by Alec Taylor
“Well, now, this is cosy!” said Tony.
“Oh, shut up,” I said, laughing.
Then Hu said, “The hangar doors. Someone has to open the doors.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said and squeezed out of the harvester. I ran over to the doors and pressed the open button. Nothing happened.
“Shit!” I stepped back from the control panel. Panic started to tighten my gut, but then June appeared beside me.
“The manual handle is over here,” she said and started winding it. I chastised myself—it was a good reminder to stay calm when things didn’t go to plan.
As the doors separated, dust started flying into the hangar, swirling in eddies in the harvester lights. It reminded me of dust floating around in the sunlight as it streamed through the windows in my family’s lounge room back on Earth. It felt like remembering a movie that I had seen in my childhood. It was incredibly distant and remote.
I quickly looked at the harvester and estimated that we needed at least three metres to give Hu enough room to drive through. The lights shining on the dust outside made it glow red.
“I thought we’d be able to see further than that.”
I took a turn on the handle while she looked outside. The dust was now flowing in a steady stream that filled the air. Hu blipped the horn and it played inside our helmets through the near-field comms system. We ran back to the harvester and jumped in.
I called Pete at the office and told him that we were leaving the hangar. He said that Liu hadn’t found any other outages and that all three power plants appeared to have gone down at precisely the same time.
“Whatever took them out,” said Pete, “must have been big to do it simultaneously. Good luck out there. And be careful.”
We nudged out into the storm. It was far worse than driving in fog. The dust alternated between a very fine mist and heavy grains driving onto the front windscreen. The harvester seemed to be operating well, despite the swirling wind.
“Okay. Where now, Security?” asked Hu.
“It’s Mike, Hu,” I replied. By now I knew the colony intimately, but I checked the electronic map on my visor screen anyway and said, “First, we need to turn forty-five degrees to the right and travel for about a hundred and forty metres.”
Hu could drive as aggressively as anyone on the planet, maybe in the solar system, and yet she drove slower than walking pace. I tried to give her specific instructions for turns and distances, but at one point we bumped over the corner of a windbreak. It probably didn’t help that June sitting on my lap was distracting. I couldn’t believe I was so easily distracted in the middle of a crisis.
After several minutes of crawling through the dust, we finally made it around the greenhouses and nudged up against a small mound, which I thought must be only a few metres from the first power plant.
Tony had tied the three of us together in a daisy chain, with about three metres of spare cable between each of us. He took the lead, with me in the middle and June at the end. He then told Hu to hold the roll so it would unspool easily.
We opened the door and dust rushed into the cab. The three of us quickly jumped out and pushed the door so that it was gently pinching the wire. On the other side, Hu held the door with one hand and the roll in the other. I wondered how long she could hold that position, particularly with a fine layer of dust streaming in through the crack.
Tony tugged on the line and I pointed ahead, to the left of the harvester. We groped around and stumbled in the dust. Then Tony fell forward into a hole, tugging me over with him. As we got up, we realised we were inside a small depression surrounded by the mound of dust that the harvester had bumped into.
The hole we had fallen into was only a few metres across and barely half a metre deep. We could just make out a broken and burnt cable at the bottom, partly covered by dust and sand. There were small pieces of shrapnel lying around—wire and twisted pipe. My mind whirled. Surely this wasn’t caused by lighting, I thought. And if this had taken out the cable to the first power plant, why had the others gone down as well? Was there some kind of electronic malfunction? Was the system flawed?
I looked up to see if June had also fallen in and, at that moment, lightning flashed. June was crouched at the edge of the hollow and, for a split second, I saw a small dark figure behind her. I gasped and stepped back.
Then I suddenly realised what the shadow was and I was shaken to my core.
15. REPAIR
Tony tugged on my shoulder. I nearly screamed, and whirled around.
“I’m going for the plant,” he yelled, my suit just managing to pick up his transmission through the static. He pointed in the direction of the power plant and started shuffling away. I looked back toward June but couldn’t see the small dark figure. The line to Tony tugged my belt and I automatically followed him.
As we got further away from the harvester, its lights faded until there was just a faint glow behind us, and then almost nothing. Our head-torches were almost useless; we were in the dark. I bumped into Tony. He was creeping forward, swaying slightly, his knees bent and hands outstretched in front. Eventually he caught hold of the front of the power plant. He moved around the side to the control box, pulled it open and peered inside, trying to keep the door closed as much as possible. He looked for a few seconds and then closed it and pointed back toward the harvester.
By the time we returned to the cab, it was filled with dust. As we closed the door, Hu turned on the extractors and the air cleared miraculously.
“So?” asked Hu.
“It’s fine,” said Tony. “The plant has full function. The circuit breaker flipped when the cable went out, so everything is fine.”
“What happened to the cable?” asked Hu.
June, Tony, and I looked at each other.
“Something blew a hole in it,” I said.
“All three?” said Hu.
“No, we only saw a break in the first cable. Let’s just focus on getting this one back up, and then we can worry about how it happened. Can we call the colony?”
Dust and static filled the air, so we couldn’t get through to Security. It took us longer to return than we had anticipated. We missed the hangar and had to drive around in the storm to find it. On the way, Tony and June discussed how to get the plant back online and were confident we would have time before we ran out of power or oxygen. I was repeatedly calling Security and finally connected as we drove into the hangar.
“Christ, Mike, you’re late,” answered Pete, letting out a huge sigh of relief.
“It’s slow going out there. Listen, it’s going to be okay. The cable to plant one is gone, we haven’t seen what’s happened to the others yet, but we’re sure we can lay a bypass line to the first plant.”
“Thank God,” said Pete. “I’ll update Karl and we’ll let the colony know. Do you need more help?”
“Um, all of Tony’s team, I think. And maybe another driver.”
Tony and I briefly considered starting the repair immediately, but June wanted to regroup, so we took off the heavy suits and rushed back toward Systems.
As we were nearing the main airlock to the inner colony, Hu stopped me, “Hey, Security?”
“Yes, Hu?”
“I want to ask you something,” she said and then glared at Tony and June.
“We’ll see you back at Security,” said Tony, and they left.
“What is it, Hu?” I asked, feeling tired. I expected a roasting.
“Why me?” she asked. “Why did you choose me to drive you out there?”
I thought for a second and then said, “Because you have incredible skills and no fear.”
She looked at me suspiciously and then decided I was telling the truth.
“Well, you’re not too bad, either,” said Hu. Then she smirked and added, “For a white man.”
“Thanks, Hu,” I said, smiling.
“No problem…Security.” This time she said it with a smile.
When we got back, Glen was
still there but had become quiet and sullen. I suspected that he had received a lecture from Pete and that, now we were confident we could restore power, he was probably a little embarrassed by his suggestion to evacuate.
The whole team gathered in the middle of the room, standing in a loose circle.
“Okay, Mike,” said Pete. “What’s the lowdown?”
“Well,” I said, “let’s check on the colony first. Chris, how’s everyone doing?”
“No problems at all,” said Chris. “It’s almost surprising how well everyone is coping. No panic attacks, and most people are quite relaxed. A few people have actually gone back to sleep.”
“I’m not sure we want them to sleep,” I said, “but that’s definitely a lot better than panic. Okay, how about the colony diagnostics? Liu, what’s happening?”
“I’ve set up a dashboard,” said Liu. “Air pressure inside the main airlock is steady and the oxygen has only fallen a little, about one percentage point. We have another eight or nine hours before breathing will become…problematic.”
“I do not understand that,” said Karl, frowning. “There is so much air in here. Why does it fall so fast?”
“It’s just the number of people,” replied Chris. “Everyone is back here for the storm; more than a thousand people are breathing the same air.”
“Anyway,” continued Liu, “I’ve set up a push message that will send the oxygen level to this team every hour.”
“That’s great,” I said, impressed by his proactivity.
“Why did you guys take so long?” asked Pete.
“Moving around out there is very, very slow,” said June. “With zero visibility and no location positioning, we had to manually navigate, using directions from a static suit map and without any visible reference points.”
“I can help with that,” said Liu. “I’ll write you a little program that will navigate the harvester based on driving commands and the built-in gyroscope. It won’t be as accurate as an autopilot, but it’ll be close enough to get you where you’re going.”
“Wow, okay,” I said. “When can you get that to us?”
“It might only take a few minutes, at most an hour,” he replied. “When do you need it?”
“Tony?” I asked.
“Okay. June and I were talking about what to do next. We don’t have a ready-made heavy cable long enough to patch in a temporary line. We’re going to need to join some pieces together, then run it from the plant to the nearest junction box, which is probably fifty metres.”
“And getting it out there is going to be tricky,” said June. “We’re going to need to test the line somehow back here, in the hangar, so we know it works before we get there. And then we’ll have to take it out there inside a harvester.”
“Okay, what’s your best estimate of how long all that will take?” I asked.
“Finding the cable and connectors,” said Tony, “wiring them up, feeding them into a harvester—I guess that will take an hour or two.”
“Let’s assume three,” I said.
“Actually,” said June, “why don’t we lift some of the cables running up one of the main greenhouse passages to save time? It might affect crop production, but it’s probably worth the risk, given the current situation.”
“Makes sense,” said Pete and we all nodded.
“Okay, and then we lay it,” Tony continued. “We should probably try to bury it as we go, so it doesn’t attract lightning. And then we need to connect it and reinitialise the plant, so I guess another hour or two?”
“Hmm,” I said. “Sounds like five or six hours, and we only have eight or nine. Karl, where did you get to on the evacuation plan?”
Karl glanced at Jan, who was standing near the door, and said, “I do not like it much, because we can only evacuate a small number of people.” He nodded at Jan.
“We can carry up to fifty in the people carrier,” said Jan, “though it’s designed for a normal load of thirty. We would board very close to the hangar, but the problem is flying in this storm. There’s zero visibility, no global positioning, and crosswinds. Our best pilots would struggle; they would be reduced to hovering close to the ground. And the carrier is not very strong; it’s made of lightweight parts. Frankly, it might crash during the first trip to the landing pad.”
That was bad news and I could sense it wasn’t going to get any better. I glanced over at Tony and caught his eye. He was thinking the same thing as me—large-scale evacuation was simply not an option.
“So, unfortunately, we only have the harvesters,” continued Jan, “and given how long it took you to drive out to the power plant, that could be a single trip to the launch pad. It’s possible some of them would miss it completely without nav, unless Liu’s app works really well. The ship isn’t that big anyway. So we could probably only get two hundred people off the planet in total. Four or six hundred if we rush and get two or three more trips in, but then we would need drivers for the harvesters to come back and pick up more people.”
“My God,” said June quietly.
“We have a list of the first fifty people,” said Jan.
“Can we see it?” asked Chris.
“Share it with the response team only,” said Karl to Jan. “It is very sensitive.”
Tony frowned as he scanned the list. He looked up at me, perplexed, and then looked over at Glen, who was still sitting near the door.
“We have outgrown the evacuation plan,” continued Karl, in a low and sombre voice. “We committed to safety and redundancy in the colony so we do not have to evacuate. We knew this. So we can only save a few.”
“Ta ma de!” said Liu, shaking his head.
We stared at each other in silence for a moment. I looked from face to face and saw disbelief and horror. Only Hu seemed unaffected.
“Let’s revisit the evacuation plan after we get the power back on,” I said. “I don’t think we should risk anyone trying to get to the landing pad. For contingency, we can make two new cables and have a second team immediately start working on the second power plant.”
“Right,” said Liu, “that’s a good idea. Oh, and I’ll make sure all power is diverted to life-support systems when it comes back online. Let’s not worry about washing or exercise or work for a day or two.”
“We should still evacuate as many as possible,” said Glen. “In case we can’t fix the cable.”
“What do you think, Mike?” asked Pete.
“I don’t think we need to,” I replied, “and I’m fairly risk averse. We’ve seen the damage and know how to fix it. We’re going to do it twice in parallel for redundancy and should still have some spare time. Let’s check in again in three hours, and if we’re off the timeline we’ll evacuate as many people as possible. Does that sound okay?” I directed the last question to Karl.
“Yes, I think so,” said Karl, looking for confirmation from Jan, who nodded.
“So, what’s the plan?” asked June.
“Right,” I replied. “Tony, call in your team. We divide them into two groups and give them as many hands to help as they want. We scrounge cable and connectors, link it all up into a long cable, test it, cram it into harvesters, and head out to lay it. Liu’s going to work on a navigation app to get us out there. Chris, can you update the colony? June and I will help the teams. Karl and Jan can identify the lucky few and prep for evac if we drop off the timeline. And Pete will coordinate everything from here. How does that all sound?”
Everyone agreed, so we got going. Tony’s team consisted of four colonists who spent most of their time working on wiring and piping for new infrastructure. June also called in some of her colony developers and we started a mad scramble for parts. The main store supplied enough for more than half of the first length and then we started ripping out the cable from the passages.
After seeing Glen’s reaction, I was surprised to see everyone so calm. It seemed like just another day on the job for Tony’s team—they were patient and thoughtful. June’s
team seemed a little more concerned, but they were completely focused and acted without panic. Strangely, even in that stressful situation I found I had trouble not staring at June and I had to drag my eyes away from her several times.
Tony’s team directed everything and did most of the disconnections and connections. All the rest of us could do was help carry the cable around. We laid it all out in the hangar after we had closed the doors. Dust still swirled and clogged the air every time we moved. We created the first cable with only two sections, but the much longer cable for the second power plant required six separate sections lifted from the passages.
Liu’s oxygen update came through just before we finished wiring the first cable—another percentage point down. It was a troubling reminder, but we were ahead of our original estimates of the timeline. We opened the hatch on a harvester and started to feed the cable in. I had to climb in to sort out a kink, but then we were ready to go. Once again Hu was driving, but this time she had Liu’s program uploaded to the harvester. Tony went with Hu, but June and I were replaced by two of Tony’s team members and some shovels. We opened the doors, they drove out, and we closed them again.
I went to help the second team finish their cable and we finished after another hour. Liu’s message came again—another percentage point down. We crammed the much longer cable into another harvester but had to pull it all out when we realised that it was bunching near the hatch. In the end, I crouched inside the harvester, coiling the cable as it was pushed in from outside, and finally we managed to fit it all in.
But then we didn’t know if we should go out to try to attach the second cable while the first team was still out there. With no visibility, there was a real risk that we could hit them with the harvester, or perhaps run over the new cable. So we waited.
As we were ahead of the timeline we decided to move to the staging area behind the airlock, where we could be more comfortable. June sat on a table in the middle of the room, talking quietly with one of her teammates. The rest of us sat on the ground with our backs resting against the walls, silently staring at nothing and wondering what was happening out at the power plants. One of Tony’s teammates actually closed her eyes and seemed to sleep for a few minutes. But everyone else was twitchy, sweating with nervous tension, highly agitated.