It was three weeks later and Harriet was back on her feet and on duty for the first time. As she had expected her whole torso, back to front, was now a web of red scars that she had been told would eventually fade to white. It was pretty gruesome but the Naval uniforms actually helped her ignore it. Her own wardrobe, now in some store somewhere, would have exposed some of the damaged skin to the outside world as she was nowhere near ready for that. She didn’t even look down at her body whilst showering, she just fixed her eyes forward.
Things were already off to a strange start. Sparrow had told them they all had to go to main engineering this workshift, so confused that was where Sparrow was heading after finishing her breakfast in the mess, which as Sparrow had said was a much more positive experience than she had expected. A CPO had even clapped her on the shoulder and just said, “You’re one of us now, didn’t expect that from an aristo but here you are.” She mumbled embarrassed thanks and he’d just laughed and wandered off to a table. When she sat down the other ratings didn’t turn away, they didn’t actively speak to her other than to say good morning leading hand but it was a marked improvement to be met with polite indifference rather than open hostility.
As she entered the main engineering deck she met the new sailors who had been drafted into the detail. No new Petty Officer could be spared either, which meant Harri was the senior, well only, NCO in the detail. Chloe and Sparrow hadn’t arrived yet from the Warrants’ mess. Still they had a few minutes to spare. In the meantime I guess she better get used to being an NCO. Sparrow had spent several evenings going over what would be expected of her so she was fairly confident she could fake like she knew what she was doing. So she went to stand somewhere that seemed out of the way of anything vital and gave her first order. “Detail, form up on me,” she called, “I’m Leading Tech Harriet Ellis, just call me Leading Tech or Killick Ellis if you must.” Slowly the detail slouched over and stood in a fair approximation of a line beside her. Moment’s later Sparrow and Ms Liu walked in. “Attention,” she ordered, again, and her and the rest of the detail all moved slightly out of sync to stand at attention, then she added “morning sirs.”
“Good morning leading tech, and to all of you as well,” Ms Liu replied, as Sparrow came to stand next to them.
“At ease,” called Sparrow and they all relaxed, “Ms Liu has something to say.”
“Well, yes,” Ms Liu began, “it’s more of an order really. Basically thanks to Killick Ellis and your predecessors we’re pretty much done repairing the water recycling system and in fact the system is running as well as it ever has. So I need you to step away and do a more pressing task. Essentially we’re running out of raw materials for our repairs. So we need you out in a shuttle hunting for anything metal rich in the immediate vicinity. Now we’re in deep space so it’s probably going to be a long wild goose chase but basically we need more metals so we have to look. Now Ms MacLeod has a shuttle pilots’ rating so she’ll be the pilot for the mission. That means Leading Tech Ellis will command the detail during any spacewalk you need to carry out to get anything you find under tow. Now I know none of you have ever done anything like this before, to which I say it’s something we’re all going to have to get used to - there aren’t enough of us left to be picky about the jobs we do. It’s simple really, attach the self embedding anchor points, fix in a braking thruster, and then attach the tow cables. Simple, it’s just in space so a bit more complicated to manoeuvre.”
Harriet gulped, well hopefully they wouldn’t find anything. She’d never been in vacuum before and she had hoped she never would. Plus she’d have to command the other five whilst she did it.
“Look don’t worry,” Ms Liu said, reading the room, “we’ll put you in the newest vacc suits, the ones with automatic manoeuvring systems. Ms MacLeod will program in your work sites before you leave, then the vacc suits will automatically fly you there, you just have to sit pretty and let the suit do the work. Once you’re on an asteroid just get your boots fixed and they’ll grip in these new suits. So will your hands if you choose that from the systems menu, I suggest you do, but you’ll need to keep flicking it on or off to do your work. And if anything goes wrong, Ms MacLeod will be in the shuttle and recover you.”
“All understood Ms Liu,” Sparrow answered on behalf of all of them.
“Very good, dismissed.”
“Detail, fall out,” Sparrow called in her usual soft voice, and she and the rest of the detail trooped out off to the loading bay.
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Five hours later and Harriet had been sat in her acceleration couch for about three of them reading training modules about working in vacuum, the rest of the time was worse; staring at an empty mass scanner screen as Sparrow spiralled them further and further away from the Whittington. The other ratings were all chatting and ribbing each other to pass the time, occasionally they made an effort to include her and she joined in as best she could but ultimately they were all still getting comfortable with each other and the conversations with her usually trickled out fairly quickly into silence and Harriet picking up her tablet again. Still she recognised they were making an effort now, and that felt good at least.
God was that all it took these days to make her happy, the bar had definitely dropped. Not that she’d ever really been happy as the Honourable Lady Ellis. Ever since she was twelve her life had been mapped out ahead of her, university, a short career and then a political marriage. Well that was all off now and honestly she was glad about that. She had never fancied marrying some Honourable boy anyway - they were all arseholes. Her family were arseholes as well to be frank, her father was Lord Mayor so she never saw him except when he was admonishing her for her latest misdemeanour and her mother was essentially a high functioning alcoholic whose moods were as changeable as the wind. As for her ‘friends’ well who else had she ever been permitted to meet other than other honourables. Their concerns were all just as petty as hers she guessed, some were comfortable with having their lives plotted for them; too inane or unthinking to care, others were equally as unhappy as she was so were bitchy little harpies, although she’d been the biggest bitch naturally.
She thought about how she’d treated Sparrow when they had first met, she guessed they were all extremely stressed, but she regretted it now; although she made it a point to never apologise. That was her father’s thinking that had somehow weedled its way into her brain over the years. Sparrow was a sweet girl at heart and she had been needlessly cruel. Maybe she should apologise; one day. In fact she should probably be nicer to Ms Liu and Mr Choudary too she guessed. By the time she got out she wasn’t going to be very honourable anymore, she was going to be acting like, well, a sailor by the time she was out. Was that even a bad thing considering how unhappy her life had been up to this point. Maybe this was actually the best thing that had ever happened to her. Or maybe this was just the message from her mum she’d picked up the previous evening - it was amazing how quantum messaging still worked but she guessed that was the thing about entanglement: distance meant nothing.
Her mother had been in one of her moods and clearly had drunk too much; the message was a badly written angry one. She’d ruined everyone’s life, undermined her father’s legacy plans and generally disgraced the whole family. She’d been told not to contact them and they would contact her if they needed to. She guessed they probably didn’t know about her actions or injuries yet from the boarding. She wondered if they’d even care now she was no longer a marriageable pawn.
Harriet was lost in these thoughts when Able Seaman Reeves, she thought that was his name anyway, who was managing the mass scanner, suddenly called out: “Warrant I’m picking something up, approximately 531 tonnes, looks like a small asteroid”
“Acknowledged, I’m going to take us in closer and launch the assay probe, that mass is just inside what we can safely load on board the Whittington anyway.” Sparrow informed them all as she boosted the engine power and steered them towards the orphaned rock. Harriet couldn’t believe the bad luck of it all, what was an asteroid doing out here just wandering through interstellar space. Let’s just hope it’s all just all junk rock and not ore rich, she thought. They wouldn’t know until the assay probe reported back in about an hour's time. In the meantime it would take them about that long to suit up - which might all be a wasted effort but that’s what they’d agreed before launch to maximise the time they could be out with the shuttle. .
“Time to suit up,” she ordered the other ratings, before pushing herself up out of her seat and heading to the storage lockers by the airlock where their suits were stored. They were all of a modular construction. You clipped and sealed two torso pieces first, then the legs in two parts and a knee joint, then the arms and then the boots, the rebreather and heating unit and finally the helmet. The whole process took about half an hour but required a second, unsuited, person to get you dressed. Much like a ball gown she thought. Harriet as the Leading Tech would have to go last and get Sparrow to suit her up. In the meantime she had to concentrate on suiting up Seaman Reeves as it happened. “You couldn’t have just kept quiet,” she quipped as she strapped the chest module into position using the criss cross restraints that went over the man’s back.
“Aye, I thought about it but then I thought some midshipman or sub- Lieutenant is probably going to review the scanner logs at some point and then we’d all be in for it,” he laughed.
“Good point, I imagine they get bored enough doing nothing all day to be bothered,” Harriet thought she was doing her best impression of a disgruntled sailor.
“I bet you know all about boredom, sitting in the Lord Mayor’s palace all day. Can’t think of anything worse to be honest; even the Navy.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Harriet retorted, “it was beyond boredom. At least here’s a bit more exciting.”
“I know I’ve seen the footage, you were lucky but you did better than I did. I think I just ducked behind my barricade firing the rifle blindly over the top,” the older rating admitted.
“Don’t worry I was petrified too, I think I pissed myself sometime around the time they were cutting through the second blast door.”
“Ha,” the rating laughed, “that must have been a new experience for you. I think I did the same the first time I saw action.”
“Well it’s better than being pissed on I guess,” Harriet said, not quite believing the way she was talking - it was starting already. Admittedly this was just her trying to fit in but it felt much more natural than the stilted conversations Honourables were forced to do: so she added, “which is all we Honourables do to each other, metaphorically.”
“I bet but at least you get the palaces and the food. I bet you had vegetables every day right? And even meat once a month?”
“Well yes,” she admitted, in fact they’d had meat every Sunday, “I guess we did.”
“Sure beats a shared dorm eh?”
“I guess, but anyway it doesn’t matter now. I’m stuck out here just like you are. It’s going to be all dorms from here on out isn't it.”
“Yep you’re one of us now too right, at least until you pension out in forty-five. I hope you like fifteen varieties of textured soya protein.”
“I guess I’ll get used to it.”
“They all taste the same anyway.”
“Ha, well it shouldn’t take too long then!” She laughed as she fixed the back plate in place. After that the conversation amongst the whole detail settled down as they started the complex process of sealing the modules together. It wasn’t as simple as just clipping together. Each electrical connection had to be separately checked and after everything was assembled there was still pressuring up and testing the seals that had to go on. It was complicated work, with someone else’s life in your hands, she didn’t want to fuck it up and clearly no one else did either. Finally she was the last one left; just in time for Sparrow to report the findings.
“Ore rich, I’m afraid you’re all going for a walk,” she offered in commiseration to the nervous detail, “Lots of iron and aluminium ore, a useful amount of silicon and titanium, and a smattering of other metals in trace amounts, although that’s likely to be all we need of them.”
“Thanks Warrant,” she replied wryly.
She watched Sparrow, as she engaged the autopilot to hold their position and set an alert on the mass scanner to warn them if anything bigger than a brick approached them. After that she got up and started to strap her into her own suit. Sparrow would be the one doing the final checks on all of them. Harriet knew that Sparrow knew how to operate every system on the ship but it was still amazing to watch the small girl effortlessly work on systems she’d never used before.
Weirdly she was finding the experience of being dressed by Sparrow strangely enjoyable. Maybe in another life, where Sparrow’s parents hadn’t sold her to the state, maybe she’d have made a good personal maid for her. She’d never really been more than perfunctory with the maids she’d been given over the years; but maybe if one of them had been Sparrow they could have struck up a friendship. Her maids were all cowed by who she was, even when she’d tried to engage with them, she was met with polite, standoffish, formality. Sparrow didn’t really know the rules so she hadn’t held back with her, probably the first person ever to do so in her life, even the other Honourables ultimately treated her with annoying deference. Well they wouldn’t again next time she saw any of them. They’d all be Aldermen by that point, building their own alliances, plotting their political games just like her father; and what would she be? Some scarred CPO or Warrant, with a modest pension, a housing assignment and marriage licence, and an annual pass to enter the reproduction lottery. Would she go back to being an Honourable, a pariah in her own class, or would she try to live as a citizen: could she even do that. She knew some honourables were stripped of their status if they committed a heinous crime and were stupid enough to get caught but she had never heard of anyone renouncing their status. Although she probably wouldn’t have to, she wasn’t sure her family would even take her back.
Gradually her worrying subsided and she started paying attention to the work Sparrow was doing. Like everything else to do with the ship she did it effortlessly but thoroughly. The occasional remarks Sparrow or her made to each other made her smile at the ease of both the speech and the silence between them, as Sparrow manoeuvred her body into the cumbersome suit.
“I wish I could go with you,” Sparrow whispered to her suddenly.
“Ah I’ll be alright, I don’t really have to do much, I just let the autopilot do the work? Attach a thruster to a rock weighing hundreds of tonnes and job done,” she replied glibly.
“Stay safe out there won’t you?” Sparrow’s worry flashed across her face.
“I will, and even if anything goes wrong you’ll come riding into my rescue right?”
“Yep you’re going to be totally safe,” the other girl beamed back as if she had just realised she was in control of the shuttle.
“Glad to hear it,” she answered as Sparrow fixed her helmet in place and began pressuring up the suit via the rebreather unit. She then took a hand scanner and ran it over all the joints in the suit to check for air escape. “All good,” she said suddenly as she finished. Harriet found herself a bit dejected that the other girl had to go and check the seals on the other suits. That largely went without a hitch although Sparrow did have to reattach one arm module, not one of the ones she had fitted thankfully, that would have been mortifying especially given her status as an NCO now.
“Right, I guess it’s time to get to work” she said to the rest of the detail pointing, towards the air lock, and resisting the urge to wave goodbye to Sparrow. They all trooped nervously into the airlock. Their suits automatically sensed the transition and immediately life support, thrusters, comms and their boot magnets activated locking them all in place.
“Prepare for depressurisation,” came Sparrow’s voice over the shuttle’s intercom, “all personnel confirm their readiness.”
“Standing ready,” Harriet answered with the stock Naval response; as did all the other ratings one by one. Once they had she replied, “Warrant, we’re ready to deploy.”
“Pressure release complete,” Sparrow’s voice came a few minutes later. It wasn’t the explosive affair she had feared. The Shuttle obviously vented the air very slowly, not that they could tell from within their vacc suits.
Their first job was to fit small thrusters to each of the work boxes that contained the self embedding ‘spikes’ and the asteroid’s thruster unit. After they had done this they placed them on the edge of the airlock and opened the outer door into the void of space. She couldn’t see their target but her suit’s scanners overlaid its outline onto the surface of her helmet’s visor. The workboxes would be slaved to the shuttle’s computer and directed along the same paths each of their autopilot units had been loaded with. In theory the boxes should all be anchored within a metre of their landing sites. All that was required of them was to give them all an initial shove out the airlock so they could drift until there was a safe distance for them to engage their thrusters.
Once the workboxes were on their merry way, it was their turn she guessed. She moved to the airlock door, her breathing heavy inside her suit, which she tried to control as best as she could. “Alright, form up on me,” she ordered the rest of the detail. “I’ll launch first, then Reeves, Wolinski, Peters, O’Rourke and finally Able Seaman Hussein. At least sixty seconds gap between each launch, we don’t want any collisions.”
“Yes Killick,” came the response from each of them as they acknowledged her orders. Once they were clear of each other, the autopilots could be activated and the programming was timed in such a way they should all touch rock at the same time. With that recollection from the training module she’d been reading on her tablet earlier that shift, she took a deep breath and pushed herself out of the airlock. She drifted slowly through the darkness around her, just as she had in her training sessions with Mr Choudary. She was in a slight spin she noticed, one of her legs must have pushed harder than the other. Guess which one she thought, thinking of the bullet hole in her left leg. Still it didn’t matter as after sixty seconds the autopilot kicked in and slowly ended her spin and then she felt the suit’s main propulsion thruster kick in for about four seconds and she accelerated quickly to what she thought was a quite terrifying speed towards the green outline on her helmet. Slowly she became aware of just how far away from the asteroid they still were - of course she had read in the training manual that it was to ensure the Shuttle wasn’t damaged by any debris floating alongside the asteroid in its weak gravity - and then the presence of the rest of her detail; tiny lights now keeping pace with her in a star shaped formation.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
It seemed like they were the only things moving, although in reality the asteroid would be moving through space at several thousands of kilometres per hour. The auto pilot had guided them to a position ahead of the asteroid and was now using their breaking thrusters to bring them to just a tiny fraction off the asteroid’s speed, a terrifying thought in itself that in vacuum they could be accelerated to such incredible speeds, but now all they had to was sit there until the asteroid caught up with them, at which point they should all impact softly enough for their gripper boots to clasp onto the rocky surface and anchor them. Such was the theory anyway, reassuringly she felt the suit immobilise and then reorientate her legs. “We looking alright Ms MacLeod?” she asked over the command comms channel rather than the open one, her first new privilege as a junior NCO.
“Yes Leading Tech, you’re all on course and all safety parameters are being met,” came Sparrow’s soft voice, “are you alright?”
“Just peachy, a massive rock is about to slam into me. If this breaks my legs, you’re going to have to carry me everywhere you know.”
“Don’t worry you won’t break anything, the autopilot will put you down gently; but wouldn’t me carrying you breach Naval regulations?”
“Probably, but at this point who cares?”
“Well Ms Liu would care, Mr Choudary would say it is beneath the dignity of a Warrant Officer. I doubt the Captain would say anything though,” Sparrow mused.
“Sounds about right, but to be honest the Captain would still sign off on the disciplinary hearing’s punishment wouldn’t she?” Harriet replied, giving away that she probably did care.
“Yes,” Sparrow agreed, “but you realise that it would be the Captain’s duty to sign off the disciplinary report.”
“Yes, Ms MacLeod,” then she teased “you’re such a jobsworth, you should work on that you know.”
“Jobsworth?”
“Yeah someone who just blindly follows the rules and doesn’t ever think for themselves.”
“Isn’t that what we have to do in the Navy though?” Sparrow replied, sounding confused.
“Well yeah, doesn’t mean we have to like it though does it?”
“I suppose,” Sparrow said slowly.
Harriet was just about to tease her about something else, she hadn’t quite decided what yet, when Ms Liu’s voice barked into the channel.
“Would you two stop wittering, I’ve had some incredibly annoying AI sub routine flashing me alerts of inappropriate use of the command channel every ten seconds now and it’s bloody persistent.”
“Sorry Ms Liu,” Sparrow replied meekly.
“Well good, let’s just stick to, um, appropriate use from now on though, think of my sanity at the very least, the beeping it makes my tablet do will finish off the last of it alright.”
“Never thought you had any to begin with,” Harriet couldn’t resist interjecting before remembering herself and adding, “Sir.”
“Borderline insubordination Killick? Let’s at least see you through one shift before you get demoted.”
“Yes, Sir,” Harriet responded with the briskness, or rather lack of, she felt was demanded by Ms Liu.
“Well very good. Right back to work and please please stop the chit chat, you’ve got a long flight back to do all that alright.”
“Understood Ms Liu,” Sparrow answered for both of them.
When she was sure Ms Liu was off the channel, Harriet said: “Well that told us then, guess it’s silence from here on out.”
“Yes,” Sparrow agreed sadly, “stay safe Harri.”
“Don’t worry, this is probably about the safest thing that’s happened to me since I first stepped foot on the Whittington.”
With that things fell silent and Harriet was left floating in the void watching the outline of the asteroid fill her visor before being replaced by a topography map indicating where her work box had landed and her own landing site two metres away. A countdown to impact had started as well, 270 seconds apparently.
“Everyone prepare for landing,” she called over the open comms, “Remember your suits will disengage immobilisation of your legs just before we make impact. Try and not move them until you hit rock, you want your boots to grip quickly.”
“Not our first rodeo Killick,” Wolinski called back,
“Well it’s mine and I don’t want anyone going for a float on my first one alright,” she retorted, “especially me!”
“Yeah Wolinski,” Reeves said joining in, “new NCOs need to say something every five minutes in case anyone forgets they’re an NCO now. You know you can just ignore it right?”
“You bloodily well can’t, that’s an order!” Harriet said, putting on her best impression of testiness as she suppressed the urge to laugh.
“Did you hear something,” came O’Rourkes voice, “sounded like we’ve got interference on the comms channel.”
“Oh shut up you lot,” Harriet said in mock exasperation, “anyway brace yourselves, thirty seconds to impact.”
The channel fell silent as their suit lights began to pick out details of the pitted surface of the asteroid. She hoped the autopilot was heading to a flat bit otherwise this was going to be a hell of a trickier landing than she could handle. Ten seconds. Five. Two, she felt the suit release her legs. Then with a gentle tremor she touched rock. Immediately her boots’ gripper micro spikes bored into the rock and held her to the surface. Embarrassingly she forgot about her own momentum and ended up folding over completely as her body collided with her anchored legs. She was glad they were all too far away from each other for the rest of the detail to witness her awkwardly push her torso back into a standing position in a vacuum. As soon as she had righted herself she realised she should have checked in with the rest of the detail rather than flounder upright.
“Detail report,” she called over the comm. She was relieved to get five other responses to come back with varying degrees of rudeness. “Alright,” she continued, “I’ll be calling to check in every twenty minutes. If someone doesn’t check in, the person nearest to them will head to their station to investigate. Otherwise stay put and get on with your jobs.”
The rest of the detail was busy constructing anchor four points for each of the tethers with the spikes and carbon fibre ropes but they’d all be done a long time before she had anchored the thruster and got it online and slaved to Sparrow’s control board. The thruster needed a lot more spikes to secure it even if it would be pushing itself into the asteroid when it fired up, no lateral movement could be allowed, lest it move out of the tiny control zone her HUD was displaying; not if they didn’t want the thruster sending the asteroid into a spin entangling all the tethers. First she removed the thruster unit from the work box, something easy to manage in zero gravity, harder was keeping it from floating into space but her boots’ grippers held as she struggled to slow its momentum. Slowly she carried it over to the edge of the control zone and manoeuvred it so it aligned perfectly with the outline on her HUD. She felt the unit’s own grippers engage and fix it to the rock, fine for when it wasn’t firing but not nearly strong enough to hold it when it was. Still with the unit secure for the time being she slowly walked back to her work box. It was laborious as with each step she had to wait a second for her rear boot to disengage its grippers before she could lope forward in a completely undignified manner. When she got there she shoved the sixteen spikes it was deemed needed into a transport stack, making sure it was completely sealed before setting off with it swinging out to her side wildly, it was only her gloves’ own grippers that made sure the strap remained in her hand, as she loped back to the thruster. However, she had known that her grippers would keep her attached and the stabilisation system built into the autopilot had been designed to keep her in control of their momentum, the suits manoeuvering thrusters firing several times a second to keep her pulling the bag along rather than the reverse; that was something wasn’t it? Suddenly the timer in her helmet went off for the first time. Twenty minutes already and she hadn’t really started. “Check in,” she called over the comm channel and was relieved to get five acknowledgements. Turning back to that she slung the large bag’s strap across her body holding it close with one hand. Then she carefully unsealed it and pulled out the first spike, carefully withdrawing her other hand from holding the bag steady and resealing the bag. Then she moved over to the top left predrilled attachment hole and she activated the spike, which immediately extended its supporting legs to balance it perfectly perpendicular to the thruster despite the uneven surface it found on the asteroid and the thruster itself. Once it had decided it was happy all Harriet had to do was watch the bloody thing and make sure nothing knocked one of its legs. Once it was embedded fully Harriet activated its lateral claws which would explode out of the main spike driving deep into the rock. Right eleven more to go. This was the really boring bit; four check-ins later she had finally finished.
The other five had already started their round trip to collect the tethers, at the speeds they had to stick to on the way back, that gave her about an hour to weld all the attachment spikes to the thruster. Well thank fuck that Sparrow had given her so many welding lessons; but first a round trip to the workbox to get the welder. This welder was a bit different as the ark was within a diamond dome about 15 cm across. She guessed that must be far enough for the gas around the arc, which heated the weld material to five thousand degrees to, to cool to below the four thousand degrees that diamond melted at in the absence of oxygen. An expensive bit of kit just to let her see the welding arc through her now darkened visor. The welder was connected by a long shielded wire to the workbox which would supply the power supply. She positioned her first load of welding material all around the spike, a thin layer of adhesive keeping them in place, which would evaporate instantly under the heat of the arc. She powered up the welder and then methodically went about creating the weld. Four minutes, perfect if she could keep it up, at least without oxygen there was no slag to chip off each weld. She worked methodically in a way she knew would delight Sparrow if only she could see it and was done a full minute before the rest of the detail returned to attach the five tethers to their attachment points,
Everything had to be done so quickly as with an object so massive it needed a very shallow curve to reposition it for a straight run to intercept the Whittington and match it’s speed and trajectory exactly so that the little cutter skiffs could dismember it into chunks small enough to fit in the loading bay; wait more than a few minutes and they’d miss their window of opportunity. The Shuttle would drag it laterally, then the thruster had to engage to guide it through its wild swing in space and back into a straight line. Such was the complexity of the job that the thruster wasn’t really one but twelve, giving approximately a 180 degree plain of control. It was then she realised that of all of them Sparrow was in the most danger on this mission. If her calculations were off when she programmed both the shuttle’s and the thruster’s firing commands the momentum of the asteroid could rip the shuttle apart or fling it wildly out of control. The rest of them would be sitting there for a few hours, but they had enough air for that, whilst another shuttle was launched to recover them. She guessed though that Sparrow wouldn’t get it wrong with her superhuman calculation abilities. Returning to the job at hand, he initiated the module and programmed in the pairing code to link the thruster with the shuttle’s thruster control.
“Detail, are all anchor points attached to the tethers?
“Yes sir,” came five replies.
“All set Warrant,” she called over the command channel.
“Acknowledged,” Sparrow’s voice came back slightly nervously, “activate the autopilot to get you all to a safe distance.”
“Detail, disengage gripper boots and engage your autopilots now please,” Harriet ordered over the open comm channel.
In just about unison the detail fired away from the asteroid to a distance where she wouldn’t get burned by the thruster and the others would be safe from a rope failure. Now she could see the shuttle in the corner of her visor begin firing up its thrusters and starting to swing the asteroid round to its final trajectory. She felt the autopilot immobilise the whole suit and engage her own manoeuvring thrusters to track the course of the asteroid. On her visor only was a copy of Sparrow’s course, so far they were within acceptable tolerance, an alert flashed up indicating that the thruster embedded on the surface of the asteroid was now engaging. For thirty whole minutes it was going smoothly when suddenly her visor flashed red, they were drifting out of the tolerance window.
“Detail, what’s going on?” she screamed into her helmet.
“Lost an anchor rope,” a panicked Peters shouted back.
“I’m coming to you, get one of the repair kits and a cutter from your work box as quickly as you can,” she yelled whilst frantically reprogramming the auto pilot to take her to Peters’ failed anchor point. As she bore down at a frightening speed towards the target she realised she wasn’t in for a soft landing this time. She was right; she slammed down into the rock positioned like a starfish, the impact knocking all the breath out of her and making her scars shoot pain all over her body in protest. She understood why though. Only the grippers on her left hand had managed to engage properly. Slowly she managed to swing her feet into contact with the asteroid’s surface long enough for the grippers to take hold. Then she disengaged the grippers on her hand and got back upright. She looked up to see what the situation was, the carbon fibre rope had snapped at the attachment point to the spike, they’d have to be careful, although the rope was now trailing behind the shuttle, any change in momentum Sparrow applied could see it swinging wildly and any contact, even a brush would be enough to send them hurtling into space.
Where was Peters? Then she spotted another loping figure, so it wasn’t just her, coming towards them with a coil of carbon fibre slung across her chest and a cutter in each hand.
“You’ve got two minutes forty to fix that line before things get critical,” came Sparrow’s voice suddenly on the command module. .
“Critical?”
“That’s the point the asteroid is going to start dragging the shuttle rather than us dragging it.”
“Peters,” she yelled down the open comm, “we’ve got 180 seconds to get this done. Drop the cutters, we'll have to take our chances repairing frayed edges.”
The loping figure boosted forwards suddenly in a slow arc to bring herself down just by her, impressive either she was super quick at programming her autopilot using eye tracking or she had done it manually. Immediately a coupling unit attached to a length of carbon fibre was thrust into her right hand and they hurried to the spike.
“You do here, I'll push up to the top,” Harriet ordered, “I’ll keep track of how much length we’re adding?”
Peters nodded an acknowledgement.
Harriet had to wait until Peters had attached the coupling to the stub of rope still attached to the spike before she could attach hers to the trailing rope. The attachment was made of Hadfield steel capable of withstanding around 900 MPa of tensile pressure. However, this made it the weak point of the whole system, the carbon fibre could withstand hundreds of GPa. So it was worrying that they were reducing the tensile strength of the rope when it had already broken, but what choice did they have? She found that she didn’t have time to ponder it further, as Peters was shouting, “Attached” into her ear through the comm.
Harriet aligned herself as well as she could towards the end of the tether she pushed off as hard as she dared, she needed to be moving slowly in order to grab the carbon fibre which she’d have to rely on her own grip and friction to hold on as it was too hard for her grippers to engage but at the same time she needed to be attached in the next 100 seconds to save Sparrow. Her HUD showed she’d judged it correctly and was on a course to intercept the end of the tether. The autopilot, which had been autocalculating a braking pattern to ensure she could successfully grip on to it, engaged suddenly, slowing her still further. Sixty seconds now. She watched the timer in her HUD countdown to twenty before she was able to make her wild grab at the tether. She caught it and gripped for dear life with her free end whilst she brought her arm carrying the attachment to bear as well. 20 seconds that meant she had 80 seconds tops to shimmy down the tether and secure the coupling. Going as fast as she could she slid slowly down the tether until she could reorientate herself to be able to reach the tether’s frayed end. She quickly snapped the coupling on, twisted it to lock it and activated the welding charge that would fully secure the coupling. “Attached, 2.17m added” she yelled the read off from her HUD into the open channel. Immediately, there was a massive change in their momentum as the shuttle;s thruster roared up to account for the changed length of the tether and to correct the shuttle’s course. Then to her horror one of the cutters they had abandoned had activated and was spinning towards Peters.
She shouted a warning, but it was too late the cutter whipped through space and caught the woman with the merest of glancing brushes, but that was enough to rip through her suit. Sealing foam would be pumping out of the suit’s outer layer even as it happened but she would still have lost a significant amount of pressure which the suit’s rebreather was going to have to use its reserves to bring back up to minimum levels quickly. What’s more she’d somehow lost engagement with the asteroid and was spinning out
“Peters, come in,” she cried.
“Oh shit, I’m fucked,” came a panicked voice, “two of my lateral thrusters on my damaged side won’t engage, the control circuit must have been cut. I can’t stop my spin.”
“I’m coming to get you. Hold tight.” Harriet’s HUD told her it was still possible to catch the other rating but it would use up 95% of her remaining fuel, not enough to safely reach the shuttle, which is where she needed to get Peters too before she ran out of air.
“Peters, what are your oxygen levels like?” she called as calmly as she could.
“Got about thirty three minutes, Killick.”
“Okay that’s enough time, but look I’m not going to have much fuel left by the time I get to you. We’re going to have to hold tight together, you take care of accelerating and I’ll do course corrections and braking ok. We’re going to have to do it manually as well, no time to program something so complex into the autopilot.”
“Ok Killick.”
“It will be,” Harriet tried to sound as reassuring as she could.
The autopilot obviously hadn’t had time to balance all the risks as she hit Peters with bone jarring force again and she barely managed to wrap her arms tightly around her. Firing her own thrusters she slowly brought them out of spin and orientated them until Peters was on trajectory to intercept the shuttle and fire her back thruster.
“On our way to you, I don’t think we’ll get more than one shot at this,” she called Sparrow over the command channel.
“Don’t worry, I’ll catch you,” the other girl replied, “I’m just about in control again.”
They hurtled rapidly towards the shuttle, Harriet’s suit's rear camera was showing her their approach. She course corrected only when she absolutely had to in order to conserve her meagre fuel reserves. She’d need to do the final braking and her suit’s computer was saying she needed at least two percent to do that. She was down to 3.5 already and they weren’t even a tenth of the way there yet. Twenty six minutes, her HUD reminded her of how much oxygen Peters had left. Unlike a traditional tank, she remembered Mr Choudary telling her, rebreathers although offering a five fold extension of operational time for the same volume of air they couldn’t be recharged from one unit to another in emergencies as they were completely closed systems.
Seven minutes, her HUD was reading after a terrifying flight as they hurtled at speeds well above safe operating procedures towards Sparrow’s shuttle. Her camera caught the air lock opening. “You should start braking now,” Sparrow’s voice suddenly piped up across the comm urgently.
“Peters disengage your thruster,” she called immediately, engaging her own as soon as she felt the jolt of Peter’s thruster cutting out. She watched the suit's speedometer slowly from 540 km/h, her computer indicated they needed to be down to thirty to survive slamming into the inner airlock door, under fifteen if they didn’t want to break anything. It was terrifying watching the speedometer and distance projection match each other and then move in opposite directions. Would they burn off enough speed in time. 140 km/h now; her thruster was doing the job but did she have enough fuel, it didn’t matter all she could do was keep burning as long as she could. 80 km/h now. “Brace!” she shouted. 50, 40, 30, 25, she kept burning fuel, right up to her impact alert suddenly screamed at her and she cut out, 19, this was going to hurt. Seconds later her left arm hit the inner airlock door and the bone smashed apart as they bounced off, she let out a scream of anguish even as the suit pumped pain killers into her as she hurtled, still entangled with Peters towards the outer door that was slamming down, shit they could hurtle out again or even get cut in half by the door slamming down on top of them. Luckily they hit the outer door just after it slammed into place, the force of which only managed to dislocate her right shoulder this time. The pain killers had kicked in at this point and she only felt it as an uncomfortable wrenching sensation. Suddenly there was a loud hiss as atmosphere was pumped rapidly into the airlock. Harriet urgently cast her eyes at the pressure monitor, waiting for it to go green. As soon as she saw the indicator change colour she called to Peters to take her helmet off. Luckily it looked like she had taken the brunt of the impacts and Peters was unscathed enough to tear off her helmet and open the inner door before coming back to drag her into the main area of the shuttle and seal the airlock behind them.
“You saved my life and you're hurt,” Peters said to her as she unclipped Harriet’s own helmet.
“Well it’s my first day on the job, got to look keen don’t I?” she joked feebly.
“How hurt!?” shouted Sparrow from the cockpit.
“The suit said my left radius is broken and I’ve dislocated my right shoulder, someone’s going to have to pop that back in by the looks of things.”
“I’ll get the medical kit,” Peters said, “we’ll get you full of bone stitching nanos, they’ll sort your broken arm in no time.”
“Ah good,” was all Harriet could muster to say through the hazy fog of painkillers washing over her.