Chewing Rocks (11 page)

“Bite me!” Sno all but shouted. “Queene didn’t sell us defective apps and core. This
excrement is deliberately poisoned. It has been sabotaged. There is no way the Sedona’s life support can change airflow by accident. Princess behavior or not, I am going to royally kill someone at Queene.” She smiled. “Maybe Queene herself.” She did not add it would only happen if she could get out alive. Some things do not need to be said.

Out of habit, she grabbed the
empty food packet and reached up to drop it into the recycle chute. She stopped herself. With a shake of her head she put the packet back over the vent, spreading the plastic out so it covered as much of the vent as possible.

“Every little bit helps.” She immediately rejected
the idea of trying to block each vent in the ship to preserve what air she had left. First: she did not know how much air was left. Did she only have a few minutes or did she have hours? Second: she did not know how much effort she would expend, using up what precious air she did have, in futile physical activity. Third: she would have to have a lot of material to block every vent. Each room had multiple vents. There were four privacy bunks in the sleeping quarters, each with two vents, one in and one out. Plus there were other vents in the room. So there would be too many to try to block given that she didn’t know how much time was left.

“Now what?”
she thought. “The air doesn’t smell stale yet, but by the time it does I won’t be thinking straight enough to do anything about it. For all I know I am not thinking straight right now. Hypoxia can be a confusing pastime.”

Given the facts
, Sno could only think of one course of action.

She went down the corridor
to the equipment room. She grabbed a small breaker bar from the wall of tools. It snapped free of the magnetic pegs with a quick twist of her hand. She stepped to the equipment room airlock.

P
er normal flight protocols, all the interior doors and the exterior hatches on the hull were closed, sealed and locked. There were three airlocks on the ship: the equipment room, the main personnel airlock and technically the rock crusher was just a giant airlock. Each airlock had two doors with automatic locks and manual backup systems.

Sno
inserted the breaker bar into the manual opener. Slowly, she pushed the bar back and forth until the locking rods completely recessed into the wall. She braced herself against the wall and pushed the door open enough to slip into the airlock. The space between the two doors was large enough to hold three workers in EVA suits.

It was a major safety violation to unlock both the
interior door and the hatch in the hull at the same time. She jammed the breaker bar in the locking mechanism and pumped until the hatch locking bars were completely pushed back into the ship’s hull. She had no desire to even get close to the manual hatch opener. Even if she was not thinking straight, she was not partial to breathing vacuum.

Her EVA suit was still in the equipment room. She had left it there when she had last min
ed this asteroid. She had not bothered to move it back to its rack in the personnel airlock. It stood against the wall with its chest gaping open like a body gutted during an autopsy.

She reached up and patted it gently. “Hi there
big fella, want to go for walkies?”

Sno took
off her sneakers and stripped off her jumpsuit. She looked down at herself standing in just her underwear and a t-shirt. She thought, “It’s starting to get cold in here. And I should have put on clean underwear. Not that it matters, since I don’t know how long I have to be suited up.” She stripped completely and stuffed the underwear into a side bin built into the suit’s thigh area.

Swimming
up, she climbed into the suit. She wiggled slightly making sure there weren’t any wrinkles in the interior lining. EVA suits were designed to be worn for four to five hours if the person was working hard at chewing rocks. A sedentary individual could almost double that time. Sitting on a wrinkle would be very irritating after a few hours.

Sno reached down between her legs and attached the suit’s plumbing features. She hated it, but she did
not know how long she would have to stay in the suit. Having to pee down your leg and stand in it would be more irritating than a few wrinkles after a couple of hours. She snapped the water line into place where she could reach it with her lips once the helmet was sealed.

She wrinkled her nose. “
So much for clean underwear; I should have taken a shower first. I am practically rancid.” She sealed the suit, leaving the helmet open. She sniffed the air, but could not tell or even guess about the oxygen content levels remaining in the ship. It still did not smell stale or even feel thin. But she had no way to tell. The human body is a terrible atmospheric sensor system, just as it is a terrible thermometer.

Her
EVA suit did not have internal sensors that could read atmosphere like a military suit or the newer models now on the market. It was a rock hound’s suit. It was simple and basic with all of the muscle enhancements that money could buy. It had deep pockets for explosives and external storage. It had rings, clips and hooks for tools and the day-to-day mining needs. It did not have any frills, bells or whistles. It was designed to give the wearer as much time outside of the ship as possible and to do as it safely as possible.

She slammed the helm
et’s face plate closed and felt rather than heard the suit’s life support come on. Sno knew she had left the suit with all of its power filled to the maximum and the air and water tanks topped off. She knew it was time for a scheduled flush and review of all the systems, but she knew nothing was wrong. The best time to do preventative maintenance on a system was when it was in perfect working condition. That kept it in perfect working condition. Everything about the suit was ready for extended wear.

There wasn’t any standard in space where less than perfect was acceptable i
f a miner’s life depended on a piece of equipment. Any miner who did not keep his suit in top operating condition was asking to die among the rocks. Maybe they would die fast, maybe they would die slow, but they would die. Humans were not designed to operate in vacuum.

Sno stepped away from the suit’s wall brackets.
Grabbing three asteroid beacons from their storage bin, she stepped into the airlock. She carefully closed the interior airlock door behind her. She wanted to lock it tight, but without power to the locks, getting back in would be difficult, so she left the door to the equipment room unlocked. She braced herself and manually opened the outer hatch. A quick puff of air exploded into space trying to drag her with it, but the suit’s powerful muscles held her in place.

She stepped out onto the
ship’s hull and pushed the hatch shut. She did not lock this hatch either, but left it unlocked and available for easy access. She hoped the easy access would be for her, but if not, there was no reason to hold a grudge against whomever or whatever salvage company came to retrieve her remains and her ship.

She placed the three mining beacons in a wide triangle in a clear space by the door
and she activated all three beacons. She sat down to wait.

Chapter 11.0

Sno woke slowly. She blinked a few times and checked the time on her helmet’s heads up display.
Eleven hours of suit time. Sleeping should have slowed down her breathing; even so she was definitely pushing the edge of her air. She glanced hesitantly at the air gauge. It was not pegged to the bottom of the gauge, but it was definitely in the red danger zone.

She still had about half a tank of water
. She had been sedentary and had not needed near the water she might have needed had she been chewing rocks. She took a quick mouthful of water and swished it around before swallowing. Her teeth and tongue felt fuzzy; her whole mouth felt as if she had been sucking on old gym socks after a long run.

She tongued the command to have the suit convert the last of her w
ater to air. The suit would feed the oxygen into her air systems and bleed any unneeded hydrogen into the suit’s power fuel bin. She took a quick pee into the plumbing. Without needing commands, the suit would break down the urine into component parts, sending the oxygen into the air tanks. She watched the air gauge. It quivered and moved up, but it did not push above the red danger zone.

Sno wanted to
go back to sleep. She knew she had been having a pleasant dream; she just could not remember what it had been. She just knew her dreams had been more pleasant than lying awake on the ship’s hull with nothing to keep her company except an unnamed asteroid. But, there is only so much sleep a person can do. There also was not much to look at except her asteroid.

Her rock hung above her blocking out most of surrounding space. She did
not think about giving the rock a name. It was not that type of rock. Her plan had been to take the rock and break it into small pieces sending all of it, down to the very dust, into the power converter for transmission to the warehouse coffers. Her plan had been to make it completely disappear over the course of the next month to six weeks. It was more in need of a number than a name; a monetary number, given that it’s only value was what it would earn her bank account when stripped down.

As a little girl Sno had known another little girl
who lived down the street from her and her dad. The little girl had been given a cute little chick for some holiday her parents were celebrating. Earthers were always celebrating some holiday or another. The little neighbor girl had named the chick Abigail. Sno could remember the chick’s name, but the little girl’s name had long since left her memory.

Six months old and Abigail was no longer a cute little yellow chick, but a full grown white rooster with a nasty disposition. One Sunday Sno and her father had gone to dinner at the little girl
’s house. They had eaten a most wonderful fried chicken dinner. When Sno had asked the little girl where Abigail was, the girl’s father had pointed at the empty platter where the fried chicken had been.

The little girl had cried out in shock and run from the room vomiting. Sno had just nodded thoughtfully.
Abigail had been a better meal than he had made a pet. Sno had never wanted to name asteroids.

Sno knew
more sleep would elude her. Time was short and she really did not want to go in her sleep anyway. What she wanted was to rub the sleep boogers out of the corners of her eyes. She wanted to brush her teeth. She wanted to blow her nose. Most of all she wanted to scratch the itch on her back side. None of which could anyone do in an EVA suit.

“Oh fraking hell!” Sno said with a start as a suited figure appeared above her
. The figure was standing at her head and leaning over. It had the affect of making the helmet seem to just appear in front of her visor without warning. The helmet was mirrored and she could not see a face.

She said, “You scared the
ever lovin’ wahoo out of me.” She rolled over and stood up to face the figure. Since most mining EVA suits were the same size she was soon face to face with the other person.

The other suit said nothing.

“Hey!” Sno shouted, although she knew shouting in space did not make any sense. It was just a human sort of thing to do. “Hey! Unfrost your visor.” She tapped the faceplate on her helmet and spoke slowly. “Clear your visor.”

The other suit said nothing.

“No? Okay by me.” Sno tapped her helmet in the location where her ears would be. “Our comms are on different frequencies.” She leaned in to try and touch helmet to helmet.

The figure backed up to avoid contact.

Sno snapped a hand forward and grabbed a hook in center of the other suit’s chest. “Whoa there, spud. I don’t have time to play around here.” She pulled the other suit to her and made helmet contact.

“
-tact, Help. It is attacking me.” A voice yelped in her ears as the suit tried to squirm out of her grasp.

Sno shouted, “Easy on there,
pal. I just want to talk. Take it easy. You keep us dancing around like this and you might kick us both off the hull.”

“Oh, sorry
,” a man’s voice said. “You just kind of jumped up and grabbed me. Scared me a bit is all. I mean, we thought you were dead and all, since you didn’t respond to our calls.”

Sno smiled at the man, using her most sincere smile, although she did
not really feel the sincerity or the smile. “We are on different radio frequencies. What is your freq?”

“Oh, I guess we hadn’t though about that. Sorry. Um, could you let me go now?”

“Okay, but before we break contact give me your comm frequency.” Sno gritted her teeth, “Please?”

“101.89. Sorry, but now can you let me go?”
the man said.

Sno let the man go. She popped open a panel on the side of
her suit and punched in the appropriate codes.

A second voice boomed out of her helmet, “W
hat the sam hill is going on? Come on, Jackson. Let’s get a move on.”

Sno replied, “Gentlemen, thank you for responding to my beacon. My name is Sno. I am with the Whyte Mining Corporation and I am asking for help.”