Ringclimber

Chapter 13 - Ventures and Rescues

The big rock rolls beneath her as she drops from the vehicle. Sharon watches the vectors swing across the helmet, ghostly lines projecting paths and intersections. Some beacons pop up as she crosses the dayside. And superimposed on everything is the grid that marks the demolition fragment zone. Just beyond that are the webs, and safety. But not for her, not for hours.

The team leader is Stan Hamirkov, from Risk Junction, Faraway. He is cool, but cordial, an attitude that never surprises Sharon. Reputation is one thing, until you have to work with someone. Then, reputation is a liability, unless it is a simple, hard-working one. Miners calls the other kind "flash", and though they might admire a flash, there is no sense of security for the team. Especially when the talent is hired or sponsored rather than homebuilt.

The suit, on the other hand, would be warm and welcoming, except that it is strange and odd-fitting. The helmet ring is encrusted with controls for the prototype runs, controls that will later be subsumed into the full-body interface, but which are too dangerous to hide in the testing.

The displays are comprehensive, and all on the huge dome of the helmet. The problem, Sharon feels, even after all her contribution to the design work, is that the options are too exhaustive, and the displays could easily become too busy to see the real problems, like a rock three meters off on a fast intersection course.

But for now, she revels in the scent of her new suit, the quiet pulse of the thrusters, the strength of the arms and legs, and the large prosthetic fingers. She wriggles the fingers as she drifts, and they dynamically change length according to the axes of the motion. Then she retracts them as the rock slides to meet her.

"Lazlo's in," someone reports.

"I'm at three eight zero three, thanks," Sharon says in followup.

"Stan's on the balcony. OK, we've got word to set the charges and slit this cuke up the center then twelve ways. You've got final nay on the blow, please acknowledge."

"We're go for the blow, Stan." She smiles.

"OK folks, it's not often we get to blow someone up. She's out here testing that sack for us, so make damn sure those charges are cool. Acknowledge all stations."

"One, clear with three-way at 1650 megas. Ready for radio."

"Two, clear with split-way at one two triple zero em. Ready for radio."

"Three, clear on five-way at twenty seven five, ready for radio."

"Lazlo's satisfied," Sharon acknowledges. "Head for the net, guys, and I'll meet you at Deep Hole."

The suit shows the beacons rising toward the vastness of the invisible web. She feels suddenly alone. And why not, standing on an asteroid in a prototype suit, to see what happens when they blow up the rock and you're on it.

"Stan here. You come out of this, flash, and the sip is on me."

"Stan, my man, you are behind my net."

She hears him laugh, briefly.

The rock floats, unsupported, in the huge web. The miners float safely beyond the periphery, each reacting in their own silent way to what is about to happen. It is each one's worst fear, to be trapped in the net when the bombs go off.

What could they think about someone who did it as part of their job?

"No flash, Stan." someone says private channel.

"Yeah."

He keys the public channel open. "OK, Lazlo, here you go."

"Acknowledged." Her voice is cool, but cordial.

"Fire in the hole!" He keys the bombs.

All of the energy is released into the rock, so there is no light. But the rock crumples, slowly, kilometers of rigidity forced into impossible positions. Then the fragments begin their frenetic race for the web.

Under Sharon's feet, the rock bucks, shifts, crushes into a sudden powder, thrown at her face, as she, in turn, is flung at five gravities upward. The blood drains from her head, and suddenly she is tumbling, weaving in and out of consciousness. But the dampers are good, firing, though erratically, to stabilize her.

That is wrong, she realizes. The rocks are rushing her, and she is slowing down. At least there is no tangent. She stabilizes, and a rock whips past: six meters across and only as far away. The pebbles are raining on the shell of the suit, laying busy tracks across the visor. Proximity alarms are firing all around, and she whirls, looking for the target. Then it is there, rushing her, twenty meters across, one of the splits. She has a momentary sight of scabs of its old surface swinging past, revealing the hot undersurface, still redly trying to radiate the energy of the explosion into vacuum. The manuver to avoid it is difficult, given everything else she is trying to manage at, now, three gravities. But she tags it into the scheduler, and watches the countdowns tick off. Is she getting into something with side effects? Yes, that fifth event, after the avoidance, is going to put her right back on its track. She deletes the maltrack just as the main event fires. The split swings right overhead, and she imagines the infrared spilling over her. She is sweating enough right then, thank you.

A fragment sweeps toward her, and now she has good enough relative to dance with it. But the alarms are screaming the web, and she still has to keep from piling into it with tons in her arms. She scans the density displays frantically, looking for dust, but the alarms are piling up. Damn it, where is the priority override. Oh, yeah. She has to fire a traverse in three point two seconds for one second at thirty five to make the patch. She schedules it and closes her eyes.

"I always close my eyes. I wonder why. It still hurts just as much." And the engineers hate it, because it screws the pupillary recognizers. But she isn't the only one.

"Three two one."

The thruster kicks her up to two gees, and then she has a fuel alarm. "That had better be real dust," she mutters. Too early to be out, has to be a mal. She muscles a chunk as she swings past, picking up an extra meter per second. A rock smashes into her arm, rebounds. She feels the prosthetics surge and recover, but the next strike takes her on the calf and she loses effective motion there for a moment. The energy puts her into a spin. The fuel alarms go yellow as the system attempts to stabilize. She overrides. She may need the fuel if the dust is a phantom, and she can handle the disorientation. Pebbles rain on the dome. Three quarters of the glass polarizes, and she loses outside sight. She attempts to override again, but there is no response. Then she realizes she's pulled the waste dump. "Damn levers," she swears, chinning the right one. The polarization is off, then, and she suddenly sees the dust column, only a few tens of meters ahead. But it is a race with the net. Another rock whips into her chest, knocking her backward, and smashing the wind from her lungs. A first layer pressure breach alarm sounds, but it seals.

Electrical discharges crackle over the open circuit as the dust clouds crawl through each other, polarizing, then equalizing.

Suddenly the system goes down. The helmet is clear, and she is left with eyes only. "Fuck." She can't know how much fuel is left. She lost a few meters per second in that last collision. "I want that drink, Stan!" she screams. Then she guesses. She waits for the spin to come around, and she fires. A muscle grip attempt on a rock. Thank the engineers, the prosthetics are up, or she might have died right then. That grip stabilizes her and flings her into the dust, just as she hits the web. Then, the avalanche buries her. Thousands of rocks embedded in the dust blacken her sight, crashing on the helmet she levers her arms instinctively to protect. The fingers respond, caging the composite crystal in an extra defense. But she is battered and bashed, swung in the net. It takes minutes for the exposure to subside. For a moment, she sleeps in the arms of the avalanche. Then she twitches, frantic; she spins, but the sound is softer; the velocity of the fragments is being dispersed by collisions and by throwback from the net. She gasps, and cuts with her fingers at the surface of the net. "Out! Out!" She pushes at the aperture, harder, harder, and swings free into space. Dust hisses past her and there is a scattering of random pebbles. But beyond them are the stars.

Kyle Trafton dreams. It is an ancient night, with the round moon hanging full over the cold forest. Streams, shielded in silent ice, wind and connect in a glistening maze beneath and between the trees. Trafton skates quietly, blades hissing, breath smoking in a plume, while the moon tracks his movements, mixing with the branches in the sky above. He wishes it could last forever. A smooth ballet of moon and man...

But the ice is shuddering; the moon wavers... and he awakens, under the cold plastic of the bubble, to the grip shaking his shoulder.

He is instantly awake, and instantly rigid; instinctively - he has lived his life in varying gravity. And where is that image of Earth from?

"What's the matter?" he demands.

Lenox looks exhausted. "Another android's gone down."

"Come on, Peter, can't you reload it yourself?" Trafton asks, irritable. "I need my sleep."

"So do I," Lenox snaps. "And I can't be babying the damn machines when the static makes them pack it up every hour."

"All right, all right. I'll do it." He checks his watch; shakes his head. "It's only sector three, Peter."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Clip me for living. Listen, this is no damn fun for me, but I had to sleep next to the alarm. Now stop bitching and get up -- I want to get back to sleep."

"Me too," Trafton mutters, heavily annoyed. But it is unavoidable.

The asteroid named Faraway rotates vast and slow among the stars. Its core, tipped with the docking precincts, is stable, and free of gravity. Sharon sleeps in the right seat while Gordon brings them in.

The Deep Hole is a blister in one of the old rotation pits, where the charges that had started Faraway on its spin had once exploded. The floor stretches transparent beneath the tables, streaked slowly with the images of the stars in a dizzying panorama. Overhead, the vines knot and tangle among the glossy stone rafters. They laugh and talk and joke, while the unobtrusive waiters move among the diners, the smoke, and the sound of clinking glass and metal.

Stan is Oriental and severe, but his cold blunt face lights when he laughs, which is often, and then lapses into its normal harshness when he is quiet, or listens. He tells them a long and humorous story about confused orbital vectors and a near accident that turns out safely. Later, he contrives to sit near Sharon, and they talk.

"But you must tell me why you let them blow you up! How can that be safe?"

She smiles, ruefully. "It's not really safe, Stan. But someone has to do it. It requires some tricky handling, especially if there are any system problems -- which there usually are - you know the conditions. The key is to minimize the effects, and to do that, a real operator has to observe them. That's me."

He shakes his head. "You deserve more than thanks. I've never been caught, but if I am, at least I'll know you took the same ride. But tell me, is it like the rings? And when are you going back? What do you think of this young fellow Trafton and his silly robots?"

She doesn't want to think of it, but it goes against her philosophy to avoid the issue with someone like Stan. "Ah... well, in a way, it's like the Rings." She hears the cry as Rael is enveloped in the stream. "But the rings go on for hundreds of thousands. That's a year, Stan. Maybe. We don't know, because no one's ever done it. The pressure's intense, living with people under that stress for that long, keeping the equipment going, handling the logistics. As for Kyle, well, I wish him luck, but I don't think the robots are going to be much use. We had enough problems with prosthetics and computers in that environment. Oh, here's our next drink."

They are within a hundred kilometers of the Keeler Gap when the second robot loses program and begins to drift into the dust stream. Lenox and Alvarez go for the pickup, but Alvarez is cursing at the effort; Trafton hears the rocks whanging the suit shell as Alvarez starts the traverse. "C'mon Al," he calls. "Get moving. Don't take forever on that damn traverse or you'll blow a joint."

"Damn these things," Alvarez grunts. He catches at the arm of the vagrant robot. Suddenly, his feet sink into dust, and he screams as current sweeps through him from the dust into the robot, sending his suit systems into silence. "Pete!" Trafton cries, "Get Al!" He schedules his own systems, but the projections give Lenox a fifteen second advantage, even as the thrusters twist him and punch him on his way.

Alvarez tries to release the robot. His arms are tingling from residual currents, but his prosthetics are down. He swears angrily at the plastic face hanging beneath his helmet. Again and again he chins the reset, but there is no response. There is no other sound as he sinks into the dust, rocks pinging against his shell. The helmet is down, the communications are down, and he has no idea if help is even on its way. Sweat suddenly emerges and cools all along his body. He feels the temperature dropping, and icy streaks trickle down his arms. The dust swings past his head, and all he can see is the robot, moving in and out of the drifts.

Trafton is panicking. He has only a vague radar hit, and the projections. Lenox is calling frantically for Alvarez, but there is no response. They enter the dust.

Anne joins the crew, standing diffidently by the edge until Sharon sees her, and singles her out for an embrace. "Anne, how are you? And how's Erin?"

"She's fine, I'm fine. She's sleeping." Anne glances at Gordon with a faint air of disapproval. "I'm surprised he's here."

"He's heading back in an hour. He just wanted to join the celebration."

"Yeah." Anne sighs. "Well, Erin's sleeping, anyway. So's little Michel. What a pair. They are so cute." She smiles, eyes distant as she remembers the two of them cuddled together, with Erin, asleep, smiling the most tender smile Anne had ever seen her use.

"Join us? I want to hear everything," Sharon demands. Anne sees those pale eyes, the familiar gestures, hears the voice she has known in relaxation and stress, remembering that first day; the slim silhouette of Sharon in the doorway of the conference room; the base camp, and the woman who could barely turn aside from her obsession long enough to eat and drink. Things have changed. Again.

Lenox and Trafton crouch in the bubble, leaning over Alvarez and the medical panel. Alvarez looks cold, skin pale, hands rigid. Trafton coughs with the dryness of the hastily contrived atmosphere. Lenox looks up, dark eyes wide with stress. He swings his head and shifts back into the web. "I'm trying, Kyle," he says.

The clouds glow with the lights of the city reflected on their darkened churning. Below, the pottery is a pale block, lined with windows, tailing slow white smoke as a breath into the snowy evening.

Phil trudges past it toward home, wishing he could stop by. But Sharon is in the Belt, the apprentices are new, except for Quince, and the whole place seems like an alien dream at times. And now, his work for Iglesias is a quiet obsession that captures him every night before he sleeps with thoughts on new designs to try.

He stops and looks up into the snowflakes, seeing her darkened window. The cold consolation of the snow streaks his face like frigid tears.

Sharon wakens sobbing into the darkness. For a moment, she is back in the bubble, unable to bear the thought of Rael's death, restrained by Erin, left at the bubble as the others search for the body. But then the darkness solidifies, and the vague forms of the foliage glow faintly on the walls around her, and she knows she is back in the Belt after Erin has given birth. She wipes her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

She lies in the web, head to one side, eyes glinting with sadness and frustration. She feels doomed to repeat her failures. How much longer?

For weeks she has been dreaming about her parents, about Rael, about old falls and mishaps. She feels the edge slipping away. She has worked so hard to regain it. Sometimes she even feels her movements faltering, her memory losing the checklists.

Look, you can lose your edge, you can creep back into a shell, you can blame yourself for all of the people you've lost, all of the times you've been injured, or failed -- or you can brush yourself off, accept reality, and go on.

But it has to be a steady healing, and this spate of dreaming is not an improvement.

If only she could stop thinking about Trafton. That has to be the problem. But why should she care if he makes it first? Is being first that important?

Only because you want it.

She rolls onto her back, flesh pulsing with heartbeat, drifting gently in the web.

I've done so much to earn it.

But I was first on Arsia, Marineris, Maxwell from the surface normal. It was so exciting when no foot had travelled there before mine, when every step was new. The first moves in the Rings, a sport I invented out of the suit tests...

She is in the chimney to the summit of Maxwell again, and feels the buffeting acidic winds pounding her suit.

Anne smiles at her in the tent on the ridge of Arsia.

The ground is unyielding under her feet as she climbs, slowly, and gradually, into sleep. Her severe lips relax and curve into a faint smile as she slips into a more supportive dream.

It is hard to be sure when they first realize they are disoriented. The higher densities of dust had begun streaking across their visors at the same time system failures were becoming more common. Alvarez is back, though his movements are a faint echo of their normal strength and agility. Trafton has opted to press on, and Alvarez has agreed. Lenox, though with misgivings, follows along.

Now they are well within the edge of the A ring, and the systems are uncomfortable. The robots are crashing from the load on their perceptual and decision systems, even while they are in flight, and the team is constantly having to double back to reload them. This makes progress slow and exhausting. Soon they are all sweating and overheating -- one more stress on the suits.

Kyle fends off a rock, and sighs as the prosthetics pass some of the force to his arm. That hadn't felt right. Lenox fires his thrusters, dragging a robot in a harness behind him, cursing. One robot moves to take the point, aiding Alvarez.

They have only travelled two thousand kilometers.

"I don't know, I just keep thinking... I'm drifting, since Rael." Sharon leans back into the gentle support of the web, the warm light of the lamp spilling over her shoulder, pooling in her lap, leaving the rest of the room darker.

Erin, leaning over the baby, looks up and smiles. "You're doing fine, Sharon."

"But nothing's happening..." Sharon sighs. "I mean, you know, where am I going? I can't seem to assert myself. I'm just crawling compared to where I was."

The baby chuckles, and Erin leans over to rub her nose on the child's chest. She looks over at her friend, buoyed by her enjoyment.

"I thought you'd remember what it's bloody like when you fail... Maybe not, though."

"I know, I know, I can't spring back all at once."

"Yeah, and sometimes you get better for a while, you push it, and then you fail, and get depressed because you blew it, or you get bloody upset because you succeeded and think its because it was too easy a challenge. Why don't you just try to keep track? Then you'll see." She spins lightly on her axis, holding out the baby, who laughs, then starts to cry. Erin stops and then folds the child into her chest. "Maybe you should take that climb in the Andes."

Sharon slips out of the web into the air. "Yeah, maybe."

Maybe she needs a mountain.

She transmits "Yes" to Louse Hill. Then she begins preparations to return to Earth.

Pat rides the bus toward Mimas' crater Herschel. The huge central pinnacle of the crater is honeycombed with lights. She thinks eagerly of climbing it, of the reference it would provide to the immensity of space.

How strange, she thinks, that we can't go higher than space, and yet we still want to climb.

She ruminates on the meeting waiting for her. Anne, wanting to expand her medical services into the trans-Jovian colonies, and needing moral support for her first meeting with the locals.

Pat is early. She needs time to mingle and remember.

But, as it all too often has, lately, Pat's mind slips from the task at hand, to Kyle Trafton. Of course, she knows him, though they have never met in person. She has faced him in conferences, confrontations, across the link, dealing on issues relating to orbital property rights. She knows his reckless attitude, his preference for machines and their predictability to backstop his shocking moves. But she also can't forget the immensity of the power of the Rings, the chaos of their nature, and the game of challenge and counterchallenge that is the physical and intellectual part of the climb. Nor could she forget the quiet moments of friendship, the terrifying moments of uncertainty, and the moments of sudden unreasoning anger that burst out of a train of exhaustion, or low oxygen, or unremitting effort. Somehow, Kyle had never seemed to be one to stretch himself that way.

How is he really making out, she wonders.

And how is Sharon taking it?

"Welcome to the Three Eight Five at Nine. I'm Nelson Redfern. At the top of the news, the Trafton Expedition into the Rings seems to be having some trouble, the Iberian Chemical Systems company announces plans to relocate its London plant to the Marianas, and some comments from the Justice Forum on recent legislative plans to cut back on support for the '64 Fraud and Title Act. More after this profile..."

Only Liam M'Butu knows how grave the situation actually has become. His office, at the pinnacle of Herschel Mount, is walled with the real-time transmissions from the team. He knows how to read beyond the image.

The expedition is in serious trouble.

Transmissions have been interrupted seven times in the last five hours. Systems are crashing like glass houses in a flood. He rubs his face in his hands. Should he release the information, hoping sensation will raise the audience level, or should he minimize it, hoping Trafton will pull it off, his struggle keeping the reputation of the Rings as a tough but potentially attainable challenge?

The wall winks to black as the transmitter crashes. Again.

Gordon is sleeping, slumped in the web beside Erin, when his pad wakens him, whispering musically from the wall where it is hung. Erin mutters something as he slides from the web, then she turns her back, trying for sleep. It is enough that she is wakens every few hours for the child -- her sleep has become precious.

Gordon acknowledges the pad, and then takes it into the main room, away from the sleepers.

"Gordon, I need your help," Liam M'Butu pleads.

"No!" he insists. "This is ridiculous."

Erin laughs, her face alive again with the fierce joy that pregnancy briefly seemed to have stolen. "Oh, come on, Gordon. You've got the bottle, you can handle a week of Michel adoring you and waking you up. If Sharon's going, I'm certainly going. How could I miss a chance to ride the Rings with Lazlo? Be bloody real, will you?"

Sharon has to pull down the corners of her mouth to keep from laughing.

"And look at the luck of it! Pat and Anne practically there already, all of us in GMSW suits, actually rescuing Kyle Trafton. The publicity will be fad! The company will love it." Erin is so good at dealing her way into a situation; Sharon finally can't contain it any longer, and she bursts out laughing.

"Oh, come on, you two," Gordon smiles ruefully. "All right, I can't stop you, can I? I should know better." But his eyes are pale, and she can see he is terrified.

Sharon gives him a hug. "You should, Gordon. You've got to teach Michel right from the beginning, don't you?"

Pat has to laugh when the signal arrives on her datapad. They are in the midst of a meeting, and the colonists look one to the other in confusion. Anne turns with a skeptical eye, wondering. Then Pat leans over and whispers to her. The resulting expression is intense, focused enough to convince the delegates that Anne is serious in her proposals, and that is enough to convince them to deal.

But afterward, Anne and Pat come as close to arguing as they ever have, clinging to the walls of the hallway.

"You have to come, Anne, its impossible to get a chance like this."

"You're crazy! I've climbed some mountains, lately mostly in micro G; I can float around in a suit, a bit."

"No, no, not now. Listen, you're good."

"No, no, I'm not. Not yet." Anne sighs. "That's not the issue."

"Of course not. The issue is getting to go to the Rings. Getting to rescue Kyle Trafton, and getting to climb with Sharon Lazlo again. Get it? She's going to the Rings, herself, after this, you can bet on it. And she's going to make it next time. And if you go this time, you'll be on that team."

Now Anne is shaking. "Don't you think I know that? What do you think I'm afraid of?"

Pat's rugged face relaxes into a smile. "Naturally. Me too. So when do we leave?"

Anne tries to smile. "Why wait?"

But Sharon is held tightly by her own fear as she spends time waiting in the pre-lock for Anne, Pat, and Erin. She feels the faint cold, and she is almost shivering, in that dry-eyed, clammy state just before panic, the state climbers call "gripped". And yet, at the same time, she is calm -- it is as if the panic is someone else's. She is just waiting for the time.

That Anne is coming is ... inevitable. Anne and Pat have grown so close that neither Sharon or Erin were able to turn Pat down. But no team had ever given Sharon so much need to search herself for rags of courage. Because Anne, entering the Rings for the first time, is too much like Rael, has too much of that ... not naiveté, but innocence.

Still, they have to have a doctor.

Her eyes rove over the suits in a rehearsal. She has already run the diagnostics twice, and as she thinks of them, her mouth becomes harsh. There are no diagnostics complete enough for her, for a trip like this.

The suits are imperfect, but they are all that is available. The team is inexperienced, but they are the best to be had. She pulls her way slowly against the acceleration and into the tunnel beyond.

It is a strange time, the meeting of the four women. Their first gathering since Arsia takes place in the dimly-lit conference room of a mining vehicle inbound to the Rings, acceleration providing spurious orientation. The whisper of moving air, the changing light of the status panels, the exposed piping and ductwork -- these are the backdrop. Sharon looks up as they enter, while Erin finishes an operation on her pad, then glances up, and smiles welcome.

To Sharon, both Pat and Anne seem younger and more vulnerable, their faces relaxed by the long absence of gravity. Pat's eyes glint as she swings into the room, belying her peace with their intensity. But Anne is more uncertain, uncertain in some way separate from the diffidence she had shown before getting to know Sharon on Arsia.

And to Anne, Sharon is harsh and grim, but her motions are abrupt with a special emphasis that seems to convey her constant knowledge of her every move. And Erin... well, she is more relaxed than Anne has ever seen her, but the new lines of her face reflect Michel's birth, and the pain that was the price of that new life.

Even Pat notes that change. Erin is older in a way beyond the notion of time. But she also sees, in that smile of welcome, a new benevolence.

"Hi," Sharon greets them. "We don't have much, so if you'll tie into the briefing feeds, we'll review the situation and the plan. Then you can give me the benefit of any ideas you might come up with."

"What, no coffee?" Pat mocks.

Erin laughs. "I guess we're taking this too seriously, is that it?"

Pat shook her head. "It is serious. I just wanted to remind you. You know what I mean, we'll make mistakes if we're not relaxed. Haste and tension make us feel like we're accomplishing more, but our error rate will go up, that's all."

"Okay," Anne says, drifting into a web beside Erin. "Let's hear it. Coffee, later, right?"

Sharon smiles slightly at the support, a weakening of her harshness. For a moment, Anne remembers her at Erin's delivery; the pensive anger at her friend's pain -- is that it? Why is Sharon so walled away?

"Yes, a little later. All right, everyone in? Here's what we know. Trafton's been in the Rings for four thousand kilometers. The robots have severe problems from the static and they just aren't agile enough. They aren't carrying even their own weight. Alvarez was injured in a static discharge that crashed his suit, but he seems to be back at some level of action. Lenox is dead. He was crushed in a shear collision about twelve hours ago, and died three hours later. Kyle and Alvarez are disoriented, and are nearly out of communication. Four hours ago, they went down on an ice moonlet and dug out a refuge. We have an approximate location that's getting worse every minute. Questions?"

"What's known about their medical status?" Anne asks. "I mean, what kind of problems am I going to have to deal with?"

Erin brings up the last status displays. "We think they're having problems with atmosphere and temperature. Alvarez may have taken some neural damage from the discharge, but that's unlikely. The biggest problems will be psychological. With Len dead, and the bloody problems they've been having, they may be close to giving up. When the suits are down, which is often, they're probably lost, and totally afraid that it's impossible to get out. It's cold, too, and they may be getting hypothermic."

Pat's expression is empty, and desolate. "We know what that's like."

Anne shook her head. "No, I don't. Not really. This is nothing like anything I've ever been in." She looks to Sharon. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

"I'm sure we can make it and get them out, if we can find them."

"I meant for me. To go."

Sharon's expression becomes gentle for a moment. Then she seems to pack it away again. "No, I'm not sure."

"I see."

"But you can do it." Pat supplies.

"Yes, she probably can," Erin responds. "It's hard and strange in there, but we're taking the easiest approach, and least we're just going in and out. Besides," she looks directly at Anne, "we trust you."

Anne's knuckles are briefly white on the web as she absorbs the impact of the compliment. Then she relaxes slightly. "Well, I trust you to tell me if you think I'm an impediment."

Sharon watches Anne carefully. "There won't be time for that. You just don't get the chance to be one. Remember, we are the rescue. There's no backup for the backup. Now, let's get on to the plan.

"This vehicle is headed parallel to the ring plane to rendezvous with Trafton's position, which it will reach in twenty hours. Liam M'Butu is trying to communicate with them, to let them know we're coming. At any rate, once we reach that position, the vehicle is going to drop us off, following a low energy orbit that will bring it back to us, oh, what is it, Erin?"

"Eighteen point three five hours..."

"OK, 18.35 hours later, for the pickup, at the same relative position. This is the only vehicle available on this notice, and the fuel schedules restrict us to the timetable. There's no question in my mind that we can get in, get them out and up above the ring plane, in a crash bubble, if need be, long before the end of the eighteen hours."

Pat leans forward. "But if we miss that pickup?"

Erin frowns, tapping lightly on the edge of her pad.

"Then we're dead," Sharon replies. "We won't have enough atmosphere to last for another orbit."

Pat shrugs. "Just so we know." She is used to the lack of forgiveness implied by physics and vacuum.

That isn't how Anne feels, nor Erin; but they keep silent. They have faced this kind of fear before.

"OK," Sharon says, gathering them with her glance. "Listen. If we were in there, we'd want the best chance we could get. This is it, for them." She paused, assessed. Am I ready for this? Strangely, she feels certainty as a crust over the fear. The fear is primal, but the certainty is her knowledge.

"Now, how about some input, and misgivings. We'd better thrash this all out before the drop.

Content, Layout, and Images Copyright © 1999 by Mark Cashman except where indicated (NASA photos)