24
The small cabin of the Specter shuttle was becoming as familiar to Marshall as his own quarters back aboard ship. He’d become as fastidious with it as his spacers had been with their suits, a fact he’d realized when he’d become annoyed with himself after finding switches misconfigured from their last excursion. It had taken an extra ten minutes to find and correct the problem after it had prevented him from powering up the little spacecraft.
And he was still mad at himself, checking and rechecking instruments and settings as they approached RQ39, determined not to waste any more time. Wylie might still be occupying the command seat, but he was leaving much of this sortie for Marshall to fly. The need to perform was not lost on him.
Rosie floated by the secondary control panel next to him, working the directional antenna to pinpoint the source of the mystery biomonitor signals. “A watched pot never boils, sir.”
“How’s that?”
She pointed at the cuff of his pressure suit. “You keep checking your watch. That means you’re in a hurry, and pilots who get in a hurry tend to make mistakes. And since I’m not a pilot, that means I’m counting on you to not make mistakes. You’re making me nervous, sir.”
He looked away sheepishly. “Sorry. Just pissed off with myself.”
She laughed. “Over a dead battery? That’s why they keep spares on the charger, sir. You think you’re the first pilot who forgot to isolate the backup bus?”
Marshall shot a glance toward Wylie up at the forward controls. He hadn’t mentioned it, which should tell him something. “I guess it is easy to miss.”
“Wouldn’t know, I’m not a pilot,” she said, following his gaze. “But yeah, it happens a lot. Even to the salty ones.”
Marshall nodded, silently wondering how long it would take him to get “salty.”
“You’re getting there, sir,” Rosie said, reading his mind. “This run’s been a steep learning curve. It’s felt like a full six-month float and we’ve only been out for a couple of weeks.”
The asteroid loomed large in their windows. Almost ten kilometers across, it was enough to have a perceptible, if weak, gravity field. Marshall pulsed their nose thrusters, parking them far enough away to keep from being drawn any closer. They hovered along its eastern limb while she listened on the biomonitor’s frequency.
“Got it,” she said. “Loud and clear, bearing two-nine-four, z minus three-zero degrees. Can you translate us port?”
“Stand by.” First marking the bearing on a digital map of the asteroid, Marshall pushed against the control stick, goosing the starboard thrusters to move them in the opposite direction. The gray, pebbled surface passed slowly in front of them.
“Lost them,” Rosie said as she tried turning the antenna to follow. “Can’t keep up with the lateral motion.”
After a few minutes, Marshall brought them to stop along RQ39’s western limb. Rosie’s eyes were shut in concentration as she gently tweaked the antenna controls, one hand keeping her headset pressed into her ear.
“Got it . . . got it! Zero-four-four, minus three-one degrees. I think we’ve got them, sir.”
Marshall marked this new bearing on his kneeboard tablet, almost directly on top of the first. “It sure looks like it. Good work.” He flicked his mic switch. “Borman, Specter. We’ve pinpointed their location. Request permission to proceed.”
Poole answered quickly, no doubt following them from his perch in the cupola with his ever-present binoculars. “You’re go for approach, Specter. Hold at fifty meters.”
“You sure this is the spot?” They orbited alongside RQ39, holding at fifty meters directly above where they’d expected to find the Jiang’s remains. “I don’t see anything.”
Rosie tuned the antenna while Nikki Harper looked out through the topside windows. “Signal’s really strong here, sir. This has to be it. There’s a heat source in the same vicinity too.”
“That’d be their surface experiment package,” he said, craning his neck and leaning farther into the window. “It was solar powered, those panels ought to make it easy to spot.”
He backed the shuttle away, moving them farther out to expand their field of view. As he did, a glint of light coming from a depression in the regolith caught their attention.
“There!” Rosie exclaimed. “At your two o’clock, sir. Can you bring us overhead?”
Marshall nodded and gave the controls a gentle tap back. Thrusters kicked beneath them and they drifted up and right. A final kick left them floating above a boxy metallic framework beneath two black semicircular fans: the In Situ Resource Unit and its unfolded solar panels. A tangle of cables and hoses glimmered in the harsh sunlight, running from the unit and disappearing into the shadow of an overhang.
“That’s their ISRU,” Marshall said. “No sign of either of them, though. Maybe dust clinging to their suits blended them in against the surface. If it’s anything like moondust—that stuff’s supposed to get into everything.”
“I don’t know, sir,” she said, leaning into the window herself. “I get the feeling this place isn’t like the Moon, or anything else for that matter.”
He turned to face her. “Ready to go investigate, then?”
“Walk on an asteroid?” she asked, for a moment forgetting why they were there. She exchanged looks with Harper. “Sorry, sir. I shouldn’t be, well . . .”
He laid a gloved hand on an arm of her suit. “It’s okay to be eager so long as we don’t lose sight of why we’re here. That’s not something I worry about with you.”
Marshall let her go first, keeping them parked above the Jiang’s presumed EVA site. She pushed away from the shuttle’s aft hatch and slowly floated across the gulf between them and the asteroid, feet first and trailing an extra tether behind her. When she made contact—“touching down” might be too strong a term in such feeble gravity—a cloud of gravel spread from beneath her feet and slowly settled back onto the surface. She bounced back herself slightly, having to give her maneuvering unit thrusters a tap to remain standing on the surface.
She’d been unusually silent for a while. “How’s it going down there?” Marshall prompted.
“I guess that’s one giant leap for me,” she said. “It’s weird, sir. Be careful when you come down.” She dragged one foot across the surface. “You can’t really walk on this, gravity’s not nearly strong enough. Feels weird. It’s not noticeable until it is, you know? It pulls at you just enough to be a nuisance. Standing’s kind of on purpose if that makes sense. It’s like you’re in your own orbit, your feet are just touching the ’roid.”
Which was exactly the truth, he thought. “What can you see?”
“Rocks.” There was a crackle of static as she moved forward, suggesting some mild electrical discharge as she stirred up the regolith. “Lots of rocks. It’s like the surface is covered with a blanket of loose gravel. Solid underneath, though.”
“You aren’t too far from their surface equipment. What can you see from there?”
“Heading there now,” she said, and he watched her launch across the surface in one clean, continuous hop. “Using my MMU instead of trying to walk on this.”
Rosie and Harper landed near the equipment setup, stirring up another cloud of gravel that stubbornly clung to her boots with static electricity. This was going to get real annoying real fast if they didn’t figure out a way to compensate for it. She shook each foot, sending pebbles flying in all directions. “How do you read me, sir?” The crackling radio channel suggested the answer.
“Loud but broken. How me?”
“About the same. I’m going to limit movement to the MMU as much as possible.”
“Makes sense. What’s it look like down there?”
The resource extraction package was a short hop away: a square, open cage of aluminum alloys atop four legs set into the rock. Beneath it, a drill shaft was embedded in the surface. The cage held foil-wrapped storage tanks and mineral processors encased in their own composite shells. Its control box was sturdy and simple, built to function in harsh and unpredictable environments. It looked to be framed in high-strength plastic, cheap and more importantly nonconductive.
“ISRU’s clean and pristine, sir.” She lifted a protective cover beneath a row of status lights, all of them green. “It’s drilled into the surface, looks like it’s been running for a while.” She whistled as she read off quantities. “Must have found a vein of subsurface ice, because it’s been cracking a ton of oxygen and hydrogen.”
“At least they’ll have proved their hypothesis,” Marshall said. “So this wasn’t for nothing.”
“Not sure where it’s all going, though,” she answered. There were umbilical lines leading away from the extractor into the nearby overhang she’d seen from overhead. “Weird.”
She jumped up and flew over to the outcropping, using the MMU’s jets to bring her back down in front of the opening. The lines led inside, behind a Mylar blanket draped over the opening. She pushed it aside to see the silhouettes of two pairs of boots lying atop a thin bed of gravel. She flicked on her helmet lamp, illuminating the inside of the little cavern they’d laid themselves to rest in. There they lay, two lifeless forms in dust-covered EVA suits, side by side beneath a rock overhang far from home.
Her heart sank. She’d come looking for them but hadn’t really known what to expect when she found them. She waved for Nikki Harper to follow.
“Report.” She must have been standing there for a while because he sounded anxious. For a boot officer, he’d been unusually patient so far.
“I’ve found them, sir. Stand by, please.”
What must that have been like? she wondered. They’d come here fully expecting to die. What goes through a person’s mind then?
Her mind went back to space survival and rescue school: “SEAL training with math.” And it had been the toughest experience she’d ever faced. Between the physical and academic expectations, the washout rate had been on the order of ninety percent. The single worst exercise, or “training evolution” in typically anodyne mil-speak, had been the suit isolation drill: a full day, encased in an EVA suit, lying in a darkened vacuum chamber with steadily draining life support and no outside communication. It would be entirely up to the trainee to be in touch with their own body enough to stretch their consumables well beyond suit design limits, the goal being to survive until the lights and air came back on without having the safety crew come pull you out early.
The idea was to test the prospective rescue spacer’s psychological limits in simulated deep-space isolation, on the theory that this could—in fact would—happen someday. “Somebody out there is going to be experiencing what may be the last day of their lives and it’s up to you to pull them out of it. You will have to stay with them and keep them alive until you can both be rescued. The farther out people go, the higher probability of them getting into bad trouble.”
It hadn’t been the physically hardest part of training, but the combination of total isolation and dwindling resources had pushed her to her limits. She was in fact ready to push the big red “I quit” button just as the chamber’s lights came back on.
Staring at the couple lying before her, she trembled. They hadn’t had that luxury. They came here knowing this would become their graves. And there they lay, holding hands, together to the end.
She felt a catch in her throat. A tear welled up, sticking to her eye in the near-complete absence of gravity. Irritated, she shook her head to knock it free. It rippled out of her field of view, slowly traveling down to settle on her neck ring.
She unspooled a rescue tether from her utility harness to clip onto one of the lifeless forms. She brushed at a thin layer of dust just beneath the suit’s chest pack and pulled at the D-ring connection.
As she pulled at the suit, a hand shot out and grabbed hers. Startled, she reflexively backed away. The light from her lamps fell on their helmets and she gasped as Max Jiang’s eyes snapped open.
Oh my God.
Her eyes darted back and forth between the pair of helmeted faces before her. Max and Jasmine Jiang, after all this time, so far from home, were both alive.
“Alive!” she stammered, almost rolling back into Harper behind her, then checked to make sure her radio was still voice activated. Her normally cool, controlled voice stumbled over the words. “They’re alive! We need a dust-off ASAP!”
* * *
Marshall moved the shuttle as close as he dared to the surface, flying formation with the asteroid over their position while they prepped the Jiangs for transport. This consisted of clumsily dragging each of them out from under their rocky shelter and into the open, where they could be tethered to each spacewalker and flown up to the waiting Specter.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” he heard her repeatedly say over the common emergency frequency. “Just stay with me.” It was like a mantra and he wondered if she was doing it intentionally, whether for their sake or her own.
Looking down through his side window, he could see the bright yellow suits of his EVA team bouncing about as they prepped their evacuees, occasionally jetting above the surface with their maneuvering packs. “Keep clear,” Rosie instructed firmly. “Minimum safe distances. I didn’t come all this way to get blasted in the face by your MMU.”
They wasted no time. Rosie had pulled both of them out from under their makeshift shelter while the shuttle maneuvered in closer. She and Harper each had one of the Jiangs harnessed to them, then to the safety tether leading back to Specter.
“You ready?”
“Ready,” she said. “Evacuees are secure.”
“Specter is stable. Bringing ’em up now.”
Marshall kept the shuttle in position from the aft control station. He watched the safety lines go taut as first one limp form, then the next, lifted off the surface behind Rosie and Nikki. “Ten meters. Halfway there. Looking good, sir.”
He was focused on their evacuees almost to the exclusion of everything else. The effect was startling; for a moment they were all he could see. He shook his head to clear it; this was not the time for tunnel vision. He checked the small auxiliary control panel: the ship remained stable relative to the surface and the inertia reel was taking up the slack as the Jiangs drifted toward him. Almost in reach.
He braced his feet in the floor restraints and reached out to slow them down as they drifted into the open hatch. He pulled them aboard, locking down the tether in its reel. “Both evacs are secure aboard. Need you guys back here ASAP.”
“On the way,” Rosie said, already heading for the equipment bay and the MMU mounts on either side of the aft hatchway. Having drilled this countless times, it was a matter of minutes for them to back their maneuvering packs into the mounts, lock them down, and glide through the open portal into Specter’s passenger cabin. She waited for her partner to go in first, then flew in herself and moved to pull the big outer door closed behind her. “EVA team secure aboard.”
“Good work, guys. My spacecraft,” Wylie called from up front as Marshall began pressurizing the cabin. “Hunter, stay there with your team. I’ll fly us back.”
Harper had already strapped Jasmine Jiang into a gurney mounted in the floor. Max Jiang floated beside her, still locked onto the inertia reel.
“What can I do to help?” Marshall asked.
Rosie slipped her feet into a pair of floor-mounted stirrups and moved to strap Max into the opposite gurney. Behind the glass of her faceplate, Marshall could see the concern clouding her eyes. “Don’t know yet, sir. They’re in bad shape.” Still encased in her suit, she tore open the Velcro flap of her sleeve pocket and clumsily pulled out a pen light to shine in Max’s eyes. “Eyes are sunken and dilated. He looks badly dehydrated.”
“Same here,” Nikki said of Jasmine. “We need to get them on IV fluids, stat.”
“Agreed.” Rosie eyed the pressurization panel, shedding her gloves and helmet even before it was in the green. “I can handle thin air,” she said impatiently, anticipating Marshall’s concern. “We coped with worse in survival and rescue school.”
“Roger that,” Harper said over her shoulder, not far behind in getting out of her suit. Marshall noticed they did not practice the same haste with their patients. As soon as the cabin pressure display went green, they were unlocking the Jiang’s helmets and opening up their suits. Both pressed oxygen masks to their patient’s faces.
She reached into Max Jiang’s suit and pinched the skin of his chest, leaving a tent-like crest behind. “Piss-poor skin turgor. Let’s get the fluids started.” She turned to open the protective cover on an intravenous pump, then pulled a pair of shears from a pouch. She began cutting open an arm of Max’s spacesuit. “It’ll take too long to get them out,” she explained to Marshall, and began probing Max’s forearm before starting an IV line. With the suit open, he recoiled at the stench of accumulated body odor and a waste control garment that was well past saturation.
To her credit, Rosie seemed oblivious to it. “How’re you doing over there?” she asked her partner.
“Blew a vein,” Nikki muttered in frustration, “but I’ve got a good one now. Starting saline push.” There was a faint electric hum as the IV pump started.
Rosie did the same, then pointed to a blue cabinet behind Marshall. “If you could, sir, there’s some electrolytes in there. One each, please.”
He hurriedly removed two squeeze bottles of a common sports drink, pushing one through the air to each medic. Rosie lifted the O2 mask from Max Jiang’s face and gently placed the straw in his mouth. “Can you take a drink for me?”
Jiang nodded weakly and closed his lips around the straw. She gave the bottle a little squeeze; a few stray globules of greenish-yellow juice floated free before he gulped the rest down. He coughed reflexively and Rosie put the mask back on. She checked to see that Jasmine had been able to drink as well. “That’s real good, folks. We don’t want to push too much too soon, enough to wet your whistles. Let’s give these IVs time to work and you can have the rest. Deal?”
Max Jiang lifted his free arm in a weak thumbs up, then reached across for his wife’s. They clasped hands, tears welling in their eyes. Rosie took a gauze pad and swabbed Max’s away, motioning for Nikki to do the same for Jasmine. “You’re going to be okay, Mr. Jiang,” she said, looking to Marshall for affirmation. Crippled or not, going aboard Borman was a hell of a lot better than where they’d been and there was another ship on the way.
Marshall nodded, not so certain himself of China’s motives with the Peng Fei. Part of him preferred to take his chances with diminished rations on a much longer return to Earth under their own power, but having two evacuees changed that calculus.
Looking at the frail bodies being cut away from their suits made him doubtful they could endure a long trip. Maybe they could snap back quickly with some food and fluids, but putting them on a limited diet for months seemed like an unacceptable risk. Ultimately that was up to Poole and he would base much of his decision on what his medics had to say, maybe even more so than the actual MDs back on Earth.
Marshall studied Max Jiang’s face: jet black hair matted beneath his helmet and skullcap, eyes sunken from dehydration and starvation. Red blotches around his neck hinted at a bloom of friction sores beneath his cooling garment.
He laid a hand on Max’s arm and they made eye contact for the first time. After months of following their expedition, watching every livestream, he was at long last face-to-face with a man he’d greatly admired. Weakened near to the point of death, his dark eyes still burned with determination. Marshall had no doubt it was this fiery spirit and inventiveness that had enabled them to survive almost two weeks in deep space in nothing but their EVA suits.
“I’m Ensign Hunter from the USS Borman,” he began. “We’ll be taking you aboard soon where you’ll be under full medical care.”
Jiang reached up to grip his hand, hoarsely whispering “thank you” beneath the mask. His strength was surprising, one more attribute which had kept them alive.
Marshall nodded silently, almost ashamed to reply. “That’s not necessary, sir,” he said. “This is what we do.” This is what we do. It sounded self-aggrandizing: No worries, dear wayward traveler, just another day at work for us Guardians. It’s our job, saving your asses from imminent death in the Big Empty.
Instinct told him it was best not to mention the Peng Fei’s impending arrival. Famously outspoken against their birth country’s ruling party, they would not welcome the news of their rescuers.