Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,79
and focused with none of the muzziness of someone in the Net. I suspected that he’d sit the same way for the entire length of the flight and I certainly didn’t feel like engaging him in any further conversation.
Twenty-eight hours.
I settled back into the acceleration couch and closed my eyes. I doubted I’d get much sleep, but I’d need every ounce of rest I could manage for what was to come.
The passenger liner tumbled through the deep like a tin can bouncing down an endless set of spiral stairs. From the video feeds being pumped to our agents by the crew of the shuttle, there was no real sense of scale. Sarah, I thought at my agent, how big is that thing?
The vessel is a Caribbean-class passenger cruiser designed for carrying passengers on the loop between Saturn’s rings and the moons of Venus. Capacity is twelve hundred passengers plus ninety-six crewmembers. Length of the vessel is approximately four hundred and thirty-five meters. The beam of the vessel is approximately thirty-four meters. Maximum thrust is…
Enough, I thought. Christ, but it was big.
“How fast is it moving?” I asked aloud. Sarah, for all her cleverness, wasn’t tied in to the ship’s sensors. Shay’s Bit could probably get me that information—her agent seemed to be almost as capable a hacker as Shay herself—but Korben seemed to have access to everything.
“The different vectors are making it difficult to get precise readings,” the man replied. “Ship’s computer’s best guess is somewhere between two and three gravities.”
“Son of a bitch,” Shay swore. “How are we supposed to board?”
“That’s what Mr. Langston is for,” Korben replied with a shrug. “After all, we understand he’s one of the best.” He offered me a smile that had more than a little condescension to it.
“You’re out of your mind,” Shay snapped. “You’re telling me he can have an effective weight of over six hundred pounds when that thing’s moving.” On the viewscreen, one of the maneuvering thrusters on the ship ignited at full power, bringing its tumble in one direction to a deceptively slow stop before pushing it the other way. I knew from experience that the actual feeling of that little maneuver wouldn’t seem anywhere near so gentle with boots on the hull.
“It’s okay, Shay,” I said, most of my concentration still on the ship. “Korben’s right. This is what we came here to do. Besides, we don’t have much choice, not if we want to get Genetechnic off our back.” I turned, offered her a grin of my own. “Oh, and then there’s that whole ‘fate of humanity is in our hands’ thing to worry about, too.”
“You really think you can get aboard that thing?” she asked.
I considered it. I knew I was going to try, no matter what. It really was the only chance Shay and I had. The speed at which the ship was maneuvering—and from what we understood of the nano-virus, they were maneuvers and not something as simple as malfunctioning drives—was a problem, but the size of the vessel mitigated it to some extent. At the very least, it gave me more time to adapt to the changes in pitch, roll, and yaw. Mind you, if I mistimed things, the added mass would be a problem. A “time to cash in the insurance policy” kind of problem.
Sarah? I asked my agent. What do you think? Can we do it?
I would estimate a seventy-six percent chance of success in your previous coil, Carter, the agent replied. I currently have insufficient data on your adaptation to your current coil. Given the time frame and the difficulty of the re-coiling process, however, the most optimistic projections I can run put the chance of success at forty-eight percent.
Shit. Basically, a coin flip. I understood Sarah’s point. While I’d had to do a fair amount of run-jump-shoot in the coil I now wore, I hadn’t done any actual EVA work in it. With the struggle to stay alive, I hadn’t even had time for the exercises I normally did to accustom a new coil to dealing with the specific range and pace of motions necessary to swim across open space and cut your way into a derelict ship. I hadn’t really considered that it might be a priority. Too busy not getting permanently erased. I felt comfortable in my coil, but muscle memory was a two-part process. The core might have thousands of repetitions—or, in my case, hundreds of thousands—but you could never be quite sure what minute adjustments