Jane licked dry lips and darted a glance at Bergen. “Dr. Bergen, we don’t actually have any technology that can tell us how many are aboard that vessel, do we?”
He drug his eyes from the controls he monitored to send her a pitying, disdainful glance. “No, Doc. This isn’t the Starship Enterprise. We don’t have a life-signs detector.”
She nodded, annoyed that she’d actually put a voice to the question, but maybe it’d distracted him from Walsh for the moment. “Right. That’s what I thought.”
He huffed, muttered to himself, and sent her some kind of brief, mournful look. That might have been an apology. Or further scorn. She couldn’t tell and was too preoccupied to pay it much mind.
The capsule lurched. There was a metallic grating sound from the outer hull. Was the capsule supposed to make those sounds?
“Goddamn it, Walsh, try a little fucking finesse,” Bergen grumbled under his breath.
They were jostled again. Walsh announced the docking procedure was underway. There was a coarse, clicking sound and then a couple of loud metallic thuds. Those sounds repeated themselves.
Bergen was nodding, features tense.
The clicking sounded again, and again, followed by a duller, more hollow thud. The ship moved slightly, boosters firing in second-long increments, accompanied by a scraping, warping-metal sound that had Bergen scowling. There was more clicking and another dull thud.
Walsh let out a string of florid curses. Bergen unlatched himself and pushed off toward the level above. He’d led the docking design committee, knew the system better than anyone on board.
Things apparently weren’t lining up as they should. Jane gathered that one of the four docking clamps was skewed and wouldn’t fully latch.
Bergen exclaimed, “Three of four is enough! The system was designed with redundancy in mind.”
Walsh continued to sputter angrily. Jane was sure that Walsh knew Bergen was right. This conversation wasn’t about docking the ship safely. It was about the opportunity to twist the knife, to highlight the failure in the design.
Bergen turned away, rolling his eyes and remarking, “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s simple geometry. Three points of contact is enough to maintain a seal. Test it. This is far from the worst-case scenario. It’s time to board the damn thing.”
They tested it. Apparently, Bergen was right.
And that was it. It was time to suit up.
Jane’s extremities tingled. She’d been preparing for this moment for almost two years—the others for many more. Now that the moment had finally arrived, it felt far removed from reality, dreamlike.
She released the harness and began to strip down, slipping out of the royal-blue nomex flight suit and the gravity-loading countermeasure skin-suit. That left her in panties. She’d given up on bras long before—they were meant to fight gravity, after all, which was pointless in space.
Modesty was long-since gone. They were six people stuck in a container no larger than a small RV. Even the vacuum-assisted toilet was only a cubby with a small curtain tethered at both ends of the entry.
Ajaya opened the locker containing Jane’s LCVG. “I’ll assist with yours, if you’ll lend a hand with mine,” she offered in her lilting, softly-accented voice.
The LCVG was essentially a union suit overlaid with a network of water-filled PVC tubes, worn for the opposite purpose. It kept an astronaut from sweating to death inside the space suit—literally.
She started to put a foot into the spandex leg of the LCVG.
“Jane, don’t forget the MAG,” Ajaya reminded her patiently as she shoved one toward Jane.
Jane caught the MAG out of the air and froze. “Oh, God, really? I thought these were just for launch and re-entry?”
“We have no idea how long you’ll be in there. The suits can support us for 150 hours, Jane. How long can you wait?”
Jane stared at Ajaya. She wasn’t joking. Of course she wasn’t.
Jane’s eyes wandered and there was Bergen, wearing nothing but a MAG, shoving a leg into his LCVG, his clothing floating around him. His eyes met hers and he looked amused. He’d heard the conversation, of course.
Then his eyes traveled down and his expression darkened. He clearly liked what he saw. He seemed to come to himself with a guilty start and turned away to busy himself with his gear.
Jane’s lips twitched. She covered the almost-smile with a sigh, peeled off her panties and pulled on the MAG. The cooling suit slid right on, a testament to how much mass she’d lost en route. Next came the puffy suit. She eased into it from behind and shrugged into the arms. Ajaya zipped it at the back and settled the Portable Life Support System onto Jane’s back, connecting the umbilicus to the suit itself.
Jane loosened her ponytail and pulled the white snoopy cap over her head, her arms swiveling smoothly in the disc-shaped shoulder joints of the suit. She felt every pair of eyes on her as she surged toward Walsh and Bergen at the hatch. They thoroughly checked the life support modules on every suit and depressurized the capsule.
She was up. It was time for her part of the show to begin.
Jane’s breath echoed in the domed helmet, coming faster, shallower—the sound of her own anxiety haunting her. She reminded herself there had been men of some kind inside the ship that crashed in Roswell in 1947—not monsters—no scary fangs and claws. Everyone assumed that small ship originated with this larger one. She fervently hoped they were right.
Jane clumsily pressed her comm to activate it. She hesitated. She couldn’t stand up any straighter, because she wasn’t standing—not that anyone could perceive her posture through the marshmallow suit. That hardly mattered when it was herself she needed to convince. So, instead, she squared her shoulders and said, “Look, I know it’s been drilled into everyone. We’ve gone over every scenario imaginable, countless times—”
It came out more timidly than she’d hoped for. She’d thrown herself off when she’d heard her own voice coming through the comm. Walsh gazed at her with a cool expression. Bergen was intense, as usual, with a hint of an impish smile.
She lifted her chin and forced herself to put resolve in her voice. These things had to be reiterated. “Once the hatch is open, follow my lead. They may look or act very strange and we have to be ok with that. Stay calm. Remember your training. No sudden movements, no loud sounds—no matter what happens. Hands open, at your sides. Do not react. I’ll do the talking.”
Walsh nodded once. “Compton, let’s send another transmission to Houston.”
Compton’s voice came back steady over the speakers resting against her ears. “Channel is open to Houston, Commander.”
“Houston. Providence. We’ve successfully docked with Target. Three of four ZTS-clamps are functional and holding. The fourth could not lock. We’re about to open the hatch.” Walsh paused and seemed, for a moment, to be struggling.
Jane felt a burst of sympathy for him. She was certain he was feeling pressure to say something profound. He’d had months to think of what to say, but maybe none of it sounded appropriate to him now that the moment was actually here.
“Compton, activate the hatch’s video feed.”
“Video feed transmitting, Commander.”
Walsh grabbed a handhold and pivoted to look at the camera behind them. “We’ll do our best to make humanity proud,” he said firmly, then swung back around and smoothly unlocked the outer door. He braced himself against the footholds and handholds placed strategically for this purpose, and, with Bergen’s help, swung open the hatch. Then, he and Bergen pushed back, assuming positions behind her with Ajaya and Gibbs. Compton alone remained in the cockpit.