Episode 120. Part 2
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Where did the other six go? Did they wander off? One of the rescued speaks up.
Mole Man #1: Uhhh…there were some people who were going to go and see if they could secure our grav anchor that we were using here, to keep you guys safe. Where would that be….?
Mole Man #2: (exuberantly) Oh, that’s no problem. I’ll take you guys. Come on, it’s down Tunnel 12.
Nika nixes the idea.
Nika: Okay, my call would be to leave them. I’m sorry. We’ve got 24 of 30 people.
Arden: How far is Tunnel 12 from here?
Mole Man #2: Right there.
Arden: What do you mean it’s right there? You mean at the entrance?
Hell, we can see the entrance to the tunnel right outside our bridge windows. It’s got a big sign with the number 12 painted on it, plain as day. Arden turns from the windows and asks Mole Man #2:
Arden: How far down the tunnel are they?
Mole Man #2: I don’t know.
Christian: However far down they went.
Rina: Wait a minute. The Marduk will be sending their people down soon. We should tell them where to go to pick up the others. We’ve got 24 lives, not including our own, to take care of. With the station crew, that’s 29 souls on this ship we’re responsible for.
Nika: Do all these guys have the sickness?
The station doc tells her that they’ve all got it in various stages. Nika tells him she wants someone who’s suffering Williamson’s the least. The doctor finds one and brings him forward.
Nika: (asking the man) How bad off were the six guys who left you?
Mole Man #3: Whaddya mean?
Nika: Sick.
Mole Man #3: They were pretty cocky, but…but, umm…
Nika: Can they last til the other shuttle gets down here?
Mole Man #3: When’s the other shuttle coming?
Rina: Less than an hour.
Mole Man #3: (breathes a laugh) Yeah….probably not. I’m assuming they’re okay, but sometimes in the later stages, you get blackouts….
Nika: Do you know where the grav anchor is?
Mole Man #3: (curt nod) Yeah.
Nika: Okay. You take the men who are the most all-right and go with the team.
Christian looks this guy over and doesn’t think he’s well enough to be trustworthy. Nika orders Christian to choose the likeliest candidates for the job and do it quickly. Christian picks out the best four from the 2 dozen and a precious minute is used up trying to determine if Mole Man #3 actually knows where he’s going. Knowing the clock is ticking, Nika delivers the ultimatum.
Nika: If you’re not back in 8 minutes, I’m taking off. How long does it take to get there?
Mole Man #3: About 5 minutes.
“There” being the end of the tunnel where the Mole Man has said the anchor is located. Arden takes his hand comm with him, and the Mole Man snorts—with all the interference down here, the comm would be damned near useless. When asked what the Mole Men use when dirtside, the Mole Man says they use the pipes.
Nika: If you are not at the bottom at those guys in 8 minutes, turn around and come back.
Upon hearing the eight-minute restriction, the other Mole Men back out, muttering their reluctance and dismay. No way we’ll get the job done in time. The station doctor wrangles the nay-sayers back into their seats in the lounge and starts strapping them in. Christian, Arden, and Mole Man #3 quit the ship for the tunnel. The weather outside is hideous. High winds howling, dirt and debris whipping around, the air heavy with ozone. No one lingers outside a second longer than they have to. The interior of the tunnel is blessedly silent in comparison and the team blinks their eyes clear. They stand in a high-ceilinged cavern, small as caverns go but suitable for a staging area before going deeper into the tunnel. Just inside is a rail line, strongly reminiscent of the old coal car lines from the Pre-Exodus mines of yore. The track sits empty. The missing Mole Men have taken the cars deeper into the shaft. We’ll have to find them on foot and the clock is ticking.
Eight minutes and counting….
Arden: Start running.
They hoof it, following the track down into the shaft. We’d better hope the men at the other end aren’t all incapacitated. Hauling six unconscious men out of there with only three pairs of hands would be tantamount to a death sentence.
On the bridge of the Gift, a proximity alarm blares to life and checking it, Nika sees a storm is approaching. It’s huge, covering the scope. Roughly the size of Iowa. The readings fluctuate wildly, however, and she can’t get a firm grasp on the particulars. She turns to one of the Mole Men who have wandered onto the bridge.
Nika: How fast do the storms roll in?
Mole Man: Well, I wish I could say that there was a specific speed they travel—
Nika: Just give me an estimate.
Mole Man: The fastest ones are no more than 200 kilometers per hour and the slowest ones maybe…50 kilometers an hour?
Meaning somewhere between a tropical depression and a Category 3 hurricane.
Great!
Mole Man: Hopefully there won’t be any heavy materials in the air. That’s when it gets bad.
Looking out the viewports at the dog’s breakfast outside, Nika has to wonder just what would fall under the Mole Man’s definition of “bad”. By her lights, we’d left “bad” behind the minute we’d hit atmo.
Six minutes.
Back in the tunnel, the team stops for a breather. The terrain is rocky, the lighting inadequate, the atmo in the tunnel hot and oppressive, and the men are blowing hard. They lean against the rough-hewn walls and suck the air in. Under his hands, Christian notes the rock feels…strange, unlike the usual sort of rock, but the clock is ticking and he has no time to spend on speculation. The men push off and run on.
Four minutes.
The grav underfoot fluctuates again and they stumble through the vertiginous effects—It’s a well! No, it’s a tunnel! No, it’s a well!—til everything stabilizes.
Three minutes.
The ground rises slightly and the team enters a domed chamber, not huge, maybe 20 feet across and inside is a nest of heavy equipment, with thick leads snaking off and burrowing into the rock walls—a subterranean octopus melding with the earth. The missing men are there, sitting on the ground and propped against the consoles. Two of the men are unconscious, while the remaining four slump drooling where they’ve collapsed. Their eyes are open, and hopefully this means they are conscious enough to help us with their unconscious colleagues.
We can count on at least one being able to help. At our entrance, he struggles upright brandishing a fire extinguisher.
Anchorman: (weakly) Stay back …bunch’a Browncoats are after us….!
Two minutes.
Christian eases forward to calm Anchorman down, and Arden contacts the Gift to let Nika know we’ve found the missing men. He has to retreat a bit to find a place where the signal can get through, but patches through to Nika.
Nika: (over the comm) There’s a storm rolling in. You have got to move!
No time left.
Christian holds his hands up—I’m a friend, we’re all friends—and tells the Anchorman everything’s fine.
Christian: Babushka sent us.
Anchorman: She did? I told ya guys she wouldn’t let us die down here—!
Anchorman turns to tell his comrades and the second his eyes are off Christian, Christian moves forward and takes the extinguisher away from him. The rest of the Mole Men react to the news as best as they are able, raising a feeble cheer from some.
Arden: There’s a storm coming in. We need to move fast.
Anchorman: (dismissing the extinguisher) Hey, wait a minute. We c’n probably help.
Arden: Everyone, into the rail car.
Anchorman: I know! Lemme vent some of the plasma over here. That’ll take care’a that storm out there….
Oh, shit, no! No plasma!
Christian manages to push the man away from the console, but not before the man hits the vent button. There’s a mad scramble to shut everything down as the Anchorman stumbles and recovers his footing. All around us, the vent tubes thrum as the plasma vents. Topside, Nika’s gone just outside the Gift’s airlock to increase her signal pick-up with Arden and she sees a seething mass of yellow and red fast approaching the ship.
Some might call it….fire.
She scrambles up the ladder, quick as a cat, and slams the hatch shut. The wall of fire hits the Gift full on and she rocks as it hisses over her hull. Nika’s smoking, singed al over from the close call, but she’s still up and functioning. She doesn’t linger to lick her wounds but runs for the bridge.
Back at the grav anchor, Christian has his hands full with the men and yells for Arden to shut the plasma vent off. The console is a mess of gauges and dials and Arden pauses to make sense of it all. Christian has three men still mobile and he enlists them to haul the others into the rail car.
Christian: We need to go.
Arden susses out the controls and starts flipping switches and pushing buttons. The thrumming stops—he’d found the right ones. He takes a running start and jumps into the car with the others. The car is long, roomy enough for everyone and then some. We flip on the lights, disengage the brake, slam down the accelerator and we’re off. The tunnel proper swallows us up and everyone hunkers down for the ride. No one speaks. There’s nothing but the whine of the electric engine and the rush of air going past our heads. Rock walls flash by increasingly faster in the circumference of the car’s lights and beyond their glow only the black maw of the tunnel awaits.
Thirty kilometers an hour, forty….sixty…ninety.
And then light flickers at the end of the tunnel, getting brighter and bigger and suddenly, it’s the end of the line. We lurch to a stop, scramble out, pull the incapacitated to their feet and throwing arms over shoulders, we haul ass through the storm for the ship. The weather and lingering wisps of plasma batter and burn everyone as Christian wrestles the airlock open. The door swings wide, they fall in, they slam the door shut.
Saved!
Christian leaves Arden to settle the men in and goes to the bridge. Nika turns around at his entrance and he pauses a step when he sees her condition.
Christian: Where’d your eyebrows go?
Nika: Tahiti. Strap in.
Christian: (taking the copilot seat) Don’t worry. I have some kohl. No one’ll know the difference.
Coming down with the Gift was hard, but with the storm raging outside, going back up is going to be even harder. On the bridge, it’s a constant battle with the controls and in the engine room, it’s a nonstop run from engine to console to engine. Outside, Perdido howls and buffets the Gift, reluctant to let us go. Nika grits her teeth and rides it out, and we punch through the atmo and make orbit trailing streamers of smoke and fire. Rina has to cut the output on the engines a touch, they’re running hot and Nika has to work harder to compensate, but we’re finally free of Perdido. We manage to dock at the station. We do it with a bump and a rattle, but we dock.
Perdido Station: You guys, you sit tight for a little while. We’ll get a fire suppression crew out there for that fire on your ship. Nika: Excuse me? Perdido Station: Is that your ship is burning? Or is that something on your ship that’s burning?
Nika opens a channel to Rina in the engine room.
Nika: Rina. What’s burning? Rina: Gimme a sec. It’s a gorramm Christmas tree back here.
It’s our fuel reserves. Hydrogen, to be exact. Some debris must have punctured right through our hull into one of our tanks and the plasma must have ignited it. Rina shunts as much of the remaining hydro as possible into the other tanks and shuts off the intake on the damaged tank, isolating it. Rina informs Nika she’s getting in a suit to assess the damage outside the ship. Once outside, she eyes the breach in the hull and shakes her head.
Rina: (muttering) I work hard for living, I bring home Meow Mix… And this shit happens to my ship.
There’s more than just the hull breach to worry about. Heavy metal bits embedded themselves to the hull and burned in place, the remainder of which will have to be removed and any attendant hull damage repaired. Dings and scratches galore.
Meanwhile, Arden tends to everyone’s wounds and burns. He goes to Nika first, then Christian, only to be told to take care of the workers. He protests, but he goes. Later he returns to Nika and Christian and treats them for their burns and wounds, and finally does the same for himself.
It takes us a couple of days docked at the station to set things right again. In gratitude for saving her men, Moskalenko offers to foot the bill for our repairs once we make it to a civilized place and we take her up on it. Boros, where we are going next, has a major military base on it. We may be able to get repairs done there. Also, Moskalenko refuels our ship. Because of the damaged tank, we’re not able to fuel up to our entire 600 hours. We’re 50 hours short til that tank gets repaired.
And so, with our bearings righted and ship stabilized enough to travel, we bid Perdido Station farewell and set off for Boros, nine hours away.
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