17

Anomalous Trajectory

In space, everyone can hear you scream.

At exactly one hundred megahertz, the common emergency radio band is easy to remember, easy to tune to, easy to find. Your vacsuit, miracle of modern technology that it is, may not be sentient, but it is certainly smart. It monitors your heartbeat, your blood pressure, the electrical activity in your brain, the oxygen saturation of your blood. It knows when you are injured, when you are afraid, when you are in distress. And it knows when to cry for help on the 100Mhz emergency band.

And by default, everywhere, everyone is listening.

Every suit radio. Every spacecraft. Every robot probe. Every relay station. Every gas planet dronescoop mining Jupiter's upper atmosphere for hydrogen or hydrocarbon plastic. If there's a company on Ganymede making baby monitors for professional-class working couples on Mars, there's decent odds their product is listening on the hundred megahertz band.

If you are in range, if your signal is powerful enough to reach them, then no matter who they are, or what they are doing, their ears are open.

Miranda's vacsuit is not just the standard miracle of modern technology. It's a miracle with extra miracle on top, so refined it doesn't have a model number. It only has a tiny, tasteful logo, marking it as the bespoke craftsmanship of the small firm of CRS Tuttle & Schmidt, of Tharsis, Mars. It is tailored specifically to match Miranda's tailored body, every bit as tightly controlled and planned as its owner's genetic code. It has never borne the indignity of price tag, because if Madam must ask, Madam cannot afford.

And Madam has never, never, not once in her life, had to ask.

So this miracle of modern engineering and artisanship is even smarter than most, and it knows exactly when to yell for help, and what to say.

And that is why I know Miranda is in trouble, why I know, moments before I hear her cry out over the voice channel in surprise and horror, that out there in the black, something has gone horribly wrong.

“Attention. Emergency. Anomalous EVA trajectory detected. Unexpected EVA thrust. Multiple vacuum suit malfunctions detected.”

The synthetic voice, urgent but somehow robotically calm, is doubled in my hearing… emergency systems talk to my neural lace, but they don't assume my neural lace is listening, and won't leave it at that. Every speaker in the bridge, every speaker on the White Cat, is repeating the same alert.

“Attention. Emergency. Anomalous EVA trajectory detected. Unexpected EVA thrust. Multiple vacuum suit malfunctions detected.”

Anomalous EVA trajectory.

Take it literally, and it's vague, but every Belter, and not just every Belter, but every Orbital of any kind who ever donned a vacsuit knows exactly what it means. It's older than all of us, from the days when our distant ancestors sailed in cruder spacecraft, made of wood, with cloth to harness the wind.

It is the ancient cry of “Man overboard!”

That's why I don't have to waste precious seconds asking Miranda what's wrong, what has happened. My fingers are already flying over controls real and virtual, summoning the data I need. All I can hear over the voice com is her heavy, rapid breathing, but her pulse rate, blood pressure, EEG, are jacked straight into the red on my display. Conscious. Alert. Panicked.

Somewhere far away, I can hear Leela asking—something—in an anxious voice. But I shut her out. I've been here before. I've fought this thing before. I need to focus.

“Miranda. Talk to me. How you doing?”

“Ohhh, God. Oh, God. I… fell. I'm… I'm off the tether!”

“Easy, easy. I have your beacon. I can find you. But I need you to calm down, okay, Princess? Get control of your breathing.”

“The thruster pack just started firing! It's just going off! I'm just…. I'm spinning. I can't see anything. I don't… I don't know where I am!”

“Attention. Emergency. Anomalous EVA trajectory detected. Unexpected EVA thrust. Multiple vacuum suit—”

I quickly thumb the switch labeled “100Mhz Emerg Alert” to “Silence.” The voice shuts off.

“Hey. Hey. Hey. Listen to me. Just listen to the sound of my voice. I got you, okay? I'm trained to deal with this. But I need you calm. I want you to take a deep breath in, and hold it, okay? Just one breath.”

Yeah, “trained to deal with.” Right. Suuure. In the simulators. Don't tell her I've only “dealt” with it once. Don't tell her that last time, someone died.

Don't think about the blood.

Just work the problem.

“Marcus, I…” There's more gasping for breath than talking. “I can't…”

“Shut up. Stop talking. Don't try to reorient yourself yet. Just. Take. One. Deep. Breath. In.”

I hear a single, coherent sucking in sound.

“Now hold it. Good. Now let it out slowly. There. Once more. In. Hold. Aaand out. Keep going.”

Numbers in my display cycle and change. Pulse. O-two sat. Okay, next step. She said the thruster pack fired. I check the telemetry from it, but there's nothing, just a flashing red “Non-Responsive” warning.

“Okay, good, that's looking better. Now, you said the thruster pack fired. Is it still firing?”

“I… ah… yes. Every couple of seconds. It's spinning me in different directions. I can't see where I am. It's just… stars. I can't see anything!”

“That's okay. That's okay, just stay with me. I'm not reading the pack, but I still have good signal from your suit. I can see your vitals. Suit integrity looks good. I think your air is fine. Can you breathe okay?”

“Yes. Yes, I can breathe.” Her voice is high and thin and worried, but not panicked anymore.

“Okay, okay, good. Now, you said you were off the tether. Did it break somehow, or did you not get a chance to re-attach it?”

“No, the pack started firing first. Just then.”

“Okay. Now, I want you to try and remember something for me, okay? When you were working your tether loose, did you detach any of the cargo lines from the artifact?”

“No…” She sounds puzzled.

“And the tether? Did you get it all the way free? Is it still tangled in the lines?”

“No, I got it free, but why…?”

She stops midway. Dead silence on the line. Nothing but the faint static hiss of the universe, the radio voice of ancient stars. Then she speaks again, softly.

“Oh.” And her voice sounds so very small. “Oh, God.”

“Miranda? What is it?”

“You're going to leave me.”

“What?”

“You're trying to figure out if the artifact is secure so you can reel it in. So you can just… go.”

In zero gravity, nothing can fall. But inside my stomach, somehow, something does.

“What? No, Miranda, why would you think that? No, don't answer that question. We don't do that. We do not do that. Not now. Not ever.”

“But…” and her voice is still so tiny, so resigned and sad, “… why wouldn't you? You have the artifact. They're closing in. All you have to do is take it and run. Why would you stay for me? Why would you risk your life for me?”

“Miranda.”

“Yes?”

“You stop that shit. Right fucking now. You shut the fuck up and you listen.

“First off, Leela, if you're hearing this, get on the high-gain antenna, triangulate that signal, and you pinpoint her location with one of the telescopes. Just keep tracking her.”

A disembodied hand gives me a thumbs-up in my display. I keep right on rolling.

“Miranda. If you never heard me before, hear this. You don't understand the first thing about me. I'm grew up in gravity well and I'm only six feet tall, so you get it twisted. Think I'm a Flatlander. Think I'm playing at this. But I'm not. I am a fucking Belter. And we don't do that.

“Out here, in the black, we stick together. You're right… I don't like you much. I don't think much of you. You only make nice when you have to. But right now, I give exactly zero fucks about that. Because I'm the captain of this ship, and you're flying with me. On a contract that we signed. Word and fucking hand.”

I'm almost at the point of shouting now. It's needless, the channel is crystal clear, we might as well be three feet apart. But it just comes out that way.

“So you can be every kind of bitch you want. But don't you ever dare to insult me again by even implying that ever, on my worst and most desperate day, would I leave one of my crew behind.”

“Oh.”

That's all she says. Just the one little sound.

“You're… going to get me out of this?”

“Yes, yes I am. Now shut it and let me work the problem.”

I smother the impulse to talk more, to try to comfort her. I'm not even angry, I'm scared. I have to get her back. I have to.

Then worry about… well, everything else. Starlight torchships closing in. Why that thruster pack went haywire. How we're going to get away with this. What to do next if somehow we do.

First things first.

“Leela, what have you got for me?”

“I have a location, but the thruster pack is still firing. She's flying all over like someone let a balloon go.” Leela's voice isn't just in my neural lace. It's on the comms band. Miranda can hear her. Maybe that's the point.

“Can you slave it from the Cat again?”

“Already tried. It's not responding. It's not even answering pings.”

“Okay, try to maintain visual track. Oh, there it is, thanks. Miranda, I am going to reel in the artifact, but I'm just doing it so I can come get you. We can't fly trailing a package. In the meantime, I want you to open the straps and ditch that thruster pack. We don't have time to try to fix it. Just let it fly free. I'll come to you in the Cat.”

“I… yeah, okay. ” I hear her take a deep breath. “I'm opening the release buckles.”

“Good. Leela, you're the alien tech expert. How tough is that artifact, do you think? Can I jolt it hard? Because I don't have a lot of time to strap it down once I get it in the bay.”

“I don't know. If it's contemporary with the main site, it's thousands of years old at least. And it's already damaged.”

“Kinda short on time, here. Those incoming contacts aren't getting any farther away. Gonna have to risk it.”

“No, no. Hold up, give me control of the crane, I got this.”

“Pack is free,” Miranda says, soft and breathy. I can tell she's still trying hard to hold it all together.

“Okay, good, sit tight. Leela, I think know what you're thinking. Catch it on the way in, lock the crane down to hold it in place, right? How fast can you handle?”

“Yeah, that's it. Still solving the configuration space path search, but I think I'll be fine below about eight meters per second or so.”

“Okay, kicking in the winches, package is moving. 117 meters out.”

“Marcus!” Miranda's voice cuts in again

“Kinda busy here, Princess, what is it?”

“Marcus, my suit is leaking!”

Shit. A wave of cold washes over me, and the hair on my forearms stands rises up. Why no breach alert? Oh—“multiple vacuum suit malfunctions.” Right. Leela will have to deal with the artifact on her own for a while.

“Okay, what are you seeing?”

“There's… there's something coming out somewhere. A gas plume. Like a mist.”

“Okay, calm down. You may have a breach, but remember, your suit doesn't circulate air except in the mask. So if it's not in your mask, it isn't air. Probably just sweat boiling off. Vacuum exposure on skin won't hurt you much, not right away. Do you see any warning lights or diagnostic codes?”

“It says 'rebreather press low,' and 'compensating.' Nothing about a leak.”

“Might be an issue with your scrubber. I want you to do an MSI.”

“What?”

“Manual. Suit. Inspection. C'mon, we went over this. Deep breath. Remember your training. Let's go.”

“Okay, yeah, okay, ah… Mask, Seal, Airflow, Scrub, Integrity, Radiation, Temperature, Maneuvering. Okay, mask—no visible cracks or breaches, doesn't feel lose or shift with gentle pressure—”

“Hey, Captain.”

“Not a good time, Leela. Is something on fire?”

“Will be if you don't give me winch control approximately yesterday.”

I don't ask, I just give. On one of my monitor windows, the artifact, trailing three slack lines, tumbles towards the open cargo bay doors. Damn. I wasn't watching the take-up rate.

“Sorry, Leela! You got it.”

“Yeah, I know, you humans can't multitask. I got it. Cargo crane catch in three, two…”

On the monitor, the weird angles of the alien… thing… loom towards the camera.

A distant clang. “GOT IT!” Leela sings out, as three robotic pincers fold around the artifact. “Locking the crane down now. Stand by… aaand locked. You're good to go. Move!”

I move, switching to chemical thrust, and punch the throttle hard. PMH and liquid oxygen flare in the vacuum with a pale blue, almost invisible fire, and the White Cat swings around and lurches forward, too slow for my taste, but I can't take a chance on the fusion drive this close to Miranda.

“Okay, Princess. Artifact is loaded and I'm moving to match your trajectory. How's that MSI coming?”

“I checked the exchanger housing, and it's… dented. It might have hit it on the artifact. I can't feel if the mist is coming from there.”

“Okay, lemme check your suit telemetry again… oh.”

The next word, the one I don't say, is “shit.”

Suits don't carry bottled air. Waste of space. All you're really using is the oxygen. So scrub out the carbon dioxide you exhale, let in a little fresh O2 from a tank so pressurized it's almost liquid, and carry on. Last you eight to twelve hours out there, easy.

Unless you lose the exchanger.

“Oh? What 'oh'? What do you mean, 'oh'?”

“Okay, you need to stay calm.”

“Marcus, what is going on?”

“No, I mean you really need to stay calm. Your CO2 scrubber's out, and the backup's got a pressure failure… probably from the same impact. It's at about thirty percent.”

“Oh, so if I… ah…”

“Yeah.”

There's no need to explain it to a brain doctor. No matter how much oxygen she has with her, if she can't get rid of carbon dioxide… bad things. She could probably explain in detail, if I didn't already know enough to be scared.

“Okay,” she says, her voice on the radio breathy, fighting for calm, “I'm not sure exactly how much time we have, but I think we're gonna need to move fast.”

“I'm trying to figure out the rates now from the diagnostics. That suit of yours is fucking smart. It's concentrating carbon dioxide as much as it can, then venting atmo through the breech to get rid of it. That'll burn through your oxy supply real fast, but it'll buy us some time all the same, probably as much as we need. So long as you—”

“Stay calm and don't breathe hard. I know. I'm trying. What's the plan? Tell me you have a plan.”

“I'm gonna match orbits, then EVA to you with a rescue bag. Leela, how are our guests doing?”

“Hot and fast. First one's behind Sedna right now, but he'll pass the horizon and have a clear shot in forty-six minutes fifteen, at his current rate.”

“Okay, power up the railgun. We're gonna dry fire it when he clears. Maybe he'll see the mag pulse and duck. Miranda, just sit tight… the Cat is on the way.”

“Okay, I have an intercept to you. Coming in on chemical thrust, so it's going to take a little while. Sit tight.”

”Take a little—” she starts in, then takes a deep breath, audibly calms herself. “How long?”

“Don't know yet. Maybe half an hour, little less. Getting to you isn't hard, but I have to match trajectories, get my vacsuit on, then EVA to you. It's going to be tight.”

“I… understand,” she says in a shaky voice. “What do you need me to do?”

“Not much you can do,” I say, nudging the thrusters again, “Just sit tight and breathe slow and regular.”

There's a long silence on the other end. A calculating, considering silence. Finally her voice comes back. Different, somehow. Calm, but sung in a subtle key of white knuckles. Her Martian accent is thicker now.

“Okay. But can you keep talking to me while you do it? I'm still spinning, and all I can see is stars, and I'm… trying not to freak out, here.”

“Okay, but this is not a trivial task, Princess. Gotta concentrate. Pick a topic, I'll try to keep up.”

“Oh, okay. Well. Can you… not do that?'

“Not do what?”

“Call me 'Princess.' I… don't like it. I know you don't much care what I like, but just… please not right now, okay?”

I don't think I've ever heard her say “please” before, asking for anything. In fact, I don't think I've even heard her ask instead of demanding.

“Yeah, well, okay, but what's the problem? You might not have the title, but you kinda are one.”

“That is the problem.”

“How's that a problem?”

“I mean, that's why I don't like it. Think about it. What do princesses do?”

“Uh… wear fancy clothes? Get followed around by tabloid reporters? Get rescued from dragons in stories? Not really the time to play twenty questions, here.”

“Okay, okay. But there's a reason you don't know, Marcus. Because the answer is 'nothing.' Literally nothing. Real princesses, I mean royalty, only had one job. Get married and secure a political alliance for the king. Then pump out heirs for whoever they were sold to.”

“And?” I ask, adding a touch of braking thrust.

“So that's who they wanted me to be. Well, mostly my mother.”

“Wanted you to be what? A princess?”

“A thing! Something that just sat around and looked nice and did nothing!”

“So, you don't have to do anything. That's a problem?

“Yes, that's a—look, my mother had me genecrafted, before I was born.”

“Yeah, I kinda noticed. But that's normal for your family, right? You're all genetwists.”

“Not like me. They're mostly just altered for health, basic good looks and longevity. I have two older brothers, so my father already had his heirs. So, when my mother wanted a girl, it was up to her how I…”

She trails off.

“And she wanted you different?” I prompt her.

“She's a trophy wife! The only thing she ever did apart from marry my father was modeling! She's just there to look good, pick out decor, and organize cocktail parties!”

She takes a deep breath. “So she just made me what she thought would look good! A cartoon with big doll eyes.”

“Yeah, those are kinda unusual. I always kinda wondered how they even fit in front of your brain.”

“They're not spheres. Flattened front to back. Took a dozen bioengineers six months to redesign all the little muscles, just because she thought it would look cute. And I'm stuck looking like this for the rest of my life!”

“So you're condemned by birth to be rich and pretty, you poor thing?” It's the wrong moment to be sarcastic, but… she brings out the asshole in me. And, technically, that is exactly what she's complaining about.

“Nobody stopped her! Nobody even said anything to her! She just picked stuff on a whim! Whatever she wanted.”

“Okay, soooo… when I call you 'Princess,' you don't like it, because it reminds that you're—”

“That I'm a doll! She just wanted a cute little girl to play with and show off to her trophy wife friends. And when I grew up, I was just supposed to be another trophy wife for some… for someone!”

“Ah, Miranda?”

“What?”

“I get it, that's actually kinda fucked up, but… this isn't keeping you calm. You're breathing hard. Better change the subject.”

She sighs. “Yeah. It's just… well, you probably think I'm spoiled rotten, huh?”

I've covered most of the distance now. I can see her on the monitor, unmagnified, in a complex tumble. Now comes the tricky part… matching velocity and position at once.

“Frankly, yes,” I tell her, nudging the stick with little bursts of gentle pressure. “I mean, I get it, but there's plenty of people who would gladly switch places with you. If the worst thing that ever happened to you is you look like a pixie, and some people don't take you serious, I mean, well—”

“Yes, yes, Marcus, I know, I've heard it already. No one but working class people have any right to complain, because nothing bad ever happens to anyone else. But you do realize that includes you, too, right?”

Huh. Where's she going with this?

“What do you mean?” I ask, slowly swinging the Cat round on its major axis.

“I mean, you're not exactly Mr. Working Class Hero, here, no matter where your sympathies lie. I mean, yes, you're serious about being a Belter, but you play it like you're this asteroid miner jock with a laser cutter in one hand and a tug throttle in the other.”

She sounds a bit funny. Thick-voiced. Slow. I press the throttle a bit harder.

“We don't use laser cutters. And I know what because I actually put in the time working rocks. For years.”

“And that was your choice. You didn't have to… do it. Your father owned the… company. So when are you going to stop… pretending… like you're the salt of the… earth and I'm some sort of… parasite?”

I'm saved from having to answer that by an alarm from the suit telemetry. At the same moment, I hear Miranda suck in a breath, startled.

“You okay?”

“I'm starting to feel really… light-headed. What's my… CO2 level at?”

“You don't wanna know. I'm moving as fast as I can.”

“Marcus, I'm a… doctor…”

“I know, you keep telling me. But there's no point in upsetting you if there's nothing you can do 'til I get there. Just close your eyes and breathe nice and slow. Regular. Count if it helps.”

And don't ask me more questions, so I don't have to tell you that your backup scrubber just failed, and your suit is running out of weapons in its heroic fight to keep your alive.

And that my palms are starting to sweat.

“Marcus, I can't—”

“Just take it easy.”

“I can't see!”

Shit. It shouldn't be anywhere near this fast. Even with the scrubbers out, she shouldn't be this far gone in only a few minutes. What's going on? Is she panicking? Losing mask pressure? Is her regulator shot?

Did the bioengineers do something else to her? Jack her metabolism? A baseline human wouldn't black out this fast…

“Miranda, long slow breaths. I'm getting close now, okay?”

Panting on the other end of the line, then a whisper…

“…please…”

Drive signature traces start flashing on my starmap… Leela's listening, drawing my attention to the incoming ships. One of them will be clear to fire in a handful of minutes.

Miranda's pulse readout is flashing red on my display now. Rate's up and down and all over the place. Not good. High pitched noises on the radio now, nothing coherent, just choking, gasps, strangled cries. I'm less than two hundred meters away now, but it might as well be a million as I listen to her drown.

There's no time to suit up. There's no time for EVA. There's no time to get to her with a rescue bag. There's only a few moments left before there's time for nothing but desperate, evasive flight. I can't go out and get her. I know that. Leela knows that. Those flashing trajectory tracks, that flashing text in my display—

CARDIAC ARRHYTHMIA - EXTREME BRACHYCARDIA - OXYGEN LEVELS CRITICAL

—tells me I'm out of options.

All I'd have to do is turn and burn. Keep Sedna between me and them while I pound for deep space. Take the artifact and take Leela and just—go. Try to sell it to the highest bidder, pay off my debts. Pay off the people I stole from. Clear my name.

And see those big violet eyes burning into mine every time I try to sleep.

I can't. I'm not leaving her.

I have one last thing to try. One last card to play.

The bay door catch.

I can try it, can't I? I have to try it. At least if I try, it won't be my fault, right? If I try it again, and it… doesn't work… I'll have done something, done all I could be expected to do, right?

Right?

Just don't think about the next part.

Just don't think about the blood.