Then I saw them. They both looked pale and woozy. Dale fell to the floor. Shit. The ISRO airlock had chloroform in its air. In the heat of the moment and all my deep planning I’d forgotten that little detail.
All right. One thing at a time. First, get the last door open. The rover had limited air, but Artemis had plenty. I spun the final hatch’s crank and tried to push it open. It didn’t budge.
Of course it didn’t. The rover was at lower pressure than the city because of the constant leak.
“Fuuuuck!” I said. I cranked the hatch’s central valve to equalize the airlock with the air on the other side. The ISRO equalization valve battled the leak. Which one had a higher airflow rate? I didn’t wait to find out.
I braced my back against the airlock outer wall and used both legs to kick the hatch. The first two attempts jarred it, but didn’t break the seal. The third did the trick.
The hatch clanked open. A whoosh of air rushed into the airlock and rover beyond. I wedged a foot in the opening to keep the hatch from closing against the airflow.
Dale and Sanchez were saved…sort of. If you consider breathing poison gas in a leaky pressure vessel to be “saved.”
My back hurt like hell. I’d be paying for all this tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow.
I pulled off my shoe and left it in place to keep the hatch open. I returned to the rover. Dale and Sanchez were completely unconscious at this point. Goddamn. Note to self: Don’t take the mask off.
Both of them were breathing steadily. I closed the rover’s inner airlock hatch to seal them in, then returned to the ISRO inner door. I shoved it open again (much easier because my shoe kept the door from re-sealing) and fell into the lab.
I retrieved my shoe and the hatch shut automatically against the rushing air.
I was in.
I sat on the floor and put my shoe back on. Then I checked the seal on my air mask. It seemed good. And I wasn’t puking or passing out, which I figured was a good sign.
The ISRO lab was littered with unconscious scientists. It was an eerie sight. Four of them had passed out at their desks, while one lay on the floor. I stepped over the one on the floor and made my way to the hall.
I checked my Gizmo. It had been twenty minutes since the chloroform leak started. So, if Sanchez’s estimate was correct, I had forty minutes left to fix the city’s air or everyone would die.
And it would be my fault.
I needed Rudy. Or, more accurately, I needed Rudy’s Gizmo.
Remember, Life Support is a secure area. You have to work there to get in—the doors won’t open unless they recognize your Gizmo. But Rudy’s Gizmo opens any door in town. Secure areas, homes, bathrooms, doesn’t matter. There’s nowhere Rudy can’t go.
His office on Armstrong Up 4 was just a few minutes’ run from the ISRO lab. And holy shit was that a surreal trip. Bodies littered the halls and doorways. It was like a scene from the apocalypse.
They’re not dead. They’re not dead. They’re not dead….I repeated the mantra to keep from losing my shit.
I took the ramps to get from level to level. The elevators would probably have bodies blocking the doors.
Armstrong Up 4 has an open space just near the ramps called Boulder Park. Why is it called that? No clue. While passing through, I tripped over a guy lying on his side and face-planted onto a tourist holding her unconscious toddler. She’d curled her body around the boy—a mother’s last line of defense. I got back up and kept running.
I slid to a stop at Rudy’s office door and barged in. Rudy was slumped over his desk. Somehow he looked poised even while knocked out. I searched his pockets. The Gizmo had to be in there somewhere.
Something caught my eye and bothered my brain. I couldn’t figure out what. It’s one of those warnings you get that’s more a sense of “wrongness” than anything else. But hell, everything was “wrong” at the moment. I didn’t have time for subconscious bullshit. I had a city to save.
I found Rudy’s Gizmo and slipped it into my pocket. My inner Jazz made another appeal to me, this time with more urgency. Something’s wrong, goddammit! it screamed.
I spared a second to look around the room. Nothing awry. The small, Spartan office was just as it had always been. I knew the place well—I’d been in there dozens of times when I was an asshole teenager, and I have a very good memory. Nothing was out of place. Not a single thing.
But then, as I left the office, it struck me: a blunt object to the back of my head.
My scalp went numb and my vision blurred, but I stayed conscious. It had been a grazing blow. A few centimeters to the left and I would have been leaking brains. I stumbled forward and turned to face my attacker.
Alvarez held a long steel pipe in one hand and an oxygen tank in the other. A hose ran from the tank directly to his mouth.
“You fucking kidding me?!” I said. “One other person awake and it’s you?!”