15th October 1984
ARC Extraction and Refining Facility
Lagrange 5
Kim barked orders into her earpiece (attached to her satphone by a slim wire) as she barreled down the corridors of the station. "Lieutenant, apprehend Adrena Lynn immediately. She may be the saboteur, and she may be armed. She left the brig five minutes ago."
"The EVA team leader? Fireteam moving. Checking. Do you want a public alert?"
"No. Keep it quiet."
Kim arrived at the station's main corridor, and stopped as she awaited the results of Isabella's search.
"Bingo! She went into the hab section four minutes ago!"
Kim raced for the hub of the spinning hab section. If she could get there before Lynn, she could be certain of cutting her off. In the distance, she saw a mop of blond hair turn out of her sight.
"Agent Possible, Lynn just left the hub with a backpack. Turned left onto the zero-gee basketball court."
"Get two Marines to cut her off from the other side!"
In main ops, Isabella barked orders to her Marines, and two peeled off.
In the net-protected area beneath the 3-D court (a refurbished cylindrical Saturn-II fuel tank), Adrena Lynn watched the game, her hand never far from her backpack and her eyes never far from the corridors. She saw the inbound USS agents, and bolted.
"She's bolting!"
Lynn pulled an odd machine-pistol from her bag.
The black machine-pistol had three side-loading vertically stacked smoothbore barrels, each perforated with thin-plastic-covered vents. Each barrel was loaded with twelve self-propelled, electronically-fired rocket bullets loaded point-to-end. The long barrels extended backward well beyond the electronic trigger to serve as a stock. The gyrojet-metalstorm-configuration chosen meant that the machine-pistol needed no special lubricants, had excellent range, had nearly no recoil, and, with no moving parts save the trigger, was extremely rugged – perfect for the rigors of space.
It also outgunned Kim and Ron's caseless pistols by a substantial margin.
Kim, Ron, and Shego ducked as Lynn sent a burst of rocket bullets down the hall. In the court, personnel panicked, comically hiding behind basketball nets, fluorescent lights, and other fixtures.
Lynn backed down the corridor, firing occasional bursts to suppress return fire.
A pair of Marines entered the gym, and two more appeared behind Kim. They returned fire, forcing Lynn to take cover.
Kim and Ron moved up to the gym, and under the cover of the Marines' caseless assault rifles advanced to the airlock.
The outer airlock door opened, and a ghastly whooshing noise reverberated through the corridor as air leaked through damaged suitports – their helmets shot to pieces by Lynn to stall her would-be pursuers. The outer airlock door closed, and the ghastly noise ceased.
Lieutenant Isabella Garcia-Shapiro turned on the PA system. "Attention all personnel. EVA specialist Adrena Lynn has opened fire on Marines attempting to apprehend her. She has just exited airlock 3a. She is armed and dangerous, and may be our saboteur. All personnel should mass in designated security zones as per terror attack response protocols. Personnel on EVAs should reenter the compound through the nearest airlock."
She called Teleops. "Teleops, this is Lt. Garcia-Shapiro. Keep your bots outside and track Lynn!"
Isabella had a brainwave. "Gretchen! Get me the IR tracking telescope! Sweep the station!"
Isabella cursed her dearth of personnel. Securing this station would have been much easier with a full platoon, rather than the reinforced squad she had at her disposal.
Gretchen soon yelled back. "She's on Rock 3! The metallic one directly starboard!"
Lynn grunted as she clambered up rock 3, a 7-megaton metallic asteroid that was nearly 90% iron. The very thermally conductive surface of the freezing rock chilled her skinsuit-clad fingers to the bone. She once again cursed her decision to pick rock 3 as her bolt-hole. It was nearest to the hab module, and did not require a long climb along exposed beams (unlike the more distant asteroids), but boy was it hard to climb!
Kim, Ron, Shego and two Marines stepped out of airlock 3c. Ahead of them, the arms attaching the hab modules to their hubs passed upwards and downwards like the arms of a two stacked contra-rotating windmills. If Ron looked port, he could see the main hub. The two ten-meter-wide high-maintenance engineering masterpieces each sprouted four arms, arranged like the spokes of a wheel.
The sun was directly beneath him, and it cast odd shadows against the arms, giving the whole scene a surreal quality. Three bulky orange semi-rigid suits (with even bulkier MMU-style thruster packs) darted to Ron's starboard. One orange-clad figure, hefting a long tether roll, darted left, towards the spin hub.
"Kim! Adrena Lynn's the other way!"
"Ron, go with Shego! My beacon's on. If I drift off, get a tug to pick me up!"
"What?!"
"Go!"
Kim stood on one side of the spin hub, the center of the giant windmill-shaped habitat sections. In front of her was the spin section, which spun past her at a leisurely pace of twice or thrice a minute.
Kim found a tether fixture on the spinning section, clipped her long tether to it, and jumped off the spinning section as hard as she could. She felt her tether go taut, released the tether brake, and watched with satisfaction as the tether continued to lengthen as she sped away from the hub.
Objects like to move in straight lines. In order to make them move in circles, force – centripetal force - must be applied, from above or below the object, towards the center of the circle.
Inside a spinning habitat module, the force to keep the space workers moving along with the habitat module in circles comes from the floor. The floor presses upwards on the workers, the workers are pressed downward on the floor, and you get spin gravity.
The same applies for a stone in an old-fashioned sling – the kind David used to slay Goliath. A sling is a long band of cloth, folded into a loop, with a rock in the crook of loop, whirled around your head at great speed. The rock is kept whirling by the piece of cloth, which supports it with tensile force. At the right moment, the piece of cloth is released, the loop is undone, and the piece of rock, no longer forced to move in circles, moves in a straight line, tangential to the circle, at great speed.
Don't try this at home, kids. Sling-fired projectiles can crack skulls, and were used extensively in the ancient world as ranged weapons of war as a result.
In the impromptu giant sling that Kim had made from the spin hub, Kim was the rock, her seventy-meter tether was the piece of cloth, and the whirling spin hub was the arm.
At the right moment, Kim cut her tether and was flung into the inky black sky.
Lynn had chosen to climb along the "fore" side of the rock, corresponding to the side of the installation from which the spinning habitat sections jutted. From her vantage point, she could see the spinning habitat sections, the short beam leading up to rock 3, and much of the facility while remaining behind cover – provided by the lips of small craters in the asteroid.
Two bright-orange figures appeared on the beam. Lynn swore, took aim, and started shooting.
"Gahhh! Get behind the beam! Go! Go! Go!"
The quartet retreated under the beam, and continued to slowly advance. Rounds smacked into the beam, and coolant hissed through ruptured pipes. A small inflatable personnel tube ruptured and deflated as it lost pressure.
The beam was good concealment, but it made for poor cover.
A pair of bullets impacted a rock ten meters from Lynn. A pair of Marines, clad in grey-and-black military hardsuits, had joined the firefight from their vantage point on a docking tube some four hundred meters away. One Marine got careless, and drifted out of the shadow of the mirrors, momentarily illuminating her like a star.
Lynn took aim through her scope, and put three rocket bullets through Private Kallie Patel, killing her instantly.
Shego barked orders as she clambered atop the huge solar-heated metal refinery. "Lynn's on the other side! Cut her off! Marines from the back, us up front! Use the rock for cover!"
The two Marines nodded with their hands, and departed.
"Gah! How the heck did she climb this thing!" The rock was cold, had precious few handholds, and only occasional tether points. Worse, the geometry of the tiny, gravity-free world – with a horizon twenty meters away – was extremely disorienting to minds that had evolved on the savanas and treetops of Africa, Earth.
Ron saw something flash by, but it was gone before he could identify it.
Hitting an asteroid at twenty meters per second is the equivalent of hitting a train travelling at seventy kilometers per hour. It is not survivable.
Kim, however, aimed for and hit Lynn. As Lynn was similar in mass to herself and unanchored to the rock, the impact sent both women skidding onto the floor of the crater before bouncing off into space, keeping the forces involved within survivable limits. Lynn, disarmed, tried to grapple her opponent, but despite her softsuit's greater agility, was quickly overpowered by the more experienced agent.
Kim successfully put Lynn into a chokehold, secured Lynn's legs with her own, and placed her helmet against Lynn's.
"If you don't stop wriggling, I'm cutting your air hose."
Kim heard a soft crunch, transmitted through her helmet, as Lynn bit down hard on the cyanide capsule disguised as a fake tooth.
"Lynn! What do you know about this station?! Do you have other contacts?!"
Lynn stopped moving. "I'm not telling you anything, Possible! I'll be dead in two minutes!"
Kim jabbed Lynn in the abdomen – hard.
"Ha! I've been on high-dose aspirin for the last fifteen minutes! I've got the bends! Didn't pre-breathe before using this low-pressure suit! My fingers hurt like heck! Do you think a little jab is going to make me talk?!"
Kim jabbed Lynn's abdomen again, and Lynn groaned. Lynn looked up at the brilliant glare of the sun, and looked down at the full Earth below. Stars emerged by the millions as her vision adjusted to the darkness.
"Possible, I'm in this for the thrill. And this… is FREAKY!"
Lynn stopped moving not long after that.
The tug took five minutes to arrive, and another five to make it back to the station. Kim kept a tight hold on Lynn's body throughout, fearful of losing any evidence that might be on her – on it.
Ron tried to find Kim amongst the millions of stars that littered the inky-black sky. "Asteroid's clear. Tug's on its way to get Kim – and Lynn's body."
Private Sweetwater spoke up. "What the heck was Lynn doing out here? Unless she packed O2 up here, she'd have been dead within hours. If she packed water, she might last a few days. But since these suits have no chow-locks, she'd have died of hunger eventually."
Ron face-palmed his helmet, leaving dust on the glass. "Guys, check the hab module."
Sweetwater came on the line. "What hab module?"
"The one the prospectors left on the rock. It's been here without maintenance for five years, and it's been nuked to hell, but it may still be serviceable. Lynn might have repurposed it for a bolt-hole."
Shego found the hab module – a repurposed propellant tank the size of a bus - on the light-colored, un-nuked side of the rock.
"Ah. The hab module has a transponder antenna. That's why it never got nuked. Checking for booby-traps…"
There were none. Shego was the first to enter the tiny airlock. Ron followed.
Ron made a beeline for the larder. "It's stocked. Lynn would have had enough food for a month. Oooh! Vienna sausages, Lasagna MRE… Oh, boy, she has Baked Pork Chop Rice! Woah! Pop Pop Porter's frozen space treats! These aren't available in the cafeteria! How did she get these things?"
"Probably the same way she got these."
Ron turned to see what Shego was looking at, and his eyes practically popped from their sockets. Behind the panel were several rows of explosive packs, a cache of light weapons...
...and a dozen or so 50-kg Brilliant Pebble anti-ship missiles.