John Ringo - East of the Sun, West of the Moon

“That was positive,” Herzer said, sighing.

“Fuck,” Herzer muttered as he drifted past Van Buskirk.

Bus tugged lightly on his line to pivot and hit Herzer, hard, on his ankle as he passed.

Herzer got to the end of his own line and was jerked back, drifting more or less helplessly in the middle of the clear lake. The water at this depth was bitterly cold and he kept in mind that he only had about another fifteen minutes of air. So he gave the line another tug and began reeling in to the far wall.

Bus was gliding past on a parabolic arc at the end of his tether. Herzer considered that for a moment, then carefully removed one of the hand magnets. He tied a quick knot in a spare safety line and flicked the magnet towards Van Buskirk’s back.

The magnet, unfortunately, missed. But he thought it was a viable technique.

He reeled himself in, retrieved the line and worked his way over to the ladder up to the support building.

The large building was actually a floating dock over the old quarry. It had an open bottom and under it was a large mock-up of portions of the ship where the team was supposed to train for microgravity conditions, including combat. So far, Herzer was pretty sure they weren’t going to be able to fight worth a damn. He knew he sure as hell couldn’t get a feel for it. The only fighter they had that seemed to have a clue was Van Buskirk. Fighting in microgravity was entirely different from normal fighting and nothing that Herzer had tried in the hour-long test had worked. Bus had gotten three strikes in on him, on the other hand.

When he reached the surface he let one of the support crew help him get his armor and helmet off. The armor was standard lorica, carefully padded to prevent wear and laid over the suit and helmet base. The “helmet” was actually a solid piece that lay across the shoulders and dipped down on the front and back to the middle of the chest and just above the shoulder blades. The original design had included a bubble helmet but Herzer had insisted on a metal helmet similar to a barbute with only a heavily constructed clear eye-slit on the front. Goggles could be dropped over the eyeslit when the user was in the bright sunlight of space. Underneath the user wore a fitted cloth cap that buckled under the chin and to which the communicator interface and water tube could be attached.

The first thing that had to come off was the hand-cranked support pack that cooled the user and fed him air. So while the rest came off, Herzer had to deal with rebreathing his own exhaled breaths in the helmet. But the lorica came off quickly and then the helmet was unbuckled from under his arms and lifted over his head.

“I hate that part,” he muttered.

“Not much to like about any of this,” Bus admitted. “And you look like a lost cow in the water.”

“We’re going to have to be really careful where we fight,” Herzer said, shrugging. “Blood Lords are good at about three to one on orcs. I don’t know how well we’ll do against the scorps, but I figure pretty well if they’re more or less the same as those we fought in Washan. We only lost one Blood Lord there and I killed three of the damned things. The elf is another question.”

“Use the guns,” Bus said, shrugging. “Stand off and pump him full of darts if we can.”

“There’s that,” Herzer said, nodding. “If we can. They don’t normally stand still to be killed. Well, let’s get the rest of the teams on this tomorrow. We’ll get the hang of it sooner or later.”

“You’re overmuscling,” Bus said, shrugging. “You’re used to using your full strength in combat. You have to wait until you have a very solid platform or have already established movement in the direction so you’re compensating against it. It takes practice.”

“And we’ve only got two weeks,” Herzer replied tightly. “Like I said, we’re going to have to be careful where we engage. Now let’s get out of these damned monkey suits.”

“Just think,” Bus said as they walked to the changing room, “the next time you get it on, you’ll be with Megan.”

“Don’t remind me,” Herzer said, groaning.

“Oh, good lord,” Megan said, looking at the handful of antiblister and sealing agent. “Do you know what this looks like?”

Megan was sitting on one of the benches in the microgravity training changing room, her suit crumpled at her feet and her stare fixed on the slippery substance in her hand. It was whitish and viscous and looked just like…

“At first I thought it looked like… something guys produce,” Herzer said, taking a large bottle of the material and squirting it into the suit boots. “Then I realized what it was. They just got a bunch of sexual lubrication cream and told us it was sealing agent.”

“It’s not that,” Evan argued, stuffing his feet down into the suit and wriggling them around to get the cream he’d already poured in squished around. “I’ve tested it. It really does a good job on minor seals. And getting in these suits would be hard without it.”

“I’m not covering myself in a sexual aid,” Megan said definitely.

“It’s that or have blisters,” Herzer pointed out. “Put it in the suit, Megan. Stress point, remember?”

“I do,” Megan said, rubbing the viscous fluid on her leg and wincing. “I am not ever going to enjoy this process.”

“How are you doing, Geo?” Linda asked as the old engineer walked into the engineering quarters day-room.

They’d been training on microgravity for the last four days, nearly sixteen hours a day. Everyone was getting better in the unusual environment but they had a long way to go. And the training was clearly taking it out of the oldster; he looked worn to a nub.

Since they spent the whole day with their respective teams, she and Geo had taken to meeting in the evenings in the day-room to talk about the engineering aspects of the mission. She found it fascinating to simply sit and listen to him talk about physics for hours, but she was also careful to keep the meetings short. The old man needed his sleep. And, for the same reason, anything else was out.

“Tired,” Geo admitted, smiling. “But very much looking forward to getting to the ship. I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out how to adjust the Tammens to perform intermediate fields. Together with a neural interface from the computer mains, it will mean Megan, at least, will be able to directly manipulate the fusion plant outputs. That’s bound to be useful.”

“Won’t that mean going to each of them and modifying them?” Linda asked, waving him to one of the day-room seats.

“There are two spare Tammens listed in Maintenance,” Geo said, shrugging. “And there are four high-energy plasma coils running down the midline for the main thrusters. If we install a field shunt, we can run the full power of all four to the two field generators and draw off at least sixty percent of the fusion bottle power. Four of the Tammens, for that matter, are in the rear section that Herzer intends to secure. If we can modify them, and set up more field shunts in Engineering, we’ll be able to get full draw. That means we’ll have effective control of the latitude thrust of the ship as well as permitting Megan to use direct power. The way I’ll set it up, Reyes won’t be able to steal it, either.”

“That’s going to be useful,” Linda said. “Definitely bring it up with Herzer, though, so he can include it in his planning. Now, you were trying to explain those binary linking equations last night…”

“So where were you last night, Tao?” Van Krief asked as she heard the westerner’s door shut.

“Washan,” Tao called though the connecting bathroom.