I must have given her a look then, because she rolled her eyes.
“Don’t worry. That doesn’t mean you’re going to die the minute you go through the hatch. The human body takes a surprisingly long time to actually shut down, even after it’s picked up many times a fatal dose. As long as you don’t take a direct hit from a grain, you should have plenty of time to upload before you go, and we’ve already got your next instantiation cooking in the tank.”
There were a bunch of things in that short statement that I wanted to argue with. Start with the fact that I was a lot more concerned about the dying part than about the specific timing of it, or whether I’d be able to upload before that happened, and follow that up with her assumption that I was going to do this despite the fact that nobody had actually asked me.
The fact was, though … she was right. I was doing this. Jemma had gone over the importance of the field generator with me in painful detail, and I was perfectly clear on how boned we were until that unit was replaced.
Once they’d finished securing my helmet, I very, very carefully hefted the generator and guided it over toward the portable air lock they’d rigged over the access hatch.
“Did I mention we’re in a bit of a hurry?” Maggie asked over the comm. I grunted a reply, but I didn’t move any faster. Heavy things don’t have weight in free fall, but they still have mass, and it’s really easy to smash things up if you get them moving too quickly. Once I was inside the lock, they sealed the outer door behind me, and my suit went taut as they evacuated the chamber. When the whistle of escaping air had completely died away, the hatch slid open.
The field generator was an array of six cubes, each exactly like the one I was carrying. I could see immediately which one was the problem. The unit nearest me as I entered the chamber had a black-rimmed hole maybe two or three centimeters wide punched straight through the top. I looked up. There was a slightly larger hole in the roof of the chamber. A beam of bluish light passed through it, and illuminated the top of the wrecked unit like a spotlight.
It was just about then that my skin started burning.
It wasn’t too bad at first. As Maggie and Jemma had said, the human body is surprisingly slow to react to acute radiation poisoning. I pulled the cables from the old unit, opened the docking latches, and got it up and out without any real trouble. When I was trying to get the new unit positioned, though, my head must have passed through that beam of light.
About ten seconds later, I was blind.
The skin on my hands was bubbling up by then, and I didn’t have much sense of touch left. The unit was latched down, and I’d managed to get the first docking cable engaged—but when I moved to the second one, I couldn’t figure out where the port was. I groped around for a few seconds, cable in hand, increasingly panicked, before Maggie spoke in my ear.
“Barnes? You okay?”
I tried to say no, but my tongue was too swollen to make the sounds, and all that came out was a moan.
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t yank on the cable.”
I stopped, or tried to. My body was shaking too badly to really hold still.
“Your helmet camera is still functioning for the moment. Try to position it so that I can see what you’re doing.”
I felt for the edge of the unit, then bowed my head toward where I thought the connector should go.
“Okay,” Maggie said. “Hold the camera there. Now move the connector to your left. Approximately ten centimeters.”
I slid the connector across the floor.
“Good,” Maggie said. “Now forward about three.
“Right one.
“Back one.
“Press.”
I felt a click as the connector snapped into place.
“Perfect,” Maggie said. “Field is reestablished. Good job, Barnes. Try to relax now. We’ll get somebody in there to retrieve you.”
It’s surprisingly difficult to relax when your body is burning from the inside out. If I could have just popped the seals on my helmet and decompressed then, I would have done it, but my hands were worse than useless, my fingers too swollen to bend. So I floated there, shaking and moaning and grinding my teeth, and waited for someone to pull me back into the world.
I understand why they forced me to upload before they let me die. Jemma covered that too. Knowledge and experience gained during a critical situation is valuable, and that can’t be permitted to die with one particular instantiation of me.
Some things, though, just really need to be forgotten.
The situation was slightly less critical by the time I came out of the tank as Mickey2. The field generator was functioning, and conditions inside the Drakkar were basically back to normal—at least if you set aside the thirty-four people who were now suffering from various degrees of radiation poisoning because they’d been in the wrong parts of the ship when the field went down. We still had a hole in our armor, though, and all it would have taken was a stray grain in the right spot to put us right back where we’d been. So, as soon as I was conscious and functioning, Maggie and her people crammed me into another vacuum suit and sent me out onto the hull with a tank full of high-density emergency patch nanites, and five minutes’ worth of direction on how to use them.
The highest intensity in the stream of protons being channeled along the hull was about two meters off the surface. Maggie told me that if I stayed close to the hull and was lucky enough to avoid getting clipped by a grain, I might even keep my exposure low enough to survive. So, I tried. Rather than just giving me force locks for my boots, like Jemma and I wore when we hiked out over Midgard, Maggie had them strap smaller attractors to my palms and knees. I went out through the forward air lock, and crawled the hundred meters or so to the impact point.
At first I thought I might be okay. As I approached the nose, though, the proton stream closed in. I started seeing flashes of light with maybe twenty meters to go, and by the time I reached the hole, my vision was blurring and my mouth tasted of iron. I pulled the nanite tank from my back, unlimbered the applicator, and pressed the trigger.
The nanites came out in a thick, sticky stream. They clung to the ragged walls of the hole, and even as I was still dispensing them they started to knit themselves together into the same hyper-dense material as the surrounding armor.
It took almost twenty minutes to empty the tank. When it was done, there was a mound of goo where the hole had been. Over the next few minutes, it flattened and smoothed itself until it would have taken an electron microscope to tell the difference between the patch and the original armor.
I only know any of this because when I came out of the tank as Mickey3 the next morning, the first thing they made me do was watch the video feed from my suit camera and listen to the running narrative I’d kept up right until the point when, halfway back to the air lock, I stopped moving, popped the seals at my collar, and showed my naked face to the universe.