Okay, more edits continue.
28: Spacewalk
Endurance, free return trajectory along Mars-to-Moon corridor-
Perfectly at home in an atmosphere of checklists and flight plans, John Tracy handled the current emergency as he had so many others. He prioritized. One thing at a time. Stop the runner at third, then get the others out. Simple.
(Of course, crisis-wise, it was bases loaded, no outs and bottom of the ninth inning, with watery Gatorade and a hung-over coach.)
John pushed some things around in his head to clear a little think-space, not needing all this emotional clutter, but unable to quite dispose of it, either. Other people, he'd long since learned, tended to leave marks.
Suited up, he joined Pete McCord in the forward airlock, the same one they'd used to first set foot on Mars. It was by no means a large space, crowded still further by two pressure-suited astronauts and their bulky gear.
The mission commander scowled through his faceplate, still concerned with the ship's frustrating comm troubles.
"Can't be a mechanical glitch," he muttered, more to himself than to John,
"CAPCOM's slower than a blue moon/ leap year/ Christmas, but not garbled… and the last call mentioned some kind of Doppler effect."
"Temporal anomaly?" John suggested, as McCord okay'd airlock depressurization. "Gravitational effects on time and momentum might be different, out here."
Pete grunted, clumsily reaching for his tool bag. Even in zero-G, maneuvering in a cumbersome EVA pressure suit was like swimming through Jell-O.
"I know enough physics to drop ordnance and land a space ship, Tracy. Fording the time stream's a little out of my league. Get back to me on that one when you've run the figures."
Then, as another thought occurred, and the sounds of whirring pump and hissing air died away around them,
"It's goddam dangerous out there, Tracy. The least we're going to get is sick. If you want to change your mind…"
"No."
John lowered hishelmet's golden sun shield, not wishing to be seen, emoted at, or reasoned with. Two men could work twice as fast, getting back inside just ahead of the final ax-blade. Alone, Pete would be doomed. Simple equation, trivial solution: shut the hell up and get started.
(He thought of Aunt Lydia, and of Stephanie, signing away like mad at their last pre-quarantine visit and trying to cage a quick snuggle. Probably, she'd want her father back.)
Pete completed the lowering of his own visor, leaving the two of them as blankly inexpressive as a pair of crated statues.
"Right," came the older man's voice, whisper-close in their padded helmets, "let's get 'er done."
McCord keyed the outer hatch open and they drifted outside the long ship, propelled by subtle air jets from the suits' thruster packs. It was full day in space, the far-off sun still bright enough to paint endurance in bold hues of gold and orange and bruised purple-grey. Space was black velvet as dense and bottomless-dark as anything John had ever seen. And Mars…?
He hesitated, baffled by sensations too numerous and contradictory to sort out. That close it was, that he could almost have dragged a gloved finger through the rusty sand, traced his initials in the polar frost. He raised his sunshield again, needing a better look.
Mars whirled silently before them, an orange-tan globe he couldn't have covered with both spread hands. The lacy, glinting whiteness of ice sparkled from the poles. Pale clouds drifted like dusty veils over giant volcanoes and savagely gouged terrain. It was beautiful, and in 10,000 life times, he'd never be able to describe it all, or the feeling that shot through him then like rushing magma.
He'd been there; left footprints on that dusty surface, planted a flag under alien skies, started a colony, fathered a child. He'd seen twin silver moons race each other across altered constellations, watched via telescope as their own familiar satellite transited a distant blue Earth. He'd escaped an ancient machine and discovered an AI. Hell, he'd gotten married.
Mars hadn't welcomed her explorers, nor lightly tolerated their presence, but she hadn't quite killed them, either. And there would be others.
He thought and felt and wanted a lot of things in those swift few moments, but all that came out was,
"Damn."
"Yeah," Pete replied in a static-fractured whisper, having drifted up to hover beside the pilot, "me, too."
They had work to do, but the way an image can be burnt onto a monitor, that scene was burnt into John Tracy. Mars, bleak and grim and beautiful; daring you to try.
He smiled a little, then lowered his sunshield and followed McCord aft along the ship's curving hull. Time to pop the hood and do a little tinkering.
Overhead, a jointed white robot arm unfolded with all the slow, deliberate grace of a molting insect. Its clawed business end held a stack of dully gleaming hull plates, pearl-grey in the streaming sunshine.
With one good hand and a very determined maimed one, Roger Thorpe maneuvered the arm's joystick control, watching progress through the cargo bay window and muttering the occasional Klingon expletive. Injured or not, he couldn't afford a single mistake or delay. He had to be perfect; right the first time, every time. Just like simulation, only without all the fingers...
Cho hovered by the aft airlock, suited up and listening to variously themed comm chatter. Helmet-to-ship transmission quality was poor, affected by the hard radiation surrounding Endurance.
From her post, Dr. Kim could see no signs of internal corrosion, even after removing access panels, testing wires and probing diligently along the ducts and casings. This was a good thing because Ferrospirilum, were it to get loose within the confines of the spacecraft, would make short work of plastic insulation, alloys, ceramic and paint. Not flesh, though. Not yet.
Radiation, steam purges and anaerobic conditions inhibited, but did not kill, the microbe, while the dark interface between Endurance and the tunnel roof appeared to have been a veritable incubator. There it had formed dense, stringy mats and begun devouring their ship. Like a chemosynthetic stromatolite, almost.
Hopefully, it had not got past their heat shielding. Endurance's hull, to save weight and money, wasn't as thick as it might have been. There was a layer of paint, of ceramic-fiber heat shielding, then a pitifully thin titanium-alloy skin, followed by a few inches of polyethylene, the water tanks and a carbon composite inner shell. Altogether, less than eighteen inches of tightly budgeted 'protection'. But…
If the infestation hadn't worked its way inward, and
If there were not too many hull plates affected, and
If the CDR and PLT weren't killed while trying to replace the troubled sections…
Perhaps all would yet be well. All she could do was hope, and remotely speed the assembly of her own countermeasure; a virulent lysin bacteriophage. Not for nothing had she been included on this mission. For, Cho was building a cruel and rapacious predator, a virus designed to prey upon Ferrospirilum's lone weakness, its cell wall.
On the flight deck, Linda Bennett scanned her monitor screen and issued orders. Outwardly, no one was calmer. Inwardly, she was overgrown and weed-choked with dread. In her childhood explorations of Cross Creek, she'd once come upon a desolate church, roofless and window-broken, with creepers and trees growing out through the crumbling masonry. She'd salvaged a brass door knob and a gummed-together hymnal, and now felt exactly as that old church had looked. A wild, abandoned thing, barely holding herself together.
She kept talking, though, because someone needed to coordinate activity, and because the faster they got through this, the more chance there was that her husband and the mission commander would safely return.
Outside, the cargo bay doors were wide open, the hold's interior bombarded with pure, fearsome sunlight. You couldn't even detect the bay's LEDs and instrument bulbs in all that blinding whiteness.
Drifting past, John briefly shut his eyes. In the darkness he saw something like fiery rain, like streaks from the path of a burning sparkler. Retinal flashes; cosmic rays, slashing clear through him and striking the retina and optic nerves of his closed eyes. Pretty as tracer bullets, and about as safe, because each streaking particle left a char-track of damage behind it.
Bit by microscopic bit, he and Pete were burning alive. Good idea, maybe, to pick up the pace.