Draft 2
Chapter 8
Helen stood in the hexagonal staging room of the Persephone’s primary airlock, locking the brass collar of her Engineering EVA suit into place.
Magnus had offered to stay behind and spot her. According to the Omni-Corp safety manuals, babysitting active cryo-umbilicals was strictly a two-person job. But the freighter was understaffed, and Helen had waved the deckhand off, telling him to go enjoy his shore leave while she handled the maintenance.
The suit was an Omni-Corp hand-me-down patched with sealant tape at the elbows and knees. As she pulled the helmet over her head, it sealed, instantly cutting off the thrum of the ship. Now, the only things she could hear were her own breathing and the crackle of the comms in her ear.
Her Heads-Up Display (HUD) projected a blue overlay of oxygen levels, suit pressure, and external temperatures across her visor.
“Comms check, Seven. Do you read me?”
“Loud and clear, Madam.” Seven’s voice came through her earpiece from his docked position at the primary engineering terminal. “You will be pleased to know that I am safe within the ship’s climate-controlled interior. Internal ambient temperature is a pleasant seventy degrees Fahrenheit. My servos are well-lubricated and entirely frost-free.”
Helen punched the airlock cycle button with her insulated glove. “Good for you. Keep an eye on the intake telemetry. This fuel is cheap, and I need you to tell me the second the lines start choking.”
“I am already deeply offended by the data pouring into the mainframe,” Seven said. “I can confirm the liquid hydrogen they are pumping is only eighty percent pure. The remaining twenty percent is a hazardous mix of unrefined ice-slush and metallic particulates.”
“That’s why I’m going out there.”
The inner doors sealed behind her. The airlock purged its oxygen, dropping the room into a vacuum, and then the outer doors slid apart.
Helen stepped out onto the ship’s exterior gantry. Her magnetic boots engaged with a clank, clank, anchoring her to the grated metal to compensate for the moon’s low gravity.
Charon Outpost was a sprawling mining community built directly into the rock and ice of Pluto’s orbital twin. Seeing it in person was a stark reminder of how far from Earth they really were.
Skeletal drilling rigs pierced the moon’s crust, mining ancient ice to be refined into hydrogen fuel. They were illuminated by clusters of floodlights and neon advertisements for cheap space-bars and black-market betting parlors.
Plumes of super-heated vapor vented into the vacuum from underground refineries, creating a fog that clung to the docking rings. Other freighters were clamped into nearby docks.
Helen lumbered along the hull toward the Persephone’s primary fuel port. Two frost-covered umbilicals were clamped into the ship’s ventral hull, pumping super-cooled cryogenic fuel into the tanks.
The hoses were thick as tree trunks. Helen could feel the vibration of the fuel rushing through them.
“Filter one is approaching critical mass, Madam,” Seven said. “Particulate blockage at seventy percent. Pressure is climbing.”
“I see it.” Helen reached down to her EVA harness, unclipped her thermal lance, and let the magnetic safety tether spool out.
She anchored her boots on both sides of the umbilical’s filter housing. The manual purge lever on the side of the filter was encased in three inches of solid ice.
Helen thumbed the ignition on the lance. A bright blue, six-inch blade of concentrated plasma erupted from the nozzle.
She held the heat against the frozen mechanism, causing the ice to boil instantly into a vapor. Within seconds, the lever was exposed. She killed the torch, let it drop to hang from its tether, and grabbed the lever with both hands.
“Madam, filter one is at eighty-five percent. A rupture will occur in exactly one minute and twelve seconds. You will be flash-frozen in approximately 1.4 seconds. Please avoid this outcome.”
“I’m trying!”
She grunted, leaning her entire body weight backward to pull the heavy lever. It groaned and then slammed open.
A high-pressure geyser of gray sludge blasted out of the side-vent. The force of the release caused the umbilical to buck like a serpent. Helen tried to lock her elbows to hold the lever steady, but she wasn’t strong enough. The bucking hose slammed into her shoulder, knocking her arm back.
The vent jerked upward, and the geyser of super-cooled slush ricocheted off the hull and sprayed across her chest and helmet.
Her suit’s thermal alarms blared, flashing red across her HUD. A layer of frost bloomed across her visor, blinding her.
“Thermal integrity compromised! Core temperature dropping!” Seven yelled over the comms.
Blinded and freezing, Helen refused to let go. She grabbed the thrashing hose with her left arm while her right hand fumbled for the lever. Her fingers were going numb. She found the steel grip, threw her body weight over it, and wrenched it back to the closed position.
The hissing stopped. The hose went slack. The pressure normalized. She had closed it.
Helen collapsed backward onto the hull. Her shoulder throbbed where the hose had hit her. She raised a glove and scraped the ice off her visor until she could see again.
“Purge complete, Madam. Intake flow returning to acceptable parameters. However, your suit’s thermal gel is severely depleted. I highly recommend not being sprayed again.”
“No kidding.”
She pushed herself up. From her vantage point, she had a perfect view of the flex-glass boarding tube extending down to the Outpost’s cargo docks.
The crew was leaving.
She watched Janet walk down the slanted corridor first with a satchel in hand.
A moment later, Magnus strutted down the tube. He was a man in need of a heavy drink, a loud room, and a bar fight.
Then came Claude. The science officer was pushing an anti-gravity cart. It was currently empty. It was an odd sight; Omni-Corp researchers rarely did their own heavy lifting, and she couldn’t imagine what a corporate scientist needed with an industrial loader-cart in the slums of a refueling depot.
Finally, Ingrid appeared. The navigator strolled down the tube, looking unbothered and ready for a relaxing two days of shore leave.
And here she was, half-frozen and tending toxic sludge. She was the help. The blue-collar mechanic keeping the ship alive. Meanwhile, Ingrid got to stroll off the ship like a tourist.
And worse, John was still trapped inside, buried under a mountain of customs paperwork, dealing with dockmasters and corporate red tape.
Helen checked the glowing digital clock on her helmet’s HUD.
15:15
Her date with John at The Last Drop was at nineteen-hundred hours. That gave her less than four hours to finish purging the sludge, detach the umbilicals, thaw out, and get to Sector 4.
She stared down at the neon lights of the outpost slums below. She desperately needed this date. She needed to sit across from her husband, look him in the eye over a cheap drink, and remember why they were putting themselves through this fourteen-month round trip. She needed to hear him laugh, the way he had laughed with Ingrid on the bridge. She needed to know they were still a team.
“Madam, filter two is currently registering a seventy-four percent blockage. The pressure is rising rapidly. Given your recent physical performance, I calculate a forty percent chance you will slip again.”
“I’m on it, Seven.”
A looping video of Helen outside the Persephone, using her thermal lance to melt the ice off a frozen purge lever on the hull.
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