“Come on,” said George. “Tell us more about that opera singer. Is it true they have specially developed muscles?”
Chapter Four
“I didn’t ask you if it was ‘going fine,’” Heris said. “I asked you what the sulfur extraction rate was. Do you know, or not?” With each day, her unease about the yacht’s basic fabric and systems had grown. Getting answers from the crew had turned out to be harder than she expected.
The moles looked at one another before Timmons answered. “Well . . . pretty much, Cap’n. It’s below nom at the moment, but it usually runs that way ’cause that dauber wants a sulf-rich sludge for his veggie plots.”
It took Heris a moment to translate civtech slang and decide this meant Lady Cecelia’s gardener wanted more sulfur in the first-pass sludge. In the meantime, they still had not answered as she thought they should. She let the steel edge her voice. “Below nom is not what I’m looking for. What, precisely, is the number you have for sulfur clearance?” Again, the sidelong look from one mole to another. This time it was Kliegan who answered.
“It’s . . . ah . . . zero point three. Of first-sig nom, that is—”
“Which is . . . ?” prompted Heris; she could feel temper edging higher.
“Well, the book says one point eight, but this system’s never worked any better’n one point six, just under first-sig. Mostly we run about two sigs below, say about point seven or so. System’s underutilized, so it’s not that important. It’s rated for a population of fifty, and we don’t have that many aboard.”
Heris closed her eyes briefly, running over the relevant equations in her head. Sulfur clearance was only one of the major cycles, but critical to the ship’s welfare because errors could not only make people sick, but degrade many ship components as well. Delicate com equipment didn’t like active sulfur radicals in the ship’s atmosphere. She added ship’s crew, house staff, and owner’s family. “In case you haven’t noticed,” she said briskly, “we now have fifty-one humans and a long voyage ahead of us. I presume you flushed the tanks and re-inoculated them while we were in port—?” But the hangdog looks told her they hadn’t. “And the last logged maintenance by offship personnel was this—Diklos and Sons, Baklin Station?”
“That’s right, ma’am,” Timmons said. “They couldn’t have done such a good job, fancypants as they are, ’cause the system never did pick up the points, but Captain Olin said never mind—”
“Oh, he did?” Heris struggled to keep her thoughts off her face. First his demand for an odd, inconvenient course that did not meet the owner’s needs, and now a tolerance for malfunctioning environmental equipment—something no sane captain would have. Failing to order the tanks flushed and recharged at Rockhouse might have been spite—revenge for being fired—but until then he had risked his own life as well. What could have made the risk worth it? “We’d better see how bad it is,” she said briskly. “Suit up and we’ll go take a look—”
“You, Captain?” asked Iklind. He almost never spoke, she’d discovered, letting chatty Timmons say anything necessary. But now he looked worried.
Heris let her brows rise. It had worked on other ships; it should work here. “Did you think I wouldn’t want to check for myself?”
“Well, it’s not that, Captain . . . only . . . these things can smell pretty bad.” Pretty bad was an entirely inadequate description of a malfunctioning sulfur loop, and she was sure more than the sulfur scrubbers were in trouble. Once the pH had gone sour, many of the enzymes in other loops worked erratically, as the chemistry fluctuated.
“That’s why we’ll be suited,” she said. When they didn’t move she said. “Five minutes, in the number four access bay.”
“Complete suits?” asked Timmons. “They’re awfully hot—”
“You prefer to risk the consequences?” Heris asked. “With a system you know is malfunctioning?”
“Ah . . . it’s just stinks,” Timmons said. When she glared at him, he said, “All right, Captain. Suits.” But as he left, she heard him mutter, “Damn lot of nonsense. Can’t be enough reaction in that loop to give us mor’n a headache at worst.”
Quickly, Heris gave Gavin his orders for the next hour: which compartments to seal, which backup crew to have ready, suited, in case of trouble. Then into her own suit—the cost of which had come from the advance on her contract, and which she never begrudged. Whatever else on this gilded cesspool of a yacht did or did not work as designed, her own personal self-contained suit would . . . or her family would enjoy the large sum which Xeniks guaranteed if any of its suits failed. She wasn’t worried—only twice in the past fifty years had Xeniks had to pay out.
When she was still a corridor away from the access bay, the alarm went off. For an instant she thought something had gone wrong on the bridge, but then she realized what it must be. One of those fools hadn’t waited for her.
“Captain!” Gavin bleated in her ear. She thumbed down the volume of the suit comunit.
“What is it?” she asked. “I’m at E-7, right now.” Ahead of her, a gray contamination barrier flapped down from the overhead and snicked tight, its central access closed.
“Computer says dangerous chemical—sulfur something—and the motion sensor said someone was there, but isn’t moving. But they’re in suits—”
“Get those backups down here,” Heris said, mentally cursing civilians in general and the ship’s former captain in particular. “Make sure they have their helmets locked on. I’m going in.” Despite her faith in Xeniks’s legendary suits, she shivered a moment. The gas in there was deadlier than many military weapons, but so familiar throughout human history that people just did not respect it. She wriggled through the access iris, which lengthened into a tube and sealed itself behind her. The suit’s own chemical sensors flicked to life, giving the readout she expected: hydrogen sulfide, here in less than life-threatening concentration.
Heris hurried, even though she knew it would almost certainly be too late. Around the corner, she came upon Timmons, who had suited up but not locked on his helmet. Presumably he’d planned to do so when he got to the access bay itself. He lay sprawled on the floor, one arm outstretched toward Iklind, slumped against the open access, wearing no protective gear at all.
She went to Timmons first, locking his helmet in place and turning his oxygen supply to full with the external override. Her suit had all the necessary drugs for standard industrial inhalation accidents—but she’d never used it, nor was she a medic. She’d have to rely on the backup team. Iklind wasn’t breathing at all, and no wonder—the hydrogen sulfide concentration in here had peaked at over 1,000 ppm, according to the monitor above the open access hatch. Inside, someone—presumably Iklind—had cracked the seal on a sludge tank. It was brimful, far above the safety line. A black line of filth drooled over its lip.
Heris picked up the wrench on the floor, closed the cover, and tightened the seal, then closed the hatch. Now the monitor indicated the concentration was below 200 ppm, still dangerous but not instantly lethal. They were lucky, she thought, that the agitator hadn’t been on in the sludge tank (and why not?) or the concentration could have been a log or so higher.
A shadow moved at the corner of her vision. The backup team—that would be the number two engineering officer and the off-shift senior mole—came around the corner and stopped. Even through their helmets their eyes showed wide and staring.
“Come on,” Heris said. “Get Timmons to the medbox—he might have a chance.” It seemed to her they moved too slowly, but they did wrestle Timmons back up the corridor toward the contamination barrier. Heris called the bridge. “Iklind’s dead,” she said. “Hydrogen sulfide—apparently he opened the sludge tank without any protective gear—” Gavin started to say something, and she overrode him. “We have three problems here—Timmons first: is that medical AI capable of handling inhalation injuries? Second: we’ve got to clear up the rest of the contamination, and the system is too overloaded to resorb it unless you can come up with a cargo section full of reactant. And third, of course, is Iklind. We need medical and legal evaluation; I will take that up with Lady Cecelia. Oh—and another thing—we’re not going to continue in this unsafe condition. I want Sirkin to plot a course to the nearest major repair facility, preferably on the way to our destination.”