Charles Sheffield: Resurgence

A rattle on her suit like hard hail cut her off in mid-sentence. It took a few moments to realize that she was being bombarded with small particles. They must be low-speed, because her suit remained intact.

“Lucky this time.” Teri Dahl had been hit by the same volley of space-gravel. “If that lot had been travelling twenty or thirty times as fast, we would be riddled.”

“That’s bound to happen as we get farther in,” Torran added. “I don’t know about you, but I’m recording Doppler velocity readings that are all over the place. We have material approaching us at ten kilometers a second, other stuff receding at the same speed. If we keep on as we are, we won’t stay lucky. Something fast will hit us. Help me out, the two of you. Look for an object ahead that holds its distance from us—the bigger the better, but the main thing is a good match to our velocity vector.”

It was a frightening ten minutes, with two more storms of low-speed gravel and pebbles, until at last Teri said, “Got one, I think. Azimuth eighteen, declination minus twelve.”

Torran added, “And just about zero relative velocity. Seems perfect. Let’s go take a close-up.”

The fragment was several hundred meters across, a rough ellipsoid rotating slowly about its shortest axis. They could tuck in close behind it and be shielded from everything in the forward direction. There was still the danger of a hit from behind, but those fragments should be arriving at a lower relative speed.

“Not too close,” Teri warned. “I’m reading a temperature of five hundred degrees. This is one hot rock.”

“A piece of Marglot’s deep interior, by the look of it.” Torran was using his suit’s light to study the surface. “See the bubbles from out-gassing into vacuum? But I think that phase is over.”

“This is only a temporary hiding place,” Sinara said. “Once we are close to Ben we’ll have to risk open space again.”

“If you can call it open space, when it’s this big a mess.” Teri had turned to keep watch behind them, relying on the other two to warn her if she came too close to the rock. “What I’m seeing is more violent and more random than it was. Everything from sand grains to molten planetoids, all with higher speeds. But for the moment, we take what we can get.”

Sinara said to herself, And after the moment, when we are close to Ben? But she saw no point in starting a discussion with so few facts.

The three of them huddled as close to the shielding rock and to each other as they could get. After a silence that seemed to last forever, Torran said, “It’s no good. We’ve been holding off, all of us, but I have to know. I’m going to call the Have-It-All and make sure that Ben is still alive. If he’s not, we’ll have to make a tough call. Do we risk dying, trying to pick up Ben’s body? Or do we leave him where he is, hang in behind this lump of rock, and hope to ride it all the way out through the debris belt to safety?”

Teri said, “You know what Ben would say. The same as we were taught in survival school. Unless you propose to eat it, a dead body is worth only the cost of its chemicals. But my bet is that Ben is alive. Call the Have-It-All and find out—if you can. They may be out of range, or they may be screened from us.”

Sinara heard the query signal in her suit. It was loud to her, but would it be strong enough to be picked up by the Have-It-All ? The ship should be a million kilometers away, perhaps already shielded by the great bulk of M-2.

For another three minutes it seemed her worries were justified. Sinara’s suit, tuned to the ship’s frequency, offered nothing but static. At last she heard, faint and scratchy and barely intelligible, Hans Rebka’s voice: “Ben Blesh is alive, but unconscious. He’s weaker, but not much. Blood pressure sixty-five over forty, pulse forty-two. Why didn’t you report in before? We’ve been picking up your beacons and vital signs, and that was all.”

“Nothing to say. We’re fine, all three. We found a rock to hide behind. It shields us.”

Sinara recognized in Torran’s laconic reply an echo of Hans Rebka. It was probably happening to all of the survival specialists. They were picking their heroes and imitating them. So who did Sinara herself sound like now?

Torran went on, “Don’t expect to hear from us again until after our rendezvous with Ben. We’ll have our hands full.”

“Don’t expect to hear from us for a while, either. We’re ready to loop around M-2. Tell us when you know your outbound trajectory.”

When , not if. Boundless confidence in their survival, which Sinara did not share. But at least the suspense would not go on much longer. The signal from Ben’s suit indicated that he was less than a hundred kilometers away. In four more minutes they had to leave the shelter of the rock and make an exact velocity match with Ben.

Teri was already drifting away to Sinara’s right, with Torran following her. They wanted to take a peek around the edge of their shield before venturing out into the open. Sinara turned to look back the way they had come. They were now so deep in the belt of debris that the stars beyond were hidden. All she saw was a sea of moving fragments, some white-hot, some glowing a dull brick-red. Without the aid of her collision avoidance radar she would have no idea of their distances—they could be moving mountains, kilometers away, or fist-sized fireballs close enough to reach out and touch. There would be many others, too dark to see and most dangerous of all.

Sinara turned again and saw Torran gesturing to her to join them.

“We’ve had a good free ride,” he said, “but it won’t work much longer. Closest approach of this rock to Ben will be more than ten kilometers. We’ll have to fly free.”

“Can you see him?”

“Not his actual suit. His signal shows he’s floating along in the middle of a big mass of rubble and boulders. It must all have been thrown off the surface of Marglot together. He’s had partial shielding from all the other junk out here. It explains why he’s still alive at all—I couldn’t understand how anybody could float free for so long and not get zapped a hundred times.”

Teri added, “We should be so lucky.”

“We may not be. We’ll stay sheltered here as long as we can, and once we reach Ben we can hide in among the same cluster of rocks. But first we have to get there. That gives us an open space run of more than ten kilometers.”

“Together, or separately?” Sinara had moved close to the other two. It was a trade-off. Travel alone, and you tripled the odds that one of you would get through to help Ben. You also tripled the odds that one of you would be hurt on the way.

“Together.” Teri and Torran spoke at once. Torran added, “If I get whacked, I like the idea that you two might be close enough to do something about it. And if we all get whacked—well, we tried. I’d say our present position is close to optimum for a move. I’m biggest, so I should go first. You two follow behind me in line, and stay as close as you can.”

Sinara realized very well what Torran was leaving unsaid. By taking the lead position, he was partly shielding her and Teri—and increasing the probability that he would be hit himself.

She noticed that he was not heading straight for Ben’s suit beacon. Instead, Torran was following a clump of materials with zero radar Doppler shift. Since it was moving ahead of them, it provided some protection. Even so, the rattle of lower-speed gravel and pebbles on her suit was non-stop. One lump of rock, fist-sized or bigger, cannoned off the back of her hardened suit helmet with enough force to make her ears ring.

She heard a grunt from Torran, then, “All right back there?”