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War's Oversight

Chapter 06

For Sarah, it wasn't the contrary motions of flying that sent her stomach to lurching. She'd led an active youth and an active adulthood, with her fair share of pleasant experiences on a swing or, more rarely, an amusement park ride like a rollercoaster. Certainly, some of her less pleasant experiences with flying had sensations which resembled those associated with the latter. No, it was the vibrations.

As smooth as some of her flights had been in the past, she reckoned that sitting in a lightly-padded chair made of a stiff composite material, which was itself rigidly bolted to the fuselage of a sub-orbital spacecraft powered by rocket motors, was not the kind of thing you would do if you were trying to hold your hands steady and practice needlepoint or eye surgery. Or read a book, in fact - Sarah detested flying on the colonial shuttle service for this reason as well. Anything a passenger tried to look at, from computer screen to printed word, would be vibrating so strongly out of phase with their eyeballs that a blur would be the best they could manage to see. Listening to music was also an exercise in futility, since in subsonic flight the shuttle's engines made enough noise to defeat even the most devoted fans of the musical arts. Those who wished to listen regardless of damage to their hearing might miss a critical announcement such as "Eject!" or "Brace!"

It irked Sarah to no end that this was only a drastic problem on Epsilon Kappa 3's shuttle, and had been experienced almost nowhere else. Certainly the colony's dedicated pilot, Capt. Rosa Gutierrez, had been equipped at her pilot's seat with the best vibration damping that could be managed, under the circumstances, and her co-pilot likewise. For passengers and cargo, however, the vibrations produced by a series of aging engines and an equally aging spacecraft would need to be endured as best as could be managed under different circumstances. Different priorities, Sarah thought to herself.

At the very least, she wasn't freezing to death, what with the temperature outside the shuttle, the early morning's departure, and the fact that the outside airspeed was several hundred kilometers per hour. Her cold-weather suit was lightweight, but heavily padded and somewhat awkward to move around in. Her suit gloves, while warm, were too large and unwieldy for anything more than ... well, she thought, grabbing the ejection loop, I guess.

She found she had little else to do except to lean into her flight harness, hug the top portion of her rucksack against her knees, sink the front of her goggles into the softer parts of the rucksack's outer pockets, and attempt to doze off.

Before long, however, she heard the voice of Gutierrez from her communications earpiece, which was uncomfortably jammed into her right ear canal by the heavy, soundproof ear protection she was wearing. "Palmer, this is Gutierrez. We're approaching the drop point at Grid Square 43-34. Stand by to disembark in sixty."

Sarah attempted to tuck her chin toward her collarbone, and failed. All the same, she felt she could make herself understood. "Roger," she emphasized, speaking to her communicator mike. She straightened in her seat, put one hand on her rucksack's carrying straps, and found the release latch for her flight harness with the other. She felt the forces on her feet and her back shift slightly as the shuttle slowed. She waited.

"Clear to disembark," came Gutierrez's voice again. Sarah quickly flipped the release latch at her chest and tossed the top portion of the harness over her head as the remainder retracted into the seat. She quickly hauled her rucksack behind her as she stood up.

"On the move," Sarah indicated.

"I've got a nice piece of level ground for you directly below, Palmer." Gutierrez elaborated. "Altitude is three-zero. 'Make sure you send everything back up when you're done. I've got two minutes before this stop makes me late, eh?"

"Thanks, Rosa," Sarah offered. She strode a little faster.

On passing through the only bulkhead separating the crew compartment from the cargo compartment, Sarah quickly made her way over to where her remaining equipment was stored. The communications repeater, packed into its (hopefully vibration-proof) sealed container, was an unimpressive cube about a meter on a side, but Sarah barely had time to check to see that it was still anchored to the deck before she neatly dropped her rucksack beside it, grabbed one of the thick support cables connecting the deck with the ceiling, and slapped a gloved hand on a nearby oversized red button, one of four such, which was helpfully marked "DOWN."

The oppressive noise of the engines became almost unbearably loud as the deck began to descend, revealing the landscape outside and the clouds of dust that the wash from the shuttle's engines were throwing up. The platform which acted as the shuttle's winched loading bay took Sarah and her gear down at a slow but steady rate. She knew intellectually that she was clear of any danger posed by the engines operating nearby, but she ducked nonetheless and crouched near her rucksack, feeling better for playing things safe.

As the noise of the engines diminished slightly, she felt a slight jolt as the platform made initial contact with the ground and the winch slowed her descent incrementally. Once on the ground, however, the platform came to a halt and the support cable gripped in her hand slackened very, very slightly. She quickly found her legs, stood up again, and neatly tossed her rucksack to land on the ground nearby. As she turned back, she grabbed the oversized handle that served as the release lever for the communications repeater, and cranked it sharply to one side. The anchor points for the large cube, which kept it tethered to a small block mounted on the platform, and against which it had been sitting, neatly snapped open. Sarah glanced down to locate the cargo release control, found the yellow-and-black striped panel a quarter-pace away, and stomped on it with her foot.

The block, which only reached perhaps halfway up the cube, began to slide inexorably toward the edge of the platform, taking the cube with it as though it were a load of snow in front of a plow. In seconds, the cube was sitting in the dust next to Sarah's rucksack. She checked near where she'd initially found the button marked "DOWN," located what she was looking for, and hit the button marked "UP-EMPTY" before taking a quick few steps backward.

The platform was fairly jerked into the sky, meeting the belly of the shuttle in seconds. With this, the shuttle began to rise, almost as if Gutierrez was taking Sarah's safe descent for granted.

"Clear," Sarah indicated, taking a knee by her rucksack and now looking fixedly at the ground. "Thanks for the ride, Rosa."

"Anytime, Palmer," came back Gutierrez's reply. As Sarah had come to expect from the pilot's unusual sense of humor, her voice took on a shading of glee. "Thank you for flying OK-Air. Remember not to look directly into the flame." There came another sudden burst of engine noise as, Sarah presumed, Gutierrez goosed the shuttle's throttle.

She was aware of the sound of the shuttle's departure rapidly fading, and soon she was left in silence, with only the empty landscape around her, the sound of Epsilon Kappa 3's morning winds, and the occasional hiss of dust against her suit fabric.

She took a moment to remove her ear protection, glad that she could get rid of the cumbersome equipment and stow them in one of her pockets. For a moment, she did nothing but straighten and stand, looking to the far horizon in one direction, and then the other. She winced slightly, however, and gingerly wiggled her communications earpiece in her right ear until it was seated more comfortably. Then, she turned to the first order of business, as far as she was concerned.

The communications repeater, which she hoped had survived the trip intact, was sitting on what she judged to be suitable terrain, and luckily, too - there was no way she could move its half-tonne weight without help. It was, like a number of securely-packaged and expensive pieces of self-deploying and autonomous equipment, a simple container that looked like a cube, but with thick seams along each primary edge and several of the faintest of vertical, ribbed grooves running from the base to the top, on each of the four sides. For the easily-distracted, the words "This Side Up" were neatly stenciled on the top face.

Sarah knelt at the base of the container and studied the single control panel on its top. At the touch of her fingers in the area marked "POWER" the small display blinked and then lit up with the words, "EMCR 278 Ready." She touched the area marked "DIAGNO" and the words disappeared again, replaced by a slowly animating bar to mark the progress of the repeater's self-diagnostic. She adjusted her position briefly, trying to ease the ache forming in her calves, and waited patiently as the repeater finished. The words, "Diagnostic OK" appeared reassuringly.

She shifted her boots by a fraction, leaned forward slightly, and pressed the area on the control panel marked "DEPLOY." She held her hand in place as the display began to animate another progress bar, this one filling rapidly. As it reached completion of its process, the repeater began to emit a hazard siren, at which Sarah released the control panel, rose to her feet, and stepped back a few paces. A faint smile touched her lips, as she'd seen this task done a few times but it had never failed to give her a small feeling of accomplishment.

The container neatly split on all its edges and began to open, not unlike a simple flower blossoming from a bud. The top of the container neatly slid to one side and then folded itself down so that it seemed to replace one of the sides - all of which had folded flat to reveal a coiled bundle of what looked like a double strand of wire or cable. In another moment, the sides split along a pair of the outermost grooves and neatly flipped the remainder of each side away from the body of the apparatus. This happened again, and again, each time with the remainder getting thinner and thinner. At last, the final transformation was completed, and the thinnest section of each side was a fair distance away from the center of the apparatus with the cable stretched out to each end and back.

What had been a neat cube of ribbed metallic grey plating was now, to appearances, a flat, amateurish sculpture of a four-pointed compass rose, with a kind of curious stack of electronics equipment in the middle.

In another moment, a thin segment of antenna rose out of the middle of the repeater, followed by another segment telescoping after it. This went on for some time, the repeater slowly cranking its most sensitive and delicate part up into the sky above, with the base growing fatter and fatter with each iteration. At what Sarah thought must be the one-third mark, the cable running out to each arm of the base began to rise with the antenna, tethered to a somewhat bulkier segment with attachment points.

In minutes, the deployment was complete. At almost a hundred meters tall, the communications repeater's antenna tip was neck-craningly high in the sky, and thin enough to be almost invisible. Close to, it resembled something like a wireframe drawing of an ancient Egyptian obelisk. Unlike something made of stone, however, the wind gusts on this flat part of the planet made it creak very, very slightly and deflect to one side. As she watched, she reckoned that the antenna tip might have gently bowed a meter or so, as far away as it was, to one side before returning to a position that was more or less plumb. For the materials of today, she thought, I'd be unlucky indeed if it bent or snapped off.

She bought her right hand to her communications earpiece and pressed a finger against an area on the side. After a few seconds, she heard a faint chirp in her right ear, and a brief salutary, "Comms. on-line," confirmation. After a pause, she heard, "Detecting transceivers - please stand by ..."

She took a moment to kneel in the dust again, and check over her rucksack. As she suspected, none of the pockets or pouches she'd meticulously packed, sealed, and then wired shut, had opened in transit. Aside from the inescapable coating of dust which the rucksack had received when the shuttle had fired up its engines, it was relatively clean and unmarred, and the main straps and buckles had no fraying or cracks. Except the cross-chest buckle, she remarked silently, and that will last a few days.

Her earpiece chirped again. "Primary transceiver 01 ID 'New Boston Ops' has minimal signal quality. New transceiver ID model EMCR 278 detected - signal quality excellent. Do you wish to connect?"

She stood again, and ducked her chin toward her throat. "Connect - as - relay," she emphasized.

"Connecting ..." her earpiece indicated. "Connection established. Using alternate transceiver 07 ID 'Oscar-Kilo-2-7-8.' Do you wish to reconfigure?"

"No," she said, firmly. Her earpiece chirped once, obediently, and was silent. She moistened her lips briefly, and then took a breath. "Base, this is Palmer, relaying through Oscar-Kilo-2-7-8, do you copy?"

There was a pause, after which she heard clearly in her earpiece the sound of some familiar background chatter in Ops accompanying one of the duty staff at Comms. "Palmer, this is Base, reading you loud and clear - over."

Sarah relaxed a fraction, and smiled to herself. "Base, I'm reading you loud and clear. Repeater is functioning normally. Preparing for departure, over."

"Good luck, Palmer." Base replied. "Did you want a comms. check every 30 minutes?"

Sarah chuckled. "Only if you have the time," she replied. "Comms. checks every hour would be fine. I need to catch up on my reading anyway."

"Fine by us," Base indicated. "Try to stay warm, Palmer."

Sarah made a wry smile to herself and hefted her rucksack by one hand - easy enough to do once or twice, but still a notable percentage of her own body weight. "Won't be a problem, Base," she replied. "Palmer out."

She carefully swung the rucksack up into position over her right shoulder, and then awkwardly managed to snake her bulky, suited left arm through its own strap before tightening both straps securely. The wind and the dust were hardly noticeable except around her collar and the edges of her goggles, where the cold-weather suit didn't quite reach. Her ears didn't feel too cold. Yet.

Raising her left forearm to her face, she peered through the somewhat-transparent material of her cold-weather suit to see that her wristcomp appeared to be operating normally. Satisfied that she had the support of her most useful possession, she reached up and touched the side of her communications earpiece again.

Ducking her chin once more, she spoke in the direction of her mike. "Computer," she demanded. After a moment, she continued. "Audio. Echo on." Obediently, she heard her earpiece chirp once and intone the words, "Echo is on."

She continued. "Navigation ... compass ... on," she said, to which her earpiece parroted back what she'd asked, and her wristcomp lit up with a compass heading. "HUD ... on. Compass ... audio ... note ... ortho." Her goggles lit up with a brief display of her current heading, 347 degrees magnetic, and then went dark again.

With her rucksack on her back and in her cold-weather suit, she imagined that from a sufficient distance she would've looked like a disoriented and slightly bloated penguin, as she carefully kept her feet together and waddled to turn around completely to her left. However, her equipment dutifully spoke into her ear when she was facing the appropriate directions, giving her "West ... South ... East ... North," when she expected each.

"Navigation," she continued, "position ... GPS ... on."

Her earpiece chirped a few times in succession before the audio came on again, advising, "Please stand by ..." As she impatiently stood, trying to balance against the occasional wind gust and the discomfort of being stationary with weight on her back, her earpiece eventually elaborated by saying, "GPS quality degraded. Additional referents required."

Fucksakes, she growled to herself. She made her way over to the side of the repeater, and poked at the sealed control panel mounted on the side for a few moments, her suit gloves making the task noticeably harder. Eventually, she found the information she was looking for, and she carefully mouthed the pattern of digits a few times to cement them in her mind. She bent slightly, glanced at her feet, straightened, and then took a deliberate step back.

"Navigation," she attempted, "position ... GPS ... add marker."

"Specify marker data," her earpiece requested.

"Grid ... 4 ... 3 ... 8 ... 3 ... 4 ... 4," she supplied. "Transceiver 0-7, callsign Oscar-Kilo-2-7-8. Distance," she glanced at her feet again, quickly. "Two," she estimated.

"Checking ..." her earpiece advised. Then: "Marker added. Transceiver 0-7 at heading 0-niner-four, distance one point eight."

She brought her left wrist up again, relieved that the numbers showed her as heading 095-ish degrees magnetic. And, she thought, _unless my legs are fooling me, I'm about two paces from the center of this glorified flagpole._She cinched the straps of her rucksack a fraction tighter, then: "Navigation ... estimate error."

"Checking ..." her earpiece advised again. "GPS error estimated at two-zero meters."

Decent, she thought,except the further I get from this repeater, the greater the error will get unless I happen to have the satellite pass overhead. She sighed, and then turned herself until her wristcomp read a steady 2-7-6, the heading to her destination on the far horizon, and started off.

Almost as an afterthought, she touched the side of her earpiece again. "Media ... Music ... Play-random."

She felt her steps settle into a rhythm as Mark Knopfler began to play his guitar for her.