Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [85]
She considered the second scenario the more likely one. Of course, it wouldn’t be the optimal way to satisfy Corporal Chang’s main mission objective—blowing up the Xindi fuel depot—but it would certainly get the job done. Nelson would understand, if he never learned the particulars about how she had died.
That would also pretty neatly solve my other problem, she thought. Nelson’s, too. She considered with more than a little wistfulness the new life that was growing within her, utterly innocent of what was very likely to happen to it in the very near future.
“Brace yourselves, everybody.” The static-laden voice that spoke in her helmet, shattering her reverie, belonged to Ensign Mayweather. “I’m charging the tethers now.”
At first, nothing whatsoever happened. Then she felt a slight, intermittent vibration that she at first attributed to her imagination. The vibration gradually intensified until it became undeniable. Suddenly, blue and gold sparks leaped from the tether line in front of her. She feared for a moment that she was standing too close to the conflagration, though she knew that there was absolutely nothing she could do to change her location so long as the Xindi booby traps remained active.
Just as suddenly as they had begun, the fireworks that had begun coruscating up and down the tether cable vanished. The vibrations beneath her boots began to fade as well, their oscillations diminishing moment by moment.
Moving with the caution of a chemist conducting an experiment with some extremely volatile compound, she tried to raise her right boot.
It came free instantly, and the rest of her body rose along with it. Luckily enough, she tumbled directly into the tether line, catching hold of it with both of her gauntleted hands.
She looked back “down” to the tank’s pitted, dusty surface, where Eby was angling his helmet toward her. Because of the absence of glare caused by the failure of their helmet lamps, she could see Eby’s toothy, triumphant grin, dimly revealed by the pallid light of Kaletoo’s distant sun.
She realized only then, with a surprising commingling of relief and disappointment, that nothing had exploded. At least, not yet.
“Do you mind not wasting time goofing off like that, Guitierrez?” Eby said, smirking. “We still have some serious demolitions work ahead of us.”
It’s gonna work. This is actually gonna work!
Mayweather felt exhilarated as he made his way along the tether line toward the shuttlepod, just ahead of Chang. As they drew ever farther from the surface of the fuel tank—and closer to the shuttlepod—he noticed that his suit’s systems were beginning to recover from the effects of the Xindi security countermeasures, beginning with the lamps on his and Chang’s helmets, and the internal thermal regulators.
Forward movement along the tether was simplicity itself, although Chang was clearly not comfortable with the maneuver—nor with much of anything else about microgravity, for that matter. Since the natural gravitational pull of the fuel depot was effectively as negligible as that of the shuttlepod, all they’d had to do was use their gravity boots to walk to the point on the tank to which the tether was attached, and then leap “upward” toward the shuttle, using the line as a hand-over-hand guide that only needed to be touched occasionally along the way, if at all, for minor course corrections.
The outer airlock hatch atop the shuttlepod’s dorsal hull was already open as they glided toward it, and Mayweather sailed through it with the grace of an athlete trained specifically for a microgravity decathlon. He silently enjoyed the difficulty Chang seemed to be having arresting his motion before he clambered into the airlock, lurching awkwardly along the hatch cables and handholds as he followed Mayweather inside.
After the airlock had sealed and cycled—a seeming eternity—Mayweather and Chang doffed their helmets, and Mayweather led the way down the ladder through the companionway that linked the inner