Greg Egan - The Arrows of Time

An alarm sounded. The pressure in the Surveyor was dropping.

He grabbed his helmet and dragged himself back towards the crew’s sleeping quarters. Agata emerged from her room, strapping on her jetpack, helmet in hand. Ramiro could see her tympanum moving but he couldn’t hear a sound; the pressure was already too low. He put on his helmet and she did the same.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Something’s hit us,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what. Is your cabin holed?’

‘No.’

Ramiro clambered past her and opened the nearest door. There was a jagged slot half a stride across missing from the far wall; the rock along the edges was shattered unevenly, but the course of the damage was unswerving. Sheets of paper were fluttering through the gash, out into the void. Azelio was motionless, tangled in his bed’s twisted tarpaulin. Ramiro approached, switching on his helmet’s coherer to supplement the safety lights, and saw three holes in the tarpaulin, each the width of his thumb.

Agata’s voice came through the link. ‘Tarquinia’s gone!’

‘What?’

‘I’m in her cabin – she must have been blown right out.’

Ramiro stared at Azelio, imagining Tarquinia tumbling through the void in the same condition – carrying no air, insensate, her flesh pierced by splinters of rock.

‘I can see sunstone spilling out,’ Agata said. ‘From the cooling system.’

Ramiro was paralysed. What did he do first? If they couldn’t run the cooling system, they were dead.

Agata shouted, ‘I can see Tarquinia! I’m going after her!’

‘ No! I’ll get her!’

Agata hesitated. ‘You can see her too?’

‘No, but—’

‘Ramiro, I can do this,’ Agata insisted. She sounded impossibly calm. ‘She’s not that far away, and I can still see her clearly. I’ve got her cooling bag here, air tank and all. I’ll get it to her. She’ll be all right.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Do it.’

Agata said nothing more, but then he caught the flash of her coherer as she jetted across the trench of stars behind Azelio’s wall.

Ramiro shook himself out of his stupor. Azelio’s cooling bag was missing from the clamp beside the bed, but the spare was in the cupboard. He took it over to Azelio and worked it up over his limp form, then he opened the valve on the air tank and held his hand against the fabric to check that there was a flow across the skin. There were five deep wounds in Azelio’s thigh and torso, but his skull seemed to be untouched. The injuries might be survivable – so long as his flesh didn’t denature and ignite.

Ramiro dragged Azelio into his own cabin; abutting the opposite side of the hull, it appeared to be completely undamaged. He got Azelio under the sand bed’s tarpaulin, and brought two straps across to be sure he wouldn’t drift away.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll be fine.’

He dragged himself back into the passage and headed for the cooling system.

Whatever had grazed the side of the Surveyor had left a single long gash in the hull running all the way from Azelio’s cabin via Tarquinia’s to the gasification chamber. Looking out through the opening where the gash had breached a narrow maintenance shaft, Ramiro could now see what Agata had reported: pieces of sunstone tumbling into the void like gravel spilling from a torn sack. The feed supplying the decomposing agent should have shut off when the pressure plummeted – and if it hadn’t, the result would have been spectacularly worse. But the sunstone would continue to react with the agent already present in the chamber. There was no way to render the swarm of jostling rocks perfectly motionless, so nothing would keep them in the chamber while there was a wide-open path into the void.

‘Can you still see Tarquinia?’ he asked Agata.

‘I’ve nearly reached her!’ Agata declared. ‘How are things there? Is Azelio all right?’ Once she’d moved away from the Surveyor she would have looked back and taken in all the damage at a glance.

‘He’s safe,’ Ramiro assured her. ‘He’s got some small wounds, but I’ve put him in my room to recover. Please, just concentrate on Tarquinia.’

‘All right.’

Ramiro leant against the side of the shaft. How was he going to seal the chamber? They had stone plugs prepared for holes up to the size of his hand, but no one had envisaged anything like this.

The repair didn’t have to be airtight immediately; he just had to stop the sunstone being lost. He dragged himself to Agata’s cabin and snatched the tarpaulin from her bed, then detoured to the tool cupboard and grabbed a jar of sealing resin.

If he entered the gasification chamber through the hatch he’d just drive more sunstone out as he pushed his way through it. Back in the maintenance shaft, he warily tested the rim of the gash with one fingertip. The damaged stone was still warm from the collision – with a microscopic Hurtler, most likely – but the escaping air had carried away enough heat to render it traversable. He clambered out into the void and made his way along the torn edge of the hull, hand over hand; the distance was so short that this was faster than messing around with his jetpack.

‘I’m with her!’ Agata announced excitedly. ‘She’s conscious, Ramiro. She’s putting on her cooling bag now.’

Ramiro started humming with relief; embarrassed, he muted the outwards channel on the link until he’d regained his composure. ‘Be careful coming back,’ he managed.

Agata replied, ‘Don’t worry, we will.’

As Ramiro climbed into the chamber small pellets of sunstone bounced off his jetpack and faceplate; he had to force himself not to raise his arm instinctively to swat them away like insects, as that would only have added energy to the swarm. He took the jar from his tool pouch and daubed resin over the nearest part of the inner wall, then tugged the tarpaulin out of the gap under his belt and fixed one edge in place. There were no ropes or handholds in the chamber that he could use to brace himself, but he could apply pressure by closing his hand over the whole exposed thickness of the wall, clamping the fabric of the tarpaulin against the resin until it adhered.

He pushed himself off from the wall to reach the far side of the chamber; he hit it with a jolt but managed to grab the rim of the gash to keep himself from bouncing. The tarpaulin was wider than the gap he was trying to cover, and once he had it secured at both ends the pellets of sunstone were too large to work their way around the sides.

Ramiro paused to take stock. There was more sunstone in the store behind the chamber; they’d probably only lost about a twelfth of their total. If Tarquinia was safe, the next most urgent matter was checking on Azelio. Getting the gash repaired and the entire Surveyor airtight again would take a long time, but as an interim measure they could seal the doors to the damaged cabins and concentrate on the cooling chamber while they still had enough air in tanks to keep them from hyperthermia.

He managed to get out of the chamber through the hatch with only a handful of sunstone escaping into the passage. Back in his cabin, he surveyed Azelio’s wounds, cutting holes in the cooling bag so he wouldn’t have to pull the whole thing off. At each site there was a faint yellow glow suffusing the punctured flesh, but it looked like the body’s ordinary signalling rather than a runaway reaction, and the surrounding skin wasn’t hot to the touch. The fragments of stone had passed right through Azelio’s body, but as far as Ramiro could see his digestive tract hadn’t been breached. If his skull and gut were undamaged, his chances were good.

‘We’re almost back,’ Agata announced. ‘Ah, you’ve closed off the chamber already!’