Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe) Read online

  “Yes, sir.” There were a few clicks, and then Malcolm spoke. “Captain John Gilly, on the line is Captain Emil Reynard, an employee of the French government, commanding Miracle at Orleans. Captain Reynard, Captain John Gilly, chief of the American Space Service’s Rescue branch. The only way to put him on the link, Captain Reynard, is speaker phone.”

  “Captain Gilly, sir.”

  “Captain Reynard. I understand you have brought a functional reactor with you, Captain Gilly.”

  “You understand incorrectly, Captain. Yes, I have a reactor with me, but it must be installed properly and then properly certified. Then it will be functioning.”

  “I have only one engineering officer left; he has a broken hand. Is your engineer capable of installing this device by himself?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Captain. She isn’t Superwoman, she can’t lift a reactor and move it into place and secure it by herself. If she has additional hands, she can help position it. If there is no additional assistance she could be close to bringing it online in eight to ten weeks.”

  “I have less than two weeks of life support. That is unacceptable.”

  “Then stop being an ass; you know your government is rushing further technical assistance to you.”

  “They could easily be even later than ten weeks.”

  “Lieutenant Cooper has one assistant. As you may have heard, reactor engineers have gone into sudden short supply.

  “That brings me to the subject of the nature of your colonists.”

  “That is none of your concern.”

  “And there, sir, you are again wrong. Your passengers are nearly ten times the number the population of the habitat taking them in can support. They cannot afford unrest. I’ve talked to the habitat manager. If your colonists become unruly, he’ll kill them all by dumping the atmosphere they are breathing to space.”

  “He will be a mass murderer!”

  “That’s laughable, Captain. You better get with the program here. You have no idea where you are going to land these people. One planet the US has found has shirtsleeve temperature and atmosphere. Take off your helmet and you’ll survive one, maybe two breaths. Don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about -- I was there. I saw a man die in less than a minute from a massive allergic response. I saw his face before they put him in a body bag -- it was swollen so he looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

  “Mass murder, sir? I am offering a safer harbor than you are likely to, except by accident. Your massive disregard for human life dwarfs anything we might have to do. The Federation may decide to intervene as well.”

  “We won’t pay any attention to the Federation! Who are they? Nothing!”

  “You’ll pay attention because Caltech will decertify France for fan licenses, making your ships subject to interception and confiscation. Sir, one more stupid comment from you, and I’ll turn this shuttle around and we’ll return to Earth.”

  “And kill thousands of people!”

  “Your last warning, Captain.”

  There was no hesitation, no time for consultation before he spoke again. “I have just received a message from my government. I am to offer all cooperation.”

  “Then make it abundantly clear to your colonists that they will behave, or they will be jettisoned like the trash.”

  “Under protest, I will comply.”

  They docked a little later, and a party met them and led them to the bridge. Malcolm and his wife refused to leave the shuttle, as did Chief Pettigrew. Captain Gilly and Becky went forward to face the captain of Miracle. He was dirty, haggard and looked more like a pirate than a ship’s captain.

  “This is Mister Heinrich, our surviving power engineer. He was indisposed when we went to High Fan, and thus survived when everyone else was killed.”

  “Indisposed?” Captain Gilly queried, saving Becky the trouble.”

  “An upset stomach.”

  Becky managed not to grimace. About the only reason you’d miss a fan transition is if you where making cow pies in your pants.

  “Whatever,” Captain Gilly responded. “Have your man show Lieutenant Cooper where you want the reactor placed. Then we’ll plan on how we’ll get it there.”

  “Heinrich, show the lady where we want it.” He turned to Becky. “It’s slotted for a compartment that was once a storeroom. It will be relatively easy to reroute the wiring. More of an issue, supplying cooling water, but a manageable issue.”

  The man led Becky back the way they’d come. “We have the colonists locked down,” he told her. “That, and we opened a compartment to space. There is no way they can reach the functional parts of the ship.”

  “Show me where you want to put the reactor. Do you have a half dozen space qualified people who can help move it?”

  “Qualified?” he asked, obviously not understanding.

  “Qualified,” she repeated. “Are you aware that if your crew isn’t qualified by the end of the year, we wouldn’t have come?”

  “What?”

  “We expect minimum competency among the people we try to rescue. If you aren’t -- we aren’t going to try.”

  “We were told you’d always come.”

  “People like you are killing us. We’ve lost more people in the Rescue Branch than we’ve rescued. No more.”

  He showed her a compartment large enough to hold the reactor and its auxiliaries. He sketched the electrical circuits and control runs... they too seemed adequate. He indicated a panel where, he said, one the two main water feeds ran to the colonist portion of the ship. Having reviewed Kinsella’s designs for Ad Astra, Becky thought that was a bad idea, having just two feeds, but at least it wasn’t just one!

  She got with Chief Pettigrew and they mapped the compartment and surveyed the route. They planned the bracing, they sketched the runs of the electrical, control and water feeds. Two days after they were aboard, they very slowly moved the reactor into place.

  “I’m not stupid, Lieutenant, but aren’t we wasting time? Couldn’t we move the reactor a little faster? I mean, a foot a minute -- turtles move faster,” the chief observed.

  “Turtles, Master Chief, don’t weigh twenty-plus tons. On Earth, if you stop pushing, it stops quickly. Here, it keeps right on trucking. Turns have to be carefully managed. We have barely enough people to move it safely.”

  He nodded. “Lieutenant, I was shooting the shit with one of their chiefs last night. They’ve had two deaths and a half dozen other casualties on their crew -- just since the accident.”

  “Chief, Captain Gilly said it. Space is a dangerous place. If you are patient, if you take your time, and stay sharp -- you can manage if you’re lucky. It really helps if you have experience. Do you know what put a classmate in the hospital with a fractured skull on Grissom Station?”

  “No, Lieutenant.”

  “He tried to play ping pong. On Earth, you whack a ball and you stay firmly planted where you were. The ball slows down rapidly, no matter how hard you hit it. Play the game in vacuum, and the ball doesn’t slow down. Worse, when you swing at it in low gravity, you start your whole body moving. Unless you are lucky, you end up in a place you never wanted or expected to be... and moving very fast -- because in weightlessness and vacuum, like I said, you don’t slow down. Weightlessness is one set of problems. Microgravity, like out at Grissom Station, is another set. Vacuum is the mother of all killers.”

  “How the hell is a man expected to work out here?”

  “The same way as back on Earth -- carefully. Except you have different set of issues that affect things. All of our reactions and responses are based on what we’ve known all our lives. Since you’re solidly tied to the ground on Earth, you don’t have to think about ‘where am I going to wind up if I twist this, this way?’ The first time you see someone trying to tighten a bolt without having his body secured first is a hoot. A lot of people get frustrated, because when you twist to tighten, your body goes the same way. Instinctively, you compensate by twisting back in t
he direction you’ve come from -- which loosens the bolt. Most people are smart enough after the second time to figure out they need to wedge themselves in place -- but more than one person has lost their temper and injured themselves because of overreaction. You never want to overreact. If you do, stop. Think about what’s happening, try to work through what you’ve done wrong and what you can do to remedy it. If you panic -- I saw it once, Chief. The guy ended up catatonic and blubbering like a baby. They gave him a medical discharge.”

  “Christ on a crutch! I’m a boot again! Who’d have thought!”

  “Chief, I kid you not -- hold onto that attitude and you’ll have your best shot at surviving out here.”

  Chapter 5 -- The Miracle that Wasn’t

  Chief Pettigrew nodded and then stiffened. Captain Gilly appeared and beckoned to them. “A moment, the two of you.”

  They moved a distance away from where the half dozen Frenchman were busy welding supports for the reactor. “Have you heard about any of the disturbances down aft?”

  Becky shook her head. “Disturbances, sir?”

  “To put it mildly. Reynard is having trouble looking me in the eye of late. I expect that means his support is further away than expected. We only sent thirty Marines to the Trojans -- that turned out to be not enough, and, all things considered, unnecessary. Never mess with a guy who has his hand on your environmental controls!

  “First it was here, aboard the poorly named Miracle. Four of the colonists overrode the lock separating them from the area of the ship that is in vacuum. The air started to go, and one of them realized what was happening and leaped for the exit and tripped it. Fortunately for his three comrades, Reynard is a cheap SOB... he just pumped a compartment down to near vacuum -- he didn’t open it to space. The three survived, but lost their nerve. Too bad, because the way was open into the ship then. Of course, they’d have died very quickly if that compartment had been open to space... and so would every one of the other colonists.

  “They got the first shuttle off without too much trouble. Alas, Muslim men don’t understand ‘women and children first’ when it comes to their personal survival. Still, they reached the habitat and that’s when the real trouble started.

  “They wanted Eagle to ‘turn the gravity on’ like they’d had on the shuttle.

  “They hadn’t listened to the explanation on how to use low gravity toilets -- that and they didn’t understand the importance of ‘close the cover’ if you don’t want a face full of what you just left behind. In no time at all, you-know-what was everywhere. Did I mention Muslims feel personally defiled if they get covered in you-know-what?

  “So, they rioted. Eagle pumped their compartment down to 2000 meters above sea level. That didn’t even slow them down. So he pumped it down to 4000 meters -- that didn’t work. He pumped it down to 7000 meters. That worked!

  “Then he told them that the next instance of unruly behavior, and he’d dump the rest of the air, dump them out as trash, and refuse to help the others. That worked, too! They initially refused to clean up the you-know-what, but the whistle of escaping air fixed that, toot sweet.”

  “Good God!” Chief Pettigrew said.

  “I’ve known the young man a couple years now; the only thing hollow about his threat to space them all was his dumping them outside. Too much debris. I have a feeling they’d have gone into a fuel bubble, and been hauled down to Earth.

  “That wasn’t the worst thing. The next day Eagle’s wife, Kat, was piloting the other shuttle. Evidently one of the colonists figured out there were just two women crewmembers aboard. He decided to rape one or both. He used a screwdriver to jimmy two locked doors -- but they knew he was coming. Never, ever, tangle with someone who has spent years in low gravity or weightlessness, when you haven’t. She killed the fans and met him at the door.

  “Kat put out his eyes with the screwdriver, then duct-taped his hands and put him on a line. She took him to the airlock, focused a camera on him, stripped him out of his clothes and then dumped the lock -- the passengers got to watch.

  “Then, because she’s Eagle’s wife, she went a step beyond. She left him in the lock for a half hour, so he approached ambient -- about minus 285 centigrade. She went out, and chiseled off his ah, external genitalia, and threw them out the door. She hauled the remains back to the passenger compartment, where she left him on display -- and to thaw.”

  “To quote the chief,” Becky said, “Good God!”

  “Needless to say, they behaved after that. Kat had heard about her husband’s problems with the toilets, and had the other woman with her, a translator, make them learn the instructions by heart. They spent the entire orbit repeating those instructions.

  “The third shuttle just left -- the occupants spending their time hearing the toilet instructions, while watching the video feed of the guy who was spaced. According to last report, they are much better behaved.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Chief Pettigrew said sarcastically. “That Eagle guy and his wife are... abrupt.”

  “Those people are responsible for more than a thousand others, including two of their own kids. Yes, they are abrupt. There are a couple of examples from our own history that come to mind; I think the best is the attack on the Northfield, Minnesota bank by the James-Younger gang in the 19th Century, after the Civil War.

  “They simply had no idea what they would find there. It was in the late 1870’s and the town was filled with Civil War veterans -- they rode in, killed a couple of people -- and had to run -- literally run for it -- most of them wounded, a couple of them killed and the rest afoot. The town formed a posse and hunted most of the gang down. The James Brothers escaped by stealing some horses and riding well west -- maybe to the western part of the Dakotas, before going south again.

  “Space is being explored -- and settled -- by the bravest men and women in history. The challenges they face dwarf those of any other frontier. And space isn’t being settled by any Tom, Dick or Harry -- it’s by the sharpest pencils in the box. The people who’ve survived out here have beaten everything Mother Nature can throw at them. You don’t even want to think about the ways they know to kill you without you even knowing it.”

  “What do you want us to do, sir?” Becky asked.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing. You’ve filed good updates -- even Reynard has nothing to complain about. I talked to Admiral Delgado earlier today. He says the French are taking their own sweet time. I told Eagle about it.”

  He sighed. “I am going to get a lot of flack about that. Eagle will be out on the next shuttle. He’s going to make a salvage claim against Miracle at Orleans. That’s going to be a legal nightmare -- he’s bringing a second, smaller, shuttle along, and they are going to take Miracle under tow as a ‘hazard to navigation.’”

  “A navigation hazard? Out here?” Becky asked. Traffic was a little sparse in their vicinity.

  “Out here,” the captain confirmed. “However, he thinks the risk to passengers and crew justifies his concern. I’m certain he doesn’t want a busted French colony ship, no matter how expensive. It’s just a way to get the French off the dime.”

  “Do you think it will work?” Becky asked.

  “Sure. The Miracle is a worth a small fortune. While international airline conventions limit a carrier’s liability per passenger, the Miracle has a lot of passengers. I watch Reynard like a hawk -- as bad as it would be if those passengers die, the liability if they were to walk into a court and sue -- ouch!”

  “He wouldn’t dare!”

  “I hope not. Right now Malcolm is reviewing with Reynard the logs of the accident. Malcolm invented a new word; I have a feeling it’s going to stick, as Admiral Delgado used it earlier. ‘Malf’ -- a malfunction, an accidental equipment failure. There are going to be a lot of those in space. Thousands. Think how much time we’ll save with a short snappy word, instead of the polysyllabic ones in use now.”

  Captain Gilly lifted his eyes. “Speak of the devil.”

/>   Captain Reynard and a young man approached. He fit Malcolm’s description that Becky had heard, but she’d seen him once before. He was the instructor who had told Colonel Munoz he would be surprised if he couldn’t get the colonel fired.

  “Captain Gilly, Lieutenant Cooper. Captain, I’d like to borrow Lieutenant Cooper for a bit,” Malcolm said formally.

  “Why is that, Mr. Malcolm?”

  “Sir, I’m not a Benko-Chang engineer. I understand Lieutenant Cooper has some expertise in that area.”

  “Honestly, not much,” she admitted.

  “Much more than anyone else available, though. None of the Miracle’s Benko-Chang people survived the malf; the telemetry was disrupted a few seconds into the accident. I’ve seen a few busted fans before -- usually they contain the accident. These failed -- they had great big holes punched in them. Usually the containment stops the debris from causing other damage. These fans -- I can’t explain the damage pattern, Captain. Perhaps Lieutenant Cooper might have some ideas.

  “I checked, sir. These are GE Model 5’s -- they’ve been installed on four Japanese probes that have left the system, and aren’t due back for a couple of weeks yet. There are a couple more installed in shuttles, used in circum-Terra space. The only vehicles that have ever gone to High Fan using this model, so far as I can determine, are those Japanese probes -- and this vessel.”

  “Surely they’d have tested them, before selling them?” Captain Gilly asked.

  “Low fan only, sir. They ran out of money to do testing for a few months -- they expect to resume by the end of the year. Everyone sir, is eager to buy anything that works. These seem to work.”

  “On low fan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lieutenant Cooper, your best estimate. Chief Pettigrew can continue to supervise here.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Malcolm followed Captain Reynard through a maze of corridors. “The compartment beyond was contaminated with radiation by-products during the accident. It has been decontaminated,” the French captain said.