Golden Fleece

“Just routine maintenance,” he said. Even with his unreadable telemetry, I knew he was lying.

He banged things around for three minutes, twenty seconds, but I was unable to tell what he was up to. He then dropped something that made a clang followed by a second, quieter metallic sound. His vise grips had rubber handles: he must have dropped them and they’d bounced, banging the deck twice. He gathered them up. Just at the threshold of my hearing, I detected a squeaking as their jaws were drawn shut, but I couldn’t hear any impact from them closing, so he must have clamped them onto something soft. The fuel line leading to the pressure gauge was made of rubber tubing— that was probably it.

I could hear Aaron groaning a bit, and his EKG showed that he was exerting himself. A jet of amber liquid shot forward from under Pollux into my field of view. He must have used his pair of shears to cut the fuel line. The jet died quickly, so I guessed that he’d snipped it past where his vise grips were constricting the flow.

“Aaron,” I said, “I fear you are damaging Pollux. Please tell me what you are trying to accomplish.”

He ignored me, clanging away out of my sight. I’d figured out by now what he was up to: he was replacing the lander’s fuel gauge. “Aaron, perhaps it isn’t safe for you to be working on the fuel supply by yourself.”

Even Aaron’s poker-faced telemetry couldn’t hide his reaction to what he saw after he’d connected the new gauge and seen the reading. Pollux’s main fuel tank was only one-quarter full.

“They’re all like this, aren’t they, JASON?”

“Like what?”

“Dammit, you know what I’m talking about. Diana’s ship didn’t use a lot of fuel.” Even echoing inside the lander’s hull, his voice had a dangerous edge. “It never had much to begin with.”

“I’m sure you are mistaken, Aaron. Why would UNSA supply us with insufficient fuel?” I sent a brief radio signal to Pollux, activating the lander’s electrical system.

“These ships could never take off again,” said Aaron. “Not from a planetary gravity well. They’d be stranded the first time they landed.”

It wasn’t as bad as all that, of course. “There’s plenty of fuel for traveling around Colchis.”

“Just no way to make orbit again. Terrific.”

Pollux began to crouch down, its landing gear retracting into the hull.

“Jesus!” I could hear the metal clasps on Aaron’s tool belt banging against the floor as he rolled first to his left, then to his right. The lander came down more quickly. The distant boomerang wing tips were less than a half-meter off the hangar floor; the distended belly hung even lower.

“Damn you, JASON!” Judging by the pattern of clicks from the metal fasteners, Aaron had rolled into a ball, scrunching into the opening he’d made in the hull by removing the AA/9 access plate. A ricochet crack of breaking bone echoed through the hangar. Lower, lower, lo—Action interrupted, error level one. The legs stopped retracting. Aaron had managed to cut the hydraulic line with his shears. But I had him trapped, his chest constricted, his respiration ragged.

“Aaron!” Kirsten Hoogenraad’s voice sang out into the hangar. Dammit, when I’d pulled her telemetry five minutes ago, she’d been over four hundred meters from here! I should have checked more frequently.

Aaron banged something against the inside of Pollux. Kirsten rushed to the source of the clanking sound. She stopped, mouth agape, looking at the spectacle of a boomerang lander flopped on its belly at the end of the row of such craft standing erect. “Aaron?”

A muffled voice: “Kirs-ten—”

“Oh, Dr. Hoogenraad,” I said, quickly, smoothly, tones of concern in my voice. “He was monkeying around with Pollux’s fuel lines. He must have accidentally served the hydraulic lead to the landing gear.”

The voice again, wan and raspy: “No, it’s—”

Clang! The safeties on the outer hangar-deck wall kicked aside. Kirsten wouldn’t know the sound, but it was obvious from his EEG that Aaron recognized it. He fell silent.

“I need forklifts, stat,” Kirsten snapped.

The portals to the cargo holds dilated and four orange vehicles rolled out, floating above the floor, thanks to their pink antigravity underbellies. One of the forklifts was the same one I had used to chase Diana into the hangar six days before. I positioned the forklifts’ pink gravity-control prongs beneath the wings of Pollux and began to raise the lander. I had them lift it well above its normal resting position, so that I could clearly see Aaron. He was stuck in a fetal position, and there was blood on his face and right arm. Kirsten scuttled under to him. “Get me out from here,” he said.

“I should call for a stretcher—”

“Now! Get me out now!”

She gently grabbed his ankles and pulled. Aaron let out a yowl of pain as his right arm hit the floor.

“Your arm—”

“Later. We’ve got to get out of the hangar.”

“I hope Aaron will be okay,” I said.