A red indicator popped up on one of Cole’s readouts, breaking the spell.
“Mechanical activity on the Orbital Station. Looks like thruster signatures.”
Molly pulled it up as well.
“It’s just maintaining its orbit. That’s not a good Lagrange point. Moon’s too small, so it’s gonna have to boost itself periodically.”
“After all these years?” he shook his head. “Something’s not right. I’ve never known the Navy to build anything that didn’t need a weekly greasing. Wait. Thruster’s off now. Okay, maybe you’re right. That orbit can’t be stable, anyway. Too much mass in the OS and not enough in the moon. And yet, all these years later it’s orbiting the planet in lockstep—”
“And at a lower orbit,” Molly added.
“You think this is good news or bad news, Cap?”
“I’d say good. There’s no ship activity in the area. The thing’s probably just functioning on its own. That means we have a good chance of fueling up the hyperdrive.” Molly looked over at Cole and noted his furrowed brow. “You thinking we should pull back?”
“No. You’re probably right. But can you get us around the moonlet and behind the station? That planet is so pretty I might ask you to take us down for a look.”
“Absolutely,” Molly said, gripping the flight controls and nudging them forward.
But she wasn’t the only one trying to control the ship.
16
The first sign of trouble was the flickering of the nav screen. Cole rapped the top of the dash with his fist in the primitive problem-solving reflex common to males. The screen returned to normal.
“Better,” he said.
Molly rolled her eyes at the unfortunate result this would have at strengthening a silly habit. She didn’t think any more of the glitch as they approached the station.
When they closed to within a thousand meters, Molly prepped for docking maneuvers. The universal coupling on the outside of Parsona’s hull needed to be lined up with the one on the Orbital Station’s maintenance bay. The airlock on the GN-290 was high up the starboard side to prevent the wings from getting in the way, so Molly rolled Parsona over and began her approach. Hopefully, they’d be able to open the hangar doors manually from inside the station to make loading salvaged goods even easier.
Molly focused the external camera on the Orbital Station. Distances were displayed on a nearby readout, but she felt uncomfortable doing this for the first time without a spotter.
“Would you mind going to the airlock and calling out distances?” she asked Cole.
He nodded and moved to unbuckle himself from the nav seat—but the ship lurched forward, pressing him back into his chair. “Hey!” he complained.
“I’m not doing that!” Molly hammered the emergency stop, attempting to kill the thrusters. “Uh, we might have a problem here.” She watched the main thrusters ramp up to full RPMs, while the accelerator between the flight chairs remained in neutral.
Parsona was going haywire.
“I’m going to the engine room,” she said. “You take over here.”
Cole nodded as she unbuckled herself. Only then did she realize how tricky this was going to be. Parsona’s forward thrust was pushing her toward the back of the ship. That was where she wanted to go, but not quite so fast. She glanced at the hand-holds recessed into the ceiling and floor. They were too small, meant for emergencies that resulted in zero gravity, not excess gravity.
The longer she hesitated, the worse it would get. Molly turned sideways in her chair, her right shoulder pressing back into the seat. She glanced at Cole and then around to the rear of the ship. No way could she survive a fall that far. Her flightsuit would protect her up to a few dozen Gs as long as it was plugged in, but as soon as she left—she’d be on her own. And what would she do even if she made it to the engine room? If the secondary emergency stop didn’t respond, could she shut down the fuel lines running back to the thrusters?
Molly placed one hand on the control pedestal and started pressing herself out of the chair. A glance at the controls sparked an old memory. The remote docking panel. Her father had rarely used it around her—they lived on a frontier planet where starships just landed in fields—but she could remember one tricky locking maneuver where he’d stood by the airlock, using the panel as he guided the ship in visually. She looked around to see if she could even recognize it.
One of the rectangular panels next to her seat had a small set of maneuvering controls with two metal handles curving out on either side. Molly pulled on them and the entire unit popped out of its housing. Just to be sure, she tried thumbing its own emergency kill switch. Nothing happened.
She wrestled the panel, already heavy from the excess Gs, across her body. A thick trunk of electrical and hydraulic lines spooled out after. The device was frowned upon by veteran pilots as a psychological crutch, but Molly hoped it could serve her as a literal lifeline to the engine room far below.
She tried to let the unit fall back through the cargo bay slowly, but her gloves didn’t have enough grip. The trunk slid through her hands; she squeezed as hard as she could. Walter made a loud hissing noise as the object flew by his chair, matching the sound of the rubber zipping through her flight gloves.
When it reached the end, the cord lashed harshly across Molly’s chest, pinning her back into the chair. That was dumb, she thought, wriggling out from underneath the taut cable. She popped off her flight gloves and flexed her hands a bit.
“What are you doing?!” asked Cole.
Molly didn’t have time to explain. “Keep trying the kill switch while I’m gone. Radio me if something changes.” She crouched on the back of her seat. “Down” was toward the rear of the ship, the floor a vertical wall. She teetered, perched on a cushioned ledge, and peered over the thirty-meter drop. At the end of that fall the closed metal door leading to the lazarette looked tiny, yet menacing. This was starting to feel like a very bad idea.
Molly swung her feet out and gripped the bundled cords. She had to act now. The longer she waited, the heavier she’d get.
Wrapping her knees around the trunk of lines, she estimated they were pulling around three Gs already. Her body felt as if it weighed over 150 kilos. Her muscles, unfortunately, were the same ones acclimated to working out in a single gravity. She was asking a lot of them.
She slid down the first meter before locking in a solid grip. When she looked up to secure her hands better, she saw Cole gaping at her from above. Beyond him she could see the green planet dappled with blue spots. It was getting bigger.
Molly turned away from the sight and began working her way down, out of the cockpit and into the cargo bay below. When she became level with Walter, the boy let out another hiss of alarm. It looked like he was trying to say something, but Molly’s visor was down and her head throbbed from the effort. Her arms screamed as well, already quivering and she’d only gone a fraction of the distance.
Her knees were doing very little work, their grip on the trunk of cables too feeble. Molly let one of them go, pressing the toe of her boot into the series of zero-G hand-holds on the floor.
Much better.
She twisted her right arm around the cable, already growing more taut under the extra gravities, and found a toe hold with her other foot. Now she was rappelling down a pock-marked cliff instead of trying to slide down a slick rope. Molly locked her legs into the weight of her torso and let her boots do a lot of the work.
She could do this.
By the time she reached the bottom of the cargo bay, Parsona had to be doing 5 Gs. The engine room was another six meters away, and her ankles felt like they might snap under the strain. She balanced swiftness and safety—for every second she delayed, the task became that much more brutal. Looking up to secure her arm a bit better, Molly could see up the shaft of the ship, through the cockpit, and out to the green planet beyond. It completely filled the windshield.
She needed to focus.
Working her way down a few more steps, she entered the hallway leading back to the engine room and crew quarters. She was about two meters from the end of the cable when one of her boots slipped out of its hold. The arm she had wrapped around the cable was wrenched violently before coming loose. Her other hand remained around the cord, sliding painfully as she crashed into the remote docking panel.
She landed with a grunt, straddling the device like a rope swing. Catching her breath, her heart racing, she clutched the cables with both hands and pressed her head to the wire. That could’ve been bad, she thought. But she was level with the engine room door, at least.
Struggling to her feet, Molly felt as if she had a hundred kilos of extra weight strapped to her body. She wasn’t sure how much the cord could take; she peered down at the twelve meters of space between her and the metal door below.
Not wasting time, Molly kicked off from the airlock door beside her to see how much play there was left in the cable. It barely moved. She kicked harder and swung slightly toward the engine room. Catching the jamb and stepping off, she pulled herself into the thick doorway and was immediately pressed back against it. The forces on her body were incredible, but at least she was on her back, standing sideways in the engine room passage.
Her arms and feet felt numb; she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to reach the fuel lines. There were more objects to grasp in the engine room, but much of it was scalding hot. She wasn’t even sure she had the strength to leave the door jamb. She contemplated her next move, and then saw that it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would. The thruster relays across the mechanical room were firing. On and off. Just as they would be if someone were piloting the ship.
Parsona wasn’t out of control or in a runaway state.
Activating the helmet’s radio, Molly shouted for Cole.
“Molly? Are you okay? Where are you? We’re pulling seven Gs right now. You need to get that flight suit plugged in!”
“I’m by the engine room. You’re not touching the controls, are you?” She took some deep breaths, her chest feeling like three men stood on it.
“No, I’m trying to shut down all subsystems from here. Now get that suit plugged in, we’re gonna hit atmosphere in a few minutes!”
Oh, no. If the ship went into turns at this speed, she’d be thrown all over the place. Then she thought of something and would’ve kicked herself if her leg didn’t weigh a ton. She thumbed the mic again. “Do you have life support controls?”
There was a pause. “Yeah. I think I do.”
“Route everything you can to the grav panels forward of the engine room and turn off the panels aft of here.”
“Doing it now. But we’re closing in on eight Gs. I don’t know if the panels will take away half that. You need to get your suit plugged in!”
Across the hall from Molly, the door to the airlock slid open. She grimaced a smile at Cole’s thoughtfulness.
Grunting, she pulled herself up as the effects of the grav systems kicked in. She hoped Cole’s and Walter’s flightsuits were absorbing the extra weight; it was unpleasant to think of them suffering just to give her a little boost, and not even one that made her feel stronger—just less weak. She didn’t have much time before the Gs crept back up or they hit atmosphere. She looked to the hallway; the panel was still swinging slightly. The strain on the cable made it more like a steel cable under tension and less like a dangling rope.
Unable to reach it, Molly took a chance by kicking a foot at the hanging remote panel. It struck, but the weight of her leg out in the void nearly sent her over the edge and down to the lazarette, twelve meters below. She pulled herself back into the jamb, her knuckles white, and watched the panel swing away from her on a slow arc. She would only have one shot at this.
The panel was little more than half a meter square, its hydraulic cables never meant for such stress. It swung toward Molly—she crouched in the intense pull of acceleration, her muscles tense. It was impossible to know how hard to jump. Her vision told her body to exert a certain amount of effort, but under these gravities, it would’ve barely gotten her feet off the door jamb. She decided to give it everything, even though the distance would be less than a meter.
Just before the panel got as close as it would, Molly leapt, her legs uncoiling like springs. Heavy arms came up and scrambled for the cord. One foot landed on the small target. But she had jumped too far, her weight carrying past the small platform as it began swinging toward the airlock. She was over a meter from the door when she lost her grip. Her hands came free, one foot still on the slow swing. She pushed off, hoping the momentum would get her to the thick jamb of the airlock door.
Again: too much. Molly grabbed for the doorway as she sailed through, her feet tripping over the edge as she hurtled through the passage and crashed into the rear wall of the airlock. Reflexively, she brought her right arm up to protect her body, and heard it snap. Heard it before she even felt the pain, like the sound of a thick branch being popped into two pieces. Her torso crunched down on top of it, grinding the fragmented bones together.
Molly gargled with pain and nearly blacked out.
Pressing down with her left hand, she forced her body up and over to her back. She was lying on the wall beside two of the space suits—her arm at her side, her wrist at a funny angle. Molly felt sick seeing it like that. The limb must belong to someone else. Her brain couldn’t process this new shape—it made her stomach churn.
Lifting her head, she could see the airlock life support panel not far away. She used her feet and good arm to kick and drag herself across the wall, every centimeter a minor victory.
Pulling the panel open, she grabbed the cord inside and plugged it into the receptacle near her armpit. The relief was immediate. Pockets of anti-grav fluid raced around the chambers of her flight suit, countering the Gs as if she were still buckled into her seat.