A slow, high-pitched hiss crept into the room.
Then her ears popped as the pressure fell.
TWENTY-TWO
Kate
The acrid smell of melted electronics continued to swirl around the control room. Kate drew shallow breaths; the toxic air burned her throat and nostrils.
We’re not going to make it.
The primitive part of her brain screamed as panic set in. It was the same ugly fear that teased her back at Mount Sutro when some thugs threatened her life. She couldn’t predict when or where it would raise its head—she’d never truly felt this threatened as a Spacer. Perhaps more happened to her at the Tower than simply discovering the Rossian ship heading toward Earth.
The escaping oxygen wheezed louder now as it found a hairline crack where the oxygenator portal entered the habitat. She closed her eyes and focused on controlling her breathing, her emotions.
This is no time to lose it. You’ve managed these things before.
But her brain didn’t work like it had in the old days, and Kate shook her head, struggling to find her voice. “Mary, get your helmet on,” she said calmly. Nothing but a haunting whimper and the clack of shivering teeth floated from Mary’s direction. Her breathing worsened. “Damn it, Mary, get your helmet on!”
“Yes . . . yes . . . okay.”
Kate snapped hers in place and fumbled for the light switch on its side. When it clicked on, she scanned the room and found Mary, helmeted, slouching over the console beside the destroyed transceiver. She pulled her gloves on. Through the suit-to-suit audio channel, Kate called her. “Let it go, Mares. Nothing we can do about it now and we’ve gotta refocus.”
“I don’t understand what happened,” she whispered, her voice weak and distant, all the confidence of youth shattered.
Kate jumped over and checked the clasps and seals on Mary’s envirosuit. She felt the fear and frustration too but wouldn’t dare let Mary see it. “The damn thing blew up, that’s what happened. Whatever that amp was, it screwed everything up, drawing way too much power from the scooter battery and overloading the system.”
Mary found her helmet light and flicked it on. She inspected the damage. “Maybe I can clean this up and try again . . .”
Kate grabbed her arm. “Look at me, Mares. We’re done with the radio, understand?”
She cried softly.
“Refocus, now, come on. Our new problem is oxygen, okay? We’ve gotta move on.”
Mary’s face, lit up by environmental data scrolling across her visor, appeared spotted and deflated.
“Control your fear . . . don’t let it dictate who you are or what needs to be done next. Take hold of it just like you told me.” Kate surprised herself with the words Mary had said to her a few short hours ago. The old Spacer overseers taught the same thing; panic had no place in those toxic work environments . . . no place in the frigid vacuum of the cosmos. “It’s simple,” they used to tell her. “You freak out, you die.”
She needed to find something for Mary to do, to get her refocused.
“Here, see those canisters we filled? Gather them up, put them on the console, then bring all the others we have from the scooter and wherever else. Got it?”
Mary nodded, sniffed, headed toward the row of cylinders.
“How much oxygen is in your tank right now?”
“Just under two hours.”
“Good. That’s good, Mares. I also have a couple.”
Kate hated pretending they were anything but doomed, but what could she do? Each canister held around 15 minutes’ worth of oxygen. They were never intended for use other than emergencies. She’d filled seven with the oxygenator, and they’d collected another dozen from the destroyed Titanius lab. The math looked harsh: about one-and-a-half hours each on top of whatever remained in their main tanks. Addition and subtraction, like all formulae, didn’t care about context: numbers were numbers, and these were as cold as the deadly vacuum outside, the same vacuum that now swallowed up the control room of this abandoned mining habitat.
Three and a half hours each. We’re not going to make it.
“Will you come outside with me?” Mary’s voice had strengthened, and Kate detected her confidence returning. Taking action—any action—pushed her back to the now.
“Sure. I’ve gotta check the scooters, anyway.”
With power no longer available in the habitat, Kate had to manually open the inner airlock door. When the seal broke around the hatchway, trapped, pressurized air jettisoned the door, smashed into her chest and slammed her against the adjacent wall. Mary kept her footing and helped her up. Then, they walked through the airlock. Kate pulled down hard on the second manual latch and pushed the exterior door open.
As Mary collected the canisters from the LunaScoota, Kate knelt beside her and examined the on-board battery and solar array. Whatever happened to the oxygenator didn’t appear to affect the scooter, other than drain the battery’s power. Nevertheless, the portable array still functioned and recharged the spent cells at a much higher rate now that no current was being siphoned off. A few hours would yield a full charge.
Moot, perhaps, if they couldn’t locate more oxygen.
“There are 12 canisters here, Kate. That doesn’t leave us enough.”
“Sure doesn’t. We’d better find more.”
“We’ve been through this dump more than once. Is there any place we haven’t looked?”
Kate’s fear rose again and she fought to keep her eyes focused on one problem at a time. “I don’t know if we’ll stumble across any more canisters, but our biggest issue right now is doing whatever we can to stay alive until someone rescues us.”
“If they’re even aware we’re marooned.”
She stood up, and scowled at her. “Hey, that’s enough negativity. Get your shit together, Mares, and help me look for more tanks. I’ll go through the sleeping quarters again, and you check out that galley area, okay?”
They separated. Kate returned to the habitat and opened the hatchway to the workers’ quarters. After degassing the airlock, she methodically worked her way through the storage bins and closets again.
“Kate?” Mary’s voice in her helmet speaker interrupted the search.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry for destroying the radio, and I’m sorry for being a completely neural ass just now.”
Kate grinned. “Hey, Mares, thanks.”
Twenty minutes later, they met up again in the control room. With the main hatchway open, a slice of sunlight cut geometric shapes through the room, reducing the gloom. There were no more O2 tanks.
“What now?” Mary asked, gazing around the dark room.
Suddenly, a warmth of clarity flooded over Kate. She folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the console, then cast a furtive glance at the monitor and frowned when it showed nothing but a black screen.
“Now, we wait . . . and pray.”
TWENTY-THREE
Mary
“I feel so useless just sitting around here.”
Mary paced through the shadow-filled main control room. They’d already supplemented the oxygen tanks on their envirosuits with emergency canisters, and each had under an hour left. For most of that time, they had spoken little, each lost in their thoughts. Now that the end crept closer, Mary’s primitive brain was on high alert.
Kate, sitting on top of the console with her legs stretched out, appeared philosophical and resigned to her fate. “Your words make sense, Mares.”
“Which ones?”
“About the inevitable end. None of us lives forever. The only questions about death are how and when. Most never know, but we do.” She looked at her. “And look at us, bored, hanging around this old dump, waiting to suffocate. I suppose I’d always imagined dying while working on something.”
Mary kicked the dust with each footstep she took. “Not much different from what folks in nursing homes do.” She stopped and nodded at Kate. “You ever think about what it’s
like to be old?”
“Nah. Not at all.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I guess deep down I expected to die way before hitting old age.” Her voice grew softer in Mary’s helmet. “When I first realized they’d recruited me for the Spacer Program, I was far too young to understand what it meant, but none of us expected to be around long with the work they had us doing. When I went into teaching, and the cancers bloomed all over my body, I took those god-awful anti-rad pills and figured I’d have a few years left.”
“Yet, here you are.”
“Uh-huh.”
After a minute or two of silence, Kate chuckled and said, “I’m like a cat. I should have died ages ago but I’m still here, like I got multiple lives or something.”
Mary smiled and joined her on the console. A renewed connection appeared to this survivor with the lost childhood and serious emotional problems. “If by some miracle someone saves us, Kate, like if you have a new chance at life, what will you do differently? Anything?”
Another minute passed. Kate’s measured breathing filled her helmet’s audio and fell into the same rhythm as her own. She squeezed her recovering elbow and shoulder, surprised to find they’d almost completely healed.
Whatever Kate did, it worked.
Then, as if reading her mind, Kate said, “Your wing’s better, eh?”
“Like it never got dislocated in the first place.”
Kate nodded. “I’m not sure how to answer your question, Mares. I mean, what could I do differently? I’m a curious scientist and computer programmer. It’s all I know how to do.”
Mary frowned. “That’s what you’ve done, but if you’re given another chance, are you saying you wouldn’t change a thing? That you’d still be doing this kind of work somewhere?” She waved her arm around the habitat.
“Maybe . . . Seems like we’re all born to do certain things. Some are teachers or pilots or garbage recyclers. I’m a computer scientist.”
Mary fell silent. A gentle warning chime pinged in her helmet showing the oxygen level was diminishing. Half an hour left to kill.
“Okay, suppose you could go way back to a time before you were a Spacer. Like, suppose that whole program didn’t exist. Then what would you have done?”
Kate chuckled again and commented about her thousands of questions. Then she said, “I had this dream of living in the woods when I was a kid. I pictured myself building a home with a tall, handsome man and a couple of kids running around. I’d do some kind of science ‘cause as long as I remember, I’ve been interested in how the world works. But, yeah, that’s what I wanted. Something simple. . . physical.”
“So why not do it again? If we’re rescued, I mean.”
“Big if, Mares,” she said, “and even if by some miracle we’re found in the next twenty minutes or so, I doubt I could ever pursue that old dream.”
“Why not?”
Kate harrumphed. “I’m sick. And not just the cancer blooms or the shit in my head. Do you get that?”
Mary puzzled over why she didn’t want to get better, as if she’d given up. That seemed unlike her.
“Messed up, isn’t it? I suppose, now that I think about it, the reason I seek no help for these things is because I fear what I might become. See, for the past twenty years, I’ve defined myself a certain way: a diseased, sick, ugly, androgenous Spacer. An outsider.” She paused. “One of those thugs at Mount Sutro called me the ‘runt of the litter’. That hurt.”
“Oh, my god.”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing. He was right, Mary. He was right. No matter what I do that’s what I’ll always be.”
A few minutes of silence rolled by. At the 15 minute mark, the oxygen depletion warning chimed louder and a small amber O2 symbol flashed on her visor. Mary ignored it.
“Yeah, so, this is me.”
Mary realized she understood little; that simply reading about things was a sorry, incomplete substitute for actually experiencing life. Studying books and lectures on emotional health could in no way prepare anyone for the visceral hate of yourself and the world so much that you had to carve random patterns on your chest and stomach in a twisted attempt to bury that pain. Yet, somehow, Mary’s love of books had given her insights and knowledge of the human condition that prepared her for her own journey. Perhaps the answer to all this depended on finding a balance between the two.
She suddenly heard Kate breathing in a stuttered, ragged rhythm through the helmet audio.
“Kate?”
A pause.
“Yeah, crazy, isn’t it?”
Mary reached for her gloved hand and squeezed it.
Carter
“What’s our ETA to Luna, Captain?”
Powell turned to face Carter who leaned over his shoulder. “Three hours, forty-five minutes, sir.”
He smiled and shook his head in wonder.
What a machine!
“Any other ship movements detected?”
“Have a look, sir.”
Captain Powell toggled a viewscreen to a three-dimensional display peppered with a rainbow of colored icons along with their velocities, trajectories, and spacecraft identification data. Although Carter had some familiarity with this graphic, it still took him a moment to get the Echo’s bearings in relation to Earth and the Moon, and then understand what the symbols represented.
“Are you serious, John?”
“Well, sir, we figured we’d have company once we broke Earth’s standard orbit, but this is something other.” Eight icons—ships of various nationalities, corporations and alliances—fluttered across the screen. The only commonality between them was their course trajectories; they all targeted Luna. “Still, none of those boats can match our speed. It’ll take at least a day for the fastest one—the Xing-Xing—to approach lunar orbit.”
“What about those, Captain?” Carter pointed to two separate blue icons approaching the Moon from deep space. “I recognize our cruiser Malevolent, but the other . . . what’s going on there?”
Powell zoomed in on the symbols. The Malevolent had several hundred thousand kilometers on the second cruiser, the Volmar, but the distance between them appeared to shorten. The captain adjusted the touch-screen display controls to highlight trajectories and intercepts. He said, “We didn’t expect the Volmar’s improved velocity. The data show she’s more or less running equidistant from Malevolent. See?” He displayed a time versus distance graphic for the two vessels. “Volmar pulls up, then eases back here . . . and here.”
Carter frowned. “What do we know about the Prussian cruiser?”
“She’s a typical PR-three heavy, sir. Same dimensions as we’ve seen on the ships in the Martian mining runs, but capable of carrying a larger crew and mid-range weapons. Built for speed, no doubt, but limited.”
Carter stood erect and pulled his shoulders back. He anticipated some interest in the Echo’s voyage, but not to this extent. Still, it made sense for the Volmar to be suspicious of Malevolent’s course change to Luna. By keeping her distant, she signaled curiosity rather than aggression.
“Keep me apprised, Captain, of any deviations. I don’t want a conflict with the Prussians or the Chinese or anyone else if we can help it.” He pivoted, then stopped, leaned back down and whispered. “But make no mistake, John, if we have to unleash firepower to keep those bastards away from Luna, we will.”
“Understood.”
Jim Atteberry had recovered from the shock of leaving Earth and sat transfixed in front of a viewer displaying Luna. A running line of data in the screen’s corner measured distance to the moon, the Echo’s velocity, ETA, and other parameters. Carter eyed him carefully and sat beside Esther. He patted her thigh and smiled, but she tensed up and shifted her weight.
“How’s he doing?”
Esther peered over at Atteberry. “Much better now, I think. You know,” she said after a moment, “he feels his daughter and Kate Braddock are still alive up there.”
“His faith in miracles
is strong.”
“Be honest with me, Clayton. What are the chances we’ll find them alive?”
Carter shrugged and made a sour face. “Minimal to non-existent. I mean, the entire lab went dark. Lunarsat images show nothing left. How anyone could survive that level of destruction is beyond me.” He stared into her grey eyes and leaned in. “But we know they did because they contacted your friend here. What we don’t know is whether they’re injured or what kind of oxygen they have. Notwithstanding the odds, we’ll do everything we can to bring them home. You have my word.”
Their tête-à-tête was interrupted by shouts and orders ringing out from the bridge. Atteberry leapt up from the viewer and shifted his gaze to where Captain Powell and Communications Officer Quigg scrambled over the comms panel. “Mr. Carter? What’s going on? Have they found something?”
He pulled himself out of his flight seat. “Stay there, Mr. Atteberry,” he said with quiet confidence, and marched toward the bridge. Esther followed close behind. He didn’t stop her.
“Sir,” Quigg drawled, “it’s—it’s an encrypted message from the HQ.” He pointed at the comms screen. “Not sure if’n it means anything, but—”
“Play it, Officer.”
Quigg punched a button on the monitor and the video message rolled. Ed Mitchell’s head shot appeared from the Titanius Operations Center. He looked abnormally haggard and confused standing in front of Stan Petrovic and a couple other comms specialists.
“At 0330 UTC, we detected a brief EM pulse from the Aristoteles Mine Site. Duration was 16.8 seconds. Frequency . . . what was it again, Stan? (garbled) Right, thanks . . . 430.800 MHz. Not a recognized transmission frequency to us. It was a single, unmodulated pulse. Then it disappeared again. We can’t tell yet whether it’s natural, or . . . I’ve ordered the lunarsat folks to swing the bird over that area ASAP, but it’ll take a while. No immediate danger to any ship. Will keep you apprised. Titanius out.”
Echoes In The Grey Page 21