The Last Dance

by Martin L Shoemaker

  This was the hardest work of the salvage operation so far, and the ache in my ribs returned. The inner arc of the stairs was supported by a metal rail, parallel to the guardrail like a giant DNA model with thin support posts joining the rails. In some places the stairs had fallen from the rails, but in others they were still attached; and the rails themselves were twisted out of shape, tangled between themselves, and knotted up the central shaft. If it weren’t for those, I might have just climbed to the top through the center; but instead I had to clear a path. The metal rails were designed to support astronauts in suits in Martian gravity, so they weren’t as thick as they might have been on Earth. With effort, I could bend and twist them a bit, trying to clear a path. Eventually, though, I had to take out a wrench and disconnect the stairs (carefully counting and pocketing the bolts) so that I could twist and pull the rails apart.

  I cleared a path as high as I could reach, but the stairs went up almost three stories. There was a ladder set into the far wall of the shaft, so I climbed that as far as the wreckage allowed. Then I used tethers and carabiners to attach myself to the ladder so I could clear more debris. It was awkward at first, my feet planted on a rung as I leaned out on my tether, but I adjusted quickly. That was my undoing: I got cocky, and I misjudged my ability to spot and dodge falling debris. When I freed up one stair, the entire rail structure shifted; and before I knew what was happening, a ceiling tile came loose, smacked me in the back of my helmet, and dazed me pretty bad (though nowhere near as bad as Pagnotto). Naturally my feet slipped from the rung, and I fell free, my tethers pulling me back so I slammed against the wall. Woof! The air was slammed out of me, my ribs stabbed with a jolt of pain, and again I bumped my head on the cushioned rear of my helmet.

  I hung there on the side of the shaft, blinking, not able to think clearly for several moments. Then a voice cut through my fog: “You okay up there, Smitty?” I looked down. Carver stood at the bottom of the shaft, looking up at me with worry.

  I shook my head. Ow! That was a mistake. “I’m okay, just stupid. Not watching what I’m doing.” Then I had an idea: Carver was talking, so I would try to keep him that way. “Lieutenant, can you help me out here?”

  “Sure, Ensign.” His voice lacked enthusiasm, but at least he showed a little life. I would settle for small steps.

  Carver reached for the rung. “You need me up there?”

  “No, I have another idea. I can drop stuff, and you can toss it out, keep the shaft clear. But I need something else, something more important. Can you be the eyes in the back of my head? As I work, can you watch for things that might fall?”

  “I can do that. Just a second.” Carver backed out to the edge of the shaft. “All right, I’ve adjusted the zoom on my helmet camera, and I’ve patched in a motion-sensing algorithm. If anything even wiggles up there, we’ll know it.”

  “Good idea, Carver. What would we do without your computer smarts?”

  “Yeah.” He spoke only that one word, but so softly I could barely hear it. I could tell that the brief flash of light in his mood had left, and he was falling back into darkness. All because I had mentioned computers. Of course! Carver was the chief programmer on the expedition; and Deece, the chief program, had doomed us (unless Captain Aames could whip up a miracle). Carver was blaming himself: for the failure of the mission, for Van’s leg, for Shannon.

  I carefully felt backward and up with my feet until I found a rung. Then I felt back with my right arm—I tried to use my left, but my ribs said no—until I found another rung. I pulled myself back up, got my balance, and went back to work.

  As I unbolted a stair from the rail, I decided to do a little direct intervention with Carver. It has never been my style to let people wallow in their troubles. Never tiptoe when you can charge in! I needed to get Carver to focus, shake him up, so I “accidentally” dropped the bolt. “Heads up, down there!” I watched the bolt slowly accelerate, leaving him plenty of time to pick it up on his motion sensor and step safely out of the way.

  Carver stretched out one gloved hand, and the bolt fell neatly in his palm, his fingers wrapping around it. “Got it.”

  I grinned, though I doubt he could see it from there. “Make sure you count that, Lieutenant.”

  “One bolt,” he answered, holding it before his visor, “one centimeter, slightly stripped.” Then his voice took a lighter tone. “Apparently coated with butter.”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant.” But I wasn’t. I had him talking again, and I was going to take the opening while I had it. “We all make mistakes, huh?”

  His helmet swiveled slightly as he shook his head. “There’s mistakes, and there’s . . .”

  I wouldn’t let him tail off now. As I worked, I kept at him. “Look, Lieutenant, things are damn bad here, but you’ll only make them worse by blaming yourself.” Carver grunted in acknowledgment, so I just kept going. “We don’t know yet what exactly went wrong. I’ve worked with Nick—Captain Aames, I mean—on a half dozen after-action reports, and even he never finds one avoidable cause. You’ve read the same reports: the cause is never just one thing, because we would catch anything that big. It’s always a dozen things that were almost perfect, but the tiny imperfections stacked up.”

  “But it was my tiny imperfection.”

  “We don’t know that, Lieutenant. And right now, I don’t give a damn. I only care about surviving the next few hours until Captain Aames comes up with a plan to get us through the next few days, and then the next few weeks.”

  Carver was getting irritated. “What plan’s he going to come up with, Smith?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why he’s the captain, and I’m just a noncom. But I trust him. He will come up with one. And it’s going to depend on all of us keeping our heads in the game. We have to rely on each other to get through this, all of us. Including you, Lieutenant.”

  I wasn’t intentionally echoing the captain, but I realized I was on the same track. He had a way of influencing you, hammering and pushing you until you learned to see things his way.

  But Carver was slipping away again. “I don’t see what good any of this is going to do us. Nuts? Bolts? Gaskets? They’re not going to change anything. Don’t you understand, Smith? I’ve killed us.”

  Before I could answer, Captain Aames cut in, and I realized I had never closed my channel to him. “If you can whine like that, you’re not dead yet, Lieutenant Carver. Neither are the rest of us, and we’re not giving up. You will not let us down, and that’s an order. Understood?”

  Carver sounded sullen, which was better than depressed. “Understood. Sir.”

  “Knock off the attitude, Carver. Now. We don’t need you blaming yourself and marinating in self-pity when there’s work to be done. If you want to have a breakdown, wait until you get back to Earth.”

  Carver sounded controlled, but pissed. “Sir, yes, sir.”

  “Lieutenant, I want you to understand something. Right now I don’t give a damn about who’s to blame for getting us in this mess, I only care about who’s going to get us out. Are you on the solution team?”

  More firm this time: “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “Good. Because if you’re not on that team, then do us all a favor: step out on the surface, and leave your air bottles behind for someone who’ll actually do their damn job. Is that your plan?”

  “Sir, no, sir!”

  “That’s more like it, Carver. You’re third-in-command on Mars right now, and I need you to act like it. Chief Maxwell put a lot of faith in you, Lieutenant. Don’t let him down. Aames out.” There was an audible click as the captain’s channel closed.

  I didn’t say a word. I didn’t want to push Carver one way or another, just when it seemed the captain had the young lieutenant back on track. So I just climbed a few rungs higher and attached my tethers to the highest rungs. Finally, I had clear access to the secondary hatch, but still the stair rails blocked it from closing. They were supposed to collapse down so we could close the hatch, but they w
ere too twisted for that. So I started work on the top bolts. When I had them half-loosened, I called back down, “Lieutenant, I have to drop the rails to close the hatch. They’re kind of tangled and twisted. We’ll need to clear the shaft once they fall, but you may have some trouble getting them out through the tunnel. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, Ensign.” His answer sounded neutral: not depressed, but without the fire Aames had ignited.

  “All right, here’s the first one.” I released the last bolt on the lower rail. I had already removed and dropped the support posts that had connected it to the upper rail, so it started falling, caught up briefly on the upper rail, and then slid lazily free, dropping and eventually reaching the bottom of the shaft. It landed with a low crash, the sound barely reaching me through the Martian atmosphere.

  Carver called up, “All right, let me drag this out.” He started pulling and sliding the tangle through the short tunnel and into the pit.

  Once the lower rail was clear, I set to work on the top rail. Soon I called down: “Top rail coming down.” I released the last bolt and dropped the rail. I also pulled down and dropped some debris from the turret, mostly shards of wall tiles and bits of wiring that hung down into the opening.

  Without even watching the debris fall, I took my chance to stick my head up into the ruins of the turret, so I could see just how bad it was. To my surprise, the damage was so bad, it was good: the turret had been almost completely swept away by the blast. A few fragments had fallen into the shaft and gotten caught, and a couple of wall panels had collapsed in a coincidental lean-to that covered the opening; but it looked like we would have no trouble escaping the turret when we decided we were ready.

  I dropped back down into the shaft and set to work on the secondary hatch. It was an entirely manual mechanism, a hinged plate under the west floor of the shaft that swung down when I unlatched it. In the Martian gravity, it should have been little effort to swing the plate up to cover the hole in the east half and latch it in place; but my ribs objected to the twisting I had to do, and I dropped the plate before I could latch it. Then I had to dodge the plate as it swung by once, twice—and I caught it. Thanks to the Martian gravity, it swung slowly, but I was taking no chances with my ribs. This time I was more careful as I lifted it into place and latched it closed. Then once it was latched, I pulled out a handle that let me turn and tighten a pressure seal. At last, we were sealed off from the storm. My mouth was almost dry by then, and the new water bag was already empty. I was ready to get to the shelter and get another drink.

  But when I looked back down the shaft, I knew I would have to wait a little longer for water. Carver was having trouble with the top rail: it was more tangled, and the twisted coils didn’t want to fit through the tunnel. He tugged and pulled and tried to compress it; but no matter what he tried, it kept hanging up on the tunnel edges. As fast as I dared, I dropped down to help; and with the two of us compressing and pulling and pushing, we slid the rail out into the pit.

  By the time we cleared the shaft, Carver and I were both puffing (though at least the ache in my ribs had dulled). It’s never smart to overexert in a suit, so I waved Carver over to sit on a bench. But he shook his head inside his helmet, and he refused to sit. He paced and he stamped, and once he even slammed a wall tile.

  Finally, I checked the captain’s circuit to make sure we were alone. Then I had to ask: “Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

  Carver turned away. “He’s so rough on me.”

  Yeah, I had seen this coming. “He’s rough on everyone, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, but he seems to have a target painted on me. Especially during flight training. I did so well with Chief Maxwell. He was patient, he showed me what I needed to do to improve, and he insisted I had what it takes to be a pilot.”

  I smiled. “Max is special, Lieutenant. He’s a great second-in-command, he understands his crew perfectly. He said plenty of good things about your flying.” Then I worried: Would thinking about Max bring Carver down again?

  But Carver was still on his rant. “Him, maybe, but not Captain Aames. Nothing I did was ever good enough for him. You should’ve heard him chew me out after my collision.”

  I laughed. “Half the ship heard, Carver.”

  I couldn’t see Carver’s face, but I imagined him scowling. “Yeah, that did wonders for my respect among the crew.” I snorted, and he turned to glare at me through the visor. “What?”

  “I’ve served with the captain long enough to know he wouldn’t waste time chewing you out if you weren’t worth it. He’d have kicked you off this expedition.” Carver looked doubtful. “He could’ve done it, screw mission planning. If he had wanted you gone, you’d be gone. But him and Max, they’re a team. They both have the same goals, they just go at it from different angles. They both want you to be your best.” Carver was silent in response. Absorbing or doubting? I couldn’t tell. “And we all need our best from each other right now. You want respect? All right, straighten up, take the criticism like a grown-up, and show that you’ve learned from it.”

  “What?”

  “Look, Carver. Aames is only as rough on you as you need him to be. You get better, the chewing out will happen less often.”

  “How good do I have to get so the chewing out stops?”

  “Heh. I’ll let you know when I get that good.”

  CRAWLER

  Carver and I entered the pressure door to the shelter. The airlock is large enough to let a rescuer carry an injured spacer, and protocol is to pair up if possible when using the lock. The extra person takes up more volume, meaning it takes less air to pressurize the lock, and so less energy to pump air in and out. We were cramped in the lock, but again, there were no claustrophobes on that mission.

  Once we were through the airlock, we entered the dustlock, an almost futile effort to keep the Martian sand out of the shelter. The iron oxides of Mars aren’t as insidious as the fine crushed basalts of Luna, but they can still play hell with mechanical and electrical systems. So in the dustlock, we took turns vacuuming off each other’s suits, then swabbing them down with electrostatic cloths, and then finally vacuuming the floor. When all that was done, we stripped out of our suits and down to our skivvies: loose white underclothes, mine soaked with sweat and leaked water. My ribs gave one more brief twinge as I unbolted and opened my bodysuit, but then they suddenly felt better. Examining the inner shell of the bodysuit, I saw where it had been dented, right into my ribs. And that part of the shell was where the water supply ran through. The impact probably split a valve.

  There would be time for suit repair later. We had had a long day already. We hung the suits in a locker next to Pagnotto’s suit and Gale’s helmet.

  But for all that cleaning effort, when I padded barefoot into the shelter, I still felt the grit of sand beneath my feet. And no wonder: when Gale and Carver had brought Van der Ven in for the amputation, they hadn’t taken time to unsuit; and since Van’s suit had doubled as a tourniquet, they had left it on until they had started the operation. Now his suit lay piled in pieces on the floor by the exam table, where Van still lay, unconscious. Gale was also still in his suit as he moved back and forth between Van on the exam table and Elvio on a bunk nearby. He wasn’t a doctor, but he and Van der Ven had both cross-trained under Dr. Koertig. It figured one of our field medics would also be our first patient.

  I crossed to the exam table and looked at Van’s medical comp, and then at him. We’d all had basic medic training, so I could see that Van was stable. He had lost blood, but the suit’s auto-tourniquet had minimized the loss. He was still low, so Gale had given him two units of null plasma, and now he was on a saline drip with painkillers. Gale and Carver had amputated his left leg just below the knee. The stump was wrapped in fresh white bandages, probably half the bandages in the shelter. Van was dozing fitfully, and Gale had used restraints to hold him down. In the low Martian gravity, it would be all too easy for him to toss right off the table.

  The sh
elter was made up of three rooms: a workroom, a utility room to the east, and a bunk room to the west. Each room was no bigger than a large ship’s cabin, so we didn’t have space for clutter. I stooped down, and my ribs weren’t so bad now that the bodysuit wasn’t pinching them. I started picking up Van der Ven’s suit as I turned to Gale. “We can watch your patients, Lieutenant. You should unsuit. We need all the elbow room we can get.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Ensign,” Gale snapped. But he headed to the dustlock. By the time I brought the pieces of Van’s suit into the lock, he was mostly out of his own suit: his sleeves and bodysuit and boots were off and in the locker, and he was unsealing his leggings. I noted that he hadn’t bothered vacuuming anything. I glared at him, pulled the hand vac from its wall socket, and started vacuuming Van’s suit. Gale just glared back, hung up his leggings, and went back into the shelter.

  I thought of making a smart remark, but then I remembered the captain’s words: “We need all of us, every single one, with our heads in the game . . . Gale’s a nervous wreck from the surgery . . . If trouble comes down, I trust you to handle it.” So I decided I could cut Gale a little slack too. I finished vacuuming and wiping Van’s suit. I also found a pair of surgical gloves and some biodegradable wipes, and I used those for the grim task of cleaning out the lower left legging. There wasn’t a lot of blood in there, thanks to the auto-tourniquet, but it was still a mess. When I was done with the blood, I started on Gale’s suit, which had some exterior blood smears along with its coating of dust. And yes, Pagnotto’s also needed cleaning. I could hardly blame Gale there, since his priority had been Elvio’s concussion.