Spin Vector Symmetry

"The control room has a week's air if the air scrubber's working, which it isn't. Even before you arrived, the air felt clammy. Now there are two of us, who knows how long it'll last?"

"That's not our only problem," Danielle said. "You know there's a military cruiser on its way."

"Yes, but I can't see how they'll rescue anyone from Carina Sunspark if Mu Carinae is still emitting electromagnetic pulses."

"The cruiser has new orders. They're not going to try to evacuate people from Sunspark. They're going to blow up MC10."

"I see," Ellen said with a nonchalance that Danielle admired. "How far away are they?"

"Six hours or so," Danielle said. "We have a choice. We can conserve our oxygen by not talking, so we can survive to get blown up by a nuclear missile. Or we can use up the oxygen and probably die of asphyxiation."

"I vote for asphyxiation. I'd rather have a nice chat than sit here in silence, waiting to die," Ellen said bravely.

3Spin vector symmetry

Danielle was surprised that Ellen wanted to talk. She assumed her boss disliked her just as much as she disliked her boss. On the other hand, neither woman wanted to sit in silence waiting to die.

There was something else as well. Ellen put on a brave face but she was clearly nervous. She may joke about dying in the control room, but someone to talk to would stave off the impending terror.

Danielle made a wide beam with her laser penknife and lit up the control room. It was a green metal sphere, with a flat magnetic floor and welded panels. There were red escape hatches in six directions, an instrument panel with a chair and a flat wall behind for holoprojected images. It was blank now.

Dust floated in the light from Danielle's laser-knife, but there was no gravity to pull the particles in any direction, so they hung as clouds in the clammy air, a sign of sterile inertia. It made the women want to speak, to show they were alive.

Danielle sat on the dead instrument desk while Ellen took the chair.

"If we're going to have a nice chat," Ellen said, "we should clear the air first."

"We should," Danielle agreed.

"You think I'm incompetent," Ellen said.

"I think you're in the wrong job."

"It's the same thing."

"It's not, really. I've only recently thought about it, but there are two kinds of jobs: doing-jobs and talking-jobs."

"I see. Doing-jobs are real jobs and talking-jobs are just a way for useless management drones like me to make themselves seem important."

Again Danielle was surprised at her hard-as-nails boss. The woman who wrapped the men around her little finger and had the big puppy-dog, Stephen Oakshott, licking her hand. The woman who arrogantly justified sending Danielle's boys into danger. It seemed absurd to Danielle that she, a naïve and impressionable academic, was the tough one. It made her consider Ellen in a different light.

"I'm sorry, Ellen. You're not a useless management drone. The fact that you're here proves that. And I had no right to accuse you of endangering my boys just to save money."

"You spoke to them?"

"I did."

"You were right. That's exactly what I was doing."

"I know, but they approved, and it's their decision."

"Very well: apology accepted. And I apologise for patronizing you. I thought you were just another spoiled academic who thought she knew better than me how to do my job."

"I didn't mean to sound like that, though it's true I thought you were heartless. I guess I've a lot to learn about commercial reality."

"Now you're making nice just because we're going to die in a few hours. ... You're entitled to be self-assured, Danielle. I've never met a physicist as brilliant as you. I know how pleased Stephen Oakshott was to recruit you. He said you're a real catch: the youngest woman PhD ever in astrophysical engineering. He says you'll be one of his best egg-heads."

It was completely surreal, having a relatively polite but revealing discussion with a woman whom Danielle thought she hated. So long as neither of them admitted how absurd it was, they could get to know each other and even make friends in the last few hours of their lives.

Danielle looked closely at the lovely face of her boss and realised that Ellen understood the convention. It made her respect the woman even more. It also raised a serious but probing question.

"Don't answer if you prefer not to, Ellen, but why do you use your beauty to get your own way in the firm?"

"You think that's what I do?"

"Don't you?"

"I like the company of men."

"You have them all eating out of your hand."

Ellen smiled. "Which you disapprove of?"

"I think I should disapprove because it undermines the work women do to be taken seriously."

"That's the academic feminist speaking. You've come from an environment where women are mollycoddled and privileged. Now you're in the real world, different rules apply. Some women embrace the challenge, happy to be judged on their merits, not by their sex. Besides, you're only twenty-three. Wait 'til you're forty and then re-examine your progressive ideals."

"That's unanswerable," Danielle protested with a smile. "I may not live to be forty - nor even twenty-four."

"Think of it this way. Tall men are more likely to be senior managers than short men. It's something to do with our innate perceptions of authority, to which women are more prone than men. But you don't see campaigns by short men demanding equal representation on boards of directors."

"I understand. So if a woman uses her looks to get ahead, that's no different from a man using his height. But there's no deliberate discrimination against short men. It's inadvertent. We don't realise we're doing it."

"And there hasn't been any discrimination against women for hundreds of years, either, so why are there still feminists whinging when all so-called inequality reflects only the natural preferences of each sex?"

"Whinging?" Danielle said, smiling.

"I'm sorry. We were getting on so well and now I've offended you."

"I don't offend so easily."

"Good for you. So here's a new topic. You should die your hair."

"I went purple once, in college."

"That sounds fun. It suits your dark-blue eyes."

"I admit I got a bit of attention, but it was back to boring straight mousy-brown when it was time to apply for post-grad places."

"Try wavy and platinum. It'll change your attitude."

"What's wrong with my attitude?" Danielle was amused.

"Nothing, except I suspect you're rarely unhappy."

"Almost never."

"Your hair should express your sunny disposition."

"All right, I'll try it when I get back to Earth. Any other advice for me?"

"Only that you should revel in being a woman and never resent men for their protectiveness."

"You're a mind-reader, Ellen. That's how I felt when I first went on a job with the boys."

"For how long?"

"About a day. Now I like that the lads call me 'Princess' and try to protect me. ... But they couldn't stop me coming on this mission," she added wistfully.

******

Despite some bruises and their lungs full of dust, rigging team B survived the electromagnetic discharge that rocked the asteroid and sent it spinning even faster, breaking off their communication with the control room.

While Ellen and Danielle patched up their differences, Geraint and the team left Rob by the north-pole access tube with the laser drill, a fuel cell and a comms device on a long cable. He cleared away some boulders and set up the drill on its stand to bore a half-inch hole through the floor to the control room.

The rigging team took the rest of the tools to the shaft at level 22, hoping to find the trapped men.

******

In a horizontal mine-shaft on level 22, there was enough centrifugal effect to push the dust to the outside wall, where it fell as a thick layer on eleven silent bodies, coating them like a shroud.

******

In the control room, a welded seam behind Ellen's chair came loose with a worrying groan. Dust seeped from the crack and began to spread outward along the wall.

The women looked at each other and shared a brave smile. They sat in silence for a minute, then Ellen said:

"I had a plan to save Carina Sunspark."

"Tell me."

"My first idea was to use my ship to push the space station out of the path of MC10, but I worked out the thrust needed and we couldn't do it in time.

"Then I thought I could move MC10. Even though it's a lot more massive than Sunspark, with the ship and the rocket launch working at the north and south poles, we might turn the asteroid over. If the north and south poles were reversed, then the magnetism of Mu Carinae would be a repulsion, not an attraction.

"Anyway, that was my idea. Then I got stuck down here and you know the rest."

"It's a good idea in respect of MC10's magnetism," Danielle said thoughtfully, "but there's a huge amount of inertia to overcome. Not just the angular momentum of MC10 but the gyroscopic effect of its equatorial bulge."

She did the sums in her head and smiled sadly.

"It would take more than a day at full thrust to turn it over," she concluded. "Sorry."

"Never mind, it's academic anyway."

******

Not far from Ellen's co-ordinates, the lads found a shaft blocked by a mining machine violently twisted at an angle so it penetrated the tunnel walls.

Mining machines were fifty feet long and weighed more than two-hundred tons. This one was so well embedded it was barely movable.

While the rigging team began to dig around the obstruction, cutting into the concrete wall to make a gap for their hydraulic jacks, Geraint sent Jake through the labyrinth to see if access was possible from the far end of the shaft. He was back in five minutes.

"It's no good," the boy-rigger said. "There's been a big cave in. At least one pillar collapsed and the ceiling fell in. It'll take hours to dig through from that side."

"All right, boyos," said Geraint. "This must be the place. Let's get to it."

When they cut away enough of the shaft wall to place the hydraulic jacks, they moved the digging unit of the machine a few inches from the wall. They stopped work to call out to the men through the gap, listening silently for a reply.

There was no response.

"The boyos could be too far back in the tunnel to hear us," Geraint said, leaving the other options unspoken: that the men were too exhausted from lack of oxygen or dehydration to make much noise; or even that they were all dead, crushed by a collapsed shaft.

Seeing Jake was about to mention the sad possibility, Geraint forestalled him, saying:

"You can think it, look you, but don't say it."

******

It was hot in the control room and the air was clammy. Dust clung to the perspiration on Danielle's face and lodged in her hair.

She took her moisturising wipes from the pocket of her utility belt and offered them to Ellen. They wiped the grime from their faces and felt better.

Even so, Ellen was uncomfortably hot. She stood up and unzipped her flight-suit. With a sensuous wiggle, she slipped the suit past her perfect shoulders and down to her thin waist.

"What are you doing?" Danielle asked.

"I've seen you admiring at my tits, so I'm showing them to you in all their naked glory."

"What?"

Ellen laughed at Danielle's scandalised reaction.

"I'm shvitzing in this flight-suit," she said, "so I'm taking it off. Do you mind?"

"No, sorry."

"You should do the same."

It was a good idea. Danielle took off her flight-suit. Ellen wore only red lacy panties but Danielle had on black knickers and a black bra.

Without the magnestrip lining of the suits pulling them to the floor, they were a little lighter, so Danielle hooked her heels under the desk of the instrument panel to stop herself floating into the middle of the room. Ellen folded her beautiful legs and held herself effortlessly in place with an elegant foot under an arm of the chair.

"You do have magnificent tits," Danielle said.

"Thank you. Yours are amazing, too. You shouldn't wear a bra."

"My mum says that. Something to do with collagen. But, you know, being the only woman on a rigging team ..."

"I know. It's not fair on the boys, seeing you all sexy and pneumatic when they haven't been with their wives or girlfriends in weeks."

******

With huge effort and lots of cutting, rigging team B made a gap in the wall behind the mining machine wide enough to force the hydraulic jacks all the way in, bracing them against the frame of the digging unit. They put their muscles to work again and moved the machine far enough from the wall to get an arm through.

They shouted again through the gap and went silent, listening for an answer. There was none.

******

"Tell me about your boyfriend," Ellen said.

"I haven't got one," Danielle replied.

"Rubbish!"

"It's not rubbish."

"Danielle, you're a beautiful, lively and ferociously intelligent young woman. It's not possible you haven't got a boyfriend."

"I had a boyfriend until recently, but we split up. It was mutual and completely painless. Since then, I've been too busy."

"Tell me about it."

"His name's Keith and he's lovely. Tall, good-looking, dark-brown hair, hazel eyes. He was studying chemistry when I was at Cambridge reading astrophysics. We were together for four years, even when I left Cambridge for Caltech to do my Ph.D. and he went to Oxford to do his. Then, when I came home to Cambridge and he was only half-an-hour away by maglev train, we broke up."

"It often happens. When you see each other every other weekend or once a month, you make more effort."

"I'm not sure it was lack of effort. We just drifted apart. When I came back, I wasn't the same person."

"I hope it wasn't your feminist indoctrination."

"I don't think it was," Danielle said with a smile. "Anyway, Keith's more of a feminist than me."

"Yuck! The only reason a man's a feminist is to get into women's knickers. ... Was it really painless?"

Danielle nodded.

"I miss him. I miss how he held me, how we were together. But we didn't mesh like before."

"I understand. When did you last see him?"

"Just after my second mission with the lads. You know about the hatch door freezing? Well that shook me up a bit, so I sent Keith a message when we were on the way back. Just to tell someone on the outside the story.

"The night we got back, the lads and I went to the pub and Keith turned up. You know how the lads are if there's an eligible bloke looking at me? How they sort of make a parting, so he can approach, then they sidle back in, so they can listen in and be on hand to protect me."

"Yes, I know. They're a kind of bodyguard. I expect it's intimidating to a normal man."

"I guess; but Keith wasn't intimidated. He came up to me and we spoke. Then Jake ..."

"I like Jake. He's so pretty. You just want to grab his head and rub his face against your tits, don't you?"

"No, I don't!"

Ellen laughed.

"We're going to die in a few hours, Danielle, you can tell the truth. I know you can't have sex with Jake because it'll muck up your working relationship; and I can't have sex with him because I'm his boss; but a girl can dream, can't she? So what did Jake do?"

"He said: 'Who's this long streak of piss?'"

"That's Jake. No tact but very pretty. What did Keith do?"

"He said to Jake: 'I'm Keith' and he shook Jake's hand. Jake mumbled an apology but Keith didn't care. He invited me outside to talk, so I told the guys to stay inside.

"It was cold outside. Keith put his jacket over my shoulders. It was warm and smelled of him. I liked his touch. It was gentle and caring. Then we talked. He came to check that I was all right. When I convinced him I was, that I didn't mean to alarm him with my comms, he told me he'd found someone. He thought it was going to be serious.

"And that was that. We talked a little more. I told him I was glad for him, that I wanted him to be happy. It was true and I really was fine. It was like a release. So I gave him his jacket back, kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye. Then I went back in to my boys."

"What about the sex?"

"What about it?"

"You miss it, of course."

"Ellen!"

"Now don't be coy, Danielle. In a few hours we're going to be vaporised. No one will know what you say to me here."

"The boys will rescue us."

"Maybe. In which case, I promise never to repeat what you say."

"All right. Of course I miss the sex. It was wonderful."

"Aha!"

"Aha, what?"

"After you'd trained him."

Danielle's smile said it all.

"I knew you had," Ellen said. "Most men need training. They watch porn and think pussy licking is actually licking, but it's more like kissing. 'French kiss my pussy,' I always tell them."

"Them? Whom?"

"Whoever it happens to be at the time."

Ellen laughed again at the scandalised look on Danielle's face.

"I told you I like men," she said. "Talking of which, if you could have one of the blokes as a lover, who would it be?"

"You said yourself just now it can't happen."

"I know, but what if it could? Is it pretty-boy Jake?"

"No."

"Why not? A big muscly lad like him. He'd make you feel like a woman."

"I've never had a problem feeling like a woman, Ellen. And I don't think of the guys that way."

"Come on, Danielle. Remember: vapour."

"I love all of them equally," Danielle insisted.

"I get it. You won't say, so I'll take a guess. ... It's Rob, isn't it? His eye-patch makes him look like a pirate."

Ellen took Danielle's smile as a confirmation, though Danielle tried to look studiously neutral. She thought she had a special friendship with Geraint, but she secretly fancied Rob, though not for the reason Ellen guessed. Yet she was happy to indulge Ellen's nonsense. It took their minds off being vaporised in a few hours.

******

The lads jacked the mining machine's drilling unit a foot from the wall. Not quite room enough for a man to squeeze through but they could shine their torches into the gap and shout.

The response was silence, except for the soft groans of the rocky pillars, settling into place.

******

"May I give you some advice, Danielle?" Ellen said.

"You may," Danielle agreed, warily.

"If we get out of here, and you get yourself another boyfriend, don't choose another effete academic."

"Keith wasn't effete."

"No, of course not. But get yourself a sportsman or a businessman, someone with a bit of 'go' in him."

"You mean sex again."

"Sex is important. Happiness is important. Don't you want a man who'll take charge?"

"I don't mind my man being assertive, just so long as he doesn't resent me also being assertive."

"Yes, very equal, in theory. But I'm talking about sex. Don't you want a man who'll grab you by the hair and force his cock down your throat?"

"No!" Danielle exclaimed.

"I'll take that as a 'yes,'" Ellen said.

"You can take it as a 'Let's talk about something other than sex.'"

"But sex is fascinating. Besides, do you think, if you were a man, that we'd spend our last few hours of our lives only talking about sex?"

"Not if I know you, Ellen."

"Ha! I think I may have given you the impression that I'm a little more rapacious than I really am."

"It never occurred to me ..." Danielle said innocently.

"My party days may be over anyway."

Ellen was silent a moment, then she spoke seriously.

"An ex-lover of mine, someone I always loved and admired, has asked me to marry him."

Danielle looked at her new friend closely, reading her mind. This was the real Ellen.

"What's the problem?" Danielle asked.

"You mean, other than being late to the wedding on account of being dead?"

"Yes, that. And I forgive you the pun."

"I think I'll be happy with Malcolm. (That's his name.) He's successful, nice-looking, with beautiful manners. And I want a home, family, children and everything. But I also want to make a successful career first."