TANKER GRAHAM

“Hey, Tavalera, look sharp now, we’re starting the rendezvous maneuver.”

Raoul Tavalera grumbled an obscenity under his breath. I know we’re starting the frigging rendezvous maneuver, he answered the skipper silently. Why the fuck else are we out here?

The Graham was little more than a pair of powerful fusion engines and a habitation pod that housed its crew of two: the hardassed skipper and Tavalera, who was counting the days until his obligatory Public Service duty was finished and he could return to his native New Jersey. Once he got back, he planned to kiss the ground and never, ever leave the surface of planet Earth again.

Cramped little Graham towed three enormous spheres full of the hydrogen and helium isotopes that fed fusion engines. They would soon be attached to the approaching habitat; once that task was finished, Graham and her two-person crew could return to the relative safety and dubious luxury of station Gold, in orbit around massive Jupiter.

The skipper was buckled into her command chair, her ugly, pasty face almost completely hidden beneath her sensor helmet. All Tavalera could see of her was her mean, lantern jaw and the cruddy coveralls that she’d been wearing ever since they had left the space station, four days ago.

When Tavalera had first come out to Jupiter he had been excited by the prospect of skimming the Jovian clouds. He pictured a daredevil operation, diving into the upper fringes of Jupiter’s swirling clouds, scooping those isotopes out of the planet’s incredibly deep atmosphere. Risky and exciting — and vitally necessary. Jovian fusion fuels fed civilization’s electrical power generators and nuclear rockets all across the solar system, from Earth out to the Asteroid Belt and beyond.

Back then, Tavalera had envisioned an exhilarating life of thrilling missions into Jupiter’s clouds and swarms of adoring chicks begging for his attention. The reality was boringly different. The screaming dives into the maelstrom of clouds were done by robot spacecraft, teleoperated from the safety of station Gold. Tavalera’s only flight missions were routine ferrying jobs, transferring fuel tanks to ships from the Earth/ Moon region or the Belt. And the women aboard the space station chose their men by rank, which meant that Tavalera — a mere grubby engineer doing his Public Service tour of duty — was quite low on the totem pole. Besides, he growled inwardly, most of the women were ugly, and the few pretty ones were likely to be dykes.

He began to count the missions, count the days and hours and minutes until he could be released and go home. This mission had been particularly dull; four frigging days towing three enormous fuel containers, plodding out to a rendezvous point to meet the approaching habitat, on its way to Saturn. Tavalera’s own coveralls stunk with four days’ accumulated crud. The skipper had tweaked him about it, asked him why he couldn’t take a shower with his clothes on. Bitch! he thought.

Now all he had to do was sit tight and watch the control panel displays while the skipper maneuvered those three huge tanks to the approaching habitat. It had been a difficult mission; they’d used up most of Graham’s own fuel climbing up over Jupiter’s north pole to get clear of the fifty million — electron-volt synchrotron radiation that hugged the planet’s equator. Then they had to maneuver farther from Jupiter than any of his earlier missions had gone, a full twenty diameters upsun, outside the bowshock of the planet’s enormous magnetosphere and its own fearsome radiation. Downsun the magnetosphere’s tail stretched all the way out to Saturn’s orbit.

The main display screen showed the habitat in a false-color infrared image. Tavalera looked up at the observation window and saw it dimly outlined in sunlight that glinted off its long, tubular body. To him it looked like a section of sewer pipe floating silently through empty space.

“Releasing tank number one,” said the skipper, mechanically.

Tavalera saw that the release light winked on, green. Cranking up the magnification on his screen, he watched a small army of technicians in spacesuits and one-man transfer flitters hovering at the far end of the habitat, waiting to grapple the spherical tank and attach it to the flying sewer pipe.

Tank one went smoothly, as did tank two.

Then the skipper said, “Uh-oh.”

Tavalera’s heart clutched in his chest. Trouble.

“Got a hangup on tank three,” she said calmly. “You’ll have to go outside and clear it.”

Tavalera had been dreading that possibility. He didn’t mind flying through the dead vacuum of space inside a ship, even a gnat-sized one like Graham. But being out there in nothing more than a flimsy space-suit — that was scary.

The skipper raised the sensor helmet off her face. “Well, brightboy, didn’t you hear me?” she snapped. “Get into your suit! We’ve got to clear that hangup before that bugger of a habitat sails out of our range.”

We, Tavalera muttered to himself. She said “we” have to clear the snag. But she means me. She’s staying in here.

Reluctantly he unstrapped and pushed himself off his chair, floating to the rear of the module where the spacesuits were stored. It took only twenty minutes or so to get into the suit and connect all the lines, but from the way the skipper swore at him it seemed like hours. She came back to check him out, and did it so swiftly that Tavalera knew she couldn’t have done it right. Then she shoved him toward the airlock.

“Get going, chump.”

Gaeta felt hungry, tired, sweaty, and generally dismal as he waited for the technicians to open the airlock’s inner hatch. Looking down on them from inside the armored suit, he wondered what was taking the idiotas tarugas so long to simply tap the right numbers on the airlock’s wall-mounted keyboard.

Fritz pressed one hand to his earplug and muttered something into the pin mike at his lips.

“What’s the holdup?” Gaeta demanded.

“Safety director,” said Fritz. “They have a team of people EVA and they want to make certain they’re nowhere near this airlock when we open it.”

“Maldito.I’m not going outside, I’m just going to stand in the open airlock. Haven’t you told them that?”

“They know—” Fritz tilted his head and pressed at the earplug again. “Say again?” He listened, nodded, then looked up at Gaeta. “Five more minutes. Then we can cycle the airlock.”

“Five minutes,” Gaeta grumbled.

Holly stepped in front of him, looking almost like a little elf as she peered up toward the visor of his helmet.

“Is there any way I can get some of this chili to you?” she asked with a smile. “You must be starved in there.”

He grinned back at her, wondering how much of his face she could see through the heavily tinted visor. Silently he thanked her for her unwitting beneficence to him. Gaeta had tried for more than a year to hitch a ride on the Saturn-bound habitat. Then Wendell had called from the Astro corporate headquarters and in less than two weeks everything had been arranged. All he had to do was keep an eye on this skinny kid, which was no hardship at all. In fact, as Gaeta looked down on Holly, he realized that she wasn’t skinny; she was slim, trim, and altogether pretty damned attractive. Una guapa chiquita.

“I’m starving, all right,” he said to Holly, “but there’s no way to open this tin can without ruining the test we want to make.”

She nodded, a little glumly.

Fritz abruptly waved her away from Gaeta as he said to the technicians, “Open the inner hatch.”

“I thought you said five minutes,” Gaeta snapped, surprised.

As one of the techs tapped out the hatch’s code, Fritz said tightly, “Five minutes until we can open the outer hatch. We can get ready for that now. I haven’t had any supper, either.”