Up Against It - M. J. Locke [8]
Carl dove behind a stack of crates. Too late to help Ivan. The bugs were everywhere. Murky, grey-brown oil surged and splatted against the other vats, the trash, the walls, the floor. Gravity on 25 Phocaea was a bare one-thousandth of Earth’s; gobs of bug juice sloshed and wobbled about; the air filled with deadly mist.
The vats were coated on the inside with a special paint that the disassemblers were programmed not to touch, but on the outside they were vulnerable. One after another, the vats blew. As Carl made for the maintenance tunnel he was badly spattered. Burning, fizzing sores opened up on his arms and face. He changed course for the nearby safety showers and doused himself with neutralizer, and the burning stopped. But he felt a breeze, accompanied by a hiss that crescendoed to a shriek. The outer walls were being eaten away. The temperature dropped—sound died away—holes appeared in the warehouse wall.
He looked around. The bugs had destroyed the emergency life-support lockers. The bug neutralization shower was across the way from the tunnel doors, and frothing blobs and puddles of disassembler were everywhere. By some miracle, the emergency systems had not yet shut those doors—so air was rushing in even as it was escaping out the holes—but with every second it got harder to breathe.
Carl leapt and dodged for the doors, looking for a path to safety. His ears popped. Sound was all but gone now. It made everything seem very far away. The floor was being eaten away, and bug juice poured into the steam and bug piping below. His lungs hurt and sparks danced before his eyes. With a desperate leap, he made it to within a meter of the door … as the emergency lights finally lit up and the door slammed shut. In that instant before it was sealed he saw his boss Mike, Mike’s boss’s boss Sean Moriarty, and others scrambling down the hall toward him. Then he bashed into the closed door.
He pounded on it, shrieking, “Help me!”—but could not hear his own words. Pain seared his lungs. He sank to the floor.
Half the ceiling came down around him. Stars blazed overhead. The air was gone. Outside the crumbling warehouse perimeter, next to the crater, the massive disassembler manifolds fell apart and a blast of superheated steam and bug juice shot out and spread across the near faces of the ice mounds. Wave after wave of membranous bubbles, color-coded balloons holding molecular nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, tumbled upward into space as the bugs got to work on the ice.
Carl’s eyesight failed. He curled up in agony. In those last seconds, while others suited up to come out and get him—as the air effervesced in his veins and saliva boiled on his tongue—he used up his last breath on a soundless scream. Not of fear, but of rage, at being reduced to component atoms himself.
* * *
Geoff looked down from orbit and saw the geodesic collapse. He spotted a man go down amid the wreckage. An unsuited man. Then the lumpy horizon swallowed the scene. “Holy shit!”
Geoff checked his heads-up. Orbital time at this altitude was nearly forty minutes; far too long. The guy had ninety seconds, max. Geoff programmed a powered reversal that would get him to the landing pad in just over a minute.
It was a risk. If he miscalculated, he could make a new crater in the asteroid. But the time he bought might save the man’s life. The main rockets cut in and his bike shuddered. The stabilizers kept him from going into a tumble. And the ground sped beneath, dangerously close.
Carl worked in the warehouses. Don’t let it be him.
He alerted the others. Someone—Amaya—beamed an emergency message to the life support teams. But all Geoff’s attention was on that uneven horizon. The cable station and warehouses crawled back into view, and as his rockets slowed him, he guided his bike in.
His wheels barked on the landing pad next to the Klosti-Alpha cable, but the pad was too short for his speed. The bike swerved wildly across the concrete