Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

She looked, and saw nothing she recognized. “Didn’t find one—I tried the auto sequence twice.” She moved aside.

Frees found the override, beneath a separate cover panel, with its own instructions. It was mechanical, requiring a hard shove clockwise, which freed a set of dials that had to be rotated into the number sequence printed on the inside of the cover. Seska and Frees struggled with the lever. She could imagine what they were saying. Fighting with the lever would use oxygen fast.

Esmay stared at the instructions for the automatic sequence, wondering why it wasn’t working. Lock inner hatch, test pressurization, enter number of personnel coming in, key in opening sequence for outer lock. She’d done that. She went on reading, past the warnings against unauthorized use, down to the fine print, hoping to find something she’d missed that would get it open.

In that fine print, down at the bottom, the final word was no : note: external airlocks cannot be used during ftl flight. In even finer print: This constraint poses no risk to personnel as personnel are not engaged in EVA activities during FTL flight .

She leaned over and put her helmet against Seska’s. “Some fool must have painted this thing shut,” he was saying.

“No,” Esmay said. “It won’t work in FTL flight. It says that at the bottom.” The others stopped struggling.

“So it does,” Frees said, leaning into her helmet. “On this panel too. Says we don’t need it because of course we aren’t out here in FTL. Silly us, being impossible.”

“Wish they were right,” Bowry said. “All right, Suiza—now what?”

Esmay opened her mouth to protest that—they outranked her; they were supposed to make the decisions—and shut it again, thinking. The oxygen running out, at a rate they could not determine. Time passing . . . somewhere, at least inside the ship, time was passing. Could they make it to their original goal before the oxygen ran out? Could they get in if they did? If all the airlocks were inoperable in FTL flight, they could at least use the air outlets in the repair bays . . . if those worked.

Then it occurred to her that maybe this airlock had an external oxygen feed too . . . some airlocks did, for the use of personnel stacked up waiting to use the lock. She turned back to the control panel and looked. There: traditional green nipple fitting, though only one at this lock. Would it work or was it too automatically shut off because no one would use it during FTL flight?

“Oxygen outlet,” she said, and tapped Bowry, next to her, on the shoulder. He looked, nodded, and turned. She found the recharge hose on the back of his suit, and unclipped it for him.

The oxygen flowlight came on when he plugged in, so at least the ship’s system thought it was supplying oxygen.

“Gauge still stuck,” Bowry said. Which was going to make it hard, if not impossible to figure out when the suit tanks were recharged. “Counting pulse,” he said then. “Don’t interrupt.”

Esmay had no faith that her own pulse was anything like normal, nor did she know how long it would take to replace an unknown consumption, even if she could use her pulse to determine duration. They crouched what seemed like a long time in silence, until Bowry said, “There. Should do it.” He unplugged from the access, and said, “Your turn. If you know your heart rate, give it three minutes. Otherwise I can count for you.”

“Others first,” Esmay said. “They were wrestling with that lever.”

“Don’t be too noble, Lieutenant; we might think you were bucking for promotion.” Seska moved over and plugged in, then Frees, and finally Esmay.

“Why three minutes?” Frees asked, while Esmay was still hooked up.

“Because—if I can just get it out—I’ve got a test that doesn’t depend on the suit’s internal clock. We’ll need more, but I figured three minutes would give us a margin of fifteen, at least. My suit stopped registering at 1 hour, 58.3 minutes. Is that in the range for the rest of you?” It was, and just as Esmay had counted not her pulse but seconds, Bowry said “Aha!” in a pleased voice.

“It works?”

“I think so. It would help if we could rig some way of getting us all hooked up at once, though, because calculating the differentials for the waiting periods is a bit tricky.”

“Give us an estimate; it’d take too long and we don’t have tools—”

“All right. Suiza, you’re still hooked up—you’ll need the longest time on, then it goes down. I’ll count it off for you.”

Esmay wondered what kind of gauge Bowry thought he’d worked out, and how long it was going to be, but she didn’t want to interrupt his count. She felt vaguely silly, hanging there in the dark and silence, waiting to be told it was time to unhook herself from the oxygen supply, but tried to tell herself it was better than being dead. Finally—she could not guess how long it had been—Bowry said, “Time’s up. Next?”

When they had all tanked up by Bowry’s count, which Esmay could only hope bore some relation to reality, they still had to decide what to do next.

Seska took the lead. “Suiza—do you know where all the airlocks are?”

“I studied it for Major Pitak’s exam when I first came aboard, but I don’t really know . . . there are some I do remember. On each deck, between T-3 and T-4, for instance. Once we’re on T-3, there are airlocks both inside the repair bay, and opening on the outer face toward T-4.”

“We could just stay here,” Frees said. “We know where this oxygen is.”

“If we knew how long the jump transit was . . . if it’s anything more than a day or so, we’ve got other suit limitations.”

“I don’t suppose you know a handy external source of snacks, water, and powerpacks?”

“And toilets?”

Esmay surprised herself with a snort of laughter. “Sorry,” she said. “I believe all those substances are restricted to the interior of the ship during FTL flight.”

“Then we’d better head toward the next oxygen access, and hope that we find a way inside before . . . we have to.”

Navigation was going to be their worst problem. Although Kos ’s hull was studded with more protuberances than Esmay had expected, it was still mostly matte black and unmarked. Creeping, feeling her way, across that great black expanse, she felt like a deep-sea creature, one of those her aunt had shown her pictures of. Some of those, she recalled, clustered around deep-ocean vents that provided warmth and nutrients. How did they find their way? Chemotaxis . . . however that worked. She couldn’t figure out an equivalent for it on the hull of a ship in hyperspace, so just kept moving.

An abrupt change in the topography she could see signaled the dropoff, as it were, into the gulf between T-3 and T-4. Esmay struggled to think which direction to move next. Down toward the lower decks in the crease between T-3 and the core? Along the top of T-3? She didn’t even know if the great clamshell gantry supports were closed around Wraith , or if they’d gone into jump with the repair bay open to the dark.

As if in answer to her question, light reappeared in the outer dark. At least, she supposed it was light, because her eyes reacted to it, and her brain, trying to make what she saw into the shapes she expected. It looked strange, and more like pale smoke blowing than light, thick streams fraying to looser strands as she watched, but it gave an impression of some angular bulk just off to her left, with towering plumes above. Far away, a tumbled trail of light, a badly ploughed furrow, receded redly into the distance.

They had all paused, and moved into the helmet-touching huddle. “If I were a physicist,” Seska said, “I just might go crazy. Most of what we’ve seen since jump hasn’t fit most of what I learned about FTL flight. But since I’m a mere ship’s captain, I say it’s beautiful.”