Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) (23 page)

He knocked on the door to
Ell’s office and felt inordinately pleased by the way she smiled when she looked up and saw him. “Gary! The master materials engineering wizard in person!” She put her hands up and made a little bowing-genuflecting motion in his direction.

“Um,” he said brilliantly, a little embarrassed
but hugely proud, “it
is
going pretty well.”

“Pretty well!? ‘Pretty well,’ the man says! ‘Freaking astonishing,’ is how everyone else characterizes it. We’re
re-designing the tethers that the new living quarters for the habitat will swing on so they can be fabricated from your graphene.”

Gary frowned, “What if it fails?”

She snorted, “Gary, the habitat will weigh at most 5,000 metric tons. At its limit, the graphene you’re making could withstand that much load with a strap having a cross section of
five and half square centimeters
! That’s like a one inch rope! So we use multiple straps totaling thirty square centimeters for overdesign insurance. Then, we back it up with another thirty centimeter strap that has a little slack in it, so if the first one breaks, the second one catches it.”

“Well, I’d have to run the numbers…”

“They’ve been run Gar’, but by all means run them again.” She grinned and waggled her eyebrows at him, then lowered her voice to a whisper, “You’re gonna be rich Gar’!”

***
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Carter and some of the other waldoes were “standing by” near the airlocks of the habitat for a docking of one of the small space planes. He routinely had some of the waldoes waiting there during dockings because he worried that one of the pilots would come in hot and bump a space plane into the habitat. He wasn’t sure what he and the other waldoes would or could do if there was a crash, but if there was an emergency, he didn’t want to be at the other end of the habitat. Docking the space planes seemed like the most dangerous thing they did at the habitat and he’d always followed the credo that safety is job #1.

The plane had turned its back to the habitat so that the airlock adaptor on the upper surface of the plane could mate with the smaller airlock. It was
very slowly moving into place on tiny puffs of air, the AI and pilot guiding it using video cameras mounted beside the airlock. Carter was connected to the audio on the flight deck of the plane so he would know immediately if they had requests for the waldoes to do anything, though they rarely did. The pilot and copilot were murmuring quietly to one another as if docking a space plane to the habitat was routine, which admittedly, it was on its way to becoming.

“We have a lock,” the copilot said, indicating that the airlock adaptor had mated successfully to the habitat. Carter turned to go and had
just started to ask his AI to disconnect him from the audio feed of the flight deck when he heard a muffled but fairly loud bang.

At first he thought something had broken on his waldo, though in the vacuum he shouldn’t have heard a sound. Then he heard the cursing from the flight deck of the space plane and his heart froze.

Spinning his waldo back around he saw gas spewing out of the dorsal tail region of the spaceplane. Most of it seemed to be gushing from the upper surface of the tail end of the fuselage and squirting toward the habitat, but Carter could see a little gas spilling out in the region where the airlock adaptor was set into the plane as well.

“Emergency!” Carter shouted, starting to jet toward the spaceplane. To his AI he said, “Take over all the waldoes in the vicinity of the habitat and send them to the airlock location… Except Alex! Alex,
get that big roll of Kevlar strapping and bring it to the airlock area as fast as you can!”

Carter
shot his waldo into the space between the plane and the habitat to try to see what was happening. There was a large and jagged hole ripped in the upper fuselage that the air was jetting out of!
What in the world?
The fuselage seemed to be wiggling around instead of stable like it usually was when attached at the airlock adapter. Presumably the jet of air was wiggling it?

The wiggle
suddenly got bigger and Carter reached out his waldo arms intending to ask his AI to use his jets to try to stabilize it, but then he found his waldo backing away…

No! The tail of the plane was moving away from him! Carter looked toward the attachment point in time to witness the airlock adaptor rip itself loose from the upper cabin of the plane. Huge gouts of atmosphere blasted from the hole where the airlock had been
, in turn that blast of air pushed the front of the plane away from the [wayholhabitat.

With horror Carter saw a person in one of the emergency suits squirt out the hole, propelled by the air flow. Then another and another and another! They rebounded off the habitat and bounced away into space! Carter found himself jetting that way. Panicked that one would get too far away to see, he was about to go after the first one, who would
bounce the farthest away the fasted.

But t
hen one shot out the hole, spinning and trailing atmosphere. 

Carter realized her helmet seal was leaking. She’d pulled her arms out of the inflated
sleeves of the emergency suit and was trying to hold the seal shut from inside the suit. He shot after her at the maximum velocity his jets would provide without lighting his rocket. “Jimmy,” he yelled at the first waldo he saw. They’d had lighted nameplates put on their torsos to improve workflow. “Go after the first one, Roger, the second one…” He’d told off a waldo for each of the floating emergency suits by the time he caught the woman with the leaking helmet seal. He threw his waldo’s arms around her and told his AI to stop her tumble and take them to the large airlock. Then he held onto her with only the left arm and used his right to help her hold the leaking helmet seal closed. This was one of the times he wished the waldo had legs he could have wrapped around her to hold on with. Then he could have used both hands on the seal. He also wished the waldo’s face had some mobile features on it so he could smile reassuringly at the panicked looking woman inside the bag. He had no idea who she was, so he couldn’t ask his AI to patch him through to her headset.

Though to be sure, she had plenty to be panicked
about. If the seal finished giving way before he could get her in the airlock she’d be done for. As it was he could see her mouth opening wide, trying to pop her ears, bloodshot eyes darting around, chest heaving in the thin air.

Carter looked around. They were approaching the big airlock but it was closed! Speaking to his AI he told it to get the outer door on the big airlock open. “Pass this on to everyone in the habitat, ‘Emergency! We’ve had a hull breach on the space plane! The small airlock is blocked. Please open the outer door on the big airlock and have any people with medica
l training standing by inside. The first person I’m bringing in has sustained at least some decompression injury.’”

Annie Jones calm voice c
ame back to him, “We’ll be standing by. Good luck.”

Looking around, he saw that some of the first victims had traveled so far
, even in this short time, that he had difficulty picking them out. He realized that the emergency bags should have flashing lights on them to make them easier to see and rescue. It was lucky that he’d told off a waldo to follow each of the victims because he could see the lighted nameplates on the waldoes much better than the bags the victims were in. Actually, he realized he was locating the bags by finding the lights of the nearby waldo. He could see five waldoes and a bag for each of them. He was pretty sure five plus the one he had was all that had shot out the hole the airlock had left in the plane.

The big airlock opened and Carter
scooted in with the woman. “Close the lock!” He worried that he might be keeping the others outside longer, but none of them had air [ thpan>

The lock closed and air started pouring in through the ports. In a moment he felt the emergency bag around the woman he’d rescued starting to soften, then collaps
ing. A green light came on and the inner lock door opened. He pushed the woman through to Chuck and Annie. “Close the inner lock door so I can go back out! I’ve got to help the others.”

Back outside Carter told his AI to take him to the space plane. With the AI driving he could look around to see what was happening to the victims who had bounced away from the plane. Locating the lighted name plates on the waldoes he found all five and saw that each had captured its respective emergency bag and victim. Trusting that they were on their way back to the habitat, he turned to the space plane. Impelled by the outrush of atmosphere from the holes it was slowly tumbling end over end, twisting
and
moving away from the habitat. One of the waldoes was following it and trying to get into the hole from the airlock. Another appeared to be trying to get a look into the flight deck through its windows.

As he approached he began to wonder how he was going to be able to follow the motion of the tumbling craft to enter the hole at the airlock. The waldo currently trying to get into the airlock had missed a couple of times already. Then he noticed
that the waldo outside the cockpit of the craft had been stationkeeping on the window since he’d begun watching—despite the corkscrewing motion of the ship! Carter found himself amazed. He didn’t know any of the other waldo drivers were even
close
to that good.

Alex came on his comm whispering, “Carter, be forewarned that the big boss lady for all of D5R took over Ed’s waldo. So if you see a
waldo out of control out there—that’d be her.”

“Bosslady?” Carter said
, as he tried to line up on where he thought the airlock would be during the plane’s next twisting rotation, his idea being to try to jet through the hole as it passed his location. The waldo would get banged around but he felt sure any damage to it would be worth the ability to assess the situation better.

“Yep, Donsaii he
rself is out here somewhere, or rather, she’s running a waldo out here.” Alex was still whispering, presumably because his waldo control station might be close enough to Donsaii’s for her to hear him directly in the waldo room.

Carter’s brow drew together
in irritation at the thought of management getting involved in something they knew nothing about. Even worse, taking a waldo away from someone who actually could use one! Then he dropped his frustration, he had no control over
that
situation, he could only work with what he did have control of. The airlock was rolling up to his location and he jetted toward it.
Damn! Missed that time,
he thought as the edge of the hole struck the head of his waldo and spun him away. Asking his AI to stop his waldo’s tumbling, he wondered if he could give his AI a command to fly him into the airlock hole and have the AI comprehend him. AI’s were great at calculating orbits, moving from one [vin to place to another and stopping tumbling, but he didn’t feel like he could even explain clearly what he wanted the AI to do in this situation and they weren’t particularly good at matching strange motions. He’d once tried to have his AI help him catch a loose steel plate and had finally had to give up and do it himself. Success in that maneuver had taken a long time which forebode significant problems with the current situation.

As Carter moved back in to have another go at shooting the airlock, the waldo that had been up by the cockpit scooted back along the twisting fuselage and into the
airlock hole as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
Who in all the hells
was
that!?

Carter shot the hole again as it came around the next time. This time he got most of the waldo through the hole before the edge hit him. It set him tumbling, but tumbling
into the inside of the cabin of the craft this time, rather than outside. He overpowered his urge to ask his AI to stabilize him. If he became stationary in this orbit—something the AI could easily accomplish—the plane would still be tumbling around him. Instead, he grabbed onto one of the seatbacks with one of his powerful waldo hands. That jerked him violently around, but a moment later he was stable in the cabin, facing backward. One more person in an emergency suit was back by the bathroom. When the emergency suit had inflated it had become wedged in the tiny hallway there. He hadn’t considered that a suit might be immobilized in here. The person in the suit looked like he was safe for now, plenty of air, no leak, but how were they going to get him out? Carter turned to face forward and saw the other waldo forced up against the door to the cockpit.
What the hell?
The waldo didn’t seem to be trying to open the door or anything. It looked like it was trying to force its torso up against the door.