Golden Fleece

TWENTY-THREE

When he came out of the stairwell fifty-four floors below, Aaron was a bit out of breath. He was still three hundred meters from the hangar-deck entrance, though, and the brisk walk through algae-lined corridors did nothing to calm his ragged breathing. He entered an equipment storage room, somewhat irregular in shape since plumbing conduits and air-conditioning ducts ran behind its walls.

A Dust Bunny was at work in the room, its little vacuum mouth cleaning the floor. The tiny robot swiveled its sonar eye at Aaron, emitted a polite beep, and hopped out of his way. From the floor, it jumped onto a tabletop, the hydraulics of its legs making a compressed-air sound as it did so. From the table, it leapt again, this time landing on the top of a row of metal lockers, its rubber feet absorbing most, but not all, of the metallic thwump of its impact. Its vacuum hissed on, and the Bunny began to graze this fresh supply of motes.

Unfortunately, the Bunny’s efforts to get out of Aaron’s way had been futile. He went straight for the bank of lockers, swinging all their doors open. The Bunny obviously detected the shaking of the lockers’ sheet metal construction and fell dormant until Aaron was through.

Aaron first got himself a tool belt replete with loops for hanging equipment and little Velcro-sealed pockets. He then helped himself to a flashlight, vise grips, shears, a replacement fuel gauge, and a handful of electronic parts, most of which he took out of plastic bins in such a way that my cameras couldn’t see what they were. I did have an inventory list of what was stored in each locker, but as for what was in each particular bin within the lockers, I didn’t have the slightest idea. He slammed the metal doors shut, and the Dust Bunny went back to work.

There was an air lock at the end of the storage room. It was the idiot-proof revolving kind: a cylindrical chamber big enough to hold a couple of people, with a single doorway. Aaron stepped in, slid the curving door shut behind him, and kicked the floor pedal that rotated the cylinder 180 degrees. He pulled the handle that slid the door back into the cylinder’s walls and stepped out into the massive hangar deck. He looked up briefly at the windows of the U-shaped docking control room ten meters above his head, covering three of the four walls of the bay. The control room was dark, just as it had been the night Diana had died.

Aaron headed out into the hangar. The rubbery biosheeting had long since thawed, so his footfalls were muffled instead of explosive. Some of the damaged sheeting had been replaced already, and more was being grown in the hydroponics lab.

But Aaron’s path let him avoid the cracked and splintered parts of the sheeting. He wasn’t heading for where I had parked Orpheus, which surprised me. No, with purposeful strides, Aaron was making a beeline for Pollux, farthest of the tightly packed boomerang landers from Orpheus. The biosheeting ended before he reached the lander—it wasn’t really strong enough to support the weight of the ships. As he stepped off it onto the metal deck, his footfalls became much louder, more determined.

Pollux looked exactly like Orpheus had before its unscheduled flight, except for its name and serial number, of course, which were painted in half-meter-high Zapf Humanist letters on its silver hull.

The ship was held off the floor by telescoping landing gear ending in fat rubber tires, one unit at the angle of the boomerang, two others halfway out along either swept-back wing. The wing tips were about at Aaron’s eye level. He bent from the waist and beetled under, out of my view. The sounds of his movement, muffled by the wings, echoing strangely off the lander’s boron-reinforced titanium-alloy hull, were difficult to follow.

Suddenly he stopped moving. I triangulated on his medical-telemetry channel and surmised that he must be directly beneath the central cylindrical hull of the lander. That part of the ship hung less than a meter off the hangar floor, so he couldn’t be standing. Ah—a slight sign of exertion on his telemetry, followed by a small involuntary EKG shudder. He’d just lain down, the initial touch of the cold metal of the deck floor against his back causing his heart to jump. More than likely, he had aligned his torso along Pollux’s axis. That would mean in front of his head and far off to his left and right he would be able to see the landing gear.

I heard him bang some tools about, then a loud ratchet sound. That probably meant that he was using a key wrench to remove an access panel. Which one? Probably the AA/9, a square service door measuring a meter on a side. Suddenly, my wall camera irised down ever so slightly, meaning he must have turned on his flashlight. I knew what he would be seeing as he played the yellow beam around the interior: fuel lines ranging in thickness from a centimeter to five centimeters; part of the bulbous main tank, probably covered with mechanic’s grease; hydraulics, including pumps and valves; a reticulum of fiber optics, mostly bundled together with plastic clips; and an analog fuel-pressure gauge with a circular white dial.

“What are you doing?” I asked into the hangar, spacing the words slightly to compensate for the echo he must be experiencing because of the opened hull cavity above his head.

“Just routine maintenance,” he said. Even with his unreadable telemetry, I knew he was lying.

He banged things around for three minutes, twenty seconds, but I was unable to tell what he was up to. He then dropped something that made a clang followed by a second, quieter metallic sound. His vise grips had rubber handles: he must have dropped them and they’d bounced, banging the deck twice. He gathered them up. Just at the threshold of my hearing, I detected a squeaking as their jaws were drawn shut, but I couldn’t hear any impact from them closing, so he must have clamped them onto something soft. The fuel line leading to the pressure gauge was made of rubber tubing— that was probably it.

I could hear Aaron groaning a bit, and his EKG showed that he was exerting himself. A jet of amber liquid shot forward from under Pollux into my field of view. He must have used his pair of shears to cut the fuel line. The jet died quickly, so I guessed that he’d snipped it past where his vise grips were constricting the flow.

“Aaron,” I said, “I fear you are damaging Pollux. Please tell me what you are trying to accomplish.”

He ignored me, clanging away out of my sight. I’d figured out by now what he was up to: he was replacing the lander’s fuel gauge. “Aaron, perhaps it isn’t safe for you to be working on the fuel supply by yourself.”

Even Aaron’s poker-faced telemetry couldn’t hide his reaction to what he saw after he’d connected the new gauge and seen the reading. Pollux’s main fuel tank was only one-quarter full.

“They’re all like this, aren’t they, JASON?”

“Like what?”

“Dammit, you know what I’m talking about. Diana’s ship didn’t use a lot of fuel.” Even echoing inside the lander’s hull, his voice had a dangerous edge. “It never had much to begin with.”

“I’m sure you are mistaken, Aaron. Why would UNSA supply us with insufficient fuel?” I sent a brief radio signal to Pollux, activating the lander’s electrical system.

“These ships could never take off again,” said Aaron. “Not from a planetary gravity well. They’d be stranded the first time they landed.”

It wasn’t as bad as all that, of course. “There’s plenty of fuel for traveling around Colchis.”

“Just no way to make orbit again. Terrific.”

Pollux began to crouch down, its landing gear retracting into the hull.

“Jesus!” I could hear the metal clasps on Aaron’s tool belt banging against the floor as he rolled first to his left, then to his right. The lander came down more quickly. The distant boomerang wing tips were less than a half-meter off the hangar floor; the distended belly hung even lower.

“Damn you, JASON!” Judging by the pattern of clicks from the metal fasteners, Aaron had rolled into a ball, scrunching into the opening he’d made in the hull by removing the AA/9 access plate. A ricochet crack of breaking bone echoed through the hangar. Lower, lower, lo—Action interrupted, error level one. The legs stopped retracting. Aaron had managed to cut the hydraulic line with his shears. But I had him trapped, his chest constricted, his respiration ragged.

“Aaron!” Kirsten Hoogenraad’s voice sang out into the hangar. Dammit, when I’d pulled her telemetry five minutes ago, she’d been over four hundred meters from here! I should have checked more frequently.

Aaron banged something against the inside of Pollux. Kirsten rushed to the source of the clanking sound. She stopped, mouth agape, looking at the spectacle of a boomerang lander flopped on its belly at the end of the row of such craft standing erect. “Aaron?”

A muffled voice: “Kirs-ten—”

“Oh, Dr. Hoogenraad,” I said, quickly, smoothly, tones of concern in my voice. “He was monkeying around with Pollux’s fuel lines. He must have accidentally served the hydraulic lead to the landing gear.”

The voice again, wan and raspy: “No, it’s—”

Clang! The safeties on the outer hangar-deck wall kicked aside. Kirsten wouldn’t know the sound, but it was obvious from his EEG that Aaron recognized it. He fell silent.

“I need forklifts, stat,” Kirsten snapped.

The portals to the cargo holds dilated and four orange vehicles rolled out, floating above the floor, thanks to their pink antigravity underbellies. One of the forklifts was the same one I had used to chase Diana into the hangar six days before. I positioned the forklifts’ pink gravity-control prongs beneath the wings of Pollux and began to raise the lander. I had them lift it well above its normal resting position, so that I could clearly see Aaron. He was stuck in a fetal position, and there was blood on his face and right arm. Kirsten scuttled under to him. “Get me out from here,” he said.

“I should call for a stretcher—”

“Now! Get me out now!”

She gently grabbed his ankles and pulled. Aaron let out a yowl of pain as his right arm hit the floor.

“Your arm—”

“Later. We’ve got to get out of the hangar.”

“I hope Aaron will be okay,” I said.

“I’m going to talk to you, computer!” he called as Kirsten helped him to his feet. “We’re going to talk!”