by Aaron Bunce
“The stomach?” Soraya asked.
“Yep,” Lex said, nodding. “This little fucker means to kill us. I’m telling you all now, my response to that is usually to kill them right back.”
“Why does it have to be violence…?” Lana asked. And Lex immediately snorted.
“Guys…he seems determined to get planetside. Can we just wait and force the issue when on Titan? Maybe we can contact the Russians and see if they can have help waiting,” Soraya theorized.
“Lana?” Jacoby asked, turning to the SysOps supervisor.
“With air scrubbers offline, carbon dioxide will continue to rise. It’ll get cold, too. We might make it until we’re on the ground, but there is no telling what kind of shape we’ll be in. He’s got power, air, and heat. Erik can just wait us out. And that is based on the idea that this tub makes it safely to the ground. We could all burn up before that. We’re lucky the safeties don’t allow for remote opening of the external hatches, otherwise he might have already ejected us into space.”
“You said he took the navigational computer. So, we don’t have any way to control the ship, even if we wanted to, right?” Lex asked.
“Correct.” Lana’s lips drew so tight they almost disappeared.
“Alright, Jacoby. It looks like we’re doing this your way. As you say, get that saw rippin’. We cut in there, neutralize him, and take back control of the ship. Then you techy ladies can figure out the rest,” Lex said, and moved behind him.
“Wait, what?” Anna asked as the others moved out of the way.
Jacoby nodded, the saw coming to life in his hands. The motor whined, bright red contact points spinning like fireworks in the air.
“You’re just going to cut through the door? Then what?” Lana asked, almost crawling over Anna.
“He cuts, and I stack up behind him. When he makes it through the far door, I rush in and take the kid down,” Lex explained, but knew it wasn’t that simple. Jacoby wouldn’t have time to cut the whole door from the frame. He could cut a hole in the middle of it, but with the metal likely glowing hot, she couldn’t use the cutout as a shield. They would bottleneck in the opening, and Erik wouldn’t even have to be a good shot to turn them into pulp. She considered looking around for anything she could use as a tactical shield, but struggled. Everything she’d seen—access panel covers that might work were polymer-backed ceramic weave. They’d take one or two rounds and shatter in her face.
Jacoby would have to cut through the lock, if there was only one, and only then could they pull the door open. Which would likely end in the same way–one of them getting shot and killed before getting inside.
He cuts the lock and before he gets shot, I push him out of the way and get inside. That weapon was my responsibility. I am not letting him get killed for my screw up.
“Do it, Jacoby. We’re on borrowed time as it is,” Lex said, tapping him on the shoulder so he knew she was ready. Jacoby nodded, lifted the saw, angling the glowing blade for its first cut, and moved forward.
“Wow! Wow! Wow!” Lana screamed suddenly and tried to jump in front of them.
Jacoby wrenched the saw to the left and cursed, turning an angry glare on the brunette.
“Do you want to lose an arm?”
“Well, no. I mean…no. It is just…stop for a second. You just might kill all of us.”
“What are you talking about? You said it yourself, we’ve got no air, no heat. The clock is ticking. We’re out of time,” he argued.
“Yes, I know that is what I said. But there was too much going on, too much with all the talking, the darkness, the impending death. Just everything with the you, and the her, and…her,” Lana rambled, her head and hands moving animatedly as she talked. Then she stepped forward and placed her hand on the door. She kept it there for only a moment, before pulling it back, rubbing it against her body, and then moving down to place it on adjacent wall panel.
“I’d say you’re freaking me out if I wasn’t already freaked out. Why shouldn’t Jacoby cut the door open?” Anna asked.
“I didn’t think about it before, because well, I never thought one of us would do this. The door is considerably colder than the bulkhead. That means Erik likely depressurized the passage. If you cut through that door, and he left the emergency containment valves open, which is what I would do to keep someone from coming through, then all the air in this whole forward compartment will get sucked out into vacuum. Forget Titan, or the message, or any of it. We’d be dead.”
“Shit. So, that’s it? We’re screwed,” Soraya said.
“What about pressure suits?” Anna asked, “We seal up what we can, protect ourselves with suits, and then Jacoby cuts through.”
“Two issues,” Lana said, immediately. “We’ve got 3 suits down in the hold, and as soon as he cuts that second door, the aft maintenance section will depressurize, too. Are we just writing Erik off, at this point? I don’t even think the Betty has enough oxygen in her supplementary tanks to re-pressurize the bridge, let alone half the ship.”
“Of course, we’re writing Erik off. Everything he’s done up to here was to kill us. I say do it. I feel zero sympathy,” Lex chimed in.
“Now wait a minute,” Soraya argued, “Poole has basically confirmed that he’s being controlled, right? What if he doesn’t know what he’s doing? What if he’s innocent?”
Lex laughed. “No one’s innocent. Not us. Not him. This is about survival–his or ours. Not everyone gets to pick. I say we take action while it’s there for the taking.”
“Okay, well, that is incredibly black and white, Lex. I’m not ready to go that grim, just yet.”
“Not grim, corn cakes. It’s just the truth. We’re speeding towards a big ball of trouble, in case you forgot, and that messed up little boy back there currently has us by the balls. I’m not willing to let him start twisting and pulling, are you?” Lex asked, returning Soraya’s glare.
“That’s graphic,” Anna cut in. “What about the acceleration chamber? It’s got its own oxygen. What if we put everyone not in suits in there, seal it, then cut the doors?”
“It’s not horrible,” Lana muttered, “Of course it has no power, so how do we open and close the door, engage the gel, or…shit, the oxygen regulators are all electronic solenoids, so how would we start the oxygen flow. I mean we could…”
Lex watched Lana, then looked to Jacoby and Soraya, who mouthed something foul, and then Anna. She marveled at how Anna was the only one still brainstorming ideas…the only one actively trying to keep them alive and not fighting.
“Hey!” Lex yelled, cutting through the storm of voices. “Anna’s idea, would that work?” The chatter died down, somewhat, and finally, Lana’s unintelligible mumblings started to gain strength.
“Yeah. I mean it could. If we can answer about eighteen questions first. And anyone trapped in there is going to have the air they take in with them from now until we set down. So…actually, yeah, it won’t work. Shit, what in the hell, man. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lana yelled, stomping her boot, and slapping her thigh. “When…I mean when, is something just going to go right? Or be F’ing easier? It’s like the universe itself is conspiring against us every step of the way.”
“Not the universe, Lana. Erik. He’s spent his time doing this to us, don’t lie to yourself. I think he knew exactly what he was doing and precisely how to screw us over the hardest.”
“Because blaming people is definitely going to make everything better, Red.”
“Am I wrong? Tell me I’m wrong.” Lex took a step towards Soraya before she realized what she was doing, the anger that took over with Poole bubbling up inside.
“Okay, stop!” Jacoby yelled, jumping in, and pushing Lex back. “This is stupid. Do you two need to go find a dark corner for a time out?”
“She called me ‘Red’. She knows I hate it when Poole does it.”
“Then stop calling me ‘corn cakes’!”
“Holy shit,” Lana gasped.
“Exactly,” Anna argued. “We need to be working together to figure this out, not fight. We’re just using up more air. Please stop.”
“You two sound like a couple, bickering kids. Can you just stop?” Jacoby yelled.
“I think I got it,” Lana said and started to nod, but no one else seemed to notice.
“Lex, please just back off for a minute,” Jacoby said.
“No,” she growled and pushed him back, “You hold the hell on, Jacoby.” Lex resisted his attempt to push her out of the way. She chopped his arms down, sidestepped, and pointed at one of the two people not busy arguing. “Lana, what is it? Guys, shut the hell up, she’s trying to tell us something!”
Everyone froze and turned as one.
“It’s weird because I said, ‘when is something going to go right’ but like in the ‘opposite to wrong’ way, not the direction, and I don’t know why but it jogged something loose in my head. Then Jacoby said, ‘find a dark corner for a timeout’ and it just fueled the fire at that point. I mean, yes Erik closed and sealed the aft maintenance passage, which pretty much guarantees that he sealed the passage to the reactor compartment, too. That effectively disconnects the two pressure compartments from one another. But then I thought about the schematics, and the wiring diagrams, and the firewalls, and the cable runs. We focused on the cable runs for so long trying to isolate the computers. In and out, in and out. That is why we left the communication wiring in place for the NavCom,” Lana said, talking faster with each passing moment. Lex struggled to make sense of it, the shaking heads and squinting eyes around her a damning indication that the others were as well.
“What is she rambling about?” Soraya asked.
“…I mean yeah, it’s small, but it’s like our only option. So, heh, we might not be so totally screwed. Not completely, that is.” Lana finished talking, her voice gaining volume after she’d faded into a mostly unintelligible slew of quasi-words and nasally grunts. Then, without warning, the brunette pushed out of the group and disappeared down into the ladder well.
“This is great. First Erik and now her. Is she going to start mumbling about hearing someone no one else can?” Soraya started to complain, but Lex jumped forward and threw herself onto the ladder.
Fighting the Betty’s light gravity, she hooked her boots around both poles and slid down. She hit hard, her knees absorbing the shock, and immediately cast her light around. Her breath fogged the meager light beam, deepening the already murky space.
She crept forward, sweeping the small light as someone moved down the ladder behind her. Boxes appeared out of the gloom, then a hectic pile of coiled cable–the excess when Erik and Lana were frantically rewiring things in the hope of bypassing the troubled navigational system.
If only we’d left it all alone. I trust Anna’s fruity program to get us down there more and more with each passing hour. It didn’t want to kill us.
The rear wall appeared, then the doorway to the engine room. It was closed, just like the aft maintenance passage in the floor directly above. Her small, white light played against the ground, splashing up the door, to the ceiling, and down the other side on the right. The door control panel was dark, a thin coating of frost already coating the fingerprint-smudged screen.
Lex took a breath to call out Lana’s name just as something moved in the dark further to her right. The other woman emerged as a shifting shadow, an inky splotch of the dark itself, only to stand and materialize in the light. It terrified Lex how close she’d been, barely five or six feet away, and yet she had been practically invisible.
I hate this dark. Hate it, she thought, struggling to not topple back to her time alone on Hyde. It wasn’t just the dread accompanying the memories, but also because she knew Ayo would float forth in her mind. And even if she wouldn’t, he would remind her that she’d given up. And she hated quitters almost as much as whiners.
Lana kicked the wall, turned on the spot, grunted, then dove back down into the darkness. Lex maneuvered around a stack of empty crates. Something popped loudly and Lana grunted.
Lex angled the light down, just as the brunette fumbled for something on the wall. She spotted a black handle, its glossy face snugged up against the wall. A quick grunt and more than a few expletives later, and Lana cursed, spilling onto her back.
“Stupid, frozen, no-lube, cast-aluminum, piece of crap,” she grumbled and clawed forward and attacked the handle once again. Lex angled the light onto the wall so Lana could see just as the handle broke loose and turned outward.
“Shit balls. Those feel like they haven’t been opened since this tub left the factory.”
“What are they?” Lex asked.
A wall of murmuring voices and scuffing feet closed in from the hold behind them. The noise seemed to bounce off everything and come from everywhere at once in the dark.
“Locking handles. Here, help me get the other two. I don’t think I can open them on my own after abusing my hands on the first two.”
Lex handed her small light to Anna, the combined glow from their two illuminators revealing the well-sealed outline of what looked like a sizable access panel. She bent forward next to Lana, found a hold on the lever, and braced.
“Ready? One-Two-Three, pull!” she grunted.
They pushed off from the wall, the black, rubberized handle sticking for a moment, before slowly swinging out. They grunted and cursed, kicked the wall for better bracing, but after several moments, pulled it open.
“That’s three. Here, let’s get the last one,” Lana said, panting heavily to catch her breath.
Lex slid over next to her and together they fought, working in concert for several moments to break the last handle free. With one last violent tug, it popped open, and they fell back.
“Okay. Good, good, good!” Lana said, spinning around and jumping to her feet. “Jacoby, Anna, Soraya, you stand here. Lex and I on both sides. It’s going to be damned heavy so don’t drop it. Just lay it down easy.”
Lex took Lana’s lead, the group working together to pull the access panel away from the wall. It popped free with some urging, the thick, hermetic seal pealing against the wall with a squelch.
Jacoby, Soraya, and Anna grunted, bearing the thick panel’s weight, and slowly lowered it to the ground. It was thicker than she realized, sizing up the foot-thick panel in the light.
“Lead shielded,” Lana grunted, moving away from the wall and tapping it with a boot. “Makes it heavy as all hell.” She turned and gestured towards the wall, the dark space where the panel stood now greedily holding to the shadows.
“I hope you’re feeling limber, Lex,” Poole said, suddenly, his voice somehow reverberating inside her brain and her ear at the same time.
Anna lifted the two light beams into the void. Lex took in a space barely three feet wide and a foot and a half deep, with several pipes running along either side. They were wrapped in shiny foil insulation, the tape bridging the seams covered in magenta and yellow trefoils.
“Radiation warnings? What did we just open, Lana?” Anna asked.
“Our way in…our only way in,” she said, kneeling and leaning to look inside. “Yes, the reactor, engine, and maintenance sections in the aft of the ship are partitioned off from crew quarters on purpose. That way, in case of catastrophic failure, the forward section could operate independently off batteries to maintain life support and communications. It would become a lifeboat. Wiring, navigation controls, and high voltage trunks run back through small, insulated conduits. But these are the reactor coolant heat exchanger lines. They intentionally run them up, around, and down…in order to keep them as far away from living spaces as possible. It is shielded, incredibly heavy, and runs from the maintenance space, past the hold, and out to the primary heat exchangers. It’s going to be hella tight, but a small enough person just might be able to squeeze all the way through.”
“Might? That feels like a…” Anna asked, stepping forward. “What about the radiation? You said those are coolant line
s? How many REM are we talking about? What about heat?”
Lana shrugged, staring into the wall space for several long moments before responding. “I mean, the reactor is basically running on standby power and if Erik is to be believed, the pulse engine has only been used for light thrust. But as long as her candle’s lit, there will always be heat. Probably don’t want to hug those coolant lines.”
“Okay. Let’s do this,” Jacoby said, held his saw out to Anna, and immediately made for the space. Lex could tell before he ever stooped down that he’d never fit. And even if he squeezed his shoulders in between the coolant lines, how was he supposed to move?
“Jacoby, you’ll never fit through there…I mean, you might, but only if we strip you naked and slather you with cable pulling soap,” Lana said as he tried to move her aside.
“Kinky,” he grunted.
“I’ll go,” Soraya said, and immediately moved forward between Anna and Lex. “I mean, considering what Shane and I went through in the umbilical to get out of the control building, I’m probably the most qualified.”
Lex watched as she eyed the small, recessed space, took a deep, shuddering breath, and let it out. A noxious, sour anxiety bled off the ever-confident former athlete. The woman Lex had come to respect for reasons beyond her don’t-back-down attitude. It tightened her own chest, squeezing in uncomfortably around her heart and lungs–the awful dread of claustrophobia.
Soraya swallowed and moved to kneel and pull herself inside, but Lex caught her by the shoulder.
“I got this…” Lex said, and despite Soraya’s apparent rejection of the notion, she felt a definitive wave of relief. “He’s got my weapon. That is on me. I’ve done close quarters and confined space trainings.”
They all looked at her, nodding quietly as she reached up and undid the collar of her padded armor, then unsnapped the shoulder and started to pull it down and off. She wanted it on, with almost every fiber of her being, but knew it was too bulking.
