John Karr - Detonation Event

Wake up, old man.

Mars.

A torrent of images. Guiding PS-9 from MOS-1. Passing the scorch marks left by the doomed PS-4 and waving at Fres in the Bay Control tower. That kid Wagner surfing his way on the conference desk at the nose of PS-9 . Mars getting huge. Racing past T1 and its dust storm for T2 on the dark side of the planet. The perimeter ground lights flashing on. Wagner diving in after a rogue drone when a relay failed. With Alicia Hamilton, flying down into the tunnel to help bring Wagner up. PS-9 in engine overload, swinging back and forth while vomiting superheated propellant. His ship in distress! Klemmet’s voice, sending a life pod.

Raising the atomizer and firing on his own shuttle.

Devans swallowed, tasted blood again.

PS-9 ’s explosion—with crew on board. Had any still been alive?

One more pod got out, so there had to be at least one survivor. Nuro? Maybe he hadn’t killed one of his best friends. Maybe.

What had gone wrong with PS-9 ’s reactor?

And then SCONA triggered the Detonation Event with him and members of his crew still on the surface.

Damn. Yeah, he’d tried to save the tunnel himself, but only when there were no more verifiable survivors. The emergency beacon in the pod may not have been operational after the shuttle blew, but SCONA should have tried to retrieve their people before detonating.

Then the pod had gotten caught in the tunnel collapse. Thrusters from the chem rockets took him out of the eruption of gas and lava but failed soon thereafter. The pod bounced along the surface, tumbled and skidded. And that was his last memory.

Now, darkness and pain.

Facial injury. Not optimal for someone in a space suit. No injury was.

Where were the others? Where was this life pod located? The chem rockets had gotten clipped but took him out of the eruption zone. Probably wasn’t too far from the T2 site.

Get moving so the rescue ship can find you.

Devans forced his eyes open. Then he realized they were already open, or at least one of them was. The darkness was environmental, not due to closed eyes. He blinked and could only feel the movement on one side. The other eye would not cooperate.

“Alive, though,” he muttered. “But for how long?”

He turned his head too quickly. Mistake. The bright flash of pain nearly made him vomit. That’s all he needed inside the suit right now. He took a breath.

The helmet lights were unresponsive. Crushed or shorted out—he had no way of knowing. The comm chip in his head was still okay; as long as there was life, there was electricity to power it. He tried mindtexts to his crew and MOS-1 but received no reply. Normally the suit status would be displayed in text and a colored triangle inside of the face shield, but now there was nothing. He had air and heat, so the suit still had power.

He must still be in the life pod. All crewmembers knew their way around a life pod in the dark. Part of training. He unbelted from the containment bay and raised a booted leg to step out.

Instead he went into short free-fall with a jarring stop. Took a one-two body and head shot that set fireworks off. He lay still, feeling for rips in the suit. Not feeling any, he rolled onto his back, felt the floor beneath him shift a little. Floors don’t normally do that. With a groan, he sat up.

Evidently the pod was on its side and he’d been hanging from what had become the upper wall or ceiling. He must have landed across two protective bays on the opposite side of the pod. Some material must have broken loose. Such an impact would have been worse in Earth’s two-thirds heavier gravity, but it was no feather comforter here either.

The dark was impenetrable. He needed to see.

He felt around the suit, felt around the forearm computer with gloved fingertips, the sensors there not relaying information. He pressed locations etched in memory, pressed everything to wake the computer up. Buttons and the screen display glowed, then brightened, making him squint and take a sharp breath as light stabbed his eye. A bunch of blinks and his pupil acclimated. He pressed three of the space suit’s body lights. Most of the interior of the shuttle was now illuminated.

“Damn.”

The pod was on its side, all right. The inner walls were mashed in at several areas, which took considerable force given the strength of the hull.

Only part of the floor was still visible. It had been punched inward, and a whole lot of red soil and rock had flowed in, filling the protective bays he’d fallen upon. He was sitting on Martian surface matter.

He was lucky it hadn’t filled the entire pod.

Devans rose to his knees, fought the dizziness, then stood. His forearm computer searched for live links from the pod and surrounding area. Nothing. The pod’s electronics were dead. He moved to the pod hatch and tried to manually open it. Not happening.

Trapped.

Panic rose. He tried to beat it back and was mostly successful. Yet he couldn’t quite ditch the potential irony that the life pod that had saved him could easily serve as a casket.

“Mars, you’re a real son of a bitch lately.” He started to shake his head but was instantly corrected by pain. He continued to speak aloud so his ears had to listen. “Pansies don’t grow in space or on Mars. Find the atomizer and carve a door.”

He had dropped it in his haste to close the hatch and secure himself in the protective bay. He hadn’t thought it would be called to action again so soon.

He moved back to the ruptured floor. The navigation console lay like a corpse, with hanging wires and ruptured panels and protruding rods of steel. It had been completely ripped from its moorings. If he had to guess, he’d say it was the cause of his injury. He placed his gloved hand on it and shoved. It barely moved. Even in the weaker gravity of Mars, it was still heavy. Must’ve only glanced him, then.

Devans looked back up at the protective bay he’d occupied, noted the chunk missing from the side wall there, tried to whistle with a swollen lip.

Lucky.

A direct hit would have made for a bad day. Not that things had gone all that stellarly up to this point, but he was still breathing.

Exhibit A: the spacesuit hanging in the compartment beside his. The helmet was crushed and must have received the full brunt of the dislodged console.

Yeah, it could have been a whole hell of a lot worse.

Get in the now, Devans! Appraise the situation.

Air. How much was left to him besides his own tank? He didn’t really want to check. He pulled out the space suits from the other three containment bays—having to climb a little for the crushed helmet one and move dirt for another. Not surprisingly, the suit with the crushed helmet had been torn as well, and the air tank was empty. But the other two were in decent shape. No visible rips, and the air supply tanks were full. So he had approximately three days’ worth of air, and heat from the suit. He didn’t want to be trapped in here for the duration, though.

Okay. Atomizer. Where was it?

This damn eye. If only he could see a little more.

Slowly he turned his head. With his jaw he felt for the sponge tube beside his neck. There were two, one for each side, but he needed the right side for now. Stretching his neck and angling his mouth, he pulled the telescoping rod between his teeth. Now there was about four inches of soft sponge on a pivot rod. Carefully he leaned into the sponge and cleared as much of the crusted and gooey blood away from his eye as possible. It felt like sandpaper scraping his lid, but at least he could see a little bit of light with that eye now.

And there was red. Plenty of red.