Return to Camerein by Rick Shelley

Author:Rick Shelley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency
Published: 1998-05-20T14:00:00+00:00

In a naval career that spanned thirty-seven years, Master Chief Petty Officer Homer O’Neill had logged no more than ninety hours in vacuum—in a spacesuit outside a ship. At that, he had more than three times as much vacuum time than anyone else aboard Avon. There was simply little call for extravehicular activity in the modern navy. Virtually all outside work could be accomplished by automatons.

O’Neill wasn’t even from the engineering department. Now the senior enlisted person aboard Avon, most of his experience was in navigation and ships’ controls. But this job couldn’t be done by robots, and the man with the most experience clomping around outside a ship in vacuum had to be part of it.

More than sixty people, including five officers, had cycled through the maintenance airlocks to manhandle eleven message rockets into place around the hull, and to seed the molecular welders that would secure the MRs to the ship’s hull. The chief engineering officer had been out the entire time, supervising, even doing some of the physical labor. Fiber-optic cables in thick protective sheathing linked the MRs and snaked through the hull, some of them through holes that had been drilled especially for the purpose, then sealed to maintain the gastight integrity of the hull.

A bloody mess, O’Neill thought. The work had been going on for ten hours. Like Commander Billingsley, O’Neill had been out the entire time.

“This is our best hope for getting out of this mess,” the commander had told him.

O’Neill suspected that the “best hope” wasn’t all that good. It all sounded like something out of a poor adventure vid. If it’s time for us all to cash in our chips, why work us to death first? O’Neill had been a noncom too long to say that, or to give his feelings away by looks or body language, especially around subordinates. If the captain and chief engineer thought that it was worth a try, Who the hell am I to say different?

Finally, the last MR was secure, and all of the cables linking them. Commander Billingsley had a portable testing unit plugged into one of the MRs. Half of the ratings had already been sent back inside. The others remained out with the engineer, gathered around him, watching the readouts on the tester, talking on a radio channel that O’Neill was excluded from.

“Okay, Master Chief,” Billingsley told O’Neill after several minutes. “Let’s get everyone inside. Make certainthat no one leaves a spanner or anything else out here. We don’t need bits of debris complicating this maneuver for us.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” O’Neill said. “I’ve kept a careful count and we’ve been sweeping. I’ll be the last man through the airlock, so I’ll be certain nothing or nobody is left behind.”

“And I’ll be at your side, Master Chief,” Billingsley said.

The nearest airlock was sixty yards forward. This far back, most of the interior of Avon was given over to machinery and to the containment fields for the main drives and fuel storage—the antimatter that had to be held in magnetic canisters until it was routed into the propulsion chambers.

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