“You didn’t try to argue him out of the fast turn-around?” I tried to sound surprised. It was enough to get another slight laugh from Angie.
“I’m glad you got here,” she said. “I’ve been doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself.”
“If we’re ever at Lowell Port at the same time, you can buy me a beer.”
“I’ll do that. How much damage does your Ebbie have?”
I gave it to her briefly. “Ebbie says it should take about ten hours work to get us shipshape for the long push home. Three sessions outside, two if I really push myself.”
“I’ll give you a hand, once I make sure that I can’t get Barta up for the trip under her own power. Make sure you get things right.” I didn’t try to refuse her help. With two people working, the job would go much faster.
We spent an hour going over the radio traffic, making certain that we hadn’t missed anything pertinent. The only talk going on was out in the cloud, and fairly close. Home was six months off by radio. There could be no advice from there, and there was no hurry in notifying Lowell Port. Even the permanent stations most distant from the Sun were four light-months from Shipwreck Station 117+9. The talk was with other pilots skimming the cloud, and there were only two close enough for conversation—Clay and the miner who had decided not to head for the station after all. The rest were between ten and thirty light-minutes away.
The event was still in progress. That’s part of the problem with a chain reaction. Anything that gets bumped has its orbit and momentum changed. Collisions lead to more collisions, and to more changes in the orbital schematics. It would take time to get the new map finalized. But farther off there was less chance of ships being damaged. The warning could travel faster than rocks and bergs. People could get out of the way.
Angie went to do her second survey of the damage to Bartholomew’s Candle. It wouldn’t change the bad news. We both knew that, but she tried to sound optimistic, and I didn’t tell her that she was wasting her time.
Clayton Reid’s ship docked while Angie was getting back out of her pressure suit. Reid had never given his ship a name. It was just “Clayton Reid’s candle.” Knowing that Clay was about to touch, I tensed up, as if I expected him to bump us hard enough to feel the docking. That was ridiculous, of course.
“I hope he’s in no hurry to come in,” Angie whispered. Viewing the damage to Barta had been rough on her. The more time Angie had before we were graced with Clay’s presence inside the habitat, the easier she would find him to tolerate.
“If he’s planning to be on the wick in seven hours, he’s going to have to get busy right away,” I said, also whispering, as if I feared that he might hear us talking about him.
The radio chirped for attention. I went for it.
“I’ll be starting my repairs right away,” Clay announced. “I’ll be in when I need to recharge my tanks.”
“Come on in whenever,” I said. “But if you’ve still got enough full air tanks in your candle, you’d best recharge there. The station lost part of its supplies in the event.”
He growled but said, “I’ll do that.” I hadn’t given him much choice, the way I had phrased it. Even Clayton Reid had to respect the needs of the shipwreck station.
After I had switched off, I turned back toward Angie. “That buys us a little time without his presence. Maybe I pissed him off enough that he won’t come in at all.”
“It’s possible,” Angie said. That halfsmile came back to her face, briefly. “Now, what about looking after your Ebbie?”
In an emergency, I could have attempted the repairs to Ebbie anywhere. But when you’re perhaps weeks away from any help at all, and five or six light-months from home, you don’t take any chances that aren’t absolutely necessary to assure your survival. Going outside to fix your candle when you’re on your lonesome presents routine dangers. If you screw up, you don’t have any backup.
Having an extra set of hands available speeded up the work considerably. There was only one place where Angie and I had to set up a mechanical persuader, a lever to hold a piece in place while I ran the cold welder to repair a fitting. Without her help, I would have had to do that a half dozen times.
After one two-hour work session, there was only one critical repair—and two or three minor jobs—left. At the far side of the station, a kilometer from Ebbie, we could see Clay working. He hadn’t so much as given us a wave when we came out.
“Let’s take a break,” I told Angie. “We’re making good time. There’s no need to press ourselves too hard.”
It can be tiring moving around and doing anything physical in a pressure suit, even in micro-gravity. In some ways, that’s harder than working in full planetary gravity. And despite the best innards in our pressure suits, it can get chilly spending extensive time outside that far from the nearest major source of heat—that is, the Sun.
When we were back inside the habitat and out of our pressure suits, Angie cranked up the thermostat a couple of notches. I heated a couple of bags of coffee.
“Ebbie wasn’t hurt as badly as I had thought from the reports Barta got from her,” Angie said.
“We were lucky,” I admitted. “We shouldn’t have any trouble at all getting Barta home for you.”
“But you’ll miss a chance to push a paying load home.” She sounded reluctant to mention that, but Angie hadn’t earned her high reputation among the mining community by shunning inconvenient facts.
I shrugged. “That’s life in the pits. We may be loners, but there are still times when we need each other.”
“Just tell me when you want to go out and finish the work.”
“We ought to take at least an hour between. Give the suits time to get back up to speed. Then we can look at the repairs we did the first shift before we tackle the remaining work, make sure I didn’t screw anything up.”
“Not likely.”
The hour stretched past an hour and a quarter. I was very comfortable sitting where I was, and I was enjoying my chat with Angie. It was warm in the habitat and I was feeling a little drowsy—and contented.
I yawned and stretched, having a last little argument with myself on the subject of getting back to work. I had just about convinced myself that it was time to get productive again when there was a buzz from one of the instrument clusters on the far wall. A small blue light started to flash.
“What the hell is that?” I asked. The question was enough to get me to my feet and moving. Angie was faster. She got to the panel and punched a couple of keys.
“There’s another ship coming in, but it’s not making any signals and not answering the station’s queries.”
“Try it manually,” I said, a waste of air since she had already started doing that.
Angie tried all five standard communications and distress channels. I worked the radar panel, trying to get better resolution. But the station’s damaged antennas kept the picture generic, so I patched through and let Ebbie do the scanning.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said when Ebbie fed me all of the data she was getting.
“What?” Angie asked.
“Ebbie’s got a full EM scan going. The shape isn’t right and the heat signature of the main propulsion unit is all wrong, like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
It wasn’t that Angie didn’t trust my report. She just wanted to see for herself. And it can help to have a second set of eyes, and a second brain, scan suspect data. We both stared at what Ebbie was providing.
“The silhouette I could understand,” Angie said finally, “if the candle had serious structural damage. The lack of any radio traffic could also be a result of damage. But that electromagnetic scan is all wrong.”