One Day on Mars

Bill grabbed the nearest adjustable powered BFW and went to work pulling the bolts out on the panel to the power unit for the propulsion plant. He took the bottom four bolts out first and then the top two. The metal cover for the power-generation unit was more than two centimeters thick and it didn't fall off on its own. The metal was so thick that it stood in place and was too heavy for Bill to push loose with his hands. Bill looked around for the crowbar that he had been considering to use on the blown power-coupling switch across the room and found where it had ended up after the collision with the Seppy rust bucket.

'Come on, you son-of-mother!' CMC Edwards pried the bar in a good leverage spot and pulled at it with all his might. The plate finally broke free from the box where some dumbass had applied the wrong lubricating sealant around the edges where the cover was attached. The lubricant had reacted with the metal, rusting it together. If he survived the crash he'd have to tear some fireman's apprentice a new asshole for letting that thing rust together like that. The plate made a sucking sound from the rest of the box and then fell heavy to the deck with a loud metal to metal clang. Bill jumped out of the way to keep from getting his toes cut off.

DEG unit is stored full and functioning normal, CMC!

Right.

Bill looked where the power conduit entered into the back outside of the power unit and then followed them to find where the coupler lock nuts of the two five-centimeter-diameter cables were on the inside side of the box. He grabbed a spanner and spun the lock ring nuts off. The giant nuts fell to the deck of the box with a heavy kathunk.

Bill made his way over the cables and gridwork to the other side of the box and pulled the two cables loose. One of them was red and one was black. He tugged and threaded them through nooks and crannies, underneath equipment racks, through knocked out holes in some of the power room metal Faraday cage gridwork, and finally over the main tool box where the two wires went into the wall leading into the propellantless propulsion system.

He dragged the cables just a few meters more to two flow conduits. Bill double-checked the drawings in his mind to make certain they were the right two conduits. One was marked as an outflow coolant pipe and the one beside it was a return coolant pipe, both of which went off behind him to the liquid metal reservoir cooling system in the aft end of the engine room. The pipes went the other direction to the port side DEG cooling loop. Bill suspected that the captain had no desire to fire the dead DEGs so they wouldn't be needing their coolant pipes. He took the red cable and wrapped it around the outflow as many times as he could bend the giant flex cable and then tucked the cable under the last two wraps. Then he repeated the process by wrapping the black cable around the inflow pipe.

'Shit . . . where is that damned . . . ah, there it is.' He grabbed the directed energy hand welder and the goggles from one of the tool box cabinets and rushed back to spark the cables hard-welded to the pipes. He had to cut a notch out of the the two-centimeter ceramic insulation with the handheld metal saw first before he could weld the cables to the conduit in both cases. 'That's got this end!'

I understand what you are doing now, CMC! I think it might work. We need to flush the pipes into space first so they don't explode on us. And, Bill, we have to hurry!

Good, hadn't thought of that. Do it.

Edwards grabbed the spot welder, a metal saw, a torch cutter, a crowbar, and a BFW just in case. You never knew when you might need to beat something with a big fucking wrench. Then he fumbled with the tools, trying not to drop them as he ran out the door and up the ladder. He rushed as best he could without dropping the tools up the deck and over two bulkheads. The ship was deserted and deep within it there was little damage other than an occasional spewing liquid from a burst flow pipe or sparks flying from the end of a broken electrical cable. But the deck he was on was in pretty good shape. It had taken Bill at least thirty seconds to get there and he was huffing and puffing every breath.

Shit, I've got to get more PT.

Here it is, CMC! Mimi told him.

Got it. Bill pulled the engineer's access panel from the bulkhead with the crowbar and stepped through the hatch, tracing two five-centimeter-diameter red and black cables into the wall from the DEG power generator.

Hey, you got this thing open circuited right? I don't want to get fried before I get a chance to crash into the surface of Mars at thousands of kilometers per hour.

The switch between the DEG and the DEG power source is open, yes CMC, Mimi acknowledged.

Bill grabbed the little metal saw and spun up the blade at the same time he slipped on safety glasses. The metal saw blade sliced effortlessly through the two high-voltage power cables.

'That is much fucking quicker than a goddamned spanner!' he muttered to himself.

Then Bill dragged the heavy cables to the edge of the engineer's hatch where the coolant conduits ran through the room about ten centimeters off the deck. He had had to step over them to get into the room. He wrapped the two pipes with the cables in the appropriate configuration—red cable to outflow, black to inflow. He sure as shit didn't want to cross the power couplings now. He ran the metal saw across the insulation on the pipes a couple of times and then he switched goggles and fired up the torch, quickly welding the cables in place.

He stepped back through the engineer's hatch into the hallway and went quickly through his process and the steps he had taken to get the dirty repair job done. He hadn't forgotten anything, he didn't think.

Throw the switch to the DEG power unit, Mimi.

Got it, CMC. There was a clicking sound he could hear through the wall but nothing else happened. He looked at the DTM virtual information and could tell that no power was getting to the propulsion systems.

'Fuck! That should have goddamned fucking worked!' Bill kicked the bulkhead three times and then regained his composure. And he and Mimi remembered the problem at the same time.

The open switch back in the Engine Room! they thought simultaneously.

Bill dropped everything but the crowbar and the BFW and ran as fast as he could back by two bulkheads and down a deck to the engine room. He was completely exhausted and out of time and his one-armed paper hanger act was in severe need of an understudy, especially if there was going to be an encore. He finally got to the point where he was standing in front of the blown-out high-voltage breaker.