Orbital Decay (11 page)

Popeye had forgotten to arrive late to get aboard the ferry. It was a game the beamjacks sometimes played: Who could find an excuse to board the ferry last? Popeye winced at his dumbness. Hang around indeed, while your arm muscles got cramped from holding the rail and your eyes got tired of looking at the back of your buddy’s head… or ass, if he was turned upside down.

He looked around and saw his own expression mirrored on Webb’s face. Webb grinned painfully and rolled his eyes up in his head:
Boy
,
I guess we fucked up again.
Popeye nodded and looked away, never dreaming that his luck had just changed.

He had had a lousy day up to now. But while space does not often forgive mistakes, sometimes it may let one slide your way. Because of his error, Hooker was given the opportunity to make more during the rest of his life.

F
OR ONCE, VIRGIN BRUCE
felt good. Absolutely on top of the whole damn world. Not only that, but he was feeling good he was on the clock, a miracle in itself because he hated to work. He felt so good he could sing, and so he did:

“What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?

“She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same;

“Livin’ on reds, vitamin C and cocaine;

“All a friend can say is ain’t it a shame.”

When he received the cassette recorder Doc Felapolous had promised him and had it installed in the instrument panel of his pod, he wouldn’t have to sing Grateful Dead songs to himself. He would get some tapes shipped up to him—surely one of his few remaining friends in St. Louis or Kansas City wouldn’t begrudge him that small favor—and then he could ride in style and never mind the syrupy versions of “Moon River” everyone else was subjected to day in and day out.

“Truckin’, like the doo-dah-man,

“Once told me ‘Gotta play your hand.

“‘Sometimes the cards ain’t worth a dime

“‘If you don’t lay ’em down.’”

As he sang he glanced through the canopy, checking his trajectory by eyeball-reckoning his distance from the powersat. The computer screen in front of him, which displayed a graphic simulation of his approach angle to the huge satellite, told him that he was just under a mile away—of course, the numbers were actually in metric figures, but he had long ago become used to making the mental conversion to yards and miles, because he was an
American
, goddammit—yet for an experienced pilot nothing could replace eyeball navigation. Bruce pushed the yoke forward a tad and gave the throttle a little push, and one of the RCR’s on the fuselage fired, braking his approach. The powersat floated upward a bit. He glanced down at the screen, making sure that the navaids computer agreed with what his eyes told him, and confirmed to himself that he was on a steady course for the construction shack. Nice shooting, guy. Who needs the computer? Satisfied, he grinned and resumed singing.

“Arrows of neon and flashing marquees down on Main Street…”

Another construction pod passed before him, carrying a load of rebars in its claws, its spotlights dazzling him briefly with their glare.

“Chicago, New York, Detroit, and it’s all on the same street.”

Chicago, he thought. What a hell of a town. I used to love cruising my bike down Lakeshore Drive, checking out all the rich dames in their spiffy threads. What a trip that was.

“Your typical city involved in a typical daydream,

“Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings…”

Vulcan Control to Pod Zulu Tango. What the hell do you think you’re doing
,
Neiman?

Virgin Bruce sucked in his cheeks and widened his eyes, the way he remembered Eddie Murphy doing when Bruce was a kid watching
Saturday Night Live
on TV: “Uh, oh, it’s the landlord!”

Virgin Bruce reached up to his chin and made sure his headset mike was adjusted, then reached to the communications panel to switch it on. To his chagrin, he found that it had already been switched on. Oh, hell, he thought. I must have been singing to the whole shift!

Recklessly, his lips stretched away from his teeth in a huge grin. Nothing to do but brazen it out. He started in on the next verse.

“Dallas got a soft machine;

“Houston too close to New Orleans;

“New York got the ways and means…”

Neiman
,
we got the ways and means to can your pay for the week if you don’t shape up and fly right. Now you come back with something other than sing-a-long or you and me are going to have a major disagreement
,
if we don’t already have one. Do you copy
?

“I copy, Hank, I copy,” Bruce snarled into the mike. “And what’s this crap about flying right? My trajectory is as clean and regulation as you’re gonna get, man.”

Bullshit
,
Neiman. Take another look at your screen. You just cut off a Big Dummy coming in on final approach to Vulcan. The pilot had to waste fuel braking so he’d keep the safe minimum distance from you and your hotdogging.

Neiman frowned. Hank Luton, the construction supervisor, wasn’t fooling this time; he was mad. Virgin Bruce punched a couple of keys on the computer and got a wide-angle display of the space around his pod. Sure enough, it showed an HLV from Earth on an approach trajectory to the construction shack. A quick glance at the coordinates told him that his pod had zipped straight in front of the big freighter. He felt instantly sorry; he, too, had been forced to make unnecessary firings to correct for careless flying by other space pilots in the crowded sphere of space surrounding Vulcan Station.

“Hey, Hank, I sure as shit am sorry about that,” Virgin Bruce said, genuinely apologetic. “I just didn’t see that guy. Tell him I’m…”

I don’t give a goddamn how sorry you are
,
Neiman
!

Virgin Bruce winced. Luton
must
be mad; no one shouts into a mike like that unless he’s full-fledged furious. It was enough to make his ears ring. The construction supervisor kept on, in just a slightly quieter tone of voice.
I don’t like this crap you just pulled
;
you got that? I don’t like you taking off to Olympus without getting authorization
,
and I don’t like what you just tried to pull over there
!
You’re nothing special to us
,
Neiman
,
and you put on your pants the same as the rest of us
!
You think you got a problem
,
you take it to me
,
I’m your boss and not Henry Wallace
!
You got that
,
pal
?
I mean do you got that
?

“Loud and clear, Hank,” he murmured. Hell, this was on an open channel. Everyone on the shift, and on Olympus—even on Earth, if they were hooked up with the right equipment—must be hearing this chew-out. “How many times do you want me to say sorry, Hank?”

Silence for a minute. Then Luton’s voice came back, authoritative and cold.
Neiman
,
you’re relieved of your shift. I want you to dock at Vulcan and meet me in the hotdogs. You and me are going to have a talk about your job
,
pal.

“Job? What do you mean, talk about my job?” Bruce almost yelled back. “Listen, Hank, who’s done the most shift-hours up here? Who’s…”

Zulu Tango
,
this is Vulcan Traffic.
Luton’s Alabama-accented voice was replaced by Sammy Orlando’s Brooklyn nasality.
We have you on course for docking at Vulcan. Do you acknowledge
?
Over.

Virgin Bruce checked his own bearings. No, he was not on course to dock at the construction shack; in fact he was heading a mile away from Vulcan, out to a section of the powersat most of the shift’s crew had been working on all day. Sammy was too good a traffic control officer to miss that; he was subtly letting Bruce know that he didn’t have a choice as to his destination. Not if his job mattered.

“Roger, Sammy, that’s an affirmative,” Bruce growled back. “Request docking at Vulcan Beta. Over.”

We copy
,
Zulu Tango. Proceed for docking in the garage. Vulcan Traffic out.

“‘Ride to live, live to ride,’” Virgin Bruce said, his customary sign-off. “Tango out.” He snapped off the comlink, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and murmured, “Oh, shit.”

He would have to handle this carefully, as gently as laying down a bike at sixty in a cow pasture, otherwise that was what he was going to get up smelling like: shit. He opened his eyes and began to make the necessary course corrections that would bring him in toward Vulcan Station. The long, huge grid of the powersat began to glide past the top of his windows. He could see the tiny forms of spacesuited beamjacks clinging to its underside, their helmet beacons making tiny moving spots of light along the silver girders.
Very carefully
, he reminded himself as he flipped to autopilot. Otherwise it was goodbye space and hello Missouri.

Actually, it wasn’t the thought of getting fired and shipped back to Earth that bothered him so much. He was sick to death of space. He wasn’t particularly stuck on beamjack work, and sometimes he thought he would gag if he had to swallow any more of the freeze-dried guano they served in the mess deck. He wanted to go back, but the time wasn’t right yet. The heat hadn’t blown over down there yet. If he went back now, it would only be a matter of time before the Exiles found out where he was and tracked him down.

It was a nightmarish fantasy, which had haunted him for over a year now. He would be in a room—maybe an apartment he had rented, maybe a seedy motel room in Texas or Maine or Colorado, where he thought he was safe. Maybe he would be expecting someone to come by—a friend he had made in a bar, or some nice chick with full tits and ass-length hair he had been laying—and he’d go answer the door, but the buddy or the babe wouldn’t be standing there. There would be four or five of them standing at the door. The light of a twenty-watt bulb would be shining dimly on their leathers and the chains they’d be carrying. Maybe one or two of them would be grinning with savage humor, but the others would have the dark, vicious glower they all too often fixed on those stupid enough to say the wrong thing or make the wrong move. Maybe he’d try to slam the door; maybe he wouldn’t even bother, knowing they could bash their way through in seconds. “Hello, Brucie,” they’d say. “Long time no see.”

Then they’d stomp him into the floor so far the cockroaches would have to get shovels to find him.

Take it easy with Hank Luton, man, he told himself, grasping the stick firmly with both hands as he headed the pod toward Vulcan Station. Tell him you’re sorry. Tell him it won’t happen again. Let him chew you out and don’t give him any shit back. Do whatever you got to do, man, but don’t let him think the best thing for him to do is to send you back to Earth and get a replacement, because you know the Exiles have put an APB out for you with the Angels and the Outlaws and all the rest, and they can find you if you come up from hiding too fast. Do what it takes to survive, Bruce man….

A blinking red light on the communications panel caught his attention. He frowned; it was the priority alert for the comlink, informing everyone that there was something on the main channel that everyone on active duty needed to monitor.

He flicked the monitor switch, and instantly he heard the high beeping whine of the general alarm, which all but drowned out the sound of several voices chattering at once in an almost indistinguishable garble. Bruce’s eyes went wide, and this time he wasn’t playing Eddie Murphy.

Something had just gone seriously wrong on Vulcan Station.

O
UTER SPACE IS AN
environment that seldom forgives mistakes. It is the most relentless environment into which man has ever ventured. It is an engineer’s nightmare, a hell in heaven for the foolhardy and the stupid. Although to enter, live, and work there demands perfection in every detail, it is in man’s nature to make mistakes, and therein lies the rub.

During the first decades of spaceflight most of the mistakes were made in the comparatively soft and safety-redundant environment of the launch pad. The mistakes led to long delays in launches and scrubbings of flights and, in the instance of the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, the death of three men who were being groomed to walk on the Moon. But although there were near-fatal accidents in orbit during the first years of the American and Soviet space programs, it was a long time before anyone died in space. The worst failures of man and machine were caught on the ground, where the consequences were less terrifying.

But mistakes always happen. They always have; they always will. No matter how sophisticated space technology became, flaws slipped in. Sometimes men died as the result, sometimes the consequences were less serious. A radio transceiver not switched on, a tether not securely fastened, a misfire of an MMU backpack in the wrong direction, a too-hard docking of a spacecraft, careless entry of a program into a computer, a lost tool during
EVA,
misunderstood communications between spacemen, miscalculation of body movement in zero g, any imaginable combination of dumb jerk boo-boos: These mistakes, which were either corrected or buffered by safety programs, were more often measured in nuisance value than in their contribution to early graves being dug.

Yet there were other types of errors which were not easily avoidable. Bad engineering on the ground; mistakes made in design or manufacture of items on Earth, which would later be carried into that place of no atmosphere, no gravity, and extremes of heat and cold. Those mistakes killed.

A construction pod undocked from Vulcan Station and began to head toward the powersat. Its pilot, a young beamjack named Alan McPhee, gently steered the tiny spacecraft around the bend in Vulcan’s bell-shaped Beta module, heading toward its underside on a course that would take him beneath both construction shack and solar power satellite. McPhee was a good pod pilot, but his skill was not enough to cope with a flaw in his spacecraft.

A fuel cell, a sphere the size of a gymnasium medicine ball, which was strapped to the outside of the pod’s fuselage, had a weak skin. It had been manufactured by a small aerospace company in Illinois, which subcontracted to Skycorp. The fuel cells were supposed to be carefully inspected by X-ray equipment for weak points, yet this one had slipped through because the technician in charge had been thinking too much about her impending breakup with her boyfriend. A couple of months later, the faulty cell had been repressurized in the construction shack’s pod garage almost a dozen times. Each time additional pressure had been put upon a thin spot in the cell’s lining, which was absolutely undetectable to the naked eye.