Trial by Fire: Chapter Ten

Adrift off Barnard’s Star 2 C

    Caine double-checked his survey results and sighed. So our survival depends upon my skill as a trash-scrounging sensor jockey. Great.

    Trevor checked the tactical plot, leaned back, removed his helmet, and powered up the life-support systems. His words rode plumes of mist up into the chill air. “Enemy hull now crowding three gees, passing five light-seconds range–and good riddance.” Trevor swiveled toward Caine. “Time to pick through the junk. What looks best?”

    Caine scanned down the list of possible salvage targets, now fallen off to less than fifty, and compared apparent mass with total thrust required for intercept. “Only one promising target remaining. This one.” He pointed. “It’s a fast mover and near the leading edge of the debris field.”

    “Is that still in range?”

    “Barely. We have twenty-two minutes left to initiate an intercept burn.”

    Trevor looked at the fuel numbers, shook his head. “Damn, that’s an expensive intercept, Caine. We’ll burn up all of our primary thrust fuel, and we’ll have to dip into our station-keeping fuel by ten percent.”

    “I know it’s expensive, but take a look at the mass and volume estimates of the other remaining targets.” Caine pointed to the depressing data. None of them were likely to be larger than six meters in their longest dimension. Most of them were probably fairly light as well. “Just hull fragments, I’d guess.”

    Trevor’s misty breath fogged the computer screens in front of him. “Any possibility for new targets, ones we haven’t seen yet?” Without commenting, Caine displayed the statistics on wreckage density. Trevor saw the sharply diminishing values, then nodded soberly. “Looks like this vein is just about tapped out.”

    “My thoughts exactly. So what now?”

    “Now we take another look at our last, best hope, see what we can learn before we have to start maneuvering for intercept. I want to make sure it’s not another dry hole.”

    Caine swallowed quietly. And if it is? Then what? Spend two days staring at the walls, waiting to slip finally, fatally, into anoxia? Or assuming they found some way to breathe, waiting for the excess rems–the ones that the EM grid and shielding didn’t stop–to build and the sickness to gather like a sour oil slick in the pits of their empty stomachs?

    The sensors produced their first image of the target wreck upon which they were pinning their diminishing hopes of survival: a slowly winking patch of brightness at the center of the screen. Caine enhanced the scan sensitivity to maximum. The object’s reflected light patterns might allow the computer to estimate its structural configuration and yield a better mass estimate.

    Trevor read off the results as they appeared on the screen. “Craft type and class: unknown. Mass estimate: 2455 tons, plus or minus 3 percent. Estimate confidence: 98.2 percent.” He frowned, then typed: “detail configuration.”

    The screen scribed a three-axis grid. An outline formed swiftly at its center: a small wedge-shaped prow, a midsection of oblong bulges, and a confused collection of sharp angles to the rear. The confidence level indicator for the basic outline showed eighty-five percent. That initial level began increasing rapidly as planar surfaces started shading in, first in green–the high-confidence planes–then orange, and finally red: successively less certain projections. Caine and Trevor watched the object go through rotational analyses several times before they looked at each other.

    Caine cleared his throat. “As a command grade officer in the USSF, it is my responsibility to be able to identify any human-built craft from a single cross-section, taken from any angle.” He looked back at the rotating image on the screen. “I am not familiar with this design, Captain.”

    “I am, Commander,” Trevor replied in a tight voice. “That’s the small craft that was approaching the cutter, the one Hazawa hit with the PDF battery.”

    Caine took a deep breath. “Do we make intercept?”

    Trevor shrugged. “Do we have a choice? Enemy or not, that wreckage is the only chance we have of extending our survival time. If we’re lucky, its engines might still be intact, and they’ve got to be at least ten times more powerful than ours. That will give us enough thrust and endurance to angle back toward The Pearl, find if anything is left, maybe in the hidden caches, see if we can piece together some way to survive.”

    “Assuming we can find a way to control the exosapients’ systems.”

    “We’ll find a way, or we’ll reroute control through to our own computer. Otherwise, we’re on a short countdown to death from either asphyxiation, radiation exposure, or dehydration.” Trevor unstrapped, pushed off and drifted to the command center’s utility locker. He opened it, reached in and produced a Unitech ten-millimeter pistol. He unholstered it and started a crisp and professional inspection of the handgun. Caine raised his eyebrows slightly. “Are you expecting a welcoming committee?”

    “No. But, in case I’m wrong…well, I hate going to a party empty-handed.”

    Caine felt his palms grow cool. He watched the computer’s graphical representation of the unfamiliar craft spin, roll, and somersault through its three-dimensioned dissections.

    Trevor reholstered the weapon, strapped back in. With a single touch to the dynamically reconfigurable screen, he wiped away the current, sensor-optimized setting and brought up the piloting set. “All systems checked and committed to computer control. Commencing intercept.”

    Trevor started firing the plasma thrusters in sustained bursts, angling the module into a trajectory that would eventually allow them to stern-chase the Arat Kur wreck. “Velocity will be matched automatically, but the final eight thousand meters of approach will have to be manual.” His gaze continued to shuttle between the trajectory data and engine controls.

    “How long?” asked Caine.

    “Of this? Another two or three minutes. Then we coast for eight hours, at which point we go hands-on for a few sweaty minutes while we match its vector and tumble values. Then we suit up and check our gear.”

    “Our gear?”

    “Our weapons,” Trevor clarified, staring at him “We are going to be boarding an enemy craft, you know.”

    Caine stared back. “Yeah. And you know I’m probably going to be more of a hindrance than a help. Like you said, I’m a make-believe soldier.”

    “That was obligatory hazing, Caine. Besides, you’ve been shot at more today than any newb has been in the last twenty years. And as much as it pains me to say it, you showed some good weapon-handling aptitudes.”

    “Mostly for heavy weapons, though.”

    “Yeah, I noticed the reports. You either had one hell of a run of beginner’s luck or you’ve got a sixth sense for those weapons. But today, the weapon of choice is the handgun. How’d you do with those?”

    Caine shook his head. “Not so good.”

    “Well, today is your lucky day. You get to work on improving that skill.” Trevor drew the Unitech ten-millimeter, held it directly in front of Caine’s eyes. “Are you familiar with this weapon?”

    Caine could not bring himself to answer yes “Read about it. Live-fired about fifteen rounds from one during the second week of training.”

    “Okay, then we take it from the top.” Trevor swiftly field-stripped the handgun, laid each piece on the console in front of Caine. “Reassemble and review.”

    You’ve got to be kidding. But Caine picked up the receiver, reached for the bolt, and dredged up already half-forgotten memories of a weapons-familiarization class that he had aced only two weeks earlier. “Unitech ten-millimeter selective-fire automatic handgun. This weapon uses a binary mix of reactant liquids as a scalable propellant. The two reactants are stored in separate canisters inside each magazine, which contains thirty projectiles. The standard load is fifteen antipersonnel, and fifteen armor-piercing projectiles.” And the recitation and assembly went on until Caine checked the action, secured the safety and handed the rebuilt weapon back to Trevor, butt first.

    Trevor looked at it, then at Caine. “Forgetting something?”

    “I don’t think so.”

    “Think again. EVA ops require special systems.” Trevor took the weapon, pointed out several small nodules along the weapons frame and receiver. “Thermal regulation studs. They control the temperature of the weapon’s primary metal components to ensure constant operating temperatures across crucial interfacing surfaces, such as breech-to-barrel. Necessity in spaceside operations where thermal variations can be extreme.

    “Also, the position of the trigger guard is adjustable, as is the tensile setting of the trigger spring. These two features allow the weapon to be reconfigured for a bigger handprint.” Trevor unlocked the trigger guard and pulled it forward until it almost reached the end of the barrel. “Looks odd, but it’s the only way you can use it if you’re wearing one of these.” Trevor wriggled his right hand back into one of the emergency suit gloves. He picked up the pistol with that hand; the weapon almost disappeared within the cumbersome gauntlet. “The bigger handprint allows you to fire and reload the weapon normally. But the most important EVA feature is–?”

    Caine recited this one from memory: “‘Projectile velocity may be varied by altering the volume of liquid injected into the firing chamber. This feature allows the user to both reduce warhead speeds and makes the weapon significantly less destabilizing when fired in low- and zero-gee environments.’”

    “Very good. Now we perform a piece-by-piece diagnostic of our two emergency suits. We can talk though our next action while we work.”

    Caine swung his own suit out of the closet and began his own checks. “What action is that?”

    “Boarding procedure.” Trevor holstered the sidearm.

    Caine swallowed–a large, uncomfortable sensation–and began the visual inspection of his helmet. A worried expression stared back from its visor.

    “I read an approximate volume of eight hundred fifty kiloliters,” Trevor’s voice announced in Caine’s earbud. “We have matched its pitch values. Yaw values are minimal. Roll rate is one full rotation every twenty-eight seconds. Do you confirm? Over.”

    Caine squinted out the bow observation port in the ready room, just forward of the command center. The stark white enemy craft was completing one full roll around its long axis about once every half minute. “I confirm that estimate.”

    “Approximate range? Over.”

    Caine sighted the pistol at the wreck’s midship hull, activated its dual-purpose targeting laser, read the rear LED: “One hundred forty meters, closing rapidly.”

    “Your range estimate confirms on-board ranging. Closing at two meters per second. Stand by for final retro burn.”

    A series of slight tugs indicated a quick sequence of counteraccelerations. The distance between the two craft stopped decreasing, stabilizing at just under one hundred meters. Caine was suitably impressed. The Auxiliary Command module had not been designed for precision spaceflight, just gross corrections to its own vector. And without Trevor’s piloting skills–well, no reason to think about that. Not unless one was eager to contemplate certain death.

    “I read vectors and two axes of tumble as matched. Confirm?”

    “Confirmed. Nice driving.”

    “Not as nice as I’d like. Every ten meters is at least three seconds of exposure when we jump across.”

    “What’s the current rate of exposure?”

    “Thirty REM per minute. Nice tanning weather.”

    Caine’s stomach contracted. “What about the exo craft? Are you reading active rad shields?”

    “Negative. No EM grid. Do you observe any lights or sign of activity? Over.”

    Caine studied the craft more closely. The wedge-shaped prow had taken damage; it looked as though its chin had been chopped off. Good shooting, Hazawa. An ovate, slightly recessed, jet-black slab dominated what Caine took to be the upper surface. A hull-flush cockpit blister? Perhaps, but no sign of life in or about what Caine mentally labeled as the command section.

    The craft’s amidships belly rolled into view, revealing two parallel rows of white, oval containers: fuel tankage. No sign of damage, but no sign of activity. The aft propulsion system was also slightly easier to examine, now that the prow was out of the way. Toroidal fusion pods and thruster bells were crowded atop one another, but there was less apparatus for gimballing than on a comparable human craft. The enemy evidently relied more on magnetic bias to alter the vector of their thrust. But again, no light, no movement, not even any signs of damage.

    “No sign of activity,” Caine reported. “No sign of damage other than to the command module comprising the prow.”

    “What about sensor clusters?”

    “None observable.”

    “Points of embarkation?”

    “Not sure. There are a number of surface irregularities on the sides of the command module, but I can’t even guess at their purpose. Can you get a better look with our external camera?”

    “Negative. If I zoom in, the wreck’s roll produces a blurred image. If I zoom out, I lose resolution. Hobson’s choice. So any greater detail is going to require eyeballing it up close. Which means it’s time for a walk around the neighborhood. I’m removing my intercom jack.”

    There was a sharp electronic snick and then nothing. Caine activated his suit’s radio, sealed his helmet, and leaned forward for a final, and better, look outside. To the left, Barnard’s Star was a small, bright red disk. To the right, the alien wreck rolled lazily. Falling behind, almost completely hidden by the bulk of the Auxiliary Command module, was the arc of the small gas giant. Strange, how serene it all looks–

    The head’s up display briefly painted an orange radiation icon on the inside of the helmet visor; Caine backed away from the window and leaned off to the side. Ten minutes of external exposure would cause profound sickness. Two times that was probably fatal.

    Another orange light came on, but this one was next to the aft passageway: the first seal on the internal airlock door had been unlocked. Caine exited the ready room, headed aft, found Trevor releasing the primary hatch seal. The orange light became red. They entered the airlock.

    After dogging the hatch behind them, Trevor leaned over until the top half of his visor touched Caine’s. Trevor’s voice was muffled and distant. “Last suit check. All green?”

    “All green.”

    Trevor nodded, tapped the red button on the wall. Caine heard a low rushing sound, somewhere in between a cascade of water and burst of released gas: the airlock was being depressurized.

    “Give me a procedure review, Caine.”

    “I wait until you reach the target and send a hand signal confirming that you have made rendezvous and that I am cleared to remotely stabilize the line. I then jump over using a line-lanyard. I maintain radio silence throughout, to be violated only in the event of emergency or upon your initiation of broadcast.”

    “How much time do we have to make our jump?”

    “One minute each. Any longer and our cumulative radiation exposure becomes–er, unpromising.”

    Trevor nodded behind his visor. “Okay, let’s go.” He turned to face the door, opened an access panel, depressed a red handle, held it there.

    The red lights flashed rapidly for three seconds and then the door started to move aside noiselessly, as if presaging the strange, ghostly silence of outer space. Or of death. Caine bit his savaged lip, used the pain to control his nerves. A widening slice of blackness and stars opened before them. Trevor drew the Unitech ten-millimeter, attached its lanyard to a ring on his utility harness, and leaned forward, allowing his feet to rise behind him. When his soles met the interior hatch at their backs, he reached out with both hands, braced himself against the edges of the now-fully open outer hatch. He contracted backward into a squatting position, legs gathered under him as he attached his tether to a mooring ring on the airlock wall. If Trevor mistimed his jump, then he’d have problems landing on the bow module, which would mean more exposure. Which in turn would mean–Caine decided not to pursue that line of thought any further.

    Trevor kicked off from the inner hatch and into open space, the line unfurling in his wake. Caine moved to a position near the door to get a better view.

    Trevor was already fifteen meters away and had rolled over on his back, pistol in hand. He aimed back along the path of his jump, then shifted his aim slightly above the rim of the auxiliary command module. Caine saw the muzzle flash briefly, followed immediately by a noticeable increase in the speed with which Trevor was moving away.

    His course-corrective shot had apparently been a good one; he was now headed directly for the enemy craft. He somersaulted very slowly to face in that direction, his legs out in front of him. The slack eased out of the tether as Trevor passed the halfway mark–and as Caine’s heads-up display painted the now-familiar trefoil radiation symbol above the scene.

    Trevor’s forward progress started to diminish, suggesting that he had now fired the ten-millimeter to both kill his forward tumble and counteraccelerate, easing himself into a slower approach. Caine checked the small green chrono at the extreme left of his HUD. Elapsed time: fifteen seconds. Coming up on five REM whole body exposure for Trevor, probably about a third that for himself.

    Trevor drifted closer to the wreck as the broad top of the prow began rolling around toward him once again. He had uncoupled from the tether: dangerous but necessary. Landing on the rolling hull with the tether firmly attached would have snapped the line like desiccated string and sent Trevor spinning off into space.

    Trevor aimed behind, fired two last times, pushing him forward as the command section’s wider aftward surfaces rotated under him. It was a tricky maneuver. If he fired too soon, one of the sharp angles of the prow might slam into him as it completed its arc, doing so with enough force to shatter every bone in his body. Coming in late wasn’t quite so bad; in that event, Trevor would land a few meters off-center and aft of the command section, but that also meant a few more seconds of exposure. Caine squinted. The whiteness of Trevor’s suit had blended with the whiteness of the spinning wreck, obscuring the outcome of his final approach to contact.

    But just before the top surface of the prow rolled out of sight, Caine glimpsed a flash of movement on its surface: two quick, wide-armed waves. The first confirmed that Trevor was safely down on the wreck; the second meant that it was now Caine’s turn to jump.

    Caine clipped a waiting electric lead onto the end of the tether. He thumbed a stud on the lead’s handgrip. A short burst of high voltage current coursed through the reactive-composite tether, converting its malleable pith into a rigid core. He looped his suit’s mooring lanyard about the now-stiff line, clipped the end of the lanyard to a ring on his own utility harness, and exhaled. Time to go.

    He leaned forward, pushed his feet back against the interior hatch, aligned himself so as to be parallel to the tether. Space loomed large above his head. He bit his lip hard and kicked.

    The airlock walls rushed past and were gone. In their place was blackness and slowly wheeling stars–which were all at once directly overhead yet also beneath him. All at once, both he and the universe were tumbling uncontrollably. He tried to focus on the one object with a constant relative bearing: the enemy wreck. However, he was approaching it too swiftly according to his inner ear, even though he was closing far too slowly according to his dosimeter. The radiation icon became red.

    He inadvertently blinked. When he reopened his eyes, it now appeared that the wreck was rolling toward him. The sudden change in perception brought up a swirl of nausea-inducing vertigo, just as the wreck’s cockpit blister started coming around again. But still no sign of Trevor. He closed his eyes and bit down harder on his lip.

    When he opened his eyes, he forced himself to see the wreck as stationary and himself as approaching–and discovered that he was more than halfway down the tether. And had still not initiated the one-hundred-eighty-degree tumble which would turn him around and position him for a feet-first landing upon the wreck. Trevor was rising into sight again, making fast, angry circles with his hand.

    Caine kicked forward slightly, felt his body begin to rotate backward, watched as the wreck seemed to fall down, beneath his feet–and was distracted by a glimmer of light just above his field of vision. He craned his neck to get a look at the source of brightness.

    Caine started. A titanic hemisphere of white, ochre, and pale blue striations wheeled, wobbly, above his head. Whereas the slow rotation of the starfield had been modestly disorienting, the drunken oscillations of Barnard’s Star II were stupefying. The gas giant brushed the stars aside, half-filled his visor, seemed ready to swallow the module he’d jumped from like a whale’s maw poised to swallow a lone krill. The mammoth planet’s atmospheric turbulence sent whorls and spirals streaming into each other in slow motion, murky fractals eternally evolving. Silvery flickers backlit the clouds, telltale signs of lightning storms more extensive than the entirety of the Eurasian landmass. Caine swallowed, fought through a rush of vertigo so powerful that he felt he might spin down into a single, contracting point and vanish–

    “Caine! Grab the tether! NOW!”

    Caine started violently as Trevor’s voice blasted out of his radio receiver. He looked down past his feet. Only six meters below, the aft end of the wreck’s prow was rolling past. He choked down a rush of bitter vomit, grabbed at the tether, lost his grip, grabbed again, caught it only a palm’s width from the end. At this close range, the wreck’s roll rate seemed to have increased, with Trevor rotating closer at a fearsome speed–

    –But I don’t have time to fear, or even think. I have to act.

    Time slowed and the gargantuan emptiness of the universe seemed to shrink back–enough so that Caine could assess how much sway his frantic motions had imparted to the tether, could watch Trevor rotate past underneath him, and could gauge the best moment to “jump down” to the wreck. He felt more than calculated that moment and pushed off the end of the tether, bending and relaxing his knees, eyes riveted down between his feet.

    Four meters, two. He kept his focus on the closest part of the wreck, scanned peripherally. There was a small angular protuberance rotating past, just to the right of him.

    Contact. As his knees absorbed the shock, he felt the wreck rotating out from under his feet, trying to shove him away. Caine kept his knees loose instead of bracing them, let his body continue to sink toward the hull, felt it bump his buttocks as he leaned to the right and grabbed.

    His hand closed around the protuberance he had spied: a curved bar. Probably a mooring point. He twisted in that direction, threw his left hand over to join his right on the bar. Caine felt pressure mount in his joints as the inertia of his old vector argued with the rotational force, the combined vectors tugging his body away from the wreck and turning it around in space until, finally, it relented. He checked his chrono as he pulled his body back into contact with the wreck and gathered his legs beneath him. Ninety-eight seconds since Trevor had started over. How time flies when you’re having fun.

    There was a light bump against his head; Trevor had crawled over and tapped helmets. His voice was quiet, tight. “Are you okay?”

    “I’m okay, now,” Caine answered, pretty sure he was telling the truth. “Let’s get going.”

    Trevor nodded, and set out on a drifting crawl to the rear of the wreck’s command section, where he pointed to a small oval recess surrounding a slightly convex section of the hull. Caine felt the edges of the recess, discovered deep, wide grooves. “Airlock?”

    Trevor nodded. “Might be. Look for a maintenance plate or manual access cover.”

    Caine pushed himself back carefully with his right hand, then his left–and stopped; something was under that palm. It was another, much smaller oval recess with a convex interior, the center of which was pierced in a quatrefoil pattern. Caine grabbed hold, tugged: nothing. He tried turning and then pushing it; there was a moment of resistance, then a short downward release before the cover swung back easily.

    Trevor was already beside him. “What have you found?”

    A cruciform knob stared up at them. Trevor reached in, turned it, watched the large convex panel that was probably an airlock. No discernible change. He turned the knob again, again, again. Slowly, the airlock door began to slide aside and farther away, deeper into the hull. Trevor braced himself and began cranking the knob rapidly with both hands: the portal widened more rapidly. He nodded for Caine to lean closer; their helmets touched again.

    “Take the gun. Safety off. Cover the entry while I finish opening it.”

    Caine detached the weapon’s lanyard from Trevor’s harness, attached it to his own, and slid the gun out of its holster. He crawled to the edge of the opening airlock and aimed the weapon inside. His visor’s red radiation icon began to flash; they had exceeded two minutes of exposure. Not good; not good at all.

    The airlock door slid away, apparently retracting along a curved pathway. When it was about half open, the movement stopped. A second later, Trevor was alongside Caine, touching helmets again. “I’m going to shine a light in and take a look. As soon as I do, you lean in with the gun. If you see anything suspicious, nail it. Understood?”

    “Understood.” Caine exhaled. After tumbling through endless, enervating space, this activity was reassuringly finite and concrete.

    Trevor scuttled around to the other side of the opening, activated his helmet lights, nodded to Caine, and looked over the edge. Caine leaned in with the gun on that cue.

    Trevor’s lights illuminated a tiny cubicle, smaller than the airlock on their Auxiliary Command module. At the bottom was another oval portal, flanked by a modest control panel. Small lights, most of which were yellow-green, stared beady-eyed back at them from its surface. The vehicle still had some sort of power, even if it was only emergency batteries. Otherwise, the airlock was empty.

    Caine looked up; Trevor pointed at himself, at Caine, and then down into the airlock. Caine nodded.

    Like a snake sliding around the corner of a rock, Trevor slipped over the rim of the hatchway and down into the airlock. Caine double-checked that the pistol’s safety was off and followed.