by Ginger Booth
“Outstanding work, as always, Cope,” she assured him. “But think about that backup plan. If lives are at risk, I will order you to contaminate the ship.”
“Understood, cap.”
Next she ran up the slide to corner Abel. “Thank you, first mate, superb work getting here so fast. The hammocks in the hold are inspired.” She hadn’t paused to count, but it looked like 30 of them. Most looked roomy enough to seat several, or one lying down. “You are relieved and reassigned.”
Abel grinned. “Great to have you back, Sass.”
She took over the big display in the dining room, and explained. He’d pilot Nanomage, with Zan on guns, and clear an access plaza with a route to each air pocket, just as they had for the first dome. Then his hunter team needed to enter and get a head count of survivors and a first read on conditions. If their air was bad, or they were out of water, make sure their priority percolated up the line.
“The hunters go in armed, Abel. Desperate people take chances. You and Zan stay aboard the Nano. Wilder and the others don’t come in, just ride in the airlock from one site to the next. Move quickly to scope out the entire refugee situation as quickly as possible.
“Oh, and these air pockets?” She pointed out the stream and the isolated gap close to the volcano. Neptune had simply greyed them out, as not a target. “I agree they’re low priority. But don’t skip them. And be careful with that stream. There might be people out of their domes down there, trying to tunnel out.”
“Wow. Got it.”
“Excellent. Go.”
Kassidy and Aurora emerged from the bio-lock. Sass made a mental note to praise Ben to the skies for re-rigging their bio-locks – now two! – to be easily transportable, and quick to restore to service.
She headed the women off. She told Kassidy to take her indoor pictures of the preparations quick, because the hero department would be outside – go help Ben save a life. Aurora she shanghaied as a general-purpose Denali intermediary. If any unfamiliar local spoke to Sass, they were talking to the wrong person.
Drawing Aurora along, she returned to Gorey with a smile. She wished she were outside seeking glory herself. But her place was here, sending her heroes out to shine.
Abel strapped in, but didn’t take off immediately. He studied the map again. “Zan, what is this red blob on the map?”
“Suspected skyships,” Zan returned. “Our priority is the creche!”
“Ours is, yes,” Abel agreed. He keyed the comm. “Sass, suggested mission while you wait. The western skyship. Blow the ash off. Maybe it can fly. Might even have a crew.”
“Excellent suggestion. Sass out.”
With that, Abel took the Nanomage up and headed for ‘L-C,’ the suspected site of a buried primary-school-aged creche. A wide space stood outside one of its doors, possibly a festival field. He started there for practice. When he was sure that he and Zan had adequate control, they inched up to a bio-lock, sound-blasting the set ash back to dust and blowing it clear.
He touched down next to the cleared space and told Wilder to get moving.
The sergean’ts team stumbled down the ash wall, bringing ash and debris down with them. Abel turned to fusing a ramp for the space, then blowing a wider plaza for Ben’s team to set up.
Wilder lucked out at the ‘L-C’ dome bio-lock – the powered door opened to his touch and lights came on in the pre-dawn murk.
Kaz strode across and hit the comms button. “This is a rescue party. Do you have a creche in this dome?”
Instantly, the red indicator light above the next door blinked to green. Apparently bio-containment was waived by the management. Whoever that was. According to their map the creche itself probably lay in a connecting dome.
“Running…out of air,” the comms gasped.
Wilder inherited custody of Sass’s gauge. “Air is fine in the bio-lock. Advise transfer personnel into lock.” But he didn’t wait. He strode through the next several decontamination chambers as fast as he could go, Kaz and Eli likewise armed and following. At the final chamber they ran into their correspondent from the button, and escorted him into the previous chamber for cleaner air.
The man gave them directions for finding the children. Apparently most of the adult farmers in this connected dome series had ceded the creche dome. They slowly suffocated so the children could breathe longer.
Wilder extracted the man’s estimated head count and status of everyone in this dome, and sent the information along. But this tired man, gasping the good air while others crowded in, hadn’t entered the children’s dome in months. All of them were farmers, to judge by their temporarily bakkra-free complexions.
Wilder continued out into the fallow farm fields. It was brutally hot, at nearly 110 Fahrenheit in here – 43 Celsius. “Wilder to Copeland.”
“Copeland here.”
“I’m in the L-C-1 dome, 60 survivors. Air critical in the dome, good in the bio-lock. Query: how long can the bio-lock keep them alive?”
“I’ll get back to you.”
Wilder never stopped moving. Soon he reached the airlock corridor leading to the reported children’s farm dome, a literal kindergarten. The first door opened readily. The second was locked tight, with no indicator light above it. Peering through the window, he looked straight into a laser rifle. He hastily pulled back. Kaz rapped on the door instead, a particular sequence which meant nothing to Wilder. The party on the other side returned the knock with a slightly different riff.
Wilder bent to his pocket comms tablet and drew a sign. “RESCUE. CHILDREN FIRST. HOW MANY?” He showed it to Kaz, who waved him forward, be my guest.
After a moment for reading comprehension, the door unlocked. The sergeant’s team stepped back to make clear they had no intention of forcing themselves in. This was just as well, since the homeowners looked ferocious. A half dozen still leveled guns at them.
“Who are you?” demanded an ag woman in the center.
“Waterfalls, hunter Kaz. Rescue team. In a hurry. How many children?”
The woman sized them up, and licked her lip. “We are 420, with 360 children and a few dozen sick and injured. And the harvest.”
Kaz objected, “That can’t be all the children!”
Wilder’s eyebrows rose. It sounded like a daunting number of children to him.
She pointed vaguely behind and to the left. “Half were in the other dome. The corridor between us cracked.”
Wilder checked the air and shook his head at Kaz. Clearly they were breathing, but these CO2 levels would make anyone cranky. Every child on Mahina was subjected to high carbon dioxide and low oxygen to learn the symptoms. The defenders also looked seriously dehydrated from the heat. He marked another dome on the map as housing another creche, with a question mark and max priority, and noted that it might be possible to get through to it from this dome, across a pressure breech.
“I’ll take triage,” Eli volunteered. “Ma’am, your children will be the first to evacuate in all of Denali Prime.”
Wilder shook his head. “First you need to surrender your weapons. All of them. Then we can help you.” He didn’t wait for her to comply, merely stepped forward and seized her rifle. Kaz and a steely-eyed Eli took aim at a couple others who were slow to comply.
Wilder’s comm buzzed and he stepped back to take the call.
“Wilder? Cope. This bio-lock you asked about, it has power?”
Wilder confirmed that.
“Sweet. Looks like their locks crack water for O2 and scrub CO2 and noxious components –”
“I didn’t ask how it worked, Cope.” Wilder beckoned to Eli to join this briefing.
“Right. Point is, the limiting factor is water.” The engineer went on to share a picture and explain how to check the water levels. The sergeant should hunt for a wall cabinet within a couple meters of the inside door. “Thrive has full tanks if they need more water.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
“Thank you. I never would have thought of this.
Too bad your locals didn’t think of it either.”
Wilder signed off, and pursed his lips at Eli. “Are you sure?”
Eli relinquished his rifle. “I’ve got this.”
The sergeant nodded respect. “Let’s move, Kaz. Next dome.”
They paused on the way out to check the water levels. The refugees could make it for a week or so.
Wilder and Kaz trotted up the ramp, only to find that Abel had cleared a small corridor for them to visit a neighboring series of domes. “Lower priority, but they’re right here,” the first mate explained.
The next domes proved to be their first catch of desperate cosmos, who greeted their rescuers with a firefight.
“Damn, I hate CO2 poisoning,” the sergeant griped, as he and Kaz returned suppressing fire.
27
Eli followed the lead woman – Maria Elena – deep into the farm dome, between rows of hydroponics gear, dry and silent for the fallow hot seasons. They passed through double doors into a dormitory of shrieking boys rousing for the day. Eli pulled his helmet off and racked it.
At the sight of the stranger in a pressure suit, a dozen or so of the bigger boys sprang forward. They hunched down with ‘tiger claws’ extended, baring their teeth in ferocious challenge.
Eli grinned and assumed the position right back at them, hissing his very best and snapping his ‘claws’ at several boys. They grinned and stepped back.
“I am Eli, from the far world Mahina. I am a hunter initiate of the Winter Sloths of Waterfalls.” He pounded his chest and boomed out the war cry of the Sloths – himself and the gaggle of 12-year-olds the hunt master chose to teach him alongside.
The war cry was a big hit with the 9-year-olds. They tried to mimic it, handicapped by voices still in the soprano range.
Eli waded through them, bopping fists with a few, to address the more timid children peeking at him from behind their bed racks. “I’m also a botanist,” he admitted. “My life work is to study plants. Mostly trees, but I work on crops too.”
Maria Elena added, “Eli’s people have come to take us to safety. But first he needs to understand our situation. Who will volunteer as his guide?”
“Elder class only!” specified a teenager, apparently in charge of herding children from bed to breakfast.
Unsurprisingly, Eli was thronged with young hunters-to-be seeking glory. The dorm proctor had to tease out a couple of the older ag children to balance them.
“You will leave the adults behind?” Maria Elena asked softly.
Eli shot her a smile. “They need their familiar caretakers.”
“I’m a farmer, not a teacher,” she clarified. She withdrew, leaving him for the creche staff to deal with.
With this first group, Eli took pictures and medical diagnostic readings and forwarded them to Dr. Tyler and Dr. Yang on the Thrive. They were skinny and fractious, but generally in high spirits. The children who hung back included ones less well adapted to the borderline air quality, he judged. These often looked scared. But he spoke to them softly about what a nice place Waterfalls was.
Eli kicked himself mentally for never entering a farm dome at Waterfalls. Nevertheless, he promised them the farms looked just the same, and they would love it there.
Then he asked his young guides to show him the broken corridor to the other children. Getting there took a while, as the kids eagerly showed off the rest of their own creche along the way, now full of children wide awake and shrieking.
His quartet of somber children stood back as Eli affixed his pressure helmet again. He felt guilty at the pleasure of taking a few deep breaths of clean air, scented with the vinegar used to clear the hoses of algae.
For this mission, Thrive issued some of the Sagamore emergency-air-bubble kits to every pressure suit. He grinned at the impressed amazement of his guides as he blew a rubbery bubble around himself that stuck to floor and wall around the sealed corridor door. With a gauntleted hand, he motioned them back when they snuck forward to poke at it. The teen proctor collared the two most adventurous and nodded that he’d keep them under control.
Eli sure hoped so, because opening this door risked contaminating a clean dome. No one here even had skin bakkra, and the corridor beyond was a known bad. On second thought, he blew a second bubble inside the first to be on the safe side.
Then he enabled on his video dot – Kassidy insisted – and contacted Abel, who patched him through to Copeland. While the engineer shifted gears to give his full attention, Eli peered into the corridor with his helmet light. Nothing worse than ankle-deep ash drifts seemed to impede the first portion.
He unbolted the door and stepped in, his bubbles inflating a bit behind him. A quick check of this air gauge confirmed the corridor certainly wasn’t air-tight. In fact, the poison stew in here could have wafted straight out of the volcano, with carbon dioxide and sulfur off the charts, and barely a trace of oxygen. He held the gauge closer to the ash, but that wasn’t the cause.
“Eli, look up,” Copeland prompted. “The ceiling’s what I’m concerned with.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Eli carefully panned his view around where the corridor met the inhabited dome, then down the centerline above him. When Cope gave him the go-ahead, he strode further into the murky maelstrom of ash dust.
A dozen meters further, a boulder stuck through the corridor’s vaulted ceiling, and down nearly to Eli’s knees. “I can fit around it.”
Copeland murmured, “Very, very carefully. But I think you’re OK. I mean, the dome walls are supporting it so far, and it doesn’t have much farther to fall. Show me the other side.”
Eli side-stepped around the boulder and pointed his camera toward the goal post, the far door. Copeland cleared his throat, and he realized the engineer meant he wanted to see the ceiling on this side. Sheepishly, he panned the helmet’s light and camera along that. Here the glass blocks of the ceiling buckled.
“I don’t like it,” Cope concluded. “There any other way into the far dome?”
“On the map, it’s surrounded by cosmo and hunter domes that don’t connect,” Eli explained. “No place to land or clear a plaza.” He realized it wasn’t up to the engineer. The scientist was their lead man scoping out the problem. “I’m going in.”
He continued to the far end, kicking a few fallen glass bricks out of his path. The roof caved in by nearly a meter above and beside the door, but the door itself looked sound. Nothing but blackness lay beyond.
Eli hastily rigged another Sagamore air bubble, as tight as possible this time to limit the noxious fumes he would bring in with him. He cracked one side of the double doors and immediately blew another bubble. Once through, he blew a third, to essentially put himself outside the original air buffer.
Now through and into the dome’s air, he checked his gauge. Gasping near death, was basically what those readings amounted to. This was no great surprise, given the lack of power. It was hot, too.
But this dome had not failed pressure integrity.
Dreading what he might find, Eli continued forward, along empty hydroponics, row after row. He turned a corner, and saw a glow up ahead. He broke into a trot until he reached double doors like the ones into the boys’ dormitory before. Peering in the window, he saw another dormitory, barely lit, with children lying on the beds, still.
Am I too late? By days, hours?
“Airlock,” Copeland prompted. “Go!”
He’d forgotten the engineer was monitoring. He hastily erected another Saggy bubble, and pushed through the doorway. Judging by the feel, yes, this was a pressurized door, though they weren’t normally. Someone made this one seal.
And on a bed right by the door, an emaciated teenager opened his eyes.
They were alive in here. Some of them, anyway.
“Air quality readings, stat!” Copeland barked. “Eli, you are priority 1 for this whole operation!”
Dr. Tyler chimed in. “I want medical diagnostics on that boy. Stat!”
Eli knelt immediate
ly, and took the proctor teen’s medical readings first, if only to hold his fragile hand and nod reassuringly into his protuberant eyes. “Tell me you’re mobilizing help for me, Cope,” he begged.
28
Ben slowed only slightly to gape around the corridor of the broken ceiling. He pushed through with his grav lifter piled high with life support technology. “Measure that,” he said to the next tech to peel off from his entourage.
He’d started with a couple dozen, now down to Kassidy plus three. Hopefully the ones he left behind would catch up soon after completing their side tasks.
Eli made the bubble-lock well at the far side. Ben came to a halt in frustration. “Bunch up, tight as you can. Then you,” he pointed to a Denali woman selected for the gear on her lifter. “Get an airlock here.”
“I’m a hunter,” she countered. “I don’t know how.”
“I’ve got this, Ben,” Kassidy interrupted. “Go.” She traded loads with the hunter. “Those are med supplies.”
Another tech blew yet another bubble to close them in. Then the group sliced and exited the other side. The second they were out, Kassidy sealed herself into the doorway with the Denali-style temporary airlock supplies, a sturdier and higher-functioning version of the quick-and-dirty Sagamore bubble.
“Air bomb here,” Ben directed, leaving yet another tech in his wake while he pressed forward. “I need to know results ASAP. Call me.”
This was short-hand. The ‘air bombs’ exploded several high-pressure tanks of liquid oxygen, strewing carbon dioxide absorbent powder into the air as well. Once that load was away, an overpowered pump-and-filters set to sucking and scrubbing air. Copeland had a team of Denali techs cobbling together these bomb kits. They couldn’t perform miracles, but one to three of them might render this stretch of dome survivable for someone without a mask. Masks and air tanks were in short supply, and children weren’t trained to use them. Waterfalls had begun making them by the thousands, but these kids couldn’t wait.