Pushing Ice (12 page)

Takahashi drew in a ragged breath. “Yes.”

“You need to stay still. Keep calm, don’t be an airhog, and we’ll get you out of there.”

“Okay.”

“How are you feeling down there?”

Takahashi’s voice became stronger. “My leg isn’t so good. Hurts pretty bad.”

Probably broken
, Parry thought: snapped or dislocated when Takahashi was wrenched off the side of the tank, or when he hit the bottom. The articulation of an Orlan nineteen lent itself to that kind of injury.

Again, Parry strove to keep any note of panic from his voice. “We’re going to do something about that pain, Mike, but right now you need to listen to me.”

Takahashi took another ragged breath. “I’m listening.”

“You’re lying in sprayrock. Your head, arms and upper body are free. The rest of you is encased.”

“Oh, great.”

“But we’re going to get you out of this,” Parry said urgently. “That’s a promise: a cast-iron guarantee. You’re going to have to work with me, though. It’s important that you stay calm. That way we’ll have all the time we need to dig you out. Copy?”

“Copy,” Takahashi said, with an unmistakable edge of panic in his voice.

“I’m serious.”

“Do something about my leg. Then we can talk.”

“I can’t do anything about the leg right now, but I still need you to stay calm. I want you to boot up some music, Mike. Scroll down and find something relaxing.”

“You’re kidding me, Parry.”

“I’m not. If you don’t choose something yourself, I’ll make the selection and pump it through from my helmet. You were never really big on opera, were you?”

“Nice joke, Parry.”

“Who’s joking? Make the call, or I’ll make it for you.”

“You have got to be —”

“Make the call. And crank it loud so we can all listen in. If you don’t comply within twenty seconds, I’ll inflict some Puccini on you.
Turandot
, maybe. I know how much you love ‘Nessun Dorma’, Mike.”

“You really are a bastard, Chief.”

“Here it comes. Scrolling down now. Public Enemy… Puccini. I hope you’re ready for this, buddy. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt like a
bitch
.”

Takahashi wasn’t fast enough, or maybe his suit’s audio system was shot. Parry didn’t care. He was glad to inflict the Puccini on him. Even if he truly hated the music, it was something else to be thinking about.

Parry called Bella.

“Turn down the racket,” she said. “I can’t hear a thing!”

“Sorry,” he said, raising his voice over Luciano Pavarotti, “but the racket’s part of the plan. I need engine shutdown, Bella. Mike doesn’t need any additional pressure on his leg, and we can’t risk another piece of debris hitting us down here.“

“You have it,” she said, after the slightest hesitation. Thirty seconds later, Parry felt the tension in the tether line relax as he became weightless again.

“What else?”

“We’re going to need more people out here, and someone from medical.”

“I’ve already paged Ryan.”

Parry twisted around to the left until he could just make out Wolinsky at the edge of his faceplate’s field of vision. “Frida,” he said, “can you reach my tether lock from there?”

“Think so, if they play out some more slack for me.”

Wolinsky leaned towards him, out of view. He felt a tug as she took hold of his tether.

“Release me,” Parry said, leaning back so that she could undo the snaplock fastener.

For once in his life, Parry would have been happier on a tether, but the lines were nearly at their limit. He felt Wolinsky pat him on the back.

“You’re free, big guy. Just be careful down there.”

Parry allowed himself to fall forward towards the surface of the sprayrock. They’d put down a metre and a half when Takahashi fell; most of it would have reached full hardness by now. There might be enough resilience in sprayrock to cushion the impulse from a mass driver, but it wasn’t going to help them excavate the injured man.

Parry had both hands on the sprayrock now. The geckoflex did not form a permanent bond with the sprayrock. Reassured, he touched a kneepad against the crust, and then a foot. He removed his other foot from the scarred metal of the tank and planted it on the crust. Now he was able to crawl across to the half-exposed form of the trapped man. He reached Taka-hashi’s upper body and raised himself to a kneeling position, keeping a three-point contact with the crust. Behind the semi-reflective glass of his faceplate, Takahashi’s eyes were wide and scared.

“Okay, that’s enough Puccini,” he said.

“Luciano and me aren’t done yet.” Parry examined him, getting his first good look at the situation. It was worse than he had expected. Takahashi’s life-support backpack was completely immersed. There would be no way to top up the suit’s consumables unless the rear part of the backpack could be exposed.

But consumables were not the main problem now. Parry cranked down the Puccini a notch. “I’m with Mike now, Bella.”

“We have you on cam,” Bella said. “What’s your assessment?”

“My assessment is —” But he couldn’t be truthful, not while Takahashi was listening in. “Mike’s in one piece. He’s conscious and lucid. But we’re going to have to stabilise him before we can look at getting him out.”

“Stabilise him?”

“We’ll need to expose his backpack.”

“Copy,” Bella said, and he knew from her tone of voice, that slight falling inflection, that she had understood. Smothered in sprayrock, the backpack would not be able to dissipate its own waste heat. The suit would already be getting warm. Nothing had happened yet, though. Perhaps there was still time, if they moved quickly.

“Bella,” he said, “how are those reinforcements coming along?”

“I’ve got three people clearing the number-four lock. They have rescue equipment and cutting gear.”

“What about someone from medical?”

“Ryan’s already in five. He’ll be outside in a few minutes.”

Parry racked his brain, trying to remember the last time he had even heard of Ryan Axford having to don a suit. Presumably during the last mass EVA training drill, which had to have been at least eighteen months ago.

“Tell Ryan to take care. I have a feeling that this isn’t going to be the last time we need him.”

“Ryan knows the drill, Parry, just like you. How’s the patient? Talk to me if you can hear me, Mike.”

“I’m okay,” Takahashi said. “Head hurts like a bitch.”

Hypercapnia
, Parry thought. He was breathing too fast, too shallowly, allowing carbon dioxide to build up to dangerous levels.

“Easy, buddy.”

“I could really use something for this leg —”

“Mike,” Bella said, “you’re probably going to have to deal with the pain until we get you inside. If you were wearing a softsuit, we might be able to get morphine into you. But you’re not.”

“Bella’s right about the painkiller,” Parry said. “It’ll have to wait. But you’re a tough sonofabitch and I know you can take it.”

“If you say so, Chief.”

“I also know that a broken leg isn’t going to kill you. Look on the bright side: it might even excuse you from any hazardous duties once we get to Janus.”

“But I’ll still qualify for that bonus money, right?”

“
And
a medical claim into the bargain. And compensation for psychological trauma resulting from repeated exposure to Italian opera.”

Takahashi managed a grunt of approval. “Maybe the pain isn’t so bad after all.” Then his voice took on an ominous tone. “Oh, wait a minute.”

“What’s up?”

“I’m seeing something here… on my HUD.” He fell silent.

“Talk to me,” Parry said.

“Suit says there’s a problem. I’m getting a red light on thermal regulation.”

“The backpack’s having a bit of trouble dumping excess heat, but we’ve still got plenty of time before that becomes a problem for you.” Parry sounded so glib he almost believed it himself.

He looked up, alerted by a change in the play of light along the length of the tanks. The rescue party approached, helmet lights bobbing as they completed the last part of their journey using their hands and feet. Bright-yellow emergency equipment festooned their suits.

“Cavalry’s here,” Parry said.

The three-person squad reached the hardening sprayrock.

Despite Parry’s presence, they insisted on testing it cautiously before joining him around Takahashi’s half-buried form. Parry’s HUD dropped names onto the group: Chanticler, Herrick and Pagis. The first two were aquatics, from his own mining squad, while Pagis was one of Svieta’s propulsion engineers. They were all people with a lot of EVA time, used to working under pressure.

They were about to get better at it, Parry thought.

“You see the problem,” he said.

Belinda Pagis was the most technically minded of the three. Through her visor Parry saw her pull a face as she appraised the situation. “That’s not good,” she said, under her breath, but loud enough to carry on the open channel. “We’re going to have —”

“What’s not good?” Takahashi cut across her.

“Easy, Mike,” Parry said. “You just sit back and…” He trailed off, lost for words.

“We need to get him out of there,” Pagis said. “That suit’s going to start roasting him alive in about ten —”

“Guys,” Parry said. “Mike’s listening in.”

“Sorry,” Pagis said hastily. “I thought you were on a different —”

“Well, I’m not,” Takahashi said, “but you don’t have to pussy-foot around the truth. I know
exactly
how much shit I’m in.”

“That’s why we’re going to get you out of there, and fast,” Parry said, oozing false confidence. “But you have to help us, too. I want you to keep breathing nice and easy.”

“You’re worried about me asphyxiating? Even
I’m
not worried about asphyxiating. I have ten hours of reserve in this suit.”

“Air isn’t the problem,” Parry said. “It’s the load on the backpack. The harder you breathe, the more the pumps and scrubbers have to work. That’s what we need to think about. That’s why you need to keep calm.”

“I have a broken leg here.”

“And you’re doing great.” Parry could have strangled Pagis. Until she had opened her mouth, he had really felt that he had the situation under control. He glanced at Chanticler and Herrick, who were busy removing gear from their suits, then back to Takahashi. “We’re going to start digging you out,” he said. “I know you want to be out of there as fast as possible, but there’s only one way we can do this. We have to expose your backpack, which means digging under you.”

Takahashi said nothing. Parry dared to think that he had won the argument. He motioned to Herrick to pass him one of the digging tools, hoping that the diamond-bladed trowel was going to be hard enough to cut through the rapidly setting sprayrock.

Then Takahashi said, with disarming detachment, “I have another red light on backpack systems. I think a pump’s just failed.”

“We’re digging,” Parry said, gouging the blade into the blue-grey crust.

“It’s getting warm in here,” Takahashi said.

Chanticler and Pagis had begun digging with larger versions of the tool Parry had borrowed, and for a few deceptive minutes they looked to be doing the job. The diamond-tipped blades cut into the top crust to a depth of several centimetres, allowing the sprayrock to be levered away in fist-sized lumps. Parry began to let himself believe that they were going to get out of this without losing a man. They were making slow, steady progress, exposing more and more of the upper part of the backpack. Then the going got harder. They had excavated a square metre of crust to a depth of five centimetres with relative ease when the tools suddenly encountered much harder resistance. It was as if they gone from clay to granite.

It took ten minutes to clear the next centimetre, and by then the tools were beginning to blunt. They were using diamond tools to cut through something that was itself approaching the hardness of diamond.

“Are you nearly done?” Takahashi asked. His voice sounded faint, like a man on the edge of dozing off.

Parry placed his tool down on one of the adhesive patches they had attached to the crust. It was no use. The next centimetre would be even harder. He used his right hand to flip up an armoured panel on the sleeve covering his left arm. Pinching his gloved fingers clumsily together, he tugged out a spool of fibre-optic line and offered the plug-tipped end to Belinda Pagis. She took it with a nod and slipped the line into a compatible socket in her own suit.

“We’re not going to get him out in time, are we?” she said. “The only thing that will get through sprayrock at this hardness is a laser or a torch, but if we damage that backpack before we can free his legs, he’s already dead.”

Behind her faceplate, Pagis’s eyes darted anxiously left and right. “We need more time.”

“We haven’t
got
any more time.”

“Maybe we could rig up some kind of pressure tent,” she said. “If we could string a ceiling across him —”

“We’d never be able to make it airtight where it touched the sprayrock,” Parry said.

“Then we use sprayrock itself, form a kind of igloo around him. We seal it at the top, then pump air in.”

“Tricky even if we had gravity, Belinda.”

“We have to do
something
.”

“I’m thinking,” Parry said. Movement caught his eye again. Ryan Axford was gingerly making his way onto the sprayrock carrying a bright-orange medical case. Wolinsky and Herrick helped him keep upright relative to the crust. The medic had put in the basic minimum of suit training, but he lacked the easy agility that came with thousands of hours of EVA time. When Parry unplugged the fibre-optic link to Pagis and switched back onto the general channel, the first thing he heard was Axford’s too-heavy breathing. He sounded worse than Takahashi. Axford moved in front of the buried man and knelt down, anchoring himself with the patches on his knees. He fixed the case to the ground and thumbed open chunky latches. Inside was a gleaming array of medical equipment, packed tight as a puzzle, and three large tanks of pressurised gas. One metallic blue tank had an angel motif sprayed near the top.