Bastion Saturn

by C. Chase Harwood

  Monty shook his head. “Damn.”

  “Shit,” said Caleb.

  “What?” asked Jennifer.

  Caleb turned in his chair, strapped in. He hated floating around, or so he claimed. “Air filters are failing faster than we hoped for. This piece of shit shuttle should have been retired for scrap.”

  “I know. You keep saying that. Why the cussing?”

  Monty said, “Because we’ve run the numbers every which way and no matter how we crunch them, we’re dead before we get there. Day after tomorrow, maybe the day after that we are unconscious. Total asphyxiation a few hours later. We have another week before we hit Phoebe—dead.”

  Jennifer stared at the men with wide eyes. Just coming out here to the far reaches of the Solar System required a certain level of uncommon bravery. She had bravery to spare. Even when she had fled across Dione, with no real hope of rescue, she hadn’t contemplated actual death. What Monty was saying guaranteed absolute and certified death. She swallowed the feeling of cotton growing in her throat, then looked at the sedated passengers.

  “Yes,” said Monty. “If we killed them. Say, put them in the airlock and suck out the air . . . We’d just make it, maybe.”

  Jennifer’s eyes got wider. “I wasn’t thinking that! I . . . I’m not going to do that.”

  “No,” said Caleb. “Me either.”

  Monty squeezed the remainder of his day’s emergency ration onto his tongue and slowly swallowed the goo. “I didn’t say we should.. Just stating a fact.”

  Both men had gaunt faces filled with dense beards, Monty’s flecked with gray. The yellowy dullness of their eyes spoke of failing health, and their every action seemed consciously calculated to conserve movement. Jennifer supposed that she presented the same awful image. “What about the calls?” she asked. “We should keep calling.”

  Monty scrunched his face in frustration. “They’re not answering. It’s not even radio silence now. I aimed a class-one distress signal at them this morning. There should have been an answer on that. It’s the law, or the agreement anyway. All class-one distress signals must be attended to by any party receiving them. It’s a basic law of space, written or not.” He typed a few digits out on the com panel and said, “There. Now it’s out there: three-sixty. I’ve dropped the cloak. Anyone can save us—or kill us if it’s the wrong anyone. But it won’t matter. Scan says we’re alone.”

  “Well, we have to figure something out,” said Jennifer. “I have plans. I can’t die out in the middle of . . .” She waved at the blackness outside the portal. “That.” Tears welled at the edges of her eyes, and she sniffed in a threatened snot spill. “Gosh, it stinks in here and my nose stopped smelling it weeks ago.”

  Caleb cracked his knuckles. “All right, let’s go over it again.”

  “Over what?” said Monty. “We’re almost out of air.”

  “That’s not true. We have the suits in the airlock. We’ve got my exosuit—”

  Monty shook his head. “Which we can’t get to without going outside. The suits in the airlock buy us a day. Sure, pull their canisters. We still die before we get there.”

  Caleb narrowed his eyes in concentration, then held up a eureka finger. “Wait, wait. We can bust into the propulsion system. Reroute the liquid oxygen. Let it bleed off into a gas.”

  “You some kind of genius engineer? Cause I wouldn’t have a clue as to how to even begin to do that. And then what do we land with once we get there?”

  Caleb said, “Well, you got a better solution?”

  Monty turned and glared through the small portal.

  Jennifer stared at the sedated passengers. “They froze us to get here,” she said quietly.

  “I don’t see any chambers on this rig.” Monty’s tone was harsh and he knew it, but his fear kept him from offering an apology.

  Jennifer continued, undaunted, “Almost every single one of us hibernated during the time it took to get out here.”

  “And?” parroted Caleb, but in a purposefully softer tone.

  Jennifer held up a hand. “What if we drop our body temps enough to, you know, hibernate?”

  The men looked at her as though the lack of oxygen had already killed most of her brain cells. Finally, Monty said, “I don’t mean to be condescending, sweet cheeks, but those hibernation chambers are sophisticated machines.” He looked her up and down. “You got some nice junk in your trunk.” He tapped his temple with two fingers. “But up here… not so much.”

  Jennifer made a sour face. “You know, Mr. Teach, I was raised to be polite when I talk to people, so I’ve never said a bad word about you or to you, but since I’m probably dead soon anyway— Her voice rose an octive. “You’re kind of a jerk!” She glanced at the sedated paasengers as if in apology.

  Caleb nodded. “Yeah, that was a dick way to talk. She’s just tossing out ideas. I only see you shooting them down.”

  “Huh? You shot her down first, douche.”

  Caleb’s face turned bright red. “Nobody calls me douche, douche.”

  Jennifer held up a hand again, cutting them off. “The suits.”

  “What?” said Monty, one eye staying firmly on Caleb.

  “In training, I was freaking out about walking around on another planet or moon or whatever, so I really paid attention when they taught us about the suits.” She pointed at the airlock. They rely on a very sophisticated heating and cooling system to properly keep the wearer comfortable in both extreme heat and cold.” She nodded with conviction. “I don’t know how exactly, but if we hack the cooling system and set the temp for proper hibernation, say ninety-one degrees or whatever it is, metabolic activity slows to almost nothing and we would need hardly any oxygen.”

  Caleb turned to Monty with a mocking look. “Sweet cheeks sounds pretty smart.”

  “You don’t get to come out here if you’re a moron, beau hunk.” said Jennifer, resigned that even under such precarious conditions she could not prevent condescension over her looks and upbeat attitude.

  Caleb inwardly glowed at the moniker beau hunk.

  Monty smiled and rolled his eyes. “We’d freeze to death. Hibernation requires cooling the body down, and the brain in particular, at a very rapid rate. You’re suggesting an even shittier way to die.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Only one way to know. We need to wake up Saanvi and get her opinion—and David, too.” She smiled at Caleb. “David actually is an engineer.”

  Monty threw up his hands. “Why not? Worst case, their heavier breathing asphyxiates us that much sooner.”

  Saanvi remained groggier than David for much longer. She was so incapacitated by the grogginess, that in a panic to get something, anything, going, they gave her a small shot of adrenaline. The doctor suddenly burst into full consciousness as if riding a rocket, panting and gulping a good chunk of their dwindling oxygen.

  “Theoretically, Jennifer has something here,” said Saanvi when she finally caught her breath. From her early career in a mobile clinic in the slums of Mumbai, the doctor new a hopeless case when she saw one. This certainly qualified. She glared at the dirty exosuits that the others had brought in from the airlock and were now strapped to a wall. “I hate to say it, but this does seem like quite a long shot.”

  Monty offered an I told you so smile.

  Speaking precisely to avoid any misunderstanding, she continued. “Nevertheless, with literally nothing to lose, let’s begin.” She took hold of her own exosuit, running her hand across the rist-mounted control panel. “It will require increasing the air pressure inside the suit to more quickly saturate the blood. The suit itself will regulate oxygen flow to the lowest demand. The hard part will be cooling off the brain fast enough. The best method would be to direct the coolant through the sinuses. Via some sort of tube perhaps.”

  “Wow and wow,” said Monty. “Piece of cake.”

  “Hardly,” said Saanvi, apparently tone deaf to the sarcasm. “As I stated, the chances of survival are really quite slim—which means bet
ter odds than the guaranteed death we are facing. Best news is that this ship has a compact med center so the drugs we need should be plentiful.”

  David, who had been listening quietly, sat at a monitor deep in calculations. He called over his shoulder. “The suits are coiled throughout to move coolant. Shouldn’t take much to pull out an end loop up by the neck and run it like a catheter through a nostril and back out through the mouth. That would sure give you brain freeze, eh, Saanvi?”

  The doctor nodded with a polite smile. “The trick will be to avoid frostbite where the tube touches the soft tissue.”

  Caleb volunteered to be the guinea pig. Monty wasn’t going to do it. Saanvi and David were critical for the procedure, and Jennifer was still allergic to the sedatives that were necessary to keep the patient at ease. That automatically volunteered her to stay awake and revive them all when they got there—a circumstance which, despite Jennifer’s seeming smarts, left all of them with grave doubts. They considered trying it on Rob first (who Jennifer and Monty both agreed was pretty much a useless stoner), but it didn’t seem right to use one of the other sedated passengers without his permission, at least not until the technique had been tested. Of course there was no knowing if it truly worked until they were revived. For all intents and purposes, Caleb was choosing to die by freezing. If it went according to plan, his body would be quickly cooled to a point at which his metabolic rate would slow down enough as to be undetectable, the same for activity in his brain, which would cease to function in a conscious or unconscious state. Long-term hibernation was a standard late-twenty-first-century practice, just not half-assed with a jury-rigged exosuit. It was David, who noted off-handedly, that none of this would be necessary if they were saturated with nanos. They could simply tell the bots to painlessly reduce the body’s metabolic rate, prioritize calorie use for brain and major organ functions and more or less hibernate as effectively as a bear. The choice to remain fully an original human, devoid of any nano enhancements had its drawbacks.

  His own suit outside the shuttle in the exosuit compartment, Caleb was forced to wear Jennifer’s suit, which though designed to fit multiple body types, was definitely stretched to its limits. To minimize the risk of injury, Caleb needed to be awake and cooperative while the nose catheter was inserted. Thankfully, the tube had a small diameter and was made from flexible silicon. A dab of petroleum jelly, and up it went. He went into a spastic coughing fit as the tube passed into his throat before Saanvi deftly pulled it out. “Worst is over,” she said with a comforting smile. She held up a small lipstick-size device. This one is to keep you at ease during the rewarming process. It only needs to be placed inside the nostril to deliver a mild sedative. It will keep you from shivering to death while you warm up and your heart rate increases.”

  Caleb offered her a skeptical smile as she and Jennifer helped him put on the helmet. An inhaled sedative came next, which Saanvi held at the ready. “Any last words?” she asked with the same easygoing bedside manner.

  “Shit,” he said with a nasal inflection forced by the catheter. “I was only in a full-blown panic before you asked me that.”

  “Nothing is nothing, officer. If you don’t return from this, nothing can’t hurt you. If there is something, then good journey to you.”

  “Thanks. And for the last time, don’t call me officer. Just another short-term occupation I can check off my list of dumb shit I don’t want to do ever again.” He looked deep into the doctor’s big brown eyes and tried his sultriest voice. “Caleb, just call me Caleb.” Saanvi blinked at the sudden intimacy, then Caleb quickly shifted his focus to Jennifer. “Your suit smells good. I’m going to reek of you when I get out of here.” Jennifer raised a doubtful eyebrow and felt David’s hand rest on her arm protectively. Caleb smiled broadly at all of them. “See you guys in a week.” Then to Jennifer almost conspiratorially, “Wake me first.”

  Saanvi lowered the small pump action inhaler to his free nostril. “One shot, Caleb.”

  He flared his nostril and inhaled as she gave it a squeeze. By the count of 2 he was out cold.

  After Jennifer strapped the last and now (hopefully) hibernating Saanvi to the wall, the first thing she did was strip. Her elastoware came off as if it had some kind of paste injected into the fibers, and she almost gagged at the layer of dead skin flakes that had accumulated on the garment. The tag on the collar promised that the fabric was self-cleaning. She, like most people, accepted the idea of nanos in nearly every part of her world (as long as they were outside the body). Clearly, she had overwhelmed the little buggers.

  With everyone else in a dead coma, she felt perfectly within her rights to use some of their precious water in the sponge shower. When she was done, she couldn’t remember the last time that she had felt so fresh. Not since her days on Earth. She did a couple of floating cartwheels past her strapped-in comrades, then paused to frown at her breasts. She loved her breasts. With the full 1 G of Earth, they were the perfect pouting B+ with small round nipples that sat up and said hello with confidence. In zero G and lesser gravities, they pointed straight out like a couple of cones. She smoothed them down attempting to mush them into the shape she loved. It was a pointless effort. God forbid she get in front of a mirror and confront the puffiness and fatigue . Again, without gravity, her sculpted cheekbones looked padded with unrestrained flesh. She knew she was being picky, but vanity was vanity. She had long ago accepted the trait as part of who she was.

  She contemplated the week ahead alone. Really alone. She hadn’t experienced that either since leaving Earth. Every day on Dione had been about building— a new life, a way of life. Her mind flashed on the image of her precious domed farm erupting up and away from her, and she felt tears clouding her vision. Without gravity, she had to rub them off and flick them away. The little spheres of salty water swirled in the air currents caused by her flicking, and she dabbed her eyes with a paper-thin towel.

  She remained naked rather than putting the disgusting oversized elastoware back on. That could wait until the last minute. She’d been watching a movie when Dione was hit. Having voted against the merger, she’d had no interest in meeting the Wang Fat people face-to-face. In her scramble to pull on her exosuit, she hadn’t bothered to take off her entertainment glasses. The device contained every book, motion picture, game, and various other entertainments known on Earth. The movie was still paused where she had left off on her last attempt to watch it. It was a dumb movie, so she canceled it. The glasses were designed to give her choices based on past use, but she wasn’t in the mood for her own taste. She could also choose to have a random selection served up to her, but that didn’t appeal, either. She took them off and lowered the light in the cabin so she could stare out the portal.

  Saturn was such a massive planet that even though Jennifer was millions of kilometers away from it, she felt like the thing was closing in on her. Scale in this place took a whole lot to get used to. An orange light lit up on the pilot’s panel and a message flashed that they were now outside of Saturn’s magnetosphere. Great, she thought. On top of everything else, I’ve got to worry about radiation exposure. She glanced at the walls around her and spoke to the ship. “You’re old, but you’ve got good shielding, right?”

  She ate while watching a tutorial on the ship’s operation. Caleb had given her a lesson on the flight controls in case he or Monty couldn’t be revived, but there hadn’t been time to practice. She highly doubted that she could land the thing, but just in case, she figured she should at least learn. Nearly every other ship in the system had pilot-thought flight control. Simple. The pilot thought about where he wanted to go and what procedures to use, and the ship pretty much did it, but not this old clunker. It had a rudimentary version of this tool, but still relied on some physical skill and knowledge on the pilot’s part. The program featured a simulator that allowed her to use the actual ship’s controls. She had the simulator replicate the current conditions: fuel, speed, ship size, along with the intended landing
zone on Phoebe, then proceeded to crash the ship over and over into the rocky moon’s harsh surface. She grew obsessed with the program, struggling with it for hours until her eyes dried up from lack of blinking and her stomach pleaded for mercy, signaling the back of her head to conjure up a headache as retribution. When the simulator ship crashed for the hundredth time, she yelled out “Son of a bitch!” and flinched at the curse and the sound of her own voice.

  It wasn’t her, it was the fuel. No matter how carefully she finessed the landing, burning the bare minimum for a supposedly sustainable crash landing, the touchdowns were unsustainable. She needed the nonfunctioning harpoon system to work. Otherwise, any attempt to land on Phoebe would mean smashing the ship down hard enough on the surface to kill or critically injure them all. She had almost a week left to think about it. She resolved to meditate and do some light judo exercises. Ostensibly the only one using the remaining oxygen, she hoped the scrubbers would provide her with plenty of it for the work out. Judo in zero G was sort of a ridiculous concept, but she locked her feet to a wall and began with some simple moves. As her confidence built, she shifted into a deeper workout. As she concentrated on the flow of energy through her muscles, thinking about each group firing and reacting to her wishes, a deep satisfaction spread throughout her being. Her mother had been a champion in the octagon. With hopes of a family legacy, she had taught her daughter well. Jennifer had never been a fighter, but she loved the discipline. Loved the joy that the mindfulness brought her.