K. Ball - Flotsam

Quin cycled through the lock and returned to crew quarters. He could feel edges of chill already. Jill was wrapped in layers of clothing and was hovering next to Zoe, who was wrapped in every sizable piece of fabric Jill could find. Quin maneuvered into place beside Jill.

“Any luck?” Zoe whispered.

“No.”

Jill glanced at him. She reached out and tapped her fist against his shoulder.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you before,” she said. Her voice had lost its earlier nasty edge.

“No, you were right,” Quin said. If she could bend, then he would too. “I’ve been slacking, feeling sorry for myself because the two of you are together.”

Jill ignored his apology.

“Marg is just going to sit there and let us die, isn’t she?” she asked.

“That’s how I see it,” Quin replied. “But Emil and his crew are still working on ideas.”

“Meanwhile, we sit here and freeze,” Jill said. “Just three more pieces of junk.”

“We’ll save ourselves,” Zoe whispered.

“How?” Jill demanded. “The batteries are almost gone and I’ve scrounged every bit of cover I could find.”

“The suits?” Zoe whispered. Jill glanced at Quin and then spit out her confession.

“I hacked yours apart, looking for the junk that hit you.”

“Wear yours, then.” If she could have managed more force, it would have been an order.

“No!” Quin said. “I won’t pray I’ll survive while I watch you freeze to death.”

Jill tapped him with her fist again, harder than before. It felt like a stamp of approval.

“What the hell,” she said. “We’ll go out together, three more pieces of junk. Edwin Abbott can just stick us into orange foam and send us down the chute.”

Zoe slipped her hand from beneath the blankets and managed a thumbs-up, but Quin was still. Jill’s words had struck a spark. He turned toward Jill’s advertising placard, taped to the bulkhead across the cabin. Better living through chemistry . And the notion came to him, every little detail bright and hard as diamond.

When he had finished laying it all out, Jill hugged him.

Once they did the homework, it took seventeen minutes to get Emil back to the radio, and when he came he sounded fuzzy and apologetic. Quin and Jill were shoulder-to-shoulder now, anchored before the communications station, and Jill had slipped a headset onto Zoe so she could be heard.

“Sorry,” Emil said. “I was sleeping.”

Quin didn’t offer up a polite response; there was no time for niceties.

“Emil, how long would it take for us to splashdown,” he asked, “if we pushed Mary Shelley out of orbit just like we do all the junk?” Quin could almost hear Emil’s calculator.

“Eighty-seven minutes from initiation of burn,” Emil said. “But it would never work.”

“Why?” Quin asked. “The command module’s an Orion unit. It’s designed for re-entry and we can blow away the rest of the ship with explosive bolts.”

“You’ve got no engine.” Quin had anticipated that reply.

“We still have enough solid-fuel cells to do the job,” Quin said. “Jill’s done the math. All I have to do is fabricate a platform to mount them around the aft hatch.”

“Maybe—” Emil began. Jill interrupted, maintaining the momentum.

“All we need, Emil, is a 2-percent delta vee. I can send my data.”

“No need. I’m doing it myself right now.” Seconds passed in silence.

“Well?” Zoe asked.

When he responded, Emil didn’t sound sleepy anymore.

“It’s possible,” he said. “But there are other issues.”

“Name them,” Jill demanded.

“The Orion’s not equipped for anything but a ballistic descent. Without parachutes, it would be a nasty splashdown.”

“But it’s been done!” Jill said. She ticked off her hasty research. “The Soyuz TMA-Eleven capsule in 2008 came down damned hard in Kazakhstan, and the Russian and the Korean walked away from it. The Expedition Six crew in 2003 survived this sort of descent too. Hell, just look at Voskhod Two back in 1970.”

“And we’ll be bringing it in at sea,” Quin said. “We could—” Emil interrupted.

“There’s one other major problem. You have to get down there in one piece, even for a hard landing, and you don’t have a heat shield.”

Quin glanced at Jill. She was looking up to him, eyes bright, and she was grinning. They had been waiting for this one.

“Tell him,” Zoe whispered.

“That’s not a problem, Emil,” Quin said. “I’m going to fabricate one.”

“It’s ridiculous!” Dierker said, five minutes later. She didn’t sound sleepy, either. “No one has ever built a heat shield from collecting foam!”

“Just because it’s never been done doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Emil said.

“Shut up, Emil!” Dierker said. “I will not allow—”

“Ma’am,” Quin said. “Would you rather have us freeze to death, waiting for rescue that won’t arrive in time?”

That quieted her for a moment. She wasn’t about to send a message to the entire Cayley staff that she considered employees to be expendable.

“Of course we don’t want you to freeze,” she said. “We’re doing the best we can. It may not be enough, in the end, but what you’re suggesting is suicide.”

“You don’t know that!” Jill said.

“No!” Dierker thundered. “I will not allow it.”

Jill was close in again, her fingers itching to settle around Dierker’s throat. Quin had no more patience for these games, either.

“Marg,” he said. “Just how do you plan to stop us?”

Dierker argued a bit longer, but there was no question now as to the outcome; there would be a revolt aboard Cayley if she didn’t let them try. When she returned the microphone to Emil, he was so excited he almost stuttered. Quin listened as Jill helped him suit up to begin work, and he was reminded of the instructors at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. Some of them had seemed as if they ate plankton, slept in their wetsuits, and pissed seawater.

“The idea is genius, Quin,” Emil said. “The foam is called Vespel. It’s a thermosetting electrostatic dissipative polymer with a graphite reinforcement component. Its tensile strength is incredible.”

His words tumbled over each other in his rush to explain.

“Inherent resistance to combustion. Fantastic heat resistance. Tested at 900 degrees Fahrenheit for hours. Some of the aerospace manufacturers used it for lightweight heat shields on suborbital flights.”

“Will it stand up to re-entry temperatures, though?” Quin asked.

Emil was silent for a moment, a bit of wind knocked from his sails.

“Flip a coin to figure that out,” he said at last. “It’s a long way down.”

There was no time now to admire the panorama of Earth, waiting so far below; no time to wonder what Zoe would do, if she were able. Quin examined his handiwork. The cells were set in place on the scaffold he had built around the docking ring at the nose of the command module. Working in the mission suit still was slow but seemed less clumsy now, even though he and Emil were making up procedures as they went.

To form the ablative heat shield, Quin had sprayed the blunt end of the command module with polymer adhesive, one small section at a time, and then affixed collecting cans in concentric circles. The last bit of work was to stretch a sheet of gold-permeated reflective foil over the cans and affix it to the circumference of the module.

Quin was pleased with the results of his work.

The jury-rigged effort might not be enough to take them home in one piece, but it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. He had read once—he wasn’t certain where—that to die trying was the proudest human thing. He understood that now.