Armis was still twenty meters from the cylinder when Brogden came fully conscious. He announced the event with a string of curses directed at the fates, safety lines, his left leg, and space in general.
“Leg broken?” Armis asked when the other began to run out of steam.
“Yes, it’s broken. Yes, I filled the leg with patch to immobilize it. Yes, I triggered the yellow pain injector, not the blue one, so I am still conscious and able to function and very aware that I really want to take the blue pain shot, too,” Brogden dispensed with the standard first aid checklist in an angry rush. “Where the hell is rescue?”
“I’m it,” Armis answered.
Firing his jets, he abandoned the harpoon and leapt for the axis of the cylinder’s tumble, the safest boarding point. Matching vectors was tricky; he was almost too late in swinging his legs up to absorb the impact. He hit with a jolt and nearly bounced free before his boot magnets engaged. Not trusting their power, he stooped quickly and clipped his own line to a safety ring.
Through his boots he felt the ring of the harpoon’s impact. No doubt it was smashed, its casing no match for the massive cylinder.
He located Brogden’s safety line almost instantly, which didn’t surprise him. The fact that the other cadet was spiraling almost lazily behind the cylinder instead of swinging wildly through space had told him the safety line was anchored near the center of the spin.
Planting his feet widely to absorb torque, he began hauling the line in.
“What are you doing?” Brogden demanded through grit teeth. “That’s my damn leg you’re jerking around.”
“Simplifying the dynamics,” Armis answered, grunting with effort. For a moment he envied the planet-born their massive musculature.
At last he had the larger man in hand. Armis wasted no time in lacing the safety line through two pairs of rings, passing it across Brogden’s body several times as he bound him securely to the cylinder.
“I’m getting tired of asking you what you’re doing.”
“Keeping you from bouncing around,” Armis replied.
“I was fine,” Brogden said. “Where the hell is rescue?”
“I’m it,” Armis repeated.
Brogden digested that as Armis worked his way toward the valve assembly. From their perspective, Kathil rose at the blunt end of the cylinder and arced above their heads at dizzying speed before setting beneath the flared shroud of the outlet nozzles.
“We’re falling,” Brogden pronounced at last.
“Right.”
The cylinder was tumbling fast enough that there was a faint sensation of “down” pressing him against the titanium steel as Armis reached the base of the shroud. That was nothing compared to the vertigo induced by the wildly streaking stars and blur of Kathil swinging past. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the cylinder beneath his feet.
“You’ve got a plan.” It wasn’t a question.
“Going to use a simple reaction drive,” Armis said, wishing he could wipe away the sweat that was seeping past his headband.
“Ah.”
The shroud was meant to shield the nozzles and valves until final connection. It was designed to open out in sections, like the petals of a flower, as the nozzles and valves it protected slid into a gasketted port in the work station’s hull. There was no way for Armis to either jettison the shroud or open it; he was going to have to climb inside to reach the water tank’s controls. His job was made a little easier by the rings of handholds meant to facilitate muscling the massive cylinder through the last millimeters of connection. Armis leaned forward, stretching himself along the grey metal, and gripped one of these tightly.
“Unclip my safety line, will you?” he asked.
“You anchored?”
Safety protocols even now. Especially now.
“Yes.”
“Line is free.”
The electric motor at his waist retracted the line with maddening slowness as Armis counted his heartbeats. He figured he had six minutes in which to either succeed or fail. He knew the station gave him a bit more, but he trusted his instincts more than their calculations.
“How are you going to stop the tumble?” Brogden asked.
“Can’t,” Armis said simply.
Catching the end of his safety line, he reached above his head, clipping it to the handhold.
“Loquacious,” Brogden said. “Anyone ever tell you you were loquacious? You just talk too damn much.”
Armis grinned.
“Good to have you back in gear,” he said. “You understand the plan?”
“You’re going inside the nozzle shroud,” Brogden answered. “You’re going to manually vent water—we’ve got what, six thousand liters under pressure here? —and hope it’s got enough thrust to push us back in orbit.”
“We’d need three of these tanks to make orbit,” Armis corrected. “I’m going for one bounce to buy us enough time for rescue to get here.”
“One problem.”
“One?”
“If the cylinder’s tumbling and you’re inside the shroud working the valves,” Brogden said, “You won’t know when we’re pointed the right way. How will you know when to open and shut the valves?”
“That’s why I brought you along,” Armis explained. “Time our rotation. Shout ‘open’ and ‘close’ at the right times. Physics will do the rest.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Brogden objected. “That’s seat-of-the-pants astrogation. You’re way better at that than I am. You sit out here and I’ll work the valves.”
“Even if both legs worked,” Armis countered, “You wouldn’t fit inside the shroud assembly.”
He waited a moment, but Brogden had no answer for that.
Gripping the handhold tightly with both hands, Armis chinned his boot magnets off. The angular acceleration of tumbling cylinder immediately swung his body around. He barely suppressed a gasp of pain as his body snapped taut, his feet swinging against the wildly spinning sky.
“Hang in there, Half Pint,” Brogden’s voice was soft in his ear, as though the big man didn’t want to startle him into losing his grip.
Armis grunted an acknowledgement.
One hand at a time, he reversed his grip on the handhold, twisting his body so that he was facing the open maw of the shroud assembly. Pulling his knees toward his chest,
