fire on us.’
‘You what?’ Langstrom exclaimed.
Saul then explained the plan to him.
Mars
The sun was dropping out of sight and Coprates Chasma sliding back into shadow when Var came across further human remains. But this one would not be supplying her with further oxygen or super-caps. This person must have been inside, and unsuited, when the building had collapsed. The corpse was as dry and brittle as aged kindling but actually came up all in one piece, having been stuck to the bottom of a regolith block like a crushed bug. Moving both block and corpse exposed the floor below, which gave Var something to work to. She cleared compacted dust from this same point back to the wall foundations, then began working along these too, shortly exposing one side of an intact airlock.
Even as she began digging out the airlock, Var wondered what she was hoping to achieve. Would another hour or two of air matter to her? Perhaps now she should really start thinking about how to ease her passing. She paused, almost resentful of this wholly pragmatic part of her mind. Just a moment’s thought brought home to her the realities.
Opening her suit directly to the Martian atmosphere was probably the worst option. Yes, she would die within a few minutes, but it would be a horrible, agonizing death. She should know, since it was how she had killed a number of Ricard’s men and she had been there to watch the whole unpleasant process.
The option of just keeping her suit on therefore seemed best. Just let the suit keep scrubbing out the carbon dioxide and, as the oxygen ran out, she would be breathing more and more of the constantly recycled remainder, which would be nitrogen – and nitrogen asphyxiation was fairly painless and quick.
Var returned to her digging. Nitrogen asphyxiation was what awaited her, but she was not prepared to just sit gazing at her head-up display and counting down the remainder of her life. Keeping busy enabled her to hold that reality at a slight remove. Contemplating her demise over any length of time might lead to her broadcasting pleas to the cosmos: begging, praying or something ridiculous like that. She realized that, at that moment, her biggest fear wasn’t death itself but the possibility of it being undignified.
‘Silly woman,’ she muttered to herself.
A further hour of work exposed the outer door of the airlock. She struggled with the manual handle, but it was jammed, so she picked up a rock and hit it with that until it thunked downwards. She heaved the door open, hoping that someone had been trapped inside and still had an air supply. When she turned on her suit light and found the lock empty she questioned her logic. If anyone had been inside they would have used up all their air anyway. She checked the electronic control panel and found it dead, as expected, then stepped back and retrieved a multi-driver from her suit’s toolkit. She leaned in with that to open the panel accessing the oxygen-feed pipework. This exposed simple pressure dials, all of them registering zero. Another hour of digging revealed the severed feed-in pipes. But usually, with locks like these, the pipes led to a pressurized air reservoir. She had to find it.
It was dark now and, checking the time, Var saw that in another couple of hours the automatic broadcast to Argus would recommence. She did not have to be there for it to happen, but maybe there had since been a reply. She returned to work, heaving regolith blocks away from the pile around where she had found the severed pipes. In this rubble she found a picture flimsy still displaying its last image – a bull elephant standing at the edge of a waterhole, some odd fragment of someone’s life, maybe their fantasies. It was an image that made her feel horribly uneasy and which she instantly skimmed away into the darkness, though she did not know why.
By the time she found the other ends of the pipes, which had been crushed right down to the floor, she was feeling utterly weary. Checking the time, she saw that her broadcast had recommenced as of an hour before, and she decided that now was the time to check for any response. Afterwards she would come back out here, for what was the point in squandering her remaining time on sleep?
Var trudged back over to the building, where, even though she could see the message icon flashing on the screen, she calmly took her time in sitting down. After a long contemplative pause, she finally summoned up the nerve to open the message, but in frustration saw it was an audio file, and she had to run an optic from her suit to the console to hear it. Then her brother spoke to her.
Var listened to it twice, then once more to be sure. Damn, the inertia-less drive had worked. The science of the impossible had been made real and the human dream of starships had just turned into reality. And here she was, dying on Mars. Alan had given her hope, but that lasted only as long as she didn’t really apply her mind. Then reality bit in. Even if Argus Station survived the
She shook her head, because it all seemed too implausible. They were probably fighting their own battle for survival out there, so putting together some way of enabling her to survive would be the last thing on their agenda.
Var stared at the screen, contemplating the grim reality of her situation. Nevertheless there was still a little hope, no matter how small. She edited the message she was sending, adding that she had found some extra air, and telling her brother precisely how long she had left. Then she stood up abruptly, headed outside again, fully aware of how hope could be a dangerous thing.
19
Plasma Weapons
