Titan

12 April 2096: Pancho’s ride

Holly and Wunderly, sitting side by side in the darkened cubicle, heard the radio interchange between Pancho and Wanamaker.

“She’s got Manny!” Holly exclaimed.

Wunderly leaned on the communications key. “The samples,” she asked. “Did you get samples from the ring?”

Wanamaker puffed, “Don’t know.”

“I’m so goddamned coated with ice I don’t know what went down in the ring,” Gaeta answered, sounding more than a little annoyed. “I had the sample boxes open when I started, that’s all I can tell you right now.”

“Make sure the boxes are sealed before you get into the ship,” Wunderly pleaded. “Otherwise the samples will melt.”

Pancho’s voice cut in. “We’ll do what we can, Nadia. Now get off the circuit and let us get the hell home in one piece.”

Down in the makeshift control center, Kris Cardenas gritted her teeth with anger as she listened to Wunderly’s demands.

Manny could get killed and all she’s worried about is her goddamned samples, Cardenas grumbled to herself.

Tavalera was standing before the pasted-up display screens like a statue, watching what was happening out there in the rings but totally unable to do anything about anything. Timoshenko stood on Tavalera’s other side, scowling at the displays. Cardenas saw the frustration on their perspiration-sheened faces. She felt it herself. There’s nothing we can do! It’s all up to Pancho now.

“We’re in the airlock,” came Wanamaker’s voice. “Closing the outer hatch.”

Cardenas’s heart nearly leaped out of her mouth. They’ve got him!

Before she could say anything, Tavalera let out a whoop and jumped into the air. Timoshenko turned and grabbed Cardenas in an impromptu bear hug, squeezing her with all the energy pent up in him for the past hour or more.

“They got him!” he shouted into her ear. “They got him!”

Manny’s safe, Cardenas thought. For the moment.

Wanamaker made certain that the airlock control panel showed green: the lock was fully pressurized with air. Only then did he press the stud that opened the inner hatch.

The hatch swung outward. Wanamaker saw that the ice coating Gaeta’s excursion suit was already melting. And the insulated sample boxes on the suit’s chest were shut tight.

“Can you move your legs?” he asked Gaeta.

The suit creaked, its servomotors buzzed wearily. Gaeta’s right arm moved slowly, ice cracking off it and floating in weightless shards. He wiped at his visor.

“C‘mon,” Pancho’s voice called. “We’re headin’ straight into the ring. Get inside and hang on to somethin’.”

Like a statue slowly coming to life, Gaeta clumped over the hatch’s sill and into the cargo bay. Wanamaker didn’t bother to remove his nanosuit. Swiftly, he detached the sample boxes and put them carefully into the cryogenic freezer standing against the bulkhead. He heard the freezer’s interior mechanism sliding the boxes from the input slot to the liquid-helium-cooled storage compartment.

“Hang on,” Pancho called. “Ready or not, here we go.”

Turning back to Gaeta, Wanamaker saw that the cargo bay was misty, hazy. But he could see Gaeta’s face through his visor again.

“Ice melted off my suit,” Gaeta said. “And all my systems are back in the green. Whatever shorted them out, the systems have come back on.”

“Good. Stay inside the suit. You’ll be safer. We can vacuum the water out through the airlock once we’re clear of the ring.”

“Maybe Nadia’ll want us to keep it, take samples from it.”

Wanamaker felt his brows knitting. “We’ll have to figure out some way to store it in a bottle, I guess.”

In the cockpit Pancho paid scant attention to their conversation. “You two lugs tied down good? It’s gonna get bumpy in about half a minute.”

“I’m in foot loops,” Wanamaker answered. “Manny’s boots are too big for them.” Then he remembered that Gaeta’s boots were magnetic.

“Grab on to something and hang on. This might get rough.”

Pancho had cut off the outside comm circuit once Wunderly started making demands. Got enough to do in here without worrying about her samples, she told herself. Before her conscience could remind her, she added, I know. I know. The whole reason for this mission is the dratted samples. But now I gotta worry about three lives.

Gripping the T-shaped control stick on the instrument panel with her right hand, Pancho was unable to suppress a tight smile. Been a long time since you’ve had to do any real flying, she said to herself. Now we’re gonna see how good you still are.

In the observation port before her Pancho saw the B ring rushing toward her, interwoven braids of ice particles with some darker, sootier areas off to her left. With deft touches on the controls, she swung the spacecraft in the same direction that the ring particles were rotating. Less difference between their velocity and ours, the less chance of us getting banged up.

But she knew the craft was going to get hit. There’s a gazillion chunks of ice up there and we’ve got to push through ’em, like it or not. The spacecraft didn’t have enough thrust to completely reverse its course and avoid the ring altogether. The best Pancho could do was to slice through the ring at as steep an angle as possible, minimizing the time they spent in the ring.

The collision alarm pinged. Starting already, Pancho thought.

“Here we go,” she said, more to herself than the two men hanging on in the cargo bay.

It was like skydiving into a glacier, falling into an endless field of ice. But this glacier wasn’t solid, it was composed of countless myriads of ice particles.

Pancho goosed the main engines slightly and felt the push of thrust sway her backward a little. She remembered a crash on the Moon that had torn one of her foot loops right out of the deck and broken her leg. Nothing that bad now, she thought. Not yet, anyway.

The collision alarm’s chime was constant now, like a one-note music box gone wild. Pancho stabbed at the alarm’s control and shut it off. I know we’re getting peppered, she said silently. Nothing big enough to punch through the meteor shield, so far.

She realized she wasn’t in a suit. Stupid damn fool! If the cockpit gets punctured I’m dead.

No time for it now. She couldn’t leave the controls, not even for the few moments it would take to pull on a nanosuit.

Pancho tasted blood in her mouth and realized she had bitten her tongue. Dumbass broad, that’s what I am. Why the hell—

“Jake!” she called, surprised at how panicked her own voice sounded. “Get up here. Quick! And bring an air bottle.”

She saw a gleaming white boulder no more than a hundred meters to the ship’s right, rolling, tumbling along. And getting closer. A quick glance at the radar screen: nothing but hash, too many objects bouncing blips back at the receiver.

Gently, gently she eased the control stick left. The boulder drifted slightly away but tumbled along beside the ship as if accompanying her, waiting for Pancho to make the slightest mistake so it could plow into the spacecraft and demolish it.

Don’t let it mesmerize you, Pancho reminded herself, forcing her eyes off its gleaming bulk. You gotta look in all directions as once. She glanced its way again and it was noticeably smaller, falling away from her.

The collision monitor’s screen was blinking like the spasmodic eye of a lunatic. Pressure’s still holding, Pancho saw. We haven’t been punctured.

Wanamaker ducked into the cockpit, still in his nanosuit, his face white, eyes staring.

“You’re not suited up!”

“Take the controls,” Pancho said, grabbing the green cylinder of air from his gloved hands.

She swung weightlessly through the hatch with one hand, let the green bottle hang in midair as she frantically pulled a nanosuit from the storage locker and wormed her long legs into it.

The ship lurched and slammed her against the bulkhead.

“Sorry,” Wanamaker called from the cockpit.

Too busy to reply, Pancho pulled the suit on, attached the air bottle, and saw the hood inflate around her face. She breathed a sigh of canned air, then stepped back into the cockpit.

“Thanks, Jake,” she murmured as she took over the controls again.

“We’re almost out of it,” he said, pointing to the observation port. Pancho could see stars and even the crescent shape of a moon through the swarming ice particles. Must be Titan, she thought.

A sudden thump sent them both staggering. The cockpit hatch slammed shut and the life support monitor said with mechanical calm, “Pressure loss in cargo bay. Hull puncture in section six-a.”

Gripping the controls again, Pancho shouted, “Jake, you okay?”

“Okay,” Wanamaker answered shakily.

“Manny? Okay?”

“Yeah,” Gaeta’s voice came through the intercom. “Got banged around a little inside the suit.”

“But you’re okay?”

“Fine. All the water vapor’s siphoned out of the bay, though.”

“How big a hole we got there?”

A moment’s hesitation. “I can’t see any hole. Must be microscopic.”

“We got hit by something bigger’n microscopic,” Pancho said. “Maybe one of the sheepdog moonlets.”

Wanamaker said, “Whatever hit us must’ve expended most of its energy on the meteor shield and only blew a tiny hole through the hull.”

“Maybe,” Pancho conceded. She took a swift scan of the instruments. Pressure in the cargo bay down to nothing, but here in the cockpit we’re okay. Good thing I got into the suit, though. Collision rate’s dropping. We’re coming out of the ring. Good thing about the suit. If we’d’a been punctured here in the cockpit I’d be dead.

“We’re almost clear,” Wanamaker said, a smile breaking out on his weatherbeaten face.

Pancho reactivated the collision alarm’s chime. It was down to a lullaby.

“I think we made it,” she said to Wanamaker.

“I’ll go back to the bay and see how Manny’s getting along.”

“He’ll hafta stay inside the suit until we dock at the habitat. Cargo bay’s the only space big enough for him to climb outta the suit, and it’s open to vacuum now.”

“Right,” said Wanamaker, opening the hatch. The air pressure in the cockpit remained normal. Pancho realized the hatch of the cargo bay must also have closed automatically.

“Oh, Jake,” she called. “Check the freezer, make sure it isn’t damaged.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” Wanamaker said, grinning and tossing her a crisp salute.

Pancho grinned at him. But her face contorted in surprised terror as she turned back and saw an ice chunk big as an apartment building dead ahead. She yanked the controls and it dropped from her view.

Wanamaker and Gaeta both yelled in a fervent blend of Spanglish and seaman’s cursing.

“Sorry about that,” Pancho called to them, realizing they had nearly run smack into one of the shepherding moonlets that orbited just along the edge of the ring.

“For what it’s worth,” she added, her grin returning, “we’re in the clear now.”