thrusters during the maneuver. There was a collision, but hull integrity is uncompromised and ship systems undamaged. I will evaluateMidnight Runner’s current motion and try to discover whether it is possible to attempt another rendezvous.”
Sula ceased transmission, watchedRunner spin away through the void, and slowly came to the realization that she was now off the hook. The vehicle telemetry she’d sent to Operations would show Blitsharts’s thrusters firing and ruining the rendezvous. She could hardly be blamed for not attempting rendezvous again, not with a target that was tumbling in a more dangerous pattern.
The mission had failed, and it wasn’t her fault. All she had to do was take a close look atMidnight Runner’s new, more complex tumbling pattern, then decide it was too dangerous to attempt.
And the failure would beBlitsharts’s fault.No blame will attach …For once, perhaps for the only time in her service career, that statement would actually be true.
She was free to abandon the mission.
For a long moment Sula listened to the air circulate through the cockpit and wondered why she didn’t feel like celebrating.
She nudged the controls and sent her pinnace afterMidnight Runner. She parked again along the axis of theRunner’s spin, and slowly eyeballed the yacht as it tumbled. Yes, the movement was more complex. More dangerous.
If she went in for the rendezvous again, she’d have to do it faster, finish it before she passed out.
What do you meanif? she demanded of herself. Surely she wasn’t going through with this.
“Display: go virtual,” she commanded.
Space expanded in her skull as her view of the cockpit faded. The yacht rolled in the void of stars.
“Display: show only images within one light-second.”
The stars, and the brighter star that was Vandrith, winked out. When the pinnace was tumbling, the frenzied dance of the stars were both a distraction and a temptation to motion sickness.
“Display: freeze motion. Display: link pointer to hand controls. Display: pointer is now at target. Display: attach artificial horizon to target at pointer. Display: resume motion. Display: link hand controls to maneuvering thrusters.”
With these commands, Sula used her attitude controls to manipulate a virtual “pointer” in the display, attaching an artificial horizon—a flat open gridiron colored a highly artificial fluorescent orange—to the skin of Blitsharts’s boat. This now rolled and pirouetted along with the yacht’s motion, a flat plane that danced in a frenzied circle around her.
With further commands, she narrowed the artificial horizon until it was only a strip, an orange carpet that led right to the point onMidnight Runner where she could successfully grapple.
“Display,” she commanded, “reverse angle.”
Instantly, her perspective faced directly away from the yacht, and she saw only the artificial horizon in its frenetic dance around her. There were no distractions in the display, no massive prow coming around to threaten her. All she would have to do was match her own boat’s motion to the artificial horizon, then back up along the orange carpet till she met theRunner.
And of course do it without getting killed. That being the sticky part.
She realized then that she had decided to make the attempt, and wondered when that decision had come. She had every justification in the world to back off—she had no reason to think that Captain Blitsharts was alive—and had every cause to fear the outcome.
But still,she thought.But still…
Maybe she was just stubborn.
She closed her helmet and triggered the comm unit. “Cadet Sula to Operations Control. I’m going to try once again.”
As soon as she ended the transmission, her hands went to the maneuvering controls and—before she could change her mind—she began triggering jets. She wasn’t going slowly this time, no cautious addition of yaw to roll to pitch, but moving in all three planes at once.Don’t think about it, she told herself,just do it.
Vertigo surfed through Sula’s skull. She felt gravity tug at her lips and cheek, felt her suit clamp down on her arms and legs. She kept her eyes focused on the strip of dancing bright orange, on making the dancing orange carpet stand still.
The orange horizon moved only in two planes now. Stinging acid rose to her throat, and she fought it back down, clamping her jaw and neck muscles to send blood to the brain. Now the horizon moved only in one plane, bobbing up and down like the bow of a rowboat, until she stilled that movement as well. Her stomach took a sudden lunge into her throat, and she battled it back down.
“Display: reverse angle.” The words fell from her lips like a faint prayer. Suddenly the angle was reversed, and she sawMidnight Runner standing still in the blackness, the bright orange carpet fixed to its back. She nudged both controls, and the yacht crept closer. She could feel tears whipping across her face as the boat’s frenzied gravities tore them from her eyes, and was thankful that tears could not blur the virtual display burning in her mind.
But gravities would. The orange carpet was not as bright as once it had been. Her vision was going black. She could barely see theRunner’s shiny black prow as it slid under her. She braked, hoping she had slowed her boat’s movement to a crawl, and as her vision darkened she cried out, “Grapples: engage!”
Both the yacht and the Fleet pinnace were made of layers of resinous polymer stiffened by longitudinal polycarbon beams—nothing a magnetic grapple would adhere to. But ferrous degaussing strips ran the length of the hull, charged to repel radiation, and these provided a lodging for the grapples.
There was a shuddering boom as the two hulls came together, followed by a tone in Sula’s headset that told her the grapples had successfully adhered. And then she was working the thruster controls again, fighting the two boats’ mad tumble through emptiness.
“Display: kill the artificial horizon! Display: show the plane of the ecliptic!” The words came from her in a choked scream. Two boats were heavier than the pinnace alone, and sluggish to respond to the controls. She could barely see the plane of the ecliptic even as it was projected onto her visual centers, a green gridiron that flashed over and around and across…
She battled the swinging weight of the locked boats, and then a new jolt of terror shrieked through her nerves as she felt somethingelse resisting her—Runner’s thrusters were firing again. Blitsharts was fighting her. Fury at this treachery raged in her heart. She battled on, struggling against the chaotic movement, battling to remain conscious as her vision darkened…A wail rose to her throat, a bubbling cry of frustration and anger.
The boat juddered and moaned as gravities warred within its frame. Then Sula gave a shout of triumph as she realized her vision was returning. She saw the plane of the ecliptic rolling around her in a simple pattern…she applied thrust, damping the ship’s oscillations, then felt a surge of weary triumph as the gridiron plane stilled, stretched like a carpet beneath her feet from one horizon to the other.
Blitsharts’s boat gave a single blast from its thrusters, and Sula corrected easily, feeling little but irritation at this last rebellion.
She discontinued the virtual display, then had to shake tears and sweat from her eyes before she could see at her cockpit. Wearily, gasping for breath and fighting the rebellious stomach that still pitched and rolled inside her, she called up ship diagnostics. No damage, no hull punctures, antimatter safely contained.
She opened her faceplate and wiped her face. Acid burned in her throat, on her tongue, and she took a long drink of water. Maybe it would settle her stomach.
She wiped her face again, reached for the comm board, and began to transmit.
“Cadet Sula to Operations Control. Rendezvous completed. Both craft now stabilized. In a moment I will grapple toMidnight Runner’s hatch and then try to enter.”
Once the transmission was over, she took her time before moving, waiting for the vertigo to stop swooping through her head and her stomach to stop trying to climb out her throat. Then she ungrappled, rolled her boat over onto its back, and slipped it forward alongMidnight Runner’s hull until the two dorsal hatches could mate.
She closed her faceplate again and touched the transmit button. “Cadet Sula again. I have successfully grappled hatch-to-hatch withMidnight Runner. I am going on board.”
She switched on her helmet camera to give everyone at Operations the same view she had herself, unstrapped from her acceleration couch and floated out into the weightless cockpit. Careful not to let her useless legs hit any controls, she rolled over, rolled away the plug of radiation shielding that blocked the exit at the back of the cockpit, then ghosted down the tunnel that connected the cockpit to the pinnace’s small airlock. Once there, she sealed the tunnel behind her, triggered her helmet lamp, and ordered the outside hatch to open.
The hatch obediently rolled back, presenting her with a view of Blitsharts’s own glossy black dorsal hatch. She floated to the hatch, looked at the controls, and told the hatch to open.
It did so in silence. Sula pulled herself head first intoRunner’s tiny airlock, braced her feet against the sides and wrenched the lever that should open the airlock to the interior. It refused. The controls made an annoying meeping sound. She looked at the airlock control display and surprise rang along her nerves.
“This may take a while, Control,” she said. “There’s hard vacuum in there.”
THREE
Acold weight lay on Sula’s heart. She knew what was inside.
She turned off the airlock alarm. “I’ll have to close and depressurize the lock,” she told her distant audience. “With the hatch shut, you won’t be receiving my transmissions, so I will record and transmit later.”
She closed the yacht’s hatch behind her and listened to the hiss of air flooding out into the vacuum, the hiss that grew fainter and fainter, until there was nothing left in the airlock to carry any sound. Sula braced her feet outward against the lock walls again and pulled the lever. The inner hatch opened inward in perfect silence, then caught half open.
Unlike that of the pinnace,Midnight Runner’s lock opened directly into the cockpit. With her helmet jammed against the hatch coaming, Sula could see the back of Blitsharts’s acceleration couch, with his helmet nestled in webbing. Blitsharts’s left hand floated above the thruster control, as if ready to pounce and initiate another chaotic maneuver.
Sula tilted her body to scan the cockpit with her helmet lamps, and her heart surged in shock.
The cabin interior was beautifully laid out and proportioned, custom-designed for Blitsharts himself, made for the reach of his arm, the comfort of his eye. The colors were cream accented with stripes of red, green, and yellow. But something had smashed the cockpit—it looked as if someone had gone over it with a sledgehammer. There were dents and scratches on the instrument panels and cabin walls, and even some of the readouts—built to resist heavy accelerations—had been smashed.
Worse, there was hair, and what looked like blood, smeared over the displays. Sula wondered in shock if someone had murdered Blitsharts. Chopped him up with—Withwhat? What could create such a horror?
She tried to shove open the hatch, felt increasing resistance. Something had broken loose and was caught behind it, preventing it from deploying.
Sula groped blindly behind the hatch door with a gloved hand. The obstacle was not within range at first, and she had to float in the airlock while sweeping her hand along the rim of the hatch. The movement was difficult and awkward in the vac suit, and her bruised muscles strained. Her breath rasped in her helmet, and she felt sweat prickling her forehead. Finally she found the trouble, something wet and bloody and hairy, and very, very dead.
The dog Orange. Not that he was recognizable as a dog; he was a battered mass of bloody meat, and had apparently been hurled like a missile around the cockpit as the boat tumbled, the erratic spin subjecting the poor animal to one ferocious acceleration after another.
It was the dog that had bludgeoned the interior of the cockpit, battering the instruments and smearing the compartment with his own blood. It was the dog that had hit the thruster controls and triggered the boat’s erratic tumble.
