第23页
His heads-up display flickered.
Kelly spoke over the COM, her transmission filled with noise. "Your IFF tag is breaking up. It shows your position in multiple regions. Abort the recon. If your electronics malfunction—"
The COM broke into a hiss of static.
"I've seen enough," Kurt said.
Static answered him.
"I'm heading back."
He tapped his altitude thrusters to spin around. The switch worked, but there was no action from the T-PACK nozzles.
Kurt released the controls. Triple redundancy in the processors or not—if his T-PACK was affected by the nearby radiation, the last thing he wanted to do was give it a command to fire.
He grasped the steel beam, and bracing, he waved back to his team. He couldn't see them out there, but he knew they were watching him. He knew they wouldn't let him down. With Kelly and Fred at his back, he could have been at the edge of hell, and they would have gotten him out.
Of course, with a malfunctioning, partially deconstructed
Shaw-Fujikawa drive within spitting distance… that might be exactly where he stood.
He spotted motion in the dark, a snaking orange-and-white striped rope and gyrating blob on one end: Kelly's rescue line. Perfect. No worries now.
The steel beam sparked. Kurt reflexively let go, and arcs played across the alloy—radiation inducing a charge.
Every display in his helmet exploded into static. Rows of status lights blinked amber, then all red. Life support, hydraulics, power all fluctuated… and failed.
He had to get out of here before that Shaw-Fujikawa trans-light drive completely shut down his suit.
The basic laws of physics still worked here. Action and reaction. Energy transfer and momentum.
He pushed off the beam, back to Fred and Kelly—hoping to grab the rescue line on his way. If he missed, they would still find him. The only thing he cared about right now was getting away from the source of his suit's malfunction.
He drifted. With his suit shut down, all he could do now was coast. And wait.
Lightning stuck. He was ground zero, and thunder kicked Kurt forward like a rag doll.
He'd absorbed a near-direct grenade explosion once, and it had felt something like this. Only this particular explosion hadn't been near him; it had been on his armor.
His first thought was sniper fire—an ambush. But then his vision cleared and he saw stars, the dull red binary suns, and Station Delphi whirling around.
His T-PACK had busted a line. He could feel the propellant gushing out… even though the tanks had been designed with redundant shutoff valves, and emergency self-sealing foam to prevent such a decompression.
He heard CPO Mendez's voice in his head, again: "Start tumbling in this gear, start praying."
"Mayday," he called out. "Suit malfunction! Mayday!"
Kurt had no idea where he was, where his team was now positioned, or how fast he was rocketing away from them.
Of course, they didn't open radio channels on this mission. Point-to-point single-beam lasers carried their COM signal. Gyrating out of control, any signal that hit a tiny Spartan-sized target in the vast volume of open space would be nothing short of a miracle.