The Orpheus Plot

by Christopher Swiedler

  Lucas’s instinct told him that this wasn’t a good idea. But Elena knew her limits, and it wasn’t like Rahul would be in any danger, right? Worst-case scenario, he could just send them back on the rover.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just be careful. Both of you.”

  When they got outside, Willem, Aaron, and Katya jumped down off the tailgate. “We’re ready, sir,” Willem said.

  Lucas ignored the mocking tone in Willem’s voice and looked over the power unit. Even in the low gravity, it would take all six of them to get it installed. “So you guys know where we’re supposed to be taking this?”

  Katya saluted smartly and held up her screen. “Coordinates right here, sir.”

  Lucas sighed. Clearly this was going to be a long trip. Willem hopped into the cab of the rover and powered it up. Lucas shook his head. He didn’t trust Willem anywhere near enough for that. “I’m driving.”

  “Oh, I can do it,” Willem said breezily.

  Whatever you do, don’t lose your temper, Lucas told himself. He tried to think of how Sanchez would have handled the situation. “Maybe you could,” he said. “But I’m driving. Move over.”

  Lucas waited for whatever snide comment or retort Willem had ready, but it didn’t come. Instead, he just rolled his eyes and slid to the other side of the seat.

  Lucas exhaled. His heart beat loudly as he climbed into the driver’s seat. He’d made it through his first challenge, at least. And now all they had to do was complete the mission—preferably without killing each other.

  Katya climbed in on the other side of Willem, and the other cadets squeezed into the back of the truck with the power unit. Katya checked her screen and entered the coordinates into the navigation computer. Lucas double-checked the route and pressed down on the accelerator. The rover lurched forward, kicking up a few small plumes of dust that settled back down quickly.

  “Hey!” Elena called, clinging to the roll bar and grabbing her side. “Careful!”

  As they climbed the small ridge that bordered the colony, the main dome of the bazaar came into view, glowing like a luminescent pearl. The nav computer’s route took them around the south side of the dome and then down into a wide, flat crater.

  “This is the old colony, right?” Aaron asked, pointing at a few small concrete mounds that were half covered in gray dust.

  “Right!” Katya said, her eyes gleaming. “Where the plague was!”

  The story of the first Vestan colony was famous, having been made into a big-budget movie that even Lucas had seen. “It wasn’t a plague,” Lucas said. “Just a virus.”

  “What’s the difference?” Elena asked. “Everyone died, right?”

  “I heard everyone came back as zombies,” Aaron said.

  “Oh, don’t be stupid,” Rahul said irritably.

  The radar station turned out to be farther than Lucas expected—it took them almost ten minutes to get there, even at the rover’s top speed. When they arrived, everyone hopped out and stretched.

  “Rahul and Katya, open up the station and disconnect the old unit,” Lucas said, pointing at the base of the station. “Aaron will move it out of the way and get the new one in place.”

  Even in the low gravity, it took a while to get the replacement unit off the back of the rover and swap it with the old one. It was a tricky operation, even in low gravity, because although the power units didn’t weigh much here, getting them to start moving—or, more important, to stop moving—would take the same amount of force as it would on Earth.

  Lucas guided Aaron through the process and made sure he moved slowly and didn’t let the power unit build up too much speed. The last thing Lucas wanted was for someone to end up with a crushed finger or a broken foot because they forgot that a kilogram of mass was the same anywhere in the universe.

  Elena, who was still favoring her left side, saw what he was doing and stayed carefully out of the way. Lucas would have thought that Willem, who’d grown up under low gee on Luna, would be smart enough to do the same. Apparently he was wrong. Even though Willem was the smallest and skinniest cadet from the Orpheus, he seemed to think that he would somehow be of instrumental help in moving the power unit. After twice asking him to stand back and let Aaron do the lifting, Lucas finally lost his temper.

  “Get out of the way before you get yourself hurt!” he barked.

  Startled, Willem finally did the smart thing and backed up a few meters. When Aaron finally got the old power unit hoisted up onto the rover and slid the new one in place, Katya cheered.

  “Nice job, big guy,” she said, clapping Aaron on the back.

  Willem glowered at her. “Well, lifting things is what he’s good for,” he said loudly. “Just don’t expect much else. He’s pretty much as dumb as a rock.”

  A furious look passed over Aaron’s face, but then it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. This was new to Lucas—as far as he’d ever seen, Willem had just devoted himself to teasing kids outside his little crew. Apparently, though, he could be just as mean to his friends. Which raised the question of exactly why they would be his friends in the first place, but that was one Lucas didn’t think he’d figure out anytime soon.

  The teasing didn’t stop at that dumb-as-a-rock comment, either. Willem slipped in a few more pointed comments about Aaron as they hooked up the new unit.

  “You must have snored right through Mr. Clarke’s basic electronics class,” he said to Aaron at one point. And then later, to Katya: “Remember on the transport ship when he couldn’t figure out how to use the bathroom? The instructions were printed right there on the wall.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Katya said tiredly. In response, Willem glared at her and sat down on a nearby rock with his arms folded across his chest.

  “Is this as weird to you as it is to me?” Rahul whispered over their private channel as he inspected the power unit’s connections.

  “Every bit,” Elena said. “Though to be honest, it’s kind of fun to watch.”

  “No kidding,” Rahul said. He stood up and turned to the others. “Okay, the last thing we need is the activation coupler.”

  “That little connector thing?” Aaron said. “Willem has it.”

  “No—I told you to bring it,” Willem said.

  “I don’t remember that,” Katya said. “You said you’d—”

  “Are you really both that dumb?” Willem shouted. “I was still putting on my suit, so I said one of you needed to put the coupler into the rover.”

  “So it got left behind?” Elena said. “Wonderful.”

  “Apparently,” Katya said, through gritted teeth. “I guess the only thing to do is for Aaron and me to go back and get it. Sound good?”

  “Yeah,” Willem said. “Hurry back, though.”

  “I was asking Lucas,” she said pointedly. “He’s commanding the mission.”

  Rahul stifled a laugh, which only made Willem angrier. “Sure,” Lucas said. “Grab the coupler and bring it back. The rest of us will finish up the connections.”

  “You know,” Rahul said thoughtfully as Aaron and Katya drove off, “I can probably pull the coupler from the old unit and update the identification codes. It’s not like these things are engineered for security.”

  “Good idea,” Willem said. “Let’s get this done and go back inside.”

  While Rahul worked, Willem watched moodily as the rover disappeared over the horizon, leaving only a faint gray dust cloud in its wake. Lucas was fascinated. Out of all the people on the Orpheus, Willem was the last one who Lucas would have expected to have any kind of difficulty with his friends. He seemed to always be in control of everything. But right now he looked just as lost and alone as Lucas had felt when he’d first arrived.

  To his surprise, Lucas actually felt sorry for him. There was no doubt Willem deserved it—he’d been a complete brat to Aaron and Katya. But everyone made mistakes, and maybe in the end he wasn’t all that different from the rest of them.

  “Perfect,” Rahul said, looking do
wn at the ground with the unfocused stare that meant he was accessing his AI implant. “I found what I need. This will just take a minute.”

  “Fantastic,” Willem said. “Aaron? Katya? Did you hear that? You can come back.”

  “You want us to come back?” Aaron asked. There was a pause, followed by what Lucas was pretty sure was a giggle from Katya. “Uh, we can’t hear you very well,” Aaron said, adding an unconvincing imitation of radio static. “Must be some interference.”

  “Stop kidding around,” Willem snapped. “We’re almost done here. Come back and get us.”

  There was another burst of fake static from Aaron, followed by twin peals of laughter. Then the link went silent.

  “Very funny, Aaron,” Willem said. He laced his fingers over the top of the helmet and turned toward Lucas. “They’ll be back. They wouldn’t leave me.”

  Elena sighed. “I’m pretty sure they just did.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Rahul said, smacking the replacement power unit with his palm. “I mean, in hindsight, we totally should have seen this coming, but still.”

  “It’s just a joke,” Willem insisted.

  “Great joke,” Rahul said, closing up the access panel. “Super clever. When we get back I’m going to make sure to tell those two exactly how funny it is.”

  “How are we going to get back to the base?” Willem asked. “They took the rover!”

  “We walk,” Lucas said. “It’s about five kilometers. Not too bad.”

  Willem stared at him as if he’d just suggested they flap their arms and fly home. “Walk? Are you serious?”

  “Well, if you want, you can wait behind and see if they come back,” Lucas said as he, Elena, and Rahul started off on foot. “Up to you.”

  Rahul crossed his fingers. “Please wait behind,” he whispered. “Oh, please!”

  Unsurprisingly, Willem didn’t wait very long before hurrying after them. Apparently he wasn’t all that convinced that his friends were going to come back for him.

  In the low gravity, climbing down off the small ridge where the transmitter was located was frustratingly difficult. It was hard to find a pace that wasn’t either glacially slow or too fast to control. The effort of running after them seemed to have exhausted Willem, and Lucas found he had to pause periodically to let him catch up.

  Finally they reached a long, flat stretch. “Not much farther to the edge of the colony,” Lucas said. “Then it’s just another few kilometers to the hangar.”

  “Hang on,” Rahul said, bending over with his hands on his knees. “I need a minute.”

  “Vertigo?” Elena asked worriedly.

  “Yeah,” Rahul said, grimacing. “It started a little while back. My implant is helping, but I didn’t think we’d be out here this long.”

  Lucas motioned to Willem. “Put his arm over your shoulder. We’ll help him walk.”

  “What about Elena?” Willem asked. “Can’t she—”

  “Elena cracked a rib in a fight with the local judo champion,” Lucas said impatiently. “Now get over here and help me out.”

  To his surprise, Willem didn’t argue any further. He and Lucas positioned themselves on either side of Rahul, and the three of them began to stumble along together.

  “Thanks,” Rahul mumbled, closing his eyes.

  After half a kilometer, as they climbed over the edge of a small impact crater, Willem pointed at a cylindrical building about fifty meters away. “That’s an airlock, right?”

  “It’s part of the old colony,” Lucas said. “We should keep going until we get to the base.”

  “Do you think we can make it?” Elena asked doubtfully. “What’s going to happen if he pukes in his suit?”

  Lucas considered this. At this point, maybe the best thing to do would be to call for help. It wouldn’t take too long for someone to get here in a rover, and then they could get inside quickly.

  But calling for assistance would mean admitting that he’d lost control of a simple mission to replace a power unit. Enough things had gone wrong already. What was Sanchez going to say if Lucas couldn’t even manage to get his team back inside without help?

  “I think he’s right,” Rahul said, keeping his eyes tightly closed. “I don’t know how much longer I’ve got before I blow chunks.”

  “All right,” Lucas said. “We’ll check it out.”

  When they reached the airlock, Lucas brushed dust off its control panel. He flipped a few switches experimentally, but nothing happened. There were no status lights or anything to indicate that it was actually functional.

  Rahul sagged down to the ground. “It doesn’t have power?”

  “Look for a manual override,” Lucas said, running his hands over the doorframe. “There’s got to be a way to open it, even without power.”

  Willem and Elena got down on their knees and followed his example. After a few minutes, Willem yelped in excitement and opened a small metal door on the side of the airlock. “Here!”

  Inside the panel was a circular hand crank about half a meter across. Lucas, Elena, and Willem each grabbed a section of the crank and started to turn. For several seconds the crank refused to budge. Then, with a deep shudder, it turned slightly. As it did, the airlock doors opened a fraction of a centimeter. “There we go!” Lucas gasped. “Keep turning!”

  With agonizing slowness, the wheel rotated around once, twice, three times. As soon as the doors were open far enough, the four of them squeezed through into the airlock. It was pitch-black except for the glow from their wrist screens. Lucas turned on a light in the collar of his suit and looked around. The airlock was cramped, with barely enough room for them to move. Rahul leaned against the wall, breathing heavily but already looking better.

  “There’ll be another manual override somewhere,” Lucas said.

  “Here,” Rahul said hoarsely. He opened up a panel next to him, exposing a hand crank identical to the one on the outside. They all grabbed on and turned it as the outer doors slowly sealed themselves shut. By the time they were finished, Lucas’s arms felt like jelly.

  “There’s no power for the air pumps,” he gasped. “So we need to look for a release valve. There’s a mechanical fail-safe—as long as there’s vacuum inside the airlock, we won’t be able to open the inner doors.”

  They found the red emergency equalization switch behind a small pane of clear plastic. Lucas smashed the plastic with his fist and jerked the lever downward. At first, nothing seemed to be happening. Then, very slowly, the air pressure gauge on Lucas’s wrist screen started to creep upward. One kilopascal, then two, then three.

  “It’s working!” Willem said.

  Lucas frowned. Why wasn’t the air flowing more quickly? After almost a minute, the pressure was only up to eight kilopascals. The pressure inside the colony would be almost ten times that. He stared at the display as if he could cause the numbers to climb by sheer force of will.

  But instead of rising more quickly, the pressure seemed to be leveling off. Lucas bent down and pressed the side of his helmet against the panel. For a moment he caught the faint hissing of oxygen flowing into the airlock. Then the sound faded, until all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing.

  He jerked the switch up and down several times, with no results. The pressure display on his screen stayed flat at fifty kilopascals. Would that be enough to turn off the fail-safe mechanism that sealed the airlock?

  Lucas opened the manual override panel for the inner doors. But even with all of their combined strength, the crank wouldn’t turn. It was still locked off by the fail-safe. “It’s not going to work,” Lucas panted. “Not without more air pressure.”

  “What do we do?” Willem asked.

  “We’ll have to find another airlock,” Lucas said.

  Exhausted, he grasped the hand crank that opened the outer doors and tried to turn it, but the wheel wouldn’t move. Willem and Elena threw their weight into it without any luck.

  “What’s going on?” Elena aske
d. “It was just working a minute ago.”

  A chill ran down the back of Lucas’s neck as he suddenly understood what the problem was. There was a fail-safe on the outer doors too. Except that instead of locking itself when the air pressure was too low, these doors would lock when the air pressure was too high, to prevent someone from accidentally opening the doors and venting the entire atmosphere of the colony into space. The emergency equalization mechanism had let just enough oxygen into the airlock so that both fail-safes were active. Unless they could either raise or lower the pressure, neither door would open.

  They were trapped.

  14

  “WHAT’S HAPPENING?” RAHUL asked. “Why won’t the doors open?”

  Willem banged on the doors with his fists. “Someone help us!” he shouted. “We’re trapped in here!”

  “Calm down,” Lucas said. “Take deep—”

  “I’m not going to calm down!” Willem screamed, throwing his shoulder against the doors as if he could smash them open.

  Lucas switched to the emergency radio channel. “Can anyone hear me? We’re stuck in an old airlock on the south side of the colony. If you can hear me, please respond.”

  There was no answer. His wrist screen showed no connections to any uplink satellites in orbit around Vesta. The ancient, reinforced walls of the airlock were blocking radio signals. Somewhere in the ceiling there was probably a transmission repeater, but even the backup power to this part of the colony had been cut off a long time ago.

  “It’s okay,” Lucas said. “We’re going to be okay. I’ll figure out a way to get us out of here.”

  He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. How were they possibly going to get around the two fail-safes? Their best hope was that someone would come looking for them. But how long would that take? Hours? Days?

  He checked the reserve air on his suit. The small liquid oxygen tank on his back was eighty percent full. Combined with the air scrubber that would pull some of the oxygen back out of the carbon dioxide they exhaled, their suits had around four hours of air.

  Would someone find them by then?

  As he watched the pressure display on his wrist screen, something clicked in Lucas’s mind. The liquid oxygen in their tanks was stored at high pressure. When it was converted to gas, it expanded to almost a thousand times its previous volume. Which meant that maybe there was a way out of here.