"Channa!" Simeon called. The med-readouts flashed unconsciousness. He overrode the suit and ordered it to inject stimulants, a horse-dose, anything to buy her time.
"Oww." Channa jerked and then shook herself, hauling back on the safety line until her feet touched the surface of the ship. A red light flashed on the inside of her faceplate and the message:
"System failure-air regulation. Ten minutes emergency supply only" appeared. It was replaced by 10:00. Then 09:59, and the seconds scrolled down inexorably.
"Channa, you okay? Should Ah git down there?
"No!" Channa rasped. "Keep ready for lift."
Simeon called. "Channa, get inside."
"I'm almost finished," she said gruffly.
"Now," he said.
She ignored him. He watched the cable part, and her hands reached for the last one. From another view he watched the ancient colony ship being dragged away at an ever increasing acceleration.
"Channa! Get your ass in that tug now!"
"Shut-up!" she snapped.
The final cable parted and the shell swung free. For the first time, Simeon saw that the feeder line was damaged. No, he thought.
08:38.
Channa began to disconnect the shell's input leads. It was difficult work in the unwieldy suit gloves, but her long-fingered hands moved with careful delicacy. She closed the valve on the broken feeder line.
"Might not be too bad," she muttered. "There'll be an interior backup. Probably ruptured when they stopped."
Then she keyed the remote to reel them both back to the tug at a careful pace, holding on to the exterior lugs and using her feet to fend them off random projections. The shell went ter-unnnggg against the light-load grapnels up near the apex of the stubby wedge; the mechanical claws closed on the hard alloy with immovable pressure.
06:58.
She turned and pivoted around a handhold and dove feetfirst into the control seat.
"Get yo' suit plugged in!" Patsy snapped, beating Simeon by nanoseconds.
"Can't. This is a standard EVA suit, the input valve's upstream of the break. Get moving, we have to help haul this thing!"
"Negative," Simeon said. "Make tracks back to the station, Patsy."
"Negative on that." Channa said. "If we don't get this hulk far enough away, there won't be a station to go back to."
Patsy bit her lip and touched the controls. The tug sprang straight up, the derelict shrinking from sky-spanning vastness to child's model size in seconds as the great soft hand of acceleration shoved at them.
"Then you plant that grapnel field," she said urgently. "We can help the boost with our own rise. But when that's done, we're goin' home, girl."
Channa began the adjustments. The tug was designed for straightforward long slow pulls, not this redline-everything race against disaster. She must balance the uneven pull that might shred the tug's structure and compensate for the hulk's weakness by intuition as much as anything. Who knew what structural members had given way within? It would do very little good to rip a large segment of it loose… The giant ship began to grow slightly smaller.
She glanced at the readout. "I hate these clock things," she said fiercely. "They must have been created by a sadist. I'm going to know when I run out of air."
"Stop talking," Simeon ordered, "you're wasting oxygen. When that clock has flipped over another thirty seconds, you return to station!"
Gus' command rang through the conversation. "Synchronize release, slave controls to mine as Patsy cuts loose."
Channa keyed it in. "Five seconds. Mark."
Patsy cursed with scatological inventiveness as the little craft surged. Then it flipped end-for-end and the space behind them paled as the drive worked to shed velocity. They would have to kill their delta-V away from the station before they could return.
"Priority," she barked over the open circuit. "Everyone git outta my way, 'cause I ain't stoppin'!"
Deceleration turned to acceleration again. Channa wheezed a protest as her ribs clamped down on her lungs.
04:11.
Simeon's monologue took on a frantic note. He forced his mind not to calculate times, with an effort that almost banished fear.
Keep her informed, he thought: "… madness to have attempted that sort of linkage. The nutrients might have given out on the trip. It depends on when the feeder line was damaged. I might be responsible for that. It could have happened when I hit them with the satellites. What do you think? No, don't answer, save your air. I know we won't be able to tell anyway until we examine him.
"What kind of people are these?" he asked for perhaps the twentieth time. "Could they be pirates who stole the brain? Then why didn't they bring it inside? The access-way? Sure, that must be it, they couldn't get it through the hatch. Still, a shellperson is a valuable resource. You'd think they try to protect him more if they had to leave him outside. It could be some kind of punitive measure by an insane religious sect. Nah, Central would never assign a brain to a group like that, it wouldn't make sense." He began to curse again. "Hey, Channa, stop rolling your eyes like that. You're making me dizzy." The circling increased in tempo. "Okay, okay, I'll change the subject. Sheesh, take away a woman's ability to talk…" Channa closed her eyes. "I was joking, Channa." Her eyes remained closed. "You're getting close to the station. You're going to need to see where you're going. Remember what it's like out there." No change. "Okay, I apologize. It was a stupid, ignorant remark and I regret it. I didn't even mean it. Bad joke, okay?"
She opened her eyes.
03:01.
She was midway between the receding colony-ship and the station.
"I estimate that you'll run out of air three minutes before you reach the station," Simeon said. "But, if you take the most direct route, that unfortunately will take you right through the thickest concentration of spilled ore."
"Shit!" Patsy hissed. "Tell me somethin' Ah don't know!"
Channa fought down an oxygen wasting sigh. "Play safe?"
"Then you'll fall short by four minutes, eight seconds."
"Play safe. Don't want a shell full a holes."
Simeon was silent for a moment, feeding the pilot instructions for avoiding the worst of the ore-meteor cloud.
"You've got more guts than sense, Channa."
Patsy closed one eye and laughed. "Mind now, Ah didn't say Ah didn't like it, Ah was just remarkin' on it." She opened her eye. "Y'hold on now, we're goin' through like a scalded armadillo."
Channa's breathing began to rasp; psychological, but it wasted air.
Oh, God, don't let her die, he thought. That shell's hanging out there. Is the mass of the tug enough to shield him from debris?
Even one pebble of ore at the right angle and all her sacrifice would be for nothing. Simeon knew Channa was about to undergo an experience that would feel like dying. Humans could survive for several minutes without air-hours, sometimes, in cold water. The length of time to brain death was utterly unpredictable but oxygen deprivation might cause brain damage.
Despite a very real and intense anxiety about Channa, his thoughts inexorably returned to the shell… to Guiyon. He's alone in the dark, Simeon said to himself, Channa's got Patsy, and me. Sensory deprivation would make every second feel like a subjective hour, and the backups would keep the shellperson conscious until the last precious molecules of nutrient were gone. Simeon wished desperately that he could spare hum the nightmare.