John Karr - Detonation Event

“Cap, the spare suits!”

“What about ’em?”

“Power...!”

“Yeah, so what? I can only wear so many at once. Wait—”

Of course!

“Swap power packs! Repeat, swap power packs and use the tool! Hurry! Less than a minute of survival time!”

Another violent quake had him crawling on his knees for the nearest space suit. Dazed or just dumb, he hadn’t been thinking things through. He grabbed the atomizer, popped out the depleted power pack cartridge.

And paused as an orange glow crept up the walls. He glanced.

“Holy…”

The metal around the ruptured hole had turned orange. Then red. Dirt and rock pushed forward into the pod. Thin streams of lava formed, as if the ground were hemorrhaging. Heat spike alarms played on the interior of the helmet and sounded in his ears.

“Captain, did you swap packs?” Hamilton shouted, but her voice was cut by static.

Devans grabbed the nearest suit, unsnapped the fasteners of the protective chest plate and hurled the casing to the side on its hinges, held a hand up to pin it there. He pulled off the rubber gasket and yanked out the power cartridge, shoved it sideways in the slot for the atomizer and whacked it with his palm, like loading a magazine into a semi-automatic rifle back on Earth.

Still no display, but a test round into the lava put a hole there. A hole that instantly filled with molten rock. The lava rose, claiming the dirt and rock and making an especially lethal mix of quicksand that slowly pushed inward, almost stalking him as he retreated.

“I’ve got it! You three haul ass out of here! Five seconds!”

Garbled mix of strained voices.

“We can’t leave him in there!” Burroughs said. “We’ll wait outside the pod!”

“He’s going to use the tool. We have to bounce, now!”

“Will visual from the lower side, Captain!” Hamilton said. “Shoot high and climb out!”

“Hurry, Ry!”

“Move, move, move!” Devans shouted.

The ground rocked back and forth, and Devans landed on his back again. Turning, he was face-to-face with a glob of angry molten rock. He crab-walked away, shoved two space suits in the nearest empty bay in the wall, raised the atomizer and carved a sizeable hole in the “ceiling.” The hull plate fell hard on top of the downed console.

Renewed alarms from the suit as lava touched his boots. He jumped up on the remains of the console, which formed a small shield against the bubble and splatter of the lava pool that now filled in around him.

He cut again, carving away metal and widening the hole.

No stars, but orange-and-red glow and a steady shower of glittering dust fell through the new hole. And something more: Red-orange drops that hissed on contact and faded to black.

Random splatters of lava shot across the opening. He tried to dodge but knew some of it found the suit. No time for damage assessment. He had to keep moving. Lava inside the pod meant lava outside the pod. Depth? Height? Unknown and didn’t matter. It was all bad.

He clipped the atomizer to his belt, grabbed the empty suits, and pinned them in a bundle over his left shoulder. He linked the ion navigation to his forearm computer, squatted and hit the ion jets—not knowing if they were still functional or not—and leaped upward in the one-third Earth’s gravity.

With his free hand he reached for the edge of the hole but it blew by him. Out he flew, ion jets in full thrust. Lava scraped one of the suits as he exited. The pod was surrounded by a glowing red lake of molten rock.

Devans, never overtly religious, glanced down in amazement and wondered if maybe someone of godlike persuasion was looking out for him. He amended the thought slightly when several geysers of lava shot up and out, twisting and spewing. He swerved hard again and again as alarms went off from the suit.

Wagner’s voice. “Need to get out of the flats, Cap! We are ten o’clock to your position, just a mile or so. Ten o’clock.”

“Analog? How many centuries old are you, Wagner?” Fading in and out of the swirling dust he caught glimpses of three sets of helmet and suit lights. They zigzagged ahead of him, space suits encapsulated in bubbles of light and having to dodge their own lava spews.

One hit a relatively dark patch, turned and paused. Wagner, on the drone board.

“Gotta hurry, CapD—look out!”

Devans cut hard to veer away from a lava spout. The image of demons with volcanic hoses played in a corner of his mind, while glittering dust kept hitting the helmet.

Lava spurted high and rained down as slags, stones, and pebbles, some already hardening but still glowing with heat. The superheated material pelted Devans, lodged on the suit’s shoulders and arms. He spun to shake them off. The suits were considerably fireproof, but evidently the limit had been surpassed.

With new winds swirling with ash and dust further complicating the effort, Devans cut in and out and away from the shifting, twisting geysers. He tried not to think about what would happen if the ion jets failed.

What, you forgot how to run?

Yeah, it’s that easy.

Focus!

Lava splattered onto his forearm and the computer screen there. Furiously he shook off as much as he could, but his acceleration became erratic and navigation slow to respond, then a sudden drop in elevation pinned his stomach to his rib cage. Head down, a liquid floor of orange and red death spun in his vision.

He reached to his side and worked the manual lever for the suit’s jets. Finally he leveled off. A sigh of relief would have been great, but breathing came hard. Too hard. He didn’t need the suit’s decompression warnings to know his air was all but gone. Pricks of pain and heat stabbed him in several areas of the suit. It struck him as ironic, heat from what was normally a deathly cold planet.

That changed as he closed in on the others. They flew away from the T2 area and toward an oasis of darkness, which he presumed was the rise leading to the ridge. Burroughs and Hamilton set down and cut their jets. Wagner eased the drone board down with the oxygen generator. They watched his erratic approach.

With twenty feet of elevation left, he hit the kill switch for the ion jets. He tried running it out, made a couple steps and was too fast. He hit hard and tumbled in a rolling mass, groaning at the renewed shocks of pain. Finally he came to a halt, sprawled out on the surface of Mars and gasping for air.

So much for the idea of walking.

Someone rapped on his helmet. Like hitting his head with a hammer.

“Stop, damn it!” Devans gasped.

Hands turned him over, brushed off his helmet.

Devans sat up, was about to yell at the three of them but got to his knees and tried standing instead. Wagner helped stabilize him. They were all talking at the same time. Wearily, and with air draining from the suit, and the cold biting in several spots, he waved for them to stop.

Burroughs got in his face, her hands on his shoulders. “You made it! But Ry, oh god. Your face… that helmet!”

“Modeling career’s on hold.” The ground shook as he eased her arms away. He gave his crew a hard stare with his better eye. “Region’s unstable. Go to a safer zone. I need… to patch my suit.”

Hamilton walked around him, assessing. “Air flow?”

“Dwindling.”

“We have to get you into another suit,” Hamilton said.

“He’ll freeze to death in this low temperature!” Burroughs said. “It’s negative twenty here! Why couldn’t we be on the damn sunny side?”

“Same problem,” Wagner said, working his forearm computer. “Blood would boil at seventy degrees in the low pressure.”

A moment of silence as realization settled in.