Manxome Foe

11

“CO, chill complete,” The XO reported. He had the daily duty to bring a report on consumables and conditions to the CO and had stopped by the conn to determine the condition of chill.

“Roger,” Spectre said. “And?”

“We’re at twenty percent on water stores,” the XO continued. “Forty on air, but we’re reaching break-point on the scrubbers without a way to blow off the CO₂.”

“Roger that, XO,” the CO said, bringing up the repeater on the main scope. They were currently parked in deep space just outside the gravitational bubble of HD 37301. The F5 star was about three quarters of the way to the mission zone and a good point to pick up supplies. The Vorpal Blade was more than three hundred and seventy-six light-years from Earth and only one really weird thing had happened to them. Spectre liked it, the mission was boring so far. Well, compared to the other missions.

“Astro, CO,” Spectre continued, hitting the comm to the conn.

“Astro.”

“We need to replenish,” the CO said. “What do we have in this system?”

“Sir, I’ve had the telescopes looking for Jovians and have found two,” Weaver replied. “Or, we could use the comet water extraction gear. I’ve had two of the scopes looking for comets also. Found a few of them out at about seventy AUs on highly elliptical orbits. That’s par for the course in case you’re wondering.”

“Well, the last time we did the Jovian thing you flooded the ship with squeaky gases.”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Then why don’t we try the comet thing. Besides, we haven’t done that before and I’m not in the mood for a hundred or more Donald Duck voices on my ship,” Spectre said with a raised eyebrow.

“Aye, aye, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Weaver responded. “But I’m not sure all the bugs are worked out of that system.”

“So your recommendation is…”

“Jovian extraction, sir,” Weaver replied.

“Right,” Spectre said. “XO, prepare for comet rendezvous and water extraction. Astro, get us up side a good wet one.”

“Aye sir,” Weaver replied. “But you’d probably prefer a good frozen one. And I’ll bet you a dollar you end up longing for the days of Donald Duck.”

“I’ll take that bet, Astro.”

Two-Gun, Lurch, Himes, and Command Master Chief Miller were Wyverned up and preparing to do an EVA onto the comet via the underbelly elevator. The elevator was made of aliglass, a substance also called “transparent aluminum” which was, in fact, more like synthetic sapphire. The elevator was a cube roughly three meters on a side — just big enough that three Wyverns could fit in it or four men in spacesuits. Four Wyverns at a stretch if they weren’t anticipating being eaten or shot on exit.

“Conn, EVA,” Miller said. The chief adjusted the weight on his footing and prepared for the gravity to drop out from under him. “We’re in the elevator and ready to drop onto the comet.”

“Roger that. I wish I could be there with y’all,” Weaver said from the EVA control. His accent always got thicker when he got excited. “Y’all will be the first humans to ever walk on a comet. But somebody has to make sure we don’t bump into this thing too hard.”

“Chief,” Spectre interrupted. “Good luck.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Team,” Berg said. “Remember, comets can have a lot of dust and gasses floating around it in close to the sun. Especially if they have a lot of water ices.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, way out here it should just be a frozen ball with no clouds or atmosphere,” Berg said. “But that’s only theory.”

“So…” Lurch replied. “It should be… Holy maulk! It’s like a blizzard out there!”

The elevator had exited the underbelly of the ship and it was apparent, whatever the theory, that the comet was surrounded in some sort of fog. Since a water fog was impossible in space, what it was composed of was anyone’s guess.

“Thought you said it’d be clear, Two-Gun!” Himes said.

“The-or-et-i-cal-ly,” Berg enunciated very slowly.

“Well, that theory’s out the window,” Lurch said, chuckling.

“Still doesn’t make sense,” Eric said. There shouldn’t have been that much ice and dust particulate matter floating around them.

“Two-Gun,” Miller said over a private channel. “We’re whited out here. Suggestions?”

“Damn thing’s down there somewhere, Chief,” Berg said, looking at the all-enveloping fog, then extending a camera to look down. “Based on the briefing, the radar has to have it close. No more than six meters from the underside. The microgravity of the comet’s much higher than the ship’s. Exit forward, give a short burst relative ‘down’ then watch our laser range-finders. They’re probably going to cut through this better than visual. And it’s not like we’re going to take any damage if we hit hard.”

“Right,” Miller said, nodding inside his suit. “Team, one safety line to the elevator, one to your buddy. Exit forward, get a relative position stopped by the opening and then one hit of jet relative down. The damned thing’s got to be down there somewhere.”

To Berg it reminded him a good bit of SCUBA school. Entering the fog immediately cut off all light from the elevators, and even the helmet lights barely penetrated, reflecting back a brilliant white that was so annoying he just turned them off. So he was working in absolute darkness and zero-gravity. It was disorienting as hell, but then so was doing the same thing underwater.

They’d kept relative position on the ship while they were still in view. Going down was when they’d lost track of everything.

But just as he was starting to wonder if there really was a comet under his feet his laser range-finder started to report a solid hit.

“Chief Milller?” Berg said, looking at the range dropping, fast.

“Team,” Miller snapped. “Prepare for landing in three… two… Contact!” It felt a bit like landing in very grainy snow. At least, what it might have felt like if it was grainy snow with no really noticeable gravity.

“Miller? Chief? What’d you see?” Weaver asked over the com.

“Not a thing, sir,” Miller replied irritably. “We’re totally zero vis down here. Wait one.” He took the harpoon gun from his belt and fired it into the comet surface. The reaction force of the harpoon pushed him upward off the surface but as soon as the harpoon bit it started to automatically reel in. All he had to do was hold on and work to get his feet in line with the harpoon. He managed to get one knee under him as he hit, then knelt down using the harpoon rope to pull against and picked up a handful of the cometary surface debris.

“Looks like ice,” Miller said, holding the material up to his camera. “Dirty ice.”

“Standard cometary ice,” Two-Gun added. “Spectrometer shows it to be water ice with about twice the amount of deuterium in it as ocean water. Just like you expected, Commander Weaver. But…”

“Good. Well, start laying out the cables and we’ll send down the chipper. What is the but, Two-Gun?”

“Uh, sir? Why all the fog? We’re so far out from the star that this thing should be frozen hard as a rock.”

“What happens when you stomp your feet against the comet, Two-Gun?” Weaver replied. “Or bring a ship and gravity field in close to it for that matter? And don’t forget that you and the ship are hot.”

“Huh? Oh, I see.” Berg realized that the disturbance of the ship landing had forced a cloud of debris particles up around it. The gravity of the comet was so slight that it would take months or even years for the dust to settle. And the heat radiators from the belly of the ship were probably melting off ice and causing a microclimate to form around them as well. Space was a delicate, although harsh place; the tiniest variance in temperature could create interesting changes.

“This damned thing looks like some sort of demented garden tiller,” Machinist Mate Gants said. Behind it a Seaman’s Apprentice rolled a large coiled-up thirty-centimeter-diameter flex hose. The spooled flex hose would be fifty meters long when stretched out.

“Yeah, or maybe a miniaturized combine tractor.” Miriam laughed then pushed at the compressed, coiled, and tied-up flex hose with her foot. “I assume that someone has noticed that flex hose is not the smartest thing you could use in microgravity!”

“Well, ma’am,” Gants said, grinning. “You know what they say about assuming…”

“That’s the last of the cables, Two-Gun.” Himes attached the loop on the end of his Spectra 1000 polymer cable onto the carabineer connected to the chipper. The cables stretched out like spokes of a wheel about the ship for about thirty meters in every direction. They would be used to help guide and hold down the ice chipper.

The ship had been carefully belayed down to the point where the elevator was in contact with the surface of the comet, then lashed to additional harpoons. As long as none of the forces about to be unleashed exceeded the rated strength of the materials, in near absolute zero cold and pretty solid vacuum, everything would be well.

If not…

“Secured to the winch up here, Chief,” Berg said. “I guess the only thing left is the flex hose.”

“Got it,” Lurch said pulling the oversized zip-tie cinched tight around where the hose fit over the output end of the chipper. Then he cut the zip-tie that was holding the hose compressed.

“No wait!” Two-Gun yelled.

It was too late.

The flex hose expanded out under the ship like a bullet, flailing like a snake with its head cut off and kicking up more ice particulates, thus making the fog even worse. But the hose quickly damped itself out to minor oscillations and lay limp floating a meter or so above the surface of the comet.

“Huh? It just stopped,” Himes said. “Why the hell did it do that? I figured it would go on forever!”

“Conservation of angular momentum,” Berg said musingly. “Should’ve thought of that. You knew that, didn’t you, Lurch?”

“I read about this experiment once called the Inflatable Antenna Experiment,” Sergeant Lyle said. “You let loose floppy things in space and one side flops one way so the other flops the other way to conserve angular momentum. Eventually, it stops flopping. No harm, no foul.”

“You’re trying to out Alpha Geek me, aren’t you?” Berg said, grinning inside his Wyvern.

“Not a chance, Brain,” Lurch said. “You can keep particles all to yourself. But, I mean, don’t all Marines read Space Daily?”

“This maulk hurts my head,” Himes said.

“Welcome to the Space Marines,” Lurch and Eric chorused.

“Commander Weaver, we are ready to commence chipping down here.” Weaver scanned as best he could in the fog at the surface, the winch cables, and the Marines. “Everybody clear out and man the flex hose. I’ve got the chipper.” The chief put his large burly space-suited hands around the ice chipper handlebars and depressed the start safety switch. The switch was a built-in safety disengage like a bicycle brake lever or, well, like the safety disengage on a garden tiller, and if it were let go, the chipper blades would stop turning. Miller stepped up on the operator’s platform, which was nothing more than two metal plates for him to stand on. As the safety lever closed, the electric engine whirred to life, spinning up the chipper blades.

The oversized and demented looking garden tiller started jumping and bouncing and would have thrown itself along with the chief off the surface of the comet and out into space were it not for the winches on either side of the device connected to polymer cables, which were, in turn, harpooned into the surface of the comet.

“Yeehaw!” Miller shouted sarcastically as the chipper bit into the icy surface of the comet and dug deeper into it, chewing up the comet debris and spitting it out through the flex hose. The chipper dug down a meter until the blades were completely under the ice. Then it started heading forward, continuing for twenty meters in less than fifty seconds.

The hose whipped taut and filled as the ice chips were forced through it. Like a rocket engine out of the other end of the hose a spray of ice flung the flex hose hither and yon. It was all that Lurch, Two-Gun, and Himes could do to hold on to it even though their feet were tied down to harpoons on the surface. The ice spray splattered across the opening of the elevator and only about two-thirds of it actually made it in.

“Hold up, Chief!” Two-Gun cried. The chipper stopped bucking once Miller let off the safety lever. It slowly flopped back and forward but was otherwise limp.

“Maulk, Two-Gun can’t you keep it up longer than that!” Himes laughed, but he couldn’t have held on any longer either.

“Shit, that was a ride,” Miller said. “I can’t fight this thing and hold down that damned safety lever at the same grapping time. Who designed this grapping thing anyway?” The chief was a big man, but in a matter of less than a minute the machine had caused him to sweat profusely and his hand and forearm muscles burned. Somehow, he just knew the Blade’s redneck astrogator had something to do with the design of the thing. “Ain’t like tilling garden soil, that’s for sure.”

“What’s wrong, Chief?” Spectre asked. The entire operation was considerably entertaining to the former fighter pilot. And for now it appeared to be safer than letting hydrogen gas seep into every nook and cranny of the ship.

“Uh, well sir, I’m not sure yet but I think I’m gonna need a foot long zip-tie, and some other stuff.” Miller looked back over his shoulder. “What’d you need, Two-Gun?”

“No problem that more Marines couldn’t solve. Even with Wyverns, keeping this hose under control is nearly impossible.”

“Did you get any ice, Chief?” Weaver asked.

“I don’t know. Hold one.” Miller turned slowly, releasing his carabineer from the cables harpooned into the ice. He was careful not to launch himself in the microgravity and inched his way back the couple of meters to where the Marines were strapped down.

“Any ice in the elevator, Marines?” He shined his suit floods at the elevator opening and saw a mountain of ice before them. He had to get within a half a meter to see it with all the fog. “What the grapp?”

“Will you look at that?” Himes leaned forward to inch closer to the elevator door.

“Uh, yes sir,” Miller said. “The elevator is completely full. And then some.”

“Good work, Chief! We’ll extract it and empty it for another round,” Spectre said, jovially. “EVA, retrieve the elevator.”

Weaver hit the elevator controls and was unsurprised when a red icon appeared on his screen.

“I was afraid of that.”

“What?” Spectre asked, leaning over the console. “Mr. Miller, did you break my elevator?”

“Wait, one, sir,” Miller replied. “Oh… grapp. Sir, forget the extra zip-tie for the safety lever and I doubt we’ll need those Marines. Uh, sir, is there a way you could send down some picks or some antifreeze or something?” Miller looking up over the elevator that the semi-frozen ice spray had filled and buried and almost immediately refroze to the comet. That elevator was going nowhere soon.

“Well, the problem, sir,” Weaver said calmly, “is that the chipper was designed by guys who had been thinking of building a mass-driver propulsion system to steer comets off of collision courses. In essence, it’s a rocket engine and spits out a hell of a lot more ice spray than I’d ever thought it would’ve. We just modified the idea for our use.”

The computer had to be given complete control of the navigation in order to exactly, or as close to exactly as possible, match the comet’s rotations. Otherwise, the momentum of the small city-sized comet would rip the elevator right out of the belly of the Blade. And, Weaver could tell by the look on Spectre’s face, that he didn’t like that not one grapping bit.

“Didn’t you do some calculations on this to figure it out, Astro?” the CO said, just as calmly. But it was clearly the calm before the storm.

“Uh, no sir, the comet water extraction didn’t fall under astrogation or propulsion or fighting the Dreen so I, uh, delegated it, sir,” Weaver said sheepishly.

“Understood. To whom was it delegated?”

“Tchar.”

“Tchar,” the CO said, nodding. Calmly. “Tchar. Right. We’ll discuss that decision of yours later, Astro. Right now, do you have any suggestions for getting my elevator unstuck?”

“I’m thinking on it, sir. Maybe Tchar has something in his junk pile. I’d better get down there sir.”

“Sir,” the COB said, sticking his head in the wardroom. “This reminds me of a boat I was on a few years ago—”

“COB, much as I enjoy your reminiscences—” the CO said tightly.

“Yes, sir,” the COB interrupted. “I know you enjoy them all, sir. But there’s a point to this one, sir. Are you willing to gain the benefit of my nearly thirty years in this country’s Navy, sir? Or are you going to tell your senior enlisted man to mind his own business, sir?”

Spectre opened his mouth, then shut it.

“Go ahead, COB.”

“The point, sir, is that we were in the arctic,” the COB continued. “Machinist Mate Gants happened to be on the same cruise. He wasn’t a mate back then and I wasn’t COB but we were on the same boat, Lord help me. Anyway, he used a welder to melt a statue of a naked woman out of some glacier ice. See, we did a crack through on the ice and…”

“Weaver?”

“Great idea, COB,” Weaver said. He hit the com keys on his console. “Eng? I need Machinist Mate Gants on the double.”

“Yeah, I did this once for a Christmas Party a few years ago when we were poking up through the ice in the Arctic. We were camping up there for Christmas with these SEALS that were waiting on a damned Chinese polar orbiting satellite to crash… uh, forget I said that part… so I decided to lighten the mood.” Gants tossed several extra long welding rods, a roll of space tape, and a few tungsten rods into a cart alongside the portable welding generator and welder transformer. “We’d better hurry though.”

“How we getting this down to them?” Miriam asked.

“Somebody’s gotta carry it to ’em out the forward or top airlock or maybe out one of the torp tubes,” Gants said. “I saw Deep Impact and I have no desire to be walking on a damned comet in the middle of freakin’ space.”

“Uh, yeah.” Miriam tried not to grin. The movie had been so incorrect in the nature of comets it was a catastrophe in and of itself. But she decided not to say anything. Besides, the voice in her head was telling her something interesting about “…the entropy due to quantum fluctuations around the event horizon being proportional to the surface area of the artificial singularity…” So she was only half listening to Gants. Being an interpreter for years had trained her to half listen to multiple conversations at once. Maybe that is why the voice likes me?

“Well, Chief, you really managed to grapp this one up, huh? No comments about whose idea this was.” Weaver was chagrined at himself, not the crew.

“Not gonna say a word about it, sir,” Miller said with a snort.

“Two-Gun, start setting this up. Get me the welding transformer plugged into the generator and get it right here by this elevator strut. The welder only has about eight feet of cable.”

“Yes sir! Himes, Lurch give me a hand.” Two-Gun shot another harpoon into the comet just forward of the elevator and winched himself to the welder that the commander had brought them. Himes and Lurch followed suit.

“Now I just stretch this tungsten rod between these two welder clips and that should do it. I see the other rods and space tape now.” He laid the other two welding rods across the back of the insulated parts of the welder clips and then space taped them to each clip so he could use the welding rods as a handle. Those damned machinists in engineering were nothing if not clever.

“Ready over there Two-Gun?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Turn me on.”

“On, sir.”

“Wheeee!” Weaver could see the tungsten rod glowing red hot. He set to work on the first ice sculpture in space, on a comet, in orbit around a distant star. Say what you wanted to about the casualty rates, but sometimes Weaver felt he had the best job in the galaxy. He felt like the heroes in those science fiction books he grew up reading. The only things missing were scantily clad super vixen heroines.

“So the t/psi interacts with the psi muon density modularity vector…” Miriam muttered. “I can see that…”

“Try it now, Mike,” Weaver told Gants over the com.

“Yes, sir,” Gants depressed the elevator controls and sluggishly the hydraulics pulled the box filled with about twenty-five tons of ice free from the comet.

“Hot damn!”

“The elevator is here, sir.” Gants replied. “It’ll, uh, take us a few minutes to unload it.”

“Copy that.”

Gants and several of the submarine’s tech crew set to work emplacing the smaller chipper and melter system in the elevator and connecting it to the flex hose that ran down the corridor around two corners and up one deck to the water reservoir inlet near what used to be ballast tanks. In space they were water reservoirs.

The smaller chipper made quick work of the ice, and the fact that it was about sixty-eight degrees in the ship helped also. The ice melted as it was chipped and was sucked away through the flex hose.

“How we doing, XO?” the CO asked.

“Uhm… About that bet with Commander Weaver, sir?”

“Tell me.”

“It’s taking four minutes to unload the elevator and drop it back to the surface. It takes about two minutes to refill it and unstick it. Total time, six minutes.”

“Not bad,” the CO said, nodding. “Not bad!”

“Yes, sir,” the XO said. “The interior volume of the elevator is thirty-six cubic meters. We need twenty-six thousand cubic meters of water. Actually, that’s just to fill the reserve tanks. It doesn’t take into account the amount of O₂ we need to crack out of it.”

“Oh,” the CO said. “Timeframe?”

“Seventy-two hours just to fill the reserve tanks,” the XO said. “Another thirty-four to create enough water to refill the O₂ tanks. Actually, that’s not exactly right, since we’re using it even as we’re gathering it. Total estimated time? One hundred and twenty hours to have everything topped off.”

“We don’t have five days, XO,” the CO said. “We’re on a rescue mission.”

“Agreed, sir,” Coldsmith said. “Would you care to venture an estimate on how long it will take to refill at a Jovian with the new systems?”

“Go.”

“Twenty-six hours, topped off.”

“Damn.”

“Suspend operations,” Commander Coldsmith said.

“Why?” Weaver replied.

“Commander, I know you haven’t been an officer for as long as your rank might suggest, but in the Navy when you’re given an order…”

“Sorry, XO,” Weaver said. “I meant to say ‘aye, aye, sir.’ ”

“There’s good news, though,” the XO replied. “The CO owes you a dollar.”

“Damn,” Spectre said, looking at the readings. Entry to the system and approach to the Jovian had taken less than an hour. Set up had taken less than fifteen minutes with the installed system. He’d gone off-watch, done some paperwork and come back to find the tanks almost filled, O₂ and H₂O.

“Good job, Commander. You were r… You were ri… Damnit, here’s your dollar!”

“I won’t say I told you so, sir,” Weaver replied, taking the dollar primly. “I’m too tired and much too big of a man to say anything like—”

“Thin ice, Astro,” the CO said. “Thin ice.”

“Yes, sir. And I’m sure no pun was intended.”