Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [84]
“Looks—Looks like it worked. Nice job.”
Mayweather grinned at Chang, who remained stuck in a standing position nearby. Thanks to the failure of their helmet lamps, there was no glare to prevent him from seeing the relieved expression on the MACO team leader’s face.
He was grateful, however, not to be the person in charge of cleaning Chang’s suit after the mission.
“All part of the service,” Mayweather said wryly. “By the way, I didn’t mean to step on your authority just now. But under the circumstances I thought it would be better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
“We can discuss that once we’re back on the shuttlepod,” Chang said, much of his earlier anger evidently having evaporated. “After we get our feet unstuck.”
Switching over to the team channel, Mayweather said, “Mayweather to McCammon. Would you do us all a huge favor?”
“—ame it, Ensign.”
“Try not to touch anything else on the com console. Okay?”
“Got it, flyboy. But why?”
Chang responded, evidently needing to reassert his authority over the team. “Because if that countdown somehow gets started up again before we figure out how to get everybody back aboard the shuttlepod, nothing will be able to stop it.”
“And that would be a Very Bad Thing,” Mayweather said.
“—got my hands in my pockets already—”
As the stars wheeled by in the blackness overhead, Mayweather looked down at his heavily booted feet, which remained rooted in place against the fuel tank’s slightly curving surface. The frigid metal seemed to be drawing all of his body heat away, apparently because his suit’s thermal homeostasis was continuing to falter. How long would it be before their suits’ life-support systems shut down entirely? And would that happen before or after their radios failed?
“Now let’s see what we can do about getting back to our ride and blowing this place up from a safe distance.”
“That’s easy enough to say,” Chang said. “We still have to shut down whatever’s got our feet bolted in place.”
“Then that’s the problem we’ll have to tackle first,” Mayweather said, looking toward the horizon, where the shuttlepod hung suspended. The little vessel’s dim, hard-to-distinguish shape conjured up old stories he’d heard during childhood about starving, parched desert travelers tantalized by mirages.
“Any ideas on how we might do that?”
Mayweather’s eyes traced the delicate, almost invisible line drawn across the shuttlepod’s hull by one of her tether cables.
He smiled. “As a matter of fact, I think I do.”
A violent shiver ran down her spine, moving almost as quickly as the high-speed funicular railway she’d once ridden across the Andes as a little girl.
Corporal Selma Guitierrez stood at Target Baker—on the exterior of the Xindi fuel depot’s largest, most centrally located fuel tank—perhaps a meter and a half from the cable that still tethered Shuttlepod Two to the tank’s hull. The cable lay just out of reach.
So close, she thought, turning her helmeted head in the direction of Private Eby, who was also magnetically rooted to the tank’s surface, only a little farther than she was from the cable.
“Is that squid serious about this?” Eby said over the private channel he shared with Guitierrez. “Using the tether lines to disable this damned booby trap?”
Guitierrez shrugged, then realized that Eby almost certainly couldn’t see the gesture through her bulky, unilluminated and dust-camouflaged environmental suit. “If it doesn’t, then we’ll just have to come up with something else.”
But she knew she was kidding herself. If Mayweather’s little stunt—sending power directly from the shuttlepod’s impulse-drive generators through the tethers—failed to disable the Xindi fuel depot’s magnetic security countermeasures, then they were all dead, and might as well simply open their helmets up to the vacuum to hasten the end. Even if the ensign’s trick worked as advertised, it could still ignite all the fuel in