Bud Sparhawk: Primrose Rescue

“Pascal, you bitched the same way when we were trying to work our way around Cape Horn in that storm back in ’79 and I got us through that, didn’t I? Now, instead of complaining, why don’t you try to figure out what this new course will do to our arrival time.”

After a few minutes of playing with the inertial and the computer Pascal announced that they would arrive too late, twenty hours behind the station.

Louella considered for a few minutes. “If we come up behind her then we can go on a broad reach and catch up to the station. Hey, our speed has to be faster than the station’s. We can catch it in maybe thirty hours or so. That’ll only add another day or so to what we originally thought. Close enough, and it saves the tow for the captain.” She nodded toward Rams, who had slipped back to sleep while they argued. “That should be good enough reward for saving our skins, eh, Pascal?”

Pascal couldn’t argue with that: He just hoped that their supplies would last.

And the captain, of course.

Rams’ condition was getting worse by the hour. Pascal had peeked beneath the bandages; he saw the swelling around the break, felt the heat radiating from the wound. Obviously there was an infection present within the leg, probably around the break. He’d been giving Rams the antibiotics until their supply ran out. The supply had never envisioned a journey this long, he thought, and now Rams was paying the penalty.

“We need to get him to a doctor soon,” he told Louella when she returned from her all too brief rest. “I think that an infection is setting in and I don’t have anything left to deal with it.”

“How far away is CS-17? We should be crossing its track this watch, shouldn’t we?”

Pascal started; the discovery of Rams’ problem had driven the approaching station completely out of his head. That was the trouble with exhaustion, it was so damned hard to keep your mind focused, so hard to remember anything. “Yeah, we should hit it sometime in the next few hours. Then all we have to do is catch up to her.”

Louella slipped into the seat and placed her hands wearily on the wheel. “Piece of cake.”

“Trust your inertial,” Pascal replied mirthlessly with a final glance at Rams. He headed for his bunk and a few blessed hours of relief.

He awoke with a start. An alarm was ringing shrilly somewhere. Was it time to go to school? No, that was the dream. He shook his head to clear it and realized that it was the radar alarm. They must be near the station! “Damn Louella,” he cursed. She must have let him sleep right through the watch, doubling her own burden to lighten his own. He tightened the truss, stood and moved toward the cockpit, checking the time as he did so.

Wait a minute; he hadn’t been asleep more than four hours! What the hell was happening? The station was still hours away. What could they have run into?

“It’s another damn ghost,” were the first words Louella spit at him as he entered the cockpit. “Come on over here and see what you can make of the displays.”

“Looks like something really big. Could be the station, just like the last one. Trim us up a couple of points higher, would you?” Louella twitched the wheel slightly to turn Primrose closer to the wind. Their speed picked up slightly and the radar image started to clear.

“Doesn’t look like a station,” Pascal announced as the outline clarified. “Come around another ten degrees. Yes, stay on this heading and we’ll be able to pick it up on the sonar.”

An hour later they still couldn’t make out what they were seeing on the screen. The image showed something larger than the ship by a factor of ten, but looking like nothing they’d ever seen.

As best they could make out it was roughly cone-shaped, with the blunt end facing the wind. Whenever they got close a slimmer projection appeared at the leading end and seemed to lead upwards.

It was Rams who figured it out. “It’s a drogue,” he explained. “One of the sea anchors the station uses to hold itself in place. They’re usually a klick below though.”

“What the hell is it doing at this level?” Louella demanded. “I though those things were hundreds of meters below the stations, not on the level the ships used.”

Pascal thought hard. “Maybe we aren’t where we’re supposed to be. Perhaps we are way down below where our instruments tell us we are.”

Louella stared hard at the display, trying to work out her own conclusions. “You think there’s something wrong with the altimeter? Oh shit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“The altimeter isn’t absolute. It just figures out the altitude by the buoyancy of the ship — it’s an approximation.”

“So we aren’t as high as we should be? That doesn’t make any sense. If the outside pressure was lower then the station would be as affected as us.” Pascal replied, fighting to hold the logic of the problem in his mind.

“ Thorn ’s dragging us down,” Rams suggested. “Rock and ship are ballast too. Holding us down.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Louella exclaimed. “Crap, all we have to do is rise to their level to dock with her.”

With that she reached out and flipped the heater switches that would vaporize and vent a portion of the ballast and lighten the ship. “Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to evacuate some ballast. Hey, that’s strange…” Her forehead crinkled in thought as she stared at one of the displays on the console. Finally, she spoke.

“Pascal, honey, I think we have another little problem.”

After extensive systems checks and repeated attempts to get Primrose ’s heaters to work they concluded that the heater circuits within her keel must be faulty.

Louella said it first. “The question isn’t how did it happen; it’s what can we do about it? How can we get the ship up to the station’s altitude?”

“Need to get down there and fix the circuits,” Pascal suggested after a few minutes of intense thought. For some reason he wasn’t thinking too clearly, probably because of the lack of rest and the pressure of their predicament.

“I think the drag of the tow is holding our speed below that of the station at this angle of attack. We’re losing way relative to the station. We need to quarter away to build up enough to catch it again,” Louella said in a tired voice.

So saying, she let the wind take Primrose on a slanting course away from the station, building their speed once more. Back and forth they passed under the station, careful to avoid the lines that held the drogues in place, and trying the radio with each pass, but getting only static for their troubles. There was no way they could tell whether the station was aware of their plight or not.

Meanwhile Pascal had crawled forward to loosen the hatch to the lower deck and the heater connections. He had to check several times, because he kept forgetting what he had done. As far as he could tell, the heaters were working properly. He could even feel the warmth through the housings with his hand.

So that meant the problem wasn’t the heaters, he reasoned slowly. Therefore, it had to be the vents. They must have been damaged whenever Thorn ’s rock had smashed against their keel. Maybe one of their collisions had warped them into uselessness. No way of telling from down here. Wearily he climbed back up and made his way to the cockpit to tell Louella the sad news.

“I knew we should have cast Thorn off when we had the chance,” he said once he got his breath back.

“Too late to reconsider that now,” she replied, too tired to even argue the point. Instead she appeared to be deep in thought.