Chapter 7

Something Is Coming...

"C'mon, Marcus... give me some sort of clue!"

Esme watched the greenish arm of the sensor sweep as it circled the monitor in the instrument panel. For four hours she had kept one eye on that screen and the other on what she could see through the shielded pilot port in front of her, but neither view had shown her anything resembling the form of a man in a space suit. 'As if they could' she thought, frustrated. 'There's no way my eyes could detect Marcus' suit without the luckiest of circumstances, and the sensors are picking up so much chaff that a hundred runabouts like this one might go undetected! Trying to pick something the size and shape of a man out of this maze is like trying to pick out a single ice crystal in the rings of Saturn! It's a goddamn waste of energy!'

Esme slammed her fist against the arm of the pilot's chair, furious. She had exchanged progress reports with the master chief every hour, and watched as the countdown clock in her console ticked backward toward 4:00:00 - and time for another report.

'Might as well get it over with, ' Esme thought, flicking over the comm button to open the channel. "Rescue two, this is rescue one, over." During their first progress report, Esme realized that neither runabout had ever been given a name, and had made a note to herself to christen them at the first opportunity after this crisis. However, given their mission, "rescue one" and "rescue two" seemed more than adequate call signs for the moment.

Esme waited a several moments for the chief to respond, but heard nothing. "Rescue one, this is rescue two. Chief McGee, please respond."

Almost ten seconds passed in silence, and Esme began to wonder if something might have happened to McGee and his runabout... something that might pull her away from the search for Marcus and into another rescue mission altogether.

However, those thoughts were blasted away when McGee's voice came back clearly through the overheads. "Sorry about that, Captain. I had a reading that seemed promising, and was concentrating on locating it. Turned out to be one of our waste pods, though, so I have no progress to report on this end. And yourself?"

"I've had even less success than you, Chief. Given the calculations we made before we left the ship, we should be approximately the same amount of distance from the ship as Marcus would be now. However, his location within a three dimensional search grid could still put him far away from us, and I'm convinced the sensors would have to be right on top of him to pick up his suit. In other words, we'd better pray for some luck... because a four leaf clover might be easier to find than a man lost in the midst of this debris."

"Well then, Captain, perhaps we should start using our instincts a little less than our instruments. Our boy out there would know all these things, and would look for ways to give us a chance to find him. What we have to figure out is how he would do it, and how we could detect it. I say we brainstorm along that path for a bit, and see if we can't work out a better solution than we have now."

"Chief, I think you're right. Since he was put in charge of hull EVAs, Marcus and I have talked occasionally about the possibilities of needing to rescue crew members from different types of situations." Esme paused a moment, thinking back to one of those conversations, with Marcus tracing little circles around her nipples as he spoke of detecting a single space suit amongst the debris surrounding the ship, driving her to distraction with desire even as he was trying to make his point. Though she could not clearly remember all of the conversation, a key word seemed to stand out in her mind. "Chief, is it possible divert heat from inside a suit and direct it in a way that could be detected with our sensors?"

This time it was McGee who paused, and, though the silence stretched longer than Esme's impatience could readily accept, she didn't interrupt. Finally, the master chief answered, "Yes, it is possible Captain. Because of its intended use for extended periods in different environments, Lt. Bird's suit controls would allow him to shunt heat from his suit's interior through vents, in order to keep him from overheating at times of strenuous physical activity. He could direct the suit to shunt all heat directly to space... but, by doing that, he'd be exposing himself to some risk, because his own body temperature would be likely to start dropping, and he'd begin to suffer the effects of exposure and hypothermia."