“Ready to open outer hatch,” she said, unconsciously lapsing into the clipped argot of flight controllers and pilots.
Amanda’s voice came through the tiny speaker set into her neck ring, “Open outer hatch.”
The hatch slid up and Pancho stared out at an infinite black emptiness. The helmet’s glassteel was heavily tinted, but within a few seconds her eyes adjusted and she could see dozens of stars, then hundreds, thousands of them staring solemnly at her, spangling the heavens with their glory. Off to her left the bright haze of the zodiacal light stretched like a thin arm across the sky.
She turned her back to the zodiacal light’s glow and attached her safety tether to one of the rungs just outside the hatch.
“Goin’ out,” she said.
“Proceed,” Amanda replied.
“Gimme the location of the leak,” Pancho said as she clambered out and made her way up the handgrips set into the crew module’s side.
“On your screen.”
She peered at the tiny video screen strapped to her left wrist. It showed a schematic of the module’s superconducting network of wires, with a pulsating red circle where the leak was.
“Got it.”
Although she knew the ship was under acceleration and not in zero-g, Pancho still felt surprised that she actually had to climb along the handgrips, like climbing up a ladder, toward the spot marked on the schematic. Deep in her guts she had expected to float along weightlessly.
“Okay, I’m there,” she said at last.
“Tether yourself,” Dan’s voice commanded sternly.
Pancho was still tethered to the rung next to the airlock hatch. Grinning at Dan’s fretfulness, she unreeled the auxiliary tether from her equipment belt and clipped it to the closest grip.
“I’m all tucked in, Daddy,” she quipped.
Now to find the leak, she thought. She bent close and played her helmet lamp on the module’s skin. The curving metal was threaded with thin wires running along the module’s long axis. There was no obvious sign of damage: no charred spot where a micrometeor might have hit, no mini-geyser of escaping nitrogen gas.
It can’t be more than a pinhole leak, Pancho told herself.
“Am I at the right spot?” she asked.
No answer for a few moments. Then Amanda replied, “Put your beacon on the wire you’re looking at, please.”
The radio beacon was strapped to Pancho’s right wrist. She laid her right forearm on the wire.
“How’s that?”
“You’re at the proper spot.”
“Can’t see any damage.”
“Replace that section and bring it in for inspection, then.”
She nodded inside her helmet. “Will do.”
But she felt silly, cutting out what looked to be a perfectly good length of wire. Something’s wonky here, Pancho thought. This ain’t what we think it is, I bet.
Behind his unkempt beard, Big George was frowning with worry as he sat at one of the consoles in the spaceport’s control center. This little cluster of desks was occupied by Astro employees, monitoring Starpower 1’s flight. They sat apart from the regular Selene controllers, who handled the traffic to and from Earth.
George wanted to send his message to Dan in complete privacy. The best the Astro controllers could do was to hand him a handset and tell him to keep his voice down.
Wishing they had worked out a code before Dan had impetuously sailed off, George pulled the pin-mike to his lips and said hurriedly, “Dan, it’s George. Dr. Cardenas has disappeared. She told me last night she was worried that Humphries wants to kill you. When I called her this morning she wasn’t in her office or in her quarters. I can’t find her anywhere. I haven’t told Selene security about it yet. What do you want me to do?”
He pulled off the headset and nudged the controller who had given it to him. The man had been studiously keeping his back to George.
He swiveled his chair to face the Aussie. “Finished so soon?”
“How long will it take to get an answer?”
The controller tapped at his keyboard and squinted at the display on his console’s central screen. “Seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds for your message to reach them. Same amount of time for their answer to get back here, plus a couple additional seconds. They’re moving pretty damned fast.”