Authors: Niko Perren
ABSOLUTE DARKNESS. PANICKED breaths. A fan whispered to a halt above Jie’s head. Then the backup lights blinked on, ghostly strips of Luminex. Sally’s eyes were twin ping-pong balls.
“Sharon? Do you want us back in the hive?” Jie called out.
Silence.
“Earthcon?”
Silence.
‹Electrical’s down,› said Sally. She giggled nervously. ‹Sorry. That’s obvious.›
‹I thought we had redundant power,› said Jie.
‹We do,› said Sally.
The vacuum and a two-meter rubble blanket should keep us insulated. The greenhouse provides oxygen. We’re probably safe for a while.
‹Come on,› said Sally, grabbing a hat and sunglasses.
‹What if it isn’t safe?›
‹Then we die first,› said Sally.
She pushed the door open, flooding the vestibule with concentrated sunlight. They were greeted by an ankle-deep lake skinned with leaves and organic debris. Dog testicles. All the base-control electronics are below us, in the hive.
‹Try to find the drain,› ordered Sally. She waded in, the water undulating around her feet like jelly in the low gravity, and vanished amongst the rows of trellised plants. Jie sloshed into the room’s center and felt around in the murk. His fingernails scraped something slimy and pulled out a handful of wet vegetation. A whirlpool formed in the dirty liquid. ‹Got it!›
Sally emerged from a different row. ‹And I found the source of the water. A cracked hose. Let’s start cleaning this up.› She grabbed the lone mop from the supply rack. ‹You’ll have to use your shirt, Jie.› She winked.
‹I’ll flip you for the mop then!›
Sally shook her head, smiling, and started mopping. Jie stripped off his shirt. He got onto his knees and sponged puddles towards the drain, while Sally worked from the other direction. ‹Hopefully we just a tripped breaker. Maybe the rest of the base still has power.›
Soon the last of the water disappeared into the floor with a rude sucking sound.
‹My uncle always warned me that water on the roof ends up in the living room,› said Jie. He wrung a slow motion rain of silvery droplets out of his shirt. ‹He’s going to laugh when he hears about this. Assuming we don’t die.›
***
Sharon and Rajit arrived a few minutes later, grimfaced. Sharon carried two thick paper books. Rajit, his curly hair matted, juggled an armful of map tubes. He swept the plastic transplant trays off the work-bench and unrolled a blueprint of the base, pinning down the corners with gar-dening tools.
“Here’s the situation,” said Sharon. “Our main computer is soaked, but I think I got the backup into the cargo dome in time. It’s damp, but it should survive. Assuming we restore power. Rajit?”
“Water shorted the circuit box,” said Rajit. “I replaced the breakers, which should have fixed it. But our outside electrical supply is dead for some reason.”
“How does upstream electrical system work?” asked Jie.
“That’s what we’re going to figure out.” Rajit traced a line to the edge of the blueprint. “Sharon, do we have the solar array schematic?”
Sharon searched through the remaining map tubes. “No. Sorry. And without power, we can’t ask Earthcon.”
“Could we raise Earthcon on the suit radios?” asked Sally. “The antenna is on the summit. It could be on the other side of the problem.”
Sharon looked up at Sally. “Great idea!”
They descended into the hive. The emergency lights cast long, red-tinted shadows, restoring the industrial facility ambience that previous teams had worked so hard to soften. The banner Cheng’s classmates had sent lay in a soggy pile, the letters smeared by moisture.
The four of them filed to the airlock. Sharon powered up her suit radio. “Earthcon, are you there?”
One… two… three …
A drop of water detached from the ceiling and drifted to the ground. It landed with a musical tinkle.
Four… five… six…
No answer.
“We’re under too much insulation,” said Rajit. “We’ll have to go outside.”
“How can we do that?” Jie asked, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “There is no power for the airlock. And we can’t force door open against air pressure. Isabel already tried…”
Fear clawed at him. I’m trapped in the habitat. Without power. No! Not like this! Not with so many people counting on us. Not without saying goodbye to Cheng.
“Let’s go back to the greenhouse,” said Sharon. Her shirt clung to her chest, dampened by a mixture of sweat and moisture from the walls. Her short gray hair stuck in all directions. Yet she radiated calm authority. Jie was only too happy to follow her up the ladder.
They gathered around the schematics. Sharon opened her scroll to full size and placed it between them. “We have half a million liters of air per dome. Each of us breathes ten liters a minute.” She brought up a calculator. “Forty into…”
“Seventeen days,” said Rajit.
Sharon looked at her scroll, then at Rajit, as if deciding whether to finish the calculation.
“Make it fourteen,” said Sally. “The greenhouse solar concentrators have stopped rotating. When we go dark, the plants will off-gas CO2.”
Jie squinted up at the ceiling. The light seemed dimmer already. “Two weeks is enough time for rescue mission, right?”
“Any situation bad enough to knock us offline is too risky for a rescue crew,” said Sharon. “Best case they send a robot to look. We need to fix this ourselves.”
“Could four of us overpower airlock?” asked Jie.
“The small door is about 1.5 square meters,” said Sharon. “Air pressure is one kilogram per square centimeter…”
“Fifteen tons,” said Rajit.
Jie wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Wisps of steam rose from the greenhouse floor, fogging his sunglasses, condensing on the plants. Already their fragile climate was drifting out of equilibrium.
“And there is no bleed valve?” asked Jie.
“There’s a bleed valve to get us into the habitat,” said Sharon. “But none on the exterior.”
“Then we need to make a valve,” said Sally. She looked around. “Unless somebody has a better idea?”
***
They chose the cargo dome airlock, since it was larger and there was more room to maneuver. Rajit clambered inside, picked a spot in the center of the outer door, and applied the drill. The reinforced carbon of the door proved a worthy adversary for the diamond-tipped bit. The battery died. Tā naǐ naǐ dè! How thick is this door? Two months ago, Isabel had died trying to get into an airlock. And now they couldn’t get out.
Rajit connected the spare battery and restarted. His arms trembled as he leaned into the drill. Slowly the bit sunk deeper in.
“Got it!” he cried. The drill punched through to the outside, and the hole started shrieking like an angry kettle. Rajit wiggled the drill free and slapped his hand over the opening. “Yaaarrrggghhhh. It’s got me, it’s got me.” He rolled his eyes back into his head, twitching as if his arm were being sucked outside.
Sharon tossed him a plastic plug. “Stuff it,” she said. “Besides, if this were movie physics, I’d be younger and wearing less clothes.” She turned to Sally. “Sally, I’d like you to stay in here. We may need somebody inside. Jie, Rajit, get suited.”
“What? Me?” asked Jie. “I’m the last person you want outside.”
“You can troubleshoot machinery,” said Sharon. “And your nanolab is a potential source of spare parts.”
Sally smiled sympathetically. “You did great when you helped us unload. You’ll be fine.”
They’re not leaving me much choice.
They spent several minutes gathering any spare parts they might potentially need and piling them in the airlock. Then Jie changed into his space suit. He crowded into the airlock with Sharon and Rajit, half-sitting on the pile of supplies. His helmet bubble jammed against the “Fit for Life” logo on Rajit’s suit. Sally pushed the door closed, trapping them in blackness until Sharon flicked on her suit lamp. It lit her face from underneath, like a jack-o-lantern.
“Ready?”
She removed the plug and air started venting out of their improvised valve with a high-pitched squeal. Jie’s suit fabric swelled. The sound faded as the air thinned. When the noise had all but stopped, Sharon tugged the outer door, working against the residual air pressure, forcing Jie flat against the wall to make room. With a pop of depressurization, light flooded through the gap.
Sharon stepped outside. Jie followed her into the dust, and stood, blinking in the harsh sunlight. Earth hung in its usual spot, nearly full, so bright that it seemed like all the color had been sucked out of the moon’s monochrome landscape and rolled up into a ball. Life. Teeming in the seas, and the forests, the deserts and the clouds. I want to be back there. Away from this terrible place. To swim in the ocean. To see wind in Cheng’s hair. I don’t want to die.
“Earthcon, this is Sharon.”
One. Two. Jie held his breath. Three. Four. Five.
“Sharon, this… Ear… con. We’re tunin… ignal… Hawaiian deep… antenna array. It’ll take us …ond to adjust our transmission. Can you hear us now?”
“You’re coming in five by five,” said Sharon. “We have a code one emergency. We’ve lost our upstream power. Can you advise?”
While the engineers earthside reviewed the situation, Sharon, Jie, and Rajit climbed into the rover and drove up the ridge towards the summit solar array. Jie stared ahead as they passed the place where Isabel had been buried. Not a reminder I need right now.
At the edge of the solar collectors they set off on foot. Hundreds of new panels had been added since Jie had been out for the funeral, in preparation for the power demands of the mass driver. They walked between the enormous rectangles of suspended solar fabric. The 30-meter high panels hung like sails from rotating masts no thicker than a tentpole.
Inhale. Hissss. Exhale. Huussss. Surprisingly, Jie wasn’t as frightened as he’d been the last time. The gravity felt natural now, his movements less alien. Sharon stopped at a utility box perched on a crossroads of wiring. Two thick black cables ran towards the habitats. Thinner blue ones, too many to count, led to the solar collectors.
Jie and Rajit pried off the plastic access panel that protected the utility box’s interior from sunlight. Jie peered inside. Tā naǐ naǐ dè. One of the circuits had fused into a block of slagged metal. Rajit panned his wrist camera over the scene for the engineers.
Jie listened to his heart beat as they waited for an assessment. It would sure be nice to have an Earth return vehicle right now.
“That’s the current regulator,” Earthcon reported. “We show two spares in the cargo dome. Assuming that’s the only problem, you should be back up in a few hours.”
Jie nearly leapt into the air in celebration.
“I remember putting one of the spares in the parts pile,” said Sharon. “I’ll fetch it. Jie and Rajit, you can start removing the old one.”
Rajit disconnected the solar array under Earthcon’s watchful tutelage. Then Jie cut the interior wires loose and tried to pull out the ruined circuit board. He stuck his head and arms inside the cramped box to get a good grasp with the pliers, but try as he might he could only wiggle the board back and forth. His shoulder ached where he’d jammed it scrambling out of bed.
“Tā naǐ naǐ dè, this is very stuck! Pass me the vice grips, Rajit. I don’t want to cut myself on a wire.”
“Take your time,” cautioned Earthcon.
Jie clamped the vice grips onto the circuit board’s thickest part. It didn’t budge. He pulled again, harder, wiggling the vice grips up and down. A hint of movement. Snap! His elbow slammed into metal, firing new agony up his arm.
“Wǒ cào! Bèn dàn,” Jie scrambled back, checking his suit for holes. “Chǔn huò. Bái chī.” He rubbed his elbow and winced in pain. His whole body trembled.
“You all right, Jie?” Sharon’s voice echoed inside his helmet. “I’m not sure what all that Chinese means, but it’s making my toes curl.”
“He called himself an idiot,” said Rajit. “Nǐ zěn mè yàng?”
Jie almost dropped the vice grips. “Nǐ shuō pǔ tōng huà ma?”
“Shì de,” said Rajit. ‹I study talk Chinese in university.›
‹Why did you never mention it?›
“Your English is better,” said Rajit. “Now hand me the vice grips before you kill yourself.”
Rajit clamped the vice grips onto the circuit board, then knelt down, bracing himself with his knees. One of the problems with low gravity was the lack of leverage. A screw was as likely to rotate an astronaut as the other way around. Rajit wiggled the board, muttering in irritation. He sat back, one foot on either side of the opening, squatting to get more power, circuit clamped between his legs.
“Rajit. Is that a good idea?”
“Just… about… got…”
The board sprung loose, tumbling Rajit backwards, jagged metal in hand. “Pop.” An innocuous sound, like a balloon bursting, but to Jie it felt as if an icicle had stabbed his chest. Rajit hit the ground in a cloud of dust. He started thrashing, clutching his leg. Escaping air sprayed a fountain of sparkling ice crystals into the sunlight.