The Ouroboros Wave by Jyouji Hayashi, Jim Hubbert Page A

climbing hooks. The low gravity made it easy to recover if he missed a hook, but after missing one five times, he knew he was out of his depth. This was getting dangerous. He found himself wishing the emergency docking port had been situated a bit more conveniently. He toggled his comm and said to no one in particular, “Ten-minute break.”
    The logistics module’s docking port had been built for cargo shuttles to use while the station was under construction—it wasn’t in routine use. For reasons Tatsuya could not recall, the port was oriented ninety degrees to Amphisbaena’s rotation, forcing spacecraft to roll in order to synchronize with the station beneath them prior to docking. Because this port had only been used during the construction phase, the designers had never thought to equip it with remote access capability. Someone had to prep it from inside. At a time like this, the design wasn’t very user friendly. Tatsuya spent his break cursing this lack of foresight.
    “Chief? Ten minutes.”
    “I know, I know.” Tatsuya started moving again. Later he realized from Kurokawa’s tone that he hadn’t just been reminding Tatsuya of the time. He’d been checking if his chief was still alive.
    Not far past the halfway point climbing became much easier. Tatsuya discovered that propelling himself tens of meters at a time was more efficient than proceeding hook by hook. It seemed Kurokawa had made the same discovery. The Coriolis effect was weaker here, and there was little drift to correct for. Soon he was able to cover a hundred meters in one go. He had to stay alert; were it not for his experience, he could easily have built up enough momentum to end up crashing into the hull of the module. But he and Kurokawa had EVA’d so many times that compensating for changing inertia was second nature.
    Tatsuya reached the hatch of the logistics module. It opened easily. Gravity was now close to zero. His body was exhausted, but he wasn’t feeling it much in the microgravity. He released the east lift’s latch, leaving the west lift for Kurokawa. They had both climbed here, each with a mission to fulfill.
    The emergency lift consisted of a plastic frame at the end of a carbon nanotube wire. Releasing the latch triggered a spring-loaded ejection mechanism. Slowly the lift began its forty-kilometer descent toward East Habitat.
    “Lift on its way, gentlemen. It’ll be with you shortly.” Tatsuya went to work prepping the docking port.
9
     
    STOPPING THE TRUCK was no easy task—Catherine was moving far faster than a jet aircraft. The truck sped past the broad central boarding area of East Platform almost before she noticed. By the time she finally came to a stop, she was five kilometers past the platform.
    Catherine clambered from the truck, taking only a small tool pack, and started back toward the platform with carefully timed, leaping strides. She felt an overwhelming sense of isolation; the nearest human was three thousand kilometers away. The ring was only five meters wide. If she veered from this path, she would be outside the human world, a satellite of Kali.
    The stars moved visibly with the ring’s motion. Bounding across this dark gray ribbon suspended in the void, it was difficult to believe that the events of the past few days had actually happened. Instead she felt she’d always been here, circling the ring forever in utter solitude.
    Seeing the ruins of East Platform brought her back to reality. She reduced her pace to a slow walk, carefully bleeding off inertia to avoid stressing her knees. The structures on the outer surface of the ring had been ripped apart by the truck and the body of Graham Chapman. The structures on the inner surface had escaped damage. That was where she would find Shiva.
    Catherine went to the hatch closest to Shiva, lifted it, and climbed through the ring and into the inner core. Shiva’s console on the surface of the ring had been destroyed in the accident. But despite the