by Andy Weir
“Negative,” said Sarah. “This could be a distraction to draw us away. We’re staying right here.”
“Copy that.”
“Hey…you’re still a trainee,” she said. “You shouldn’t be outside on your own. Is there a master with you? Who’s with you?”
“Uh…you’re breaking up…” I switched the radio back to our private frequency.
“That’ll take some explanation later,” said Dale.
“One fuckup at a time,” I said. “Let’s go to the Port of Entry and see what’s going on there.”
“Yes,” said Sanchez. “That’s where the train will be—where my people will be.”
Dale took the driver’s seat and got us rolling again. Sanchez and I sat in silence, avoiding eye contact for the rest of the trip.
Dale drove at breakneck speed back to town. As we approached the Port of Entry, we could see the train docked at its airlock.
Sanchez perked up. “How do we get in?”
“Normally you radio the EVA master on duty at the freight airlock,” Dale said. “But since they’re not answering I’d have to suit up and use the manual valves on the outside.”
“Check out the train,” I said. “We’ll be able to see into the port through the train’s windows.”
Dale nodded and drove us across the well-trafficked terrain. We passed the freight airlock and stopped at the docked train. The windows were considerably higher than ours. All we could see from our vantage point was the ceiling inside.
“Hang on, I’ll get us a better view.” Dale tapped at the controls and the cabin began to rise. Turns out Bob’s rover had a scissor-lift as well. Of course it did. Why wouldn’t it? It had every other feature you could want.
We drew level with the train windows and Sanchez let out a gasp. I would have too, but I didn’t want her to see me do it.
Bodies lay in disarray—some in their seats, others piled atop each other in the aisle. One had a pool of vomit around her mouth.
“Whu…” Dale managed to eke out.
“My people!” Sanchez frantically shifted around to look from different angles.
I pressed my nose against the glass for a better view. “They’re still breathing.”
“Are they?” she asked. “Are you certain?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Look at the guy in the blue shirt. See his stomach?”
“Michael Mendez.” She loosened up a bit. “Okay, yes. I see movement.”
“They dropped right where they sat,” I said. “They aren’t crowded at the airlock or anything.”
Dale pointed to the hatch connecting the train to the port. “The train airlock’s open. See the Kenyan flag in the station?”
I furrowed my brow. “The air,” I said.
Sanchez and Dale looked at me.
“It’s in the air. Something’s wrong with the air. Everyone in the train was fine until the conductor opened the hatch. Then they passed out.”
Dale wrung his hands. “Right when we fucked up the smelter. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Of course it’s not a coincidence!” Sanchez said. “My smelter has an air pipeline directly to Life Support in Armstrong Bubble. Where do you think your air comes from?”
I grabbed her by the shoulders. “But your feeds have safeties, right? Valves and stuff?”
She slapped my hands away. “They’re made to stop leaks, not stand up against a massive explosion!”
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit…” said Dale. “The explosion was contained in the smelter bubble. It didn’t have anywhere to vent. You made your weld too good. The air pipeline was the only place for the pressure to go. Oh shit!”
“Wait, no,” I said. “No, no, no. That can’t be right. Life Support has safety sensors on incoming air. It’s not like they pump it straight into town, right?”
“Yes, you’re right,” said Sanchez, calming a little. “They check for carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. They also check for chlorine and methane, just in case there’s a leak at my smelter.”
“How do they check?” I asked.
She walked to another window to get a better look at her fallen employees. “They have liquid compounds that change color in the presence of unwanted molecules. And computer monitoring to react instantly.”
“So it’s chemistry,” I said. “That’s your thing, right? You’re a chemist, right? What if the explosion at the smelter made something else? Something Life Support couldn’t detect?”
“Well…” She thought. “There would have been calcium, chlorine, aluminum, silicon…”
“Methane,” I added.
“Okay, add that in and it could make chloromethane, dichloromethane, chlor—oh my God!”
“What? What?!”
She put her head in her hands. “Methane, chlorine, and heat will make several compounds, most of them harmless. But it also makes chloroform.”
Dale sighed in relief. “Oh thank God.”
Sanchez put her hands over her mouth and suppressed a sob. “They’re going to die. They’re all going to die!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “It’s just chloroform. Knockout gas. Right?”
She shook her head. “You’ve watched too many movies. Chloroform isn’t some harmless anesthetic. It’s very, very deadly.”
“But they’re still breathing.”
She wiped away tears with a trembling hand. “They passed out instantly. That means the concentration is at least fifteen thousand parts per million. At that concentration they’ll all be dead in an hour. And that’s the best-case scenario.”
Her words hit me like hammers. I froze. I just plain froze solid. I shook in my chair and fought back the urge to puke. The world grew foggy. I tried to take a deep breath. It escaped as a sob.
My mind went into overdrive. “Okay…um…okay…hang on…”
Assets: me, Dale, and a bitch I didn’t like. A rover. Two EVA suits. Lots of spare air, though not enough to feed a city. Welding equipment. There was also an additional EVA master and trainee (Sarah and Arun), but they were too far away to do any good. We had one hour to solve this problem, and they couldn’t possibly get back in time.
Dale and Sanchez looked to me with desperation.
Additional asset: the entire city of Artemis, minus the people inside.
“O-okay…” I stammered. “Life Support’s on Armstrong Ground. It’s right down the hall from Space Agency Row. Dale, dock us at the ISRO airlock.”
“Roger.” He threw the throttle to full. We bounced over the terrain and skirted the arc of Aldrin Bubble.
I climbed to the airlock in the rear. “Once I’m in, I’ll haul ass to Life Support. They’ve got tons of reserve air in the emergency tanks. I’ll open all of them.”
“You can’t just dilute chloroform,” Sanchez said. “The molarity in the air will be the same.”
“I know,” I said. “But bubbles have overpressure-relief valves. When I blow the reserve tanks, the city air pressure will go up and the relief valves will start venting. The good air will displace the bad.”
She thought it through, then nodded. “Yes, that might work.”
We skidded to a stop just outside the ISRO airlock. Dale threw the rover into reverse and performed the fastest, most skilled docking procedure I’ve ever seen. He barely slowed down to mate the two airlocks.
“Jesus you’re good at this shit,” I said.
“Go!” he implored.
I put my breather mask on. “You guys stay here. Dale, if I fuck up and the chloroform gets me, you have to take my place.”
I turned the airlock crank. The hiss of equalizing air filled the cabin. “Sanchez, if Dale fucks up, you’re next in line. Hopefully that won’t…”
I cocked my head. “Does that hiss sound strange?”
Dale shot a look at the airlock door. “Shit! The rover airlock’s damaged from ripping the inflatable tunnel off! Close the valve, we need—”
The hiss grew so loud I couldn’t hear Dale an
ymore. The airlock was failing.
My mind raced: If I closed the valve what would we do next? Dale and I had EVA suits, so we could walk to the ISRO airlock and use it normally. But that would require us to leave the rover, which would mean using the rover’s airlock, which would kill Sanchez. The only solution would be to drive the whole rover into town through the freight airlock at the Port of Entry. But no one was awake inside to let us in. We’d have to open the airlock manually, which would mean leaving the rover, which would kill Sanchez.
I made a snap decision and cranked the valve to full-open.
“What the hell are you—” Dale began.
The rover rattled from the force of escaping air. My ears popped. Bad sign—the air was escaping faster than the rover could replace it.
“Close the hatch behind me!” I yelled.
Four doors. I had to get through four fucking doors to get into Artemis. The rover’s airlock had two and the ISRO’s airlock had two more. Until I got through that last one, I’d be in danger. Dale and Sanchez would be fine as soon as he closed the first door behind me.
I opened Door Number One and hopped into the rover airlock. Door Number Two was the one trying to kill us. Ice condensed along the edges where a steady stream of air escaped. Just as Dale predicted, the aperture was warped where the inflatable tunnel had been attached.
I spun the crank and yanked on the hatch. Would the door even open in its fucked-up state? I prayed to Allah, Yahweh, and Christ that it would. One or more of them must have heard me because the hatch inched open. I used all my strength to widen the gap and finally opened it wide enough to slither through. Sometimes being small is awesome. I’d made it into the collet—the one-meter tunnel between the two airlocks.
Both the rover outer door and the collet had been badly warped. Both leaked air like a sieve. But at least there weren’t any big holes. The rover’s air tanks were keeping it pressurized for the moment, though they were losing the battle. And if you’re wondering about my breather mask: No, it wouldn’t help in a vacuum. It would just blow oxygen onto my dead face.
I cranked the ISRO outer hatch handle and threw it open. I stumbled into the ISRO airlock and glanced back to check up on the others.
I’d assumed Dale would already be closing the rover’s inner hatch. I’d assumed wrong. If he’d closed the hatch, my air supply would’ve been gone until I got into Artemis. Was that on his mind? Was that idiot being noble?
“Close the fucking hatch!” I screamed over the wind.
Then I saw them. They both looked pale and woozy. Dale fell to the floor. Shit. The ISRO airlock had chloroform in its air. In the heat of the moment and all my deep planning I’d forgotten that little detail.
All right. One thing at a time. First, get the last door open. The rover had limited air, but Artemis had plenty. I spun the final hatch’s crank and tried to push it open. It didn’t budge.
Of course it didn’t. The rover was at lower pressure than the city because of the constant leak.
“Fuuuuck!” I said. I cranked the hatch’s central valve to equalize the airlock with the air on the other side. The ISRO equalization valve battled the leak. Which one had a higher airflow rate? I didn’t wait to find out.
I braced my back against the airlock outer wall and used both legs to kick the hatch. The first two attempts jarred it, but didn’t break the seal. The third did the trick.
The hatch clanked open. A whoosh of air rushed into the airlock and rover beyond. I wedged a foot in the opening to keep the hatch from closing against the airflow.
Dale and Sanchez were saved…sort of. If you consider breathing poison gas in a leaky pressure vessel to be “saved.”
My back hurt like hell. I’d be paying for all this tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow.
I pulled off my shoe and left it in place to keep the hatch open. I returned to the rover. Dale and Sanchez were completely unconscious at this point. Goddamn. Note to self: Don’t take the mask off.
Both of them were breathing steadily. I closed the rover’s inner airlock hatch to seal them in, then returned to the ISRO inner door. I shoved it open again (much easier because my shoe kept the door from re-sealing) and fell into the lab.
I retrieved my shoe and the hatch shut automatically against the rushing air.
I was in.
I sat on the floor and put my shoe back on. Then I checked the seal on my air mask. It seemed good. And I wasn’t puking or passing out, which I figured was a good sign.
The ISRO lab was littered with unconscious scientists. It was an eerie sight. Four of them had passed out at their desks, while one lay on the floor. I stepped over the one on the floor and made my way to the hall.
I checked my Gizmo. It had been twenty minutes since the chloroform leak started. So, if Sanchez’s estimate was correct, I had forty minutes left to fix the city’s air or everyone would die.
And it would be my fault.
I needed Rudy. Or, more accurately, I needed Rudy’s Gizmo.
Remember, Life Support is a secure area. You have to work there to get in—the doors won’t open unless they recognize your Gizmo. But Rudy’s Gizmo opens any door in town. Secure areas, homes, bathrooms, doesn’t matter. There’s nowhere Rudy can’t go.
His office on Armstrong Up 4 was just a few minutes’ run from the ISRO lab. And holy shit was that a surreal trip. Bodies littered the halls and doorways. It was like a scene from the apocalypse.
They’re not dead. They’re not dead. They’re not dead….I repeated the mantra to keep from losing my shit.
I took the ramps to get from level to level. The elevators would probably have bodies blocking the doors.
Armstrong Up 4 has an open space just near the ramps called Boulder Park. Why is it called that? No clue. While passing through, I tripped over a guy lying on his side and face-planted onto a tourist holding her unconscious toddler. She’d curled her body around the boy—a mother’s last line of defense. I got back up and kept running.
I slid to a stop at Rudy’s office door and barged in. Rudy was slumped over his desk. Somehow he looked poised even while knocked out. I searched his pockets. The Gizmo had to be in there somewhere.
Something caught my eye and bothered my brain. I couldn’t figure out what. It’s one of those warnings you get that’s more a sense of “wrongness” than anything else. But hell, everything was “wrong” at the moment. I didn’t have time for subconscious bullshit. I had a city to save.
I found Rudy’s Gizmo and slipped it into my pocket. My inner Jazz made another appeal to me, this time with more urgency. Something’s wrong, goddammit! it screamed.
I spared a second to look around the room. Nothing awry. The small, Spartan office was just as it had always been. I knew the place well—I’d been in there dozens of times when I was an asshole teenager, and I have a very good memory. Nothing was out of place. Not a single thing.
But then, as I left the office, it struck me: a blunt object to the back of my head.
My scalp went numb and my vision blurred, but I stayed conscious. It had been a grazing blow. A few centimeters to the left and I would have been leaking brains. I stumbled forward and turned to face my attacker.
Alvarez held a long steel pipe in one hand and an oxygen tank in the other. A hose ran from the tank directly to his mouth.
“You fucking kidding me?!” I said. “One other person awake and it’s you?!”
He took another swing. I dodged away.
Of course it was Alvarez. That’s what my subconscious had tried to tell me. Rudy’s office was the same as I always remembered. But it was supposed to have Alvarez locked up in the air shelter.
The whole sequence of events played out in my mind: The shelter had protected Alvarez from the chloroform. Once Rudy conked out, the now-unsupervised murderer had wrenched a meter-long pipe loose and used it to force the hatch handle. The lock and chain on the other side stood no chance against that kind of torque.
Alvarez might not be
a chemical engineer, but it wouldn’t have taken a genius to work out something was wrong with the air. Either that or he’d spent a second almost passing out before realizing. Either way, the shelter had air tanks and hoses. So he’d rigged up a life-support system.
And hey, as an added bonus, the pipe had a jagged, sharp end where he’d broken it off. Wonderful. He didn’t just have a club. He had a spear.
“There’s a gas leak,” I said. “Everyone in town will die if I don’t fix it.”
He lunged without hesitation. He was an assassin with a job. Got to admire his professionalism.
“Oh, fuck you!” I said.
He was bigger, stronger, a far superior fighter, and armed with a pointy metal stick.
I turned as if to run, then kicked backward. I figured it would throw off his attack and I was right. He ended up swinging the pipe around me instead of bashing my head in. Now I had his hand in front of me and my back to his chest. I’d never get a better shot at disarming him than this.
I grabbed his hand with both of mine and twisted it outward. Classic disarming move, and it should have fucking worked, but it didn’t. He just reached around me with his other hand and pulled the pipe up to my throat.
He was strong. Very strong. Even with the injury to his arm he easily overpowered me. I got both my hands between the pipe and my neck, but it still dug in. I couldn’t breathe. There’s a special kind of panic that overwhelms you when that happens. I flailed uselessly for a few seconds, then used every ounce of willpower I had to get myself under control.
He’d either break my neck or choke me out and then break my neck. The breather mask was useless—it couldn’t force air through a closed throat. But the air tank on my hip might help. Solid metal blunt object. Better than nothing. I reached down for it.
Pain!
Taking my hand off the pipe was a terrible idea. It got rid of half my resistance. Alvarez dug it deeper into my throat. My legs gave out and I sank to my knees. He followed me down and kept the pipe perfectly in place.
Darkness closed in around me. If only I had another hand.
Another hand…
The thought echoed in my increasingly foggy mind.
