Saturn Run

34.

And then the engineering operation stopped being routine, and turned into a nightmare, a train wreck. Everything happened in a fraction of a second, but Sandy’s combat-trained brain played it out in slow motion, so he wouldn’t miss any of the uglier details.

The radiator boom-wall ruptured right next to the hot spot his IR camera had highlighted. Molten radiator metal poured out of the breach, a surreal liquid explosion of silvery blobs moving at different speeds. One droplet of spray, traveling at over one hundred kilometers per second, pinged on the large front port. He instinctively recoiled—sniper! Then his explosion reflexes kicked in. Look for bricks coming down.

He leaned on the joystick, realizing in the first second that he would be hit. The bigger blobs moved more slowly, like oncoming cars, but there was no hole in the spray he could duck into. He couldn’t move the egg fast enough to avoid all of the molten metal. A major hit on that big Leica-glass window would be very bad. He needed to rotate the pod to get the window out of the line of fire. The egg’s least sensitive equipment was located in the bottom, where the heavy mechanicals were, and Martinez had given him the good training. He started spinning the egg so the bottom would take the impact.

He didn’t quite make it, but it was good enough. The impact came a second later, on the corner of the utility cradle, below his seat. It felt like the rubbery impacts of a bumper car at a carnival, but a lot harder, but that was okay, because it came through his butt. If he’d taken it on the face, even if the window had held, which was doubtful, he’d be looking at a fractured vertebra.

Then the electronics started screeching at him, and the life-support indicators went to a screaming yellow. And though he was upside down to Becca, he saw a barrel-sized slug of molten metal slam into her egg at head-on-auto-collision speed.

No sound, other than his own electronic warnings: he was locked on Becca’s channel but heard not a word or a scream, the vid was down, nothing but the sight of the egg getting hit, and the egg flying off, tumbling, at ten, twenty, thirty meters per second. He wasn’t sure. His own egg was rotating, and she’d passed out of his field of view.

“Becca’s hit, oh fuck oh fuck, Becca’s hit, I’m going that way, I’m going that way…” He slammed over the joystick.

Nothing happened.

He slammed it again.

Nothing happened.

Martinez: “I’m coming, I’m coming…”

Sandy called Becca once, twice, three times, got nothing back.

One of the techs called from the egg base: “Sandy, your egg’s screwed. Stay off the electronics… stay off the electronics…”

“Becca’s hit, you gotta—”

His microphone shut down—Martinez could do that from his command egg—and Martinez said, “Shut up and listen. I’m in my egg, but it’s gonna take a couple minutes to get out there. The data feeds say you’ve got a fire in the R-Box, you’ve got to pull the flush ring for R. Can you pull the ring?”

The emergency panel was overhead and Sandy swatted the cover away, saw the red flush ring for R, and pulled it.

“R ring pulled. Joe, you gotta move. She was hit hard. Jesus, she was hit, I can’t see her, my maneuvering gear is all red—”

“Sandy, I’m losing your data feeds, I don’t know if it’s the fire, I think that’s gone but it’s possible the metal is still hot and is reigniting, but the feeds are going down one by one.”

“What about Becca? You gotta get going… you gotta go—”

“Do you have a status on your air?”

“No, not anymore. I’m dead in the water, man, all the vids are going out, they went yellow and then red and now they’re going out. The LEDs are still powered, but they’re going to red, too, I’m not gonna be any help.”

“Listen. Did you take that bag of cookies with you?”

“What? What? Cookies…”

“Listen to me, man. The cookies. Did you eat the cookies?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Joe? Are you out—”

Martinez’s voice was cool, but sharp: “Sandy, this is important. Did you eat those cookies?”

“No, no… I…”

“Look at the bag. Is the bag normal, or is it all puffed up? Is it fat?”

Sandy looked at the lunch box—the container where they kept the food, picked up the bag of cookies. It looked like somebody had been pumping air into it.

“It’s fat. It’s like a ball.”

“Goddamnit. You’re leaking air, your pressure is dropping. Hold real still, spit a little, just easy, small drops of spit… see which way the spit drops drift…”

“Tell me about Becca…”

“Becca’s a separate problem and we’re working on it,” Martinez said. “We’ve also got to work on your problem. Spit.”

Sandy spit, and the tiny drops of saliva hovered in front of his face for a second, then another, and then they began drifting down to his right. As he did that, he heard Martinez shouting over the open link, “Elroy! Elroy! Call Butler and see what the situation is with the other eggs,” and “Sandy, what happened with the spit?”

“They’re drifting down to my right, not outward… it’s not centrifugal force… they’re going down behind the seat, I can’t see… Joe, I think if there’s a crack, it’s probably in the bottom of the interior shell. I can’t reach it.”

“Shit. You smell anything?”

“No, I—”

Sandy’s microphone went dead, and so did the sound feed coming in; a new red LED light began blinking up and to his left. Now he really was dead in the water, and not only that, he was isolated from the others.

He couldn’t see the ship itself, but he could see one section of the radiators, which seemed to be moving along in a smooth flow. It had been the other one where the problem occurred, he thought.

The interior lights flickered, and another LED popped up: the lights had gone to emergency battery power, and the emergency batteries were in the ceiling, away from the impact zone. He should have light.

Anything he could do to help himself? Nothing came to mind. He looked up at the emergency box, and a half-dozen additional flush rings. Couldn’t hurt to pull them, he thought: they were basically fire extinguishers, mechanically operated, and the egg was dead, anyway. He pulled them all, one at a time.

His egg continued its slow tumble, the ship was now below his feet. Then he picked up Becca’s egg. He almost missed it: it looked like a large dim star, and he wouldn’t have noticed it at all except that it was moving. Maybe three or four kilometers away, he thought, though he didn’t know for sure.

Nothing, nobody was going after it.

He screamed at it: “Becca! Becca!”