CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The price of rescue
They did not wish to change their precisely calculated velocity vector, so the push to take them outside the Have-It-All’s airlock was a gentle one. Sinara, Torran, and Teri drifted slowly away from the hull, keeping pace with it. The tiniest thrust from their suit jets could take them back into the air lock.
And then that was no longer true. The Have-It-All was gliding ahead, increasing speed as though it intended to plunge into the broad disk of debris. Within half a minute, Sinara could see another change. The ship was turning, thrusting itself away from the dangerous whirlpool and beginning the long drive out to and around the far-off bulk of the gas-giant M-2. She watched the pale-blue exhaust of relativistic particles until the wake of the Have-It-All’s drive faded to nothing against the background of stars.
She, Teri, and Torran hovered in space with only each other for company. Except that they were not hovering. They were heading for the danger zone of Marglot’s remains, a kilometer closer every few seconds.
Inside a ship you could feel a sense of security, no matter how threatening the situation. You were surrounded by older people, experienced people who had seen a thousand dangers and found a way to live through them. That sense of security, false as it may have been, vanished when you had no protection but your suit and were exposed to the enormous openness that made up even the smallest planetary system.
As they approached the whirlpool of matter that had once been Marglot, Sinara’s feeling of discomfort increased. She steered her suit close to Torran and Teri, and noticed they were edging toward her.
“Still a long way to go.” Teri’s voice came over the suit radio. “Two and a half thousand kilometers to the nearest piece with a long-range radar reflectance. Seventeen thousand to Ben, according to his beacon.”
That was half a day’s journey, given the slow speed at which they were closing in on him. Their suits could pick up his distress beacon, but not his vital indicators. The Have-It-All, despite its distance, could monitor those, and Sinara had access to that information if she wanted it. She did not ask. Nor, she noticed, did Teri or Torran.
Half a day’s journey, but not a second of it in which they could afford to relax. Sinara had proof of that when her suit’s collision avoidance radar gave a loud beep and a great boulder rushed silently past. It appeared and disappeared so fast that her eyes scarcely had time to register its presence.
“I guess I was an optimist.” If Teri felt nervous, she hid it well. “The belt of debris is wider than I thought, and our long-distance radar registers only big fragments. Some of the really huge lumps in the belt must still be colliding and fragmenting and ejecting parts of themselves. Look out! Here’s another!”
This one was smaller, but Sinara saw it coming. She had time for a sudden spurt to the right, placing herself well out of harm’s way.
“Seems as though Julian Graves was right.” Teri had made the same sideways jump. “If we were as big and massive as the Have-It-All, that lump of rock wouldn’t have missed.”
“It wouldn’t have hit you,” Torran said. “It would have cleared you by at least ten meters. We don’t want to go hopping around if we can avoid it. We could lose our original velocity vector.”
“It wouldn’t matter. We can pick up the signal from Ben’s suit, and home in on that.”
“Not if it cuts off, we can’t.”
That had unpleasant implications which Torran did not need to spell out. Ben’s suit had ample power for the distress beacon. The signal would be lost only if the suit itself was damaged by impact. Ben’s chances of surviving in that case were slight.
Torran said suddenly, “Something’s wrong. My inertial guidance system shows me shifting away to the right.”
Sinara checked her own monitor. “Not just you. All of us. It’s a change of direction, but we’re not heading off course. E.C. Tally predicted this, and he allowed for it in his calculations of our original vector. The most massive chunks of Marglot still have a hefty gravitational pull, and we are responding to one. Unless there are chaotic effects which Tally couldn’t anticipate—”
A rattle on her suit like hard hail cut her off in mid-sentence. It took a few moments to realize that she was being bombarded with small particles. They must be low-speed, because her suit remained intact.
“Lucky this time.” Teri Dahl had been hit by the same volley of space-gravel. “If that lot had been travelling twenty or thirty times as fast, we would be riddled.”
“That’s bound to happen as we get farther in,” Torran added. “I don’t know about you, but I’m recording Doppler velocity readings that are all over the place. We have material approaching us at ten kilometers a second, other stuff receding at the same speed. If we keep on as we are, we won’t stay lucky. Something fast will hit us. Help me out, the two of you. Look for an object ahead that holds its distance from us—the bigger the better, but the main thing is a good match to our velocity vector.”
It was a frightening ten minutes, with two more storms of low-speed gravel and pebbles, until at last Teri said, “Got one, I think. Azimuth eighteen, declination minus twelve.”
Torran added, “And just about zero relative velocity. Seems perfect. Let’s go take a close-up.”
The fragment was several hundred meters across, a rough ellipsoid rotating slowly about its shortest axis. They could tuck in close behind it and be shielded from everything in the forward direction. There was still the danger of a hit from behind, but those fragments should be arriving at a lower relative speed.
“Not too close,” Teri warned. “I’m reading a temperature of five hundred degrees. This is one hot rock.”
“A piece of Marglot’s deep interior, by the look of it.” Torran was using his suit’s light to study the surface. “See the bubbles from out-gassing into vacuum? But I think that phase is over.”
“This is only a temporary hiding place,” Sinara said. “Once we are close to Ben we’ll have to risk open space again.”
“If you can call it open space, when it’s this big a mess.” Teri had turned to keep watch behind them, relying on the other two to warn her if she came too close to the rock. “What I’m seeing is more violent and more random than it was. Everything from sand grains to molten planetoids, all with higher speeds. But for the moment, we take what we can get.”
Sinara said to herself, And after the moment, when we are close to Ben? But she saw no point in starting a discussion with so few facts.
The three of them huddled as close to the shielding rock and to each other as they could get. After a silence that seemed to last forever, Torran said, “It’s no good. We’ve been holding off, all of us, but I have to know. I’m going to call the Have-It-All and make sure that Ben is still alive. If he’s not, we’ll have to make a tough call. Do we risk dying, trying to pick up Ben’s body? Or do we leave him where he is, hang in behind this lump of rock, and hope to ride it all the way out through the debris belt to safety?”
Teri said, “You know what Ben would say. The same as we were taught in survival school. Unless you propose to eat it, a dead body is worth only the cost of its chemicals. But my bet is that Ben is alive. Call the Have-It-All and find out—if you can. They may be out of range, or they may be screened from us.”