"Quick and dirty calculations show all of the water and one full sewer plant," Mija announced over the deck intercom speakers. "We would need the water in there to keep the sludge from solidifying."
"Okay. I figured we'd need the water. We have to purge the hot liquid metal out of the pipes now! There is no place to do that quickly but here," Joe said as he pointed to the pipe that Jimmy had been beating with the big fucking wrench.
"Joe, that will kill us," Fireman's Apprentice King said in a panic.
"Like we weren't dead already . . . but maybe not if I'm in the shithole," Joe said. "Jimmy, get the hell out of here now, that is an order."
"Joe, we can't fit in there. The biggest openings are only thirty centimeter pipes into the topside of it. And the topside is four stories up," Mija corrected him.
"I know that, Mija Kitty. Once Jimmy is out you will close off this room including all electronic hatches and exhaust ports. This is gonna be some shit." Hull Technician Joe Buckley took the big fucking wrench from King and stood in front of the main pressure-drain valve on the bottom of the sewage bladder and started banging the living shit out of it. "Jimmy, I thought I told you to get the fuck out of here."
"Sorry, HT. Guess I'm just hardheaded." Jimmy picked up a second BFW. "You're gonna need some help to bust that one. It's too big."
"Suit yourself. But once it goes you get as high as you can on the aft wall. Mija, the instant this deck is filling with shit you purge the heat pipes for the forward DEGs into this room and then flow the water and the shit through the DEG coolant pipes. Got it?"
Joe raised the giant pipe wrench and brought it down against the valve stem at the boot of sewage tank. Clang. Then Jimmy hit it with his giant crescent wrench, clang, then Joe, clang. Clang, clang, clang went the BFWs against the shitter's release valve.
"Goddamnit, let go!" Clang. Buckley hit the valve stem one last time and then ka-thunk went the valve head as it was blown across the room into the far bulkhead from the pressurized sewer bladder. Joe and Jimmy dropped their makeshift hammers and looked for a spot with higher ground. Jimmy made it to the top of some tool shelving on the aft wall of the shithole, but the high-pressure flow coming out of the sewage release valve had him cut off from anything other than standing on the deck.
The SIF fields around the bladder squeezed it inward and forced it empty, throwing a fire-hydrant force flow of human waste across the room. The pressure of the flow ricocheted across the room and quickly washed Buckley off his feet, covering him from head to toe with shit. The pressure burst the nasty brown liquid into his nostrils, ears, eyes, and mouth, choking him.
Joe Buckley swam through the lake of shit as it filled the room with the mixed methane smells of decomposing waste from thirty thousand human beings and he began to lose the fight against the high pressure current and the horrendous stench.
Now, Mija! Joe thought. He took one last nauseating breath of the methane-filled air and fought harder to keep his head up.
The structural technician AIC triggered the software per Buckley's orders and a string of valves were released in order to allow the flow of the DEG liquid metal coolant to flow through the damaged heat-pipe conduit. The extreme pressures in the flow loop didn't take long to overcome the weakened metal in the pipe. Mija released the structural integrity field around the pipe at that location and the eight-hundred-degree-Celsius liquid sodium-potassium alloy flowed out of the pipe in a high-velocity jet with nearly explosive force. A small rupture in the pipe vented the liquid metal like a rocket nozzle that passed through both of Buckley's legs, cutting them off instantly and cauterizing them almost as quickly.
The heat pipe forced more and more of the liquid metals into the raw sewage that at the same time was converted quickly to steam. The heavy-liquid metals began to settle into the bottom of the pool of sewage and were forming dense methane gas clouds just above the surface of the brown sludge. Buckley had had a good idea from a mechanical and industrial flow point of view what would happen, but his lack of chemistry knowledge was going to be his undoing.
The chemical reaction of sodium and potassium metal and water created sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide, heat—which was already in abundance—and hydrogen gas, which was highly explosive and had a very low flashpoint to boot. Plus there was a cloud of methane vapor rapidly forming just below the cloud of hydrogen rapidly percolating to the top of the room. The natural buoyancy of the two gases forced the heavy methane to pool on the surface of the sludge and the lighter hydrogen to pool at the top of the room. The sewage continued to drain into the compartment and was just as rapidly vaporized by the influx of molten liquid sodium-potassium alloy that was now covering the deck of the engineering room and beginning to eat away at the deck coverings.
Fireman's Apprentice James King had held on firmly to the aft bulkhead, as Hull Technician Joe Buckley had ordered him to do. The sight of the young sailor was one of the last things Joe would ever see as he struggled to keep his head above the surface. As if the searing pain from his amputated legs, the noxious gas fumes that were burning at his lungs, and the sodium and potassium hydroxide eating away at his skin weren't enough, finally the heat from the searing liquid metal exploded out of another failing part of the conduit, spraying his face with a mist of the molten vapors, melting his face and eyes to beyond flesh all the way to the bone.
Mija . . .
Rest, Joe. I'm here.
Did it work . . . ?
Rest, Joe. I'm here. Mija uploaded the control code to Uncle Timmy with priority status since she knew that she would not last long enough to execute the final commands of the flow system that Buckley had engineered. The AIC had figured out the chemistry a little too late herself to warn her counterpart, but in time that they wouldn't die in vain.
Finally the hydrogen gas cloud reached critical density for the heat in the room, the heat from the liquid metal, and the exothermic reaction. The overpressured clouds of gases and lack of oxygen had kept the room from igniting initially, but the heat of reaction and molten metal had finally reached the flashpoint for the volatile mixture. It ignited with explosive force. In turn, the compressed hydrogen gas cloud explosion ignited the methane fog with the force of several tons of explosives that blew a hole forty meters in diameter and out the three decks below and into space and upward six decks, killing hundreds of unsuspecting sailors. The explosion did blow out the fires created by the failing heat flow systems in the engineering decks but in the process it covered hundreds of sailors with septic human waste products on several decks. Several members of the crew were lost from explosive decompression and others just simply suffocated before they could make it to oxygen bottles. The remains of the sewage and the liquid metal quickly vented into the vacuum of space. The remains of Hull Technician Petty Officer Third Class Joe Buckley and Fireman's Apprentice James King would never be found.
Chapter 20
2:01 Mars Tharsis Standard Time
"Prepare to fire the gluonium-tipped torpedoes, XO," Captain Jefferson ordered the suicide command. There was no way that the Madira could survive a close-range teraton explosion. But the Separatist hauler was on a collision course for the Tharsis Mons region of the planet below and that would kill millions. Maybe as many as ten or twenty million. It had to be done.
"Aye sir!" the XO said begrudgingly. At almost the same instant the ship vibrated with a myriad of notes that sounded almost like a bosun's pipe combined with the jarring of the tracks on a garbage conveyor. The ship lurched forward and that was followed by a secondary explosion. Warning klaxons sounded throughout the ship for fire and damage control teams.