Chapter Thirty-Two
Bowden walked into the hangar bay Murphy had mentioned, and his eyes widened to find Burg Hrensku and Malanye Raptis talking to Karas’tan Kamara in front of Kamara’s ship, which had two boxy structures—that did look very much like CONEX boxes—mounted on top of it. The RockHound nodded to him as he approached, and the others turned to gaze expectantly at him.
“Hi, umm…everyone.” When they continued to look at him, he turned to Kamara. “Uh, can I talk to you?”
“It’s okay,” Kamara replied. “This is the rest of the team.”
“Seriously?” Bowden asked, a little louder than was necessary. “Seriously?” he asked in a more conspiratorial tone. “This is just like old home week.”
Raptis’s brows knit. “What does that mean?”
Bowden smiled. “Nothing. It’s just a way of saying everyone’s back together again. I’ve spent more time in space with the three of you than anyone else. Other than Kamara, I didn’t know you’d all be part of this, and it surprised me to see you all here.”
“It appears that your Murphy called in a number of favors,” Raptis said. “With the loss of my ship, I didn’t have anything better to do, but Kamara and Hrensku had trips that had to be canceled so they could be part of this.”
Bowden scanned the hangar bay; a number of SpinDogs were walking around. “Why don’t we go inside the ship to talk?”
The others nodded and followed him into Kamara’s ship.
“So, how much do you know about what we’re supposed to do?” Bowden asked once they crowded into the ship’s small galley area.
“Only that my ship was completely repaired and refurbished for it, at no cost to me, and two modules were brought and attached to it,” Kamara said. “What can you tell us?”
“At the moment, I’m not at liberty to tell you anything other than this mission is incredibly dangerous and extremely important, and that I need your assistance to accomplish it. You can read into that whatever you’d like. Once we get to where we’re going—or at least are on our way there—I can give you more of the details.”
Kamara shook his head. “They want us to follow your directions—to do something you admit is extremely dangerous—and you won’t tell us what it is?”
“Sorry,” Bowden replied, “I’ve been sworn to secrecy.” His eyes swept across the group. “You can back out now, I guess, if you don’t want to be part of this, but I can’t give you any more information at this time.”
“I, for one, can’t back out,” Hrensku said. “The Primus asked me to do this as a favor; if I drop out, he will be greatly displeased with me.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” Bowden said with a chuckle.
Hrensku didn’t join in the mirth but looked Bowden in the eyes. “No, I wouldn’t,” he said after a moment. “You have no idea.”
“Well, I was told I’d get a new ship of my own at the end of this mission,” Raptis said with a bit more humor. “I figured it was going to be something dangerous, but everything I owned was on my old ship. When the comet ate it, it took away my life. This is my chance to start over again.”
“If you survive,” Kamara said darkly.
Raptis nodded. “If I survive.”
Bowden shrugged, and his eyes met Kamara’s. “I’m in because Murphy gave me an order, and I believe in this mission. Seems like you’re the only one with a choice. Are you in or out?”
Kamara’s eyes dropped to the table. He didn’t move for a few seconds, but then he sighed and looked back up. “Yes,” he said finally. “I am in.”
Bowden checked the hydraulic fluid level and shut the access hatch. After the accident on the planet, his preflight inspections had become very thorough. A smiling Dave Fiezel stood waiting when he turned around.
“Any problems?” the former Air Force officer asked.
“No,” Bowden replied. “I haven’t found anything that looked like sabotage since that one flight.”
“Good.” Fiezel winked and nodded to the space suit and gear he carried. “Because I’m coming with you.”
“You are? Since when did you get qualled to fly in space?”
Fiezel chuckled. “About the same time as you, apparently, but my training was a little more…under the radar, shall we say? I didn’t blow up any interface craft or rescue maidens from comets or anything like that.” He smiled. “Little did either of us know, but I was your backup for this…whatever it is.”
Bowden felt the blood rush to his cheeks. “In case I got killed? Was I nothing more than bait? Or was it because Murphy didn’t think I could cut it?”
“I don’t think so,” Fiezel said, shaking his head slowly. “I think my training was nothing more than Murphy being cautious. Bad things happen in space, and your trip to the comet could easily have gone horribly wrong. I think I was nothing more than Murphy wanting a backup option. And with everyone looking at you, I could get my training under the radar.”
“Okay,” Bowden said, a little mollified. “So why are you here? I’ve got this.”
“Yes, you do, and I wouldn’t want to take your place.” He held up a hand. “Before you ask, I don’t know any more than you do about it; in fact, I probably know even less than you do. All I know is that I’m just here to pilot the packet once you get to…wherever it is we’re going.”
Bowden nodded. “We better get at it, then. We’re already behind schedule.”
The packet launched from the habitat, and Bowden had Kamara put it on a flight path to Outpost, then everyone met in the galley.
“Are you finally going to tell us what we’re doing?” Kamara asked.
“Well, I’m going to tell you what I can for now, anyway,” Bowden said. “We’re trying to catch up with a package that launched from R’Bak yesterday for the second planet.”
Amazement—and a little shock—flew across the SpinDog’s and RockHounds’ faces. Fiezel’s remained a neutral mask. Raptis was the first to speak. “A package?” she asked. She cocked her head. “I take it this package is valuable.”
Bowden nodded. “Very valuable. And we need its contents.”
Hrensku shook his head. “If they see us, either before or after we catch up with the package, the Kulsians will kill us.”
“They will,” Bowden agreed. “Our first priority is to remain unseen.”
Kamara shook his head. “There is nothing in that package important enough for us to risk ourselves and this ship.”
“It’s more important than that,” Hrensku said. “If the Kulsians see us, it is possible they will come search us out and destroy everyone on the spins.”
Bowden nodded again. “That’s why it’s imperative we remain undetected.”
“Still,” Raptis said, “this is a near-suicide mission.”
Bowden shrugged. “And yet, I tell you that it’s necessary for not just us Terrans, but the well-being of everyone in the system.” He paused and then added, “Anyone that wants to get out at Outpost is welcome to do so.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to be at the moment,” Raptis said. “I’m still in.”
“Nothing has changed for me,” Hrensku noted. “I imagine the Primus was aware of what this mission entailed when he asked me to come. I doubt he would have done so if this mission wasn’t vital.”
Kamara nodded slowly. “True…at least to a point, I guess.”
“What does that mean?” Fiezel asked.
Kamara raised an eyebrow. “It means you have no idea of how things work here.” He shrugged. “As Burg said, though, nothing has changed. I am still in.” He shifted to look at Bowden. “If we need to go in-system, though, why are we headed to Outpost?”
Bowden smiled, happy to have at least their partial buy-in. That’s probably going to change, though, once they see what we’re really doing. “Some of you are aware of what I did back before I came here, right?”
“You flew atmospheric fighters from ships on your planet,” Hrensku said.
“Correct. On takeoff, though, we only had a hundred meters to achieve flight speed.”
“How did you do it? You certainly didn’t use RATO on a ship. Or did you?”
Bowden chuckled. “No, we didn’t. That would have made things…interesting, to say the least. No, what we used was a catapult system to get us up to speed in the shortest amount of space possible, and that got me thinking…”
“The railgun,” Kamara said, catching on. “You want to use Outpost’s railgun to get us up to speed.”
“Well, I’m not saying I want to do it that way, but that’s the only way I can think of to give us the velocity we need.”
“It won’t work,” Kamara said.
“Why’s that?”
“It’s never been done before.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It just means no one’s needed to do it before.”
“Or been stupid enough to try it,” Hrensku noted.
“Or that,” Bowden acknowledged. “Having said that, though, I looked at the design of the gun and this ship, and I think it can be done.”
Raptis shook her head. “I don’t think it will give us enough velocity.”
“Especially with whatever those modules that were added have in them,” Kamara said. “What’s in them?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” Bowden replied. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Can you tell me what their mass is, then?”
“Five thousand kilograms.”
Kamara shook his head. “The railgun won’t give us enough velocity to catch up to your package.”
“Well, no,” Bowden admitted. “Not on the initial stroke anyway. And not in its current configuration.” Not from what I did with back-of-the-napkin math. A supercomputer would figure this all out easily…if we could use any of the ones we have. “Let me tell you about baseball.”
“What’s that?” Raptis asked.
“It’s a sport we play back on Earth,” Fiezel said. “What’s that got to do with it?”
Bowden smiled. “I’m glad you asked. One of the positions is called ‘the catcher,’ and his job it to catch a ball that’s thrown as hard as the person called ‘the pitcher’ can throw it.”
“I don’t understand,” Raptis said.
“Well, I was thinking about the glove he wears to keep from breaking his hand. It’s nice and padded to absorb the force of the ball.”
“I still do not understand.”
“What would you say if we built something similar on the back of the packet and then, after launch, had the railgun fire several heavy slugs into it, giving us additional velocity?”
“I would say you are doing your best to destroy my ship,” Kamara said.
“I don’t think so,” Bowden replied. “Not if we add a shock absorber system to mitigate the instantaneous shock to the structure of the craft from catching the slugs.” And besides, it’s far more likely that the force of the catapult is going to destroy the ship by ripping off your landing gear, Bowden thought. Especially since the craft’s never been stressed—or intended—for something as stupid as that.
“That might work,” Kamara admitted. “Maybe. It would be better, though, if you used smaller slugs. It would reduce the kinetic shock from each impact and would be easier on both the ship and the crew.”
“You’re probably right,” Bowden allowed. “It would also make it easier to kick the slugs away from your ship if they were smaller.” And less likely to completely destroy us if the system fails or there’s a glancing blow to the ship.
“The downside to using more of the slugs,” Bowden continued, “is the error ratio. Whatever the fail rate is on this, the more shots that are fired, the more likely we’re going to get one off angle or out of tolerance.” He shook his head. “We need something that can increase our accuracy.”
“What about if we used some laser targeting for this?” Hrensku asked.
“Laser targeting?”
“Yes. We could place lasers on the ship and on Outpost, and fire them at each other. When the two beams are centered in the other’s reception dishes, the system can fire the slugs. That should give the system a higher accuracy rate and reduce the chances of failure.”
And take the onus of aiming off the backs of the half-witted local computers, Bowden thought. He nodded. “What do you think?” he asked, looking at Kamara.
Kamara chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then nodded slowly. “It might work.”
“Good,” Bowden said. “There’s one more thing…”
“What?” Kamara asked. “You haven’t come up with enough ways to kill us yet?”
“In order for us to be light enough for the railgun to give us enough initial velocity, we’re going to have to remove a lot of the craft’s cosmic ray shielding.”
Hrensku nodded. “You do want us to die.”
“No, I don’t,” Bowden said. “But I do want us to succeed. To do so, we’re going to need to dump a lot of the water that provides the shielding.”
“Out of the question,” Kamara stated.
“It’s not forever,” Bowden replied. “I have a plan.”
“Of course you do,” Raptis said. “Can you share it with us, or are you not at liberty to tell us this, either?”
“The plan is easy. Before we launch, we use the railgun to fire several pods down our line of travel at a slower velocity than we’ll be traveling. As we pass them, we scoop them up. Then, once we are safely away from Outpost, the railgun can go back to its normal operation of shooting pods, except it will be shooting pods to us that are full of the rest of the water and fuel we’ll need for the mission, and we can replenish them en route. Since the pods don’t have passengers, they could be launched by the railgun at extremely high gees.”
“You’re really serious about this,” Kamara said.
“I am,” Bowden replied. “It does two things for us: not only does it allow the mass of the ship to be extremely light at launch, but it doesn’t increase our total signature. Each of the supply containers can be kept relatively small and made of lightweight materials that will be extremely difficult to detect.”
Raptis shook her head. “There’s only one problem with all that.”
“What’s that?”
“Who’s going to go out and capture all these pods? You?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bowden replied. “The cargo will handle the acquisition and retrieval of the supply pods.”
“The cargo?” Raptis asked. “You mean there are people in those boxes?”
“Yes, there are, and yes, they are trained in EVA operations. They are coming to help recover the package we are going after; they can bring the supply pods aboard and pump the additional water and fuel into the tanks. We’ll need to stay in a relatively small area of the ship at the start, but as more and more of the water is brought aboard, we’ll have full access to the entire ship.”
Bowden looked at the faces of the crew and saw a mixture of disbelief. “Okay, I don’t like it any more than you do, and I know it makes you put a lot of trust into people you don’t know really well, but I am here to tell you that they can, and they will, get it done.”
“Are you willing to bet your life on this?” Hrensku asked.
It’s gotta be Tapper, and if I can’t trust him, who can I trust? Bowden nodded. “I already am.”
Hrensku sighed. “Then I will as well.”
“I’m in, too,” Fiezel said quickly.
“I’m too much of a mercenary to give up the chance to get a ship out of this,” Raptis added. “I am in.”
Everyone looked at Kamara. After a few seconds, he jerked his head in a single nod. “Against my better judgment, I—and my ship—are in, too.”
Bowden nodded back. “Outstanding. We’re pressed for time on this, so we need to get everything in place as soon as possible.”
The meeting broke up immediately after, with Kamara, Raptis, and Hrensku going to see what Kamara had that could be used for the “catcher’s mitt” and the laser targeting system. Fiezel stayed and pursed his lips. “Were you really going to let them leave at Outpost if they weren’t onboard with the mission?” he asked in a whisper.
Bowden shook his head. “Think Murphy would have allowed that?”
“No. What were you going to do if someone had wanted to get off?”
Bowden shrugged. “Whatever it took to stop them or convince them to continue.” Including using the pistol that’s in my gear if it had proven necessary. Happily it wasn’t…this time.