The soles of his armor, though, encountered the upthrusting pod with a “clang” that could be heard through his armor. It slammed him upwards, hard, spinning him away. But as he spun he got a glimpse of the piece and the rotation had slowed to almost nothing.
“Good one, Two-Gun,” Commander Weaver said. “You okay?”
“Fine, sir,” Berg replied, working his jets to try to get his own tumble balanced out. “Himes, Smith, can you stabilize it now?”
“Got it, Sergeant,” Himes replied.
Berg finally got stable looking “down” at the ship and the piece of debris. He was low on nitrogen-pressure for the thrusters and still moving away from the ship. That wasn’t so good.
“How you doing, Two-Gun?” Weaver asked. The transmission was somewhat scratchy.
“Working on that one, sir,” Berg admitted. “I’m not sure I’ve got enough pressure to make it back. I don’t suppose you could ask the CO to come pick me up when you’re done, could you?”
“Lo… ssure?”
“Low fuel,” Berg said calmly. “Low fuel. Low fuel.” His rangefinder had the Blade at over a kilometer and receding at ten meters per second.
“…ger… ait.”
“Conn, EVA…”
“Two-Gun’s doing a Dutchman,” the CO said. “We see that. Tell the other Marines to standby on the debris. We’ll go pick up Two-Gun and come back.”
“Roger, sir.”
“Pilot,” the CO said, gesturing with his chin. “Carefully.”
“Go pick up one wayward Marine, sir,” the pilot replied. “Aye, aye.”
The pilot swung wide around the debris, which was between the ship and the wayward Marine. The boat was nearly three stories high, if he didn’t go “high” he was going to clip the debris and the Marines still clinging to it. That would be, in piloting terms, an “oops.”
The ship at these low speeds was remarkably delicate in handling. He could accelerate and decelerate faster than an Indy car. So he had to mainly be cautious in how fast he moved. Although he could decelerate fast, he could accelerate fast enough that he didn’t have the reaction time to slow down. A thousand gravs of accel were at his fingertips. This movement required less than a gravity of acceleration. Keeping it that slow was the problem.
From Berg’s perspective, the ship was starting to get a bit smaller. Which was not comforting. Space was a very big place.
But as he watched it moved “upwards” from the debris as delicately as a snowflake then suddenly expanded in size, coming towards him like lightning and then “stopping.” Actually, it was still coming towards him, just much slower. The pilot was a genius.
Then he started to feel the “pull” from the ship’s artificial gravity and “down” suddenly became far less abstract.
“Commander!” Weaver said as Berg started to fall towards the ship, accelerating fast.
“Conn, EVA,” Weaver said over the comm link. “We’re going to need to bring Two-Gun in in microgravity. And we need to convert fast.”
“Already considered, EVA,” the CO replied. “XO, sound microgravity.”
“ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS. MICROGRAVITY IN TEN SECONDS. TEN, NINE, EIGHT, SEVEN…”
“Shit,” Machinist Mate Gants said, grabbing his tools up and putting them in their slots.
“Just what we needed,” Red replied, picking up the smaller attachments for his Number Two arm and stowing them in a butt-pouch.
As the gravity fell away, Red continued picking up tools with the small pincers that were a permanent attachment of the Number Two Arm. Gants picked up his last screwdriver, grabbed a screw and then paused.
“Man, I really wish we hadn’t had chili for lunch,” Sub Dude moaned.
“If you puke all over this compartment… Use a bag man, use a bag!”
Berg still had his velocity but the pilot, again, corrected delicately so that he floated “down” to the ship, only having to correct slightly as his boots touched the upper deck.
“I’d take that as a mixed experiment, Sergeant Berg,” the astrogator said. “On the one hand, you corrected the rather notable spin.”
“On the other hand, I got blown into space doing it, sir,” Berg ended. “Yes, sir. I’d given that some thought.”
“Conn, EVA,” Weaver said. “Marine recovered. Let’s go pick up some debris.”
“Okay, this is where it gets tricky,” Bill said. “We’re grounded, right COB?”
“Aye, sir.”
Four lines had been attached to the debris as well as a grounding cable, the ship rotated “up” to the wing and positioned delicately under it. All they had to do was get it across twenty meters of empty space.
“Pulling this thing in will be easy,” Bill said, looking at the four bosun mates on the lines. Those lines, however, had already started to oscillate, imparting a vector to the wing. “But while it seems light, it has lots of mass. If we get it moving too fast, it’s going to crush you between it and the hull when it hits. So you’re going to have to—”
“Sir, if I may?” the COB said. “Team. On my command. Handsomely.” He waited about a second. “Belay. Step back. Retrieve lines. Retrieve… Just pull out the oscillation. No more pressure than that.”
The piece was coming down slightly askew and very slowly. But slow was good in Bill’s opinion. And he noted that the COB had arranged some sort of rubber matting where the wing was going to hit the ship.
The ropes the crew was using were flying everywhere in the microgravity environment, but they didn’t seem to be getting in the way. The four bosun mates were retrieving them hand over hand, stepping away from where the wing would impact.
“Four, handsomely,” the COB said as the wing started to get some drift to the side. “Belay. Retrieve. Retrieve…”
As the wing impacted the rubber mat, it rebounded upwards.
“Belay!” the COB said. “Sharply!”
All four of the bosun mates clamped down on their lines, then pulled in, fast, stopping the wing from getting out of control. In a moment it was hard against the hull and steady.
“Something like that, sir?” the COB asked.
“Just like that, COB,” Bill admitted. “I’ll leave it to you to get secured.”
“Why, thank you, sir.”
17
The tactical tech leaned forward and frowned at his screen. It was a mass of junk. The problem was that while all sorts of particles could be picked up, the Navy still didn’t know enough about space to filter for everything. It was a bit like being back in the WWII days of unfiltered hydrophones. You had to listen to all the noise of the sea, and there was a lot of it, trying to find the sounds of submarines or surface ships. Waves, shrimp, herring farts, they all added up.
In this case, solar wind, the residue of particles from the space battle, the particles generated by the ship. It all added up.
So filtering it out, until they got good algorithms for the system, was still more art than science. Fortunately, the tech was a pretty good artist. And the latest reading was giving him fits.
“Sir, permission to do a visual survey of one-one-seven mark fifteen?” the tech asked.
“Go.”
“Can you figure out how to get that off, Machinist Mate?” Bill asked, pointing to the pod.
“I don’t know what this is, sir,” Sub Dude answered, slapping the wing.
The alien device had been secured behind the sail, held down with ropes and space tape. It was only one of several pieces cluttering the deck but definitely the largest.