Get a grip.
Dancers slow their spins by holding out their arms. She tries it.
It slows her enough to get her bearings. The Homunculus shrinks away from her, a black triangle with a few flashing lights. It’s too far to see specific features or movement, like whether or not the hydra has managed to get back onto the hull, or what kind of damage it is trying to do now. She’s probably too distant for them to see her. But maybe if they look out the viewing window at the right moment, they will witness her passing into the solar wind. Is there enough oxygen in her suit to light a flame, or will her skin just blacken and dry like charred meat?
She puts these thoughts away, disgusted with her mind. There has to be hope. This suit has a beacon that activates with the alarm. She checks her wrist panel, and the blinking red letters confirm this. They should be able to pinpoint the signal and come get her.
Too close to the sun.
Her comms are too weak to reach them from out here. Why would the beacon be any different?
She wants to scream and never stop.
Concentrate.
Spinning, spinning.
The panic pod. A blinking light. Impossibly, it is almost level with her center of mass, as if they are both on a plane. With each rotation, it looms larger. Her depth perception is pretty much gone, but she’s close enough now that she can distinguish the open door and the steady light inside. It must be around 1500 feet away, roughly ten degrees left of her trajectory. If she had any fuel left, it would be so easy. Maybe if she vents her oxygen. The suit comes equipped with an emergency air line that fits over her mouth and nose, a last resort in the case of a breach. She could sever the main line and direct it like a hose.
She reaches for the latches over her neck, finds the release, and starts to tug.
She stops herself.
She’s not thinking straight. Pulling her helmet off would be suicide. Nevermind the pod. Even with an oxygen line she’d be unconscious in seconds. Then what, even if she could reach the pod? Pray the controls are intact? And how exactly would she steer with no pilot training?
Although…
The pod has spare EM-packs. And a comms system powerful enough to reach the Homunculus. Those are better odds of surviving than spinning helplessly into the big nothing.
Now, to find a way over there.
She searches her mind. She doesn’t know much about physics beyond her school lessons more than ten years ago. Even then, her focus was biology. She dated a theoretical physicist once, briefly. He had long greasy hair and untrimmed fingernails. He’d been pleasant enough, but a bit too ungrounded for her taste. Their first night out together, he kept saying he didn’t want to talk about his research, then went on to talk about his research. Something about grav drives and how they alter spacetime. Their lingering trails not strong enough to measure with current technologies, but in a few hundred years the combined forces could alter the orbits of small bodies, with potentially serious consequences.
If these are her final minutes of life, why is she thinking about Dan the theoretical physicist? There’s plenty else to reflect upon. But there is something about this memory. Something important. That stinted awkward conversation over wine. She politely nodded, lonely and desperate for human contact, heady and bored and guilty and sad, faking interest in the differences between grav tech and traditional acceleration. How grav drives open a hole in the space around them—like a zipper, Dan had said, oblivious to the sexual connotations—whereas physical acceleration comes from expelling mass at great speeds. Equal and opposite reactions. Good old Newton. You throw out energy in one direction, the energy throws you in the other.
Of course.
There is only one item she can think to use. And its mass is great enough that it might actually work. It just has to be perfect.
Gregorian stalks beside him while Hunter hounds him on comms, both stressing all the reasons Jack absolutely cannot go outside. He knows them already, but he also knows that even if Lana is alive, she’s no use with her portable down, which means someone has to go the hell outside with her, don’t they? Neither Gregorian nor Hunter have rebuttals to this.
Gregorian helps him suit up in the main chamber. They’re just about to secure his helmet when another shudder racks the ship, accompanied by a drawn-out metallic howl. The lights flicker and the gravity comes and goes in pulses. They hold to the walls.
“Hunter, please tell me that’s you.”
“Jack. Get back up here.”
“I told you I’m going—”
Something gives. The floor falls away and Jack bounces off the ceiling. The ship sways, groans. He collides with the floor, the wall. The gravity throws him down again. The Homunculus’s voice booms throughout the ship: “Catastrophic failure in weapons system. Damage to ceramic shielding. Hull integrity questionable. Repeat.”
“Holy shit,” Hunter announces.
“Talk to me!”
“Jack, we just lost the plasma cannon.”
Lana misses the immediate flash, but knows something is wrong on her next rotation. The Homunculus now faces her at an angle, and a bright white field of debris expands outward. She can’t dwell on what this signifies. The panic pod is coming up fast, and if she doesn’t act soon, she’ll be too close to change her path.
Sliding out of the pack proves trickier than she anticipated. With the straps unclipped, her angular momentum tugs the EM-pack away, shifting her center of mass and altering their spin. Like when two kids face each other holding hands, whipping around in circles. Not only must she throw the pack off at just the right angle, but must compensate for the spin, timing her separation so she doesn’t kick off facing the sun or the nothingness.
She manages to shift her mass. While maintaining a grip on the pack’s harness straps, she tucks her feet against its inner side. It is as if one of the the spinning children lifts their feet and presses them to the other child’s chest. With every rotation, the pod passes straight overhead.
She watches and waits, tucks into a ball, legs braced, ready to kick off. She tests herself by counting and guessing where the pod will appear, repeating this until she’s confident she could make the leap with her eyes closed. Yet with each rotation, how many feet does she travel? And each foot lost widens the angle between herself and the pod, which decreases the chance of this working.
No more delays. This rotation.
When the pod nears its zenith, she kicks with all her might, releasing her grip and stretching out straight, arms extended, toes pointed. The EM-pack spins erratically away. She turns about half as fast now, eye on the pod each time it rotates into view, drawing nearer.
Thrusters are down, Hunter says. They are paralyzed.
Both airlock doors have a round viewing porthole. Jack peers through, rendered mute by the sight. The hydra must have ripped the cannon from its place. And it exploded, releasing a cloud of plasma, charged particles that could vaporize steel. A glowing murk flashing with lightning strikes that savage the Homunculus. As if flying this close to the sun wasn’t bad enough, their own weapon unleashed a radiation storm, the kind designed to destroy ships just like theirs. So far they are holding strong. The initial eruption dispersed most of the plasma’s energy away from the hull. But this shit hanging around could still eat through their thrusters, paralyzing them.
He tries not to think of Lana.