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15
First Step
Lev chaffed under the pressure suit, his helmet tucked under one elbow as he drifted next to the outer hatch of the airlock. Marina and Toya working to haul a heavy gauge cable into the airlock.
“Come on, don’t just float there and watch, help us haul this in sloth.” Grunted Toya as she pulled on the length of cable. The wrist thick black snake of insulated cabling pulled from deep in the storage inventory, letting it coil between her knees.
Rolling his eyes, Lev let go of his helmet, leaving it to drift in the weightlessness near the outer airlock hatch as he dove to the floor beneath Toya, grabbing the growing mess of cable and winding it up properly. “It’s easy to move this stuff, you forget we’re in zero gravity?”
“Still has mass, even if it doesn’t have weight.” Toya grunted as she pulled more of the cable, hand over hand, into the airlock.
Marina’s voice drifted into the airlock from the passage beyond. “No time for bickering, there’s work to do. This isn’t the time for needless banter. And Toya, be nice to my man, especially on the spacewalk.”
Now Toya rolled her eyes, shouting back down the passage to Marina deeper in the ship, who was feeding her the cable from around the corner of the passage. “Calm down boss lady, it’s not just you that needs him, but this whole ship needs him, and me, this colony needs his hands to do this just as much as you or I need to, now spare your voice, and let us work.”
Marina didn’t reply, but the cable kept drifting around the corner to her. Lev kept spooling it back up as Toya pulled it into the compartment. Without looking back at him, Toya started quizzing Lev. “You ready for this? You know what we’re about to do?”
Lev was all business about it. “Yes Ma’am. We’ve gone over it twice already, even on the video call with both the captain and Konstantin. I’ve already been wearing this suit longer than I would like. While we hammered out the plan for this. But in reality, it’s simple, we’re running extra cables between the Stalingrad and Langok station.”
“Maybe if you’re a five-year-old. But it’s not as simple as just running cables. We’ve got to run insulation, shielding, hook up to the right external panels.”
“Yes,” he answered flatly.
“Don’t give me that. It’s not simple. We’re doing a spacewalk with a complex and technical task on short notice with little planning while under pressure. And if that wasn’t enough pressure, we’re doing it in a different dimension.”
He didn’t reply for a long time as he continued coiling up the cable, wrapping it tighter and tighter as Toya pulled more and more into the compartment. Eventually he said. “I’m surprised we just had this lying around anyway. What possible use case could we have to need this?”
“I mean, we need it now, don’t we?”
“Yes, but this isn’t the kind of malfunction you expect, this isn’t the kind of thing you can plan for. Who had the foresight to bring just a bunch of this heavy gauge random electrical cable? I mean, every gram of weight aboard a ship is accounted for, how did they figure this into the weight budget?”
“This is a colony expedition,” Toya replied. “I’m sure they have all kinds of raw materials packed away in the storage holds of both Stalingrad and Langok Station. Not everything can be three D printed after all.”
Lev worked on wrapping the coils tighter, trying to make the growing bulk of the cable fit into the compartment, and still leave them room to move inside too. “How much of this is there, anyway?”
“It’s three hundred meters between the ship and the colony. And we have to cover that span three times to carry the multiple phases of power. So we’re pulling a thousand meters of cable.”
“A whole cranking kilometer of phat cable? This is ridiculous. There’s only two of us, no way we can do the whole thing ourselves, not in the time we’ve got left before the jump window.”
“We talked about this, Lev, you know there’s another crew coming from Langok station to help us, there will be more hands. Both us and them got printers working to make the sheathing for the cable too. We’ll have to feed the protective shielding over the cables and attach them and the cables to the docking tube between us and Langok station.”
“Yeah, I know,” Lev waved his hands dismissively, “Still a lot of work for a few people in a little bit of time. We’re going to be busy, we’re going to be tired, it’s going to be cutting close to our timeline. If it doesn’t work, we might not have time to do anything about it.”
“I mean, we’ll still have time to fix it so we can make the jump. The jump and the problem will just get a lot more complicated afterward if we miss the jump window.” Toya replied. Marina came around the corner with the end of the three hundred meter length of cable into the airlock with them.
“Don’t stress about it, this is a spacewalk, and nothing is ever as easy as it should be. The part I am worried about is not because you’re doing a spacewalk, but we’re doing it in the transit dimension. As far as I know, no human has ever been outside a ship in the transit dimension.” Marina said, both Toya and Lev stopped, sharing a glance with each other.
“I know you’re both well trained with the pressure suits and the tools, we’ve all done drills for outside the ship. I’ve done it too.” Marina continued. “But this transit dimension is still relatively unexplored.”
“Relatively, would be an understatement.” Lev snorted. “We don’t even know if physics works the same here still.”
“Exactly!” Marina exclaimed as she turned to Toya. “And don’t make that face, I care about you, everyone is important to the mission, don’t think I’m giving him special attention just because we decided to make it official.”
Toya’s critical expression vanished as she stifled a snort. “From what I heard, you kinda decided for him.”
“That’s besides the point. We have to be careful. We have no idea what’s going to happen.”
“Yes, but there’s no way to prepare for it either.” Lev replied.
Marina was crestfallen. “I know, but…”
“We all know.” Toya comforted her. “We’ll all be careful. Don’t worry, I won’t let him do any dumb man things. We might be on a timeline, but what’s the old phrase, fast is slow?”
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” Lev corrected, looking dubious in his pressure suit, as he set the helmet down on his shoulders, locking it into the pressure seal.
Marina glanced around at the tools and the length of cable they had collected inside the airlock, turning to Toya as she drifted out of the airlock backwards. “We’ve gone over this a couple of times in the past few hours. You two will go out, find and open the panels, and attach this cable to the Stalingrad. Meanwhile, we’ll get the other cables loaded into the airlock for you. Hopefully, the other team from Langok Station meets you out there with the shielding…”
Toya nodded in reply as she seated her own helmet and hit the button to start the airlock cycle, the door slowly swinging closed on its motorized hinges. Marina stayed rooted in place as the hatch shut, waving as they disappeared behind the door. Once the airlock shut, she stayed there, her mind racing.
They’re on their own now, I can’t help them. They’re going to make history. A pang of jealousy raced through her, lighting up the nerves down the length of her spine into her gut. I won’t get to be part of the first inter-dimensional spacewalk. She shook her head to herself as she turned away, heading back to the cargo hold to help Chief Konstantin drag out the next length of cable. Shouldn’t matter, I didn’t sign up to this for glory, this is a humanitarian mission. Don’t need to worry about me, just the mission. This has to work, if it doesn’t… I don’t know what we’ll do. Realistically. If we miss the jump… who knows. Sure, we can jump back after we fix it, but who knows where we’ll be. Inter-dimensional navigation is so rough, so untested. Maybe it was too early to launch a mission this important.
Down in the storage deck, she found Konstantin and Sofiya already pulling the next section of cable out. Still lost in thought, Marina hung there watching instead of helping, asking the chief engineer all the questions still filling her gray matter. “What if this doesn’t work? We jump back to normal space, and we’ll have only the roughest of ideas where we are. We could be off by dozens, or hundreds of light years, maybe thousands, depending on how long a proper fix takes. None of the constellations will look the same from such a different perspective. We’ll have no idea which star is which, we’ll have no way to navigate.” Panic creeping into her voice.
The chief replied without looking up as he used a small folding knife to cut open the packaging of the cable as he hunched down between the cramped rows of storage boxes and supplies. “Sure, we can. We can individually identify pulsars. Yes, that takes time, sure it’s been done, that’s the backup protocol for deep space navigation, just like this.”
“I know, but those tests were done under a controlled environment, they weren’t lost when they did it, just used the extra step to verify where they were. Even if did do that, it’ll be less accurate than a proper fix.” She countered, getting more worked up.
Helena emerged from deeper in the racks of supplies. “Mar freeze yourself out, why don’t ya?” She said sharply. “No use getting worked up, not helping. Let’s get this stuff moved. The more we help them, the better they’ll do, the more likely this is to work, the less likely it is we’ll need to go to Plan B.”
“Plan B isn’t good enough!” She snapped.
“We have to play the cards we’ve been delt, if you have a better idea, I’m all ears. But you are not going to sit idle and worry about it! Or waste time overthinking it. Grab that end and head back to the airlock.” The chief engineer barked, edge coming back into the man’s voice. Marina had never heard him angry like that before. In the cramped lower cargo hold, she was briefly more afraid of him than of their situation. “Yes, sir,” she chirped, grabbing the end of the thick cable he extended to her and leaving quickly. She kicked off from the hatch frame, dragging it with her. She struggled to compensate for the weight and ended up bumping into the floor of the hallway only a few meters away.
She adjusted herself, kicking off from the floor again, distracting herself not with thoughts of the ship’s predicament, but of Lev’s. What is it like for him out there in the void’s void in only a pressure suit? How does he function in the unfiltered face of that angry, otherly purple? She shuddered as she drifted, still clutching the end of the second cable in her hands, remembering the migraine it had given her after only briefly looking at it on the bridge. Perhaps it was better she had not gone out there.
Update 40: Unfortunately, we’re still dealing with a delay from the line editor. The hand painted water color that will be the cover of the book is done, but hasn’t shipped or been scanned yet. After which it’s a matter of formatting. Please subscribe below to keep informed and not miss the release announcement for Book III: Knowledge of Gods, or any other updates from Tight Beam, and our serial novel Pending Pending Receipt. In the meantime, get a t shirt and to show support.
-Featured image credit to NASA
The Descendant Saga 