Bastion Saturn

by C. Chase Harwood

  The displaced dust on the hillside where the ship had hit left a dark stain against the otherwise uniform grayness. “Jennifer, do you copy? Come back?”

  Phoebe’s rotation was fast enough that Caleb could perceive it in relation to Saturn in the distance. The planet was setting quickly, and so was the Sun. It would grow dark in a few minutes. Three-hundred meters to the right of the crash area, he saw the entrance to the research station, a simple round door. His heads-up informed him it was ten meters in diameter. Two spaceships sat on the landing pads outside, one of them clearly marked as a police vehicle. This caused him to frown. Probably a coincidence. How many times had he been doing something naughty in his life, only to be surprised by a police cruiser or a patrolman, who, as it turned out, suspected him of nothing? Still, Monty had put out that mayday.

  Walking was awkward in the somewhat fluffy terrain, and he fell often. He tried hopping like a bunny, and made rather impressive leaps, but it was exhausting. He finally settled on a feeble skipping motion, finding the effort to be the most economical. In minutes, he was climbing over the loose dirt over the partially buried ship. The remains of the landing gear had been rendered into a series of torn metal stumps. The airlock door could not be reached, buried under the still-slipping hill, but the suit-docking station remained exposed. He had to make a decision: dock his suit and go in right now, not knowing if the hull had been breached and the air gone, or go get help. With Jennifer not answering, and no one attempting to leave the ship, the chances were high that any survivors remained in hibernation, and that Jennifer was hurt or worse. With only rudimentary medical training, he was not the guy to help a severely injured person. Saanvi would take too long to fully revive, and he wasn’t certain he could do that right, either. Jennifer was the one with the revival skills. He reluctantly chose to march-skip toward the research entrance and reach out to the authorities. It occurred to him that no one from the station had come out to investigate.

  The door seemed positively huge as he approached. It was a common enough entrance to a lot of moon bases, especially those on Mars. An automated drilling rig dug a tunnel while cauterizing any loose soil into glass as it moved forward. A robot-laden caboose laid down the life-support grid working right behind the rig. Another machine installed prefab labs and living quarters, and finally, the plug, as it was called, melded to the entrance, sealed off the tunnel with a roll-away door airlock. Cheap, sustainable, cave-living at its best. This door was much bigger than others he had read about. It was also slightly open, just enough for a man to step inside. Caleb slowed his skip.

  When he was eight meters away, he stopped. The space beyond was pitch black. Something felt deeply wrong. He turned and glanced past his long weak shadow, back over to the wreck, reconsidering the option to revive the group. Caleb wasn’t afraid of much, but he hated dark spaces. Then the Sun and the mother planet fell behind the horizon. Everything went immediately black. His helmet work lights automatically kicked on to a dim passive setting, and he quickly commanded that they click to full strength. A warning flashed in his heads-up that his battery pack would only allow full brightness for a maximum of fifteen minutes. Life-support would force it into the dim passive setting again after that. Perfect. A crappy old suit to match his crappy old ship.

  He hesitated for another moment before nodding as if to give himself permission and stepped forward. Normally, as he squeezed through the crack, motion detection sensors would have turned on a light as he entered the open airlock, but nothing happened. A few LEDs glowed on the control panel, which was encouraging. At least there was electricity. Designed for close-up work ,the beams on his helmet lights shot out in a narrow focus by default,. As he swiveled his head to scan the room, the twin beams fell across a pair of legs splayed out on the floor. Caleb took in a big gulp of air, and his reflexes jolted him several feet backward.

  “Jesus fucking Christ! What the fuck?”

  He scanned about again until his lights found the legs and the body. Make that bodies. Two cops lay on the floor wearing exosuits without helmets. Their bodies and faces were twisted in what looked like surprise from asphyxiation in the frozen vacuum.

  A warning flashed in his heads-up that he needed to control his breathing. Automatically, the suit adjusted the gas mixture to keep him from hyperventilating. He slowly realized that he had shifted and pressed his back against the door with all the strength his legs could muster. On the opposite end from the entrance, the other door remained sealed. It featured a small porthole that allowed for an observer to see the goings-on within the airlock. Caleb’s lights passed across the door revealing more bodies piled at its base, then a very white face peering back at him. It was a woman, her features wide-eyed and frozen in a scream. Caleb let out a scream himself.

  As he scrambled to slip back through the crack in the door and get outside, his urine flowed into the suit’s waste receptacle. Once outside, he skipped away as fast as he could toward the parked spaceships and ducked behind the cop ship. He shut off his lights and crouched, before looking back from under the ship’s belly. It was so dark outside and his night vision had been so tweaked that he could barely make out the edge of the crater above, much less the door. If someone were to march right at him, he wouldn’t be able to see it before it was too late. What the hell? Monty hadn’t even bothered to tell them what type of research station this was and no one had bothered to ask. It had all been about getting to safety. Another warning on his heads-up alerted him that he had roughly a half an hour of oxygen left. He brought the dim lights back up on his helmet and scanned the cop ship above him. This one had a proper airlock with an exit ladder. The ladder was up, which meant the door was locked. Standard procedure, even out in the middle of nowhere. The second ship was thirty meters away, a Hanson Design shuttle. Pretty new from the look of it. The rear loading ramp was up, but that didn’t mean it was locked. Glancing back toward the cave entrance, he still couldn’t see well enough to ease his terror. Then he cursed, remembering that his helmet was equipped with a starlight enhancer. Fool. He switched over to starlight mode and the area around him transformed into a sharp green landscape. Nothing was coming at him from the cave. He skipped over to the shuttle, opened the exterior door control panel and stood dumbly staring at the keypad lock. He reflexively brought his hands up to lace his fingers across the bridge of his nose (something that he did when he stopped to think) and was startled by his hands smacking into his visor.

  Keeping one eye on the cave, he skipped back to the cop ship. Unlike the piece of junk that he had been issued, this one was a battle-ready model with the full complement of paramedic and rescue gear. The external tool-locker opened easily enough, and he pulled out a shovel. Even if he saved Jennifer and revived everyone aboard his ship, the only way they were getting out was through the buried airlock door. Getting out to what, he didn’t know. But he was out of options. His ship wrecked, the two good ones inaccessible. That left moving into the cave–regardless of whomever had been rude enough to slaughter a pile of people and stacked them out in the airlock. If he was going to do that, he needed some backup. He was going to have to dig.

  The dirt fell away quickly, and Caleb felt a mild sense of embarrassment as he cleared the an area around the crashed shuttle’s hatch. Rather than fumbling about in the dark and scary, he could have dug out the airlock hatch with his bare hands and been done with it. If his suit’s air supply alarm hadn’t been beeping incessantly, he would have allowed himself a morbid laugh. There was no guarantee that there was any air left inside the shuttle. His progress was hampered by a constant stream of dirt slowly sliding down on the hatch, tripling his work load. The entry controls were lit up nicely, which meant the fuel cells were still good. He punched in the code that he had set to forget—123—satisfied to see the bright red No-Go light turn to amber. It took about ten seconds for the airlock to go through its diagnostics and make certain that no valuable air would be lost when he opened the door. While he waited, he mutte
red curses aimed at his exosuit for not letting him manually turn off the warning beep. A man fights to the last breath for to get to some more air, and the effing suit turns a fasten-seatbelt chime into a death knell. The airlock light turned green. He yanked the open handle, cringed at the gray dirt sliding inside, then fumbled with trying to clear off the seal without causing more dirt to slide, and finally pulled the door shut. The info panel on the inside flashed a warning that the seal was not complete. He would have to try again. With a mounting headache, sweat seeping from every pore, and that goddamn fucking chime merrily beeping and beeping and beeping, he carefully opened the hatch again, only to have more dirt gently rain down on his helmet. The ship was buried at an awkward angle for him to stand, one foot on the inner door and another on the floor. A glance down at his footing allowed him to see the entry observation porthole. He got the second biggest scare of his life when he saw Jennifer’s bloody face. She was yelling something, so at least she wasn’t dead. He tapped the side of his helmet and shook his head, so she could deduce the fucking obvious. She shook her head, then drew her finger across her neck frantically and repeatedly, but he was beyond paying attention, the oxygen indicator in his helmet rapidly blinking its last bar. Carefully, while holding the door open with one hand, he swept his fingers along the edge of the hatch seal, making certain that he brushed off as much dust as he could. Satisfied and feeling light-headed, he gently pulled the door shut, hit the locking button, and was rewarded with an amber light. The moment the light went green he popped the seal on his helmet and took in a breath of rank air. Even though it was off his head his helmet kept chiming away.

  Jennifer, with a drying bloody gash on her forehead, opened the inner door and said, “There’s no air in here, dude!”

  Caleb pointed behind him. “There ain’t any out there, either! I see you breathing!”

  “Not for long. Why didn’t you go for help?”

  “How about, ‘Holy shit, Mister Day! How did you survive crashing on the surface of a moon wearing only your exosuit?’ I went for help, but I found dead bodies and an open outer airlock door—not even a welcome mat. Two ships out there. One of them a cop’s, but they’re locked. I figured trying to save you was better than nothing.”

  Jennifer stood awkwardly on the angled deck. “So save me.”

  Caleb pointed at the hibernating passengers, who were still miraculously strapped to the wall. “Are they alive?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “And they stayed like that through the crash?”

  “Dave and Rob were ripped free. I strapped them back.”

  Caleb stepped over to Rob and looked inside his visor. “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  Caleb popped the clasp on Rob’s helmet.

  “What are you doing?”

  Caleb pulled off the helmet, and Rob’s head gently fell back on his neck at an impossible angle. Unfazed, Caleb opened up the dead man’s life support pack.

  “God. Rob.” Jennifer took an awkward step back. “Now what are you doing?”

  “Unlucky Rob. Lucky me.” He glanced at the stats inside Rob’s discarded helmet. “While he’s been hibernating, taking little sips of air, he left me with a bit still in the tank.” He pointed at her suit, which she had cast off in a corner. “Put that back on. We have to make another go at the station. Something is really wrong there, but we have no other options.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged, pointed at the suit, and said, “I released my air from there so there would be air in here. The airlock was sealed shut, so I figured I’d wait for a rescue. When I saw you coming in alone, I knew I was screwed.”

  Caleb pulled the air pack from Rob’s suit. “Check David.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “It’s ghoulish.”

  “Seriously?”

  “If he’s dead, I don’t want to know.”

  Caleb rolled his eyes. “We should check all of them.” He pulled David’s helmet off. The man appeared to be peacefully comatose, but his pallor was whitish blue. Caleb lifted one of his eyelids. The eye was a deep color of red, full of blood. The other the same. Jennifer only mildly protested when he gently unzipped David’s suit. The chest cavity was crushed inward. Jennifer let out a soft whimper. Caleb said, “I’m sorry. Were you close?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Good thing you were strapped in. These others really rode it out strapped to the wall?”

  Jennifer nodded, tears and snot getting ready to let loose.

  Caleb did a quick inspection of the others while Jennifer pulled the air pack from David’s suit and installed it into her own. He said, “Incredible luck that two died.”

  “Luck,” she said as if uttering a curse.

  Ignoring this, Caleb said, “I’m sure there’s only one shot at this. Gravity’s almost nothing. A little extra weight will help you walk. We drag the living with us and beg for mercy.” He strapped his nerve disrupter and his laser pistol to his hip and thought about what little effect they would have on a hardened airlock door. The disrupter was little more than a fancy Taser, and the laser was designed, for safety reasons, to only fire at living flesh. Then he remembered the breaker. It was a standard issue piece that he had been given five minutes of training to learn how to use. The device defeated lower security door locks. He dug around in several lockers while Jennifer moved the hibernating survivors to the airlock. He was just about to give up when he found the prize still in the manufacturer’s box. He discarded the box and turned the small handheld thing on. The battery indicator blinked one bar. He quickly shut it off. “Does everything have to be on the edge of depletion?”

  Chapter Seven: The Station

  Caleb dragged Monty and the now-widowed Bob across the lunar surface with one hand, hauling Stephanie’s draped body over his shoulder. Jennifer dragged Saanvi and the whiny teenager, Trey, while leaving a curious track in the dust behind them.

  “So does the station seem operational?” asked Jennifer.

  “I don’t know. Like I said, the motion detectors were off.”

  “No light on the inside? Past the airlock I mean?”

  “What did I just say? There were dead people. And like someone turned the lights off on the way out. Scared the piss out of me: literally. I’m man enough to own it.”

  “Did you knock?”

  “You’re wasting air.”

  They continued to walk in silence until coming to a stop ten meters from the entrance. Jennifer looked at the cracked open door and asked “Who leaves an airlock door open?”

  “Again, more air, wasted.”

  “So don’t waste your breath being a turd.”

  “Touché.” Caleb hesitated twice, then, “No time like the present.”

  “And you’re sure your door opener thingy won’t work on one of those ships?”

  He sighed with frustration. “I told you, didn’t give me one of those. Only sergeants and above. Chances are this one won’t open an airlock, either. It’s for busting into an apartment or a locker or whatever. Either way, I don’t dare waste what little charge there is on a ship I know I can’t enter.”

  Caleb stepped in first with Stephanie and then struggled pulling in the rest while Jennifer pushed.

  “Oh, gosh,” gasped Jennifer when her helmet light lit up one side. There were far more bodies than Caleb had made out in his panicked state. Most seemed to be simply asleep, nothing like the surprised terror on the two dead cops, no panic in the final resting gesture of their limbs. The secondary door that led into the station recorded a more graphic tale. Bloody fingerprints from torn nails betrayed a profound change of heart. Several bodies huddled against one another up against the door, their faces anguished with last breath.

  “I count twenty-eight,” said Jennifer, her voice wavering. “That has got to be most of the researchers.”

  Caleb’s light paused over the two cops again. “
And look. They still have their nerve disrupters. They came out here by choice. No way their weapons would be holstered otherwise.”

  The oxygen warning lights flashed in each other’s helmets. Caleb said, “Whatever drove these people out is likely still inside.” He pulled a weapon out of one of the cop’s holsters and handed it to Jennifer. “If we get in, we gas up asap. Leave your helmet on.”

  “Why?”

  Caleb looked at all of the unprotected bodies. Not one bothered to suit up, except the cops who had taken their helmets off. “Just a gut feeling.” He pointed at their hibernating friends. “We leave these guys out here.” He turned and punched the red close button on the far wall. The giant wheel rolled shut. A good start.

  They wasted precious oxygen pulling the stricken bodies away from the inner door, and when they finally had it cleared, Caleb took the packing plastic off the door breaker and turned it on. He held his breath and pointed the device at the badge scanner that acted as a backup to the standard keypad lock. There was a long pause, then the battery died on the breaker. Caleb was at the edge of an epic stream of curses when the red light on the badge scanner turned green. A fog billowed into the airlock from the nozzles that surrounded the door. The warmer air instantly condensed as it filled the space. Sound suddenly moved around the room filled with breathable molecules, and they heard the door lock thump into the open position. Caleb readied the nerve disrupter and nodded to Jennifer to do the same—as if she really needed prompting. Caleb pushed the door in. It only took a light touch to open, and his shove swung it so hard that it banged against the inside wall and bounced back toward him.

  “Bang a gong, why don’t you,” snapped Jennifer.

  They stepped inside, Caleb first, and she closed the door behind her, hitting the lock button. A vacuum array sucked the air out of the chamber outside, once again making it feel like a ruined mausoleum. The prep room proved to be the first good thing that had happened all day, with exosuits and assorted gear for external exploration, maintenance and whatnot. It remained in perfect order. A rack held air packs would fit into the insulated slot that was standard on all exosuit breathing apparatus connectors. Caleb checked that two were full and grabbed one while Jennifer turned her back to him to swap hers out. She did the same for him and they simultaneously took in big gulps of air before they sighed with relief as the beeping in their helmets abruptly stopped.