Bastion Saturn (9 page)

“Wait. What?” said Jennifer, holding up a hand. “Wait. Solvents, what?” She felt along the seam where her helmet met the suit. “Nanos?”

Caleb said, stressing last two words “Bot. What happened here? No robo-speak.”

The robot stood and held a still pose. “I am known as Bert. Based on your vocalizations, my analysis of your stress levels indicates that you wish for a paraphrased explanation. The timeline is as follows: The police brought to the lab a child’s toy found on the last Freeman Ship to arrive at Hanson. The Toy had been unclaimed and remained in the ship’s luggage isolation chamber. All unidentified items in isolation are further isolated. Proper protocol required that the item be placed in cryogenic stasis and brought to this lab for analysis. Upon investigating the toy, Scientist Romano’s right glove was breeched by pretasked nanobots that had been placed inside the toy. As I stated before, upon release, the nanos entered the neocortexes of the research scientists, starting a process of self-destruction that spread through this room, and eventually throughout the station, which additionally claimed the police who made the delivery. I remain the sole witness.

“You said solvents,” said Jennifer.

Bert cocked his head and pointed at the dangling disintegrating glove. “Was I not clear?”

Caleb sneered and muttered to himself, “Typical assistant bot wise ass.”

Jennifer turned to Caleb. “We’re dead. We can’t take our suits off, but they’ll be breached soon enough. We’ll commit suicide just like everyone else.”

“My assessment as well,” said Bert.

Caleb stepped closer to the toy in the box. “Bastards back on Earth.”

Bert took a single step forward. “I have calculated that if it were 100 degrees Kelvin in here, the nanos would cease to operate.”

“That’s great,” said Caleb. “All we need is to be freezing at minus one-seventy C.”

“Minus one hundred-seventy-three Celsius,” said Bert.

“So if we went back out on the surface,” said Jennifer, “the temperature would stop the bots?”

Bert said, “Actually, yes. However, they will reactivate at only a slightly higher temperature than the typical high on the surface. In other words, it won’t destroy them.”

“Can they be scrubbed off?” asked Caleb.

“They have already penetrated the seals on your suits. No.”

“So going outside is not a solution.”

“It is not.”

Caleb started pacing. “Clever weapon.”

“Expect nothing less from AI,” said Bert with a just a hint of synthetic-intelligence pride in his voice.

Jennifer’s voice rose with hope. “We find the keys to one of those ships out there, ditch our suits in the airlock.” She spread her arms, palms in the air. “And Walla.”

Bert took a beat to calculate every possible outcome after such an event and said, “The temperature inside the airlock of any ship will be higher than one hundred Kelvin when the ship is active. The nanos will reactivate and attack the ship’s seals.”

Resigned, Jennifer sat on a stool.

Caleb quietly cursed. “We could drop . . .” His voice trailed off. “Nah.”

Jennifer stared at the floor. “Drop what?”

Caleb shrugged and pantomimed pulling his helmet off. “We could drop our suits outside a ship. Go in basically naked.”

“Are you serious?”

“No matter what, we’ll be walking outside without protection. Might as well do it with the purpose to live.”

Jennifer clucked her tongue. Bert took a step forward as if in response, placing himself under the beam of a ceiling light. He said, “That is possible, in theory. You will be unconscious in approximately fifteen seconds, dead within three minutes. I calculate that accessing either ship’s airlock and going through the repressurization steps will require more physical activity and time than those fifteen seconds will allow.”

Caleb hated pessimist do-nothings. Robots, it seemed to him, were naturally pessimistic, with their constant evaluations. Their simple lack of free creative thinking, their unwillingness to embrace chance, made him glad they would never replace men. Then he remembered home and the full integration of humanity into what was basically one big robotic mind. “Are you being assaulted by the nanos, bot . . . Bert?”

“To my knowledge, no. Logic dictates that their programming causes them to seek out human tissue.”

“Do you have access to that Hanson Shuttle out there?”

“I do.”

“Good, then you are going outside and helping us.”

Bert walked with awkward steps as it dragged Monty’s and Bob’s hibernating bodies behind it. The robot didn’t think as it trudged along. It wasn’t designed to think. In fact, if it could think, the humans who relied on it, would not have supported their existence. Instead, it calculated the requirements necessary to fulfill the latest command: Get five hibernating humans into the shuttle, then help two other humans to quickly get out of their exosuits and then into the shuttle before they die of asphyxiation and the boiling of bodily fluids.

They had left the outer airlock door to the research station wide open and placed a hastily scrawled note on the access panel, explaining the danger within.

Behind the robot, Caleb held the child, Stephanie, and trudged with Saanvi in tow. Jennifer dragged Trey. Bert explained that in the event of an emergency evacuation, the shuttle had the capacity to hold the entire population of the research station and get it to Hanson. The airlock was small, holding four people at a time. With the bot and the hibernators not needing any air, they could have all crammed into the space, but why push it? Caleb and Jennifer would need the maximum of attention. They had a doctor in Saanvi, but there was no way to revive her in time to offer any assistance. The maneuver was going to have to be lightning fast. Yet they had to be extremely careful about not touching the outside of their exosuits even once as they climbed out. Jennifer and Bert remained highly skeptical about their chances.

Jennifer felt a cold sweat along her back, and her exosuit was having difficulty countering it. There had been videos and drills regarding sudden de-pressurizations before she left Earth, then during the orientation at Hanson. All ships and stations had emergency breathing apparatuses, mostly just for show. The bottom line: lose atmosphere, you die pretty quickly. And don’t hold your breath, or the expanding air in your lungs will turn those delicate tissues into paste. There had been countless accidents and awful deeds done as Man had colonized his solar system. Everyone knew of the unpleasantness of a death in the frigid vacuum. Tales of survival were few and had been turned into legends among a people who chose to risk all to leave the paradise of the atmosphere that was spaceship Earth.

Jennifer suffered from a recurring nightmare in which she was blown naked out of an airlock. It was never Saturn that greeted her as she struggled in the void. Oddly, Jupiter held its great eye on her while the fluid in her eyes boiled and the gases expanded in her guts. As she dragged the teenager behind her, flashes of the nightmare played in her head. She was so lost in fear that she barely took note of Bert relieving her of the burden and placing Trey inside the shuttle’s airlock with the other hibernators.

Caleb said, “Rough few weeks.”

“Huh?” said Jennifer absently.

“Farms blown to shit, crashing here, and then this.”

She blinked at him. “You think?” Jennifer wasn’t generally a sarcastic person, but when presented with the deeply obvious, she had little patience. This, despite the fact that she was guiltier than most of pointing out the self-evident. Then she admonished herself. Caleb was likely just as scared as she was. “I’m sorry. I’m scared shitless, too.”

“Yeah.” He reached out to her hands, and she let him hold them. The biofeedback in the gloves was excellent and they could almost pretend that they were actually holding hands skin to skin. He said, “Everyone says you’ll lose consciousness before anything hurts . . . hurts much. Just remember to breathe out. Breathe out, breathe out, breathe out.”

“Right.” She glanced up at the ship and then over at the chronometer on her heads-up. “Getting kind of tight on time. I mean, Bert did say about an hour for the things to burrow into our suits. I think it’s been fifty minutes more or less, if I include the time that we entered—”

She stopped talking as the airlock opened and Bert stepped out unencumbered by any suit, built to withstand hostile environments. Still, it was always weird to see a human looking thing stepping back out into vacuum. Caleb and Jennifer were about to look the same.

“Your companions are settled. I suggest we proceed with haste.”

The suits were meant to be entered from the rear. In the interest of getting into or out of the suit with ease, it was just a matter of activating the automatic seal. Caleb said, “If we do this right, we pop our seals, bend over and back out asap.”

Bert said, “Remain off the ramp. To remove the chance of contamination, the suits must not touch the ship. You must not touch the outside of your suits.”

Caleb blew out a breath and said, “Piece of cake.”

Bert offered a nonreassuring smile. “I’m compelled to remind you that at your insistence, if you do contaminate yourselves, I’m to insure that you do not enter the ship and risk the lives of the others, as confirmed by law J-84DR: the lives of the many being worth more than the few.”

Jennifer looked at Caleb one more time. “Let’s do this?”

Bert said, “In my working relationships with humans, I’ve observed that yelling is an excellent method for releasing your breath.”

Caleb and Jennifer simultaneously lifted their left wrists and keyed the buttons to unseal their suits. Immediately, warning lights flashed and text and audible messages repeated that there was no atmosphere. Caleb hesitated, his finger hovering above the override until he noted Jennifer bending in his periphery. Her scream was cut off as she stepped backward out of the suit, the thing slowly falling away like dead skin. He screamed himself and punched the button. There was a whoosh behind him as his air shot into the void and his ears immediately and painfully popped. He bent and shucked off the top first, pulling his arms back while the weight of the helmet helped drag the thing off him. As he stood upright in the open vacuum, the sound of his scream was instantly cut off, and he couldn’t be certain that he was still doing it. The cold was shocking, but not as shocking as he had expected. He kicked his right foot free and stepped out of the leg, then hopped out with the other. He was vaguely aware of Jennifer’s movements next to him, but only as a minor detail. As he noted the feeling of the talc and pebble moon under his feet, he felt his chest and guts expanding. Simultaneously, he belched and farted uncontrollably as he stumbled backward onto the ramp. His vision began to fog, and he became disoriented, spun in confusion, stepping away from the ship. He had a last thought as he felt the spit bubbling on his tongue:
too bad that Jennifer had fallen
.

He was hacking, a deep struggling hack. As light filtered past his fluttering eyelids, Caleb heard the cough only in the back of his returning consciousness. The flatulence continued, and he became aware of the sound of it, along with a deeply uncomfortable feeling of bloating. He tried to open his eyes until he realized that they were already open and that everything was blurry. His first fully formed thought was,
Great. I’m blind
. Then he realized that he was inside and breathing, and that he could hear, but that his ears ached and his hearing was dull. There was a woman coughing, too, and a human shape was hovering over him. They were inside. They were breathing. He took in a big lungful and fell into a coughing fit, his lungs feeling seared. A mask was placed over his mouth and nose, and at first he struggled until he heard the bot say, “Calm, sir. Calm. It is just oxygen.”

Caleb’s vision began to clear, and he could feel the bloating dissipate. From what he could tell, he was inside the ship’s airlock. He turned his head and found himself face-to-face with Jennifer. She had an oxygen mask strapped to her face, as well, and she lay with her eyes closed, tiny coughs escaping her lips, jerking her torso.

Bert continued, “As discussed, I am utilizing the airlock to repressurize you. We will be in here for a few hours. Sleep may be the best use of your time.”

Sometime later, Caleb woke to find Jennifer laying on her side and looking at him. She no longer wore the oxygen mask. He lifted his hand to his face and found that his was gone as well. The light was different in the airlock. A glance over his shoulder told him that the main hatch was open to the rest of the ship. Jennifer said, “Bert is checking on the others.”

Caleb tried pushing himself to sit upright. His hands were sore and he could see broken blood vessels all over the surface of the exposed skin. He finally asked, “How do you feel?”

“Like I drank a liter of vodka and fell off a roof. You?”

“Sounds about right. I don’t seem to be compelled to want to walk out of this airlock, so I’m guessing we’re nano free.”

“I sure hope so.”

He pointed outside. “Not so bad, huh?”

“Bert said neither of us made it up the ramp, much less into the airlock on our own. He saved us. Good guy.”

“The guy is a bot. Programming saved us.”

“Grateful one, you are.” She gently dragged her tongue across her teeth. “Meh. Feels like I sunburned it.”

Caleb felt his own tongue and agreed with the description. His eyesight was still hazy, black dots floating back and forth. It was all typical of a massive decompression, but he nevertheless marveled at surviving it. He retained a flash of memory of himself standing outside without his suit. It was surreal now that he could contemplate it.

Bert stepped back into the doorway. “Your companions remain in hibernation. I can detect that they continue to show basic vital signs. You may of course come inside if you are able, or I can assist you.”

Jennifer reached out to the robot. “I could use a hand up, Bert.”

Bert gently pulled her to her feet and offered support as she stepped inside. He turned back to Caleb. “I will return for you in a moment, sir.”