55
Kris awoke to find the Wasp in zero gee.
“How long have we been in orbit?” she asked Nelly.
“Less than five minutes,” her computer said. “If you want to take a shower, you’ll need to do it quickly, they’ll be draining most of the water into the launches’ reaction tanks to make the refueling run.”
“If I can stand myself, they better be ready to stand me, too.”
“You intended a double meaning there, didn’t you, Kris? Not only your body odor but also what you have done. Am I right?”
“You are getting very good at understanding us humans, Nelly. Be careful, or you’ll turn into a real little boy.”
“I’d prefer to be a real little girl, but I will not be Pinocchio to your Geppetto. If I had legs to go my own way, I would be my own woman.”
“Well, for now, you’re stuck going where I go.”
“Kris, I am not stuck following your path. I could have chosen not to mention the need to take me and my children on this risky flight. I could have kept my brood safe on the ship. We can wait a whole lot longer for rescue than you humans can. I and my children chose the course we’re taking. They may be your legs taking us to the gallows, but we’re walking the walk with you.”
That gave Kris pause. She mulled it over for a moment before saying, “Thank you for the reminder, Nelly. Sometimes I forget who I’m dealing with and the courage that it takes to be you.”
“Thank you, Kris. Shall I call your team together?”
“Please do, Nelly.”
Fifteen minutes later, a rather expanded version of Kris’s team were fastening seat belts so they could stay seated around her table. Jack and Penny were to her immediate right. Abby, Staff Sergeant Bruce, and a very alert Cara were to Kris’s left. Seated around the other end of the table were Chief Beni, Colonel Cortez, Professor Scrounger, and an attractive but very shy Communications Tech, Second Class, named Maria Moreno.
Sergeant Bruce looked surprised to be included in the meeting. Maria was shocked and asked twice if this wasn’t some mistake. After Kris assured her the second time, the sailor folded her hands into her lap and sat quietly.
“We have a problem,” Kris said, and the room fell silent. Kris had come to expect back talk when she opened with those words, but they were clearly not surprised today, and no comeback came at her.
“Nelly, would you care to give them the briefing you gave me.”
With that, Nelly brought the largest screen in the room alive and proceeded to wreck, smash, and otherwise destroy three launches with amazing speed.
“I hope we’re not going to try that,” Chief Beni whispered.
“At least not that way,” Kris said. “Nelly, show them what you think we can do.”
Nelly quickly explained the idea of using Smart MetalTM for the connecting cables. She then showed how this allowed them to dance with the clouds the same as the Wasp without ending up in shattered pieces.
“That looks a whole lot better,” Professor Scrounger said, using the voice of a skeptical but encouraged economics professor rather than the scrounging supply chief of the Wasp. “So, just exactly why am I here, along with the rest of you? Not that I mind sharing time with you. I’m not looking forward to chow tonight. I understand Cookie finally had to break out the famine biscuits. They look and taste too much like things my second wife insisted on feeding our dog. I finally got rid of the wife and fed me and the dog something decent.”
“TMI,” Cara said, waving her hand in front of her face.
“So why are we here, Kris?” Jack asked.
“Nelly, you want to tell them?”
“I think you should, Kris. The words sound better when they come from a human. And besides, Kris, you’re a Longknife. People just expect you to say things like this.”
“Like what?” Abby asked, making a show of checking to see that her wallet was still in her purse and closing it firmly inside.
“What you saw was a simulation. A re-creation of the flight the Wasp went through when it went cloud dancing. Unfortunately, what we’ll experience will be different. The simulation shows that it is possible to avoid overstressing our launches, crashing them together, and tearing the balloot to shreds. The problem is doing it all in real time.”
That drew a response of low whistles, “Yeah,” and “That is a problem.”
“There are several ways we can do this. Nelly and her kids can come up with the best subroutines they can. We can juice up the computers on the launches a bit, and see if it works.”
Kris held up one finger. “By the way, that would let Nelly and her kids stay safely here on the Wasp. If we failed at refueling the ship, they would survive long after everyone had gone crazy, starved, or suffocated. Sooner or later, an Iteeche would be bound to come along and find them.”
That raised several eyebrows.
Kris put up her second finger. “Or we can hang three or four computers around the necks of me and the bosun’s mates that will fly the launches. I don’t know what having three more Nellys prancing around in my brain would be like. Don’t know how a sailor would take to suddenly having three computers in his or her brain, but we could try it.”
“And if you failed, the rest of us would be looking at each other like pork chops,” Abby said.
“Ew,” Cara said.
“Something like that,” Kris admitted.
“I take it that you have a third finger up your sleeve,” Penny said.
Kris raised it. “Each of us present takes our pet computer, straps into one of the launches, and does whatever we need to do to share in stretching out or shortening up the lines holding the balloot between us.”
“I only had a brief time working with Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” Professor Scrounger said. “Will that be enough?”
“I don’t know,” Nelly said. “But it’s all we have.”
The petty officer cautiously raised her hand. Kris gave her an encouraging smile.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” the sailor stammered. “The scuttlebutt aboard ship is that you all have these really super-duper computers who talk back like I used to do to my mom before I left home. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t, but I’ve never had anything to do with any of this.”
“You are totally correct,” Kris said. “But you see, Nelly has nine children, computers, whatever you want to call them. Eight have worked with the people you see around you. Some more. Some less. The last computer worked with Amanda Kutter, who is no longer on board. Nelly, you want to explain this?
“Scheherazade, or you may call her Sheri, has reviewed all the psychological profiles aboard, and she picked you. I am not sure whether the choice is because of who you are or because you seem closest to Amanda—Sheri is rather reticent about that—but she has chosen you. You may accept her offer or decline.”
The young sailor looked around at all of them, and seemed to hesitate for a longing moment when she passed the door, but she tightened her lips finally, and said. “If it will get us home, I can risk as much as any of you.”
The words would have sounded braver if she hadn’t choked on the last sentence.
“Don’t worry,” Kris said. “No one can tackle something like this without being scared. Some admit it. Others just get good at hiding it.”
“And some of us are just crazy,” Abby said. “You okay with this, baby ducks?” she asked Cara.”
The thirteen-year-old swallowed hard. “You really mean it. You want me to fly with you.”
“It seems that way,” Sergeant Bruce said. “I’m assuming that, three to a boat, the three of us get to form our own crew?”
“I figured the three of you would,” Kris said.
“The family that gets splattered together, stays together,” Cara said, with a little tremble at the end.
“We won’t let you down,” Abby said.
Likely she meant that, Kris thought, and would keep thinking it right up to the second the launch came apart. Then again, they just might pull it off.
“Jack, I figure you’ll be in the same boat with me.”
“Isn’t that always the case?” he quipped. “Do I get a paddle this time?”
“Don’t let him have one,” Penny said. “You know what he’ll do with it.”
“I can’t think of a better guy to use it on her,” Abby insisted.
“Hey, crew, let’s be careful with our gallows humor,” Kris said. “We’ve got some new folks on board this trip and they may not understand us.”
“I don’t have a problem with it,” Professor Scrounger said.
Kris tossed a glance at Cara and Maria, who were a bit on the pale side at the moment, and the rest seemed to get her message. Kris went on.
“Maria, would you and Sheri join Jack, Penny, and me? We’ll be flying the low boat in the triangle. The ride will likely be the worst, but I’d like to put four of us there to take that corner.”
“I’d be honored to, Your Highness.”
“If you’re flying with us,” Jack said, “you’ll have to adjust to calling her Kris. When we start ‘Your Highnessing’ her, she figures something is wrong.”
“Of course, she’s ‘Commodore’ whenever we see her outside this room.” Sergeant Bruce cut in with some semblance of proper military etiquette.
“Yes, ma’am, Your Highness, I mean Kris,” the poor young sailor stammered.
“Don’t worry, kid, you’ll have a great story to tell your grandkids,” the colonel put in. “So, let’s see, Chief Beni, Scrounger, and I have the third boat. Why not put all us old farts in one tub.”
“I’m not old,” Chief Beni shot back. “I’m just one of the few around here that has some caution. It makes me appear more mature and older than I am.”
Kris let the jokes fly freely for the next few minutes. Slowly, Cara got her color back, and even managed to inject a joke of her own about the music she’d be playing while they made the run, which drew a groan from her aunt.
When Maria looked like she’d settled into the idea of actually being a part of this and doing a mission with one of those Longknifes, Kris unbuckled herself from her chair.
“Folks, the sooner we do this, the sooner we get home. Anyone have a reason we shouldn’t do this today?”
No one did. Quickly, they all followed her lead, unbuckled, and pushed off for the drop bay.
There, Kris discovered that Nelly and several others, including Chief Beni, had been making preparations for some time. The Smart MetalTM from the Wasp’s protective shield had been drawn in and apportioned among the three launches that the chief in charge of boat maintenance assured Kris were in the best shape.
“No water weeds sucked up into any of these, ma’am,” he assured her with a nasty look at one of the bosun’s mates flying the mission.
The 1/c bosun took the ribbing with a good-natured but determined smile. He might have made a mistake on Kaskatos, but he was one of the five pilots chosen to keep the Wasp from being left a derelict in space.
Kris would have a copilot riding on her right hand, and three brains strapped in behind her. Chief Beni had specially rigged helmets for the brain-to-computer connections for those, unlike Kris, who did not have their computers plugged directly into their brains. The brain sensors that gave the computer access to its human, and let the human communicate with its computer, had been soldered directly into the helmet. And while the computers usually communicated on Nelly net, today they were hardwired into the Smart MetalTM cable, and a comm line was included in that as well. All of the computers as well as the launches would be able to communicate by line as well as net.
“Don’t know if the static of us passing through all that gas will kill our wireless net,” Chief Beni said. “With this hard connection, it won’t matter.”
“Belt and suspenders,” Professor Scrounger said. “Good idea. Might have saved one or two of my marriages if I’d worn suspenders as well as a belt,” he muttered only half to himself.
Cara got the giggles at the image. Maria blushed.
Kris cleared her throat, and said, “Excuse me, I’ve got a preflight to do,” and headed for her launch.
It was Launch 1, the lander that had sucked up water weeds on Kaskatos and changed Kris’s whole order of the day by not letting her run away from a fight. Everything had worked out in the end, but at the time, it had not been funny.
The bosun 1/c joined her as she walked around the bird. Everything that could come loose showed itself tight to her pull. The collar of Smart MetalTM was attached where the forward and aft sections of the shuttle were welded together, giving a strong bulkhead for the attachment. If any location on the launch could take the strain, that spot should.
Reaction mass was being pumped aboard as Kris watched.
“That’s the last water we got,” the chief in charge of the launches told Kris. “No showers until you get back. Not sure we can even flush the head, ma’am.”
“We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Kris assured him.
As Kris boarded the launch, she made a final check of the engines. The antimatter containment pod had been attached as usual. Now it was held in place by steel cables that were welded to the aft bulkhead. That puppy was not going anywhere, no matter how much bounce was in the ride the planet below gave them.
Everything that could be done had been done. Now all that remained was for six pilots to do some of that fancy flying they boasted about at every opportunity. If Kris pulled this off, all those skiff race championships would be taking a backseat to this story.
A way-back seat.
“First, girl, you got to pull this off,” she muttered to herself.
“You say something, ma’am?” her copilot asked.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” she said, and shared a high five with him.
Jack, Penny, and Maria were already in their seats right behind the flight deck. Jack was on one side of the aisle, Maria and Penny on the other. The young petty officer seemed lost in thought as she and her computer hurried through the interface process. All aboard wore space suits with their own oxygen supply. The launch was pressurized, but no one was betting that that would last the entire flight.
Kris strapped in tight and began the preflight check with her copilot. The bosun 1/c knew his stuff, and the check went smooth and fast. When it came to a radio check, Kris found that Jack, Penny, and Maria, along with their computers Sal, Mimzy, and Sheri, were on the same circuit as the flight deck.
“We will be talking to the other launches by landline,” Nelly said. “Captain Drago wants to hold radio communications to a minimum. He doesn’t care what Ron says about the Iteeche not using this system. He insists it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“Smart man,” Kris said.
“So we’ll establish a Smart MetalTM link to each craft and the balloot just as soon as we launch. We can use wire after that.”
“We can do better than that,” Kris said. “Launch 2 and 3, you will fly wing on with the balloot. Two, you have the planet side. Three, you get the deep-space side. I’ll cover the low end. Let’s see if we can match up with the balloot and not break Captain Drago’s radio silence.”
With that, all preparations were done. Kris pressurized the launch, brought the engines up to idle power, and made her final check.
“Launch 1, requesting clearance for launch.”
“Launch 1, cleared for launch, and Godspeed,” came back in the skipper’s own voice. It was unusual for him to approve launching a longboat, but then, there was nothing usual about this mission.
Kris let the launcher shove her away from the Wasp before she applied any power to her boat. Using as little reaction mass as possible, she edged away from the Wasp. The other two boats followed her until they were drifting in echelon.
Several sailors were out, loosening the balloot from its lockdowns on the underside of the Wasp. The balloot looked for all the world like a butterfly net Kris had used to catch flutter-bys, then release them, for a summer before she lost Eddy and everything lovely disappeared from her life.
The balloot narrowed aft until it hooked into a feed line into the reaction-storage intake. For today’s mission, that aft end would be locked down. It widened gradually before it reached a shoulder well forward, then tapered a bit toward the mouth. During a refueling flight, the forward end would dilate open to swallow up the available gas.
Somewhere out of sight was supposed to be some kind of tongue arrangement that assured that whatever went in stayed in.
As the balloot drifted free of the Wasp, Launches 2 and 3 maneuvered to latch onto the shoulder. Wisps of Smart Metal TM reached out from the collar on the launches to catch on the shoulder collar of the balloot. The connection made, the two boats guided the balloot away from the Wasp. Kris brought her boat back into formation, taking the lower slot, and Nelly guided Launch 1’s Smart MetalTM connection up to the balloot.
“We’re all attached,” Nelly reported on the wire net. On the instrument panel before Kris, a flight path opened up on the central screen.
“If you pilots will fly this course,” Nelly said, “it will keep us together, and we should be able to fill the tank. We computers will do our best to adjust the cable so that it isn’t too long or too short, no matter where you are.”
Kris eyed her flight path. It showed as a crosshair in the middle of a wide red circle. “I assume if we get too rowdy and fall out of the red, we lose the connection?”
“That is correct, Kris.”
“Does this assume that we’re only using the Smart MetalTM we have on each boat?” Kris asked. “Have you made any arrangements for robbing Peter to stretch out Paul’s line?”
That brought a pause. A longer one than Kris would have expected.
“You are correct, Kris, we should be able to move some metal around the collar from one line to another one. We had not made allowances for that option. Please wait while we adjust our subroutines.”
Kris and the rest of the boats waited.
While she waited, Kris eyed the triangular arrangement. “Nelly, did you consider flying the mission with only two boats? Two seem sufficient to hold the balloot between them.”
“We did consider that, Kris,” sounded kind of dry for a computer. “Our simulations showed a good chance that without the pull from below, the mouth of the balloot would close up. It wasn’t absolute, but the probability was there. Kris, we’re using just about the last drop of the Wasp’s reaction mass. There was no guarantee that we could try the mission with two boats, then redo it with three if we had to.”
“Thank you very much, Nelly. We’ll do it with three just fine.”
KRIS, YOU KNOW THE ODDS ON US PULLING THIS OFF STILL AREN’T BETTER THAN FIFTY-FIFTY.
NELLY, I FIGURED THEY WERE WORSE. IF YOU AND YOUR KIDS HADN’T DONE ALL YOUR WORK ON THIS, I EXPECT IT WOULD BE WORSE.
THANK YOU, KRIS, FROM ALL OF US. I KNOW YOU HAD TO SAY THOSE ENCOURAGING WORDS FOR THE HUMANS, BUT WE COMPUTERS KNOW THIS COULD BE OUR LAST FEW MINUTES OF EXISTENCE. I WANT YOU TO KNOW, WE THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU’VE GIVEN US.
AND I THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU’VE GIVEN ME, NELLY.
On net, Kris took in a deep breath. “All hands, and that includes you computers. It has been an honor serving with you. You know how much the rest are counting on us. Let’s go bring home the bacon.”
Some Marines sent back an Ooo-Rah to Kris. Cara said, “Oh, let’s,” and others answered, “We’re with you,” or the like.
The screen in front of Kris showed a five-second countdown to a retro burn. Kris followed the countdown to zero and kicked in the engines.
Live or die, they were committed.