Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  The next shift change, before Capell took over driving, he and Stormie brought in two more blocks of ice. She insisted on it, to minimize the number of times they’d have to cycle the airlock. The routine continued as they crawled, kilometer by kilometer, toward home.

  After Capell, Stormie drove. After her, Gabe. After him, Bruce. With every passing hour, the air seemed thick with tension but dangerously thin on everything else.

  Midway through Bruce’s shift, his voice came over the intercom. “We’ve got company, folks. Suit up and let’s go meet ’em.” The truck slowed and stopped.

  Stormie cycled third through the airlock and climbed gingerly down. The Sun cast long shadows into the shallow bowl of Weiss Crater. About thirty meters away stood a half-dozen suited figures and three of the colony’s smaller trucks. Her attention was drawn to one tall figure standing by a K-bottle. Her knight hadn’t brought her jewelry or flowers or candy, but he had exactly what he’d promised.

  It’s awkward to hug somebody when you’re both wearing spacesuits, but that didn’t stop her. It was more important to get that contact, even through layers of insulation and polymers, than to get some of the oxygen Frank had in the bottle.

  “How are you doing, my love?” Frank radioed.

  Tired. Relieved. Dirty. Stormie wasn’t sure what to say. She put her gloved hand up to Frank’s faceplate. “Better, now,” she said.

  Frank hooked her suit up to the bottle. “You did well.”

  The pressure in her suit tank rose bit by bit, displayed in one corner of her faceplate. She looked beyond the numbers to the big ugly Turtle with its ungainly trailer and its load of life-sustaining ice.

  “Thanks,” she said. She breathed deep, and smiled.

  A small orange LED double-blinked and caught Stormie’s attention. Her stomach was suddenly heavy, as if it were under full gravity. She switched over to the emergency frequency.

  Jake Adamson’s voice came over her speakers. “Okay, everybody, listen up. We’re going to do a poll to see if everybody’s on. When you get the green light, squawk once with the button.”

  In a matter of seconds, the orange blinking light became a steady green, then went out when Stormie blinked her acknowledgement. As the other acknowledgements continued, she turned on the exterior spotlight mounted on her helmet. She turned Frank so that her light shone into his helmet and she could see his face. His eyes widened a little, and he shook his head. He didn’t know any more than she did.

  “Okay, gang,” Jake said. “Sorry to break up the little reunions, but we got an emergency call. Medical assistance needed at the fuel storage area. So, Bio, transfer enough oxygen to get the Turtle folks breathing good, but save a little in case we need it at the response site. Bruce, once you’ve got some air, take Snapper back to the colony and start offloading. Otherwise, everybody get in your original vehicles and we’re heading out quick as we can.”

  Stormie keyed her microphone and said, “Jake, this is Stormie. I’d like to ride back with Frank. I can charge my suit from the K-bottle while I ride in the back of the MPV.” She barely registered what she was saying. When she analyzed it in the few seconds it took Jake to respond, she decided her motivation was more because she wanted to be close to Frank than because she wanted to be far away from Karl Capell.

  “Fine,” said Jake. “Just make sure you’re in place and ready to roll.”

  Frank squeezed her upper arm through the layers of her pressure suit, nodded from behind his faceplate, then they got to work. She unhooked and helped load the bottle of oxygen onto the back of the truck. He pushed her up and into place and she hooked up to the bottle again—she’d take a few more liters and make sure she left a good bit for the response.

  She and Frank touched gloves, briefly, palm to palm, in a slow, intimate high five. Then he sat down next to her on the truck bed. Frank radioed Scott Herbert, who was going to drive the little truck, that he wanted to ride in back with Stormie. She smiled as Frank awkwardly put his arm around her shoulder and sat as close as possible. She snuggled next to him as the vibrations from the turbine tickled their way up her legs and the truck started to roll.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Beneath What Sky Shall Be Thy Fate

  Monday, 21 January 2036

  On the way to the accident scene, Frank reviewed the information Jake downloaded to the responders. The oxygen plant was now the rendezvous point for the rescue effort: east of the main colony, not far north of Rupes Mercator. It was not quite a direct line from where Frank and the rescue team had met the Turtle, but close enough that it was on their way back to the colony.

  A four-person team had been installing a new tank at the fuel storage area, using one of the multipurpose vehicles fitted with a small crane on its bed. Apparently the load had shifted—it was unclear whether it was human error in the rigging, not enough ballast on the MPV, or some mechanical problem—and the tank had smashed into Trish Springer. She fell and it pinned her leg. The team immediately issued a distress call, extracted her from beneath the tank, and safed the area.

  However, the only other vehicle the team had, besides the crane-equipped MPV, was one of the small, limited-range electric carts that were kept adjacent to charging stations at various points in the colony complex. They took the cart from the fuel processing station—it converted asteroidal ammonia into hydrazine—and transported Trish to the oxygen plant, where the responders would retrieve her.

  “Talk about bringing a gun to a knife fight,” Scott Herbert said. “All of us to pick up one person.”

  Frank did not think that was the most appropriate cliché, but he said nothing. The colony could not send another vehicle out to pick up Trish because his resupply effort had commandeered all of the available multipurpose vehicles. Even though Gary Needham was the one who actually made it happen, Frank felt responsible, since he had put the plan together. He would feel awful if the rescue he envisioned turned into a disaster for someone else. A line surfaced from some crevice in his brain—“defeat upon defeat, disaster on disaster”—but he could not remember its source. He pushed it back into the crack from which it had emerged.

  They approached the ARPOES from the south. The setting Sun threw the autonomous processing facility into sharp relief, with a distinct terminator between the blindingly bright left side and its dimmer right side, which was only partially lit by reflections from outlying equipment.

  “Okay, gang,” Jake said as they approached. “Here’s where we split up. Let’s have the Bio team pick up Trish. She’s stabilized on the e-cart, over by the scavenger pen. The rest of us, let’s go on to the fuels area and see if we can get that tank stabilized. If we can, we’ll set it in place and help the team finish their shift. Once things are under control, we’ll let most folks head back in and leave somebody behind to replace Trish.”

  Frank sat up straighter and prepared to acknowledge his instructions, but before he could speak Van Richards radioed, “I’ll stay behind and finish Trish’s shift.”

  “Roger that,” Jake said. “Frank, if you and Stormie are up to taking care of Trish, how about let Scott come over and go with us to the fuels area.”

  Frank acknowledged Jake’s instructions, as did Scott, who bounded over to another MPV after he parked theirs between the oxygen processor and the scavenger holding area. Sonny Peterson, who had driven the electric cart Trish was sitting on, followed close behind.

  Once he was sure no other instructions would be forthcoming, Frank switched away from the general chatter back to his and Stormie’s assigned channel. “Mr. Richards certainly has a lot of energy,” he said. “This will not take too long, my dear. You can stay here and rest, if you wish.”

  Stormie laughed a sharp little laugh, and Frank imagined her shaking her head inside her helmet. “No way,” she said. “If both of us do it, it’ll take even less time. And maybe we can charge the AC double.”

  Frank did not argue. As they exited the bed of the truck, however, he looked at her s
uit indicator; she had taken on only a partial load of oxygen. He asked why.

  “I took enough to last until we find out whether Trish needs some,” she said. “I don’t need a full tank right now.”

  Trish’s leg was roughly splinted with two pieces of metal, wrapped and affixed with duct tape. It looked as if a stickypatch had been applied to her suit before they splinted her leg. Frank switched to the common channel to ask her if her suit had been breached, but Stormie was already talking to her.

  “Not a very good day for you, huh, girl?” Stormie said.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Trish forced out the words in quick bursts, as if she was gritting her teeth. “Just in the wrong place at the right time. I don’t think it’s broken. At least it doesn’t hurt as bad as when my uncle’s horse kicked me that time.”

  “So what is it about you and your husband letting things fall on you?”

  “Don’t joke about it. I’m never going to hear the end of it as it is.”

  They bantered, and Frank smiled to hear the tension in Trish’s voice dissipate as she and Stormie spoke. He had never thought of Stormie as having a good bedside manner, and it pleased him to find out he may have underestimated her.

  A few more lines of that poem crawled up out of his memory, and he said,

  I do not know beneath what sky

  Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;

  I only know it shall be high,

  I only know it shall be great.

  Stormie asked quickly, as if she hadn’t heard, “What’s that, Frank?”

  “Nothing, my love,” he said. He was ashamed to admit that he still did not remember the source.

  “Okay, well, we need to get Trish moved.”

  Frank drove the little electric cart to the back of the multipurpose vehicle. He and Stormie lifted Trish as gently as they could into the truck bed. Frank drove to the oxygen plant and plugged the cart in; by the time he returned, Stormie had Trish hooked up to the K-bottle of oxygen and was climbing down to the surface. Stormie motioned with her hand, and Frank switched back to their channel.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said. “I assume you heard Trish say that Sonny added that second splint when they stopped here. It looks like he left some metal scraps behind from where he cut that piece of tubing to length, and I want to go pick them up. No sense letting them stay there and have somebody get hurt on them, or gum up the works of a scavenger when it runs over them.”

  She bounced away, and Frank climbed up into the cab of the multipurpose vehicle and started running the pre-drive checklist. He had just applied power to the gauges and was reading the fuel level when a nagging sensation, almost like a breath of air against his left cheek, made him look toward where Stormie was gathering pieces of metal.

  Fifty or sixty meters away, she knelt in the dust. Her left hand was holding her right shoulder.

  “Frank,” she said, “I have a problem.”

  * * *

  Stormie’s trouble meter tickled her again as she approached the litter Sonny had left. She didn’t expect the trouble to start quite so soon, though.

  It began with the light brush and whirring sound of wind inside her pressure suit. She couldn’t believe it at first, because she had done nothing to damage her suit. She had just bent down on one knee, after she made sure the spot was clear and nothing there was a puncture danger, and reached out to pick up a wad of duct tape next to the cut-off end of one of Trish’s splints.

  It was easy enough to locate the source of the leak. The breeze blew across her face from left to right, and up her body from the depths of her suit, directly toward her shoulder.

  Except that it wasn’t a breeze. It was a gust. She choked back a little laugh because it reminded her of her own name.

  Stormie radioed Frank that she had a problem, and told him, “Bring the biggest stickypatch you can find.”

  She pressed with her gloved hand on the outside of her suit, trying to close the hole wherever it might be. The shoulder joint made it hard to find exactly where the hole was. The wind’s force began to fade.

  She wished she had a full tank of oxygen.

  She fought the temptation to hold her breath; she forced herself to breathe shallowly. She doubted it would make much difference in the long run whether the pressure differential in her lungs burst some alveoli or not, if there wasn’t enough pressure in her suit for her to breathe at all. She wasn’t too afraid of the bends, since they didn’t breathe as much nitrogen as an Earth normal atmosphere. Higher percentage of oxygen, lower overall pressure, right partial pressure for breathing, less stress on the materials that had to keep that pressure from escaping into the vacuum.

  Her thoughts scattered. Her vision blurred.

  A suited figure she assumed to be Frank landed a few meters in front of her. Her eyes followed a fine spray of dust that arced in a ballistic trajectory originating at the figure’s feet. The dust sparkled as it flew in the low angled sunlight. It was really quite beautiful.

  She closed her eyes and held the image of the dust as she slipped forward. She put her hands in front of her to catch herself, but she wasn’t sure if she succeeded. She had a vague sensation of new pressure on her shoulder and arm, but it was indistinct, as if she was growing smaller and farther away from whatever it was outside her.

  The image of the beautiful dust faded to blackness in her eyes, and Stormie was sad that she hadn’t gotten to tell Frank how pretty it was.

  * * *

  Frank skidded to a halt. He caught Stormie as she pitched forward, and let her settle on her left side. She had been holding her right shoulder, and that was the only place he could think to put the stickypatch. His gloved hands were clumsy trying to remove the packaging, and he hesitated a second figuring out how to orient it. He pushed it into place and pressed it down without bothering to smooth it.

  “Mayday, mayday,” Frank called. “I need an oxygen bottle A-S-A-P.”

  He rolled Stormie on her back and looked at the indicators on her suit. Too many of them were red. Too many of them were dark.

  He opened the access panel on her suit and on his, found the emergency fitting, and linked their suits together. It was a survival procedure they had first learned in the mine in Utah and practiced several times in the New Mexico desert, by which they could scavenge oxygen from an incapacitated colonist—the assumption being that the colonist was already dead, and the situation was so dire that breathing air from a dead person’s pressure suit was the only means of surviving. The method had the ungainly name of Emergency Life-Support Pressure Acquisition Procedure. Frank was determined to use the procedure not to his advantage, but to Stormie’s.

  He watched the pressure in his suit drop as their suits equalized. He wondered why no one had come to help, but that did not concern him as much as seeing the pressure between their two suits continue to fall even as he input more of his oxygen.

  The stickypatch must have slowed the air loss, but not stopped it completely. It was still trickling away. He pushed down on its edges as best he could, but the reading did not stabilize. He could not leave to get more patches, and he was afraid to move Stormie lest he open the leak wider.

  Frank repeated his call. His own words vibrated back to him through the connection between his suit and Stormie’s. He realized then that he was still on their private channel.

  Stormie’s eyes flickered open. They were unfocused, and a little dim, but they were beauty to him.

  Frank selected the broadcast channel and sent his distress call a third time. Even as he heard an acknowledgment, he realized with despair that as long as her suit continued to leak the air supply would not support them both until help arrived. He had not topped off his oxygen tank, and Stormie’s limited supply had bled away.

  Oh, wife, why could you not have thought of yourself?

  The closest person was Trish; she was rebroadcasting his mayday, now that it had gone out. Everyone else was at the fuel site by now. It was not far—jus
t over the rise to the northeast, a little farther into the Sea of Clouds. On Earth the fuel and oxidizer stations would be separated to keep their contents from mixing, but here any spill would flash to vapor in the lunar vacuum. The separation distance was not a function of chemistry or of blast overpressure—there being no air to carry a detonation shock wave—but of fragmentation distance, since pieces of a ruptured tank could fly hundreds of meters and cause more damage to nearby facilities. All these facts, so commonplace and innocuous, bombarded Frank and left him feeling more alone than he ever had. Trish was incapable of moving from the back of the truck to bring the nearest oxygen bottle, and the others were simply too far away.

  The sense of isolation clung to him more tightly than his pressure suit. He had only one chance to save Stormie’s life.

  Frank shut off the intake to his own suit, and shunted his supply tank directly to hers. “Lord, forgive me,” he said.

  He shut down the circulating equipment in his suit, and it became utterly quiet. His suit creaked and moaned as he lay down next to Stormie, but then the silence descended again. Into that silence, he spoke what he expected to be his last words.

  “I love you, Stormie Gale.”

  The atmosphere inside his suit became thick and warm with his own exhalations. He put his suit into typing mode, and wrote a few lines until tremors and then convulsions turned his thoughts and words to gibberish.

  * * *

  Van had once described himself to Barbara as a mental cockroach. By that he meant that sometimes he acted without thinking; in the same way that a cockroach will run because it detects minute changes in air currents and sends the impulses directly to its legs without going to its brain, he tended to act on stimuli while other people were still processing them.

  So when Frank’s distress call came over the radio, he was in the cab of the nearest MPV and had started warming it up before Trish repeated the call.

  The problem was, the catalyst bed wasn’t heated up enough. When the vehicle stopped, in order to save power, they kept the catalyst warm but not hot. That put the turbine efficiency way down at the bottom of the curve, and Van found himself tapping on the control yoke to try to speed the damn thing’s warmup as Frank asked for forgiveness over the radio.