Энди Вейр - Artemis

The bottle released pure chlorine gas into the air.

Chlorine gas is lung-dissolvingly dangerous. They used it as a weapon in World War I, and it worked very well. Where did I get ahold of a tank of compressed death? I had my pal Svoboda to thank for that. He stole it from the ESA chemistry lab.

The FFC Cambridge Process involved a bunch of molten calcium chloride. In theory it was all safely contained inside the sealed, extraordinarily hot smelter. But just in case the smelter had a failure, the facility had chlorine gas detectors all over the place. Very sensitive ones too. They were designed to raise the alarm well before the toxic gas could harm people.

I left the valve open briefly then sealed it again. Within seconds, the chlorine gas alarm went off. And my, what a show!

Yellow lights flashed to life in twenty different places. An incredibly loud alarm blared throughout the facility. I felt a breeze. The emergency circulation vents had sprung to life. They would replace all the air in the facility with fresh oxygen from an emergency reserve.

In the control room, the employees scrambled to safety. Normally, their procedure would be to get into the air shelter in the back of the room. But why would you do that when there’s a train right there? It’s much better to be in a train that can go back to town than sitting in an air shelter awaiting rescue. It didn’t take them long to make their decision—they piled into the train and sealed its hatch.

It was probably cramped in there. Both shifts were sharing the train—a total of forty-eight people.

I snuck a peek at the control room and fist-pumped when I saw it empty. They’d done exactly what I wanted.

Obviously, I had to get everyone out of there before making the smelter melt down. I could have let the pressure alarm go off when I was cutting the inner hull—that would have made people skedaddle. But a pressure leak would bring emergency crews to the hole in the wall. That’d raise a few eyebrows once they saw the rover, makeshift airlock, an awkwardly blushing Dale, et cetera. A toxic gas leak was much better. That was a purely internal issue.

I opened the valve to the chlorine tank again—just a trickle. That way the ventilation system couldn’t clear it out. And as long as the chlorine alert blared, the workers would stay in their train.

I didn’t have to hide anymore. I walked around to the front of the smelter. Then I shimmied underneath it and into the catch basin below.

As a last-ditch defense against meltdowns, the smelter had a copper plug at the bottom of its tank. Copper has a higher melting point than the operating temperature of the bath, but a lower melting point than steel. So if things got too hot (1085°C to be exact), the copper would melt. The superheated salt bath would drain into the cement basin below. There’d be a hell of a mess to clean up, but the smelter itself would be saved.

Can’t have that!

I pulled the welding equipment and my duffel into the pit with me. Once again, I would be welding upward. Sigh. And this time I was joining steel to steel with steel rods as stock. So, in case it wasn’t clear: steel. Yay. Well, at least this time I wasn’t in an EVA suit. Any molten steel that hit me would just disfigure me for life instead of killing me. So I had that going for me.

I got to work. I stayed well to the side as I joined the plate to the underbody. I admit I lost the bead a few times, sending a blob of flaming death to the ground. But I kept at it. After fifteen minutes, I had a solid steel plate covering the copper plug.

I wasn’t sure what grade of steel the smelter walls were made of, but most grades melt at or below 1450°C. So, just to be safe, my plate and stock rods were Grade 416 with a melting point of 1530°C. The smelter would melt before my patch would.

The patch was thin, so you’d think it would melt first, but physics doesn’t work that way. Before the temperature could get up to the patch’s melting point of 1530°C, everything that could melt at a lower temperature had to melt first. And the melting point of the smelter walls was 1450°C. So, even though the patch was thin and the smelter was thick, the bottom of the smelter would give out before the patch got anywhere near its melting point.

Don’t believe me? Put ice water in a saucepan and cook it. The water temperature will stay at 0°C until the last ice cube melts.

I crawled out from the pit and checked the control room. Still empty. But not for long. The train had left.

With all that chlorine in the air, it made sense to send the workers back to town. But once they got there, a bunch of hazmat-suited engineers would board and come right back. I had ten minutes for the train to get to town, call it another five for the changeover, then another ten until the enemy cavalry arrived. Twenty-five minutes.

I hurried to the thermal control box. I unscrewed four bolts and took the access panel off. I yanked out the thermocouple management board and produced a replacement board from my duffel. Svoboda had spent the previous evening piecing it together. Pretty simple, actually. It acted just like the normal board, but it would lie to the computer about the bath temperature, always reporting it low. I inserted it into the slot.

For verification purposes, Svoboda’s replacement board had LCD readouts showing the actual and reported temperature. The actual temperature was 900°C and the reported temperature was 825°C. The computer, believing the temperature was too low, activated the main heater.

There was an audible “click” even though there was no relay. The power conduit—thickest power line I’d ever seen, by the way—actually squirmed for a moment when the current began. So much electricity flowed through that cable, the resulting magnetic field made it bounce around while it ramped up power. It settled down once the current got to full amperage.

I watched Svoboda’s board. Soon, the actual temperature clicked up to 901 degrees. Then, in far less time, it rose to 902. Then directly to 904. Then 909.

“Shiiit,” I said. That was way the hell faster than I expected. Turns out a massive power line carrying the bulk of two nuclear reactors’ output can heat things up pretty quickly.

I left the access panel on the floor and ran back to my private entrance.

Dale waited for me in the inflatable connector. “Well?” he asked.

I shut the air-shelter door behind me. “Mission accomplished. The smelter’s heating up fast . Let’s get out of here.”

“All right!” Dale held up his gloved hand.

I gave him a high five (can’t leave a fella hanging). He bobbled down the tunnel toward the rover.

I took one last look at the air-shelter hatch to make sure it was sealed properly. Then I turned back and started down the tunnel—wait a minute.

I spun back to the hatch. I could swear I’d seen movement behind me.

The hatch had a small, round window. I drew closer to it and looked through. There, inspecting equipment along the far wall of the smelter bubble, was Loretta Sanchez.

I put both hands on my head. “Dale. We have a problem.”

Sanchez peered at the emergency air system. She wore goggles and a breather mask. Apparently a little chlorine gas didn’t scare her.

Dale, halfway down the inflatable, gestured to the rover. “Come on, Jazz! Let’s go!”

“Loretta Sanchez is in there!”

“What?!”

I pointed to the airlock window. “She’s just wandering around like she owns the place.”

“She does own the place,” Dale said. “Let’s get out of here!”

“We can’t leave her there.”