The Orpheus Plot

by Christopher Swiedler

  “How big is this airlock?” he asked, turning to Rahul. “Can your implant tell?”

  Rahul glanced around. “About twenty cubic meters. Why?”

  He pointed at the pressure gauge, which was hovering just above fifty kilopascals. “How much air do you think it would take to raise that to seventy-five?”

  “Not that much, I guess,” he admitted. “But where are you going to get it from? You’d need . . .”

  He trailed off and closed his eyes. “Please tell me you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  “It could work,” he said. “If we have enough air.”

  “What are you talking about?” Elena asked. “What could work?”

  “He’s talking about venting our reserve air,” Rahul said, pointing at the small tank on Lucas’s back. “It’s an enclosed space, so the pressure in here would rise.”

  “Which would disable the fail-safe and let the inner doors open,” Lucas said.

  “Sure,” Rahul said. “But if it doesn’t work, then we’ve just dumped our air for nothing.”

  Willem shook his head. “We’re better off just waiting for someone to find us.”

  “Who’s going to find us?” Lucas countered. “How long do you think it will take for Aaron and Katya to realize that we’re not coming back?”

  Willem considered for a moment. “A long time,” he said finally.

  “We’ve each got four hours of air,” Lucas said. “A little more if we conserve it.”

  “I’m not sure it’s worth the risk,” Elena said. “But it’s your decision, Lucas. You’re the commander.”

  The first lesson of command, Sanchez had said: a leader is responsible for his crew. Up till now, Lucas had always thought of that responsibility in abstract terms. But right now, his decision could mean life or death for all three of them.

  “We could wait a little while and see if anyone comes,” Rahul suggested.

  Lucas shook his head. “The longer we wait, the less air we have to vent. It’s now or never.”

  He unclasped the outer seal on his collar, causing his suit to beep angrily at him. The inner seal was locked with a fail-safe similar to the ones on the door—as long as it detected low pressure outside the suit, it would refuse to open. He found the override command on his wrist screen and disabled the fail-safe.

  There was a loud hissing sound as the air in his suit started to vent out into the airlock. Lucas’s ears popped painfully as the pressure in his helmet dropped. His suit beeped again and pumped more oxygen out of the tank on his back. The reserve air display on his suit dropped to seventy percent, and then to sixty. He let out some more air, careful to not bleed it off too quickly.

  Finally the hissing stopped, and he pulled his helmet off completely. The air was thin and had an unpleasant, metallic tang, but it was breathable—for now, at least. The pressure gauge on the wall showed a little less than sixty kilopascals. He tried the hand crank on the inner door, but it was still locked tight.

  “How high do you think it needs to be?” Rahul asked.

  “Seventy, I’d guess. That’s usually the minimum safety pressure.”

  “So it didn’t work?” Willem said.

  “Not yet,” Elena replied. “Show me how to do it.”

  “Me too,” Rahul said.

  “Are you sure?” Lucas asked.

  “We’re not letting you be the only one to try,” Rahul said. “Come on, show us.”

  Lucas demonstrated how to open the collar seal and override the safety mechanism. “Be careful—don’t let out too much air at once.”

  Elena nodded and unfastened the seal. There was a loud hissing sound, and she grimaced in pain. She adjusted the seal and worked her jaw back and forth to get the pressure in her ears to equalize. After a moment of fumbling with his collar, Rahul followed suit. Lucas watched the gauge on the wall settle at sixty-eight kilopascals.

  “That’s as much as we can spare,” Elena said, pulling off her helmet. “We need more.”

  “Stupid,” Willem said, pulling at the crank. “You all did that for nothing.”

  Rahul pointed at the pressure gauge. “Not for nothing. We’re almost there.”

  “All you need is the air in my suit,” Willem said. “Except that you don’t know for sure that it will even work.”

  “We could tear that helmet off your head,” Rahul said darkly.

  “Just because the three of you were dumb enough to let out all of your air doesn’t mean that I have to,” Willem said.

  Leadership was about persuasion and empathy, Lucas reminded himself. Willem was obviously scared—that was no surprise. And, Lucas guessed, he wasn’t taking too well to the idea that anyone could order or force him to do something risky like vent all his air. But maybe there was another angle Lucas could try.

  “Listen, we’re going to get out of here,” he said. “This is all going to be a funny story we’ll tell a few years from now at our graduation dinner. ‘Hey, remember the time we were all trapped in that airlock?’”

  He hoped he sounded convincing and authoritative, especially since right now he desperately wished there was someone else here to be the authority. “But Willem, you’re right. We don’t know that dumping your air is going to make our situation any better. Which is why it’s up to you.”

  Lucas looked pleadingly at Rahul. If this was going to work, he needed them all to be on the same side. Rahul sighed and folded his arms across his chest. “Okay, sure. We’re not going to force you. But I swear, if I die, I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  “Your ghost would be about as scary as a labradoodle,” Willem said, rolling his eyes, but his voice had only the tiniest hint of its usual sarcasm. He looked at the gauge for a moment, and then he took a deep breath, disabled the fail-safe, and tugged open the seal at his collar.

  The air hissed out of his suit, and he pulled off his helmet. “If that didn’t work—” he began, but he was cut off by a faint but distinct click inside the airlock doors.

  Rahul and Elena looked at each other for a moment, and then they simultaneously grabbed the hand crank and turned. The inner doors slid open a fraction of a centimeter, and a light gust of air rushed through the gap.

  “It did work!” Rahul shouted. He grabbed Willem and hugged him tightly.

  “Hey, watch it,” Willem said, pushing him away. “We’re not out of here yet.”

  They took turns on the hand crank, rotating it a little each time. It was much harder to turn than the one outside the airlock, though it wasn’t clear whether there was corrosion or some mechanical problem. After a few minutes of grunting and straining, the gap was wide enough for them to slip through.

  “I didn’t think I would ever be so glad to breathe forty-year-old air,” Rahul said, leaning against a wall of the corridor outside the airlock. “Now let’s get back to the base before the last shuttle leaves.”

  The short hallway they were in ended in a circular stairway that led down to a much longer passage with rows of doors on either side. The walls were metal, but the floor was rough concrete. Everything was covered in a fine layer of gray dust.

  “This is the old colony?” Willem asked. He gave a wan smile. “I don’t see any zombies, at least.”

  They poked their heads into a few of the rooms. An old metal bed frame had been left in one, and in another a faded family portrait hung at an angle on the wall.

  Elena wrinkled her nose. “People really used to live underground like this?”

  “They still do, on some of the smaller asteroids,” Lucas said.

  They reached a common room with passages leading away in four directions. In the middle of the room was a metal table with six neatly stacked chairs. A tall pyramid of plastic crates was piled up against one wall. Lucas shone his headlamp around, trying to figure out which way they needed to go to get back to the main colony.

  “There,” he said, pointing at a door on the far side. “I think.”

  As they
headed across the room, the clang of metal on metal echoed from the hallway he’d chosen. Lucas froze, staring at the open door. Far down the corridor he could see the faint flicker of a flashlight or headlamp.

  “What was that?” Willem whispered.

  Lucas turned off his light and motioned for the others to do the same. Even as he did, part of him wondered what he was worried about. Shouldn’t they be happy to find someone else down here? If nothing else, it would save them the trouble of wandering around until they found the bazaar.

  But a much louder voice in his head told him that there was something very strange about running into other people here in the old colony. Maybe whoever it was had a good reason for being here—and maybe they didn’t.

  Lucas crept to the doorway and listened. After a moment he could make out footsteps and a rhythmic squeaking. Rahul, standing on the opposite side of the door, waved his hand to get Lucas’s attention. “Someone’s coming,” he mouthed.

  He was right—the sounds were getting louder. Lucas pointed to the space behind the stack of plastic crates. They huddled down and held their breath, listening to the approaching footsteps.

  “This is it,” a woman’s voice said. Lucas’s eyes went wide. He recognized that voice—it was Willis, one of the Belters who McKinley had introduced him to back at the Janusarium.

  Someone opened up one of the plastic crates. “Should be forty of them,” Willis said.

  “Looks like it,” a man replied. “High-quality. Nice.”

  Lucas fought the temptation to peer around the side of the stack of crates. Why was Willis down here? What was inside the crates? Whatever the answers were, Lucas was now very certain that it would be a bad idea for the Belters to find them here.

  For several minutes the cadets listened anxiously to the sounds of crates being opened and the contents loaded onto some kind of cart or truck. Every crate that was removed from the stack brought them closer to being found out.

  “That’s it,” Willis said finally. “The rest of the boxes are just junk.”

  Lucas breathed a sigh of relief as the cart, now heavily loaded, rattled and squeaked down the hallway. He peeked out and risked a quick glance, but all he saw were the shadowy forms of Willis and her companion disappearing through the doorway. He waited until the sounds of the Belters’ footsteps had died away completely and then crept out of his hiding place.

  “Who was that?” Elena whispered.

  “Nobody we want to run into,” Lucas said, turning on his headlamp. “Let’s get out of here in case they come back.”

  They followed the same hallway that Willis and the other Belter had gone down, moving quietly and pausing frequently to make sure there was nobody waiting for them ahead. The farther they went, the more signs of activity they could see: occasional boot prints leading into side rooms, indecipherable graffiti on the walls, bits of trash tossed into corners. After a few minutes they saw the steady gleam of an overhead light down a cross-corridor. They followed the light until they came out into a large storage room that was almost twenty meters across.

  This area had clearly seen recent use, and not just from smugglers. Boxes and containers were stacked all around, stamped with labels like 64 Count Dinner Rations or 72 Emergency Suits. Colorful Belter clothing had been stuffed so tightly into a large metal rack in one corner that the whole thing looked like it was ready to topple over. At the far end of the room, a rusty ladder led to a metal hatchway in the ceiling.

  After checking carefully to make sure that Willis and her friend weren’t around, they climbed up the ladder. Lucas pushed the hatch open and stuck out his head. He found himself in a small side alley that was empty except for a pile of signs advertising sales, like ALL SARIS HALF OFF. A small brown monkey wearing a gold collar sat on top of the signs, eating from a plastic bag filled with grapes. Through a window a few stories above them came the sounds of a talk show being played at high volume.

  The monkey chattered at Lucas for a moment, apparently annoyed at the intrusion, and then scampered up the back wall of the alley with the grapes under one arm. Lucas helped the others climb through the hatch, and they jogged out into the street.

  “Massage, sir?” a deep voice said.

  They turned and saw a burly man standing in the front window of his shop; its sign advertised THE SOLAR SYSTEM’S BEST MASSAGES. The man flexed his fingers in what Lucas assumed was supposed to be a demonstration of his ability.

  “No thanks,” Lucas said.

  They followed the street to a larger intersection. Lucas looked around, trying to get his bearings. Willem craned his neck and pointed through the crowd. “There’s the base!”

  They ran through the crowds and past the guards, who gave them only a brief glance. They headed directly for the hangar and sprinted past loader bots and stacks of transport containers until they reached the Orpheus’s patrol boat. Palmer, standing in the hatchway with his arms folded, glared at them as they passed by.

  “Get inside, now!” he roared.

  “Yes, sir,” they said in unison, vaulting up into the cabin. Only a few cadets had stayed for the last flight. Aaron and Katya were sitting by themselves, looking nervous and talking quietly. Aaron stopped mid-sentence and looked up at them.

  “There you are,” he said, sounding relieved.

  “Worried about us?” Elena asked, sitting down across from them with a tiny grimace of pain.

  “We went back to look for you,” Katya said uneasily. “It was just a joke.”

  “Funny joke,” Willem said. He leaned toward the two of them with an icy smile. “Super funny joke.”

  “So how did you make it back, anyway?” Aaron asked.

  Willem sat back, folded his arms, and leaned his head against the seat as if he were going to take a nap. “All you need to know,” he said, closing his eyes, “is that Lucas here isn’t nearly as much of a punk as you guys think.”

  15

  THE ORPHEUS STARTED accelerating away from Vesta almost as soon as the patrol ships landed. Lucas climbed up to their cabin in an exhausted, hazy stupor and fell asleep in his bunk fully dressed. When reveille sounded the next morning, he opened one eye blearily.

  “Physical training this morning,” Rahul said, sitting up in his sleep sack. He turned around his screen as proof. “I was sure they’d cancel it. Doesn’t Palmer know we’re under acceleration?”

  “That’s exactly why we’re doing it,” Elena said. She stretched and pressed her fingers against her rib cage experimentally.

  “I’m sure Dr. Voorhaus would tell you to skip it,” Lucas said.

  “Probably,” she said. “Which is why I’m not going to ask him.”

  Rahul rolled his eyes. “Elena Pruitt, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Any hopes that Lucas had for a thawing of alpha section’s rivalry with Willem and his friends were dashed when they got to Palmer’s class. The kids from delta section seemed to have completely forgotten about everything that had happened down on Vesta, and Willem was back in his role as the leader of their little trio.

  “Hey, Lucas!” Aaron called. “Don’t puke on the teacher today, all right?”

  Katya and Willem dissolved into laughter and immediately started pretending to vomit all over each other.

  “Looks like everything has returned to its rightful place in the world,” Rahul said, watching the delta-section kids laughing and wrestling on a judo mat. “Too bad. Seeing the two of them rebel against Willem was almost worth getting stuck out there.”

  Was this really how it was going to be? Lucas didn’t care much about the teasing, but he’d thought that maybe things were going to be a little different. He caught Willem’s eye. “Seriously?” he mouthed.

  Willem paused for just a moment. Was that regret on his face? Guilt? Or just irritation? Lucas wasn’t sure. Willem gave a little noncommittal shrug and turned back to his friends.

  “I should have just left him out there,” Lucas muttered to himself.

  “You did the ri
ght thing,” Elena said, elbowing him gently.

  By the end of phys ed that morning, everyone was too exhausted to walk, much less speak. Palmer evidently had decided that today was the right day to introduce them to devil stands, which even Elena found difficult.

  “My arms,” Rahul moaned as they climbed slowly up toward their cabin. “My poor arms.”

  “I think this is the first time I’ve ever looked forward to zero gee,” Elena said, massaging her shoulders.

  When they reached alpha section’s deck, Lucas headed to the showers to clean off and change into a fresh uniform. When he got to his cabin, he shoved his sweaty uniform into one of the drawers next to his bunk. As he closed the drawer, the data chip that Stockton and Willis had given him clattered onto the floor.

  Rahul bent down and picked it up. “What’s this?”

  “Oh—nothing,” Lucas said. With everything else that had happened down on Vesta, he’d actually forgotten about the chip entirely. “Just something McKinley’s friends gave me.”

  “They gave you a data chip and you brought it back to the ship?” Elena asked. “Didn’t you hear Jones’s lecture about infosec? There could be megaviruses on that thing.”

  “I sure hope you weren’t going to plug it in,” Rahul said, peering at the chip as if he could see inside. “At least, not into any of the ship’s computers.”

  Lucas was pretty sure that megaviruses were exactly what was on the chip. “Of course not,” he said, a little weakly. “I was going to throw it away.”

  “On the other hand, if someone happened to have their own forensic setup, that would be different,” Rahul said. His eyes gleamed as he pulled a high-tech folding screen from one of the drawers next to his sleep sack. “Mind if I check it out?”

  “You’re going to plug it into your own computer?” Lucas asked doubtfully. “That seems kind of . . .”

  “Idiotic,” Elena said. “I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘idiotic.’”