Interplanetary Thrive by Ginger Booth

Author:Ginger Booth [Booth, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

16

Sass’s heart pounded a few more times, thundering in her ears. Familiar panic sweat coated her hands inside her gauntlets. And her key man was petrified by a disaster beyond his training and abilities, and the possibility of never seeing his baby boy again.

That thought, compassion for her poor engineer’s plight, broke through her paralysis. She nodded to him firmly and grasped his proffered hand to vault out of the trapdoor airlock into the hold.

Their backup team was only just arriving, not yet suited. And clearly Copeland didn’t know yet what to ask them to do. She nodded to them as well, and briskly proceeded with Copeland to exit the side airlock, above the container array.

While the air cycled out, she switched to a private circuit. “What are you thinking?”

“I have no fucking clue,” he replied, belatedly realizing he hadn’t switched off the damage control channel. Ruefully, he changed channels now. “First, secure the remaining containers. Somehow.”

“Then we hope to retrieve the others?” The airlock was depressurized, so she punched the button to open the outer door.

Copeland secured their D-rings and peeked out. They were traveling at over 4,000 kilometers per second. He gulped and switched to the command channel. “Abel, no maneuvers, no engine burns. None. Zero. Until further notice.”

“Roger that,” Abel agreed. “Ben?”

Ben replied, “Disabling AI piloting control. Guns only. Cope, I found one of the containers.”

“Great, Ben. Not now,” Copeland replied. Back on his private channel with Sass, he added, “Need to secure what we have first.”

“Absolutely,” Sass agreed. “I’m tethering you to me, and both of us to the ship. I’ll mind the tools.”

He nodded sharply and headed out, crawling along the side of the ship using the magnetic pads on his knees and forearms, transferring his D-ring off to each hand-hold.

Sass deemed his progress too slow. “Stay clamped, Cope. Passing you,” she announced. Zero-g propulsion took extensive practice to build reflexes, just as a baby learned to walk. She was simply better at it than he was – one of the best on the ship. She clamped off her ring in front of her, gathered to jump as hard as she could, and launched at a 20-degree angle off the side of the ship forward, straight into the stars.

This maneuver took real guts the first time. But the physics were reliable. When she reached the end of her tether, her momentum had to go somewhere. In this case, her line pivoted on her anchor point back by the airlock, and slapped her to the side of the ship at the front of the containers, because that’s how much slack she’d allowed. She grabbed a hand-hold and locked on.

She tugged on her line to Copeland, who was also clamped to a hand-hold. “Let go, I’ll reel you to me.”

He trusted her – confident movement engendered that trust. Within a few more seconds, he was securely anchored within a meter of the problem of the moment. The engineer didn’t even bother to acknowledge the ride. He immediately resumed crawling on magnetics to reach what he needed to see, and clicked on his helmet light.

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