Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,86
and violent death, but if I was going to get my shiny new coil pasted along the hull of a passenger liner, I might as well be in the driver’s seat when it happened.
“Sarah,” I said aloud, mostly to hear the comforting sound of a human voice, even if it was my own. “Remove all displayed trajectories except for the one that’s most likely to send me bouncing off the hull.”
My agent didn’t respond—another sure sign that her processors were overworked trying to keep me alive. Well, we’d fix that soon enough, one way or another. But my display did clear of the confusing web of red and green. In its place was a single green line arcing across the void that slowly bled to red about halfway down its path and terminated—a most appropriate word—in a point of space that was, for the moment, unoccupied.
“Release manual control,” I said to Sarah. Another indicator popped up in my HUD, this one showing me that control of the thrusters had been restored. There was no physical manifestation necessary to control them, no buttons to push or throttles to adjust. They were linked to Sarah, and through her to me. They responded to my thoughts and using them was more akin to learning how to walk again after an accident—or acclimating to a new coil for that matter—than it was to operating machinery. EVA activity had been called first walking, when it was done with tethers and magnetic boots alone, and then swimming when manually controlled thrusters came onto the scene. We still called it swimming now, centuries later, but the term had taken on new meaning. It was far more analogous to using your own muscles to move your body through water than it was to piloting a vehicle.
The distance between me and the AI-controlled vessel steadily dwindled as I used mind and machine to keep my flight path nailed to the doomsday trajectory. I rode the steadily reddening line like a rail and a time-to-impact counter popped up of its own accord in my HUD. One minute. I held my course. Fifty seconds. Then forty. Thirty. The ship loomed in my vision, obscuring the blackness of space with the featureless gunmetal gray of its hull. The imaginary line that was my guide was now flashing red, all green long since lost. The terminal point was a blotchy red spot sliding slowly along the hull of the vessel. Appropriate.
The nose of the vessel was now clear in my view and it was swinging toward me like the mouth of some vast and ponderous fish. Throughout the entirety of the swim, my thrusters had been in the standard configuration—the two mains at my waist providing forward thrust, the two secondary at my ankles reverse thrust, and the two at my wrists lateral thrust. According to Genetechnic, the Bliss AI was a heuristic, self-learning entity. But it was also a fairly young entity as such things went. I was betting my life—or at least my coil—and maybe the lives of the rest of humanity, on the notion that, given the vast spectrum of data available to it, it hadn’t yet learned all there was to know about man-portable extra-vehicular activity thruster packages.
When Sarah was in the driver’s seat, I’d kept my body locked in a tight ball, and she’d managed the orientation and thrust without the added complexities of my limbs operating independently through their own axes of movement. Now I uncoiled, positioning my arms and legs to allow me a broader range of motion and independent control of each thruster. As I moved, the new vectors imparted spin which I countered almost subconsciously with minute thruster blasts. Then I oriented all the thrusters in the same direction. I sent the mental command and locked my muscles against the surge of acceleration.
I hadn’t simply reversed thrust to try and slow my approach to the ship, though there was some angle of deceleration to the burn. Most of the power was sending me sliding lateral to my original course, moving lengthwise down the hull. The AI had the nose of the ship burning full power toward me, forcing the vessel into a turn of its own. But as the nose came closer, the rest of the vessel fell away, buying me precious seconds. The AI reacted quickly but it wasn’t as simple as stopping the turn. The ship had a lot of mass, and maneuvering thrusters weren’t designed for instantaneous shifts—the acceleration in one