Mission Control in Houston came online. "Hi, Ayame, what's your mission status? We're getting some pretty wild readings…"
"There's been a collision, Houston," said Ayame into her helmet microphone while reviewing her readouts. "According to computer, the Advantage appears to be leaking fuel. I'm getting the passengers onto the Waste-REL."
"I can see it on camera. If you ignite your rockets you'll light up that fuel," warned the mission manager in Houston.
"I know," said Ayame. "I'll have to stay put until we can come up with a plan."
That's when the next object hit the shuttle, this time in the nose cone, sheering off a large chunk of the front of the ship and bouncing heat tiles off the windshield. The impact knocked everyone sideways but otherwise everybody kept moving towards the back of the shuttle's living quarters. Lyle already had the shuttle-bay portal open and he and Verna were pulling themselves along the wall and up to the Waste-REL.
Portia called out, "Jules! Can you hear me!"
"Yes," said Jules.
"Open the door!"
"Oh, yes, sorry," said Jules. "I've been grieving you see and…"
"Shut-up!" said Portia. "We've got a problem. The shuttle's been hit. We've got to get the Waste-REL out of the shuttle bay right away."
"Okay, you needn't shout," said Jules as the Waste-REL's locks unhinged and the exterior portal eased open. "It's just I've lost a lot of friends…"
"Be quiet, computer!" yelled Verna.
Donny motioned to Mickey to keep climbing along the wall. "Go! Go! I've got to make sure Aya's okay."
"We need you in there, Don," said Mickey. "Don't do anything noble."
"Yeah, right," laughed Donny. "As if some piece-of-crap pheely-geek could do anything noble."
Mickey was already climbing into the Waste-REL when he said. "If the shuttle is toast, tell Ayame to come with us."
"I'm already on it," whispered Donny.
Ayame was busy trying to find a way to cut off the flow of rocket fuel but nothing worked because the impact had opened a small hole in the tank. The shuttle was just going to spin around until fuel pressure depleted. There might have been a slim hope of fixing it on an EVA but not if the shuttle was being regularly punctured by space junk.
"Aya," called Donny from the bay door. "Forget it. You'll have to come with us now."
A 5-inch bolt tore a perfect little hole in the cockpit, entering from the top and exiting through the floor. Debris was blasted into the space around them as the remaining atmosphere in the cockpit was sucked out. Ayame instinctively grabbed for her helmet lock but it was already in place.
"Once we get the Waste-REL online we can repel these things with the magnet," said Donny. "We gotta get out of here before the Waste-REL gets hit."
"I think you're right," said Ayame, turning to the control panel. "Houston, I'm abandoning ship. I'm going to the Waste-REL now."
"Understood," said Mission Control.
Ayame made a move toward the lockers at the back of the cockpit but Donny grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the cargo bay. "Come on," he demanded.
-----
Verna was the first into the Waste-REL .
"Computer," barked Verna.
"Call me Jule…"
"Is the engine online?" Verna interrupted.
"Yes, ma'a…"
"Good. Can you remote the Canada-arm?" asked Verna.
"Yes, I …"
"Once the door is closed, fling us into space as fast and as far as you can and start up the anti-magnet or whatever the helix you call it."
"On it," said Jules.
As Lyle and Portia climbed into the Waste-REL, Lyle pointed to where Portia should sit. The seats in the Waste-REL were much smaller but came with similar if less expensive belting. "Strap in," said Lyle as he sat beside her, following his own order.
If the publisher of this edition of this text has included an illustration of the Waste-REL, it's probably totally incorrect, because no one would want to buy a book with a depiction of a golf ball hovering in space, except for possibly that classic book 18 Stupid and Uncomfortable Things to Do With Golf Balls. Nevertheless, when Mickey looked up at the Waste-REL while standing/floating inside the shuttle cargo bay, what he saw was a gigantic golf ball.
The Waste-REL, because it was designed to attract and cling to space junk, had to be perfectly round. Because it had to travel through space, it needed dimples to reduce turbulence and drag when travelling through the atmosphere -- even the rarefied atmosphere at near-Earth orbit. The Waste-REL was not entirely featureless; many of the dimples also acted as LASAR tracking sensor dishes, communications transceivers, camera lens ports and handy places to keep your pocket change while on a space walk. Nonetheless, the overall visual impression given by the Waste-REL, when you looked at it from a distance, was that of a very large golf ball with an STC logo where the word Titliest should have been.
The fact that he was about to enter into a giant golf ball gave Mickey a terrible feeling of foreboding. He'd spent a lot of time golfing in a pheely game called "Golfers Heaven," a game in which the balls could talk and tell you what club to choose and how best to maximize your shot. Since the balls were programmed to scream as they spun off into the distance, Mickey always kind of empathized with the little guys and inevitably stopped playing all together because it made him feel guilty.
Mickey grabbed the door handles, pulled himself up into the Waste-REL and began reviewing the familiar surroundings. He'd spent weeks in the simulation of this little room and he knew it inside and out, except now there was a proliferation of blue plastic crates stacked and magnetized to the floor. There was even less room than usual.
"What's all this stuff?" asked Mickey.
"Things you'll need," said Jules in one of the many available 3D computer displays embedded in the curved wall. Jules was also talking to Verna in another display. Once he became part of the metaquantum computer on the Waste-REL he was capable of concentrating on 1016 conversations without distraction.
"Like what?" asked Mickey.
"Like you'll have interior hull failure within 36 hours and the laser torch in crate number 64 will allow you to weld together a seam to fix it. Or crate 23, which contains a compressed air duster.”
"Why would we want that?" asked Mickey.
"You know how you have a space suit for extra vehicular activity?" asked Jules.
"We didn't practice much with those on the pheel," said Mickey. "I mean, we zoomed around outside for a couple of hours but that was just for fun."
"My review of the schematics of the propulsion jets on the maneuvering unit provided with your suit indicates that they will malfunction and explode 1 out of every 2 times you use them so I'm recommending you use the spray-can to get around outside the craft."
"Good suggestion," nodded Mickey, giving Jules the thumbs up. Mickey was sold: Jules = good.
"Do you two want to shut-up and strap in?" blurted Lyle, overwhelmed with the anxiety associated with the stress of the knowledge that he was probably going to die.
Jules began to display a video recording of the safety features of the Waste-REL but Verna told him to stop it because, let's face it, the Waste-REL had no safety features.
Back at the Cargo Bay doors, Ayame wrenched her gloved hand out of Donny's grasp and she returned to the shuttle cockpit, ripped open her locker and pulled out her duffel.
"Come on?" asked Donny, as he waited, glancing back and forth from the Waste-REL portal to Ayame. As Ayame floated back into the cargo bay, the cargo bay doors (that comprised the ceiling between them, the Waste-REL and outer space) blew off. Jules had blown the emergency bolts (after calculating that the ability to do so could be lost with the next space-junk impact). Both Ayame and Donny were pulled off the floor with the force of the explosion and they grabbed hold of the piping in the wall to keep from being sucked into space. Like it or not, they were in a "space walk".
The force of suction was so great that Donny's rubberized space suit, which unlike Ayame's, was supplied by STC, stretched out toward the open maw of the cargo bay. Donny's boots slipped off and would have flown into space if they weren't adhered to his pants, which were made of some very stretchy material. Soon Donny's legs appeared to be about 12 feet long, with the boots spinning about at the end. The suction ended as the pressure equalized and the boots then just floated about aimlessly.
They could see the Canada-arm descending, its claw opening and preparing to grab the Waste-REL by a small oval ring on the top of the craft. The shuttle was also outfitted with a Canada-leg, positioned behind the Waste-REL, ready to place-kick the craft into orbit.
Donny quickly shimmied along the handles in the cargo bay wall and pulled himself into the Waste-REL. Ayame followed by grabbing his boots and climbing up his stretched out pant-legs. As Ayame pulled Donny's dangling pants and boots in through the Waste-REL's portal, the metal door swished shut and bolted. Donny inserted his feet back in his boots, stood up and his stretched-out space suit pants pooled at his feet. "Would you look at this?" he lamented.
"Get seated now!" said Jules, his head and shoulders displayed on the monitor closest to the floor. Donny pulled up the crotch of his pants from the floor, grabbed Ayame with his free hand, and plopped her into the seat beside him.
"There's only 5 seats," said Ayame.
"I'll be fine," said Verna, checking her control console at the center of the room. "It's my turn to fly."
Mickey was not strapped in. Instead he was reviewing all the controls at the magneto-graviton station.
"Sit," ordered Verna.
"Who's gonna run the anti-magnet?" asked Mickey.
"I will," said Jules. "In fact, in this part of space the only hope you have of surviving is to let me run everything." Jules smiled at Mickey as sweetly and as innocently as he could. "Believe me, just sit down and enjoy the ride."
Mickey took Jules' words to heart and acquired the last remaining chair and strapped in. Verna stayed at the navigation console. "Go sit in Lyle's lap," said Jules.
"What?" asked Verna.
"I got you covered here," said Jules. "Please, I can't do my job if I'm worried that you'll get hurt."
"You want me to sit in Lyle's lap?" asked Verna.
"I don't mind," said Lyle, his eyebrows pushed together nervously, though he tried valiantly to smile.
"Yeah, I just bet, lover-boy," smiled Verna. She was becoming oddly drawn to Lyle, like opposites attracting -- except more so. "But how do I strap in?" she asked.
"Just share the straps," said Jules with a wink. "You can work it out."
Lyle did not want to work it out. He was afraid of Verna in a way that upset his already bursting storehouse of irrational fear mixed with completely reasonable terror. Verna's substantial yet soft bottom eased into what little chair lip Lyle's welcoming lap could afford. "Is that a rocket in your space suit or are you just happy to see me?" she quipped. Even behind the glass of his space helmet, Mickey could see Lyle blush, but that was only because Mickey was directly beside him, otherwise Verna pretty much obscured everyone's view of Lyle and Lyle's view of everything else. Verna's strapping solutions were creative and allowed her to wiggle a great deal. Lyle's badly messed up psyche became so overloaded with stress signals that his brain refused to participate any more and he passed out.
"Hold onto your helmets," said Jules and he fed the command to the Canada-leg to fling the Waste-REL into space. The group felt a strong pull of acceleration and then the computer display showed the shuttle falling away. A large and growing sphere of rocket fuel was floating near the tail. In the distance an approaching metal object glistened.
"Houston wants to talk to somebody," said Jules.
"I'll talk to them," said Portia.
"Waste-REL?" said Houston. "Can you read me?"
"Yes," said Portia. "But we're in trouble."
"I'm in trouble," said Ayame, looking about the cabin in shock. "I'm not supposed to be in this piece of junk."
"We're away from the shuttle, but…" started Portia. Then some ages-old shrapnel from a long ago abandoned military experiment hit the shuttle. The explosion threw the Waste-REL even farther into space, spinning out of control.
Next: Too Fast
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