“Why don’t you just ask?” Ariel was always quicker to wake up than he was.
“Oh. Yeah.” What’s going on? he sent out over the comlink.
General alert,a featureless voice replied. The autopilot, no doubt. Life support system failure.
Life support! Derec suddenly felt his breath catch. What happened to it?
The oxygen regeneration system has failed.
He let his breath out again in a sigh of relief. Oxygen regeneration was serious, but not as serious as, say, a breach in the hull. They weren’t actually losing air, at least.
“There’s a problem with the oxygen regenerator,” he said to Ariel. “Come on, let’s see how bad it is.”
As they pulled on their robes and stepped out into the hallway, Derec realized that the best thing to do in a case like this was to go back to sleep and reduce their oxygen consumption while the robots fixed the problem, but the time to think of that would have been before the alarm woke everyone up, not after. He couldn’t have slept now unless he were drugged, and he had no intention of drugging himself in the middle of an emergency.
Shut off the alarm,he sent, and relative quiet descended upon the ship. There was still the clatter of feet and voices coming from the other bedrooms. Derec heard Avery demanding loudly that Lucius find his pants, and across the hall Wolruf howled something in her own tongue.
Ariel was already headed for the common room. Derec followed her down the hallway, through the now-unfurnished room, and through the open door beside the automat into the back part of the ship where the engines and other machinery stood.
The smell alerted him even before he saw the flickering glow or heard the crackle of flame. Something furry was burning. He looked over Ariel’s head and saw flame silhouetting three robots, Adam and Eve and Mandelbrot, who were all emptying fire extinguishers into the blaze. A lot more than just something furry was burning.
“Look out!” Ariel shouted, backing up and bumping into Derec as a tongue of flame shot out, engulfing one of the robots.
Derec reacted with almost instinctive speed. Wrapping an arm around Ariel, he pulled her back into the common room, shouted, “Door close!” and even as it began to slide shut added, “Make this door airtight and vent the engine room to space!”
The door shut with a soft thump, seemed to melt until it was just a ripple in the wall, then hardened. From beyond came a loud whoosh, diminishing quickly to silence.
Mandlebrot!Derec sent. Can you hear me?
I am receiving your transmission,Mandelbrot replied, always the stickler for accuracy.
Are you okay?
I am functional; however, I am drifting away from the ship.
“Frost!” Derec said aloud. “I blew Mandelbrot out into space along with the fire! “ He turned and ran for the control room, sending, Hang on, old buddy. We’re coming after you. How about Adam and Eve? Are you guys still there?
We are,another voice sent, and the fire is extinguished. We will assess the damage while you retrieve Mandelbrot.
No!Mandelbrot sent. You must not. The engines could have been damaged in the fire.
I’lljust use the attitude controls, then.
Whatever Mandelbrot said to that, Derec never heard it. He collided headfirst with Avery as Avery came out of his bedroom, sending both of them sprawling on the floor.
“Why don’t you look where you’re going for a change?” Avery growled. “What’s going on around here, anyway?”
“Fire in the engine room,” Derec answered, getting to his feet and offering Avery a hand up. Lucius, still under Avery’s orders, beat him to it. Derec shrugged and dropped his hand. “We’ve got it out, but Mandelbrot got blown into space. I’m going after him.”
“What burned?”
Avery’s question reminded Derec that they had other problems than just a robot overboard. Some part of him hadn’t wanted to face that just yet, still didn’t, but Ariel was standing just behind him and she said, “Life support. The whole recycling system was on fire.”
“What?”
Derec felt tempted to say, “You should have your hearing checked,” but he suppressed the urge. Instead he said, “See for yourself, but be careful. The engine room is still in vacuum.” He moved around Avery and on toward the control room, Ariel in tow.
Wolruf was already there, peering into a short-range navigation holo-screen while she wove the attitude control joystick through a gentle loop that brought the ship around to aim toward Mandelbrot. Internal gravity kept them from feeling the acceleration, but through the view screen Derec could see a tiny stick figure grow into a robot as they drew near. Mandelbrot held his arms and legs out as far as they would go, either to help his rescuers see him or to minimize his spin. Wolruf slowed the ship with the forward jets rather than spinning it around and braking with the main engines, so they got to watch him grow larger and larger until he thumped spread-eagled into the viewscreen.
Derec and Ariel both flinched, and Wolruf laughed. The viewscreen was much more than just a simple pane of glass; it was an array of optical sensors on the hull transmitting a composite image to the display inside. The hull in between was just as thick as anywhere else on the ship. Derec knew that, but it worked like a window just the same, and his reflexes treated it as such.
Mandelbrot crawled off the sensor array and disappeared from view. Thank you, he sent, and moments later he added, I am inside the engine room again.
How bad is it?Derec asked.
Very bad,the robot replied.
“It looks like the old question of who quits breathing first,” Avery said. They were sitting at the table in the common area, three humans and a caninoid alien. The four robots stood against the walls around the table, Mandelbrot behind Derec, Lucius behind Avery, and Adam and Eve together behind Ariel. Wolruf sat alone at her end of the table. It was more than coincidence. With a life threatening crisis on board, the robots’ First Law imperative to protect humans from harm didn’t extend to her.
Avery looked genuinely worried for the first time in Derec’s memory. His face was pale and drawn, an effect his white hair and sideburns only accentuated. He held his hands together in front of him on the table, neither gesturing with them nor drumming with them as he would have if he was just speaking normally.
“The recycler is toast,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion. “We have enough air left for three days for the four of us, four days if we sleep all the way. It’s five more days to Ceremya. That means one of us has to stop breathing, and I say the obvious choice is Wolruf.”
“I’ll try,” the alien said, puffing out her cheeks and rolling her eyes around in their sockets. When that failed to get a laugh, she let her breath out in a sigh and said, “Thought a little ‘umor might lighten the mood. Sorry.”
“This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“I don’t even think it should be a matter,” Derec put in. ‘\We should be spending our time thinking of a way to keep us all alive, not arguing about who we sacrifice. What about using Keys?”
The Keys to which he referred were Keys to Perihelion, Avery’s name for an experimental teleportation device he had either created or discovered when he built the first Robot City. With a Key, a person or a robot could make a direct point-to-point hyperspace jump without a ship.