Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [73]
He took another step, and another after that, and then glanced down again at the padd to check on his location. Satisfied, he knelt on the gently sloping metal surface, the magnetized tip of his right boot holding him tenuously in place as he carefully opened the Velcro-secured flap of his toolbelt.
He took out the topmost of a short stack of flat, metallic disks, each of which measured some ten centimeters across; though his gloves made his fingers clumsy, he managed to pull out the device’s arming pin and push it back down. As he attached the disk’s magnetized top surface to the tank, a blinking red light confirmed that the mechanism was now armed and awaiting its terminal countdown-to-detonation signal.
Chang looked up and saw that Mayweather was now standing beside him, showing no obvious signs of spacesickness-related distress as he opened his own munitions bag. Mayweather’s gloved hands moved with a stage magician’s grace. Chang remained amazed that anyone could maneuver so quickly and confidently in microgravity. Because of the glare coming from Mayweather’s helmet lamps, Chang couldn’t tell whether or not the Starfleet pilot was laughing at what Chang saw as his own obvious deficits in this area.
With as much confidence as he could muster, the MACO strike-team leader said, “Let’s get the perimeter covered as fast as we can, and then double-time it back to the shuttlepod.”
Before anything has a chance to go seriously wrong out here, he thought, squashing down the notion even as it surfaced in his mind.
At Target Charlie, McCammon knelt again and attached yet another explosive unit to the storage tank’s wide, curving hull. Ordinarily, he would have been disappointed to have been sent to his target without a buddy—someone with whom he could share a bit of companionable martial chatter. Today, however, he was grateful to be alone.
He wondered how he was going to conceal the evidence of his steadily worsening spacesickness from his fellow MACOs—and particularly from Ensign Mayweather—once he concluded his work out here and returned to the shuttlepod’s airlock. Maybe Archer’s squids really do have a good reason to call us “ground-pounders,” he thought. Guess I’m a shark out of water out here.
McCammon’s misery remained mostly unrelieved, though he was thankful that Doctor Phlox’s drugs had at least prevented him from emptying the contents of his stomach into his helmet, an eventuality that often proved lethal to anyone sealed into an environmental suit. On the plus side, the unrelenting discomfort was keeping him focused like an asteroid-mining laser on the task at hand.
He tried to use his nausea to motivate him to increase his speed as he armed and set a fourth charge, used his magnetic boots to clomp methodically several meters farther along the tank’s waist, and then knelt to set a fifth charge. Feeling almost detached from his body, he moved along, circumnavigating the huge storage tank’s entire perimeter. As he worked, he began spinning the current mission in the back of his mind, trying it on as a saga of personal valor that he would add to his already highly burnished repertoire of battle yarns, suborbital skydiving tales, and other extreme-sports anecdotes the next time he held court in Enterprise’s crew mess.
McCammon grinned and belched simultaneously as he finished placing his twelfth and final charge. He looked backward along the skin of the fuel tank, which was illuminated only by his helmet lamps. Just barely visible above the tank’s weirdly foreshortened horizon, the shuttlepod hung in the blackness at an oddly skewed angle. Fortunately, the boat remained unmolested, at least so far, by any Xindi vessels that might have been lurking unnoticed nearby. At this distance the little ship looked as small as a child’s toy, making McCammon uncomfortably aware that he owed his life to a few scant millimeters of transparent aluminum, and not many more cubic centimeters of air.
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