And she needed to do it before the ship blew up. At two g. Without tools or access to the controls. Or… was that right? Access to the controls was going to be hard, but she should be able to improvise some tools. The EVA suits weren’t powered and didn’t have bottles, but they had seals and reinforcement. She could take the cloth apart, and salvage some lengths of wire. Maybe something solid enough to cut with. And could she use the helmet clamps as a kind of vise grip or clamp? She wasn’t sure.
Even if she could, what would that gain her?
“More than you’ve got now,” she said aloud. Her voice reverberated in the empty space.
All right. Step one, make tools. Step two, drop core. Or warn anyone coming in. She stood up and forced herself back to the airlock lockers.
Five hours later, she was on the ship’s perfunctory little engineering deck, sealing the hatch manually. Two of the EVA suits had given up what little they had to offer to make a tiny, sketchy tool kit. Doing anything with the controls had failed. So she could be a rat in a box, or she could take out the middleman. After all, the controls all connected to machinery, and the machinery—some of it—was where she could put her hands on it.
The space between the hulls was in vacuum, and she didn’t have any great faith that the outer hull was actually sealed. The one remaining suit held about five minutes’ worth of air without a bottle and she could set the radio to passive and pick up the faintest echo of her own voice making the false message with the residual charge in the wires. The lock that should have let her get into and out of the maintenance access had been hauled off as salvage, but she could turn the full engineering deck into a makeshift airlock. Close the hatch to the rest of the ship, force the access panel into the space between hulls. She budgeted two minutes to locate something useful—a power repeater she could sabotage to force the drive to shut down, the wiring for the comm system, an unsecured console that was talking to the computers—then two minutes to get back out. Thirty seconds to close and seal the maintenance panel and pop the engineering hatch. She’d lose a roomful of air every time, but she’d only lose a roomful.
She put on the helmet and checked the seals, then opened the access panel. It fought her at first, then gave all at once. She thought she felt a rush of escaping air go past her, but it was probably her imagination. Twenty seconds already gone. She crawled into the vacuum between the hulls. The darkness was so complete, it was like closing her eyes. She tapped the suit’s controls, but no beam of light came from them.
She backed out, closed the access panel, opened the hatch, and took off her helmet.
“Light,” she said to the empty space. “Going to need some light.”
The monitor hung from wires, asking for her password. It just fit past the lip of the access panel, and filled the space between the hulls with light so dim, she couldn’t see colors in it. Shadows of struts and spars made deeper darkness all around, and shapes she couldn’t make sense of. She had forty-five seconds before she had to head back. It was the fifth time she’d been down trying to scrape through the coating on the wires. In a real ship, it would all have been protected by conduit. On this piece of crap, the wiring had all been fixed directly to the hull with a layer of yellowed silicone epoxy. On the one hand, it was a blessing. On the other, she was horrified that she’d ever trusted her life to the ship. If she’d inspected between the hulls before they left Ceres, she’d have been sleeping in an environment suit the whole way to the Pella.
The coating peeled free. Thirty seconds. She took a bit of salvaged wire and shorted the circuit. A fat spark leaped out and the world lurched. Across the space, maybe four meters away, an indicator light went amber, and she was falling sideways. With the extra illumination, she could see the round, tree-thick body of the maneuvering thruster. She put out her arms, catching herself against a steel strut. When she pressed her helmet to it, the rumble of the drive drowned out the ghost-quiet radio. She reached for the wire, broke the connection, and the rumble stopped.
Out of time, she turned back, her head swimming. The ship was spinning, then. She had no way to know how quickly, but the Coriolis was enough to make her stumble on the way back.
With the panel closed, the hatch open, and her helmet off again, she sat still until her balance came close to returning. Then, moving carefully, drunkenly, she scratched the new information on the wall. She was developing a crude map of the ship’s secret interior and keeping track of all she learned. She was tired enough not to trust her memory. From the count she’d started, she knew she’d been on thirty sorties. Now, for the first time, she’d done something. It was only one thruster, but the ship was spinning now, tumbling in circles instead of burning ahead in a line. All the acceleration would be bled into the changing angular momentum, and she wouldn’t be going toward Jim as quickly. So maybe she’d bought a little time. It would make things harder for her, but she’d grown up in the Belt and on ships. Coriolis—and coping with the sick dizziness—was nothing new to her. She knew that the feeling of power and accomplishment she felt was out of scale with what she’d actually managed, but she grinned all the same.
Thirty sorties. Two and a half hours just of time spent in vacuum. That didn’t count the minutes refreshing the air in her suit or planning out the next run. Maybe five hours total since she’d started this. She was exhausted. She felt it in her muscles and the pain in her joints. She hadn’t eaten—couldn’t eat. She was thirsty with the first strains of a dehydration headache coming on. There was no reason to think she would survive this. So she was surprised to notice that she was happy. Not the powerful, irrational, and dangerous joy of a euphoric attack, but a kind of pleasure and release all the same.
At first, she thought it was because there wasn’t anyone there with her, guarding her, judging her. And that, she decided, was part of it. But more than that, she was simply doing what needed to be done without having to concern herself about what anyone else thought. Even Jim. And wasn’t that odd? She wanted nothing in the world more than for Jim to be there—followed by Amos and Alex and a good meal and a bed at a humane gravity—but there was a part of her that was also expanding into the silence of simply being herself and utterly alone. There were no dark thoughts, no guilt, no self-doubt tapping at the back of her mind. Either she was too tired for that, or something else had happened to her while she’d been paying attention to other things.
This was the difference, she thought, between solitude and isolation. And now she knew something about herself she hadn’t known before. It was an unexpected victory, and all the better for that.
She started getting ready for the thirty-first sortie.
She had almost a minute, because she’d figured out that coming up the comm array power supply took a lot longer than it did going back down. It was the sort of thing she’d have realized much more quickly if her mind hadn’t been a little on the compromised side.
The comm system was held in place by more than epoxy. Long strips of metal tape lashed the transmitter in place, the welds still bright as if they’d been made yesterday. Three sorties ago—number forty-four—she’d thought there might be a diagnostic handset. Not that she could speak into it, but she might have been able to tap out a message. But despite the fact that handsets like that were standard and required, there wasn’t one.