Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

She had never been that good in theory, and she knew little about FTL flight, except that there was no way to define where and when ships were when they vanished from one jump point and reappeared (later, if there had been such a thing as absolute time, which there wasn’t.) FTL flight wasn’t instantaneous, like ansible transmission; the onboard reckoning might be anywhere from hours to days to—for the longest flight ever recorded—a quarter-standard year. Onboard, inside the hull and the FTL shielding, the clocks worked. Here . . . she forced a breath, which was not reassuring. She was breathing; she could feel the warm movement of her expiration on her cheeks. But the suit timekeeper wasn’t keeping time, which meant it wasn’t logging the oxygen she breathed, which meant she could run out without even knowing it.

And was it better to know when your oxygen was out? She shied away from that to a consideration of the suit comm failure. Lights and comm worked fine inside ships in FTL flight . . . why not here, if they were inside the shields?

If they weren’t inside the shields . . .

A low moan came through the suit earphones, dragging on and on like a lost cow on a spring night. Esmay couldn’t figure out what it was, until it ended in a long hiss. Her mind put the sounds together like pieces of a puzzle: it could have been a word, slowed down. She struggled, trying to imagine what word it could have been, but a piercing jitter followed. She nudged the suit controls, damping the sound—at least that worked. But if the suit coms didn’t work, they could all get lost . . .

Something bumped the back of her helmet; she turned cautiously. It had to be one of the others. It bumped again. Now she could hear someone’s voice—Seska’s—as well as a faint gritty noise where their helmets rubbed together.

“Radios don’t work. Have to touch heads. Hook in.” He tapped her arm, and she remembered her safety line. Of course.

Esmay switched on her helmet light, and watched in amazement as the light reached slowly— slowly —down like the extrusion of a semisolid adhesive from its tube. When it reached the hull, the edges of the shape it made rippled uneasily, the edges a moire pattern of odd colors. Unfortunately, it illuminated no helpful markers, nothing to suggest which way an airlock might be.

“—Suiza?”

If the light moved slowly, so might comm, the radio waves distorted by whatever the FTL drive did to space and time. Esmay had a sense of waking up from some kindred slowness, as if part of her body were keyed to the velocity of light itself, and lagged far behind them.

“Here,” she said to Seska. She dipped her head; the bar of light from her helmet bent slowly, undulating with the movement. She handed the end of her line to the gloved hand that appeared in the light.

“—know someone who would take one look at that and spend the next month in a trance of math, trying to explain it.” That was another voice, fainter, and she worked out that it must be transmitted helmet to helmet, from the other side of Seska. “Frees linked. Bowry linked.”

“—airlock? Clock’s not working.” Of course they had figured out the implications of that for themselves. Where was the nearest airlock? She stared into the darkness, trying to picture this part of the ship, to build up the model from her first days aboard when she studied Kos . There was an airlock for the emergency evacuation of bridge crew at the base of the dome, across from T-1, which meant on their present path and perhaps a quarter hour’s careful traverse. In the dark she was not sure what their former path had been, but the leakage of the gravity unit helped her find downslope.

“Follow me,” she said, and pointed her helmet downslope. The light beam bent, kinked like water from a moving hose, and rippled off in the approximate direction. Esmay started after it, uneasily aware that she could catch up with her own light source. Just like the idiot captains they taught about in the Academy, who had microjumped their ships out in front of their own beam weapons, and fried themselves. She glanced sideways without moving her head, and saw other streams of light like her own but slightly different in color . . . felt a touch on her back.

“—Follow you,” Seska said. “Stay in direct contact.”

She felt her way cautiously from one grabbable protuberance to another. It was like climbing boulders in the dark, which she’d done only that one time because it was such a stupid way to get hurt, hanging out over a dark place feeling for nubs and not knowing how far down . . . .

Here down was a meaningless concept, and she had no idea what would happen if she lost contact with the hull. There was no sensation of external pressure, as there would be from speed in an atmosphere, with wind battering. No, but from deep inside came another pressure, as one body cavity after another insisted that things were wrong, were bad, and shouldn’t be moving this way. The worst of the vibration had evened out, it should have been better. Instead, she felt growing pressure in her skull; she could feel the roots of her teeth tickling her sinuses; her eyes wanted to pop out to escape the swelling.

She paused as she felt a tug on the line connecting her to the others. A helmet tapped hers, then steadied.

“—think maybe we’re not inside the FTL shielding,” Frees said. “Just the collision shields.”

Of course. Her memory unreeled the correct reference this time, showing the FTL shield generators affecting a network of spacers set just under the hull covering. Of course the outer hull could not be shielded from FTL influences—it had to travel there.

It was hard not to overrun her light, but she finally figured out just how to position her head and move, so that she could see possible handholds and clip points coming up just out of reach. She passed a communications array, and remembered that it was only a few meters from the airlock entrance. But which way? And exactly how many? She paused there, wrapped her line around the base of the array (and why hadn’t it snapped off when they went through the jump point?)

“It’s nearby,” she told the others when they’d caught up and touched helmets, for all the world like cows touching noses. “Wait—I’m going to look.”

A pause. “—Shine in different directions. Might help.” It would. She watched as the two beams she could see looped out on either side of hers. She gave herself five or six meters of line, and scooted out to the end of it, then began circling.

The airlock, when she found it, had a viewport beside the control panel. She clipped in to the bar meant for that purpose, peeked through, and saw only more dark. She didn’t want to try turning on the interior lights—why announce to the Bloodhorde commandos where they were?

She tugged a signal on her line, and wrestled with the control panel as she waited for them to catch up. She had trouble making her light stay on the controls while she tried to operate them. The safety panel slid at last, and she looked at the directions. It had been designed for emergency exit, not entrance, so the entrance instructions were full of cautions and sequences intended to keep some idiot from blowing the pressure in neighboring compartments.

She punched the sequence that should work. Nothing happened. She looked at the instructions again. First lock the inner hatch, the button marked inner hatch, then the close switch. Then check the pressurization, test pressure. She went that far then read and completed the rest of the sequence. But the lights did not turn green, and the airlock did not open.

“—Have a manual override?” Seska asked. She had not even noticed his approach, or the touch of the helmet.