War Angel: part six

Kate glided the mini-craft out of the War Angel’s cargo bay and down towards the surface of Pluto. Casting her gaze across the barren-looking rock where they had cast their academic fortunes, she wondered for not the first time if her entire university career was about to crash and burn, leaving her future as nothing but a burning husk of former potential. She had thrown in with Jack and Sarah, hoping that the insanity factor would add an additional element of risk to her project, enhancing her chances of graduating with honors. But so far her experiments had yielded little in the way of progress or data.

And her personal life, Kate thought. That was a major disaster.

It wasn’t like she didn’t know, or that she hadn’t heard the rumors whispered across campus. Ben Drake was the best-looking male student in the place, but he had left a trail of empty beds and broken hearts across the city. He was a user, a cad. Scuttlebutt brought stories of disease and terminated pregnancies. “No woman with even half a brain in her head,” Kate thought, “would even give that piece of excrement the time of day. What happened to self-esteem and good judgment? These girls make me sick.”

Now all Kate could do was laugh. “But not as sick as hypocrites do.”

All it took was the death of her grandmother, a bottle of aged tequila, and what seemed like genuinely caring conversation, and she had gone home with Drake that night. In the morning, she awoke alone, and the vomiting began in earnest. After a couple of days, the sick feeling subsided and the anger kicked in, and word got around quickly that Drake had better make himself scarce. Kate “F.A.” Stinson was on the warpath, and he was the target.

One evening in the dinner hall, she narrowly missed his head with a thrown plate of food and scalding hot cup of coffee. A week later, she chased him across the quad, planning on punching him in the kidneys until he needed a transplant, but he eluded her in the old tunnels beneath the student union. After that, she allowed her anger to subside. “It isn’t healthy,” she thought, “to carry it with me so. I was taught better than that.”

Indeed, Kate’s sensei had worked very hard to help her master the fire in her heart. When she arrived on campus, the first major thing she did was to find a nearby dojo where she could put her training back on track. Before leaving home, she had allowed her discipline to lapse, and she was without a trustable teacher.

“Well, that’s not technically true, I suppose” she told the owner of the campus dojo. “My former teacher and I had a… ‘falling out’ I guess you’d say.”

That falling out included six broken ribs and a punctured lung for her former sensei. A simple suggestion about different training techniques and bringing balance to her life exploded into an orgy of flying fists and feet, and suddenly the sensei realized that he had perhaps taught his prize student too well.

Discipline. It all came back to discipline. Yet the idea of doing to Ben Drake what she had done to her old teacher was a delicious one. How many drunk and vulnerable women had he taken advantage of? A hospital stay would certainly help him see the error of his ways.

Two weeks ago, the sick feeling returned. And it lingered. And lingered. The box she smuggled out of Dr. Gray’s stores confirmed her worst fears. That bastard. That total and completely worthless bastard.

Once again, Kate questioned her life’s choices. Particularly the one in which she chose to continue this mission, even after Drake was added as a last minute member of the crew. But she vowed to make sure that Drake regretted his own choices even more.

After a pinpoint landing, Kate put on an E.V.A. suit and headed toward the small research lab tent that she and Dr. Gray had set up on the planet’s surface. The experiments Kate was running (under the doctor’s watchful eye) were designed to study how radiation affected various bacteria and viruses in Pluto’s nitrogen/methane atmosphere as compared to how similar radiation doses affected them in Earth’s atmosphere. Changes had been slow to appear so far. With only two days left, Kate was beginning to despair of getting useable data. That was about to change.

“What the hell?” she said softly, peering through a high-powered electron microscope at a sample of salmonella. She refocused the device to a greater magnification. The little red bacteria had tripled in size since yesterday. What looked like small phalanges had formed along the edges, and they were pulsating in a strange rhythm. Kate stood up and stepped away from the table. This was something that required a second eye. Clicking on her radio comm, she signaled the mini-craft. “Dr. Gray? I need you to see something.”

Five kilometers away from Kate’s research tent, Gina Almond was following the sensor in her hand and rapidly losing track of time. What she was seeing was hardly possible, wasn’t it? Nothing like this could be natural. The odds of it were… well, they were astronomical.

“No,” she thought, “I’m doing this right. And I’ve checked and re-checked this thing multiple times.” The implications were staggering. From what the instrument was telling her, almost 15% of this planet’s mostly ice upper mantle was actually hollow.

Her comm. sparked to life. “Hime, this is F.A., do you read?” Gina shook herself out of her reverie. Turning off the scanner, she placed it on the E.V.A. suit’s belt, and then pressed the suit’s comm. to respond. “Go ahead, F.A.”

“Hime, we have a quarantine situation that needs to be returned to the War Angel. How close are you to being ready to return to ship?”

Gina activated the digital readout on the inside of her helmet to get a look at her suit’s performance. The numbers scared her a bit. “Umm. I guess I should go now. In fact, can you come and pick me up? I’m reading less than 45 minutes of air recycling capability left, and I think I’m a few klicks from you. Not… not sure I can make it back in time.”

A second voice ripped through the comm. channel. “Dammit, girl! I’ve warned you about this!” Dr. Gray yelled. “Stay put. We’ll be there in a few. Leave your comm. channel on so we can track you.”

The young explorer took the surveying scanner off of her belt and went back to work. It would likely be fifteen minutes or so before the mini-craft tracked her down. That was fifteen minutes more of data that she didn’t want to miss out on.