by Ginger Booth
Cope reached Ben and held out a hand for his pocket tab. He tapped it with his own. “Schematic, and engineering remote controls. Password is ‘Nico rocks’, spelled correctly.”
“How’d you manage that?” Ben cried in astonishment. He paged through the town floor plan, quickly identifying the docks unloading their human popsicles.
“Set it up 15 years ago,” Cope confided, with a crooked smile. “When I worked star-side. Left myself a back door in case anyone screwed it up.”
“You’re awesome. Always. How does that keep surprising me?” He’d love to develop that thesis, but this was no time to flirt. He tapped a location on the schematic. “Main cafeteria, latrines, med bay. Wish it was closer to the loading dock. All sealable behind pressure doors. Make that livable, they can work out from there.”
“The whole place should be breathable,” Cope argued, then tilted his head. “Ish.”
Ben asked sourly, “Potassium mines suck as bad as phosphate mines?”
“This one’s been dormant 40 years,” Cope replied. “We’ll see. Batteries are low.”
“They won’t charge?”
“Chemically depleted.” Cope shrugged. “They left a star drive backup here, in theory. We need to get to engineering.”
Ben nodded curtly. He called out, “Who is not ready? Tell me now before I blow pressure and lower the ramp!” Everyone simply sealed their helmets. Cope did the honors sealing the internal pressure doors again. At his nod, Ben punched the ramp release, and they rolled out.
64
Ben found the entrance already jimmied on the pedestrian entrance to the ghost town. It took him the work of a moment to prop open the double doors, and the next set beyond the entry hall.
In the mine, these lobbies functioned as gear rooms more than airlocks, but a little of both. Excavation kicked plenty of dross into the air, and the ore was rich in radioactive trace elements and contaminants. The miners wore pressure suits outdoors and cleaned them in this sort of vestibule before entering the domestic halls. Huge blowers and filtration systems should be running to keep the toxic dust out, with industrial grade heaters combating the brutal cold of the dark-side night.
Problem one – it was pitch dark in here. Cope attempted to solve that remotely with no luck. “Just keep our suits,” he murmured, as Ben finished with the doors. “You don’t want to breathe this anyway.”
“How bad for the paddies?” Kassidy asked. She assisted on tree detail for the moment.
“They’ll survive it,” Cope replied. “Seal up the target habitation core first, OK? And watch your comms. I might need you out of there for cleaning. Ben, let’s go.”
Ben led the way. Wearing a pressure suit on Mahina seemed odd, but after 15 years, it was second nature. He jogged ahead to the main refectory to make sure the tree folk knew where they were going, while Cope continued straight to engineering.
By comm channel, he checked with Wilder and Zan, who split left into the loading docks. “How do the paddies look?”
“Rego hell, cap,” Wilder muttered. “They must have a hundred in each box.” He paused for a side consult. “Correction, two hundred sixty per box, they tell me.”
“We need habitat for max fifteen hundred,” Ben concluded crisply, to model the sort of professional report he wished for. Mentally, his head count was more like 1200 – 10-20% fatalities was common for the popsicle treatment. But no need to emphasize the grotesque. “We need to be gone before urb security gets here. We have maybe five hours if they start from Mahina Actual. But watch for transport from the other mines. They may not have many guards on tap, but they’re closer.”
“Aye, sar,” the pair chimed.
By then Ben’s tree team caught up. He gave Eli’s comm the schematic and made sure he understood which spaces they aimed to make livable. Then he trotted after Cope to engineering, a good 300 meters farther down a different corridor, hanging a right, then left along the way. The mechanical zone sat at the back of the warehouse-shaped settlement, serving town and mine alike.
“Could use a pallet of star drive fuel,” Cope said by way of greeting. “Warming up the main drive now. Check the filters?”
“Air quality sucks,” Ben noted. He used a hand-held meter to reach that conclusion. He located the life support console, but it remained dark until Cope got some power online.
“Check the mechanicals,” Cope prompted. “Filter or ion screen for cleaning.”
“Does it matter?” Ben countered. “We don’t have replacement…filters.” That’s what he found in the mechanicals room, vast air filters. He poked at one. His finger broke through layers of dust, and the crumbling substrate below. From the looks of them, these filters were nearing end of life forty years ago when the place was abandoned. “Filter system, Cope. Not salvageable. Checking per-room equipment.”
The engineer didn’t respond, but Ben recognized the signature gasp-and-thrum of second-stage warmup on a first generation star drive. Cope hated having his elbow jostled, and Ben agreed that job one was power. None of the paddies would thaw at these temperatures, for one thing. Even in their cold sleep containers, they were warmer than celestial midnight on the star side, a chilly -12 centigrade indoors, and getting colder until dawn.
Yes! Ben recalled his history correctly from college courses. Entry doors and cafeteria space both relied on their own zonal point-of-use air conditioning systems, built on the more modern ion screen filtration. All he needed to do was wash out the spaces before he tested the blowers, rather than gunk them up with 40 years of dust buildup.
Wash. That would imply water, which was not liquid at these temperatures.
Cope inquired, “Ben, any joy on my battery recharge chemicals or fuel pellets?”
“Sorry, forgot.” He called Teke and told him to look in the storage bay under Prosper’s shuttle for a chemical recharge kit, metal hydrate ion. When he found it, please drop it by the mine-side doors.
Ben already knew his ship didn’t carry any pellet fuel compatible with a first gen drive, but he checked with ‘Pelican.’ Unfortunately, although they still ran a first gen backup star drive, all their fuel was safely loaded and liquefied in the tanks. To safely extract it and pipe it into whatever archaic storage KM-2’s drive used would take a tedious bit of engineering.
“Cope, no joy on first gen pellet fuel. Lavelle has some in his tanks. But the fastest refueling would be to beg humanitarian relief from neighboring mines. Or the cops. You got enough to keep them alive a couple days?”
With a whir and an odd thump, suddenly heart-beat lights started glowing amber from the dusty consoles around around him. “Way to go, Cope!”
“Yeah,” the chief belatedly responded. “If the drive doesn’t crap out in the next hour, it’s probably good for a week. By then hopefully they can get something solar running. Provided I fix the batteries.”
“Kit found for that. Willow’s bringing the ship around. Teke will dump the box outside the closest doors in a few.”
He stepped over to Cope and showed him his partial plan for cleaning out the refectory spaces. The engineer survived months living at PM-1, an even more outmoded facility. In 80 years, they still hadn’t exhausted the rich phosphate vein there. Despite at least three bouts of good intentions since Cope escaped, they hadn’t yet replaced its death trap of a town, either. Though they offered good hazard pay these days, and sufficient supplies and equipment to breathe safely, plus effective meds.
Point being, Cope knew more than he ever wanted to about these deficient systems. “Once the water’s flowing, you start by blowing the dust out this roof hatch. Then the flood and mop cycle drains to the floor. Then hot blowers to dry it out. Takes about 20 minutes. Maybe 40 with this much accumulation. Blow twice, flood twice.” Drawing on memories long unused, he found the pipe heater controls in a fraction of the time Ben would have taken, and flipped them on.
“Sorry,” Ben said sadly. “I’m not much help as an engineer, if I’m talking to people all the t
ime.”
Cope glanced at him in surprise. “Ben, 90% of engineering is figuring out what to do. You’re good.”
Ben elected to accept the compliment. No question, anything mechanical that needed devising, Cope could do faster. But without even noticing his superior talent in directing people, Ben conveyed the cleaning plan clearly to all stakeholders. He verified with Eli that he’d checked the local seals and moved everything alive out of the target area. Then Ben flipped the toggle to open the roof windows.
And – nothing.
“Eli, eyeball this for me. Did a moon roof open above the galley?” He still thought it was silly to call a window in the ceiling a ‘moon roof’ when the moon was beneath them. But these Earth idioms endured.
“No open hatch that I can see,” Eli confirmed.
“Outstanding.” Stymied at step one, he reported his hangup to Cope while already trotting toward the cafeteria. He doubled back when the engineer mildly suggested he forgot his toolbox.
65
Hunter Burke followed behind Zan and Wilder’s team to the loading dock. Unlike the others, he bore no obvious weapons. What he carried weighed heavily enough – moral responsibility for these new immigrant souls.
On arrival, he hung by the doors to drink in the scene. Pressure-suited crew from Lavelle’s Gossamer-Pelican carried shelves of hibernating paddies from the first container. These they loaded onto racks erected on paired grav lifters. Off to the side, a couple figures worked to awaken a handful of the unfortunate liberated slaves. They looked so tiny and fragile, grown men and women the size of skinny 12-year-olds, and deathly pale.
Hunter paused to crack his helmet open, and take a breath. Pfaw! The air was bone dry, bitter cold, and thick with disturbed dust. He resealed his suit promptly. Still an acrid taste furred his tongue and burned his throat.
His groggy new citizens were coming to without benefit of air masks. Surely they could do better?
While Wilder’s crew waded in to help with the shelves, Hunter headed for the few paddies being woken. “Lavelle? Burke. Can we get one of those air bubbles erected around you?” It was the Saggy captain himself kneeling before the diminutive unfortunates on their plank.
“I have no better air to fill it,” Pierre Lavelle replied.
“Hell with that,” Burke replied. “I’ve got air in my suit.”
Lavelle glanced up at him searchingly, then nodded. He popped an emergency air bubble out of his tool belt, and drew Hunter in closer. “Thank you, nurse,” he dismissed his assistant. “See to others.” The second figure backed out of the vicinity, and Pierre blew his bubble.
A Sagamore invention, these handy balloons essentially created an airtight space wherever the user stood. They didn’t provide an oxygen source, merely trapped whatever air one happened to have so it wouldn’t escape. Hunter watched them in action on the news during the rescue of the trapped volcano victims of Denali Prime. He watched bemusedly as the semi-transparent pink bubble inflated slowly around them.
“Sealed,” Lavelle noted.
Hunter pulled off his helmet, freshly unimpressed with the air quality. “How do I spill my air?” Willow hadn’t covered that detail in his EVA and pressure suit lessons.
Amused, Lavelle doffed his helmet as well, wrinkling his nose in distaste. He stepped behind Hunter and rummaged down his neck. In a few moments, a cool breeze of air jetted into his hair. Hunter shivered, but it sure smelled better, and began to slowly belly and tauten their spherical pink wall.
With his helmet off, Hunter could hear the groggy paddies. An old woman kneeled and swayed, keening and muttering in an unnerving fashion, with wild arm movements. “Who’s she?”
“Shaman,” Lavelle explained in his musical French accent. “These five were identified to wake first, leadership. Shaman, headman, two technicians and a medic. One technician is dead. The medic and the headman, I think they will survive, but they are cryo sick. This is unfortunate.”
Hunter watched the gesticulating woman uneasily. “Why wake the shaman first?”
“The paddies, they do nothing without their shaman,” Lavelle excused the choice. “She keeps the demons at bay. A fearful people. But the headman makes them act.”
He pointed to a rather blue-looking elderly gentleman, perhaps 140 cm tall, curled into fetal position and shuddering with weak full-body convulsions. A fellow sufferer, younger, groaned beside him on his back. Lavelle fastidiously left the corpse outside their pink air pocket. The final paddy of this sample, a petite woman maybe 30 years old, sat hugging her knees in baggy natural linen culottes. Her shins and feet were bare, and showed a few nasty bruises. Other than that, her color looked vastly better than her sick comrades, though her lips were tinged blue. She must be freezing.
Hunter squatted, still looming over her. “Mon cher,” Hunter attempted to address her. “Uh…” He didn’t speak much paddy creole.
“I speak English,” the woman claimed. “Margaux.”
“The technicians, they are educated,” Lavelle added. “Margaux, this is Hunter Burke. He is a headman among the Mahina. Not an overseer.”
Margaux nodded guardedly.
Hunter attempted, “Margaux, can you find others to help you organize your people?”
“I fix machine.” She glanced at a pallet of bodies being offloaded from the container, looking horrified. “I no know them.”
Lavelle bent down to murmur so only Hunter could hear. “The others don’t fully trust technicians. She was educated by the overseers.”
Hunter sighed. “Welcome to Mahina, Margaux. You have many machines to tend here.” He rose and asked Lavelle, “These people are all from one village?”
“Five,” the captain returned. “Different sizes. Remote. The younger, they are smarter. The ville is punished by reducing oxygen.”
Margaux drank this up with wide eyes. Hunter told her, “We don’t do that on Mahina. You are safe here.”
Margaux frowned in doubt. Hunter could hardly blame her under the circumstances. “Maybe I need to stay behind,” he suggested to Lavelle. “If they have no leadership of their own.”
“They will not follow you,” Lavelle pointed out practically. “Only the shaman. Margaux, our technicians work to get life support here for you. Then you will maintain the machines, and wake more people, yes?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
Lavelle is from the overseer class, Hunter recalled. He rebelled against it, devoted his life to overthrow the slave owning aristocrats. But he himself was born into the high nobility, an etcetera son to a man with plenty to spare. “There are no overseers here, Margaux.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
Hunter wryly turned back to Lavelle. “How many do we wake?”
“We need heat first,” Lavelle said practically. He rotated Hunter and did some further arcane things to his pressure suit. Now the air blew hot up his neck. “Maybe this suit, you should take her off.”
Hunter hastily complied. His ears were getting scorched. He handed the suit over to Margaux. She appeared scandalized and fearful to touch such a treasure. The shaman turned to exorcise it, and the cryo sick men huddled closer.
“Nice,” Lavelle observed. “You tell her she is like an overseer now. The paddies, they are not allowed to keep pressure suits.” Not that the diminutive tech could readily wear Hunter’s suit, Earth man’s size medium.
“Under what conditions do we abort?” Hunter asked. “Pack them back up and leave?”
“Under no conditions,” Lavelle replied. “We leave in 5 hours, before urb security arrives. They stay here. This cannot be helped. They are better off, Hunter. I promise you this.”
“Damn. Alright, how do we get out of this bubble?”
The captain raised an amused eyebrow. “You will be cold.”
But he extracted another bubble-gum-on-a-stick from his belt, and blew a compact sub-bubble around them, stuck to the wall of the original one. Once a seal was accomplished, he sliced open the wall to exit. Though Hu
nter never noticed the air was better inside, or warmer, it sure tasted awful and shockingly cold once he stepped out.
“You wanted new citizens,” Lavelle reminded him. “Congratulations. They will vote as you wish. At first.”
“I care about these people too, Pierre,” Hunter insisted.
“But of course.” Lavelle’s sneer spoke pure disdain. “As do I.” He clamped on his helmet and went to help his crew.
Still trying to think how he could make himself useful, Hunter’s gaze was arrested by Margaux. The woman transferred the awkwardly large tool belt from the pressure suit onto her slender hips. Then she blew a smaller pink bubble to surround the shaman and the afflicted, but not herself. The bulky suit and helmet hooked in one elbow, she casually sliced her way out of the bigger bubble, gathering in the now-billowing pink. She cut off a third of this material with a few deft knife strokes, and draped herself for warmth. She bowed her head and offered the rest to Hunter.
Still new to the stuff, Hunter fingered the deflated bubble stuff, finding it no longer sticky. Margaux decided he didn’t comprehend the concept, and wrapped his shoulders for him, reaching on tiptoes to do so. “Warm, yes?”
“Ah – yes! Thank you, Margaux! Merci.”
She nodded acknowledgment and strode to a rack waiting full on its grav lifters. She pointed to a head. “Hontair, technique.” He liked the way she pronounced his name. She shifted her pointing finger two shelves down. “Also technique, two.”
“Merci! Allez!” a nearby Saggy crewman called, beckoning the medic.
Margaux returned to Hunter. “Warm. No. Heat-air. I fix. Where?”
“I’ll take you,” he offered.
She turned first to the shaman, and executed a ridiculous courtly bow. The strange little shaman gesticulated wildly, stabbing fingers out toward the technician, alternated with hex-signs. “Hontair, you bow also,” Margaux prompted him.