The Furnace

by Timothy S. Johnston

  “We’ll spread off this bloody station eventually. It’ll just take longer than I had hoped.”

  “The only thing spreading off this station will be your ashes, Brick.”

  He loomed over me. “Such confidence!” he bit out. “I wonder what could make you so—”

  I stabbed upward savagely with a shard of solar panel. It was fifteen inches long and came to a deadly point that thrust past his outer suit material, through the coolant layer and into the soft flesh of his lower abdomen. I twisted savagely and shoved my visor next to his.

  Through the cracked glass, I saw his eyes register shock as he realized what had just happened. He let out a low, sustained, sepulchral groan. I twisted the other way now; his eyes bulged in agony. My knowledge of anatomy was extensive—I had just severed his abdominal aorta and renal arteries. Death would be almost immediate...as well as intensely painful.

  “I’m sorry, Brick,” I whispered.

  His suit lost air fast. Coolant fluid and gouts of blood spilled out and floated away in boiling bubbles of froth.

  I realized suddenly that an alarm had sounded in my helmet. My suit’s pressure was dangerously low. The computer had compensated by increasing the volume of air released from my oxygen tank, but I had almost expended the supply.

  I reached down with my left hand and clumsily tore the patch kit from the pocket on my right thigh. I held the spray bottle awkwardly with my right hand—the pain in my shoulder was incredible—and sprayed the sealant foam over the fabric on my ripped left forearm. In two seconds the job was done. The pressure in my suit rose quickly to a normal level, but now the oxygen alarm blared in my helmet. I had only fifteen minutes to get back for another tank.

  Brick’s lifeless body floated next to me. Blood still oozed into space from his gut, and the hideous expression was now seared into his face. It would remain there for a while.

  Until I burned him, that is.

  * * *

  I removed a tether from one of the pockets on Brick’s vacsuit and tied it around his boot. It was easy to drag him in zero gravity; it was stopping him that was difficult. I pulled myself to the edge of the array and looked at the daunting chasm before me. I swore as the body began to float across without me. I had to give it a yank to stop it from pulling me out into open space, but even so, I almost lost contact with the array.

  Leaping across to SOLEX with a body in tow was easier said than done. I needed to get both of us across safely, and Brick was deadweight, so to speak. If I didn’t do this right, things could still go very badly for me.

  I considered what to do next. I could throw Brick across and hope he got hung up on the station’s hull somewhere. I could throw him across with a very slight velocity, then follow with a big push and wait for him to reach me on the other side. Or I could tie the tether to my waist and jump in the hopes that it would tow him across with me.

  Shaheen appeared from behind the curve of the module, thirty meters away. “Tanner?” she asked tentatively. We faced each other, but she clearly couldn’t make out my features at such a distance. Also, with the sun at my back, I was probably just a silhouette.

  I grunted. “It’s me. Don’t worry.”

  “Thank God! I thought you might be Brick.”

  “Do you think you can catch him?”

  She advanced to the edge of the module. “Sure. Just let me brace myself on something here...”

  I eyed the space between us, estimated for a long moment, then gave Brick a shove. His body floated across the gap and Shaheen caught him easily.

  “Yuck,” she said as she noticed the mess. “You broke a panel for this?” She rotated him slightly so the blood was nowhere near her. There were probably no nanos in it—it was from his abdomen, after all, not his head or fingers—but we had to be careful.

  “No other choice. Now shut up and catch me, will you?”

  She chuckled. “We shouldn’t feel so relieved, only hours from death.”

  I hesitated. “Actually,” I finally said, “we may have another option after all.”

  * * *

  “The mass driver?” Shaheen said. We were back in the tunnel that led into SOLEX; Brick was behind us, still attached by tether. His corpse bounced off corridor bulkheads as we pulled ourselves through the station. “But you launched all the life pods,” she said.

  “Sure, but it’s still operational, right?”

  “Yes...”

  “It has its own power source.”

  She looked at me as though I were mad. “You’re not suggesting launching ourselves, are you? Tell me you’re joking.”

  “Well why not? What other hope is there?”

  She shook her head. “Listen. Without a ship or an EM shield, the radiation would fry us. The heat would tax our suits beyond their limits in only a few hours. We’d cook either way. Our oxygen would run out. And the velocity wouldn’t be enough!” She threw up her arms. “It’s insane!”

  “What happens if we stay here?” I locked eyes with her. “Be honest with me.”

  She sighed. “We have about six hours remaining.”

  “And then?”

  A shrug. “We’ll repressurize the modules. But it doesn’t much matter, because then the coolers fail. Then the EM field fails.” She pursed her lips before, “We can stay in the suits for a while, but as I said, they’ll give out soon enough. We’ll also be taking a lot of radiation. It’ll probably kill us before anything else.”

  “So we die if we stay.”

  “Within maybe three hours of battery failure.”

  I snorted. “So you have to admit that we might have a better chance in the mass driver. We wait here until the batteries drain completely, then we launch ourselves.”

  She frowned. “But I told you, the velocity wouldn’t be nearly enough. Where would we go?”

  “Toward Mercury and hope for a—”

  She held a hand up. “Wait.” She stared into my eyes. Her lips pursed thoughtfully, then split in a grin. She burst out laughing.

  “What?” I asked, perplexed.

  It took her a moment to catch her breath. “You’re insane. But I trust you. I’ll do it.”

  I blinked. “You will?”

  “There’s no other way. You said so yourself.” She grabbed me around the waist. “Come on, let’s take care of the bodies and get into some fresh suits. If we’re going to do this, we might as well be prepared.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  My shoulder throbbed horribly. In the command center, after restoring the gravity field and repressurizing the station, Shaheen pulled my arm for me and allowed it to grind slowly back into its socket. The pain was incredible, but I clenched my teeth and did my best to ignore it. After all, we still had a lot to do.

  We took the medication to counteract the radiation exposure, but I knew it was more or less just to keep our hopes up. I was pretty sure how this was all going to end, mass driver or not.

  We dumped Brick’s body in the common mess on the deck next to Bram. He fell on his back as I dropped him, his arms outstretched, his lower torso a bloody mess. I peeled off his vacsuit and left it crumpled at his side.

  Bram’s face was unrecognizable, although there were a few strands of red hair still protruding from a chin cleaved with ash. The pistol blast had burned the rest completely away.

  Katrina and Rickets were next. I retrieved them from the clinic, along with the two headless corpses in the freezer, Reggie and Bel. I placed them next to Brick’s body. I then went back for Grossman and dragged him to the mess. He probably weighed close to three hundred pounds. I should have moved him in zero gravity, I thought wryly. Here I was using all my strength to move corpses, when I should have been focusing my energy on survival.

  I stepped back to examine the scene. It was surreal. S
even bodies, limbs intertwined, blood intermingled, faces frozen in pain, now lay together on the deck. Incineration was only moments away. Before I performed the final extermination, however, I stalked back to the clinic and looked around with a practiced eye. There was blood smeared on the deck under the chair Malichauk had sat in during the tests. It had dripped from his hands and was most likely swarming with nanos.

  Rickets had fallen flat on his face when he died, arms out to either side. He had left bloody droplets on the deck, also probably infected with nanos.

  Shaheen located a small hydrogen bottle in the engineering module. I opened the valve on the tube and lit the gas as it streamed out. It produced a flame a half meter long. I held it over the infected blood and seared it until the deck was black. I then did the same over every blood splatter I could find, just in case.

  The blood that had pooled on the procedures tables during the autopsies had collected in the drain under both tables. I removed the catchment containers and placed them in the hazardous-materials ejection chute. I pumped the hand lever built into the bulkhead and purged the material to space. The sun would incinerate it. I didn’t think it was infected, but I had to be thorough.

  As I worked the lever, I realized that it had last been used when Brick had ejected Jimmy’s head and hands into space to conceal his infection. It was a gruesome thought.

  In the common mess again, I poured cooking oil from the galley over the pile of bodies. Shaheen brought in a couple of bottles of pure oxygen and cranked the valves to full. I placed the burning hydrogen bottle beside the pile and made sure the flame licked the deck under Brick’s body.

  We retreated to the hatch before the smell of burning flesh hit us. The room was an inferno within minutes. We watched the funeral pyre silently through the viewport. It was a depressing sight; some of those people had died because I had failed in my efforts to protect them. In particular, I felt a great deal of guilt for Reggie, Bel and even Grossman. All had been uninfected and had died completely innocent.

  I sighed as the flames consumed them.

  Thirty minutes later, I reentered the mess and studied the charred mass on the deck. It was mostly ash, but a few white bones protruded from the mound. I kicked them and uncovered what I thought was Brick’s skull. I turned it over with my foot to expose its interior, then peered through an eye socket.

  Empty.

  I searched the entire pile for long minutes. No flesh remained.

  * * *

  Shaheen and I went through the remaining modules and found two unused vacsuits, air tanks fully charged. A little more looking and we uncovered six spare oxygen bottles, which we moved up to the mass driver.

  Back in my cabin, we started to undress as we prepared to change into the fresh vacsuits.

  “When do we have to leave?” I asked.

  “Batteries will be gone in an hour. We should launch soon after that.”

  “Should we turn off the gravity?”

  She frowned. “I put it back on to burn the bodies. Can you think of a good reason to turn it off?”

  Taken aback, I said, “Sure, to give us a few more—” I stopped as I studied her face. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You really don’t like zero-g?” Her eyebrows arched.

  “I hate it.”

  She smiled coyly. “What exactly have you done in it before?”

  I shrugged. “Mostly vomited and fought with crazy nano-infected people.” I paused for a long moment as I eyed her. “I haven’t done that, if that’s what you mean.”

  She approached and put her arms around my neck. “Maybe it’s time to try. We have an hour, you know.”

  In her skintight coolant suit, her figure was astounding. Her breasts pushed the material outward and her narrow waist and wide hips were enticing. Her black hair cascaded to her shoulders and framed her blue eyes, which were fixed on me intently.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I shook my head and felt stupid. Of course I knew what she was doing. She had grabbed her zipper and pulled it down the length of her torso, exposing her large breasts and a triangle of black hair at her crotch.

  “Aren’t you going to turn off the gravity?” I muttered. My voice seemed distant, as though someone else had spoken.

  “Can’t be bothered,” she purred as she pushed her lips to mine.

  The suit fell away and I gathered her in my arms.

  * * *

  We showered and pulled our vacsuits on slowly. The emotion I felt was bittersweet; neither of us knew what was about to happen. They had abandoned us on this miserable, remote outpost. We were expendable. And yet amid the horror and the pain, I realized that I might have found something in Shaheen that had been absent all my adult life.

  I looked at her as we dressed. She caught my eye and smiled. “Are you scared?” she asked.

  After a beat, “No.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “Then what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I think...”

  “What?”

  I hesitated for another moment. Finally, “I feel happy,” I said. I glanced away, then back again. “Is that weird?”

  She shook her head. “No. I feel it too.” A grin lit her features.

  I grabbed her hand and together we left the cabin.

  * * *

  In the mass driver module, we tethered the spare oxygen bottles together. Each of us took three. The vacsuits had external air-supply valves, which would make it easy to connect the bottles in the vacuum of space.

  “It’s too bad we ejected the other modules,” Shaheen sighed. “We lost most of our spare oxygen and other supplies.”

  I snorted. “I hadn’t thought of using the mass driver at the time. Give me a break.”

  She laughed. “This is so damn crazy. I’ve never heard of anything like this.” She looked down the barrel of the driver at the powerful magnets that were aimed inward to suspend metallic objects and speed them away from the station. She frowned. “How the hell are we going to do this? We don’t have the escape pods.”

  I chewed my lip. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  She pondered it for a minute. “Well, the mass driver will only work on metallic objects. Preferably symmetrical.”

  “So we need something to attach ourselves to.”

  “Yes.”

  “How fast will this get us moving?”

  She pursed her lips. “Not fast. The big drivers on planets are kilometers long. They have to get objects moving at escape velocities while fighting planetary gravity wells. This one is just under a hundred and fifty meters. It’ll get us going at about three kilometers per second more than our current velocity.” We would continue to orbit the sun, but we would also move away from it and closer to Mercury as our orbital radiuses increased.

  “That seems incredibly fast.”

  “Seems like it, but it’s not. Most ships that launch from a planet need escape velocities of ten kilometers per second or more.”

  “I see.” I paused as I considered that. I had no ideas. “So what can we use?”

  “Let me look.” She started to scour through the material that lay on the deck. At one time it had been a neat pile of scrapped piping and metal plates and other discarded equipment in a corner, but zero-g had left the module a mess. After a few minutes, however, she said, “Ah, here’s something.” She rolled a bottle of compressed gas toward me. It was over a meter long and thirty centimeters thick.

  I peered at it closely. “That looks pretty old-fashioned.”

  “It is. But it’s metal and it’ll work. There are four of them.”

  “So we each tie two of them together—”

  “With chain.”

  “—and tether ourselves to them.”

  “Then we tether the spare oxygen
bottles to ourselves. The mass driver will propel these old clunkers out, with us behind them.”

  I kicked one with my foot. “What the hell was in these things?”

  “During the station’s construction they held coolant for the life-support systems. I held on to them in case I could use the material for something else.”

  “Smart thinking.”

  She frowned. “I couldn’t have predicted what we’re about to do. Only someone insane would do it.”

  Or someone willing to do anything to survive, I thought.

  * * *

  I wrapped a chain around two of the metal canisters and left a good two meters of slack to use as a handhold in the mass driver. Next I took three of the spare oxygen bottles and wrapped a tether around them. I would attach them to my waist so they could trail behind me during launch. I then did the same for the other two canisters.

  “Will we be able to hold on to those chains?” Shaheen asked.

  I frowned. “It’s either that or we’re dead.”

  “If we wrap the chain around our suits it’ll probably tear them. But maybe I can come up with some sort of harness or something.”

  “Good idea.” I paused for a moment. “How much time now?”

  She checked her watch. “Batteries should give out within five minutes or so.”

  My heart pounded. Time had counted toward our deaths for over twenty-four hours now. It was impossible to get used to, and it was far from over. “How do we launch?” I muttered.

  “I rigged it to fire when you hit the red button over there.” She gestured at the control console. “A twenty-second launch countdown will begin. Get in the barrel with the canisters and try to keep your lunch down.”

  I blinked. “You think it’ll be that bad?”

  She grimaced. “It’ll be harder than zero-g, that’s for sure.”

  I winced at the thought.

  A few minutes later, the emergency red lights that I had grown accustomed to all over the station flickered, went out and plunged us into utter darkness. An instant later, the computer broadcast a message over the comm:

  “Attention all personnel. Battery depletion estimated in sixty seconds. All life-support and environmental controls including the EM radiation field will cease to function.”