by R. E. Weber
As he stared at the pod, the pulsing, green light in the bottom left hand corner of his Companion changed to red, and he heard an urgent sounding, repeating bleep. Quickly, he selected the dot and then a status message appeared:
Warning. Code 2.5 Security Alert.
Theo didn’t need to know the exact meaning of the message to know that he was in trouble. It was worse. He continued to stare at the message as it pulsed faintly. Then it changed again:
Warning. Unauthorised access to research station and node, detected.
As he stared at the message, alarmed, his heart began to thump hard. Then it changed again:
Security Protocol 1.4 Initiated.
Then:
Extreme warning. Facility Self Destruct Initiated.
Theo stared at the message in stark horror, suddenly feeling like he was about to throw up.
Extreme warning: Facility Self Destruct in P.S.N 1:29:44. Immediate evacuation of personnel, required.
Theo didn’t need to do any calculation to know how long that was. It was a little under an hour.
Extreme warning: Immediate evacuation to minimum safe distance of three Hotah, required.
Theo could barely breathe as he stared at the message. The station had somehow been set to self-destruct in less than one hour. And he had to evacuate to a distance of three hotah to escape the blast. That was six kilometres! Theo gasped as he lifted his hand to his mouth in shock. He was going to die. The next word that came out of his mouth wasn’t a word that could easily be repeated. At least not in polite company.
*
Theo soon found himself racing back down the corridor into the control room. Exactly why, he wasn’t sure. He could, after all, access the node from anywhere in the station. But maybe there was something else he could do from there – something he hadn’t yet discovered. And if he was honest, it somehow made him feel better, like he was doing something or that he was at least in control, even though a part of him knew that he wasn’t really.
Once he had reached the control room, he skidded to a halt on the suspended platform, like a racing car slamming on its brakes. Then he walked to the edge of the platform, grasped the barrier with both hands and hung his head down, breathing quickly and trying to force back the panic. He had to calm down and think rationally. For several long moments, he stared at the ground, his breathing shallow and rapid. Then he heard a voice.
‘Breathe Theo, Breathe.’
Startled, he stood upright and looked around, expecting to see somebody in the room with him. But the control centre was empty. Who had said that? It wasn’t coming from his companion because that was always clear like normal speech, whereas the voice he’d heard was indistinct as if echoing down a long tunnel. And it couldn’t have been a ghost because he didn’t believe such things. Was his mind playing tricks on him? Was his feeble human brain unable to cope with everything that was happening to him and beginning to crack?
Yet somehow, it didn’t feel like he was cracking up. Instead, the voice had made him feel strangely calm. And wherever or whomever it was coming from, it was at least giving him good advice. So if he was going mad and hearing voices in his head, at least they were helpful voices! Slowly, he took a deep breath. Then another. Then another. And after a minute or so, he could feel that it was working. His heartbeat was getting slower and his thoughts were coming into focus.
Now, feeling much calmer, he had to think. He had to carefully assess the situation and come up with a plan of action.
He knew that in less than one hour, he had to be a long way away from where he was now: six kilometres to be precise. And he knew there seemed to be no way to communicate with the ship in orbit, so he might not be able to expect help in time. His transportation pod wasn’t working, so he couldn’t escape in that. So he needed to get away from the research station himself, and that meant going outside onto the planet’s surface. He remembered what he had been told about the planet in his briefing. ‘Its atmosphere is extremely thin and is composed largely of carbon dioxide’. He wouldn’t be able to breathe in that. So he was going to need a space suit.
Quickly, he connected back to the node. When he’d first connected, he’d remembered seeing a list of options, one of which had been Inventory. He knew that Inventories were just detailed lists of things which one owned – something he’d remembered from his time spent playing on-line role-playing games. So hopefully, the Inventory would just be a list of all the equipment available on the station. He selected the option, and to his relief he was correct. He then scanned the first few items in the list:
Inductors: 2 (minimal charge)
Personal Transport Pods: 1 (inactive)
Maintenance drones: 5 (all inactive)
Food ration packs: 3 (beyond useful service)
Cross species med packs: 0
Theo read on down the list. There were a hundred or so items listed, many of which he didn’t recognise. But when he reached the end, he saw something that looked familiar:
Self-Contained Environment Suits: 0
Or Space Suits as humans called them.
*
Exactly as planned, after the ship had almost completed another orbit of the planet and First Mentor had tilted it to precisely the correct angle, the ship began to brush upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere, and within seconds the underside was glowing red. But in its low powered state, there was no shield to protect it. That meant the ship’s hull was beginning to heat up. And soon it would be dangerously hot.
*
A minute or so into re-entry, Orientator woke with a start to the sound of a deep, thunderous roar, reverberating through the ship. When he’d drifted out of consciousness, the last thing he’d remembered was the intense cold slowly sapping every last ounce of energy from him. Slowly, he sat up and took a deep breath. The air was cool, but not cold. Then he felt the floor with the palm of his hand. And it was warm. Much warmer than he’d expected.
*
As First Mentor steadied the ship through its fiery descent towards the planet’s surface, it was able to gently guide the flow of heat from the outside of the ship – now a deep orange colour – through to its power cells. A little more power meant a little more control of the ship’s thrusters, and slowly but surely the thunderous vibration began to smooth out. First Mentor was now touching and controlling every system in the ship simultaneously, concentrating as hard as it had ever done in its entire existence. Even the ship’s computer node, which had given over complete control to First Mentor, couldn’t have done a better job. Indeed, there wasn’t a being anywhere that could have.
*
Inductors! They seemed to be about the only things from the Inventory that looked like they might be of some use to Theo, or were at least working to some degree. From what he’d read on the help screens, it seemed that Inductors were some sort of multi-purpose tool, which could be used either to cut through almost any substance, or induce a chain reaction into any material it came into contact with – either dropping its temperature down to almost absolute zero, or the opposite: inducing an extreme heat reaction. And it seemed that it could also be used either by hand or by remote control. Could he perhaps use it as a cutting tool to cut his way out of the research station, through the window? Maybe. But then what? He had no space suit, so he wouldn’t be able to breathe. He would probably be dead within a minute. And besides, cutting a hole wouldn’t work. He had, after all, seen enough sci-fi movies to know that even a tiny hole in a spacecraft’s hull would cause the air to rush out explosively and suck everything out into space, including the people within it. And he imagined it would almost certainly be the same for the research station, with the planet’s extremely thin atmosphere. But could he perhaps weaken it somehow so that it might shatter completely? If so, then it might even allow him to survive being sucked out onto the planet’s surface, even if he couldn’t breathe. But how could he get far enough away from the station to escape the explosion in time, without a space suit? It
was all beginning to look like an impossible situation.
He walked over to the observation window and looked out across the huge canyon. Then a thought occurred to him. If he could somehow break the glass and get sucked out of the station through the window, might he possibly be blown far enough away to fall into the canyon? The canyon was deep, very deep, perhaps even several kilometres deep. And that meant that if he fell into the canyon, it would take some time, perhaps several minutes, to hit the bottom in the low gravity. Several kilometres in several minutes! That might do it. That might get him far enough away to escape the explosion. But was it as deep as six kilometres? If it was, would he even survive for the duration of the fall if he couldn’t breathe? And if he could hold his breath, wouldn’t he just freeze to death before he hit the bottom? And if he could do all this and survive long enough, could he, by some miracle, time it to happen when he saw the ship coming? It was a slim chance at best, but at least it was a chance. Now all he had to do was to blow a big enough hole in the window for him to be sucked through in one piece with just a couple of inductors. Piece of Cake, he said out loud. Not!
He checked the node to see how long he had until the self-destruct activated:
Self-destruct in P.S.N: 0:42:03
Immediate evacuation to minimum safe distance, required.
That was barely half an hour. Theo began to panic again. His heart began to race and his mouth was bone dry. He was gasping for some water. But then something told him that he wasn’t likely to find some anytime soon. Then suddenly, the thought of a glass of water triggered a distant memory. And although he wasn’t quite sure why, it somehow seemed important.
*
After the ship’s fiery re-entry into the planet’s atmosphere, its speed had dropped considerably and its outer hull had cooled somewhat. First Mentor was able to control the ship with greater precision, and it barely needed any thrust to control its descent as it had enough momentum to carry it on towards its destination without much adjustment.
Anytime now, it might just be close enough to attempt a low power communication with the research station several hundred kilometres away. Of course, under full power, the distance wouldn’t have been an issue. But with its power reserves still low, any communication signal might still struggle to reach the station. Still, First Mentor had to try. So it sent a repeating communication pulse to the station to establish contact. But it was no use. After several minutes, without any sign of a response, it terminated the message to save power. It would attempt it again later when it was much closer.
*
The full detail of the memory came flooding back to Theo. He had only been nine years old and his grandfather had been sick in bed with the flu. Trying his best to help, Theo had searched through the cupboard for some cold and flu medicine, which he’d soon found in the form of a sachet of yellow powder. Carefully, he’d read the back of the sachet:
Pour sachet into a mug and fill with hot but not boiling water.
While boiling the kettle, he had found a glass in the cupboard and emptied the yellow powder from the sachet into it. Well a glass was more or less the same as a mug, wasn’t it? After the kettle had boiled, Theo had waited a few seconds for the water to cool down, so it wasn’t boiling. Then he’d impatiently poured the water into the glass. But as soon as the water had touched the glass, it had cracked and split into two jagged pieces on the work surface, splashing the hot yellow liquid everywhere. Luckily, save for a few tiny splatters, none of it had landed on Theo. Upstairs, his granddad had heard him yelp, as one of the pieces of the glass had fallen to the floor and shattered, and had called down to see if he was OK. But Theo had been too busy sobbing to hear him.
Then the following day, Theo had taken it upon himself to ask his school physics teacher why the glass had shattered when he’d poured boiling water into it. And he’d remembered the answer clearly:
It’s called Thermal Stress, Theo. If you pour boiling water into a glass, there is an uneven increase in the thermal expansion of the walls of the glass. If the expansion is uneven enough and the glass is not strong enough, it will break.
Once his teacher had explained it more fully, Theo had understood. While part of the glass – the outside – had remained cold or at least cooler, the inside had become suddenly hotter when the boiling water had been added. Glass, like many substances, expands when heated. And because the inside and the outside had expanded at different rates and the glass had been brittle, it had cracked.
Theo looked at the observation window. Was it really glass, or at least something similar – something equally brittle? He walked up to the window and put the palm of his hand up against it. It certainly had the cool familiar feeling of glass. But even if it was glass, it was almost certainly strengthened and would no doubt be extremely difficult to crack.
Theo checked again to see how long he had left:
Self-destruct in P.S.N: 0:34:03
Immediate evacuation to minimum safe distance, required.
Twenty-five minutes. That was all the time he had left to be rescued. He looked out of the window. Surely it was better to wait rather than attempt to escape. If the ship came, then it could probably cut through the glass safely or melt through the rock – as the pod had done – and rescue him. Assuming of course there was enough time. He really should wait for the ship. But then he hated the thought of standing around doing nothing while the countdown raced towards zero. So at least if he had an escape plan in place, he could be ready to use it, should it become necessary. It might buy him a few extra seconds. And those seconds might just give the ship enough time to rescue him, assuming he was still alive.
Then he thought about the Inductors and his eyes popped wide open. It was at least a chance or a possibility.
*
Minutes later, Theo had found the Inductors in a storage room, brought them back to the control centre and rested one against each edge of the observation window so that the ends were touching what he really and truly hoped was as brittle as glass. If he could induce a heat reaction from one side and then a cold reaction from the other, it might just crack and even shatter the window. Then he might be blown free of the research station and down into the canyon below, as planned. Of course, he still hadn’t thought of any way to survive outside the station without a suit. But then it was extremely cold outside, and if his body froze quickly, he might be perfectly preserved. And if the ship was able to find him then it was at least a chance.
He checked the status of the inductors:
Power level: Four per cent.
Was that enough? Would that even crack the window? Or was it just the vain hope of a weakling, primitive human, struggling to cope with circumstances beyond his control? There was no way to know. But in any case, his little experiment was ready – probably his last ever experiment. And so he sat on the floor and stared out of the window, waiting. Waiting for a signal from First Mentor that rescue was coming. Waiting, so he might catch sight of the ship plunging out of the sky to save him. Indeed, waiting for anything that might make him think that he didn’t need to go ahead with the crazy and insane plan he had devised to escape.
Self-destruct in P.S.N: 00:15:23
*
The ship was descending fast towards the canyon when its sensors began to detect faint, regular pulses of X-ray energy coming from the station. They weren’t at dangerous enough levels to cause any harm, but they were gradually pulsing faster and faster. First Mentor recognised the pattern immediately as the pulse generated when a security protocol 1.4 had been initiated. And within moments, it had analysed the frequency and the rate of change to determine how long it would take for the self-destruct mechanism to reach critical mass and explode:
Self-destruct in P.S.N: 00:07:14
But was Theo even alive? The ship’s long distance sensors weren’t working so there was no way to tell. Despite several attempts at communication, Theo hadn’t replied. And First Mentor regretted the fact that it had not been able t
o react sooner.
*
There were barely minutes left now as Theo stared at the sky through the observation window, his eyes wide with panic, desperately hoping to catch sight of a distant black shape in the sky. But there was nothing. He’d tried several times to contact the ship, but there hadn’t been even a glimmer of a response.
Theo stood up and pulled the cords of his environmental suit’s hood tight around his face until only his nose was uncovered – even though he knew that the suit was of limited use without a working power supply. He knew that even if the ship arrived before the explosion, it probably wouldn’t have time to cut through the rock above him or the glass of the observation window to free him. So that meant that his only way to escape was through the window. His untried and untested experiment had to work.
Theo didn’t need to see the Inductors to operate them. He had already remotely connected to each of them and prepared them to initiate a chain reaction with just one command. He would start the cold reaction first, then the heat reaction a few seconds later. He knew there was no point waiting any longer. It was now or never. Do or die.