Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe) Read online

  Becky calmly reeled the line in and tossed it again. This time it was about six feet short. Her calm words were for naught; Captain Hightower glanced around himself, curled up into a tiny ball and started crying.

  Out of nowhere someone appeared, flying one of the maneuver units and snagged the captain. The other man said simply, “You don’t get this one back.”

  The instructor sighed. “I don’t want him back. He’d get the wind up with half the others.”

  The instructor lightly tugged on Becky and she faced him. “You will return inside. If asked, you will report that Captain Hightower is ‘indisposed’ and has been returned to Earth. His mates will learn soon enough what transpired. This isn’t about him; it’s about you.”

  “And have I passed?”

  He laughed. “So far. Do you want the final test?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He laughed harder. “Okay then. Two things to influence your final decision. You don’t graduate or flunk out until everyone in your class is rated, one way or the other.”

  “I’m patient.”

  “That you are, Lieutenant. How do you feel about jousting?”

  “Jousting, sir?”

  “Our favorite form of Russian Roulette. You come at me with a lance; I come at you. Whoever knocks the other back along their original course, wins.”

  “Is this your way to find out if I have balls after all?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a test of steadiness.”

  “It’s a test of stupidity; it’s pointless.”

  “Well, you can prove to the rest of us that you have the balls to risk your life.”

  Becky still had the cable for Captain Hightower in her hands. She unclipped it from her belt, and lofted it into space. “Fetch, boy!”

  The instructor laughed at her. “Nice theory, Lieutenant. A little weak in the imagination. Now someone has to go after it; we can’t afford debris like that, even out here. Go inside. Sit still; don’t distress anyone that you don’t have to.” He chuckled. “The really great thing about this? No one thinks they are going to panic, until they do. You could tell them all, and it wouldn’t affect the results.”

  “You made it clear I wasn’t to tell anyone.”

  “Exactly so; someone might be able to fake it. We don’t want that, do we?”

  “And me?”

  “You watched a man lose it. You did everything you could to help him, offering him every chance. You didn’t do anything stupid more than once. You’re going to do something stupid now and again. Space isn’t nice, Lieutenant. You could find a decision of yours has killed everyone around you. It’s happened twice, already. Once the person in charge did everything he could reasonably do to prevent it, when physics said there was nothing he could do. He was still keeping people busy when the law of gravity killed them all. The other commander led his men in a rousing version of ‘Men of Harlech...’ before they were killed.”

  “And what am I’m supposed to take away what?”

  He smiled thinly. “One man led his people to their deaths, thinking that if they did everything right, they might survive. They didn’t -- none of them did. Hope doesn’t trump physics. The other went out on a high note -- but none of them survived either. Bravery doesn’t trump physics either.”

  Becky went inside, and not unexpectedly, into a firestorm of curiosity.

  She shook her head and sat mute.

  The next morning they were back in Hawaii and told that they had the rest of the day off. Two minutes later Becky had an angry Air Force lieutenant colonel and an Air Force major in her face, demanding to know what had happened to Captain Hightower.

  Becky contemplating explaining; there wasn’t much chance that she’d panic anyone now -- and hadn’t she been told that it wouldn’t matter if she did?

  She looked the colonel in the eye. “Sir, the instructor in charge told me not to talk about it; if he countermands those orders I’ll be happy to explain. I am not, Colonel, in the habit of disobeying my superiors.”

  That shut him up.

  Two hours later she was playing ping-pong with the enthusiastic Marine pilot in the class -- but who was a poor ping pong player -- when Colonel Munoz, the senior Air Force officer, entered the day room. The Marine captain called them to attention, even as the instructor showed up last.

  The instructor waved at the Marine. “Get lost, Captain!”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  He hastily departed, leaving Becky facing the other two.

  “I am philosophically opposed to this, Lieutenant,” the instructor told her. “But I’m cognizant of the importance of inter-service communications and relations. Before Colonel Munoz asks, let me inform you both that Captain Hightower was medically retired late yesterday.”

  Becky’s eyes teared up. “I’m sorry to hear that, sirs.”

  “Colonel Munoz, I’ve told you that this is a bad idea. I know the futility of ordering it, but I will simply request...”

  Commander Townsend burst into the day room. He said nothing, but moved to stand next to Becky, staring at the two other officers.

  The instructor hardly missed a beat. “Commander Townsend, I’ll repeat what I just said. I think this meeting is a mistake, but I’ve agreed in the interests of inter-service cooperation. If you will simply nod, I will not extract the same promise from you as I did from Colonel Munoz: he has asked to question Lieutenant Cooper in regards to the accident to Captain Hightower. I’ve agreed, but I get to ask questions as well. If you nod, you can remain silent and I won’t ask you any questions.

  “If you have anything to say, so will I.”

  The navy commander nodded.

  “One last time, Colonel Munoz -- you will not hear anything worth doing this. Let the matter lie.”

  “What happened out there, Lieutenant?” the colonel asked Becky.

  “A full and complete answer, Lieutenant,” the instructor directed.

  “Sir, the first task I was directed to perform was to throw Captain Hightower a line. He was to catch it and attach a clip to the belt on his suit. Sir, I failed to check the line I used. I just tossed it to Captain Hightower. He hooked it to his belt and I tried to reel him. The clip parted at once. I drew the line back, and tossed it to him several more times. Sir, all he had to do was hold the line. An instructor had lifted him a centimeter or so off the hull of the shuttle.

  “Sir, with all due respect, Captain Hightower panicked when the line initially parted. He lunged at the line and missed it, taking himself further from the shuttle -- but he was still within a meter of the hull. I tried several times to toss him the line. The last time, he knocked it away.”

  “Do not be gentle, Lieutenant,” the instructor repeated.

  “Sir, he had completely lost it by then. He curled up into a ball and started crying.”

  “At which point, an instructor rescued him from a less than two-meter separation from the shuttle. He was sedated and transported to the base hospital, Maunalua. Where he was evaluated as unsuitable for the space service. He subsequently requested separation and a medical discharge,” the instructor told the colonel.

  Colonel Munoz opened his mouth to speak, but the instructor was faster. “If you intend to berate Lieutenant Cooper about her failure to check the line, she has repeatedly admitted to that.”

  “She has ruined a fine officer’s career!”

  “Colonel Munoz, I intend to ask a few questions.”

  “You already have!”

  “Now it’s your turn to answer. You had Lieutenant Cooper’s role in a similar exercise. What happened?”

  “That isn’t germane! I wasn’t responsible for ending a man’s career!”

  “Answer the question, Colonel. Did you check the clip?”

  “No.”

  “How many times did you attempt to reach your partner with the line?”

  “Three. I didn’t understand at first why I was missing. Eventually I corrected my aim.”

  “Then what, Col
onel?”

  “On the third time he managed to grab the line. He clipped it to his belt, and the clip failed when he jerked it to check it.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he called on the radio for an instructor to come fetch him from less than a foot separation from the shuttle.”

  “There was some... inappropriate language, as I recall,” the instructor observed.

  “He was rude; he blamed me for the failure.”

  “Colonel Munoz, you are relieved for cause. Mistakes happen in space. You apologize and learn from them. You’ve never apologized for any mistake you’ve made -- you blame the other party. I have no confidence in your judgment.”

  “You don’t command here!”

  “You’d be surprised. If you press the matter, I can guarantee that you will be surprised.”

  “I protest!”

  “You might want to reconsider,” the instructor told him. “I’m told I can flunk anyone.”

  “I will protest!”

  “That, sir, is your right. In that event, the recording, audio and visual of the incidents in question would be played for the inquiry. Where you didn’t get it right until an instructor, exasperated at your obtuseness, told you to, and I quote, ‘Take your time and don’t throw so hard.’ The instructor got a written reprimand; you were required to solve a simple problem on your own and failed.”

  “It’s more difficult than it looks,” the colonel said defensively.

  “It is that, sir. However to a panel of men who’ve never tried it -- all that they are going to see is that you were unable to toss a flexible line ten feet to a stationary target. I’m afraid to the average man on the street -- even fellow Air Force officers -- they aren’t going to understand the difficulties. Go quietly, Colonel -- the Air Force will welcome you back with open arms, free of the harsh oversight of those tyrants Stephanie Kinsella, John Gilly and their staff of Myrmidons. Er, minions.”

  Only years of training as a midshipman, learning to suppress grins and laughs, saved Becky from the gaffe of laughing. She’d heard the word before and was quite sure that she knew who used it first.

  The room cleared and the Navy commander shook his head. “I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything. But I surely heard enough. Lieutenant, don’t answer verbally, but contemplate the true reason Colonel Munoz was sent packing.”

  For a moment Becky was back in the Academy, with Commander Jacobsen asking her for her evaluations of things. And learning that while she got the surface easily enough, hard nuggets remained that were important -- and that she had no awareness of them until they were explained.

  The commander grinned and patted her on the shoulder. “Before you go beating up on yourself for not seeing things like this -- realize that there is a reason you start out as a junior officer. It takes experience to learn all the ins and outs, all of the nuances and hidden meanings. And experience takes time and exposure to varied situations.

  “I used to have a terrible time in history. The instructor would give a list of events and then say, ‘and those meant, X, Y and Z and led directly to event A -- except that I couldn’t see the relationship...

  “Then one day I was reading, of all people, Machiavelli. At first his line, ‘Gold can’t always buy you good soldiers, but good soldiers can always find you gold’ was just meaningless, seemingly unconnected, thoughts. Then I realized you don’t always get what you pay for, but if you’ve got good people, they can get the job done. After that, I learned to look for relationships I never expected and found I’d been missing the forest for the trees.”

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  “One of my duties, no matter what my formal job description of the moment says, is bringing along young officers. You don’t need to thank me.”

  “I might not need to, sir, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling thankful.”

  He inclined his head, and he too left.

  Chapter 4 -- Graduation Exercise

  There was nothing more said about the incident. There followed more and more training. Then Captain Gilly appeared. She’d heard a lot about him from Anna Sanchez. He was tall, with dark salt and pepper hair. The dark brown still predominated, but it was clear it was going to lose the battle in the end.

  He was brisk when he addressed her class. “The course materials for this class are still in a state of flux. Admiral Kinsella has given us a syllabus of necessary information, and we’ve been concentrating on it.

  “Admiral Kinsella recommended that deliberately staged ‘accidents’ are too dangerous and that they be dropped for the time being. Admiral Delgado and I agreed, so for now there will be no further ‘deliberate accidents.’ That isn’t to mean that at some point that they won’t be reinstated. We have entirely too short a baseline of experience to make judgments on.

  “Even the simplest exercise, the one you’ve all experienced, where we jimmied a line, frequently resulted in injury or near injury. We stopped before we killed someone. You need to learn to crawl before you walk, learn to walk before you run, and need to gain experience in handling common events in vacuum and zero g, before you’re exposed to out of nominal situations. So, tomorrow, be packed for a week. You’re going back to Grissom Station for some practice in crawling. Me too, I might add, as while I’ve been there, I haven’t done that.”

  For the next weeks they literally learned to crawl, then to walk. Trying to run in microgravity situations, they were told, was a good way to get yourself killed. They didn’t turn around and go home right away either; they were more or less permanent station residents.

  They did simple tasks, including hammering nails, although that too was clearly dangerous. Even screws were dangerous. Nuts and bolts were far safer, and butterfly bolts with safety wires safer yet.

  The funniest thing was that one day they asked for volunteers to take part in a plumbing test. All that was required was running a PVC pipe two meters along a wall, with two joins, and valves beyond the joins, and then running water through the pipe. Three of the older members of the class, all avowed Do-It-Yourselfers, took the challenge. The task was done in near-weightlessness, but in shirtsleeves for a change -- just about everything else had been done in vacuum.

  Then they called everyone to observe the room being pumped to vacuum. Each man had a section of water line he had been responsible for. The results might have been thought funny elsewhere, but the fact was that all the pipes leaked into vacuum, and sent fine sprays of water into the compartment. The water exploded into mist, and then vanished in the vacuum. After a few seconds of that, a bubble hit a weak spot, and one of the pipes exploded. It wasn’t with great force, but until the water was turned off at the valves, water spurted into the compartment, turned to mist and then vanished.

  “Nothing works up here like you expect,” one of the instructors said. “Standard PVC cement evaporates like any volatile in a vacuum, until the joints start to fail. After that it goes rather fast. When we build a new line, we use a special cement, and then we test the line with the lowest of pressures and the line is fully monitored for leaks. It’s as expensive as hell, but we don’t run lines for anything liquid or gas without valves every little ways and days of testing.”

  Not long after that one of the Air Force captains was in the infirmary with a mild concussion. For whatever reason, he’d convinced a member of the staff to try a ping-pong game with him in microgravity and vacuum. The first time he took a swing at the ping-pong ball, he’d shattered it (there was no air resistance to slow it down), but since he was in motion, he continued to obey Newton’s laws until he slammed into a doorway.

  They were kidding him about it, gently, because it was the sort of mistake you weren’t supposed to make. Abruptly Captain Gilly entered the hospital room where they were gathered.

  “Lieutenant Cooper, come with me. As the Naval commander of the naval student detachment, Commander Townsend, you can join us.”

  They went to the Grissom station’s commander’s
office. He left his desk without a word and affixed himself to a wall.

  John Gilly made no effort to sit down. “You are done here, Lieutenant Cooper. As of this moment, you’ve graduated.”

  “Sir? I haven’t taken the final exam.”

  “We don’t have time. There’s a cargo ship coming up from Earth now, docking in about forty-five minutes. You and I will be aboard. I regret to say this but we will have to deal with the most serious accident to date -- one that dwarfs the Fore Trojan accident.

  “About two hours ago, the French colony ship, Miracle at Orleans, departed Earth orbit. They had a crew of two hundred and fifty -- plus they had thirteen thousand colonists aboard. Admiral Kinsella heard about this expedition a day ago and told me that I was a fool to try a rescue if they got into trouble. Miracle, you see is going blind. They have a list of two dozen likely stars. The first colonizable planet they arrive at, they were going to land and set up shop.

  “This is, candidly, like playing Russian roulette with a machine pistol with a full fifty-round magazine. Your only escape is if the first round jams the weapon.”

  Becky was pale. All those people! Were they insane? It sounded like it!

  “Miracle got lucky. If you want to call fifty dead and injured lucky. They cleared Earth orbit, oriented for their first destination and reached the fan limit. Then they went to High Fan -- or at least they tried to.

  “Her master reports that almost at once one of her fans exploded, shattering containment. In the next few seconds, two more fans failed catastrophically... the second causing severe reactor damage. Their reactor scrammed, killing the power to the five remaining fans.

  “They are currently just beyond Saturn’s orbit, more or less system northwest. Their environment is currently stable, but they’ve lost about 60% of their oxygen, almost all of their carbon dioxide scrubbers, and a bevy of other things. Their most critical item is the CO2 scrubbers -- they have resources remaining for five days.

  “The good news is that Eagle is out at the Aft Trojans. He’s closest to the ship, and he has a couple of vehicles that he can configure to handle a couple of hundred people at a time. We’ve got some smaller shuttles going out there to help. The idea is that we’ll transfer passengers from Miracle to the Trojans, for subsequent transfer from there back to Earth. Eagle doesn’t have the life support for that many people, but we’re going to be sending cargo haulers out with what he’ll need.