So It Begins (35 page)

  As his vision cleared, he could see that the mission clock had started. It read 482 hours and 56 minutes as the seconds counted down. “That’s almost three weeks under driver,” he said, now realizing that it was over and that, for the first time, he hadn’t lost it all over himself from the hypes.

  “Attention all personnel, secure from Transition,” sang out over the intercom in the lovely, neutral female voice that was the SC; it was accompanied by the usual low-gravity warning.

  Uncoupling his harness, Donovich stepped out onto the deck; now under pseudo .3-g—one of the unforeseen side effects of the TLD was that it creates something akin to its own gravity well—he felt heavy again, with that all-too-familiar draining feeling as fluids once again moved toward their lowest points.

  After a few deep breaths and a bit of stretching against the elastic action of his MAC suit, Donovich turned and reached past his console for his pressure mug. He heard the warning tone from the console as his hand touched the mug’s handle; in that instant the very reality around him rapidly compressed and expanded like an image in a carnival mirror.

  He grabbed for his jump seat and managed to get a handhold on the frame. The vertigo drove him to his knees, retching, unable to breathe from the abdominal contractions. His other arm was locked straight, with the hand pressed down into the deck in an effort to support himself.

  At that moment he was alone; trapped in the darkness behind his own eyes, with the feeling of being squeezed to the point of suffocation. Then somewhere at the edge of his consciousness he could once again hear the alert tones, now joined by the voice of Major Ware.

  Donovich opened his eyes, but growing pressure against his face threatened to force them shut. Somehow he managed a gulp of air, which he forced down past the burnt feeling in his throat; he hadn’t voided his stomach, but definitely refluxed up into his mouth, then he was breathing again.

  “Chief, what is your status!” the Major demanded. “Patterson get up there and see what you can do!” she ordered.

  “Donovich here,” he said with a raspy voice.

  “Thank God.” There was stress-tainted relief in her voice. “Chief, the SC reports that we’ve gone into field imbalance.”

  “Understood, ma’am, I’m on it,” Donovich responded, as he scanned along the length of his console.

  “I’m headin’ up,” replied Patterson.

  “Patterson stay put . . .” Donovich countermanded as he pulled himself up to his console on unsteady legs, “. . .in case the problem’s at your end of the module.”

  “Yes’ir.”

  Donovich was having trouble seeing—no doubt he’d blown some blood vessels from the straining. It wasn’t so much that his vision was blurry, but that every lit display now had a superimposed twin. The console was awash in flashing yellow status lights, each indicating some irregularity with its respective system. They could all wait: red priority markers strobed around the icon for the Drive Frequency Controller. With a touch of the icon, Donovich opened a dialog window stating, “MANUAL OVERRIDE AT DFC UNIT,” accompanied by two columns of numbers; one number set was flashing red.

  “Damnit!” he exclaimed, looking over at the machinery mounted to the nearby equipment platform. “That’s where that bang came from,” he muttered, remembering the sounds he heard during Transition.

  Like a chimp climbing slowly through the treetops, Donovich reached out from one handhold to another for support, not releasing his grip on the first until he was secure to the next.

  Before long he was holding onto the platform’s guardrail, just across from the unit; the marked access hatch was flanked by handholds. Reaching out, Donovich grabbed one, and then depressed the spring-loaded latch pin on the hatch, which opened with a snap. He swung it up until it locked. Inside was the unit’s hardwired controls with its oscilloscope-style display showing two color-coded, opposing harmonic waveforms—normally it was just a straight line, indicating that all three axial oscillations were being effectively countered—but now one was out of sync.

  “By the book,” muttered Donovich as he looked up at the interior of the hatch for the procedural check list; it took him a moment to sort through the different emergency scenarios. “One: Check for manual setting change at panel.” He looked down at the instrument panel, mostly back-lit in green; there were the three metal gear-tooth, wing-lock knobs in question. One was back-lit in red. “That’s it!” he said.

  To the side of the panel was the maintenance log—the Techs from the
Vandenberg
had recalibrated the system to compensate for the loss of two of the ship’s external fuel tanks—the last entry was less than a day old.

  “Right,” he said as he reached for the knob. Its safety-lock worked like a prescription bottle’s child-proof cap; with a determined squeeze to its side-wings, Donovich ever so gently turned the knob to the recorded setting. Like a concluding drumbeat, the pulsating stopped.

  “. . . and all was right with the world!” he said with relief. Holding his hand still, he opened his fingers. The knob’s locks pressed out and clicked; its backlight turned green.

  He just stood there for a moment, looking over the instrument display, checking the lockdowns for any other possible problems.

  “Chief, I take it you have things under control?” asked Ware over the comm.

  “Yes, ma’am,” rasped Donovich. His mouth and throat were a mess. “Right now, it looks like a switch shook loose; it’s going to take us the better part of a day to look over the key systems to confirm that’s the only problem.”

  “Very well, keep me informed; Ware out.”

  With a tap, he once again switched his comm to stand-by, then withdrew a marker from his pocket.

  Dutifully, Donovich recorded the malfunction and setting change on the maintenance log; the computer entries would have to wait. His next stop was the medical supply cabinet, or med-station. Distracted by the thought of impending relief, he let his marker once again get away from him. It fell somewhere into the recessed area of the panel. “Butt-monkeys,” he exclaimed.

  Carefully he moved his head in for a look—the last thing he wanted was to bump something and start the show all over again. The marker wasn’t in the front. Retrieving his pocket flashlight, he depressed the base switch; the LED cluster came to life.

  Moving in close, he could only bring one eye to bear past the frame of the access hatch; he played the spot into the side portion of the recess. At first the stowaway didn’t register—since he was preoccupied with looking for the marker. Once it did, he was feeling too crappy to really care either way. Things do manage to get onboard ship, but generally they don’t last long in the inorganic environment of the module. “Great, and me without a mayonnaise jar,” he said, with a feeling of annoyance at having something else to deal with.

  His unwanted visitor was a spider, just sitting there at an odd angle, affixed to the instrument panel.

  “Why is it always a spider, don’t the cockroaches have a space program?” he said sarcastically.

  As house spiders went, it was pretty big, maybe as much as an inch across, but it was hard to judge; his new friend was all bunched up, and Donovich’s eyes were still a bit fuzzy.

  Letting out a long breath, he thought over his options and decided upon the ancient, tried-and-true approach—the one that did not involve a newspaper.

  He did, however, need something to store the beastie in. Donovich pulled the unused biohazard bag from his pocket, and with a practiced hand, swiped it full of air. Placing his flashlight into his mouth, he bit down on its flexible grip; he could feel the tension in his jaw rising along the left side of his aching face.

  Rubbing his gloved fingertips together, Donovich explored whether he would have enough sensitivity not to squish the beastie—which would require him to dismantle the unit’s casing to clean up the mess—let alone be able to catch it just by feel. The suit’s gloves were state-of-the-art for working in vacuum; highly flexible, heated, and armored against puncture, so taking one off to reach blindly into a confined space, to grab a potentially poisonous spider, was out of the question.

  Slowly he reached in, palm down and fingers fanned out; aiming for the mental image of the beastie’s position. “I bet when I turn you over, you’ll have ‘Property of the
Vandenberg’
stenciled on your butt,” he said.

  Now beyond the controls, he slid his hand along the surface of the panel. Then he touched something with the side of his index finger, with a pinch, he tried to catch it against his thumb.

  It felt slick—not wet—more like the effect you get when you bring equal poles of a magnet together, a sort of wavy feeling. Then it popped free and was gone. With his head starting to pound against the pressure in his jaw, Donovich withdrew his hand and took the light from his mouth.

  Looking back in, Donovich saw that the beastie was still sitting in the same spot. “Now you’re just messing with me,” he said. This time around he noticed that the spider had thick, antenna-like protrusions coming from where its head should be, kind of like a cylinder with round ends.
Sort of hotdog-shaped
, he thought.

  What he originally thought of as fur turned out to be either a glossy, blue-grey skin or a carapace, which meant it wasn’t a spider, but whatever it was, it was hefty for its size.
What are you?
The very thought added to his headache; looking back over his shoulder, he could see the med-station in the distance, with its beautiful, six-pointed blue and white “Star of Life,” which seemed to call to him. “I’ll deal with you later,” he said as he closed and snap-locked the unit’s access hatch. Flattening the biohazard bag, he tucked it in a pocket and went to find some relief.

  “I was enjoying myself earlier,” he commented as he stood in front of the med-station’s closet-sized door; he removed his comm-hood and let it hang by the suit’s interface cable, he then ran a hand over his buzz-cut hair before opening the cabinet.

  “Nothing is ever simple,” grumbled Donovich as he looked at the maze of labeled, numbered, and color-coded drawers, compartments, and lock-boxes; unfortunately, he knew from experience where to find what he needed. He snapped a cold-pack to life and balanced it on his head while he dug out a tube of chewable pain killers.

  As he was popping open the package’s safety cap, he thought he heard something. Taking out several pills and slipping the rest into his pocket, he turned to face the gangway. He listened for anything beyond the usual sounds of the module; there was nothing. With the pills now dissolving in his mouth, it was time to get back to his station and finish off his coffee; he felt in his guts that this was going to be a very long day.

  He had only taken a few steps when the sound of a dull thump echoed from somewhere in the module.
Must be Patterson moving about,
he thought, reaching for the comm control at his arm.

  A distant crack and a sizzle caught his attention—the dreaded sound of something electrical arcing and shorting out. No alarm had sounded . . . yet. He quickly looked around his immediate area for any telltale signs of arc light or smoke.

  The arcing sound had stopped, to be followed by a splat sound very near by. With a hand holding the cold-pack in place, he was looking up through the deck gratings when something moved at the edge of his vision. Turning, he caught sight of it. Something steaming hot oozed down through the grating from the deck above.

  Donovich moved toward it, being damn sure not to get underneath. Every fluid used onboard ship was color-coded and often scent-infused—like the sulfur they added to natural gas—this to alert the engineers to its threat level and possible system of origin; but this stuff was dark amber in color, and moved in a thick ribbon, like some form of industrial grease. It was already seeping through the deck grating at Donovich’s feet. There was the smell of ozone in the air, and something almost sweet, like a marshmallow burnt black over an open fire.

  Fear grabbed at Donovich as his imagination broke loose. The parallels to an old sci-fi movie raced through his mind; he suddenly felt vulnerable and naked against the unseen, but envisioned, horrors, moving about through the machinery of the module. Escape was out of the question; whatever was there was between him and the main hatchway to the CM.