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I woke to Sullivan pulling my hand, and he wasn't being gentle. It felt like the flesh under the MediSkin was tearing apart. "You still upset because I wouldn't let you keep playing doctor on me?" I growled, struggling to clear my head.
For all the good the NanoBiotics had done, they hadn't helped my hand. They'd been targeted there, but I'd been kind of hoping some would get lost and find their way. Unfortunately, they were all too dutiful, confining their work to the main injury sites.
"There's no cure for stupidity." Sullivan couldn't stop himself from checking the diagnostic readouts above the bed. "You're in poor shape for high-g tests. I strongly suggest we postpone for another two days at least."
"How long until we begin?"
"Has anyone ever told you you're a stubborn bastard?" Sullivan let out a sigh. "First sequence in fifteen."
"Both. Many times." I unfastened the restraints and floated off the bed, orienting myself while gripping a handhold. The truth was I wasn't feeling so good. What sleep I'd gotten seemed to make me feel weaker. "I better get upstairs, and you need to get strapped in."
The bunks in the cabins were multi-purpose and could function as acceleration couches as well as beds. The planned maneuvers weren't high enough to turn people to jelly, but anyone who wasn't restrained would be a perfect guinea pig for impact trauma research.
Logan and Aurore were at their stations when I swam through the door, and a large counter was ticking down on the main display.
"How goes the war?" I said looking from one to the other.
They both laughed. "Better, thank you," Aurore said.
I strapped myself into the main piloting seat.
"Room for one more?" Hernandez pulled himself into a spare seat. "I made sure the kiddies were tucked away before I came up."
"You'll be disappointed," I said. "There won't be much to see."
"That's what I told my last girlfriend."
My mouth was as dry as Pinocchio's cremated ashes, and I swallowed a mouthful of coffee. It didn't help much, and my leg started quivering. The on-screen counter dropped to zero. I activated the command sequence for the first tests then opened a ship-wide comm channel. "All hands. Prepare for first maneuver in thirty seconds. Four-g deceleration for ten seconds."
"Starting out gently," Hernandez muttered.
"Ten." I counted off the remaining seconds. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One."
We tumbled, as if we'd clipped an asteroid, so fast that it left my brain lurching. It stabilized briefly and then I was kicked in the spine by an invisible elephant.
"Jesus," Aurore whispered.
"Breathe," I called out. Logan gasped next to me, and I heard a groan from Hernandez.
The pressure continued until I thought the seat would drill through my tailbone. Then as fast as it arrived, it was gone. We tumbled again, in a sickening roll that left my head spinning, but the instruments confirmed the move had returned the ship to its original heading.
Hernandez coughed. "What in bog's name was that?"
"Whirling Dervish maneuver," Aurore said. "Rotates the ship to coincide with the thrust axis so the acceleration couches are always down."
"That was deliberate?" Hernandez looked incredulous.
Logan grinned. "Be grateful. Otherwise we'd be thrown against the restraints."
"Remember mama's scrambled eggs? Next maneuver in thirty seconds. Six-g deceleration, twenty seconds." I braced myself as I counted down.
Again, I was hit by a wave of nausea as we spun around, and this time the elephant brought along his vindictive brother for good measure. The pressure sent a stab of pain through my injured shoulders. I grunted at the spasm and fought to control my breathing. The lights in the room seemed to darken, and fireflies danced through my field of vision. When the ship lurched back around, I heard someone retch. I wasn't sure who, as I was busy trying not to do the same.
The next test executed, and I struggled to read the screen, announcing it by sheer force of will. This one was a straightforward acceleration sequence without the sickening lurch as a preliminary, but it still had all the crushing g-force.
After that it was a case of maneuver, recover, repeat. The series took almost an hour to complete, and by the time we'd finished, we were all planning on investing heavily in vomit bag shares. The g-force, it turned out, was just the icing. The real puke inducers were the wild tumbles as the ship switched rotations in all three axes to align the thrust.
I felt like a week-old corpse that had been resurrected for the sole purpose of being kicked to death once more. I rubbed my forehead gingerly, and my hand came away slick with blood. Sullivan had been right—it had been too early to try it. Not that I'd ever admit it to him or anyone else—Ballens are made of sterner, and dumber, stuff.
"Everyone okay?" I struggled to look around.
Logan mumbled something that could have been a yes, and Hernandez was coughing.
"Aurore?" I forced my head around.
"Please don't look at me." She unbuckled her seat straps and seconds later was out the door.
Hernandez triggered the ship-wide comm. "Grant? You guys alive down there?"
There was a delay of several minutes before we heard anything.
"Yeah, we're okay." Grant paused. "Sullivan missed the goddamn barf bag."
I finally managed to check the ship's diagnostic readouts. There were several orange and red lights blinking on the screen. "Time to get cleaned up. Looks like we have some patching to do."
The Shokasta hadn't been designed to handle such stresses, so we were pushing the structure beyond its design parameters. Thankfully most of the damage was simple to fix. The CASTOR plumbing had sprung leaks at various points, and the control splicing had shaken itself loose, but we had everything patched up and reinforced within a few hours. Hernandez had his team on clean-up duty after Sullivan's disaster in the crew quarters, so even the sour puke smell was mostly gone.
I met back up with Aurore and Logan, feeling hot and sticky after dragging myself awkwardly from one handhold to another. I needed nerve-tranq but wanted to analyze the test performance first.
"Remind me never to be an Aeromobile passenger with you at the wheel," I said to Aurore. "That was vicious."
She laughed. "Do women drivers scare you?"
I stopped, my lighthearted mood evaporating. "Not until recently."
Logan brought up the test logs on the screen. "Analyzing these might let us tune the maneuvers to put less strain on the ship."
"The ship's doing fine," I said. "It's the crew that needs help."
Aurore ignored my feeble attempt at a joke and got straight to the point. "Now we go to Mars?"
I couldn't see any reason not to and programmed the course into the navigation system, then triggered the ship-wide comm. "Prepare for acceleration and gravity in ten minutes."
"I'm heading back to my bunk to rest up some more. To be honest, I'm glad we can't make more than one-third g at the moment."
"Do you want Sullivan to look in on you?" Aurore said.
"Hell, no. I'm suffering enough already."
I slid out of my chair and headed for the exit before the drive kicked in. Every part of me was raw, and my neck felt like I'd been bench testing a guillotine.
*
I'd been in bed for fourteen hours, which was a record for me—at least asleep. I felt better. The NanoBiotics worked their magic on my wounds even while I was unconscious. I stumbled to the control room, but it was empty.
After verifying our position and status, I opened the comm. "I know I'm an acquired taste, but did everybody abandon ship while I was asleep?"
The console beeped a few seconds later, and Logan yawned over the speakers. "It's the middle of the night for most people. See you in three hours."
I realized he was right. My internal clock was messed up from the extra sleep, and after a few minutes of mental thumb-twiddling, I headed to the ship's modest fabrication shop to work on my secret project that I'd whimsically named Project RoboPony.
The shop had a large screen that I could use in private, a definite advantage in the design phase. My testing had uncovered some glitches that I wanted to iron out before we reached Mars. Plus, my original simulation was put together using abstract components, with no thought for actual packaging, and I needed to get it as close to a finished deal as I could for the patent application.
I was engrossed in the project when someone knocked on the door. Instinctively, I closed down the design screen then opened the door to find Logan holding several coffee tubes and breakfast pastries.
"Beware engineers bearing gifts." He thrust one of each into my hands. "What's got you hiding away in here, my friend?"
"I'm working on a top-secret project aimed at easing tensions for lonely spacemen."
"Hate to tell you this, but they came up with that one a few thousand years back."
I squeezed the nipple on the tube of coffee and sucked the warm liquid into my mouth, then tried the "pastry." It tasted like a vanilla-flavored block of congealed grease and sugar, which likely wasn't too far from the truth. "Mmmmm... got to love high-density carbs first thing in the morning."
Logan took a bite and grimaced. "Limited supplies and simple storage."
I washed away the taste with another gulp of coffee. "Sometimes you're too damn logical."
"One of us has to be." Logan gestured at the large screen. "Want to tell me about it?"
"Gift shopping. Wouldn't want to spoil your birthday surprise, would you?"
"I'm well-stocked up on knitted socks." He smiled. "Okay, whenever you're ready. But if you're feeling up to it, we could use some help putting together the SMPTs. We might need them at Deimos. Somehow I can't see the 'Tollers helping us out much, despite their promises."
I threw on a set of light coveralls and gracelessly clambered after Logan as we made our way down to the large payload bay on the underbelly of the Shokasta. It was the only area big enough to build the SMPTs in, and it was where they'd launch from anyway. Hernandez and his team were waiting with an assortment of crates, the strip lights running the edge of the external doors casting gloomy shadows in all directions.
"Aurore having a lie in?" I said as Logan clambered down the handholds on the large doors.
"When does that ever happen? She's analyzing our aerobatics performance. She could kill the propulsion if you like."
I should have thought of that. Building these things would be a lot easier in ZeeGee—at least for me and Logan. Hernandez's team would be gophers, passing us what we needed. They were soldiers, not construction people, and we'd work faster without them. The stumbling block? I was the only one authorized to pilot the ship.
"Sorry, I'm not prepared to hand over control just yet."
Logan had his hand near a comm panel and lowered it. "You can't go on like this, Joe. At some point you need to trust someone."
"Yeah... look where that's got me." I was thinking about Dollie more than the ship.
Logan clapped his hand on my shoulder. "How about some construction?"
"Back in a few," I said.
I clambered back upstairs and killed the thrust. Aurore was deep into her figures and only looked up momentarily to say hi. Minutes later, the gravity bled away, leaving us weightless, and I returned to the payload bay.
I floated into the middle of the room to talk to Hernandez. "If your guys unpack the components and pass them to us, we'll handle the assembly."
Logan drifted over, holding out a tool belt for me. He'd already strapped one on and was ready to go.
"Thanks." I snapped the belt around my waist, spinning slowly. "I should have grabbed one myself."
"Don't worry about it. I've got you covered."
I knew Logan would always be there for me, no matter the circumstances. And I was grateful, but at the same time I resented it. Partly because I didn't like feeling so stupid, but also because I knew I wasn't at the top of my game.
I was slipping on a lot of things. Nothing big or obvious to anyone else, perhaps, but I recognized them, and my brain took note. Each additional clumsiness, each moment of forgetfulness, and every instance where my mind wobbled unsure of what to do next was silently recorded and weighed.
I grabbed the first part to move it into position. Was I losing it? I was probably too young for normal dementia, but maybe all the years in space were starting to hit me. And then there's the booze, a voice I didn't want to hear whispered inside my head.
The first job was building the SMPT's spine. This was a wide tube that would eventually contain the propellant and air tanks. With Logan's help, we put it together in short order, leaving us with something that resembled a white composite torpedo.
"Let's string it." I floated to the wall.
Logan moved to the front of the cylinder and attached a temporary fitting to it, then pushed himself toward the wall playing out a thin cord behind him.
I did the same at the other end and tied it off to one of the lifting rings dotted around the bay. After we'd attached a few more lines, the tank assembly was anchored in place, making it easier to bolt on the other parts.
"Looks good, Joe," Logan said. "Let's get the rest done."
Most of the parts were flat-packed for easy transport. Giotto and Hernandez pulled several hull panels from their shipping boxes and pushed one into my hands. Now we were working, I seemed to function okay. I'd even been the one to suggest tethering the assembly to make it easier. That made me feel better, but in the dark recesses of my brain, I clung to the fear that I was starting to break down.
I pushed the panel into place and squirmed around to engage the clips that locked it into position, followed up by tightening the bolts that held it in place. Then it was time for the next one. By the time we'd finished, we had something that resembled an origami pufferfish—ugly would have been a compliment.
The second unit went together faster now that we'd been through the process once. And ninety minutes later, we had the two SMPTs floating in the bay. After that, all we had to do was attach the cradle assemblies to the roof so the pair of unlikely looking craft could be secured.
I looked around. Everyone looked flushed—ZeeGee was always hard work. "Time to open a few cold ones, I'd say."
"I wish." Sullivan wiped his forehead then dried his hand on his coveralls. "We should have packed a few cases of Dogrut Dark."
Dogrut looked like a blend of blood and dog piss, and from what I'd heard had a taste to match. At twenty percent alcohol by volume, it wasn't the strongest beer around, but powerful enough—and rough enough—to make you feel like you'd been rutted by a large dog.
"You'd need to put a few hairs on your chest before drinking that." Grant flashed a grin.
"Dogrut would melt the hairs off your chest." Hernandez paused then spoke again in a more serious tone. "Besides, on a long op like this, you could find yourself being plied with liquor and wake up with Giotto taking advantage of you. Then it would be my fault."
"Neck off, Sarge." Giotto skewered Hernandez with a look that could have killed and buried the corpse afterward, but she was obviously holding back her own laughter.
"Grab hold, everyone." I left to switch the drive back on.
Gravity settled back on us like a cloak, and by the time I returned, the levity had vanished. The construction of the SMPTs was a victory, but everyone knew the real job had barely begun.