“Easy, buddy.”
“I could really use something for this leg —”
“Mike,” Bella said, “you’re probably going to have to deal with the pain until we get you inside. If you were wearing a softsuit, we might be able to get morphine into you. But you’re not.”
“Bella’s right about the painkiller,” Parry said. “It’ll have to wait. But you’re a tough sonofabitch and I know you can take it.”
“If you say so, Chief.”
“I also know that a broken leg isn’t going to kill you. Look on the bright side: it might even excuse you from any hazardous duties once we get to Janus.”
“But I’ll still qualify for that bonus money, right?”
“And a medical claim into the bargain. And compensation for psychological trauma resulting from repeated exposure to Italian opera.”
Takahashi managed a grunt of approval. “Maybe the pain isn’t so bad after all.” Then his voice took on an ominous tone. “Oh, wait a minute.”
“What’s up?”
“I’m seeing something here… on my HUD.” He fell silent.
“Talk to me,” Parry said.
“Suit says there’s a problem. I’m getting a red light on thermal regulation.”
“The backpack’s having a bit of trouble dumping excess heat, but we’ve still got plenty of time before that becomes a problem for you.” Parry sounded so glib he almost believed it himself.
He looked up, alerted by a change in the play of light along the length of the tanks. The rescue party approached, helmet lights bobbing as they completed the last part of their journey using their hands and feet. Bright-yellow emergency equipment festooned their suits.
“Cavalry’s here,” Parry said.
The three-person squad reached the hardening sprayrock.
Despite Parry’s presence, they insisted on testing it cautiously before joining him around Takahashi’s half-buried form. Parry’s HUD dropped names onto the group: Chanticler, Herrick and Pagis. The first two were aquatics, from his own mining squad, while Pagis was one of Svieta’s propulsion engineers. They were all people with a lot of EVA time, used to working under pressure.
They were about to get better at it, Parry thought.
“You see the problem,” he said.
Belinda Pagis was the most technically minded of the three. Through her visor Parry saw her pull a face as she appraised the situation. “That’s not good,” she said, under her breath, but loud enough to carry on the open channel. “We’re going to have —”
“What’s not good?” Takahashi cut across her.
“Easy, Mike,” Parry said. “You just sit back and…” He trailed off, lost for words.
“We need to get him out of there,” Pagis said. “That suit’s going to start roasting him alive in about ten —”
“Guys,” Parry said. “Mike’s listening in.”
“Sorry,” Pagis said hastily. “I thought you were on a different —”
“Well, I’m not,” Takahashi said, “but you don’t have to pussy-foot around the truth. I know exactly how much shit I’m in.”
“That’s why we’re going to get you out of there, and fast,” Parry said, oozing false confidence. “But you have to help us, too. I want you to keep breathing nice and easy.”
“You’re worried about me asphyxiating? Even I’m not worried about asphyxiating. I have ten hours of reserve in this suit.”
“Air isn’t the problem,” Parry said. “It’s the load on the backpack. The harder you breathe, the more the pumps and scrubbers have to work. That’s what we need to think about. That’s why you need to keep calm.”
“I have a broken leg here.”
“And you’re doing great.” Parry could have strangled Pagis. Until she had opened her mouth, he had really felt that he had the situation under control. He glanced at Chanticler and Herrick, who were busy removing gear from their suits, then back to Takahashi. “We’re going to start digging you out,” he said. “I know you want to be out of there as fast as possible, but there’s only one way we can do this. We have to expose your backpack, which means digging under you.”
Takahashi said nothing. Parry dared to think that he had won the argument. He motioned to Herrick to pass him one of the digging tools, hoping that the diamond-bladed trowel was going to be hard enough to cut through the rapidly setting sprayrock.
Then Takahashi said, with disarming detachment, “I have another red light on backpack systems. I think a pump’s just failed.”
“We’re digging,” Parry said, gouging the blade into the blue-grey crust.
“It’s getting warm in here,” Takahashi said.
Chanticler and Pagis had begun digging with larger versions of the tool Parry had borrowed, and for a few deceptive minutes they looked to be doing the job. The diamond-tipped blades cut into the top crust to a depth of several centimetres, allowing the sprayrock to be levered away in fist-sized lumps. Parry began to let himself believe that they were going to get out of this without losing a man. They were making slow, steady progress, exposing more and more of the upper part of the backpack. Then the going got harder. They had excavated a square metre of crust to a depth of five centimetres with relative ease when the tools suddenly encountered much harder resistance. It was as if they gone from clay to granite.
It took ten minutes to clear the next centimetre, and by then the tools were beginning to blunt. They were using diamond tools to cut through something that was itself approaching the hardness of diamond.
“Are you nearly done?” Takahashi asked. His voice sounded faint, like a man on the edge of dozing off.
Parry placed his tool down on one of the adhesive patches they had attached to the crust. It was no use. The next centimetre would be even harder. He used his right hand to flip up an armoured panel on the sleeve covering his left arm. Pinching his gloved fingers clumsily together, he tugged out a spool of fibre-optic line and offered the plug-tipped end to Belinda Pagis. She took it with a nod and slipped the line into a compatible socket in her own suit.
“We’re not going to get him out in time, are we?” she said. “The only thing that will get through sprayrock at this hardness is a laser or a torch, but if we damage that backpack before we can free his legs, he’s already dead.”
Behind her faceplate, Pagis’s eyes darted anxiously left and right. “We need more time.”
“We haven’t got any more time.”
“Maybe we could rig up some kind of pressure tent,” she said. “If we could string a ceiling across him —”
“We’d never be able to make it airtight where it touched the sprayrock,” Parry said.
“Then we use sprayrock itself, form a kind of igloo around him. We seal it at the top, then pump air in.”
“Tricky even if we had gravity, Belinda.”
“We have to do something.”
“I’m thinking,” Parry said. Movement caught his eye again. Ryan Axford was gingerly making his way onto the sprayrock carrying a bright-orange medical case. Wolinsky and Herrick helped him keep upright relative to the crust. The medic had put in the basic minimum of suit training, but he lacked the easy agility that came with thousands of hours of EVA time. When Parry unplugged the fibre-optic link to Pagis and switched back onto the general channel, the first thing he heard was Axford’s too-heavy breathing. He sounded worse than Takahashi. Axford moved in front of the buried man and knelt down, anchoring himself with the patches on his knees. He fixed the case to the ground and thumbed open chunky latches. Inside was a gleaming array of medical equipment, packed tight as a puzzle, and three large tanks of pressurised gas. One metallic blue tank had an angel motif sprayed near the top.
Takahashi’s backpack was still largely buried, but his much smaller chestpack was fully exposed. Axford flipped aside the plastic cover that protected the chestpack’s diagnostic traces. He raised a hand to his visor, shielding his gaze as he tried to make sense of the trembling histograms and snake-like pul
ses. With surprising deftness he tapped commands into the little keypad next to the read-out panel, cycling through display options.
After a few moments he paused long enough to look up and make eye contact with Takahashi. Axford nodded once: an acknowledgement that promised no miracles, but that he would do all he could.
Axford then turned to Parry and tapped a finger against his sleeve. Parry spooled out the fibre-optic line and plugged in.
“He doesn’t need to hear this,” Axford said, “but it isn’t good. He’s already suffering the early stages of heat exhaustion. It’s like a hot day in Manila in that suit.”
“It’s only going to get hotter,” Parry said.
Axford looked at the abandoned excavation. “You can’t get him out, can you?”
“It’s not looking good.”
“Then I may have to euthanise him.”
Parry thought he had misheard. “I’m sorry?”
“I can put him under quickly if I alter his gas mixture. He’s already in pain.”
“Let me get this straight.” Parry strove to keep the edge of hysteria from his voice. “You’re talking about killing him.”
“I’m talking about shutting down central-nervous-system activity. We do it cleanly and quickly, and then we crack open that suit and pump it full of hydrogen sulphide.” Axford touched the metallic-blue gas tank. “He’ll cool quickly. Then we cut him out as fast as we can. Once he’s back aboard the ship, I’ll run a saline flush to remove the remaining blood oxygen from his system.”
“And then you revive him?”
“No. That’s not something I’m capable of doing. That’ll have to wait until we get back home.”
“Jesus, Ryan. Is that the best you can offer?”
“If he burns up in that suit and suffers cardiac arrest, ischemic damage will destroy critical brain structure within four to six minutes. I’m giving him a shot at surviving.”
“Some shot.”
“It’s a high-risk procedure designed for situations just like this.”
“And you know what to do?”
“It’s already in the book. Operation Frost Angel.”
After a horrified silence, Parry said, “How many of these have you done?”
“This’ll be my first.”
“And now you get to test this on Mike?”
“Don’t sound so horrified, Boyce. I’m trying to save his life.”
It was the first time he had ever heard Axford angry. Parry had the uncomfortable realisation that he had trespassed into the area of another man’s professional expertise: just as if Axford had tried to lecture him on the right way to dig a mass-driver pit. “I’m sorry. It’s just —”
“Clinical? Yes, that’s rather the point.”
Parry found that he needed to get his own breathing under control before he tripped his own suit’s heat overload. “How much time before you have to do that to him?”
“The sooner the better. It’ll take time to put him under… I wouldn’t want to run the hydrogen sulphide exposure while he’s conscious. There’s something else, too. This may be the hard part.”
“What?”
“We’ll need consent.”
Parry closed his eyes and wished he could be somewhere else. “I’ll issue it, if that’s his only way out.”
“Not from you,” Axford said. “From Mike. He has to know what he’s getting himself into.” He reached into the medical case and removed a plastic laminated card the size of a dinner menu. He opened it and passed it to Parry. The card was printed with bold text accompanied by simplified medical diagrams in primary colours. It looked like the kind of thing they put in aircraft, showing how to use the escape slides. The figures in the diagrams had the same look of blank, fatalistic serenity. Attached to the sheet by a nylon line was a magic marker, chunky enough to be gripped in a spacesuit glove.
“Oh, no,” Parry said.
“Oh, yes,” said Axford. “This is the only way he gets a ticket back home.”
“And when he gets home — what then?”
“We hand him to the Chinese. Or keep him on ice until we can bring him back to life ourselves.”
“There is no other choice, is there?” Parry said heavily after a few moments.
Axford shook his head.
Parry unplugged from the medic. “Mike… Are you still hearing me?”
“I’m here,” Takahashi said faintly. “Is that Ryan with you?”
“Ryan’s here.” But that’s as far as the good news goes, Parry thought. “Mike, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Ryan says it’s too dangerous to get you out with cutting torches. I don’t like it, but I think he’s right. None of us are good enough to guarantee that we won’t touch your backpack or pierce your suit. So we’re going to try something different, if you agree to it.”
Takahashi must have heard something in his voice. “And if I don’t agree to it?”
“Then we’ll do our best with the torches.”
“Tell me what the other plan is.”
“The other plan is —” In his hands, the laminated sheet trembled uncontrollably.
“Parry, just tell me.”
“There’s a contingency for this, a procedure. Ryan will put you under… render you unconscious.”
“He needs to know the facts,” Axford said firmly. “We need to be clear that we’re not just talking about unconsciousness here.”
Parry held the medical sheet up to Takahashi’s faceplate and tapped his finger against the cartoon man whose head was a cross section, revealing roselike whorls of brain and brainstem. Boxed and arrowed flatlines indicated the absence of activity in the CNS.
“Ryan will use your suit controls to euthanise you. It’ll be painless… like going to sleep.”
“No —” Takahashi began.
“Listen,” Parry insisted, “there’s a good reason for this. When you’re out… when you’re under… Ryan can preserve you. You stay like that until we get you back home.”
“I’m dead,” he said numbly.
“You’re in stasis,” Axford said, working the Frost Angel tank from the medical case. “What matters to me is that there’ll still be a chance that you can be brought back.”
“What kind of a chance?”
“Better odds than if we try to cut you out of this. That’s the one thing I’m certain of.”
“He’s right,” Parry said. “This is the way it has to go down, Mike.”
“There must be something else you can try before we take that route,” Takahashi said desperately.
‘There isn’t,“ Axford said. ”And we’re already short on time. You know this, Mike. If our places were reversed, would you trust yourself to cut me out?“
“I’d try.”
“I wouldn’t let you,” Parry said. He pushed his faceplate as close to the other man’s as he could. It looked warm and wet in there, like the inside of a greenhouse. “Ryan needs your consent. You have to read this and sign it.”
“No.”
Parry pushed the magic marker into Takahashi’s glove and squeezed the fingers until they gripped. “Just sign the damned thing, Mike.”
Takahashi let the pen go. “I can’t.”
Parry grabbed it and forced it back into Takahashi’s glove. “Sign it, goddamn you. Sign it and live.”
“I can’t.”
Red lights were pulsing all across Takahashi’s chestpack. The suit was beginning to fail, relinquishing its duty of preservation. Parry closed his own gloved hand around Takahashi’s and steered the tip of the pen towards the consent box.
All they needed was a mark… an attempt at a signature.
“Mike, do this for me. For all your friends.”
Another red light lit up on the chestpack. Then all the lights flashed once and faded to black. Deep in the suit, some critical circuit had just failed. Parry pushed the pen towards the sheet and started to form the upsweep of an M, and then felt — he hoped — Takahashi’s hand move with some
intent of its own. The tip slid across the consent box, forming a mark that could almost have been Takahashi’s signature.
Almost.
Parry let Takahashi’s hand drop the marker and turned back to Axford. “It’s your show now, Ryan.”
Axford waved Parry aside and began to tap commands into the chestpack keypad. The lights flickered back on again, dimmer now. Axford entered some more instructions and then the full significance of what was happening must have dawned on Takahashi, because he tried to push Axford away, out of reach of the chestpack. Axford fell back on his haunches.
“Help me,” he said to Parry. “Hold his arms.”
Parry looked at his friend, taking in the utter fear he saw behind the steam-smeared faceplate.
“I don’t think he wants this to happen any more,” Parry said.
“It doesn’t matter what he wants,” Axford answered. “I’ve got consent now.”
SIX
It was not the first time that someone had died during Rockhopper operations, and Bella doubted it would be the last. But that didn’t mean it would be business as usual from now on: although Bella had seen her crew snap back into action only a day or two after a death, sometimes it took much longer. The process of recovery never appeared to have much to do with the popularity of the crewmember involved, or the circumstances in which they had died; it was governed by subtler forces than that, and Bella did not have their measure.
She coped in her own way. Takahashi’s medical status might be open to debate, but in her heart, Bella believed it to be permanent and irreversible death, and she treated it as such. She composed letters of condolence, trying to strike the right balance between respectful formality and the personal touch. It was easier than with some of the dead; Mike Takahashi had no close family, so the letters were going to distant relatives and friends.
Sometimes, writing those letters of condolence, Bella found herself wondering who they would find to write to if she were to die. She knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of such a message: she had been expecting a call to tell her when Garrison was being rotated back from Big Red. Instead she heard that his shuttle had smeared itself over half of the Sinai Planum after an aerobrake failure. He’d been returning from Deimos.