Marcus helped them drag their equipment back to their rover, and when he took his helmet off after returning, Zora could see he was scowling.
“Not much cooperation there,” he said. “I don’t think that new girl, that Valkiri, will last long with the tribe.”
“Where’d she come from?”
“Lunar nomads. Last of her tribe there. Rest gave up, sold themselves to a cheap labor outsourcer on Earth—you can’t live off the land on Luna.” He made a small disapproving sound in his throat. “I wish I could talk to this group’s tribe chief. The rest of the tribe’s rovers went ahead a day. Tango says they hunkered down and rode the storm out with free radical repair drugs.”
“A good way to die young.”
“But painless. Stupid. And the drugs also reduce their use of consumables by about fifteen percent. Anyway, Valkiri jumped all over me. Implied we were child endangering just to have little ones here, on the Pharm. Hoped Sekou would beg us to go back to Earth.”
When visitors leave, there is always cleaning up to do. Environmental parameters on oxygen and water consumption must be recalibrated to the normal settings. The hab must be tidied. Reports of the visit must be logged in and the balance sheets of consumables must be recalculated so that things will last until enough energy is generated by the solar panels and the nuke.
So Zora didn’t notice the anomaly until after fifteen hours.
She had just put on the top segment of her environment suit, ready to recheck the entry airlock, which she always did when there had been visitors, because once Chocko, a nomad from a different tribe, had left so much grit in the airlock that it froze open. When she looked at the detector in the airlock, she almost dropped her helmet.
The radiation warning was going off like gangbusters.
She looked around wildly for Sekou, who was playing quietly in the high pressure greenhouse. Well, not playing so much as trying out an adult role—he was clumsily transplanting a frostflower.
The sensor for this airlock showed a lot of radiation, an alarming level. Cautiously, terrified, she grabbed a handheld sensor and ran to the airlock of the greenhouse where Sekou was humming to himself and getting his hands dirty
. Thank Mars the shrilling of the alarm didn’t crescendo when she moved toward him.
But it didn’t get any softer, either. That meant there was a tremendous beacon of deadly radiation coming from some distance, else moving would make it rise or diminish.
Where, where, where?
Think. If she grabbed Sekou, as was her instinct, she’d have to know where to move him, and quickly. Most likely the cooling system of their nuke, the hab’s power source, had sprung a leak. She’d heard of such things.
But knowing that didn’t help. She closed her eyes to concentrate and, unbidden, an image came to her of a slow trickling of radioactive water seeping into the clean water supply that heated the house.
“Marcus,” she called in a shaky, low voice. Then she gave in to instinct, cycled through the airlock between her and Sekou and scooped him up into her arms.
They had no environment suit for him. He was still growing too fast. But if she couldn’t find the source of the leak, she’d have to get him out of the hab, out into the environment.
Marcus appeared beside her, a sudden angel of rescue. Deliberate and measured movements. Competent. She exhaled a breath of gratitude. as he encircled her and Sekou in his arms.
“It’s coming from all over,” he said, as if he had read her mind. “Hard to know what could cause such a failure.”
“There has to be a safe place in the hab,” she said reasonably.
“Look,” he said, and broadcast his picture of the hab’s health and life systems monitor to her wrist com.
“Sekou—”
Sekou had at first been curious at his mother’s urgency, but now he looked scared. He knew what radiation was; children had to know the dangers of their environment, and knowing the signs of radiation, though it was a rare hazard, was just as much a part of their early training as learning to heed airlock failure alarms.
“It will be fine,” said Marcus, putting his hand on the boy’s head. And to Zora: “I’m looking now at all the sensors in the hab. If there’s a safe place, I can’t find it. I left an evacuation ball in the main entry. Let’s go.”
Sekou didn’t like the evacuation ball. “Mama, please, it hurts.”
“How can the evacuation ball hurt?” She tried not to grit her teeth as she wadded the limp, slick surface around him and tried to force his legs to bend so she could seal it.
“It hurts my stomach when I have to put my knees up like that.”
“It will just have to hurt, then!” She tried to pry his left shoe off, then decided he might need shoes—wherever they ended up.
Marcus intervened. “Take a big breath, my man. Big breath. Hold it. Let it out slow. Now, pull your legs into the ball. See?”
Sekou, half enveloped by the flaccid translucent thing so like an egg, nodded through tears. His puckered little face, trying so hard to be brave, stabbed Zora’s heart. It occurred to her for the hundredth time that Marcus was just better with children than she was. Marcus winked at Sekou as he pressed the airtight closure shut.
The transparent ball, designed for animal use, had two handles so Zora and Marcus carried it between them. If only one person were there to carry, it would have been rolled, not a pleasant process for the person inside.
“Go ahead,” Marcus murmured. “I’ll do the minimum shutdown.”
“Marcus, I can do it. Sekou wants you.”
“Sekou wants both of us. Go, girl. I can do it faster and we’ll all be safer.”
The rover was ready to go, its own nuke always putting out power. She bundled Sekou inside it and fumbled to embrace him through the pliable walls of the ball, finally settling on a clumsy pat on the top of his head.
“Where to go?” Marcus asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. The Centime’s pharm is within range, but are they at their winter place?” Zora was shaking from the shock of being jerked out of her comfortable hab and, worst of all, seeing her little boy in fear and pain and danger. She fingertipped their code and got back cold silence, then the Gone Fishing message.
“Strike out for Borealopolis.”
“We need somebody to sponsor us there. Even if we have enough credit to buy consumables, we need somebody to vouch for us.”
“Call Hesperson.” Hesperson sold them small electronics and solar cell tech.
They did so, and explained the radioactivity problem. The image on the screen was wary. Hesperson sighed. “I wish I could tell you what to do. There’s a big decontamination mission near Equatorial City—”
“Our rover would take twenty days to get there! And we would run out of consumables first.”
“Let me get back to you on this.” And Hesperson was gone.
“The Centimes,” Zora said. This couldn’t be happening. Couldn’t. It was a crazy nightmare, and soon she’d wake up. “We’ll contact the Centimes at their summer habitat and ask them to let us use their Pharm. They can send us codes to unlock it.”
Krona Centime’s face, on the monitor, looked distracted and her hair was sticking up as if she hadn’t combed it in several days. Maybe something had happened during the Centime’s trip to the southern hemisphere to derange her mind. “Yes! Yes, of course. No, wait, I ought to ask Escudo.” Without waiting for an answer, she logged off.
Marcus was staring at a life-support monitor. Some of the rover’s functions ran much better when the sun was in the sky, and it wasn’t up very much in Winter-March. Zora pressed his hand, a gesture he could barely appreciate through the thickness of their gloves.