I checked my Gizmo to see how much time I had left: thirty-five minutes.
And it wasn’t like I had until 0:00. That was just an estimate. Hopefully a little on the safe side. Nevertheless, with over two thousand people in town, some were sure to die ahead of schedule.
I “sheathed” the pipe by slipping it between my belt and jumpsuit. Alvarez was knocked out, breathing chloroform, had a broken arm, and was handcuffed. But I still wasn’t taking any chances. No more fucking ambushes.
I ran toward Life Support. I wheezed harder and harder and my throat swelled up—still pissed off about the recent strangulation. I probably had a hell of a bruise there but it hadn’t swollen shut. That was all that mattered.
I tasted the bile on my breath, but didn’t have time to rest. I powered through the obstacle course of bodies. I cranked up the flow rate on my air tank to get more oxygen into my aching lungs. It didn’t help much (that trick doesn’t work when the entire atmosphere is already oxygen). But at least the slight overpressure kept me from sucking in chloroform-riddled air around the edges. That was something.
I reached Life Support and waved Rudy’s Gizmo at the door. It clicked open.
Unconscious Vietnamese guys lay everywhere. I glanced at the main status screens along the wall. As far as the automated systems were concerned, everything was hunky-dory! Good pressure, plenty of oxygen, CO2 separation working perfectly… what more could a computer ask for?
Mr. Đoàn’s seat at the main panel was empty. I hopped into it and looked over the air-management controls. The writing was in Vietnamese, but I got the general idea. Mainly because one wall showed a map of every pipe and air line in the system. As you can imagine, it was a pretty big schematic.
I gave it a long, hard look. Right away, I picked out the emergency air system. All its lines were marked in red.
“Okay… where’s the actuation valve?” I said. I traced my finger along various red lines until I found one that entered Life Support itself. Then I found something that looked like a valve icon. “Northwest corner…”
The room was a maze of pipes, tanks, and valves. But I knew which one I needed now. The third from the left in the northwest corner. On my way there, I passed Mr. Đoàn lying on the floor. From the looks of things, he’d tried to get to the valve himself, but hadn’t made it.
I grabbed the valve with both hands and turned. The throaty roar of pressure release echoed throughout the room.
My Gizmo rang in my pocket. It was so unexpected I drew my pipe, ready for a fight. I shook my head at the silly move and re-sheathed my weapon. I answered the call.
“Jazz?!” came Dale’s voice. “You all right? We passed out there for a minute.”
“Dale!” I said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m in Life Support and I just opened the flush valve. You okay?”
“We’re awake. Feel like shit, though. No idea why we woke up.”
Sanchez spoke in the background. “Our lungs absorbed the chloroform out of the rover’s air. Once the ppm’s dropped below twenty-five hundred, it stopped working as an anesthetic.”
“You’re on speaker, by the way,” said Dale.
“Sanchez,” I said flatly. “So glad you’re well.”
She ignored my bitchiness. “Is the flush working?”
I ran back to the status screens. Each bubble now had multiple blinking yellow lights that hadn’t been there before.
“I think so,” I said. “There are caution and warning lights all over the place. If I’m reading this right, they’re probably the relief valves. It’s venting.”
I prodded a technician in the chair next to me. He didn’t stir. Of course, even with perfect air, it would take these guys a while to wake up. They’d been breathing nineteenth-century anesthetic for half an hour.
“Hang on,” I said. “I’m going to take a sniff.”
I pulled the mask away from my face for a second and took a very shallow breath. I immediately fell to the floor. I was too weak to stand. I wanted to puke but resisted the urge. I held the mask against my face again.
“…no good…” I murmured. “…air still bad…”
“Jazz?” Dale said. “Jazz! Don’t pass out!”
“ ’m’okay,” I said, getting up to my knees. Each breath of canned air made me feel better. “I’m… okay… I think we just have to wait. It takes a while to replace all this air. We’re good. We’re doing good.”
I guess the gods heard that and laughed their asses off. No sooner had I said it than the sound of air through the pipes quieted down and fell silent.
“Uh… guys… the air stopped.”
“Why?” asked Dale.
“Working on it!” I shot a look at the status screens. Nothing obvious there. Then I went back to the line schematics on the wall. The main valve was right there in Life Support and it led to a staging tank in that room. It read empty.
“Ugh!” I said. “We ran out of air! There’s not enough!”
“What?!” Dale said. “How can that be? Life Support has air to last months.”
“Not quite,” I said. “They have enough air to refill one or two bubbles and they have enough battery power to turn CO2 back into oxygen for months. But they don’t have enough oxygen to flush the entire city. It’s just not something anyone thought of.”
“Oh God…” said Dale.
“We’ve got one chance,” I said. “Trond Landvik stockpiled huge amounts of oxygen. It’s in tanks right outside.”
“That bastard,” said Sanchez. “I knew he was after my oxygen-for-power contract.”
I looked over the control board again. Thank god Vietnamese uses a superset of the English alphabet. One section of the schematic was labeled LANDVIK.
“Trond’s tanks are on the schematic!” I said.
“Of course they are,” said Sanchez. “Trond would have had to collude with them to make sure his air system could interface with theirs.”
I ran my finger along the map. “According to this, Trond’s tanks are already connected to the system. There’s a whole complicated set of valves in the way, but there’s a path.”
“So, do it!” Dale said.
“The valves are manual cranks and they’re outside,” I said.
“What?! Why the hell are there manual valves out on the surface?!”
“Safety,” I said. “Trond explained it to me earlier. Doesn’t matter. I just memorized the pipe layout. It’s complicated as hell and I don’t know what state the sub-valves will be in. I’ll work out what to do when I’m there.”
I bolted out of Life Support into the corridors of Armstrong.
“Wait, you’re going out?” Dale said. “Wearing what? Your EVA suit’s in here.”
“I’m on my way to Conrad Airlock and I’ve got a big pipe. I’ll pry open Bob’s locker and wear his gear.”
“Those lockers are centimeter-thick aluminum,” said Dale. “You’ll never get through in time.”
“Okay, good point. Uh…” I hurtled through the Armstrong–Conrad Connector tunnel and checked my Gizmo. We had twenty-five minutes left. “I’ll use a tourist hamster ball.”
“How will you turn the cranks?”
Goddammit, right again. Hamster balls had no arms, gloves, or articulation points at all. I’d have no way to grip anything outside.
“I guess you’ll have to be my hands. The tanks are in the triangle between Armstrong, Shepard, and Bean. Meet me at the Bean–Shepard Connector. I’ll need your help to get into the triangle.”
“Roger. Driving to the connector now. I’ll get as close as I can and walk the rest of the way.”
“How will you get out of the rover without killing Sanchez?”
“I’d like to know that too,” Sanchez added.
“I’ll put her in your suit before opening the airlock,” he said.