David Brin - Earth

Another switched from crimson to yellow-gold. And another. Then an amber light went green.

As quickly as it had arrived, the frightening rainbow began melting away! She blinked twice, three times. Starting in the middle, the visual blurriness evaporated. Acuity returned as warning lights and musical alarms subsided one by one.

“ Pleiades …” Station Control sounded breathless.

Buzzers were shutting down over there, as well. “ Pleiades , we seem to be retiming—”

“Same here,” she interrupted. “But what about the tether tension!”

“ Pleiades , tether tension… is slackening.” Control’s tone was relieved. “Must have been transient, whatever the hell it was. There may be some backlash though…”

Mark and Teresa looked at each other. She felt stretched, pummeled, abused. Was it really over? As more amber lights winked out, they inventoried damage. Miraculously, Pleiades seemed unharmed.

Except, of course, for the million-dollar transit tube she’d just jettisoned. The passengers weren’t going to appreciate being ferried like so many beachballs, in personal survival enclosures. But their resentment couldn’t match that of the bean-counters in Washington, if no justification were at hand.

“Jeez. What if we’d gone ahead and blown the boom?” Mark muttered. “Better put that squib on safety, Terry.” He nodded toward the primed trigger, flashing dangerously between their seats.

“Hold on a sec.” Teresa’s eyes roved the cockpit, seeking… anything. Any clue to the mysterious episode. She tapped her throat mike. “Control, Pleiades . Confirm your estimate that backlash will be minimal. We don’t want to face—”

That was when her gaze lighted on the inertial guidance display, showing where in space their ring laser gyroscope thought they were. She read it like a newspaper headline. The numbers were bizarre and rapidly changing in ways Teresa didn’t like at all!

Eye flicks took in the corresponding readouts of the star tracker and satellite navigation systems. They were in total conflict, and none of them agreed with what the seat of her pants was telling her.

“Control! I’m disengaging, under emergency protocols.”

“Wait Pleiades’ . There’s no need. You may increase our backlash!”

“I’ll take that chance. Meanwhile, better check your own inertial units. Have you got a gravitometer?”

“Affirmative. But what… ?”

“Check it! Pleiades out.”

Then, to Mark, “You blow the boom, I’ll handle the DAP. Jettison on count of three. One!”

Randall had his hands on the panel, still he remonstrated. “You sure? We’ll catch hell…”

“Two!” She gripped the control stick.

“Terry—”

Intuition tickled. She felt it — whatever it was — returning with a vengeance.

“Blow it, Mark!”

Before she even felt the vibration of the charges, Teresa activated her vernier jets in translational mode, doing as any good pilot would in a crisis — guiding her ship away from anything more substantial than a thought or a cloud.

“What the hell is going on up here? Have you both lost your minds?”

A sharp voice from behind them. Without turning she snapped, “Colonel Spivey, strap in and shut up!”

Her harried, professional tone worked better than any curse or threat. Spivey might be obnoxious, but he was no fool. She sensed his quick departure and swept him from her mind as reaction jets wrestled the orbiter’s reluctant mass slowly away from the station’s tangle of cranes and storage tanks. On the back of Teresa’s neck all the tiny hairs shivered.

“ Pleiades , you’re right. The phenomenon is periodic. Anomalous tension is returning. Gravitometer’s gone crazy… tides of unprecedented—”

A second voice interrupted, cutting off the controller. “ Pleiades , this is Station Commander Perez. Prepare to receive emergency telemetry.”

“Affirmative.” Teresa swallowed, knowing what this meant. She felt Mark lean past her to make sure the ship’s datasuck boxes were operating at top speed. In that mode they recorded every nuance for one purpose only, so endangered spacers could obey rule number one of their trade…

Let the next guy know what killed you.

The station commander was dumping his operational status into Pleiades in real time — a dire measure for the chief of a secret military station. That made Teresa all the more anxious to get away fast.

She ignored navigational aids, checking orientation by instinct and estimate. Teresa groaned on realizing that two main thrusters were aimed at Nearpoint’s cryo tanks, risking a titanic explosion if she fired them. That left only tiny verniers to nudge the heavy shuttle. She switched to a roll maneuver, cursing the slowness of the turn.

“Oh, shit! Mark, is that guy still in the cargo bay?”

The creepy nausea was returning, she could tell as she fought the sluggish spacecraft. Nearby, Mark laughed suddenly and a bit shrilly. “He’s still there. Helmet pressed to the window. Guy’s mad, Terry.”

“Stop calling me Terry!” she snapped, turning to get a fix on Nearpoint again. If the tanks were clear now…

Teresa stared. They weren’t there anymore!

Nothing was there. Tanks, habitats, cranes… everything was gone!

Alarms resumed their blared warnings. With her instruments turning amber and red again, Teresa decided Erehwon was none of her business now. She punched buttons labeled x-translational and high, then squeezed the stick to trigger a full-throated hypergolic roar, sending Pleiades where she figured the station and tether weren’t .

Mark called out pressures and flow rates. Teresa counted seconds as the blurriness encroached again. “Move, you dumpit bitch. Move!” She cursed the massive, awkward orbiter.

“I found the station.” Mark announced. “Jesus. Look at that.”

Through a narrowing tunnel Teresa glanced at the radar screen. She gasped. The bottom assembly was more than five kilometers below them and receding fast. The tether had stretched suddenly, like a child’s rubber toy. “Damn!” she heard Mark Randall cry. Then Teresa had difficulty hearing or seeing anything at all.

This time the squidgy feeling went from her eyes straight back through her central sinus. The blaring of new alarms mixed with strange noises originating within her own skull. One alert crooned the dour song of a cooling system gone berserk. Unable to see which portion, Teresa flicked switches by touch, disabling all the exchange loops. She had Mark close down the fuel cells as well. If the situation didn’t improve before they ran out of battery juice, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

“All three APUs are inoperable!” Mark shouted through a roar of crazy noise.

“Forget ’em. Leave ’em turned off.”

“ All of them?”

“I said all! The bug’s in the hydraulic lines, not the APUs. All long fluid lines are affected.”

“How do we close the cargo bay doors without hydraulics?” he protested through rising static that nearly drowned his words. “We won’t… able to… during reentry!”

“Leave that to me,” she shouted back. “Close all lines except rear hypergolics, and pray they hold!”

Teresa thought she heard his acknowledgment, and a clicking that might have been those switches being closed. Or it could have been just another weird sensory distortion.

Without hydraulics they couldn’t gimbal the main maneuvering rockets. She’d have to make do with RCS jets, flying blind in a chiarascuro of distortion and shadow. By touch Teresa disengaged the autopilot completely. She fired the small jets in matched pairs, relying on vibration alone to verify a response. It was true seat-of-the-pants flying, with no way to confirm she was moving Pleiades farther from that dangerously overstretched tether, or perhaps right toward it…