Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  Stormie started her air supply and sealed herself into her suit. She tuned her radio to the response channel and hand-signaled George to do a buddy check on her suit.

  As the seconds flashed away in her display and she waited for Control to answer, her throat tightened as if she were slowly strangling. Pumping down the tunnel made no sense: why force the combustion products into the equalization tanks? They’d be hell to filter out, and it would be much quicker to purge the module of its atmosphere and rob the fire of its breath. If anyone was still inside, trying to contain the fire, they should be on the air system and expect the tunnel to be vented; because they would be unlikely to have gotten fully suited, the vent procedure would avoid going all the way to vacuum. It would hurt like hell, especially their eardrums, but getting the fire out was the first priority, and Control would do their damnedest to get more pressure back in the tunnel before whoever was inside sustained too much physical damage. That’s also why the procedure wasn’t instantaneous: the same pylons with the emergency power and air supply hookups had lights and klaxons to warn responders so they could work their way to the ends of the module and be closer to any rescue parties.

  Stormie checked George’s suit seals and gave him a thumb’s-up. She found it difficult to concentrate as her mind shifted from one scenario to another to another. She considered the volume of air in tunnel three-A compared to the capacity of the pumps to move it; then how she and Frank would compensate when that volume was lost; then the damage inside the tunnel and the possibility of finding a person inside. A wave of vertigo struck her as her mind jumped from topic to topic, and the thought of fire on the other side of the door brought back the memory of the scorching treatment she and Frank had recently endured. She punched her own thigh through the fabric of the suit to give herself some external stimulus to consider.

  “Central,” Stormie said, “this is Bio. On the record, in my professional judgment, I believe the module must be vented immediately. Repeat: in my professional judgment, module three-A must be vented now.”

  * * *

  Frank stepped through the hatch from habitat module one-A into the junction leading to module two-A. The water sample bottles clinked against the little wire mesh tray he was carrying back to their makeshift lab. In Frank’s opinion, calling it a laboratory was like calling a paper wasp a jumbo jet, since their workspace was basically a closet with a cramped lab bench shoved into it.

  The speaker above his head crackled to life. A female voice called for attention and reported a fire in the next module but one.

  Frank stepped into module two-A. A group of people hurried toward him from the other end of the habitat. He flattened himself against the right-side wall to give them more room to pass.

  Frank still had trouble keeping some of the trainees straight; he registered the tall, blonde electronics technician without recalling her name, then the Carmichael couple stepped past him into the junction. Frank said, “Where are you going?”

  “Fire in tunnel three-A,” Carmichael yelled over his shoulder. “We’re evacuating.” He ran past, with four more trainees on his heels.

  Frank was alone in the tunnel, frozen not by fear but by incredulity. Evacuating to where?

  The AC had gone to great pains to simulate the condition in which “evacuate” carried a similar meaning here as it would on the Moon. The fake habitats were positioned inside mine tunnels, and outside hatches were sealed in such a way as to simulate vacuum on the other side. The trainees had even had to enter through a big airlock and walk into the habitats wearing pressure suits, just as they would at the colony. The layout in the mine was linear instead of the branching plan of the Mercator base, but Stormie had commented as they processed into the mine that the facility must have been absurdly expensive. One of the trainers had overheard and said, “Yeah, but Cheyenne Mountain was already taken.”

  Frank set down the tray of sample bottles and ran in the opposite direction from Carmichael and the others.

  Voices echoed from the end of the tunnel, in the junction between modules two-A and three-A. He recognized everyone in this group: Jake Adamson, Chu Liquan, and Maggie Stewart. All of them were in the category of candidates that Stormie had called “most likely to succeed,” and it was clear to see why: they weren’t running away from the danger, they were putting on pressure suits to confront it. Jake, the smallest of the three, had his suit on completely except for helmet and gloves; the others lagged only a little. Liquan stepped aside gracefully from the open suit locker so Frank could get a suit for himself.

  “Why did the alarm not sound?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “We can sort that out later. Get a suit on quick as you can, or back away and let us handle it.”

  One of the two suits left in the locker was a “large,” and Frank pulled it out and started putting it on. He wished he’d had more orientation and more time working in the suit, but the last few days had been whirlwind enough. Thankfully, the suit design was somewhat intuitive.

  “What is the plan?” Frank asked.

  Jake answered, and he didn’t sound happy. “Damned if I know. I don’t have status on the module, this panel’s not reading right. The idiots who evacuated this way didn’t count bodies on their way out before they dogged the door. Harmony hasn’t given an update—”

  He was interrupted by Stormie’s report on Abernathy and Markov, and Central’s announcement for first aid support to module five-A. Now Frank recognized the controller’s voice as Jake’s wife, though he concentrated on donning and checking out his suit.

  His suit failed its self-test.

  Over the intercom, Stormie called for the status inside the affected module. Frank half-listened to the answer while he traced the failure to the left glove—he hoped the diagnostic routine had correctly identified the source. It was probably something simple, like a short, but he didn’t spend time wondering about it. He grabbed a new glove out of the locker, sealed it to the suit, and finally got a green light.

  “Did she say pumpdown?” Frank asked. “That is not the standard procedure.”

  “Damn right it’s not,” Jake said. His face was tense, and his voice sounded as if his vocal cords needed lubrication.

  Frank thought about it while he finished checking out his suit. They were pumping the atmosphere into the holding tanks? Something about that did not add up. True, lowering the pressure in the habitat would mean less oxygen to sustain the fire. And it was not a matter of pressure—the equalization tanks were rated high enough that they could hold the compressed contents of two entire modules—but a matter of composition. If the fire was small, and contained quickly, the atmosphere pumped out might contain a useful concentration of oxygen. But surely the fire was using up oxygen and creating a lot of carbon monoxide and possibly other compounds which would be better lost. Frank asked, “Why pump the habitat down? Why not open the access port and let the module vent down to the limits?”

  Over the intercom, Stormie asked the same question of Central Control. Central did not respond.

  Liquan said, “Your wife seems to be wondering the same thing. Perhaps Central does not believe we can afford to lose that volume of atmosphere.”

  “Seal up and buddy check, everybody,” Jake said. “Frank, you’re with me. Maggie, dog that door shut and then you and Liquan check each other out. As soon as everyone’s ready, we’ll pump down the junction so we can open the door and get inside the module. Liquan, you and Maggie get extinguishers in case the fire hasn’t smothered. Frank, you and I will pull out bodies if we find any. Damn, I hate not knowing what’s going on.”

  Frank checked his oxygen supply and power, then sealed his suit. He and Jake ran through a buddy check and everyone checked in on the common response radio channel.

  Stormie’s voice came through inside Frank’s helmet. “Central, this is Bio. On the record, in my professional judgment…” The hint of tension in her voice was vintage Stormie; she was wound tight like a spr
ing-driven clockwork, ready for action and barely held back. He heard in her voice the passion that so captivated him. Frank stifled a chuckle but smiled so wide he caught the reflection of his teeth from his darkened head-up display.

  Frank turned on the display and tried using it to pull up a status report on the module, but all he got was a schematic out of the database with dark spots where the sensors should be. Something was wrong with the electronics, probably either the sensor package or the power supply; that would account for the missing alarm and the nonfunctional status panel. With a quick glance at the air system schematic Frank took in the pumps, filters, and tanks that kept air circulating and as fresh as possible—he and Stormie knew that system as well as they knew their own names. Stormie was right—that habitat needed to be purged immediately. It should have been purged as soon as the doors were shut. Every trainee was supposed to know where the airline respirators were, where the extinguishers were, and the importance of getting people either protected or out of the danger zone so a module could be purged if needed. But Adamson had said people fled the scene without doing a basic check; if they left behind someone incapacitated, purging the module would kill them. Did no one stay in place? Did no one fight the fire?

  Frank began to share Jake’s agitation with the lack of information; it lay on the back of his neck like a warm itch. “Who is with Stormie in the other tunnel junction?” Frank asked.

  He regretted the question immediately as Jake’s wife overrode the signal from the Central Control station: “Cut the chatter. I need reports. Junction three-A-four, report your status.”

  * * *

  In the junction between three-A and four-A, Stormie answered Harmony’s call for the status report.

  “Central, this is Pastorelli,” she said, pleased that Frank was listening in the other junction cell. He was safe, and she could be sure to answer his question in her report. “Since Christy said the fire was electrical, George and Alex are going to try to pull the plug on three-A from here. The pump-down is taking too long,” she resisted the urge to remind them that she had told them it would, “and I recommend shutting off the tank and purging the tunnel immediately. Regardless of whether they can get the power shut—”

  “Roger,” Harmony said. “I’ve got only intermittent signals from the heat detectors. There’s still something hot there, and I don’t know if it’s people. I’m about to initiate the purge, but the system’s screwed up and you may have to do it from there.”

  We should’ve already done it.

  Stormie fought to keep her voice steady. “Understood, Central,” she said. “Anybody in that module should be on an airline by now.” If someone is still inside … Christine hadn’t reported anybody else, and Stormie’d told Central that herself. Why were they dragging their feet?

  She reminded herself briefly that this was still training, but shunted that aside because they all needed to act as if it was the real thing. The brief realization that everything was a long, complicated test produced a fluttery feeling in her stomach—no, further down and deeper in—as if her guts were alternately weightless and leaden. The feeling intensified and abated in spasmodic bursts as she considered possible courses of action. Obey Control and let the fire do more damage, or do what needed to be done? A bead of sweat tickled the back of her neck as it tumbled down her spine. She hovered her hand lightly over the controls.

  “Hey, Harmony,” Jake said over the response channel. “Why not do a head count on the rest of us? Process of elimination—”

  “What do you think I’m trying to do, Jake? Just shut up a second and let me do my job.”

  Normally Stormie would commend Harmony for standing up to Jake in a moment of crisis, but her voice carried a thin film of near panic. Stormie lifted her hand away from the touchscreen. If she purged the module now, it would save Harmony trying to make the decision, but that wasn’t a good reason for doing so. Stormie’s only turn in the Central Control “hot seat” had been in a simulation during the early computer-based phase of training. Neither she nor Frank would ever be assigned to monitor all the inputs, communications, and chaos that crashed into and filtered out of the tiny control center … control cubicle was more like it. She liked knowing what the controllers went through, because it helped her know when to talk and when to shut up, and it was part of the general approach of learning a little bit of practically everything. The frontier might need a few specialists, but most early colonists were generalists by necessity. They might not need to be able to gut a pig or handle a plow or do any of a hundred mundane earthbound tasks on the lunar frontier, but that kind of flexibility—to be able to step in and perform adequately a wide variety of tasks—could mean the difference between life and death. So Stormie could do the control job, but had no desire to. She endured enough stress across her shoulder blades and in the muscles running up either side of her neck—and with the stress, searing memory-heat—with just the dilemma she was facing: including, in the back of her mind, how to re-balance the whole air system once she dumped nearly an entire module’s worth of atmosphere, and how to filter out any contaminated air pumped into the balancing tank. She didn’t need the additional stress of monitoring and directing all of the base’s routine and emergency activities. It was no wonder Harmony was stressed, but there were only forty trainees in this facility: within a year there would be more colonists than that for Control to keep track of. If she can’t handle it at this scale.…

  Still, as far as Stormie could tell there was no reason to do a headcount, no reason to poll the proximity sensors to see if anyone’s ID ring showed up inside that module—even if those sensors were still working, and they hadn’t loaned out their ring to somebody else. On the other side of the pressure door there was, or had been, a fire. An electrical fire, which meant to some degree burning insulation, probably burning plastic, spewing out a variety of poisons. Anyone in there should’ve found the airline system and plugged in, even in the dark—if anything, they would be wondering why their ears hadn’t popped yet from the blowdown.

  Stormie looked back at the two men with her. Alex had sealed the junction and started its airlock cycle; the slack in Stormie’s suit ballooned away as the good air in the smaller space was pumped out. At this rate the junction, being so much smaller, would get down to the amber line almost as fast as the module would if she purged it. George stepped away from the other control panel and waved his hand across his throat. Stormie took that to mean he’d gotten the power shut off; she confirmed it with a glance at the panel itself, and smiled because he’d had the presence of mind to cut only the noncritical circuits. George nodded behind the glass of his helmet, and Stormie took that to mean he was ready to go.

  She touched the “Initiate” block on the control pad. Only five seconds had passed since Harmony had last spoken, but they seemed like five or even fifteen minutes.

  Harmony came back on the air almost immediately. “Confirmed, Bio,” she said, “module is clear. Heat sensors indicate the fire is out, but sensors have been intermittent. Initiating vent.”

  “I just did,” Stormie said. “Standby to open the supply valve if we happen to find anyone in there.” She watched the pressure reading fall, wondering briefly if the indicator was programmed to respond in that way. She waved George to the hatch when the inner and outer pressures read nearly the same.

  Stormie pulled a flashlight out of its wall socket and moved after George into the dimly lit habitat. The rotating warning beacons were off; only the two sets of battery-powered explosion-proof emergency lights spaced down the passageway cast any light. They were sharp and distinct and their oblique reflections made the corridor seem unusually long and narrow. The emergency air stations were set just under the lights, and beneath the warning beacons were amber lights that came on when the airline systems were operating. The amber lights were dark.

  George began checking the first cramped compartment on the left side of the corridor. Stormie paused just inside the hatch and radio
ed in their status.

  “Central, we’re entering the tunnel now. No one in the corridor that I can see. No lights from the e-stations. Jake, you coming in from your end?”

  “That’s affirm,” Jake said. “Opening the hatch now.”

  An oval of light blossomed in the far wall of the habitat, then was obscured by a human figure stepping through the hatch.

  George checked the left-hand compartments and Stormie checked the right. Had this been real, rather than in the training environment, the toilet water would have boiled away, but the ambient pressure hadn’t fallen that much: the Consortium would never have invested as much money as it would take to make the mockup tunnels that realistic.

  The room and the water pumping station were clear of people or damage, as were the first two multi-use compartments thereafter. The third multi-use cubicle, however, was set up as an electronics repair area, and at the moment held a collection of charred components inside a half-melted plastic shell. Stormie found the power cord and unplugged the unit. She wrinkled her nose and chuckled at herself for doing so: her brain had imagined the smell of burned plastic and her nose had reacted.

  That’s okay, we’ll smell it when we get out of these suits.

  “Central,” she said, “I found one … I think it’s a signal generator or an analyzer … that looks like it was the fire source. I unplugged it, but I think we should check the rest of the rooms before we turn the power back on.”

  “Roger, Stormie,” Harmony said, and turned the suggestion into a set of instructions. If she was mad that Stormie had acted to purge the module before she gave instructions to do so, her voice didn’t betray it.

  Stormie rotated her head as far as she could inside her helmet, easing the knots in her neck and shoulder muscles. Once they got the power back on and started re-pressurizing the habitat, she could go back to work. She grinned at the fact that she was actually looking forward to cleaning air filters, then remembered that her first task would be recalculating the air exchanges based on the lost volume—