The plastic seal was little more than it seemed, an adhesive patch. It concealed no microcircuitry, although its conducting polymers were sensitive to electric fields and preserved the patterns of any that had recently been applied.
By placing her hand over the patch, by leaning close to it and inhaling its odor, Sparta learned what she needed.
The field detectors under her palm picked up the strongly impressed pattern of a diagnostic device—someone had passed a field detector of their own over the plastic, hoping to discover its secrets. Doubtless they had learned that it had no secrets. Then they’d grown bold enough to handle the seal, presumably with gloves. The inquisitive one had left no fingerprints, but from the odor that clung to the surface of the plastic, Sparta had no difficulty identifying who had been there.
Each person’s skin exudes oils and perspiration that contain a blend of chemicals, especially amino acids, in a combination as unique as the pattern of the iris. When Sparta inhaled these chemicals she instantly analyzed them. She could call the specific chemical formulas into consciousness or, more usefully, match them to patterns she had already stored. She routinely stored the amino acid signatures of most people she met, eventually discarding those of no interest.
Two hours ago she had stored the amino acid signature of Kara Antreen. She was not surprised to recognize it here. Nor could she blame the guards for lying to her.
They’d been told to keep quiet; and they’d have to live with Antreen long after Sparta had gone back to Earth.
Sparta couldn’t blame Antreen for her curiosity, either.
She’d examined the seal, but there was no evidence she had opened the hatch. The only other entrance to the ship was through the midships airlock aft of the cargo holds, and Sparta doubted she’d used that. Antreen would have been in full view of a hundred controllers and dockside workers had she donned a spacesuit and gone into the ship that way.
Viktor arrived, pulling the tool bag and a suit for her—a blue one, the uniform suit of the local law. He’d already climbed into his own suit; his gold badge was blazoned on his shoulder.
Minutes later they were drifting close to the spotlit hull of Star Queen, their attention concentrated on a small round hole in a metal plate.
Behind them in the cavernous docking bay great metal clamps clashed, shackling craft to the station, and selfguiding hoses and cables snaked out from the refueling manifolds, seeking the orifices of fuel tanks and capacitors.
Tugs and tenders were arriving and launching from the bay, sliding in and out of the huge bay doors open to the stars. All this activity took place in the dead silence of vacuum. The Space Board cutter was moored next to Star Queen in the security sector. A launch stood by at the commercial lock across the way, fueled and ready to bring passengers into the station when the liner Helios arrived.
Over the whole scene the clear dome of Traffic Control presided.
They’d gone through one of the worker’s locks, dragging the translucent nylon bag of tools, tethered to Proboda’s wrist, behind them. Sparta had carefully worked her way around the superconducting coils of the radiation shield that looped in a lacy hemisphere over the top of Star Queen’s crew module, keeping a respectful distance.
If Proboda wondered why, he said nothing, and she didn’t care to explain what she’d learned through unsettling personal experience, that strong electric and magnetic fields were dangerous to her in intimate ways that other people could not sense: induced currents in the implanted metal elements next to her skeleton were disorienting and, in extremis, threatening to her vital organs.
But she maneuvered to hull plate L-43 without diffi- culty. It was not easily accessible for even one person in a spacesuit, since it was tucked away on the underside of the crew module just above the convex end of the long cylinder of Hold C.
“I’ll take a look,” she said, squeezing close. “Here, put this someplace else.” She popped the crablike robot eye off the hull where it perched over the hole and handed it to Proboda; the magnetic rollers on the ends of its legs were whirring as it searched for a grip. Proboda put it up higher on the module and it scurried away toward its home hatch.
Sparta got her head up next to the damaged plate and focused her right eye upon the hole. She zoomed in and examined it in microscopic detail.
“Doesn’t look like much from here,” Proboda’s voice said from the commlink in her right ear.
“Wait ’til you see inside. But let me get a picture of this first,” she murmured. She snapped it with the ordinary photogram camera looped around her left wrist.
What Sparta could see on the outside of the hull, even at a magnification that would have astonished Proboda, corresponded to just what she would have expected from the collision with the hull plate of a one-gram meteoroid traveling at forty kilometers per second—a hole the size of a BB, in the center of a small circle of gleaming smooth metal that had melted and recrystallized.
The damage done to a ship’s hull by a meteoroid travelling at typical interplanetary velocities approximates what happens when, say, a hypervelocity missile strikes armor. The indentation on the outside of the plate may be modest in itself, but the deposited energy creates a coneshaped shock wave travelling inward that spalls a wide circle of material off the inside of the plate. This molten material keeps on moving and does its own damage; meanwhile, if the interior of the hull is filled with air, the shock wave quickly expands, producing overpressures which are intensely destructive near the hole, although they fall off rapidly with distance.
“Is that one of the ones that comes off easily?” Proboda asked.
“We’re not quite that lucky,” she said. “Want to hand me that wrench and a standard Philips?”
Almost a third of the surface area of the life support deck consisted of removable panels, and L-43 was one of these—not, unfortunately, a door that conveniently swung open like others nearby, but a plate that could be removed by patiently unscrewing some fifty flathead bolts around its edges. Proboda took a power drill from the nylon tool bag and fixed a bit to it. “Here,” he said, handing it to her, “anything I can do to help?”
“Catch these damn little screws.” It took her almost ten minutes to remove the bolts. He plucked them from the vacuum and corralled them in a plastic bag.
“Let’s try the limpet now.”
He handed her a small, massive electromagnet and she set it against the painted yellow triangle in the center of the plate, which marked the presence of a ferrous laminate hardpoint. She flipped the magnet’s switch and tugged hard. The magnet stuck fast to the hardpoint, but— “That’s what I was afraid of. Can you get your feet on something? Then tug on my legs.” He braced himself and grabbed her feet. He tugged on her and she tugged on the plate, but the plate was stuck fast in the hull.
“We’ll have to set up the grip rig.”
Proboda reached into the tool bag and withdrew a set of steel rods with sliding couplings. He fed her the pieces one by one, and in a few minutes she had rigged a bridge of parallel rods over the recalcitrant hull plate, set against the hull to either side on gimbaled feet. She mounted a worm gear in a heavy bracket in the center of the bridge.
She fitted a crossbar handle to its top; its lower end rotated in a joint on the back of the magnet. When Sparta twisted the crossbars the worm gear turned and began to exert an inexorable pull. After three complete turns the bulging plate, like a stiff cork sliding out of a bottle, popped free.
“This is what was holding it.” She showed him the inside of the plate. “Sealant all over the place.”
Blobs of hardened yellow plastic had held the plate tight, plastic foam that had spewed from emergency canisters inside the deck. Some of it had been carried by the outrush of air into the meteoroid hole, where it congealed and sealed the leak as it was designed to; the rest had simply made a mess.
Sparta inspected the inner side of the plate and the hard dark mound of plastic that covered the hole. She photogrammed it, then peered back over her shoulder. “Let me see that knife kit.” He held it out and she took a curved, thin-bladed knife from the set. “And give me some of those little bags.” She carefully worked the edge of the blade under the brittle plastic. She began peeling back the plastic, which came away in thin layers like sediment, like wood grain.