrapped years ago. Which old geezer are they sending up to fly it?"
David's hands curled before he restrained himself. One shot was all it would take, he was sure. Beaume was built like a wrestler, but David would have bet a month's wages he was hiding the glass jaw to end all glass jaws. What had Gin ever seen in him?
"This ship might be old, Captain, but if you treat her with respect, you'll find she's more than capable of doing her job. And if you look, you'll find her cargo bay stacked to the roof with empty pallets made to fit her. I suggest you get a power loader and bring some of them out, because those bags'll shift so much during acceleration we could end up on Jupiter."
Beaume's color rose, but he cut off a retort when Ellen slapped his arm.
"Sorry, David. I should've thought. Come on, Beaume, let's get to it."
As his two crew members trudged off, David passed a despairing eye over the chaotic loading bay. Why couldn't they have assigned me someone useful? Beaume, a former test pilot and US Navy Fighter Weapons School trophy winner, seemed to think his star quality extended to areas he knew nothing about. The access door hissed open, and Dr. Porter stalked in, suitcase in hand. The sooner she was out of his hair, the better, too.
"Dr. Porter, your shuttle is waiting in Bay 7. You can depart any time."
Her face set hard. "I won't be leaving on that shuttle, Mr. Longrie, I'll be leaving on this one. I'm coming along as an observer."
"You're what? "
"You heard me, Mr. Longrie."
David looked at the sprawling pile of supplies, then at Porter's elegant business suit. "Forgive my asking, but are you space-qualified?"
A genuine smile almost curved her lips. "My office reports directly to the president, and she has personally assigned me to this mission."
"The McAuliffe isn't a pleasure barge, Dr. Porter. She's not got faux-gravity or mod-cons, and it's sixty days to Mars and back. It isn't like taking the Atlantic tunnel."
"I am aware of that. If you wish to protest, feel free to contact Ms. Fukazawa."
David marched to the nearest communications point.
Gin answered quickly. "I know, David, I know. Instructions just came in from way over my head; there's nothing I can do."
"Does she think the McAuliffe's equipped to haul a passenger to Mars and back? Sixty days with her is not what I need in my life right now."
"Then this should cheer you up--Seamus is at the London spaceport. We can get him back in eight hours. He says he'll fly the mission if you want."
David looked at Porter poking around among the supplies, while Ellen and Beaume struggled to repack them. "Do you really want to leave Seamus alone with Porter for two months? If she wants to can the program already, I'm not sure Seamus 'Bungee Jump From An Airplane' O'Brien is the best person to bunk her with. Tell him to enjoy his vacation."
"You're sure?"
David nodded reluctantly.
Gin frowned. "Okay, I'll tell him. Did you call Mike yet?"
"Next on the list. Thanks for keeping quiet about the crew assignment, by the way."
Gin rubbed her eyes. "I'm sorry, David, it slipped my mind. If it makes you feel better, Xavier's a jerk when I see him, too. Just ignore him."
"I'll have to. Or commit the first murder in space."
She didn't smile. "Save the jokes, David. Call Mike, then get back to loading. There's a launch schedule to keep." The screen washed white.
David searched his wallet for the call code of the Orphans of Yellowstone Gym, then waited several minutes before Mike Parry's lived-in face filled the screen, blocking out the punching bags and sparring ring behind him.
"Dave," said the big, black man, "you still in orbit?"
David nodded. "Yeah, something's come up. I've got to fly a rush mission to Mars, so I'm going to be off the map for a couple of months. I'm sorry to spring this on you, but it just fell on me this afternoon."
Parry grimaced. "Well, I can reschedule the other volunteers to fill the training roster, but the kids are gonna be awful sorry. Especially Timmy, after last night."
"I've been up to my ass in alligators ever since I fell out of bed this morning. What happened?"
"Kid just wasn't there. Started badly and never came back--lost his confidence. Got knocked down twice in the first round, and I stopped it in the second. Leaned into a right hand he'd normally slip blindfolded, and got cut under the eye. You know the kiddies' rules when there's blood on the canvas."
"Damn! Timmy should have taken that kid to the cleaners. What did you tell him at the end of the first round?"
"Not to go toe-to-toe with the other kid, keep to the center of the ring and not get caught on the inside."
David shook his head. "Timmy's not a technical fighter; he's heart and instinct."
"What else would I have told him?"
"Go forward, bet it all on one lucky shot. Take the puncher's chance. It's what I would've done."
"He'd have got his head knocked off!"
David shrugged. "Maybe. Or maybe he'd have won. Bet your life he'd have preferred going down swinging, though. How is he?"
"Not too hot. Feels like he let you down. I tried to talk him up, but he went back to the shelter pretty unhappy."
"Christ, I should've been in the corner with him. He's got all the talent in the world, but he needs help focusing. Tell him--" David looked aside as Ellen gave him a piercing whistle from the cargo hatch. "Look, just tell him he didn't let anyone down, and I'll bring him back a Martian rock, okay?"
Parry nodded, and Ellen whistled again.
"Damn. Look, Mike, I've gotta go. I'll see you when I get back."
"Good luck, man."
David killed the connection and jogged across the bay to Ellen. Concerns about the mission crowded out the vague sense he was forgetting something.
* * * *
The clock counted down toward the end of their acceleration phase. The mission clock ticked quietly alongside it, depressing red figures announcing a twenty-six day wait until their arrival in Mars orbit. David, restless after nearly four hours in his seat, checked the voltage and current gauges attesting to the condition of the acceleration magnets on the McAuliffe's underside. They all registered normal, and the propellant and battery levels glowed green. With the ship's attitude controlled by the navigation computer, David felt like a fifth wheel, but he kept his hand hovering near the manual override, just in case.
His earpiece crackled. "HEO to McAuliffe, prep for beam shutdown in five minutes, over."
David thumbed the transmit key. "Copy that, HEO. How're we looking?"
"We show you at thirty-eight point four clicks per tick, McAuliffe, trajectory five by five. Mars concurs. Range passing two hundred and seventy six thousand kilometers downrange. Right on the money, over."
David touched the data onto the navigation computer screen. "Copy that, HEO. Remind us to duck when the Moon comes along, over."
Laughter rang in his ear. "Will do, McAuliffe. Prep for beam shutdown in three minutes twenty. HEO out."
In a little over three minutes, the magbeam--a three-hundred-thousand-kilometer-long bolt of lightning connecting them to the distant HEO station--would shut down, ending their four hours of acceleration. The cloud of argon gas ionized by the magbeam glowed invisibly in their wake, the thrust it imparted on the McAuliffe's acceleration magnets pushing David down into his seat with almost a fifth his normal weight. It would be the last time he felt weight for a long while. The Earth's heartbreakingly beautiful blue and white disk receded in the viewer; Mars still lay invisibly distant somewhere ahead and to the right.
Beaume grimaced in the copilot's seat, his muscular frame too bulky for the cramped cockpit. He was wearing cologne, and David wondered which of the women it was meant to impress. Even Beaume must have realized Porter was way out of his league, and David smiled as he wondered how long he would take to discover that the preternaturally beautiful Ellen was also gay. He'd warned a few optimistic, young astronauts off her in the past, but looked forward to Beaume finding out the hard way.
David would have preferred to see Ellen in the cockpit, but Beaume needed to get acquainted with the controls. Interplanetary flight protocols just weren't part of the training for lander pilots, however talented. Besides, Ellen was still orienting their unwanted "observer" to the vagaries of life on the McAuliffe. So far, Dr. Porter hadn't left the lav for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch, and they weren't even at zero gee yet. If she didn't stop heaving soon, he'd order her drugged up until she adjusted. He was tempted to order it anyway, just to keep her out of his way. He ran a hand through his close-cropped grey hair and tried to relax the muscles in his neck and shoulders. His head throbbed.
"Past your bedtime, gramps?" Beaume said.
David shot him a savage look. "Do you intend to do any work on this flight, or are you just gonna park your ass in front of the vidscreen all day like you do on those landers?"
Beaume grinned and stretched expansively, his shoulders muscles rippling.
David ducked aside. "And put your damn restraint belt on. I don't need you bouncing around the cockpit when they turn the beam off."
"Ooh, sorry," Beaume said, not moving. "This is so much more dangerous than flying an F-18. Just imagine what could happen if I got a jolt at a whole point-two gees. It could crush my eyeballs to jelly and snap my spine."
No, asshole, but I could. "Just put the damn belt on, or it goes in your performance report as a safety violation."
The radio burst into life. "HEO to McAuliffe, come in, over."
David touched his earpiece. "We read you, HEO, over."
"HEO to McAuliffe, prep for beam shutdown in one minute, over."
"Copy that, HEO. Initiating shutdown procedure, over." David thumbed the 1-MC control to transmit across the whole ship. "Longrie to all crew. Brace for transfer to zero gee in forty-five seconds." He slotted his headset into its receiver.
The overhead speaker crackled. "HEO to McAuliffe. Shutdown proceeding in ten, nine, eight--"
David took hold of the jolt bar above the instrument panel and looked levelly at Beaume. He held out until six, then reached for his restraint belt and slotted it deftly home over his chest. On zero, a slight jolt forward signaled the shutdown of the McAuliffe's thrust. David flicked controls to deactivate the acceleration magnets and propellant feed, set the batteries to begin recharging from the solar panels, then unbuckled his restraint belt.
"Gin said something about you being too cautious," Beaume said. "Maybe that's why she asked me onto the crew: girl needs a bit of excitement in her life again."
David stopped, one hand clenched white into the back of his seat. Restraining himself, he reached for the communications panel. "Longrie to all crew. Magbeam shutdown complete and propulsion secured. Out."
David shot along the narrow aisle toward the galley area, anger making him push off harder than he intended. He wanted an aspirin and a bulb of coffee. By now he should have been lying next to Gin in her quarters on the LEO platform. Maybe Beaume was right. Maybe he was an old geezer flying an outdated bucket of bolts on a pointless, cover-your-ass mission. Thirty years as an astronautical engineer, and here he was, reduced to flying suitcases of itch ointment to Mars with Gin's jerk of an ex-boyfriend. He could have been mopping the decks on the platform for all the good he was doing.
He swung into what served as the McAuliffe's kitchen and common area, hooked a foot into a toehold, and popped the lid on the first-aid kit. A series of racks held an assortment of medicines in single-use packets, all filled to the top--except the aspirin rack, conspicuously empty. Cursing, he slammed the lid closed.
"That didn't sound good." Behind him, Ellen guided Porter into the cramped space. The two women glided to the table, and Ellen propelled Porter into a seat. The Assistant Director of Space and Aeronautics at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy looked green.
David rolled his head around to loosen the tension in his neck. "Aspirin supply got left behind. Shipful of emergency medication, and I can't get a damned aspirin."
"Just hook your foot under the bar down there." With her charge anchored at the table, Ellen glided smoothly from the room. She returned a minute later and handed David two aspirin. "I always carry my own, just in case."
David smiled wryly. "Remind me to give you a raise when we get back. Do me a favor and go make sure Beaume doesn't accidentally fire off the thrusters or jettison our water supply, will you?"
Ellen gave him a grin and a mock salute. "Yes, sir! And did you remember to tell Anna you'd miss the big day?"
David released a string of profanity. He'd promised his daughter he wouldn't let space prevent him from attending the most important moment in her life this time. So much for promises.
Ellen arched an eyebrow at him. "I'll enter that in the logbook as a 'No.'"
As she floated away toward the cockpit, David rummaged in a supply cabinet for a bulb of coffee. Sleep would have been better than caffeine, but Beaume's taunt rang like a bell in his head, precluding any chance of rest. He glanced at Porter.
The good doctor hunkered over the table, her knuckles white. The dark, rich chocolate of her hair accentuated the paleness of her skin. Not even her peach lip-gloss could mask a bloodless face. She stared vacantly at the wall, her pupils bare pinpricks.
"Can I get you some coffee, doctor?"
She shook her head without looking up. David tossed his bulb into the galley's microwave, twisted the dial, and muttered in frustration when nothing happened. He was damned if he was going to spend twenty-six days on unheated STS reconstituted food, so he snatched up a screwdriver.
Porter finally moved her eyes, watching him as he probed around the back of the microwave. "If Beaume isn't qualified, should you be letting him fly the ship?"
David left the screwdriver hanging in midair and glided across the galley. "I'm not. We're on an inertial trajectory; just coasting. We can't even change our course without a magbeam powering us. Nothing much to do now but monitor communications and life support and watch the batteries recharge."
He returned with a handful of tools. After a few moments poking inside the microwave, he replaced the back, reconnected the power, and smiled as it burst into life. "I take it you haven't spent much time in zero gee?"
"It doesn't take a space jockey to decide whether a system is running safely and efficiently, or whether it represents the best use of taxpayers' money. And I do have a postgraduate degree in physics."
The microwave pinged, and David extracted his coffee. "If the politicians were worried about safety and efficiency, we wouldn't be sitting in a geriatric ship headed out to Mars at twelve hours' notice. We'd have a modern, properly maintained shuttle with a dedicated crew on permanent standby for emergencies."
She took her eyes off the wall and met his, avoiding the galley's tiny porthole. "Another fancy toy needing tens of millions of dollars to maintain, just so a handful of 'special' people can play at being pioneers."
"The Mars colony is run for the benefit of everyone, not just the people in the space program."
"What nonsense. What would you say if there were a catastrophic event like the '21 Yellowstone eruption, and the government was too busy indulging your pipe-dreams to build safe shelters on Earth? 'Sorry you died, folks, but we just had to see whether there was life on Mars?'"
What would I say? How about 'Sorry I abandoned you, Dad?' Maybe space wasn't worth it. David threw the aspirin down his throat with a swallow of STS coffee substitute. "My shift's over. If you're too sick to go to the exercise suite today, you can skip it, but you'll need to be in there by tomorrow at the latest. I'm going to get some sleep."
* * * *
David swore as the edge of the circuit board sliced his index finger. He scrounged a rag from his back pocket and applied pressure to the cut. The first-aid kit probably wouldn't have any bandages. Like every ship, the McAuliffe boasted a thousand different subsystems. Half of them he'd upgraded himself during his years of tinkering, but the rest were as reliable as politicians in election year. He'd spent almost every waking hour in the fortnight since launch fixing niggles and glitches.
Ellen glided up and offered him a beverage bulb. "How goes the repair?"
He took a swig and gave her a black look. "What the hell is this?"
"Sorry, boss, it's the only caffeine we have left. It's tea with cream, just the way you like your coffee."
"I take my coffee with cream and sugar."
"Not on this boat. And you'll be taking it black tomorrow."
David sighed. No coffee, no cream, no sugar, but enough chicken soup to feed an army. Heaven only knew what else had been left behind between Beaume's junk sale and the scramble to make room for the exalted Dr. Porter. At least she had the good grace to stay out of his way. He spotted Beaume swimming along the corridor toward them. If only we could have left him behind instead of the coffee. His shoulders tensed as the pilot drew closer. He wasn't sure he could make it another eleven days without slugging the guy. Once Beaume realized David's authority over him didn't extend beyond the end of the mission, he'd gone from being merely insubordinate to openly offensive.
"Ship still falling apart faster than you can put it back together, Longrie?" Beaume didn't quite stop in time to avoid bumping against Ellen.
She slid away. "Anything else I can get for you, boss?" she offered. "Need any parts from stores?"
"There aren't enough parts in the whole system to fix what's wrong with this piece of junk," Beaume said. "Gin's crazy thinking it'll get us to Mars. I sure ain't taking it coming back."
David glowered at the pilot. "You want to jump ship early, the airlock's just behind you. Anyway, aren't you supposed to be on watch in the cockpit?"
"Sure, but I came to tell you Gin's on the horn."
"You could have used the intercom."
Beaume raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. "You mean it's working again?"
Ellen gave him a disgusted look. "Give it a rest, you idiot. You broke it in the first place, trying to wire in your stupid music system."
David gave the petite engineer a glance, wondering if Beaume had finally made his inevitable pass at her.
The pilot snorted. "Don't talk dumb. I've done it a thousand times before, and it's never caused trouble."
David pushed himself upright. "This isn't one of your new commercial landers. You can't jump into the wiring without checking the layout first. This ship needs care and experience, not some cowboy fumbling around where he's not qualified to go."
Beaume stiffened. "Hey, who the--"
David cut him off. "Just keep your damn fingers out of systems you don't understand, all right? I've got enough to do without cleaning up your messes."
He finished tidying up the circuitry and pulled himself in the direction of the cockpit. Beaume eased a shoulder against the companionway wall, putting himself in David's path. With no handhold to grab, David cannoned into him and spun away from the pilot's greater bulk, rolling over and bouncing painfully into the wall. Beaume laughed.
David's patience snapped. He checked his spin with an outstretched hand, braced his foot against the wall, and thrust himself towards Beaume, right fist first. With two hundred pounds and an amateur heavyweight's technique behind it, the uppercut sank in under Beaume's ribs and doubled him up. David took a wild left hook easily on his guard, and responded with a sharp double jab to the bridge of the nose. Beaume's head went back, setting him up beautifully for the crunching right cross that followed the jab as night followed day.
It didn't land. Ellen seized his arm on the backswing and, her foot anchored under a trip bar, pulled him around to face her. "Enough, both of you! David, stop acting like a kid and go get Gin's message!"
Beaume recovered his balance, coughing. "Yeah, get into your stairlift and go see what your night-nurse wants."
David tried to lunge for him, but Ellen kept him pinned back. "Shut your face before it gets damaged, Beaume," she snapped. "I'm sick of the pair of you."
David pushed off for the cockpit. A knot of wiring lay draped across the cockpit deck, vanishing into the back of a homemade stereo box. David yanked the wires unceremoniously loose, booted the stereo into the companionway, and set about reconnecting the intercom. The few minutes' work gave him time to compose himself before he played the message from Earth. Gin looked years older. Dark half-circles discolored the skin under her eyes, her mouth was pinched, and her hair hung slack and dull.
"Bad news, David. We have new cases appearing by the hour, and much more serious than before. Apparently some of the contaminated water was used to brew coffee. When it's ingested, it migrates slowly to the nervous system and eventually the liver and kidneys, where it has devastating effects. Two of the early cases are comatose, and the infirmary's medical supplies are running low. They can keep people stable, but they need the antidote to flush the toxin out of the tissues. We're sending more antidote on another shuttle, but she won't arrive until two months after you. Once you dock at the Mars orbital platform, get your supplies to the surface as quickly as possible, to tide them over until the relief shuttle arrives. You'll need Xavier to fly the station lander down. Both colony pilots are grounded."
Surprised as much by Gin's appearance as her news, David took a moment before sending a reply. "Message received, Gin. Don't worry--we'll get the supplies there for everyone who needs them."
David swiveled up from the pilot's chair and came face to face with Dr. Porter, drifting silently in the cockpit doorway.
"Still think it's just a milk run?" she asked.
* * * *
David tossed his soup bulb into the galley disposal and drifted toward the door. It was his turn on the exercise wheel, and he welcomed the diversion. After twenty-five days, they were all on a short fuse. Porter remained sullen and uncommunicative, Beaume obnoxious and cruising for another fight, and even Ellen's determinedly cheerful humming grated on David's nerves.
"David?" Ellen's voice crackled over the intercom.
"Yes?" he barked. What's broken now?
"You have an incoming message."
He pushed off and cruised forward to the cockpit. Ellen started to unbuckle from the pilot's seat, but David waved her down. She snatched her handheld as it drifted away. He could make out enough of the screen to recognize a graphic novel. What happened to the days when people read real books written with real sentences and paragraphs, requiring the reader bring some imagination? Now it's all picture books with captions.
David switched on Gin's recorded message. If anything, she looked worse than a few days earlier, when she'd reported three more colonists slipping into critical condition--bringing the total sick to thirty--and informing him the infirmary's medical supplies were almost exhausted. But this time a wan smile played across her lips. "Congratulations, David! You're a grandfather! Jodie Melissa Smith was born at 1:42 this morning, weighing eight pounds three ounces. Mother and baby are both doing great. I sent a balloon bouquet in your name. Take care. I miss you."
Ellen whooped and punched his arm. "Congrats, old man! This calls for a celebration! And I know just how to do it. Follow me."
She led him back toward the galley, pounding on Beaume's door as she passed and disappearing inside the cabin where she bunked with Dr. Porter. She emerged a moment later with two Hershey's chocolate bars and Dr. Porter. Beaume, rubbing sleep from his eyes, drifted sullenly behind them.
They all crowded into the tiny galley, where Ellen announced the happy event. She passed out bulbs of juice, and proposed a toast.
"To Jodie on her birthday. May she have a long and happy life, and follow in her grandfather's footsteps." Grinning, she rapped her bulb against David's and the others followed suit. Even Beaume managed to raise him a convincing smile. After taking a sip, Ellen unwrapped the chocolate and distributed halves around the group.
"Chocolate," breathed Porter, popping a piece in her mouth. She closed her eyes and a moan issued from her lips. David tucked his own morsel of chocolate into his pocket and watched in amusement while Porter savored the treat. Finally swallowing, she opened her eyes to see them all gaping at her. Flame red shot up her face.
Ellen coughed. "Well, I'd better get back to the cockpit. Still my watch."
"Don't forget the battery level check's due this shift," David said. "Earth'll want to know how much we've got in the tank."
Ellen nodded and drifted out of the galley.
Beaume followed hot on her heels. "Hey, I'm claiming the reader."
Their voices faded as they bickered their way through the length of the ship. David shook his head. Good thing they were only twenty-four hours from the Mars platform, or they might have their space murder yet.
Porter cleared her throat. "If they're any indication, we won't arrive a moment too soon. Now that I've made this trip, I can't understand why anyone would put up with it."
David finished his juice. "It isn't all like this. Sure, the travel can be a bit uncomfortable, but I warned you the McAuliffe's not a pleasure barge. The vista on Mars will be worth it, though. It's like nothing you've ever seen before."
"The cost for us to admire that vista is astronomical. How can you defend that when so much remains to be done on Earth?"
David sighed. "It's not just about admiring the vista on an alien world. Earth's a dangerous place: war, famine, disease, global warming, asteroid strike, supervolcanoes like Yellowstone. We're just tenants on planet Earth, and the landlord could evict us any time he likes. The rent's been rising for decades, and it's time we took the hint."
Porter raised an eyebrow. "Is there a point to this poetic aside?"
David tossed his juice bulb into the disposal. "Like you said, the '21 eruption was a wake-up call. Self-sustaining colonies would ensure the human race could survive another plague like AIDS or the '09 flu pandemic, or the second coming of the Yellowstone supervolcano when it happens."
"And how many lives will be saved in your colonies? A few hundred? What about the billions on Earth who'd be better prepared for a disaster if we spent the resources there?"
"I don't buy that. Our budget wouldn't save billions of people on Earth. Magbeam's cut costs enormously. Sure, the colonies aren't ready yet, but if we put the effort in, we avoid having all our eggs in one basket if the worst happens. That's worth a little risk and discomfort."
Porter laughed. "Maybe you space cowboys want to risk your necks out here, but ordinary people don't give a damn whether we have colonies on Mars."
David waved his hand at the walls around them. "This ship's official name is just some six-figure project code, but years ago I rechristened her with a tiny red ribbon and a champagne miniature. She's named for a school teacher of mine, Christa McAuliffe. She wasn't an astronaut or an adventurer, just an ordinary teacher with a husband and two children, and an understanding of how space could open doors for a kid like me. She inspired me to quit my dad's wrecking yard and go to college, and later to leave a dead-end career in the Air Force and go into space. She was one of the seven people who died when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. She never saw space, so I brought her name with me. Ordinary people do care."
Porter opened her mouth and closed it again. For the first time, David saw her hostility melt, saw a soft, vulnerable woman emerge, felt his own pulse quicken.
Ellen's leaden voice spoke over the intercom. "David, we have another transmission from Earth. One of the Martian colonists has died."
David's heart sank, and Porter turned sharply away.
"We don't belong out here."
* * * *
David came convulsively awake, adrenaline bursting through him as the raucous blaring of the Master Alarm shattered the silence. The lights flickered, and the rotating amber of the alarm indicators turned the cabin into a chaos of shadow and light. David wrenched at his sleeping belt and lunged for the door. The ship lurched, and his head hammered into the bulkhead. Ears ringing, he hauled himself into the corridor. The ship stopped shaking, but the lights continued to wax and wane at half their usual intensity. As he dragged himself toward the cockpit, the other cabin burst open to reveal a half-dressed and disheveled Dr. Porter, naked terror in her eyes. David ignored her, pulling himself forward hand over hand. He wrenched the door open to find the cockpit empty, its darkness punctuated by a flickering aurora of emergency warning lights, flashing urgently in myriad colors.
"What's happening?" Porter screamed. Her eyes were wide and white, and her hands shook.
"Christ knows!" David yelled back. "Some kind of power failure. Any sign of Ellen or Beaume?"
She displayed enough self-control to shake her head, at least.
David wormed his way into the cockpit and plucked up an emergency headset. Its power lights remained dark. "Damn it! Communications are down. Follow me!" He shouldered Porter aside and thrust himself along the main companionway toward the engineering spaces. At the first connecting hatch, he looked back. Porter clung to the cockpit door, transfixed by the play of warning lights across the control panels.
"Porter! Move your ass, damn it!" he shouted.
Shocked out of her inaction, she followed, fumbling clumsily along in his wake.
As David thumped to a halt against the engineering hatch, a fire claxon burst out, fast and insistent, louder even than the Master Alarm. He seized a fire mask from the wall and pulled it over his head, then grabbed an extinguisher and opened the hatch.
Banks of hulking battery cells stood in rows, electrical relays and monitoring equipment sandwiched alongside. At the far end of the compartment, from between two batteries, fire poured out into the central walkway. Unconstrained by gravity, it dipped and whirled, spreading and splashing outward like a liquid, bright oranges fading to blue. And over the banshee screeching of the alarms a more primal sound issued: the scream of a human being in agony and terror.
David thrust himself forward, arrowing along the central walkway with the extinguisher held out. A quick burst of carbon dioxide dashed away the drifting droplets of flame, and he thudded home against the side of one of the batteries. He sucked in a deep breath and pushed off for the center of the fire, spraying the extinguisher indiscriminately before him. He hammered into something solid, and felt choking heat below him. A globule of liquid fire splashed onto his hand, and he roared in pain.
Another extinguisher opened up, bathing him in white clouds of CO2, and the heat subsided. David spotted Porter anchored a few yards from him, extinguisher in hand and a mask over her face.
Over the blaring of the alarms, he shouted to be heard. "Porter! The fire's out! Just inside the hatch there's an emergency venting control--a red handle. I can't see a damn thing in here."
She nodded and dragged herself away. David pulled himself down to the deck. Billowing clouds of gas masked everything, forcing him to search by touch, not knowing what he might find. The screaming had stopped. A sudden howl announced the activation of the emergency venting fans--thank God they've got a stand-alone power supply--and the clouds whirled away up to the extraction port in the ceiling. After a few moments, the room cleared enough for him to see again.
"Porter! Get over here! We've got people down!"
* * * *
David stared down at the bundle of sheeting held fast in a cargo net. Through the plastic, he could no longer see the charred flesh that used to be her rosy cheeks, the scorched and blackened teeth that had once been her vivacious smile, but they were in his mind nonetheless. He'd suffered ten minutes of dry retching before he'd been able to bag her up, telling himself the tears were caused by pain from the convulsions in his empty stomach. Ellen Francis had died on his watch--his watch. As the commander of the vessel and leader of the crew, the responsibility was inescapably his.
But Ellen had been more than just a colleague. She'd been friend, comrade, and confidant. She'd been the woman he wished his daughter could become, from whom she could hardly have been more different. Anna shunned him, blaming him for the divorce; Ellen always wrapped him in warmth. Bold, courageous, always smiling, she'd thrived in space. When the panel turned down her application to join the Martian colony permanently, she'd just lifted her chin and soldiered on, taking the rejection a thousand times better than he did.
David secured the cargo net and wiped his eyes. There was work to be done. He floated into the engineering space where Ellen had died, levered away an electrical panel, and lost himself in a labyrinth of burnt wires and molten fuses.
Porter touched him on the shoulder, and he turned to face her. "How's Beaume?"
She shook her head. "Not good. He's alive, but barely. He has a burn on his right hand where the electricity entered, and another on his right instep where it went to ground. If the current had crossed his heart, he'd have died immediately. I administered drugs for shock and started IV fluids. What happened?"
David gestured to the monitoring panel in front of him, illuminated by a spacesuit's spotlight. Rows of charge gauges registered zero. Even the warning lights below them were dark. "The ship's entire electrical reserve shorted through them. Shouldn't have been possible, but the safety interlocks isolating the batteries from one another weren't activated. I guess it was Beaume who forgot; the interlocks are automated on the modern shuttles he's used to."
"The charge must have gone through both of them," Porter said. "Beaume was lucky and Ellen wasn't. I hope she died before the fire reached her."
David's jaw tightened. She didn't. I heard her screaming. "These gauges are shot: I don't even know how much power's left in the system. There's been charge backstreaming throughout the ship: systems are shorted or fused everywhere I look. I've cut us down to minimum life support to conserve what we have."
"We can recharge the batteries from the solar panels, can't we?"
David squeezed his eyes shut. "There's a nominal seventy-two hour recharge time. I've already started the process, but we're not getting much power through, and we've only got sixteen hours until beam pickup."
"What's the bottom line?"
"It takes about seventy-five percent of the total battery capacity to run the magnets for a full four-hour deceleration. The best I can figure, they're at about five percent capacity. They've been recharging throughout the trip, using the excess energy from the solar panels, but we lost nearly everything in the accident. Even with life support at minimum, the panels are so damaged they're only providing a trickle. Even if we turned life support off and took to suits, the batteries couldn't gather enough power by the time we reached the beam pickup point. There just isn't time."
Realization dawned. "Oh no--"
David met her eyes. "We won't have enough power to decelerate. I'm sorry."
She slumped back, blinking away tears.
"Porter--Victoria, listen. We're not helpless. We've still got supplies, and the panels are providing enough power to run minimum life support pretty much indefinitely. They'll send someone out after us."
"A rescue at nearly forty kilometers a second?" A look of hope died, stillborn. "I'm not a complete fool, David. We're not going to make it."
"Don't think that way. They brought Apollo 13 back safely. We're not--" He stopped.
Porter blinked at him, then voiced his unspoken thought. "Free return trajectory?"
David nodded, amazed the thought hadn't occurred to him before. Ellen's dead, damn it. Get your mind back to the problem. "It could work, too. I'd need to know exactly how much we have in the batteries, and somehow get a transmission to the Mars station. But if there's enough juice left, we could run the magnets to slingshot us around Mars and back towards Earth. That's only a short interaction: we've gotta be able to get enough power together for it. By the time we get close to Earth, the batteries should have recharged enough to decelerate at HEO station. If we can get the orbit right." He snatched up a scratch pad and grease pencil and started jotting figures. "Ever done orbital calculations before?"
Porter shook her head. "I can do the mental arithmetic if you want, though. I won a state prize for it once."
David grinned and thrust the pad toward her. "All right, then. Check those numbers. Us engineers can't do big math without taking our boots off first." He grabbed the access cover for the battery control panel and scrawled on its surface.
Porter, more animated than he could remember seeing her, jotted rows of tiny figures along the borders of the pad, brushing her hair absently back from her eyes and muttering silently. David looked at her and thought of Gin, whose same intensity had won her the posting to the Mars colony. He slowed his own scribblings, then reached out and touched Porter's shoulder.
"Porter, stop. It's no good."
"No, I think it'd work! We'd only need a velocity change of one or two kilometers per second, and the trajectory's--"
He held up a hand. "I mean, what about the people on Mars? We're supposed to be thinking about them, not us. Without our medical supplies, most of them will die. We're on a rescue mission; we can't just run away."
Porter stiffened. "Wait a minute, Longrie! You can't just throw away a chance to save us because you think your heroics will somehow resurrect the colonization program. You're beating a dead horse. The president won't back the appropriations bill for colonist transports. In another year, Mars will be abandoned."
"Maybe. But it's still there now. And nearly a hundred people could die without our help."
"Well, that's tragic," Porter said, "but it was their own mistake that put them in danger. We're on a crippled ship with hardly any power. We'll be lucky to save ourselves, let alone a bunch of colonists. It's simple common sense. If the lifeboat springs a leak, you don't send it out in a storm. Let the relief shuttle rescue the colonists."
"The relief isn't due for two months. Without our supplies, the colonists will die long before it arrives. And what about Beaume? Do you think he'd survive a two-month trip to Earth? Are you ready to watch him die?"
"What the hell does it matter whether I want to save him? You said it yourself: there's no power to decelerate. What do you want to do--crash into the planet at forty kilometers a second and hope the medical supplies survive?"
"What if I could think of something--build something--to extract power from the magbeam?" David mused. "It's essentially electricity, after all. After we pick up the beam, we could recharge the batteries before switching the magnets on."
Porter chewed her lip. "But then you wouldn't have four hours' deceleration time. We'd overshoot."
David grabbed his grease pencil and scribbled furiously. "Not if we decelerated harder than normal. The platforms are tested at something like a hundred and twenty percent of normal operating levels."
"And if it isn't enough?"
"I didn't say it would be easy. But we won't have to strip off as much velocity as normal. We're not looking to rendezvous with the magbeam platform: without Beaume there's no one qualified to pilot their lander."
"So how the hell do we get to the surface--sprout wings and fly?"
"Back in the Stone Age, before magbeam, the McAuliffe was the first ship ever to make a successful landing and relaunch from Mars. The magbeam harness is just strapped on; it's got explosive bolts so it can be jettisoned for maintenance. If we cut it loose after we decelerate, she'll be reentry-capable again. Reentry orbit is faster than the beam platform's orbital velocity, so the deceleration should be a bit easier--"
"As easy as free return?"
"No, but if we can tell the Mars station to switch to a high-power beam after we've recharged our batteries, we can push ourselves into a reentry orbit. Then we use Mars' atmosphere to aerobrake and glide in."
"You're insane, Longrie. For God's sake, listen to yourself. You've got a granddaughter now; don't you want to see her? Because if you try this crazy plan, you never will."
"You'd rather run away?"
"Are you calling me a coward?"
"What would your superiors think if you took the safe route and let the colonists die? I'd have no choice but to report you vetoed an alternative."
Her brows drew down. "So now you're threatening me?"
"I'm just asking you to think about the effect this could have on your career. Think of all the headlines if we save all those people. Isn't that worth taking a chance for?"
"In other words, 'sign onto my lunatic scheme, or I'll ruin your career?' Nice try, but I think my bosses are a bit more objective than that. Why are you so dead set on trying to be a hero?"
"Do you know anything about boxing?"
She shook her head. "What are you getting at?"
"When a boxer's outclassed, he's got two choices. He can either ride out the punishment, accepting the defeat but not getting hurt, or he can forget about defending, go forward, and try for the knockout, even though he could get badly hurt trying. We call that taking the puncher's chance. When I was twenty-two, I won the Air Force Heavyweight Championship that way, against an opponent ten times as good. Got my nose broken, but I won."
"So?"
"This mission is right on the ropes, and way behind on points. We could take the shots on our guard, but however well we duck and weave, we still lose. If we take the puncher's chance, we can win clean: save ourselves, the colonists, everything. But we've got to risk walking into the big punch for it. We can't let those colonists die without taking a few swings for them first. What do you say?"
Porter chewed her lip, and David thought he saw a moment of doubt cross her face. Then her mouth curled. "Goddamn space cowboy!" She pushed off awkwardly for the engineering compartment door and banged hard against it on her way out.
* * * *
David tried to pin the circuit board to the work surface with his wrist. It was no good. The board slipped, and David cursed as he soldered two channels together. The globule of burning plastic had left the back of his hand so blistered and throbbing he could hardly use it. He tossed the board aside into a growing cloud of botched components hovering next to a sheaf of scribbled notes, then looked up at the mission clock on the galley wall. With heartless precision, it announced beam pickup in thirteen hours, forty-one minutes, and eleven seconds.
Porter had vanished into the cabin they were using as a makeshift infirmary, refusing to speak. She pulled herself through the galley occasionally to retrieve more medical supplies for Beaume--her color fading from furious red toward pallid white with each circuit--but each time she ignored him. Trying to wait me out. She knows my solution will take longer than hers. But for all the lives hanging on it, David would have laughed at their petulance. I may be going to die out here, but they'll not say I ran away.
The galley door opened, and Porter floundered silently in, awkwardly upright as always. She said nothing, avoided his gaze, and dragged herself toward the medical kit. David, focusing more on her than his work, scraped his hand against the edge of the table.
Porter turned and frowned at him while he clutched his wrist and cursed. She pulled herself closer and scrutinized his hand.
"Bloody fool. Why didn't you say something?" She rummaged in the first-aid box for burn ointment and bandages. By the time she finished wrapping the hand, the ointment was starting to relieve some of the throbbing pain.
"Thanks." He flexed the hand, frowning at how the bandage limited its usefulness.
She scowled and turned to leave.
"That's the first time you've spoken in more than a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers," David said. "A bit less than an hour ago, we came within two million kilometers of beam pickup. I'm trying to modify the emergency transponder to send out voice messages: the shipboard communication system's fried. If we can't send messages to the Mars station, we won't even be able to navigate a free return trajectory. At least let's do something."
Her scowl softened a fraction. "What's wrong?"
David held up his hand. "Damned burn. I feel like I'm trying to sign my name with my boxing gloves on. Is Beaume stable?"
She nodded reluctantly. "The medical monitor will alert us if his condition changes. What can I do?"
David gestured to the cloud of discarded circuit boards with its magic carpet of sketches and mathematical speculation. "Grab one of those and hold it steady for me. This should be a ten-minute job, but soldering's a cast-iron bitch in zero gee. Doesn't flow properly." He worked as he spoke, hoping she'd ask the vital question.
She did. "What's the drawing?"
He shrugged. "Idea of mine. Not sure about some of the science, to be honest; I'm more of a nuts and bolts man."
Porter raised her chin, but held out the circuit board and said nothing.
"Just turn it over for a second. Thanks. Okay, you can let go now." David gathered up half a dozen circuit boards and began slotting them into the transponder. Porter eyed the bundle of filmies. Come on. Let's see the ambitious, nosy bitch who made my life hell back in orbit.
While David fitted pins and wires to the transponder, Porter brushed one of the spoiled circuit boards to one side, then reached out and pulled the bundle toward her. David concentrated on the intricate wiring. Plastic rustled as Porter turned to the second page, and she hummed faintly.
A few minutes later--six minutes and thirty-one seconds according to the mission clock, or about fifteen thousand kilometers--David risked an open glance at Porter. She still floated next to him, clutching the tabletop with one hand. Her eyes riveted on the sheets, she nearly bumped her shoulders into his chest. David coughed.
She looked up in surprise, the last of the pages in her hand. Startled by their proximity, she drew back. "This won't work, you know. The incoming ion velocity's too high."
"I was thinking of using a collider to slow them down," David said. "Something like a tapering metal funnel, to slow them by collision until they're ready to deionize."
Porter shook her head. "It'd need to be huge. What you want is something like a giant multichannel plate."
"A what?"
"Electron multiplier. Basically an array of slanted tubes bundled together and coated inside with a scintillating compound. Electrons collide with the inside wall and set off a charge cascade. We could use the same thing--without the compound, of course--to slow the incoming ions before they separate."
David nodded. "I see. The electrons and ions rattle around like peanuts in a jar, then come out the far end slow enough to be used. By using narrower tubes, you make the collisions take place in a smaller space, right?"
She gave a sudden smile. "Exactly. They'd need to be the right length, though, or the beam would deionize before you got any current out of it."
"How long?"
"Depends on the angle of slant. I could work out a formula."
David grinned. "Brilliant. I can get all the tubing we need out of the plumbing system. So, once we've got the magbeam slowed down to a manageable level, what then?"
"Well, once you've slowed the beam, you can use an electric field to separate it into electrons and ions, like you suggest, and you should get a current between your two collectors. What were you going to make them out of?"
"I thought something like the mesh screens out of the ventilation system. The separator I could make out of some metal blinds from a fan outlet--"
"With the louvers alternately charged positive and negative," Porter broke in. "I see. You'll need several layers of mesh for the collectors if you want to keep the efficiency up."
David nodded. "I know. My main concern is heat dissipation. A full-power magbeam would fry anything we could build. If the incoming power's too high, it won't self-cool quickly enough. We need to get the Mars station to run at low power while we're recharging, then turn the power back up past a hundred percent when we're ready to decelerate."
"Well, contacting Mars is no problem if your transponder works."
David chewed his lip. "We'll only be able to send, not receive. Our long-distance receiver is slag, and the ones in the spacesuits aren't compatible. We won't know whether Mars received our message."
"How long do you think the converter would need to recharge the batteries enough to decelerate?"
"I was hoping you could help me with the numbers. I did a couple of estimates, but you're the math wiz."
Porter shuffled through the sheets, flailed helplessly in midair for a moment until David dragged her to a seat, then set to scratching figures. Every now and then she would snap her fingers and demand some esoteric figure of merit for the ship or magbeam: mass, battery capacity, charge ratios, power consumptions, ion velocities. Without resorting to computer or calculator she jotted for ten minutes, then triumphantly double-underlined a number.
"Forty-seven minutes, thirty-one seconds!" she announced. "That's a minimum, of course."
David closed his eyes and silently blessed the bloody-mindedness of physicists in the face of an intriguing problem. "Okay. If we call it an hour for safety's sake, we'll still have three hours' deceleration at a bit under a hundred and thirty three percent power. We've got thirteen hours to build this thing and get it into place. I'll need to go EVA to secure it. That's a two-hour job in itself, so let's get to work."
* * * *
David took a deep breath and started the recorder attached to his improvised transmitter.
"Mars station, this is the McAuliffe. At present this is the only communications channel available to us. We do not--repeat, do not--possess the ability to receive communications on any frequency. We have suffered a massive power failure and lack sufficient battery reserves to undergo a standard deceleration. Two crew are down. Life support at minimal levels. State of navigation system unknown. We intend to use a space-mounted electrical converter to recharge our batteries from the magbeam prior to executing an emergency deceleration to Mars entry orbit--repeat, Mars entry orbit--for landing and direct rendezvous with the colony for immediate cargo delivery.
"Execute standard beam pickup, but operate magbeam at one-zero percent power output for six-zero minutes after acquisition. Then increase magbeam power output to one hundred and twenty-nine--that's one-two-nine--percent standard and maintain target lock for one hundred and eighty minutes. We'll do the rest. Wish us luck, Mars station."
He set the recording to repeat and dragged himself from the cockpit.
The build had taken far longer than David anticipated, but finally the converter was complete. It didn't look like much for ten hours' work. About the size of an armchair, the bulk of it was comprised of the big metal blinds from two ventilation ducts. Each of the pivoting metal leaves was attached to the terminals of a tiny power supply cannibalized from a spacesuit. To either side, two metal cylinders jutted. Inside them, behind David's hasty welding, lay the two ion collectors, built of dozens of layers of fine metal mesh. Great coils of insulated power cable protruded from each collector, to carry the electricity they hoped it would generate. He'd spent three hours making the ion collider, welding four hundred lengths of metal tubing to the front of the assembly in an array like a narrow slice cut from a bundle of drinking straws. Heat sinks and cooling fins bristled here and there, welded on wherever space permitted.
David stood back, trembling from pain and fatigue. He couldn't count the number of times he'd jarred his burned hand in the past hours, turning the persistent burning into lances of fire. The ointment did little to stop the pain, and edema puckered the inflamed skin, swelling his hand to half again its normal size. Porter hung next to him, dirty and exhausted but with a curious glow about her, like a child with a new finger-painting to show her parents. Between them they pushed their creation towards the airlock.
David pulled a stretchy, one-piece spacesuit undergarment from the rack, then stripped down. He glanced up to see Porter averting her eyes, red creeping up to her face. He pulled on the skintight pants and tried to insert his burned and bandaged hand into the sleeve. After barely an inch, he stopped, weeping in agony as the tight material tore at his burnt hand, setting it bleeding.
"Longrie? Are you all right?"
He gasped, trying to recover his breath. "Hold the sleeve straight for me. I'll try again."
She did, but the tight suit still crushed the bandage against the burn. He stopped her, breathing hard. "It's no good. Even if I can get it on, I won't be able to use the thruster controls or tools properly. You'll have to do the EVA instead."
All color drained from Porter's face.
* * * *
Porter clutched the edge of the galley table, her knuckles white. The mission clock ticked away behind her, unnoticed. After four weeks in space, he should have guessed. All the signs were there: she never admired the view from a porthole, always aligned herself with the gravitational axis of the furniture in the ship, always moved between handholds without drifting free.
David sucked his teeth. "Why the hell did you insist on coming?"
"What was I supposed to do? Tell my boss, 'Sorry, I can't go on the inspection tour because I'm afraid of falling. Your Assistant Director of Space and Aeronautics is terrified of space?' I'd have been the laughing stock of Washington. Besides, my psychologist told me I could be desensitized if I exposed myself to space. Damn crackpot. Let him take a walk off the edge of the Grand Canyon, see how he likes it."
"You fell from the edge of the Grand Canyon?"
She nodded, empty-eyed. "I was nine. My father took us on vacation there. My brothers wanted to use the binoculars and stargaze. We sneaked out of the tourist area after dark and walked along the edge for a while. We were looking up, pointing out the constellations. I stepped over the rim.
"I hit a ledge about twenty-five feet down, broke my arm, and fractured two vertebrae. I lost the use of my legs and only managed to stay on by clutching some weed growing out of the rock face. The rescue squad took two hours to reach me. All I could see were the stars above me and the darkness below, waiting to swallow me whole." She shivered. "Now you see why I can't go out in a spacesuit?"
David spoke quietly. "Even if we turn off life support this minute, the solar panels won't be able to gather enough power for a free return trajectory. If we don't get the converter into place, we die. It's that simple."
Porter turned haunted eyes on him. "I'm sorry."
Three hours and twenty-one minutes until beam pickup, the mission clock warned. David cast about helplessly. Take the puncher's chance.
"Your therapist thought you could get over this by being exposed to what you fear most, did he? Let's try it. We'll start slow, maybe just looking out a porthole. I'll be there to talk you through every moment of it, from start to finish."
Porter gaped at him. "You're crazy!"
He barked a short laugh. "Do you have a better idea?"
* * * *
David locked Porter's helmet into place. She stared out through the plastic shield, her dark eyes wide with frightened anticipation. He touched a control and was momentarily blinded when the four spotlights mounted around the helmet blazed to life. He gave her a thumbs-up and squeezed out through the airlock's inner door, then swung it home and spun the locking handle. Over the past half hour he'd coaxed her into the clumsy carbon-fiber suit, pushed her to gaze out a porthole while floating free, and now had her ready to open the outer airlock--he hoped. She'd cursed him a blue streak throughout.
He pulled the communications cap from another spacesuit over his head. "Porter, give me a radio check."
"I can hear you."
"Great. I'm going to pump the air out. You don't need to do anything." He pressed the Atmosphere Purge control and heard the whirr of the extraction pumps. She didn't know he was running internal life support at a dangerously low level just to hoard enough power to run them. He hoped a handheld atmospheric sensor would warn him if the air became too stale to breathe.
"Okay, Porter, we're ready to go EVA now. Do you remember what I told you?" He wished he could see through her visor-mounted camera, but with the ship's systems down, crackly suit-to-suit radios provided their only link. All he could do was wait by the cargo bay airlock and talk her through the operation.
Her voice wavered. "Yes. I'm pulling the external release handle now."
The residual atmosphere in the airlock whistled away out of the hatch. Porter's breathing accelerated as she looked out into the vacuum of space.
"You're doing great," David assured her. "Clip the converter to your belt." He looked through the airlock porthole and saw her latch the bulky instrument onto her spacesuit's retaining harness, next to the connection for her safety line. "Okay. Are you ready to go outside?"
Porter drew what sounded like a steadying breath. "Why the hell did I let you talk me into this?"
"Because I'm your Prince Charming. Use the grab handles along the walls to pull yourself towards the hatch. Take it slowly and don't forget you need to stop the converter as well as yourself when you get there."
"All right, I'm at the hatch. I can see outside." After a pause, she went on, quavering. "My God, it's full of stars."
David grinned. "Sure it is, Commander Bowman. To the right of the hatch is your first handhold. Grab it with your right hand, then bring your left hand across your body and reach for the next handhold beyond."
He glanced down at his watch. In just under two hours and forty-five minutes, the magbeam would reach out to them. If the converter wasn't there to meet it, he and Porter would die more alone than two humans had ever been. He looked up. Porter hadn't moved. The converter drifted to the end of its short tether, tugged at her frozen figure, and began its slow return trip to her side.
"Porter, reach for the handhold."
Her raspy breathing filled his earpiece.
"Take the handhold in your right hand and swing across to the next one with your left. Victoria! Do you hear me?"
An alarm buzzed, barely audible over her panicky breathing. If it were a warning from her suit, he would have heard it more clearly. Abruptly, it stopped. Frowning, he glanced around the cargo bay.
A squeal came through the earpiece. "Ow! Damn contraption! Who the hell built this heap of junk?"
David peered into the now empty airlock. "What happened?"
"Your little fixit toy nearly sliced my suit open with its damn pointy corners. How the hell am I supposed to drag this thing all the way out to the magbeam ring?" A long string of profanity followed.
"Try shortening the tether." He could hear her ragged breathing and continuing mutters. "How far have you gotten?"
"Not far enough. This is impossible. I think I'm going to be sick."
Not with the meds I pumped into you, you're not. "Just take slow, deep breaths. Let yourself hang in space for a minute. Focus on relaxing. You'll make faster progress if you're relaxed."
The faint buzz of the alarm reached him again. He pulled off the communications cap, using both ears to pinpoint the sound. To the left, he decided, somewhere up near the engineering section. He drifted to the hatch. As he reached it, the buzzing stopped. Placing the cap back on his head, he heard Porter setting off a new string of curses.
"Calm down, Victoria, and tell me what's wrong."
"The damn tether is caught on something! I'm still five meters from the magnet harness, and I can't go any farther."
David returned to the airlock, and inspected the windlass through the porthole. Plenty of line remained on the spool, but the line trailing out the door stood taut. "Victoria, can you see the full length of your line?"
"Yes, of course I can see it. There's nothing else out here. It must be snagged inside the airlock."
David groaned. Just what they needed--a jammed windlass. Fifteen minutes for her to return to the airlock, ten minutes to repressurize, then twenty-five more to pump the lock out again and return to the magbeam harness. Fifty minutes wasted, plus however long it took him to fix the windlass. Too long. He took a deep breath.
"Victoria, your tether's stuck. You'll have to cast yourself loose."
The shriek in the earpiece nearly deafened him. "What? Do you think I'm a lunatic? I'm not about to cast off my safety line!"
"We're out of time and out of options. Either you unclip the tether, or we die a hundred million kilometers beyond the asteroid belt." The alarm buzzed indistinctly, barely audible over Porter's protestations. David pushed off for the engineering section. Maybe the life support systems were tripping an atmospheric sensor. His handheld sensor hovered between green and yellow.
"Look, Victoria, the suit has thrusters built in. If you lose your grip on the handholds, you can use them to push you back to the ship, just like I explained to you. You're safer than walking down the street in D.C. Get yourself back to the handholds, unclip your tether, and pull yourself on to the magnet."
More curses, then, "All right, I'll do it."
David grinned. "Atagirl. You'll be fine, I promise."
The radio crackled in his ear. "Longrie, what's that noise?"
The alarm stopped, and David looked around intently, trying to imagine what it could have been. He shook his head. "Nothing important. Just my radio. Banged it and got some feedback going."
"Well, don't do it again. I nearly jumped out of my skin." Porter's voice eased, and a few minutes of silence passed. "I'm at the magnet now. How much time do we have?"
David looked at his watch. "You're doing fine. Just make sure you get the converter securely attached as quickly as you can."
He continued trekking through the engineering spaces, checking subsystems and sensors. Nothing registered an alarm. Porter's scream stiffened every muscle in his body. "Victoria, are you all right? What happened? Victoria?"
"Damn! The converter is drifting away! I just let it go for a second to get a tool out. I can't reach it!"
He stifled a curse. "How far away is it?"
"Two meters. I can't reach it from the handholds. It's getting farther away all the time."
David took a breath. "Victoria, let go of the handhold and use your suit thrusters to reach the converter before it goes any farther."
"I can't."
He heard her sob, pictured tears welling in her eyes. That she'd gotten this far was nearly miraculous, but if she let the converter get away, it would all be for nothing. "You can, Victoria. You can do this. It'll be just like when you were on the tether. Use the thrusters to go to the converter, clip it onto your belt again, then head back to the ship."
Sheer terror swelled her voice. "No, I can't. What if the suit thrusters run out of gas? I'll be stuck out here, falling forever."
David thought about how he'd handled young boxers afraid to fight on after a knockdown. His watch showed less than two hours to go, and the job of bolting the converter in place wasn't even begun. They were in the final round and needed to deliver the knockout blow, but the clock was ticking down towards the bell--a bell that would signal their deaths, as well as those of Beaume and God knew how many colonists.
"You're not falling, Victoria. You're swimming--swimming between the stars. There's no place to fall to, no planets to suck you down to their surface. Think about swimming, Victoria. You're not afraid of falling when you swim, are you?"
She sniffed, and then answered in a small voice. "No, I don't fall when I'm in the water."
"And you aren't falling now; you're floating. Use the thrusters to help you swim to the converter. Think of it as a life buoy. Swim to the life buoy and bring it back to the ship. Do it now, Victoria, before the life buoy is too far away."
She sniffed again and hiccupped. He thought he detected the sound of teeth grinding. After several minutes of heavy breathing, she reported she'd retrieved the converter. David gave a silent prayer of thanks. "Well done, Victoria. Now go back to the magnets and secure it. We don't have much time."
"We've done it, David. We've done it! The converter's in place!"
Porter beamed as David helped her out of the airlock. Fatigue lined her face, and her hands shook as she removed the outer shell of the spacesuit, but her eyes were wide and her voice slurred as if she was high on drugs. David admitted to himself that the clinging undergarment looked a lot better on her than it did on him, as did the crazy grin they shared. No sooner was she free of the spacesuit than she threw her arms around him, the strength of her embrace pleasantly surprising, her lips close to his. To look at her, she could have been through a war, but new confidence gleamed in her eyes. He hugged her tightly, and she squeezed his shoulder, feeling the muscle, looking at him with lips slightly parted.
"You did great, Porter. I'm proud of you."
She kissed his cheek. "Vicky," she whispered. "My friends call me Vicky."
"Vicky." He tried the name for size, and found it fitted her. "Well, Vicky, I think you've done enough to deserve a little prize."
She looked up at him from under long eyelashes. "And just what did you have in mind?" Her fingers touched his earlobe, stroking gently.
David felt his face redden, and fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out the lump of chocolate handed out by Ellen at their abortive celebration, and proffered it to Porter with an apologetic smile. "I tried to get something better, but the confectioners don't deliver this far."
The fragment was gone from his hand before he saw her move, and suddenly he was pressed back against the wall with her legs braced against him and her fist twisted in the front of his shirt. "You've been hiding this from me all this time?" she demanded, her face savage. "All this time?"
David recoiled from her fury, then jerked in surprise as she burst out laughing.
"Fooled you!" She broke the bar into two pieces and held a fragment up to his mouth with delicate fingers. With a pang of guilt about how it would have looked to Gin, he let her feed him the piece of cheap chocolate. Ecstasy overtook her face as she consumed the other, and she pressed herself against him harder, then licked her fingers lasciviously clean, one by one, right in front of his face.
She gave a rapturous smile. "Not bad, but shouldn't you have ordered Mars bars?"
He kissed her. There didn't seem to be any other response. He meant it to be momentary, but her arms locked around his neck and held him until they were both out of breath. They only parted when his watch let out a beep. She looked at him in gentle query.
"Five minutes until beam pickup," he explained, regretfully. "It's game time. You remembered to switch on the power supply to the separators, didn't you?"
She flicked his ear. "I'm not incompetent, David."
He smiled. "No, Vicky, you're not." He pushed off for the engineering section, trying hard to forget the taste of chocolate on her lips.
Porter trailed along behind him, and bounced to a halt as he stopped at a voltmeter attached to one of the battery panels. "When will we know if this converter of yours worked?"
"If we don't explode in the first seconds, we'll know when this little gizmo bleeps at us."
"Explode! You never said anything about an explosion!" She grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.
There was no point in deceiving her any longer. "If Mars didn't get our message, and picks us up with a full power beam, the batteries'll get a high voltage spike before the converter melts. It could trigger an explosion. I don't know about you, but I'd rather go quickly than starve to death in the outer reaches. Nothing I could do about it, so I didn't think you needed to know."
She swelled up in anger, then just as abruptly deflated. "Thanks, but I'd rather have known."
David shrugged, and took her proffered hand. "One minute." They clung to each other, staring at the voltmeter, lying blank and silent as the time ticked down.
"Thirty seconds," David said. "Fifteen. Ten. Five. Time."
Silence. No explosion, no sound from the voltmeter.
"Time plus five. Time plus ten. Plus twenty." He looked down at the frightened woman clutching him. "I'm sorry, Vicky. I'm truly--" The ventilation fans sputtered, then sped up, pushing cool cabin air over them both. David opened his mouth just as the voltmeter sounded. Its electronic bleep could have been a siren's song for the effect it had on them. Porter whooped like a cheerleader, and David threw back his head, roaring in triumph.
"That one's for you, Christa!" he shouted, then turned to kiss Porter again, who grinned like a fool. "It's working, Vicky," he said. "We just scored our first knockdown. Let's make sure the bastard doesn't stand back up again."
* * * *
"Yes! Now we're motoring!"
Porter stumbled into the cockpit, no longer submerged in Stygian gloom, but filled with bright lights and video displays. Above the viewscreen, the mission clock announced the beam pickup was fifty-three minutes old, while another ticked down towards zero, marking the time when they would begin decelerating. "What's up?"
David gestured to a tiny video screen. Columns of numbers propped up the title InsertionCourse1. "Navigation came back online. We won't have to manually steer the insertion course; we can let the microchips do the thinking."
"What about the other systems?"
"I've just asked the computer to run a full diagnostic; the results'll be back any second. Damn, but this beats digging around with a voltage probe." The biggest video screen lit up, rows of numbers cascading down it. David touched a control and the avalanche froze.
"Let's see now," he said. "Attitude thrusters operational. Deceleration magnets operational. Liquid recycling and cargo heaters down. Food refrigeration down, cabin temperature sensors busted. None of those matter. Propellant feed, power couplings, heat shield sensors, landing parachutes: all operational. The radio's still down, but we're broadcasting position telemetry again."
Porter grinned. "We have what we need, then? We're good to go. Aren't we?"
David scrolled through the diagnostic screens. "We're--" He stopped, his mouth hanging open. "Oh, shit."
"What? What isn't working?"
"It's the inductor coils for the magbeam harness."
"The whats?"
"Little gizmos that fire the explosive bolts to break the contacts between the magbeam harness and the hull. They must have burnt out when the batteries discharged. We'll have to replace them."
"Why not just leave the harness in place?"
David shook his head. "Can't. It'd make us aerodynamically unstable. We'd burn up in the atmosphere. The coils've gotta be replaced."
"How long will that take?"
He frowned. "I don't know. I've never done it before."
"What? I thought you knew this ship!"
"This ship has over a million working parts. Those coils are about the least important of them."
"Not right now, they're not. Right now I'd say they're pretty damn vital. What are you going to do?"
"I'll have to get a look at one of the original coils, and help you make some new ones to match them."
"You want me to make them?"
"No choice. I can't do delicate work with my hand. But we're only talking about half a dozen metal coils, about the size of your finger. We've got three hours to replace them."
"What if I had a better idea?"
"Like what?"
"Screw landing on Mars. Set a course to dock with the platform instead."
David's teeth clenched. "We can't get to the surface from the platform. I can't fly their lander, and Beaume's in no state to do it for us. The sick people are on Mars. The medicine to save them is on this ship. We're going to Mars."
"You're going to risk crashing into the surface when we could dock safely with the station?" Panic tinged Porter's voice, and her eyes implored him. "At least dock for a few days to fix things. Then, if you're still bent on this kamikaze mission to the surface, you'd have a fighting chance."
"Their medical supplies have already run out. I'm not letting anyone else die waiting for us." He reached for her. "Vicky--"
She wrenched away from him. "Don't you dare call me that. You're going to get us both killed. We've got three hours, but what if we started on an insertion course and it turned out we couldn't fix the coils? We wouldn't be able to change course to dock with the platform, would we?"
She read the answer from his face.
"So, we'd be plunging down toward Mars, knowing we were going to burn up and not a damn thing we could do about it. Right?"
"Six little coils, Porter. Will you let them say we were beaten by six little lengths of wire? That we gave up after coming this far?" He nodded at the mission clock. "Three minutes until deceleration starts. Time to make a choice. Are you going to go for the knockout?"
She paused, frowning at the navigation computer. He could see the play of emotions across her face.
"I'll make your damn coils," she snapped, and stormed out of the cockpit.
Stifling a smile, David punched the Execute key to start the insertion program and trailed her back through the ship.
He felt weight return as the deceleration began, and for the first time in a month, "up" and "down" meant something again. At first he felt crushed, even though it was barely a quarter of what he carried every day of his life. After so much time watching Porter fumble around in weightlessness, it was a surprise to recall how gracefully she moved with gravity on her side.
He levered the access panel open. The metal tunnel beyond was barely wide enough for his shoulders, and with only one hand, he needed Porter's help to pull himself into it. He pushed a flashlight between his teeth, and crawled.
Fifteen minutes later, he dropped a melted and blackened wire coil onto the galley table. "We need to make six copies of this. It's just a copper coil with connections soldered on, but the dimensions need to be just right. The problem will be reinstalling them; we'll have to fit three each to save time. They're tricky to get at, along tunnels around the ship's perimeter."
"How do I find them?"
"I marked up the first tunnel with tape arrows while I was fetching this; the others are all the same. But let's get started making the coils; I'll explain as we work."
Porter proved adept at twisting the copper wire into the correct spiral shape, but the connections were fiddly and intricate, and her soldering needed constant supervision. After an hour, they were only onto the third coil.
"Hold the iron to the wire for a few seconds first," David said. "The solder'll flow better when you--" He stopped as the buzz of an alarm reached his ears. "Damn thing," he said. "It went off while you were on EVA. It kept stopping whenever I tried to find it. See--it's stopped already. Can't be anything important."
Porter swore as the alarm went off again, making her slip. This time it didn't stop, but kept sounding insistently. With a horrifying jolt, David realized at last where it was coming from.
The alarm blared as Beaume's cabin door slid open, and a red light pulsed on top of the medical monitoring unit. The EKG trace should have shown its distinctive pattern of dips and spikes separated by long flat stretches. Instead, a continuous ripple played across the monitor. Other indicators told a story of failing respiration and blood pressure. Beaume must have been teetering on the edge of cardiac arrest for hours, tripping the alarm for a few seconds at a time. He lay on his pallet like a corpse, muscled chest sunken and unmoving, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
David seized the med kit and unpacked the defibrillator, then thrust an ampoule of epinephrine at Porter.
"Add that to his IV line and open the pump wide."
While she injected the drug into the line, he pulled the defibrillator paddles from the charge unit and ripped open a package of conductive gel with his teeth. Porter stepped in and squeezed the gel onto one of the paddles. The defibrillator beeped, signaling its readiness. David spread the gel on both surfaces, then forced them against Beaume's chest and punched the buttons in the handles. Beaume jerked violently, his massive shoulders gouging at the pallet, but only flat red lines trailed across the monitor. Porter strapped a respirator mask over Beaume's face and squeezed the bag, forcing air into the pilot's lungs.
When the defibrillator beeped its ready signal again, David traded places with Porter and sent another shock through Beaume's body. This time his heart sputtered back to life, showing regular beats interspersed with erratic ones. The blood pressure reading climbed slowly and shallow breathing registered on the monitor. David sagged, feeling suddenly old and tired.
* * * *
Beaume went into arrest twice more during the fabrication of the coils, and each time he was harder to resuscitate, wasting precious minutes. David brushed sweat from his brow and glanced at his watch every few seconds.
Porter put down the soldering iron. "That's the last coil. How long have we got to install them?"
"Forty minutes. We'll have to hurry."
The medical monitor sounded again. Racing to the cabin, David arrived to see the heartbeat indicator jump, squiggle, and flatten. Porter loaded another ampoule of epinephrine in the IV line while he flipped on the defibrillator. As soon as it charged, he applied the paddles to Beaume. No luck. Blood pressure and respiration fell off the chart. Porter cursed as she struggled with the respirator. David added his own litany of malediction under his breath. On the cabin wall, the clock ticked ever closer to atmospheric contact.
David grabbed Porter's arm. "We've got to stop."
She shook her head. "We can still save him."
"There's no time."
"I'll stay with him."
"No good. I can't install all six coils in forty minutes." The defibrillator's beep interrupted them. Might as well give the poor bastard one last chance. David set the paddles in place and squeezed the buttons down.
"Time's up." He dropped the paddles without waiting to see the results, and hurled himself out of the cabin, towards the first access panel, with Porter on his heels. He handed her three coils and helped her into the tunnel. As she pulled her legs in and grabbed a voltmeter, the monotonous buzz of the alarm stopped, replaced by the irregular beep of a heartbeat.
* * * *
Mars loomed large, a great, rusty disk filling the viewscreen from edge to edge. David muttered a silent prayer and pulled the magbeam harness release handle. The McAuliffe shook with a series of sharp cracks as the explosive bolts fired. Six red lights flickered, went blank, then turned to green. Weight vanished as the ship's drive floated free, and the view tilted as the McAuliffe oriented herself to meet the Martian atmosphere.
David turned to Porter, strapped into the cockpit next to him. "It worked. The harness is loose. The referee just raised our glove."
The viewscreen washed white, and a rumble of thunder drowned out Porter's reply as the aerobraking began. David closed his eyes while the ship shook and bucked around him, and the heat and the roaring propelled him back through the years, to a time when he'd stood in front of a crowd, tired and bloody but unbeaten, in a boxing ring under the desert sun.
* * * *
A combination of fatigue and Martian gravity anchored David and Porter in their seats while they watched a tank-like vehicle roll across the rocky surface to meet them. The wind whistled softly over the McAuliffe, like a new father soothing a restless infant. A cloud of red dust roiled up from the vehicle's treads and spun away to the south, whirling off toward the star-crowned horizon of an alien world.
David turned his gaze to Porter. "Welcome to Mars, Vicky."
* * * *
David fastened his seatbelt and gazed out at the disk of blue and white visible through the shuttle window. In a few short hours, he and Porter would be landing at Dulles spaceport to face more cheering crowds. In the evening, they were due at a presidential dinner. It seemed like the whole world had listened to his emergency broadcast, prayed for the fate of the colonists, watched through the Martian cameras while they landed.
But however much the public and media trumpeted his supposed heroism, six months after the fact, saving the Martian colonists seemed a hollow victory. David couldn't shake the feeling that Ellen should have been there with him. On arriving at HEO the day before, he'd found Gin waiting--waiting to deliver his decommissioning papers. He'd passed the mandatory retirement age for active space duty during the flight home from Mars, and was sentenced to a life's imprisonment on the surface of the Earth, with no right of appeal. He'd boarded the shuttle headed for LEO after only a few minutes' good-bye. She'd leave for Mars soon, to take up her new post as Colony Coordinator. She'd be fine, he was sure. They'd probably exchange messages at first, then she'd become too submerged in the work to remember him, casting aside her old life in the Space Transit System for a new one in the colony.
Beaume had survived. STS was set to settle quietly to prevent any claim of malfeasance, even though the inquest suggested Beaume's own careless attempt at a battery check had caused the accident. He'd soon be sitting pretty in some tropical paradise on Earth, surrounded by beautiful women who only wanted his money and not the cripple in the wheelchair. David didn't envy him.
"You're drinking in that view like it's a desert oasis."
David turned his attention to Porter, still fumbling with the straps of her harness. She'd never mastered weightlessness despite all the long hours traveling to Mars and back. He reached over to help her.
"Thanks." She flashed him a smile and glanced out of the porthole. "These presidential receptions are only one-night stands. You'll be back up here before you know it."
The mournful look on his face must have revealed the truth.
"You're not coming back, are you?" she said. "Oh, David, I'm sorry. I know how much you love it out here. What will you do?"
"I don't know. I'd like to make sure that Christa McAuliffe, Ellen Francis, and the two colonists who died on Mars aren't forgotten when some new president decides to pull the plug on the space program. Perhaps I'll do the rounds of the talk shows, let Hollywood make their vid of my life story, and advocate like hell for more space investment while people still remember who I am."
"Hm. Fame's a fleeting thing, and fans can prove fickle in the long run."
David looked again out the window. "The '26 elections are coming up. I could file for the Senate seat left vacant after Senator Ferrera's heart attack. A senator could be a powerful friend to the space program. I've never really seen myself as the Washington type, but maybe I should strike while the iron's hot."
Porter lifted an eyebrow. "And your kids at the gym? Your grandchild? Will you still find time for them?"
"Wyoming's a short hop from Washington by scramjet. Besides, how much more good could I do from Congress? Keeping space open as a possibility for those kids is just as important as what I do at the gym. What will you do when you get back?"
Porter gave him a crafty look. "I've been offered a promotion from Assistant Director of my division to Associate Director of Technology."
"Sounds impressive."
"One step below the top; without even a spell as Deputy Associate Director first. And the director's already made it clear he won't stay for a second term when the president carries the '28 elections. I'll be nicely positioned to move into the open slot."
"So the headlines helped a little, did they?"
She blushed.
"The president is bound to ask your opinion of the space program at the dinner tonight," David said. "What will you tell her?"
"Well, I didn't find anything significantly wrong with STS, however much I wanted to. There's no indication of malfeasance, fraud, or inefficiency. The only problems are down to underfunding. It'll be up to her to decide what to do with my report. What will you advise her to do?"
David narrowed his eyes. She was getting at something. "I'll tell her to back the Mars colony one hundred percent."
Porter nodded. "And what will you offer her in return? It would be political suicide for her to resist expanding the Mars colony transport system right now, but with all the attention you'll be focusing on disaster contingencies, and her '24 campaign promises about building arcologies, she'll need something to demonstrate her commitment to people stuck here on Earth. She also has to balance the budget. You'll need to offer her something of equal value."
He shook his head in confusion. "Give me an example."
"Tell her to pull out of the US/EU Jovian expedition and use its budget to build arcologies on Earth."
"The Jovian expedition is the next step toward colonies at places beyond Mars. I can't recommend it be cancelled!"
Porter snorted. "Amateurs. Always thinking they can have it all. If you want to survive more than five minutes in Washington, learn that life is about compromise."
David opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded ruefully. "All right, I'll do it. I'll recommend postponing the new Jovian expedition in favor of expanding the Mars colony."
Did he detect disappointment? Porter's face settled into the old, frosty look he hadn't seen since their landing on Mars. David gazed out the window for a few moments. "We can launch the Jovian expedition much more economically from an independent Martian colony, anyway."
Beside him, Porter shook with peals of laughter.
* * * *
Jodie looked out the shuttle window at the receding Earth, thankful that her husband and son were waiting safely on Mars to begin their trip to the new colony on Ganymede. Below, a cancerous black cloud obscured half of Montana and most of Wyoming, blanketed South Dakota and Nebraska, then crossed the Mississippi, creeping relentlessly eastward. The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano was only eleven hours old, but already death tolls were rising. The vulcanologists didn't know when it would stop, or how much of the world would be left.
She glanced down at the pamphlet in her hand, read her grandfather's name on the cover: David William Longrie. She'd attended his funeral service with her mother only the day before. So many years spent as a champion of the space colonization effort, warning against an event exactly like the one occurring now. At least he hadn't perished in it the way his own father had died in the '21 eruption. How ironic the eruption should start on the day of his memorial service.
Jodie's gaze returned to the window. She hoped her mother would be safe in the arcology under Mexico. The evacuation of the selected few was underway, starting the week before when the first rumblings sounded deep beneath the earth. That nice doctor who'd given her mother the arcology lottery ticket five years ago had attended the service as well. Jodie couldn't remember her name. Although elderly, she'd been ramrod straight, a quiet pillar of strength among the mourners, paying her respects to a great man.
Copyright Â© 2006 James Grayson and Kathy Ferguson