Bastion Saturn (7 page)

“My suit’s attached to the hull.”

She got into her exosuit, then helped him to the small airlock hatch that lead into his own suit, which was designed to ride on the exterior, thereby leaving dirt and other contaminants outside. He’d already warmed it up, so it was just a matter of slipping inside through the rear shoulder area and pulling the hatch closed behind him. Before he got in, he turned to Jennifer. “I’ll be able to see really well from out here, so I’ll talk you through anything that seems out of alignment. Just remember, rock, ice, and dirt are harder than corn.”

“Thanks. Jerk.”

He offered her a roguish smile and leaned in for a kiss. She placed a hand over his mouth. “Um, no. Not happening.”

He mumbled under her hand, “Sure? We likely won’t get another chance.”

“I appreciate your confidence in me. Either way.”

“Your loss. Safe landing.” He slipped inside, turned to blow her a kiss, and pulled the hatch shut.

Jennifer had been alone for a week, yet as she strapped herself into the pilot’s seat, it was the first time she had actually felt alone. Caleb’s voice broke in over her com, and a flood of relief shot through her veins. “You gotta come up another two degrees at least to put our ass at the right descent angle. And remember to plug the com into your heads-up relay jack.”

The pilot’s console fed its information into her irises with a laser array that created a 3-D effect. It was useful, but she still felt disconnected from the world outside. She looked around the console, grabbed a retractable fiber cable and plugged it into a jack on her wrist. Suddenly she became the ship, or that’s what it seemed like. Her view made it feel as if she were sitting right out front. The landscape was crystal clear, filling her entire field of vision. She was skimming along, perhaps a thousand feet above the dark, pockmarked, potato-shaped moon. The logic of Caleb’s advice became immediately evident, and she made the adjustment to the ship’s attitude.

“That’s better,” he said.

“OK. Going to initiate the burn.”

“Not yet. Wait for it.”

“But we’re at three-hundred meters.”

“But about twenty klicks ‘til touchdown. Wait for it.”

As Jennifer held her breath, the ground grew ominously close. They were approaching at over 13,000 kilometers per hour. In her peripheral vision, a red light began to flash urgently, and she cringed. “Ship says now. Now?”

“Sure. Why not?”

She touched the re-entry button. Nothing happened. She touched it again. Nothing.

“OK. Now would be really good,” said Caleb in a high-pitched tone.

“I did. I hit it. I’m hitting it over and over.”

“Did you arm it?”

Jennifer glanced at the flashing red light. It repeated a question over and over:
Arm? Arm? Arm?
“Darn! Yes. Arm!” She touched the flashing button. The re-entry button glowed green, and she hit it again. Her view became distorted as the cameras adjusted to the sudden brilliance of the rockets firing.

“Holy shit, that’s awesome!” yelled Caleb. “Just let it burn baby. Let it . . .
barghhhe blllllllughh.
”

“Caleb? Caleb, you okay?”

“Jesus. Crazy tremors. I hope I didn’t fuck up my nervous system.”

The ship’s engines kept firing for a few more seconds and then flared out. They were roughly one-hundred meters above the surface and descending fast. Caleb said, “Retro. Retro four. No! Three! Sorry. Crap. Four would put me on the belly side.”

“You said four before you went outside.”

“Did I? I meant three. I think I meant three.”

“Which one!”

“Three! Now!”

A retrorocket fired out of the nose of the ship slowly lifting it, then with a soundless smack, the skids touched ground and skipped across the lip of a crater, caught on the edge, and sent the spaceship into a cartwheel. It careened end over end, bouncing across the landscape, leaving gouges and scrapes. Outside, Caleb lost all sense of direction, as if he were tumbling in a huge wave, the sky and the ground blending together in a swirling, twisting, vomit-inducing crush. “Emergency eject!” he screamed. Behind him his suit detached from the hull of the ship and he shot out like a golf ball from a tee, hurling across the sky in a great arc.

He was fully prepared to go splat, and experienced a thrill of relief at the gentle touch of Phoebe’s pussy-ass gravity field. He bounced a bunch of times, but it didn’t hurt much. When he finally came to a stop, he was oriented perfectly so he could watch his ship cartwheel straight across the Erginus Crater and into the side of the surrounding Jason Slope where a huge plume of dust shot up into the airless vacuum, some of it breaking the small moon’s gravity well and hurling into space..

“Jennifer? Jennifer, you copy?”

Caleb sat in the dust feeling infinitesimally small. He was a tiny spec on a little rock that but for the gravitational force of Saturn would be just another asteroid floating in the void. Incredible. The distant Sun was shining, but its light was dim. The ground around him was a dark mixture of fine particles and small rocks. He could see the trail created by his bouncing, scraping, twisting landing. It stretched almost all the way to the curve of the horizon. He aimed the rangefinder in his heads-up to the approximate spot where he had first hit. It read 10089 meters. He felt surprisingly fine, no major injuries, but his muscles had atrophied in the past week. Even in the light gravity, he groaned as he got to his knees.

He felt incredibly exposed on the open plain. Alone, with only the sound of his breathing to keep him company, he suddenly longed for the green of earth and the warm womb it provided, the trick of blue sky making him forget that even at home he was naught but a bit of celestial stuff, a spec of insignificance against the backdrop of infinity. Like a hungering mouth gushing with saliva, his mind played games with him, filling his head with a recurring memory of night insects. For Caleb, growing up in the verdant Vermont summers, insects had always been a burden of one sort or another, irritants to be reckoned and casually dismissed as background noise. Now, here he was, standing on the surface of a dusty ice ball, the equivalent of his mind’s saliva glands flooding his skull with a stabbing desire for the sound of crickets, cicadas, and sex-starved frogs.

Phoebe was a desolate place. Only the vastness of its colorful ringed mother planet offered solace and company in a place that was otherwise a dead thing floating through the abyss. Agape, experiencing a transcendent moment, he slowly turned, scanning his surroundings until the crash site brought him out of his reverie.

The displaced dust on the hillside where the ship had hit left a dark stain against the otherwise uniform grayness. “Jennifer, do you copy? Come back?”

Phoebe’s rotation was fast enough that Caleb could perceive it in relation to Saturn in the distance. The planet was setting quickly, and so was the Sun. It would grow dark in a few minutes. Three-hundred meters to the right of the crash area, he saw the entrance to the research station, a simple round door. His heads-up informed him it was ten meters in diameter. Two spaceships sat on the landing pads outside, one of them clearly marked as a police vehicle. This caused him to frown. Probably a coincidence. How many times had he been doing something naughty in his life, only to be surprised by a police cruiser or a patrolman, who, as it turned out, suspected him of nothing? Still, Monty had put out that mayday.

Walking was awkward in the somewhat fluffy terrain, and he fell often. He tried hopping like a bunny, and made rather impressive leaps, but it was exhausting. He finally settled on a feeble skipping motion, finding the effort to be the most economical. In minutes, he was climbing over the loose dirt over the partially buried ship. The remains of the landing gear had been rendered into a series of torn metal stumps. The airlock door could not be reached, buried under the still-slipping hill, but the suit-docking station remained exposed. He had to make a decision: dock his suit and go in right now, not knowing if the hull had been breached and the air gone, or go get help. With Jennifer not answering, and no one attempting to leave the ship, the chances were high that any survivors remained in hibernation, and that Jennifer was hurt or worse. With only rudimentary medical training, he was not the guy to help a severely injured person. Saanvi would take too long to fully revive, and he wasn’t certain he could do that right, either. Jennifer was the one with the revival skills. He reluctantly chose to march-skip toward the research entrance and reach out to the authorities. It occurred to him that no one from the station had come out to investigate.

The door seemed positively huge as he approached. It was a common enough entrance to a lot of moon bases, especially those on Mars. An automated drilling rig dug a tunnel while cauterizing any loose soil into glass as it moved forward. A robot-laden caboose laid down the life-support grid working right behind the rig. Another machine installed prefab labs and living quarters, and finally, the plug, as it was called, melded to the entrance, sealed off the tunnel with a roll-away door airlock. Cheap, sustainable, cave-living at its best. This door was much bigger than others he had read about. It was also slightly open, just enough for a man to step inside. Caleb slowed his skip.

When he was eight meters away, he stopped. The space beyond was pitch black. Something felt deeply wrong. He turned and glanced past his long weak shadow, back over to the wreck, reconsidering the option to revive the group. Caleb wasn’t afraid of much, but he hated dark spaces. Then the Sun and the mother planet fell behind the horizon. Everything went immediately black. His helmet work lights automatically kicked on to a dim passive setting, and he quickly commanded that they click to full strength. A warning flashed in his heads-up that his battery pack would only allow full brightness for a maximum of fifteen minutes. Life-support would force it into the dim passive setting again after that. Perfect. A crappy old suit to match his crappy old ship.

He hesitated for another moment before nodding as if to give himself permission and stepped forward. Normally, as he squeezed through the crack, motion detection sensors would have turned on a light as he entered the open airlock, but nothing happened. A few LEDs glowed on the control panel, which was encouraging. At least there was electricity. Designed for close-up work ,the beams on his helmet lights shot out in a narrow focus by default,. As he swiveled his head to scan the room, the twin beams fell across a pair of legs splayed out on the floor. Caleb took in a big gulp of air, and his reflexes jolted him several feet backward.

“Jesus fucking Christ! What the fuck?”

He scanned about again until his lights found the legs and the body. Make that bodies. Two cops lay on the floor wearing exosuits without helmets. Their bodies and faces were twisted in what looked like surprise from asphyxiation in the frozen vacuum.

A warning flashed in his heads-up that he needed to control his breathing. Automatically, the suit adjusted the gas mixture to keep him from hyperventilating. He slowly realized that he had shifted and pressed his back against the door with all the strength his legs could muster. On the opposite end from the entrance, the other door remained sealed. It featured a small porthole that allowed for an observer to see the goings-on within the airlock. Caleb’s lights passed across the door revealing more bodies piled at its base, then a very white face peering back at him. It was a woman, her features wide-eyed and frozen in a scream. Caleb let out a scream himself.

As he scrambled to slip back through the crack in the door and get outside, his urine flowed into the suit’s waste receptacle. Once outside, he skipped away as fast as he could toward the parked spaceships and ducked behind the cop ship. He shut off his lights and crouched, before looking back from under the ship’s belly. It was so dark outside and his night vision had been so tweaked that he could barely make out the edge of the crater above, much less the door. If someone were to march right at him, he wouldn’t be able to see it before it was too late.
What the hell?
Monty hadn’t even bothered to tell them what type of research station this was and no one had bothered to ask. It had all been about getting to safety. Another warning on his heads-up alerted him that he had roughly a half an hour of oxygen left. He brought the dim lights back up on his helmet and scanned the cop ship above him. This one had a proper airlock with an exit ladder. The ladder was up, which meant the door was locked. Standard procedure, even out in the middle of nowhere. The second ship was thirty meters away, a Hanson Design shuttle. Pretty new from the look of it. The rear loading ramp was up, but that didn’t mean it was locked. Glancing back toward the cave entrance, he still couldn’t see well enough to ease his terror. Then he cursed, remembering that his helmet was equipped with a starlight enhancer.
Fool
. He switched over to starlight mode and the area around him transformed into a sharp green landscape. Nothing was coming at him from the cave. He skipped over to the shuttle, opened the exterior door control panel and stood dumbly staring at the keypad lock. He reflexively brought his hands up to lace his fingers across the bridge of his nose (something that he did when he stopped to think) and was startled by his hands smacking into his visor.

Keeping one eye on the cave, he skipped back to the cop ship. Unlike the piece of junk that he had been issued, this one was a battle-ready model with the full complement of paramedic and rescue gear. The external tool-locker opened easily enough, and he pulled out a shovel. Even if he saved Jennifer and revived everyone aboard his ship, the only way they were getting out was through the buried airlock door. Getting out to what, he didn’t know. But he was out of options. His ship wrecked, the two good ones inaccessible. That left moving into the cave–regardless of whomever had been rude enough to slaughter a pile of people and stacked them out in the airlock. If he was going to do that, he needed some backup. He was going to have to dig.

The dirt fell away quickly, and Caleb felt a mild sense of embarrassment as he cleared the an area around the crashed shuttle’s hatch. Rather than fumbling about in the dark and scary, he could have dug out the airlock hatch with his bare hands and been done with it. If his suit’s air supply alarm hadn’t been beeping incessantly, he would have allowed himself a morbid laugh. There was no guarantee that there was any air left inside the shuttle. His progress was hampered by a constant stream of dirt slowly sliding down on the hatch, tripling his work load. The entry controls were lit up nicely, which meant the fuel cells were still good. He punched in the code that he had set to forget—123—satisfied to see the bright red No-Go light turn to amber. It took about ten seconds for the airlock to go through its diagnostics and make certain that no valuable air would be lost when he opened the door. While he waited, he muttered curses aimed at his exosuit for not letting him manually turn off the warning beep. A man fights to the last breath for to get to some more air, and the effing suit turns a fasten-seatbelt chime into a death knell. The airlock light turned green. He yanked the open handle, cringed at the gray dirt sliding inside, then fumbled with trying to clear off the seal without causing more dirt to slide, and finally pulled the door shut. The info panel on the inside flashed a warning that the seal was not complete. He would have to try again. With a mounting headache, sweat seeping from every pore, and that goddamn fucking chime merrily beeping and beeping and beeping, he carefully opened the hatch again, only to have more dirt gently rain down on his helmet. The ship was buried at an awkward angle for him to stand, one foot on the inner door and another on the floor. A glance down at his footing allowed him to see the entry observation porthole. He got the second biggest scare of his life when he saw Jennifer’s bloody face. She was yelling something, so at least she wasn’t dead. He tapped the side of his helmet and shook his head, so she could deduce the fucking obvious. She shook her head, then drew her finger across her neck frantically and repeatedly, but he was beyond paying attention, the oxygen indicator in his helmet rapidly blinking its last bar. Carefully, while holding the door open with one hand, he swept his fingers along the edge of the hatch seal, making certain that he brushed off as much dust as he could. Satisfied and feeling light-headed, he gently pulled the door shut, hit the locking button, and was rewarded with an amber light. The moment the light went green he popped the seal on his helmet and took in a breath of rank air. Even though it was off his head his helmet kept chiming away.