Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(102)
A Juke ship would also have a nanooze surface. It would also have emergency airlocks on the outside. He might be able to get into the ship. That way, the raiders could conveniently kill him right on their own ship instead of having to hunt for him through the whole station.
They don’t want to kill me.
I don’t know what they want. If I come into their ship from the outside, dressed in a regular spacesuit, they’ll kill me before they realize from my size that I’m a child.
Well, what else did I think I was going to do? I can’t do recon from inside the station. What will I learn there, without exposing myself to detection and capture? The only thing we don’t know about is the ship. How many soldiers does it have seats for? What kind of weapons are they carrying? Can we steal any of them for our own use? Do they have room to take hostages with them? If they don’t, does that mean they plan to kill us all?
While these questions and speculations ran through Dabeet’s mind, he was experimenting with the nanooze—without ever letting go of the airlock bar. He found that it did take some effort to pull away from the nanooze. Being composed of millions of tiny intelligent-networking robots, the nanooze knew the difference between full-body contact and boot or glove contact. When he attached to the nanooze with only one hand and both knees, the nanooze held tightly, so it took a deliberate effort to pull any of those body parts free. And he couldn’t pull more than one part free at a time. So the nanooze had the rule about not letting go of one handhold till you’ve got a grip on the next. It was designed specifically for his purpose. It was meant to hold somebody to the hull without preventing them from moving.
Even after these tests, Dabeet could hardly bring himself to let go of the bar. He was trembling. But he did it, and without too much delay, either, because if the information he gathered was going to be worth something, he had to get it now.
Can I still think of the hull of the station as “up”?
No. That really was too much like a silverfish. He had to think of it as down, so that what he was doing was crawling along sloping ground, not clinging to a down-curving ceiling.
With his mind properly oriented, he began creeping. He wasn’t quick—especially at the junctures between the wheels—but his steady movement got him there quickly enough. Only twenty-two minutes since he saw the docking vessel.
Was that even possible? It felt like it took forever to run through the pass-through and get up to the top corridor. And twice as much of forever to get down the side of the wheel. Twenty-two minutes of forever.
There was no nanooze on the dockbridge between station and ship. Nor were there handholds. He couldn’t exploit the physical connection between Fleet School and the Juke vessel, not without a serious risk of coming loose and drifting along to an unshielded reentry.
I’d die of the heat long before I actually burst into flames. So, it could be worse.
Of course, if I didn’t get sucked into Earth’s gravity well, there’d be more than fifteen hours of using up all the oxygen in this suit, singing old Spanish lullabies to myself and weeping for Mother as I drifted off into the cold black of space.
Why didn’t these suits have directional rockets to allow a person to maneuver and save himself if he came loose?
A quick scan of the heads-up display showed a little icon labeled DIR. He focused on it for one, two, three beats and the icon expanded into a menu.
DIRECTIONALS
GL BL D
GR BR V
He made it a point not to focus on any of these long enough to activate them. Decoding them wasn’t hard, especially because now he could remember hearing an explanation of the directionals in a lecture when everybody else was going outside. Glove Left, Glove Right, Boot Left, Boot Right, Dorsal, Ventral.
No, no, no, no. His first attempt with directional rockets was not going to be all by himself out here. He didn’t even know what part of the glove and boot the rocket blast would come from.
Yes he did. Sole of the boot just under the pad of the foot behind the toes. Middle finger of the glove but only when the finger was rigidly extended. And the rocket blast would be only the tiniest trickle so that any effects would be slight.
He could almost hear Monkey saying it—though he knew she had never mentioned the directionals to him: One second of that tiny trickle will put your frozen corpse a hundred kilometers off your original trajectory within a minute, so search parties will never, never find you. Stay on your original trajectory.
Monkey hadn’t said it. An instructor had said it. Odd Oddson had said it. But it sounded much more important and believable in Monkey’s voice.
It was disconcerting how easily he could recast his memories. How often did such distortions happen inadvertently? If he couldn’t trust his memory …
The nanooze won’t let me break free with two feet at a time. What do I have to do in order to simply jump this very, very short distance of maybe ten meters? That’s a short distance, isn’t it? Must I balance on one foot and then hope I can take off straight up and then catch myself on the Juke vessel’s nanooze?
He migrated over to the nearest emergency airlock door on the hull of this wheel, and took hold of the bar there. Holding on with both hands, with both feet firmly planted in the nanooze, he pushed off very gently, both feet at the same time.
They didn’t budge.
Bacana. A safety feature that made his mission impossible.