Against the Odds

Chapter Eight

Barin was in the middle of his midshift meal when the alarms whooped again. The task force was still picking up loose mines—a ticklish task even with the help of the specialty minesweeper. The diners seemed to freeze in place for a moment—waiting, he realized, for the announcement that this was another exercise—and then they all lurched into motion. Lieutenant Marcion picked up his bowl and swigged down the rest of his soup, grabbed two rolls, and bolted for the door. Barin eyed the rest of his stew with regret, grabbed rolls for himself, and a hunk of cake from the dessert table, and followed at the double.

He had almost reached his station when he staggered—the artificial gravity had wavered for an instant. That was not a good sign . . . he came around the corner to find Petty Officer O’Neil already in place. He took the list, and began calling names, glad that his voice wasn’t shaky or shrill. Everyone had made it to station; Wahn came jogging up just as he got to that name. Barin reported all present up the tube and got a terse acknowledgement; he wanted to ask what was going on, but knew better.

A shrill whistle: the warning for closing the section seals.

“Must have some shield damage,” a pivot said, and grinned nervously.

“Less chatter,” O’Neil said.

Barin could hear the shuffle of someone’s feet on the deck, the soft whirr of the ventilating fans . . . and the sudden clunk-groan of the section seals as they unlocked and moved in their deep grooves. A final echoing thud cut them off from noises elsewhere in the ship. “Check the seals,” Barin said. Petty Officer O’Neil told off two of the team for that task and set the others to taking initial readings of the pressure, temperature, artificial gravity, and other factors. “Suit by pairs,” Barin said, when the seals had been reported secure. It seemed to take them forever, though he knew the creeping second hand on the chronometer was actually moving at normal speed, and they were suiting up well within the required time.

At last it was his turn; he stepped into the p-suit and found himself remembering a question he’d asked long, long ago. Why, he’d wanted to know, didn’t ships carry escape pods for use in disasters? Everyone knew p-suits weren’t really protection, not if you were blown out into a seething maelstrom of broken bits and pieces. The marines had hardened combat suits, but the rest of the crew . . . He went on fastening seals and making attachments as he remembered the instructor’s answer. There was no way, on a large ship, to provide escape capsules for everyone, and the bulky space combat suits took up too much room, and besides—you shouldn’t be thinking about getting out of the ship, but of saving it—keeping it working.

Barin turned so his partner could check his back—the hang of the air cylinders, the attachments of hose and cable—and then checked his partner’s. For now they didn’t need the suits’ air supply. For now, they had air in the compartment. If all went well, they would come out of this hot, sweaty, smelly, but with fully charged tanks. If it didn’t—they’d have this small additional chance. He had them all call off their air supply gauges; the only one below 100% was Pivot Ghormley, who had predictably forgotten that he was not supposed to turn the airflow on until he needed it. Barin let the petty officer chew Ghormley out and tell him to recharge his tank from the outlet.

With the section sealed off, this team was responsible for damage assessment and control in the starboard aft compartments of Troop Deck. Two open squad bays; four cramped and complicated four-man compartments for NCOs, fitted around essential ship equipment; the shower hall; the heads; a crew lounge with battered couches and cube readers; and—taking up almost half the cubage—half the gymnasium, the other half being cut off by a section seal. Barin sent his team off to take readings in each compartment; he stayed by the command console, from which he could report results, or receive orders.

He felt a lurch in his stomach—the gravity generators again?—and glanced at the gauge nearest him. Sure enough, a two percent negative spike . . . the lights dimmed, then brightened. His team reported the first set of numbers, and Barin forwarded them through his console. A vast shudder rumbled through the deck . . . missile launches. Another.

Betenkin said, “Are we taking hits, sir?” in a voice two tones higher than usual.

Barin said, “Missile launchers,” almost in concert with Petty Officer O’Neil; their eyes met, and he saw that O’Neil was watching him just as he watched the others. O’Neil gave a short nod. Then the deck bucked beneath them, one great concussive blow. Barin swallowed and said, “That was incoming.” O’Neil grinned for a moment. “Check the seals first,” Barin said. Pressure had to be all right; he would have felt if it hadn’t been. He glanced down at his console. Two decks down a red blaze expanded across the ship’s schematic. Even as he recognized it, the loud-hailer came on. “Hull breach—hull breach—report all starboard aft teams—”

Barin pressed his code key and read off the current numbers. In his headset, the damage control officer said, “Serrano—get your team to Environmental, go down the portside access; watch the heads-up on the way down in case the aft locks don’t hold.”

He tried to remember what he’d been told about hull breaches. Everything tried to escape to vacuum: the air and all that could be moved by the explosive decompression. This left the damaged area clear, usually, of the noxious gases and thick smoke that endangered personnel when the ship was still whole but some system had fractured. But the next compartments, where there might be pressure loss, were likely to be cold, dark, and confusing.

In the aft portside passage, Barin and his team met up with the officer on site. The major glanced at his nametag, touched his compad, and said, “Serrano—good. We want you in SE-14. Pressure’s dropping, but slow enough it must be fairly small—but big enough nothing’s plugged it yet. Your report channel is eleven. Cycle through two at a time, and be careful. The pressure differential’s enough to knock you off your feet. You’ll go in number four, got that?”

Barin led the way into the lock. When it opened on the far side, he faced the starboard passage, now lit only by emergency lighting, and the long emergency bulkhead that separated the passage from the “plumbing works” of Environmental. Along it, several preformed partial pressure locks showed, each clearly labelled. He located #4, and, as the rest of his team cycled through, he opened the #4 emergency locker and handed out the elements of the single-person pressure lock. This was something they’d drilled in often enough: place the frame to the existing frame and seal, pop open the rest and check that the other side of the lock was closed. The first person through did not actually cycle through, but was pushed by the suction that pulled the lock into the low-pressure chamber and held it extended until the second locked the frame in place.

Barin checked that everything was ready, took another look at his suit readouts—grabbed hold of the safety bar of what would become the low-pressure side of the inner hatch, and popped the bulkhead’s preformed opening.

The emergency airlock, sucked through the opening with all the force of the pressure differential, hit him in the back like a truck, and he barely kept his grip on the safety bar. All around was a dark, dense, cold, whirling wind . . . he could see nothing, but he could feel the buffeting of air currents, and the cold now rapidly falling to the freezing point of water. His feet slithered on something incredibly slippery . . . ice already?

Air screamed through the crevices as it escaped, audible even inside the suit. Barin turned on his helmet lamp, and saw swirling fog, streamers of vapor pouring away from left to right. Environmental was the wettest place on the ship, barring the water reserves or a shower in use; here the air was more humid than anywhere else, and decompression chilled it below its ability to hold that water as invisible vapor.

“Lock’s up, sir,” he heard in his helmet com.

“Come through, but watch it—it’s slippery, dark, and windy in here.”

“Rig safety lines,” O’Neil said.

Now why hadn’t he thought of that? His suit had all the attachments ready. Barin managed to get the primary hookup out of its fitting and attached to the lock’s safety bar. Now he could move away a little . . . look for other points of attachment. He tried a cautious step away from the hatch and skidded on the wet deck, slithering into something round and hard. A culture tank? His helmet light didn’t show him anything identifiable but the fat shiny haunch of a metallic tank of some kind. It looked shinier than it should, and he rubbed it with his gloved hand, then wiped the glove on the chem-patch. A formula he didn’t recognize came up on his suit display. Not all water, then. It had a lot of C and H and O and some Cl. Hydrocarbon, his mind reminded him, and he didn’t need a laundry list to think of hydraulic fluid.

Slippery, flammable, and—if coming from a high-pressure leak—lethal to get near.

He switched his suit com to channel 11 and reported the presence of hydraulic fluid, then back to his own unit’s channel.

“Sir?”

“I’m over here . . .” he rotated his head, sending his helmet light in all directions. “I slid over here—we’ve got hydraulic fluid as well as water vapor. Show your lamps.”

Three feeble glows that could have been any distance. “Right, sir. We have five more to cycle through—three now clipped on the same safety bar. Have you found any other attachment points?”

“No,” Barin said. “Not yet.” He had only three meters of line on the primary attachment, and they couldn’t all clip on to the same bar—there wasn’t room. They could clip on each other, but they still needed other attachment points. He edged his way around the metal tank and found a handle of some sort. When he tugged, it held firm; by leaning close with his headlamp, he could see that it opened by turning, with a safety latch holding it closed. Good enough. “Found an attachment. Who’s in?”

“Wahn, Telleen, Prestin.”

“Wahn, clip onto my line, trail a line to the lock, and come to me.”

He felt the vibration in his safety line, as someone moved—and was there beside him.

“It’s only about two meters, sir, but you can’t see anything in this murk.”

“True enough. Let’s have that line—” Barin used a running clip to attach the line Wahn had trailed to the attachment he’d found. Now anyone could come that way. “Now you clip in.” Wahn did so, keeping a safety grip on Barin’s line while unclipping his own and reclipping it onto the tank handle. “Telleen, find my line, and give it a tug.” When he felt the tug, he said, “Now—unclip my line and put it on the trailer.”

It took a tediously long time to cycle everyone through the lock safely, make sure they were all clipped in, and advance through the greasy murk toward the actual leak. Since the problem was known, at least in part, four of the last in the chain lugged a great awkward roll of bulkhead fabric, which when stretched across a gap and foamed would provide an airtight seal with some structural integrity.

Barin, in the lead, slithered and slid from one obstacle to another, barking his shins and his ribs on things he couldn’t see clearly until he fell over them. This was only fair, he knew, since he had less actual experience than most of the team. He knew he was going the right way, because the wisps and tendrils of vapor blew past him—all he had to do was follow. He reported at intervals, when his helmet display prompted him to.

Suddenly his lamp threw back a bright sparkle . . . a rime of ice now outlined a line of pipe and shapes that should be a row of scrubbers. He could see past them to an irregular white shape bordering a jagged black line. Could that be the—

His boots slid on the greased icy decking again, as the strengthening current of escaping air and vapor whipped about him and sucked him toward the gap. He managed not to yelp and felt the jerk when his safety tether came up short.

“Don’t worry, sir, we’ve got you.”

He tried to think of something offhand and casual to say, but couldn’t. That black crack . . . how big was it really? Not big enough for his whole body, surely . . . but an arm? A hand? “All that ice,” he managed to say finally. “We’re supposed to patch on a dry, clean surface.”

“We can always torch it off,” someone said.

“No! This vapor may be explosive,” Barin said. “It’s got hydraulic fluid in it, remember?”

“Well, then, we’ll—” A fan of light brighter than the brightest day scythed into the compartment through the crack, giving structure and substance for a moment to the roil of vapor, striking blinding highlights off the ice.

“What was that?” yelped a frightened voice. Barin caught his breath, trying to think.

“The war’s not over,” the petty officer said. “The battle’s still goin’ on, and it’s time we quit sightseeing.”

He should have said that, but he was noticing the glow . . . it had not died instantly. It came again, another flash.

“Hitting the shields,” the petty officer said. “Hope they hold.” He sounded as unconcerned as if it made no difference either way. Maybe it didn’t.

Barin reported in that they’d located a crack, and the margins were ice-covered.

“Ackman, you an’ Wahn get to chippin’ it off.”

“Won’t it just re-form?” Barin was glad someone else had asked that question. The petty officer grunted.

“Notice there’s less fog? Most of the water vapor’s out now, and the pressure and temp are both way down. Pretty soon it’ll be clear enough to see.”

It already was, Barin saw, when he flashed his lamp around. The fog was below waist level; he could shine his light all the way back to the portable airlock. Something glittered across the darkness, a fine wire . . . no . . . the hydraulic leak, still spitting a fine stream of the fluid. He reported where he thought it was coming from. Another scythe of light blazed through the crack. Barin ignored it.

They still had to fix the leak. Very carefully, in short moves each restrained by a tether, they moved toward the crack. Ackman and Wahn chipped the ice off the bulkhead. “Carefully,” the petty officer warned them. “We don’t want to damage it . . . lay your irons down just about horizontal to it.” They chipped from the outside toward the crack; Barin and the others unrolled the patch material and cut off strips to use as supporting surfaces. As soon as they cleared ice from a strip, someone laid down a bead of adhesive and a strip of patch material.

No more ice formed on the upper surface of the patch cloth rimming the crack. Barin laid another bead of adhesive on the cloth rim, and then—turning the roll around—put the end of the roll flush with the bead at the bottom, and began unrolling upwards, sealing one side, while Averre sealed the other. The suction was less now, but still pulled the patch cloth tight against the crack. Someone—Barin couldn’t tell who—pumped the foam gun and sprayed quickset foam on the cloth.

One leak down. Were there others? Barin checked the pressure in the compartment, and realized it was so low they’d have to wait quite a while to be sure. He reported in to the Damage Control Officer.

“We need you to do a check of the environmental system,” he was told.

“We don’t have any moles,” Barin said.

“That’s all right. You don’t need to make it run, just report on what you find. I’ve got a checklist—I’m flashing it to your suit comp.”

“Yes, sir.” What he could see of the list in his heads-up display looked easy enough. Check each tank for leakage, check the lines, test for certain contaminants—Barin recognized some of these but not all.

“You’ll report on channel six, that’s the environmental officer this shift, but don’t bother him unless you have to. They’re trying to patch the remains of the starboard system upstream of you into the hard-chem backups.”

This meant nothing to Barin, who had always considered Environmental the dullest of all specialities. Of course it was important—everyone liked to breathe—but it had none of the glamor of drives or weapons. He had passed the required courses by dint of dutiful memorization, and he’d put most of it out of his mind immediately after the exam.

The checklist was long and detailed. Every vat, chamber, pump, connection, pipe and tube . . . and the whole place was full of them. Barin looked at the time, at his own air supply, and calculated that they’d have to cycle out for air at least once. He wanted a margin of safety—he’d send half the team out when they had an hour’s air left, then the other half. He set his suit alarm to remind him to check with the petty officer, and took his half-team up to the forward end of the compartment.

Here there was less ice on the deck. Barin flashed his headlamp around and wondered if it would be safe to rig lights—it would speed up their assessment. He clicked on his comunit, and heard a spirited argument about whether some unpronounceable compound could be used to do something equally hard to say to something he’d never heard of. When he clicked twice, the voices stopped, and an annoyed one said, “Yes?”

“Serrano with damage control in SE-14. Is it safe to rig lights in here?”

“What’s your gas situation?”

He called Wahn over—Wahn had the chemscan—and had him read off the numbers.

“That sounds safe enough. No methane? No hydrogen sulfide? See any big leaks?”

“No methane, no hydrogen sulfide,” Wahn said. “I’m not sure my chem-scan has all that stuff on the list . . .”

“No visible leaks since they cut off that hydraulic line,” Barin said. “But we can’t see much yet.”

“All right then. Rig your lights, but watch your pressure. We’re not airing up that compartment until it’s secured, so any increase in pressure means you’ve got a leak of something coming in. Some of that stuff’s nasty.”

“Yes, sir.” Barin clicked off, told O’Neil they were clear to rig lights, and should probably bring in something to sop up the flammable stuff on the floor.

A few minutes later, two of his team came back in, lugging strings of lights and a sack of the flocculant for the deck.

With lights strung as best they could, the damage was certainly more visible. Bulkhead material had spalled in a broad cone across the aft end of the compartment—there most of the tanks and vats were dented and one was holed, with a now-frozen mass of stringy stuff—filamentous algae? worms? Barin couldn’t guess—firmly adhering to the side of the tank and the deck. Chunks of bulkhead like big flakes of obsidian lay where they’d fallen. He walked around, noting which tanks were damaged and how badly. When he got back to the forward bulkhead, he checked the pressure gauge. Seventy-eight. It was up, but very slightly.

“Wahn—what’s our gas mix?”

“Oxygen’s up a point, sir. But with this low pressure . . .”

Oxygen, Barin thought, was the least of his problems. He spotted the green Olines, and started checking them. Oxygen was breathable; it wasn’t going to poison anyone even if it was leaking, and at very low pressure and temperature it wasn’t likely to support combustion, either.

“Anything else?”

“No, sir, nothing I can identify. But most of the stuff on the list you flashed me isn’t on this chemscan’s selector.”

“It’s not?” A tiny cold finger ran down his spine. “What have you got, then?”

“Well, what you mostly need—oxygen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen. But not all that special environmental stuff.”

“Let’s see.” Barin took a look; there was oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, all at very low amounts. “What about broadscan, did you try that?”

“Yes, sir, but I don’t know what all these little peaks are. None of ’em are red-marked.”

So probably it was picking up traces of whatever had been in the breached vessels. Maybe some outgassing from the patch adhesive. He looked at the scan readout himself, but while whatever it was had a molecular weight of around 16, he didn’t know what it might be. He tried to envision the periodic table, but most of it eluded him. Oxygen? No, that was atomic weight; the molecular weight was 32.

He looked around, and saw a tangle of green lines—the oxygen code—snaking around a series of long tanks. There was an obvious place to look for an oxygen leak. Even if you could breathe it, it still shouldn’t be leaking out. He started at the nearest tank, and tested every connection with his squirt bottle. On the second, little bubbles rewarded him—sure enough, something was coming out, and the most likely thing coming out of a green-coded line was oxygen. He called up the checklist and protocol and found that he needed a special patch. Which pocket had he put it in? There. He peeled off the backing, glad that whoever made these things realized they’d have to be used by people in gloves—that long pull-tag helped.

He looked around again to see where his team was. O’Neil and his group were down at the most-damaged aft end; the rest were scattered up and down the compartment, checking every bit of tubing for leaks.

That unknown peak on the readout bothered him. He called the Environmental Officer again.

“Sir, we’ve got a peak our chemscan doesn’t identify. Something with a molecular weight of sixteen—” He flashed the readout to the EO.

“What do you mean your chemscan doesn’t—sixteen? Lieutenant, didn’t I tell you to look out for methane? What’s the readout?”

Barin went cold. Methane. That was the one that blew up when it contacted free oxygen . . .” Sir, we don’t have a readout for it on our machine.”

“Oh my god . . . you don’t have an Environmental chemscan. Lieutenant, get your people out now. You’re sitting on a bomb.” He’d figured that out; terror and guilt almost strangled him. He pushed them down. Later. Right now he had to get his people to safety. “Wait—tell them to move slowly. If they run through a pool of the stuff, and mix it, that’s when it’ll blow. Turn off those lights you rigged. Can you vent to vacuum?”

“We just—” Barin bit that off, switched channels, and called his team. “Emergency—” Heads turned toward him. “We have a potentially explosive gas mix. Don’t run—we don’t want to move the stuff around more than we have to. Whoever’s closest to the lock, douse the lights.” The lock. The portable airlock . . . would it hold pressure if there was an explosion? He switched back to the EO. “Sir, we accessed SE-14 through a portable airlock; if this compartment goes, it may not hold.”

“I’ve already alerted them, Lieutenant. Get your people out. Vent to the vacuum if you can.”

Could he? If they took the patch off . . . at least it wouldn’t be an explosion in a closed space. “We could try to take the patch off—” He hoped the EO would say it was impossible, not worth the risk.

“Do it,” the EO said. “If there’s an explosion in that compartment we could lose the whole ship—”

And it would be his fault, because he hadn’t checked to see that they had a chemscan programmed for Environmental. Barin shivered, anticipating what the captain would say, or his grandmother. Again he pushed it aside. No time.

He switched back to the team channel. Who was nearest? Telleen and O’Neil.

“Petty Officer O’Neil—” He saw, down the compartment, O’Neil turn towards him. “We need to vent this compartment immediately to vacuum. The EO has authorized us to tear down that patch. You four—” He couldn’t think of their names, but they were closest to the airlock. “There by the airlock. Get out now. Has anyone identified a methane line leak?”

The EO’s voice came in on his other channel. “If it’s from a tank, it’ll be in the outboard array, about a third of the way aft in that chamber; if it’s a line, it could be anywhere.”

Barin glanced over and saw Pivot Ghormley standing approximately in that location, about seven meters away. “What’ve you got, Ghormley?”

“Dent in the fermentation chamber, sir. There’s a . . . a kind of crack in this little pipe here from some sort of collection tank—I could seal it—”

“Too late,” the EO said. “You’re probably standing in a pool of methane—if you stir it up . . .”

“Ghormley, stay where you are. Do not move,” Barin said. Then to the EO, “I’m standing by the photosynthesis chamber. And there’s a crack in the oxygen line.” He looked down, and at that moment someone cut the lights.

“Lieutenant?” That was O’Neil.

“I’m standing in the oxygen,” Barin said. “If I don’t kick it around, this explosion may not happen. You get that patch torn down. Everybody who’s not with you—except Ghormley and me—get out, but don’t run.” He could see their headlamps moving; he could see them cycling through. Surely they’d be safer in the corridor; surely someone would get them through the blast doors to the other side of the ship. He found himself counting the disappearing lights. One safe. Two. Then a pause, and, three, four . . .

“Sir, I’m scared—” That was Ghormley. The kid, the newest of the bunch. And he, Barin, had condemned this kid to die, maybe.

“Well,” Barin said, “I’m not any too happy myself, but if we don’t dance a jig, we can still get out of this in one piece.”

“Do you really think so?” Ghormley’s voice was high and tense.

Of course he didn’t think so, but what good would it do to tell the kid that? “If they get that patch off,” Barin said, “the rest of the gases in here will vent to vacuum. It’s cold now; it’ll be colder then, and it takes heat—” But not much, he knew, not with methane and oxygen. Firedamp, miner’s enemy. Anything might set it off. “And even if it blows, it won’t be confined—”

“I don’t like this—” Ghormley said. “I can’t just stand here—”

“Sure you can,” Barin said. “Smartest thing you can do.” Another light, and another, vanished out the airlock. Four remained, at the aft end of the chamber, working to remove the patch they’d tried so hard to put on. “If we don’t mix the two, they won’t blow up.”

“But sir, we was all walking around, all over; they gotta be mixed already.”

What a time for Ghormley to show reasoning ability. “It hasn’t blown yet,” Barin said. “I promise not to kick my oxygen at you if you won’t kick your methane at me . . .”

“Are you scared, sir?”

Of course he was scared, but did Ghormley need to hear it? He was saved by O’Neil’s voice.

“Got a leak, Lieutenant.” O’Neil’s headlamp bobbed. “We’ll just widen ’er out a bit—” Barin could feel through his bootsoles the impact of O’Neil’s blows on the sides of the crack. “She’s spalled off quite a lot—we should be able to—get—more—open—”

Barin started to ask if they had their safety lines hooked on, and realized that that was probably not a high priority at the moment. Should he bother to clip onto the tank beside him? If there was an explosion, it wouldn’t help much. It might even rip his p-suit apart.

“Can you see the pressure gauge from where you are, sir?”

“No—”

“It’s dropping,” said the EO. “We’ve got you on full monitoring now. It’s still dangerous.” Great. They’d get to watch him get blown away.

“Do we need a bigger hole?” Barin asked.

“Wouldn’t hurt,” the EO said.

“Will do, sir,” O’Neil said. He sounded calm enough. More shivering vibrations in the deck . . . Barin tried not to think of the effect on a puddle of cold gas of such vibrations—shaking it, dispersing it faster than it might have gone on its own, mixing it . . . he kept his eyes on the far end, where suddenly a large section of bulkhead seemed to fold back like paper, and he was looking out into blackness speckled with lights that might be stars or the worklights of the outside repair crews.

“Got it,” O’Neil said.

“Get yourselves out,” Barin said. “It’ll start flowing your way.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, I think Ghormley and I will stand here awhile and let things clear out—go on, now.”

The lights moved up the compartment, toward the airlock entrance, more slowly than he wanted. Probably O’Neil was making them stay on the safety line; airflow out that size hole wouldn’t be strong, but the deck down there was slick. Two reached the airlock, opened it, and went through; the others were almost there.

Barin turned his head to watch them, as they worked their way up the inboard bulkhead, the arc of his headlamp sweeping across the compartment.

“No! Don’t leave me behind!” Ghormley’s voice cracked; Barin looked back to see him plunge away from his position.

“No! Don’t—” He knew as he said it that once in motion Ghormley wouldn’t stop, that he had miscalculated again, this time in his judgment of men.

He had time for an instant of pity, for a thought of Esmay, and then the flash came, too bright to see.