GETTING SENT ON near-suicide missions like Marshall’s snipe hunt is pretty much routine for me at this point. Getting rescued, on the other hand, is not. That part is a little disorienting. Even before she staged my mock execution, Jemma made sure I was one hundred percent clear on what to expect in situations like that, and it definitely wasn’t Berto riding in like my guardian angel and spiriting me away.
I sometimes wonder if maybe Jemma didn’t do too good a job of letting me know exactly what being an Expendable was about. After the Drakkar had slipped her moorings and boosted out of orbit around Midgard, I spent the first few weeks of the journey wandering around the corridors in a funk, waiting morosely for one of the things she had prepped me for to happen, waiting to be told to climb into the engines or step out an air lock or stick my head in a blender to see whether the blades were sharp enough.
For a long time, though, none of those things happened. That ship represented a huge fraction of Midgard’s accumulated wealth, and the systems architects had put a fair amount of effort into making as certain as possible that she’d get where she was going without exploding—and despite my worst expectations, nobody seemed to be particularly interested in killing me just for fun.
The longer we went without any disasters, and the more I thought about what we were actually doing, the more I started to expect that I might actually reach Niflheim without ever having to go through the tank. I mean, the one thing everyone knows about interstellar travel is that it’s boring, right? And, especially once you’re finished with the boost phase, which is when the engines are working hard and the ship’s frame is under stress and you’d think anything that’s likely to break is going to do it, it really is. The cruise phase of a colony mission, as it turns out, is in fact dull as dirt.
Until it isn’t, anyway.
The last thing I remember about life in the body I was born with is a technician slipping the upload helmet over my head as my arms and legs spasmed and blood seeped out of my mouth and nose and pooled under my blistering skin. We were a bit more than a year out from Midgard by then. We’d gotten through first boost, pushed through our sun’s heliopause at sub-relativistic speed, cranked the engines back up for second boost, and finally settled in at a hair under point-nine c for the long glide to Niflheim.
Life on the Drakkar was easy, for the most part. As far as the actual ship’s crew were concerned, the bulk of the colonists were basically baggage during transit. Because I wasn’t attached to any particular branch, I was even more so. I was supposed to be doing two hours of training per day, rotating among branches so that I could serve as a stopgap for any of them as the need arose, but a lot of the folks who should have been training me thought I was spooky, and some of the others, like the engineers, were actually busy doing their jobs and didn’t have time to spare for training someone with zero technical expertise, so it mostly worked out to more like two hours a week. Outside of that I fed myself, took naps, and hung around the common areas with Berto playing puzzle games on our tablets. Throw in some gravity, and it wouldn’t have been that different from my life on Midgard.
As I was about to be reminded, though, we weren’t on Midgard. We were moving through interstellar space at two hundred and seventy million meters per second—and at those sorts of speeds, high-energy physics takes over from Mr. Newton, and things get wacky.
Space, as Jemma carefully explained to me, is not as empty as you might think. Any given cubic meter of what we think of as hard vacuum actually contains on the order of a hundred thousand hydrogen atoms, for instance. Hydrogen atoms are benign at rest, but at point-nine c they’re dangerous projectiles. The Drakkar had a field generator in her nose that shunted them aside, and turned them into a continuous stream of cosmic rays just above the surface of the hull as we plowed through the interstellar medium—so, not a problem as long as you stayed inside, which everyone on the ship other than possibly me was definitely going to do for the duration.
Interstellar space also contains the occasional dust grain—only about one in every million cubic meters, but every square meter of the ship’s surface area was passing through two hundred and seventy million cubic meters of space every second, so we bumped into those on a pretty regular basis as well. The vast majority of those grains carried enough net charge to get funneled along the surface and away by our field generator. Some of them didn’t, which produced a continuous patter of tiny explosions against the nose cone. The ship was designed to withstand that, though. The armor on the nose was ablative, and thick enough to survive twenty years or more of normal wear and tear.
The armor was not, however, designed to withstand the impact of anything much bigger than a dust grain.
In fairness to the folks who put the Drakkar together, things bigger than that are pretty rare once you’re past the heliopause, and there’s no such thing as armor thick enough to protect you from an actual macro object. A rock the size of my head carries a hundred times the energy of a fusion bomb at Drakkar’s cruising speed.
Luckily, the thing that hit us wasn’t quite that big.
We don’t know what, exactly, the object was, obviously. It got reduced to its component quarks and gluons on impact. We know it massed between fifteen and twenty grams, though. One of the engineers calculated that based on the volume of armor that it vaporized, and the amount of kinetic energy the ship gave up on impact.
The jolt wasn’t trivial, by the way. We were in free fall, so most things were reasonably well secured, but anything that wasn’t—including a fair number of the crew—went flying into the forward bulkheads. There were a couple of broken arms, and one significant concussion. I clipped the edge of a table as I fell, and wound up spraining an ankle.
Nobody cared about any of that. There was a hole in the nose cone and one of the field generation modules was gone. Twenty percent of the interior volume of the ship was suddenly flooded with hard radiation.
It was my time to shine.
The summons came from Maggie Ling, who was the head of Systems Engineering during transit. She met me in the machine shop, which was the nearest safe compartment to the nose cone access hatch. Two of her people stuffed me into a vacuum suit while she explained exactly what she needed me to do.
“We think the power coupling is shot,” she said. “We’re not sure, though, and we don’t have time to screw around, so you’re replacing the entire unit.” Another of the engineers had just finished unpacking a half-meter-square silver cube from a storage crate. It had two floating connector cables on one side, and two maneuvering handles on the other. “When you’re done with that, get the old unit back here if you can.”
“If I can?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Before you die, right? That compartment is open to space at the moment. Until you can get this unit running, you’ll be absorbing a lethal full-body radiation dose every three-point-five seconds.”