David Pedreira: Gunpowder Moon

“Copy,” Lane said. “AMD and lasers set to intelligent defense. Electromagnetic pulse shielding at a hundred percent, fusion reactor encased in second shield.”

Dechert went through a mental checklist of their evacuation procedure. Station secured. Shield doors down. Power grid at minimum sustaining. Reactor encased in liquid metal. Defenses engaged.

“Lane, confirm evacuation sequence is complete and bug out.”

“Confirmed complete.”

“Quarles, verify.”

“I agree, Commander. We’re ready to go.”

Dechert checked the chronometer on his heads-up display. They had three minutes. Maybe four. He could hear the outer hatch opening through the background hiss of the com, its door beeping a muted alert that the vacuum of space was about to be let into the station. They were going to make it, with a decent margin for error.

“Okay, let’s…”

His helmet erupted with alarms before he could finish speaking. Fast-beeping shutdown alarms from Serenity 1’s fusion reactor. Slower, deeper pressure-door alarms. Chimes for a computer master alert. A symphony of alarms. More alarms than he could register.

Dechert looked at the video on his heads-up display, confused by the sudden flurry of noise. The video blurred and slowed down. The main hangar went red, its emergency lighting on full. A white and yellow strobe flashed on top of the pressure door leading to the Bullpen. The two-ton door began to shut. The exit from the station began to shut.

“Quarles, what the hell?”

The wailing sirens continued.

“Shit, I don’t know. We’re on automatic lockdown. Shit, everything’s locking down!”

“Override.”

“Trying now.” Quarles leaped up to the flying deck. He punched the touchscreens on the plasma banks, his fingers thick and unwieldy in the pressure gloves. The sirens kept going. The Bullpen pressure door—now a third of the way shut.

“Quarles, override!” Dechert yelled. “Vernon!”

“Yeah. Outer doors just shut and sealed,” Vernon said. “I can’t get them back open.”

“Get the Bullpen door,” Dechert yelled. “Vernon, Bullpen hatch is closing!”

He saw Lane and Quarles look up from the flying deck’s control bank at the hatch that was sealing them into the station. They froze for a fraction of a second, and then returned their focus to the control bank. Standard stood in the background, unmoving except for his helmet, which swiveled from right to left in uncertainty.

“Sonofabitch!” Vernon yelled, still outside of the camera’s view.

Lane and Quarles ran through recovery sequences, yelling at each other in bits and pieces of short, staccato jargon.

“Main buses A, B, C, and D, off line. E through H nominal.”

“I’m locked out of the system. CORE is not responding.”

“Reactor undervolt. Liquid-metal sphere stable, but fusion first-wall is unresponsive. It’s gonna shut down from lack of inner containment.”

“Jesus.”

After five seconds of listening, Dechert realized with a jolt that his station was being put to sleep. It was in emergency lockdown/shutdown, the type of quick-freeze that would be initiated only in a full-scale solar storm. And there was no solar storm—only a fleet of missiles flying more than seven thousand kilometers per hour toward his entrapped crew.

“Dechert,” Thatch yelled into the com. “What the hell is going on?”

“Station’s on emergency shutdown,” Dechert managed. “Crew’s still inside.”

“What the hell?”

Dechert ignored him. Think. Slow down. The infrared Moon view above the video display in his helmet began to blur, the interlocking grids becoming a haze of glowing green. Could the Chinese have sent a command directly into the CORE, ordering it to lock down and turn off its defenses? Impossible. Only hardwired code could shut down the station, and the CORE was completely protected from wireless signals. Could they have snaked a line into the station itself? No, it had to come from within.

“Quarles, run command override Dechert two-one-one-two. Repeat, Dechert two-one-one-two.”

“Roger. Dechert twenty-one twelve.”

Quarles punched in the command. The sirens still wailed. The Bullpen door continued to close—now half shut. Thirty seconds more, and they’d be sealed inside the station.

“Negative on command override.”

“Can you run a bypass into the CORE?”

Vernon appeared in the video’s background, outside the Bullpen door. He was trying to wedge one of the crawler’s thick hydraulic tire chucks into the portal in an effort to keep it open. It had only a few meters to go before shutting them in completely.

“Negative on bypass. Takes too long. I’m shit out of ideas.”

How much time left before missile impact? Three minutes? Dechert’s mind flashed through alternatives. Quarles and Lane had to keep trying to regain control of the station’s servers so they could get the outer pressure door open and keep the defensive systems on. Waters had to keep the Bullpen hatch ajar so they could all make it to the rover and escape the station—if they could find a way to pry open the outer doors.

“Standard, help Waters!” Dechert yelled. The commissioner’s head snapped up when he heard his name, and he turned and shuffled toward Waters, unused to the bulk of his pressure suit and to the need for immediate action.

“I can keep the mains online, Commander, and I should be able to sequence the autodefenses, because they’re off the CORE’s operating system,” Lane said, “but we’re locked out of the pressure-door controls. We can’t open the outer hatch.”

“I count three minutes to impact,” Hale said.

“Lane, can you blow the outer doors?”

“Negative. Explosives are in the shed.”

“Acetylene torch?”

“Negative. Takes at least ten minutes.”

No one spoke for a few seconds as they all went through the alternatives again. The tire chuck Vernon had wedged into the Bullpen door began to bend from the thousands of pounds of pressure being exerted on it. Should they get into the Bullpen and take their chances, or retreat deeper into the station?

“Lane, what about sealing yourselves into the Hole?” Dechert asked. “Can you get down there in time?”

“Maybe, but I don’t know if we can open and close the roof.”

“What about the observatory?” Thatch asked. “Blow the glass.”

“Shield doors are reading down in Observatory.”

Dechert, Hale, and Thatch began their descent over the open mouth of Crater Yangel’. They could see the shuttle now, parked on a small ledge just inside the impact wall about a kilometer below them. Just a few seconds more, and they could begin the run back to Serenity. Maybe the autodefenses would stay online and knock the incoming missiles out of space. Maybe things could still be salvaged.

Maybe…

The crack of a rifle shot went off in the station. Dechert’s ears rang with the sound. He saw Lane and Quarles flinch and look up, saw Standard stumble back from the Bullpen door, and saw Waters’s head snap back and turn, the visor on his helmet cracking into spider webs.

The titanium tire chuck had snapped in two and hit Waters in the head, smashing his helmet with machine force.

“Vernon!” Lane screamed.

They went to him. Standard turned him over. The Bullpen door—now a little more than four feet from closing them in. Waters didn’t move.

“He’s venting,” Quarles said. “Jesus Christ, man, he’s losing pressure.”

“Seal his helmet,” Dechert yelled. “You’re almost out of atmosphere. And get him into the Bullpen. Quarles! Do you hear me? Quarles? Get in the Bullpen!”

A few random pops of static disrupted the signal. The video feed distorted in waves, first horizontally and then vertically. It fuzzed over completely. It came back again long enough for Dechert to see a horrific scene: Lane running to snatch a bottle of emergency sealant off the bulkhead wall. Quarles leaning over Vernon and yelling his name. Standard, now trying to hold the Bullpen door open with only his thin legs and arms as leverage, a weakling Sisyphus, fighting a losing battle against a rock that was about to roll over him.