With the section sealed off, this team was responsible for damage assessment and control in the starboard aft compartments of Troop Deck. Two open squad bays; four cramped and complicated four-man compartments for NCOs, fitted around essential ship equipment; the shower hall; the heads; a crew lounge with battered couches and cube readers; and—taking up almost half the cubage—half the gymnasium, the other half being cut off by a section seal. Barin sent his team off to take readings in each compartment; he stayed by the command console, from which he could report results, or receive orders.
He felt a lurch in his stomach—the gravity generators again?—and glanced at the gauge nearest him. Sure enough, a two percent negative spike . . . the lights dimmed, then brightened. His team reported the first set of numbers, and Barin forwarded them through his console. A vast shudder rumbled through the deck . . . missile launches. Another.
Betenkin said, “Are we taking hits, sir?” in a voice two tones higher than usual.
Barin said, “Missile launchers,” almost in concert with Petty Officer O’Neil; their eyes met, and he saw that O’Neil was watching him just as he watched the others. O’Neil gave a short nod. Then the deck bucked beneath them, one great concussive blow. Barin swallowed and said, “That was incoming.” O’Neil grinned for a moment. “Check the seals first,” Barin said. Pressure had to be all right; he would have felt if it hadn’t been. He glanced down at his console. Two decks down a red blaze expanded across the ship’s schematic. Even as he recognized it, the loud-hailer came on. “Hull breach—hull breach—report all starboard aft teams—”
Barin pressed his code key and read off the current numbers. In his headset, the damage control officer said, “Serrano—get your team to Environmental, go down the portside access; watch the heads-up on the way down in case the aft locks don’t hold.”
He tried to remember what he’d been told about hull breaches. Everything tried to escape to vacuum: the air and all that could be moved by the explosive decompression. This left the damaged area clear, usually, of the noxious gases and thick smoke that endangered personnel when the ship was still whole but some system had fractured. But the next compartments, where there might be pressure loss, were likely to be cold, dark, and confusing.
In the aft portside passage, Barin and his team met up with the officer on site. The major glanced at his nametag, touched his compad, and said, “Serrano—good. We want you in SE-14. Pressure’s dropping, but slow enough it must be fairly small—but big enough nothing’s plugged it yet. Your report channel is eleven. Cycle through two at a time, and be careful. The pressure differential’s enough to knock you off your feet. You’ll go in number four, got that?”
Barin led the way into the lock. When it opened on the far side, he faced the starboard passage, now lit only by emergency lighting, and the long emergency bulkhead that separated the passage from the “plumbing works” of Environmental. Along it, several preformed partial pressure locks showed, each clearly labelled. He located #4, and, as the rest of his team cycled through, he opened the #4 emergency locker and handed out the elements of the single-person pressure lock. This was something they’d drilled in often enough: place the frame to the existing frame and seal, pop open the rest and check that the other side of the lock was closed. The first person through did not actually cycle through, but was pushed by the suction that pulled the lock into the low-pressure chamber and held it extended until the second locked the frame in place.
Barin checked that everything was ready, took another look at his suit readouts—grabbed hold of the safety bar of what would become the low-pressure side of the inner hatch, and popped the bulkhead’s preformed opening.
The emergency airlock, sucked through the opening with all the force of the pressure differential, hit him in the back like a truck, and he barely kept his grip on the safety bar. All around was a dark, dense, cold, whirling wind . . . he could see nothing, but he could feel the buffeting of air currents, and the cold now rapidly falling to the freezing point of water. His feet slithered on something incredibly slippery . . . ice already?
Air screamed through the crevices as it escaped, audible even inside the suit. Barin turned on his helmet lamp, and saw swirling fog, streamers of vapor pouring away from left to right. Environmental was the wettest place on the ship, barring the water reserves or a shower in use; here the air was more humid than anywhere else, and decompression chilled it below its ability to hold that water as invisible vapor.
“Lock’s up, sir,” he heard in his helmet com.
“Come through, but watch it—it’s slippery, dark, and windy in here.”
“Rig safety lines,” O’Neil said.
Now why hadn’t he thought of that? His suit had all the attachments ready. Barin managed to get the primary hookup out of its fitting and attached to the lock’s safety bar. Now he could move away a little . . . look for other points of attachment. He tried a cautious step away from the hatch and skidded on the wet deck, slithering into something round and hard. A culture tank? His helmet light didn’t show him anything identifiable but the fat shiny haunch of a metallic tank of some kind. It looked shinier than it should, and he rubbed it with his gloved hand, then wiped the glove on the chem-patch. A formula he didn’t recognize came up on his suit display. Not all water, then. It had a lot of C and H and O and some Cl. Hydrocarbon, his mind reminded him, and he didn’t need a laundry list to think of hydraulic fluid.
Slippery, flammable, and—if coming from a high-pressure leak—lethal to get near.
He switched his suit com to channel 11 and reported the presence of hydraulic fluid, then back to his own unit’s channel.
“Sir?”
“I’m over here . . .” he rotated his head, sending his helmet light in all directions. “I slid over here—we’ve got hydraulic fluid as well as water vapor. Show your lamps.”
Three feeble glows that could have been any distance. “Right, sir. We have five more to cycle through—three now clipped on the same safety bar. Have you found any other attachment points?”
“No,” Barin said. “Not yet.” He had only three meters of line on the primary attachment, and they couldn’t all clip on to the same bar—there wasn’t room. They could clip on each other, but they still needed other attachment points. He edged his way around the metal tank and found a handle of some sort. When he tugged, it held firm; by leaning close with his headlamp, he could see that it opened by turning, with a safety latch holding it closed. Good enough. “Found an attachment. Who’s in?”
“Wahn, Telleen, Prestin.”
“Wahn, clip onto my line, trail a line to the lock, and come to me.”
He felt the vibration in his safety line, as someone moved—and was there beside him.
“It’s only about two meters, sir, but you can’t see anything in this murk.”
“True enough. Let’s have that line—” Barin used a running clip to attach the line Wahn had trailed to the attachment he’d found. Now anyone could come that way. “Now you clip in.” Wahn did so, keeping a safety grip on Barin’s line while unclipping his own and reclipping it onto the tank handle. “Telleen, find my line, and give it a tug.” When he felt the tug, he said, “Now—unclip my line and put it on the trailer.”