by Jerry
Then the answer appeared around the curve of the hull.
A big elliptical hole, two or three meters long and maybe half a meter wide, slashed diagonally across the hab’s skin and part of the airlock door, ending in a fresh one-meter crater in the dirt. Meteorite strike.
Jets of gas spewed silently in several directions from the edges of the gash, showing where the meteorite’s grazing path had cut through pipes carrying water, air, and other fluids and gases. Nothing came out of the gaping void in the middle of the hole, though, indicating that whatever compartments the damage had breached had already lost all their air.
Fighting down panic, I forced myself to focus on the problem at hand. Which compartments were behind the damaged sections of wall? The main airlock, of course, and the EVA prep room next to it. What was on the other side of the prep room’s back wall?
Aw, crap. The engineering workroom.
No wonder the power was out. The damage cut right through the main power panel. Where the main and secondary systems came together.
Single point of failure.
As I tried to visualize the deck 1 floor plan, I realized the problem was even worse than I’d thought. If the EVA prep room and engineering workroom had both lost pressure, anyone left alive inside would be cut off from both the main airlock and the engineering airlock—and those were where the space suits were stored.
The two upper decks were equipped with survival balls, airtight spheres that could keep one or two people alive for a few days. But once you crawled into one of those you were dependent on someone in a full-service space suit to fix the problem or haul you to safety.
And that came down to me.
I realized I was hyperventilating. I adjusted my air mix and bent down, hands on knees, until I got my breathing under control.
Okay. Priority one was to assess the situation. Did that. Priority two was to ensure my own safety, then that of others. Priority three was to prevent further damage, then initiate repairs.
I was in no immediate danger. My suit had power, air, and water for almost seven hours, though heavy physical activity would reduce that. How about the rest of the crew?
I peered up at the windows in decks 2 and 3. Flashlights still moved there. At least two, maybe three, maybe more.
There were handheld radios in the same emergency kits as the flashlights. I called all the handheld frequencies but got no response. Why?
After I gave up on that, I stepped back and waved, but got no reaction—probably nobody was looking out the window at the moment. Even throwing small rocks at the windows didn’t prompt a response.
Well, they’d be okay for a few hours at least. Even if there were nine survivors and they were restricted to the top deck, that was still over a hundred cubic meters of air. Without power that air would get cold and stale pretty quickly, but the gouts of steam from the meteorite scar had slowed and stopped—they weren’t losing any more of it.
The situation was stable, but it wouldn’t improve by itself. After one more radio call—still no response—I headed back to the hab to see what I could do.
The main airlock’s outer door was too damaged to open.
The gash made by the meteorite was too narrow and ragged to risk slipping through.
The engineering airlock door, around the back of the hab, appeared undamaged but wouldn’t open. I hauled at the handle but it simply refused to budge. I peered through the small porthole in the outer door with my headlamp. Nobody was in the airlock that I could see.
I stopped to think. If both airlock doors had been closed at the time of impact, and the engineering workroom was open to Mars’s near-vacuum, then the engineering airlock would be an island of air between the vacuums of the exterior and the interior. That air was doing nobody any good, and preventing me from opening the door.
I pried open the emergency manual depressurization panel and opened the valve I found there. Air jetted out—I regretted the loss but couldn’t think of an alternative—and soon the pressure was equalized; I was able to open the door with no problem.
A long, hard look through the porthole in the inner door showed nothing moving inside the hab. There wasn’t any visible damage, though papers and other lightweight objects were scattered everywhere. After a reflexive check to make sure the outer door was shut—probably pointless, but by now it was a deeply ingrained habit—I tried the inner door. The handle moved easily, indicating no pressure differential, but the door itself met some kind of resistance.
I pushed against the resistance and felt something fall away with a soft thud that reverberated through my feet. With a sense of dread I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped through.
Oh God. It was Suma. She’d made it as far as the airlock door. Now she lay still, eyes open and blood-red, dark skin peppered with red blotches.
“I’m sorry,” I said aloud. The sound of my own shaking voice in my helmet made hot tears spring to my eyes, but I blinked hard and tried to sniff them back. I had no way to wipe my eyes.
I checked out the rest of the lower deck as quickly as I could. All the airtight doors had sprung shut as the pressure dropped, but with the hole slashing across so many compartments there was no air on either side of any of them. The main power panel was as badly damaged as I’d feared. And in the EVA prep room I found Audra halfway into her suit. She’d managed to get the helmet on her head and the air turned on full, but it hadn’t been enough.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn.
The only good news was that all eight remaining suits were in their racks and appeared undamaged.
Okay. Time to head upstairs.
The airtight hatch at the top of the ladder was sealed and wouldn’t budge. That was good news—it meant there was pressure on the other side. But there was no window in that hatch and I still had no radio communication with the survivors for reasons unknown. I tried pounding on the hatch but got no response; even when I pressed the top of my helmet against the hatch I heard nothing. That didn’t mean too much, though. The hatch was heavily padded on both sides—I myself had bashed my elbows and knees against it many times and welcomed the padding—so the sound might not be audible.
How to get them out, or get the suits to them, with no airlock? How to even let them know I was here and trying to help?
I clung to the ladder, breathing hard. The indicator on my wrist said I had enough air for another four hours at this rate. Damn.
Okay. Think, think.
From the top of the ladder I looked down, passing my headlamp beam over scattered papers and equipment and . . . oh God, Suma’s body. I swallowed. Think. From the bottom of the ladder it was just ten or twelve steps to the engineering airlock and its emergency suits. Not far, but too far to walk in vacuum, and donning the suits would take much too long.
But still . . . it wasn’t far to walk. In fact, it wasn’t a very large space at all.
If I could force open the hatch, air would flood down from the upper deck. Shared between the upper and lower decks it would thin out dramatically, but might still support life, at least long enough to get to the suits and don them.
The claustrophobic tightness of the hab might save us all.
I scanned my headlamp around the space, considering my plan . . . but no, damn it, it wouldn’t work. There was still a huge hole in the wall behind the damaged power panel.
I climbed down the ladder and examined the hole. It was about one and a half square meters all told, with ragged edges of torn metal and plastic. Heavy power cables and conduits crossed the gap, blocking easy access. Some of them might still be live.
How to seal it? Even temporarily?
We had expanding foam for small holes. This was far beyond what that could cover.
But we also had something else that expanded . . .
I let myself out through the engineering airlock and ran to the rover. The box still held six weather balloons. I grabbed three, just in case, put them in my thigh pockets, and ran back inside.
I put one of the folded packages on the floor about two meters from the damaged power panel and pulled the inflation tab. It inflated rapidly, and in less than a minute it had nearly filled the space, bulging out tautly between floor and ceiling.
It wasn’t a clean seal by any means. The taut plastic film was tough, but far from immune to punctures. The balloon was full of potentially explosive hydrogen.
It would have to do.
I went to the EVA prep room and hauled all eight suits to the base of the ladder.
There was just one more thing to do.
I went back outside and flung a few rocks at the windows, then inflated another weather balloon. As it rose gently into the black sky I played a flashlight beam across it, hoping someone inside would notice.
It worked. A flashlight from one of the deck 2 windows caught me in the eyes. Behind it I saw a waving hand. Still nothing on the radio, though. At least they knew I was here.
I ran back inside. I checked that the balloon was still in place. I made absolutely sure that every airtight door on the lower deck was closed and sealed. I climbed the ladder.
And then I put my shoulder against the hatch and pushed.
A hundred kilopascals of air pressure pushed back. It was like lifting a car. It was impossible. It didn’t budge at all.
I pushed harder.
The plastic and metal of my suit’s hard torso creaked as I put every bit of my strength into the effort. The edge of the neck ring bit painfully into my shoulder. I found myself grunting “Nnnnngh . . .” through gritted teeth.
I kept pushing.
A jet of air hissed across my helmet, letting me know I’d managed to open the hatch by just a crack. I was elated, but the pressure didn’t let up at all. I kept pushing.
And then, just as I feared my trembling legs and back would give out altogether, I heard/felt a scraping noise in the hatch. I looked up and saw the scratched metal tip of a pry bar probing at the gap.
I took a deep breath, gathered my strength, and heaved.
The pry bar made it through the gap, caught, and began levering the hatch upward. The jet of air turned into a hard wind, then a wash like a waterfall as the press of the hatch on my shoulder lessened and then evaporated. The hatch swung back with a clang, revealing Kabir’s smiling face.
I clung, shivering, to the ladder rungs. It was all I could do to just stay in one place as the air rushed past me. Soon everyone would be safe.
The flow slowed . . . slowed . . . and then, with a whump, it sped up again.
I looked down.
The weather balloon was gone. Only a few scraps of torn plastic fluttered in the gap where the air was rapidly escaping. The sharp edges of the hole had punctured the balloon.
I looked up. There were Kabir and Lynne Ann, hair whipping around their heads as they moved to close the hatch again.
If that hatch closed it would shut off all hope. I didn’t have the strength to push it open again.
But I had one last weather balloon in my pocket.
I pulled the tab and, as the package began to inflate, lobbed it underhand toward the hole in the wall.
The growing wad of plastic and gas struck the hole and stuck. It inflated for a moment, like a kid blowing bubble gum . . . then suddenly deflated. It had been punctured.
But this time it was only half-inflated. The plastic was not stretched taut under pressure. It didn’t tear.
The punctured balloon caught in the hole . . . and stuck like a glob of gum. It bellied out, away from me, growing more and more taut as the air from the upper deck filled the lower deck.
But it held. For now.
“Come on!” I shouted, clambering down the ladder, waving my arm to reinforce the words they probably couldn’t hear through my helmet. “Get in your suits! Hurry!”
Down the ladder they came, Kabir and Lynne Ann and all the rest. I counted them as they passed me, joining the mob scrambling to find and don all the pieces of their suits in the crowded space. Four. Five. Six.
Only six. “Where’s Dae-jung?” I asked Kabir over radio as soon as he sealed his helmet.
“Still upstairs,” he gasped. “Fell down the ladder when the lights went out. Broke his leg.”
We made a bucket brigade, passing Dae-jung’s helmet and torso and boots and all the rest up onto deck 2. It wasn’t easy getting him into the suit with a broken leg, and it must have hurt like hell, but though his eyes clenched tight shut and his skin was pale and sweaty he didn’t make a sound.
I dogged down his helmet and turned on his backpack for him. As soon as the suit’s cool air hit his face his eyes opened.
“Thank you,” he said.
It took nearly three days to get the hole repaired and the pressure restored and the power back on. When we finally contacted Mission Control they tried to maintain their usual bureaucratic detachment but, reading between the lines, you could tell how frantic they’d been during the days of silence.
There were a lot of lessons to be learned. One, re-route the power systems to avoid a single point of failure. Two, store emergency suits on all decks. Three, deploy analog radios as a backup. Digital radios were great, but the hab’s metal structure had blocked enough of the signal that they’d refused to communicate at all; the more primitive analog radios would provide at least some communication in situations of weak signal.
We buried our dead. We worked hard, eighteen and twenty hours a day, getting the hab functioning and stable. And we started to think about what we were going to do next.
Our launch window for return would open in ten days. We’d lost two people, including our most experienced engineer, and a lot of air and water and other resources. Even worse, public confidence in the whole mission had been shaken by the incident. Mission Control strongly recommended we use both landers to abandon the station and return all eight of us home. They’d try again soon with a more robust hab.
But we knew that “soon” for UNSA almost certainly meant “next decade” and might mean “never.”
Defying Mission Control’s recommendation, we decided we’d stay on Mars until the next crew arrived in six months, then reassess the hab’s status. Mission Control didn’t like it, but there was nothing they could do about it.
We knew we were taking a risk, but Kasei 19 was already on the launch pad, its crew trained and ready. If we managed to fix the hab and do good science under these circumstances, it would be a public relations triumph. Mission Control would have no choice but to continue the program.
But we couldn’t all stay. Dae-jung’s leg was too badly broken for him to work at all. He’d need surgery to walk again, the sooner the better. And getting the population of the hab down would make our narrowed resource margins a lot more comfortable.
In the end my own decision wasn’t as hard as you might think.
“I’m staying,” I blogged, “because I can’t leave now. There’s a lot of work to be done to get the hab back in full working order . . . more than Kabir could possibly do alone. I’m not a professional engineer but I know I can do the work. And humanity needs this program to succeed. We’ve made some amazing discoveries already, but there’s far more to be learned from Mars. That’s why Lynne Ann and Huang are staying as well—to keep the science going. Two engineers and two scientists isn’t a full crew, but it’s enough to keep the dream alive.”
After that post my ratings shot through the roof.
Which was nice, but it wasn’t really important any more.
The four of us stood and saluted as the lander rose silently into the salmon-colored sky. But we returned to the hab before its vapor trail had cleared.
We had a lot to do.
FAITHFUL CITY
Michael Pevzner
I’m not a music person. Father has all sorts of things in the house that can still play, and he listens to them on occasion, but I never cared. I have no need of borrowed emotions; my own are more than enough for me.
Yet a morning came when the orc
hestra sounded within me. It burst through the cobweb of my dream and I knew that it was something different. I couldn’t see it, I could only hear it, and I heard that it was calling me to it. I felt all of me drawn towards something greater than myself, something distant and beyond my comprehension, something I must become a part of.
In my dream I could fly. I had gossamer wings and these wings carried me upwards, above the tin tent, above the hydroponic farms and the rest of the settlement. I flew, led on by the sounds of the orchestra, not yet knowing myself where I was headed, but knowing with the utmost certainty that the orchestra was leading me to where I belong. I flew through the dust clouds, above the heaps of garbage that have flooded the world, towards the ruined buildings that towered on the horizon like the rotten teeth of a giant. I saw underneath me skeletons of cars and tractors, of trucks and of buses, and I flew straight through the shattered windows of colossal buildings. In one of them I saw a writing desk covered with dust and a shattered television set and a framed picture that lay on the desk, and I stopped for a moment to sweep the dust off the picture and saw the face of a woman smiling at me.
I continued over mountains that grew refuse instead of trees, over rivers whose waters had turned black, over collapsed smokestacks of old factories.
At last the shades of dark grey and brown gave birth to pure, blinding whiteness—below me I saw the dome of the City, bigger than I could have ever imagined.
And at that moment, what I had understood deep within has reached the front of my consciousness—the City was calling me.
I open my eyes. I am once again on the metallic net of my bed in the tin tent. The gossamer wings are gone, yet the orchestra remains. I feel it filling me, inflating me as if I were a plastic bag. All that remains for me is to be a thin covering over a bubble of music that is moving on its own. The orchestra is pulling me—beyond the houses, beyond the black rivers and the collapsed factories, pulling me to the City.
I have been found worthy. Worthy to join the last hope of humanity that lives in the City. So it is told, at least—when all fell apart, when Earth revolted against us, the City was built to protect the worthy from Earth’s fury. And the City still chooses the worthy and calls them to it.