Galaxia Read online

  “Electricity. We still don’t have any. The power conduits are in place to provide power to this dome, but there isn’t any flowing.”

  She frowned. “Have you checked in with the admin building?” That was the dome in the middle of the complex. Everything was run from there, pretty much.

  “Yes, but they say turning on the juice is an outside job.”

  Meaning outside the dome, in a space suit. The thought of being outside gave Carmen a rush. What an amazing feeling that must be!

  “How long will it take?” she asked.

  “They couldn’t say. It sounds like their personnel are all tied up unloading. The problem is, we’re going to lose refrigeration on these samples before long. We may need to move them to another dome.”

  Or just get someone to turn the power on, Carmen mused. She wondered briefly if Patrick would help her get the electricity running, if she asked. He’d been so nice about helping her in the galley – and then so cold when it came to dealing with the stowaway! She shivered at the memory. No, she didn’t think that she could rely on him for help.

  Then she thought about Jacob. He might be willing to give her a hand! All she had to do was find him.

  “I might know someone who can help,” she told her father. She bounded away before he looked up to reply.

  Jacob said he’d be working as an engineer. Where would he be, right now? Probably helping to unload, like everyone else, right? She pulled out her tablet. The base computer had all their personal details on file, and was tracking their location. She’d see if she could find him that way.

  It worked! The computer system was incredibly easy to navigate, and finding personnel turned out to be an elementary function. Carmen guessed that if you needed to find someone because there was something wrong, you probably needed to find them right away. In space, small problems became bigger ones quickly.

  Jacob was in the central dome. She marched down the hall, around the ring, to the short hall that ran into that dome. It was larger than the other domes, maybe twice the size. No one was around by the doorway, so she walked right in.

  Inside, Jacob was directing a few other men carrying heavy loads of equipment. “Over there, by the printer,” he said, gesturing at a machine about the size of a big van. Carmen was intrigued, and walked over to tap him on the shoulder. He jumped at her touch.

  “Hey! What is that thing?” she asked.

  He relaxed when he saw her. “It’s a 3D printer,” he replied. “A big one. And that gear they’re bringing in is stuff I’ll use to upgrade the unit’s design. By the time I’m done, it’ll be able to make just about anything we can design.”

  “Anything?” she asked, dubious.

  “Well, anything we can model. It can’t print a circuit board. It can print a chair, or all the parts for a bike, or similar stuff. With the new upgrade, it’ll even be able to print new habitat domes. And with some work, and a few other parts, I think I could even get it to print new printers.”

  “That’s awesome!” she said, and meant it. It really did sound cool, and would probably be very useful. But she had a bigger issue right now: sample containers that were losing refrigeration. “Jacob, I’ve got a problem. I was hoping you might be able to help me out?”

  “If I can, sure. It’s a little crazy around here right now,” he said apologetically.

  “It’s my father’s lab. There’s no power.”

  “Really?” He rubbed his chin. Then he went over to a console and poked at the screen a few times. He pulled up a schematic of the base, and examined it for a moment before turning back to her.

  “Everything looks like it’s hooked up right. But the power all comes from the central hab-dome, right where we’re standing, and is routed through cables to the other domes. The lines are in place, so someone must have forgotten to flip the breakers when they hooked it up,” Jacob said.

  “That doesn’t sound too hard,” Carmen said.

  “Eh. Harder than it sounds. The breakers are outside, where the conduit is plugged into the dome.”

  “Outside! Why outside?”

  “Something to do with safety regs. Can’t run a high voltage power cable through a crew passageway. And nobody has set up separate passages for power to make them easy to service. Not yet, anyway.” He seemed lost in thought for a moment. “Maybe with the new adaptations to the printer we can do that, now…”

  “Jacob, focus,” Carmen said. “My dad’s samples will lose refrigeration soon. They’re on battery power, but that will only last so long.”

  He looked confused. “Can’t we just move them into another dome and plug them in there, for now?”

  “Live virus samples, Jacob. You want them sitting near where you sleep?”

  He blanched.

  “Yeah, me either,” she said.

  “Well, I’ll get one of the guys to help me as soon as I can. They’re busy for a bit, and protocol says we can’t go out there solo. Have to use the buddy system outside.”

  Carmen felt a rush of excitement. Wait – this could be her chance to get outside the base in a spacesuit? On the first day here? How incredible would that be? She smiled sweetly at Jacob.

  “You could just bring me, if all you need is someone to watch your back,” she said.

  “Are you rated for EVA?” he asked. His voice challenged her – he knew this was her first trip into space, so he already knew the answer to that question. And Carmen wasn’t stupid enough to lie about it.

  “Of course not. But this is an emergency, right? And you’d be following regs.” She inhaled and crossed her fingers for luck, then rushed on. “Not like we’d be out there long anyway, right? Simple job, out and back quick?”

  “Yeah, we could get it done fast. OK,” Jacob said. “Follow me.”

  He took her to out of the main room, off to the far side of the center dome. There was an airlock here. Probably to help with maintenance on the other domes. An easy way to get outside and get things done. Jacob popped a suit locker on the wall next to the airlock, and started pulling out chunks of spacesuit. Businesslike, he slipped the bulky elements of the suit over the ship-suit she still wore from the trip up here. His hand slipped getting the top over her chest and brushed her breast, causing him to blush furiously. She hid a smile at his reaction.

  Poor guy. She wondered how often he got friend-zoned. Probably way too often, and she could already tell this time wasn’t going to be any different, even if he couldn’t. He was nice, and she liked him. But there wasn’t any spark.

  Finally he had her all suited up and ran system checks on her suit. Then he started getting himself ready as well. She watched him click the pieces of suit together, hoping this job didn’t take too long. They’d already burned so much time. Carmen wondered how long her father’s samples had before the battery power ran out.

  “OK, check my suit. Make sure the locking points are all good,” Jacob said over his suit radio. She gave each one a tug, but as near as she could tell he had done a good job.

  “Looks good,” she said. “Where’d you learn to do this, anyway?”

  “Back on Earth. In a swimming pool,” he admitted.

  Carmen sucked her lower lip. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that! She recalled that this was his first time in space, too. Both of them would be taking their first walk outside here.

  “You good?” he asked. Something of her fear must have shown in her face. She looked up at him, forced a grin, and gave him a thumbs-up sign.

  “Then let’s do this.” He stepped into the airlock.

  She followed. This one wasn’t like the big cargo airlock on the spaceship. It was more like the passenger one – about wide enough for two people to stand side by side, if they were not in suits. It was really only big enough for two suited people standing one in front of the other. The space felt a little claustrophobic, a feeling only augmented by being locked into a close fitting and bulky space-suit.

  Jacob pressed the touch screen panel beside the outer
door, and the door behind Carmen snapped shut. Suddenly the feeling of being trapped in a tight space became incredibly intense. Sweat broke out on her brow. She was breathing faster, and she could hear her heart pounding in her ears. This was a terrible idea. She was going out into one of the most hostile environments imaginable for the first time, with someone else who’d never been out there before. They were both going to get killed. She was about to open her mouth to tell Jacob to stop – they’d find another way to secure the samples. But he’d already cycled the air out of the lock. The light above the outer door turned green, and it opened. Jacob stepped outside, and Carmen found herself following him if for no other reason than to escape the metal coffin of the airlock.

  It was daylight outside. The sun beat down on them, and her visor quickly dimmed to protect her eyes from the bright light. Looking around, all she could see was white. The domes were white, a fine coat of dust covering them to make them blend in with the ground. She took a few gentle steps, each footfall stirring up more dust. Many people had walked out here before – she could see their footprints scattered all over the area, hundreds of boot prints all overlapping one another.

  That made her feel a bit better. It wasn’t like she was exploring someplace no one had ever been, after all. People walked out here all the time. She took an experimental bound that carried her half a dozen feet, and landed as lightly as if she’d floated back to the ground. This wasn’t going to be so hard.

  “Look up,” Jacob breathed.

  She followed his advice, and gasped. All she could see was stars. But it looked like she could see all of them. It looked like every star in the galaxy had gathered in the lunar sky. She’d read poetry written on Earth comparing the stars in the sky to jewels on velvet. If only those poets could have seen this! The view from any place on Earth paled.

  “The breaker is over here,” Jacob said, breaking her from the view. He’d walked over to the lab dome, and was standing next to a pile of heavy cables that ran there from the central dome. That must be the power conduit. Jacob bent forward and opened the breaker box.

  “Odd,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Carmen asked.

  “It looks like the breakers are all set correctly.”

  She bounded over next to him. “So what’s wrong, then?”

  He knelt down next to the box, poking inside it. “I’m not sure. It should be working just fine. Let me try uninstalling the breakers and setting them back in place. Maybe one of them is socketed badly.”

  Carmen stood back and watched him work. To her, it looked like a large gray box with a bunch of smaller black boxes stuck into sockets inside it. She knew how breakers worked. But she didn’t know what was wrong with these ones. She was curious, so she watched everything Jacob did, tracking his every moment. So she spotted the small blue spark as he worked one of the breakers out of its socket. That didn’t look right.

  “Jacob, I don’t think–”

  She was cut off by a much brighter flash of light, a huge spark that jumped from the breakers up to Jacob’s hands. He yelled – she could hear him over the radio. And then he fell backward. The hands of his suit were blackened and smoking. And he wasn’t moving.

  “Shit,” Carmen said. “Jacob? Answer me, Jacob!”

  She went to his side and looked into his helmet. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving at all. If he was out of the suit, she could see if he was breathing, check his heart rate. How could she do that here? She exhaled – and saw the breath mist the bottom of the glass faceplate a little. She leaned over, and watched for any misting on Jacob’s plate.

  Nothing.

  “No you don’t,” she said. The suits had gripping points on the shoulders. She grabbed his so she could drag him over to the airlock, but she found there was no need. In the low gravity, she could pick him right up. She grabbed his arm instead and slung him over her back. The mass threw her balance off a little, and she wobbled with the first couple of steps. But she was quickly making good time to the lock.

  “Hang in there. I’ll have you inside in a minute,” she said. She pressed a button on her left wrist to change radio frequencies to the emergency channel. Everyone with a radio would pick up her message. It was seriously time to call for help.

  “Medical emergency at the central dome airlock,” she called. She hoped someone would come running. Jacob was going to need treatment, fast, and she still didn’t know her way around well enough. Where was the medical bay? If his heart was stopped by that burst of electricity, where was the nearest defibrillator?

  “Roger, help is on the way,” came a reply over her radio.

  Carmen exhaled in relief. She’d never been so glad to hear another voice. It was her fault Jacob was out here in the first place! She’d never be able to live with it, if anything happened to him because she’d been in a rush.

  She reached the airlock, and touched the panel. She felt it buzz under her fingers. But the red light above the door didn’t change. Was it cycling? It ought to be ready for them, still in a vacuum state. Why wasn’t the door opening up?

  Again and again, she pressed the panel, frustrated. The door wasn’t opening. She looked inside through the window, but everything looked normal. The inner door was closed. Even if the airlock had refilled with air and had to cycle that out before opening, shouldn’t it have finished that by now?

  Then she saw faces inside. They went to the panel beside the door, and…nothing. She could see them working on something on the inside door, and then one of them was talking over a radio, saying something she couldn’t hear.

  This wasn’t good. They couldn’t get the door open!

  “Airlock doors are frozen,” someone said over the emergency channel. “What’s the nature of the medical emergency?”

  “Electrical accident,” she said. “Victim is unconscious. Not sure if he is breathing or not.”

  “What does his cardiac monitor say?” the voice asked.

  Cardiac monitor? The suits had cardiac monitors? Where was the display? She set Jacob down – if his heart was stopped, it had already been a couple of minutes, and he was running out of time, fast. She searched his suit. Where was it?

  “Carmen.”

  This time, she knew the voice. It was Patrick, the captain from the ship. Oh, she was in so much trouble now. She could hear it in his voice. With her luck, he’d want to space her, too.

  “Yes?” she replied.

  “The readout is on the wrist computer. Same display that controls the radio. Press the heart icon on his wrist,” he said.

  She did as he said, and a medical display popped up. The suit was monitoring breath rate, heartbeat, oxygen level, radiation exposure, and body temperature. And thank god! Jacob was still breathing, his heart still beating. Slowly – but it was a nice, steady beat.

  “He’s still breathing,” she said.

  “Good. Now hang tight, I’m on my way to you.”

  How, she wanted to ask. But she held her tongue. He seemed pretty calm. No sense antagonizing him. Actually, she admired that calm. She’d seen plenty of people who fell apart in a crisis, and she couldn’t stand it. She was in her element hip deep in the middle of a mess. She’d worked more emergency rooms than she could count, in the few short years she’d been a doctor. Chasing viral epidemics left one in hot zones way more often than not. And her dad was getting on in years – he’d started relying on her as his eyes and ears.

  She remembered calling one now-ex-boyfriend from a clinic in Israel, once, where she was tracking a possible Ebola outbreak. He’d asked what all the noise in the background was. When she’d calmly replied that the area was under a rocket attack, he hadn’t believed her. So she took video. He completely freaked out. She broke up with him shortly after.

  There was something very unattractive about people who couldn’t handle themselves when things went bad.

  She felt a vibration, and looked up. Something was coming over the dome! She looked more closely and realized it was a
person, in a space suit, with some sort of flying setup. A thruster pack. That had to be Patrick on his way to get her. He wasn’t just coming around – he was flying over to her.

  He jetted over her, setting down a few feet away. The blast from his landing kicked up huge plumes of dust, and she covered her face with her arm instinctively at first, before remembering that the suit mask would keep the dust away from her eyes. His suit was the same as hers, but the thruster pack on his back looked like a huge turtle shell. It was clearly heavy, too. In the low gravity they could carry a lot more, but she’d already learned that the additional mass made moving with a heavy load difficult. That thruster had to weight about as much as Patrick did himself, but he took slow, careful steps toward her and never lost his balance.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He picked up Jacob’s body, hefting it over a shoulder. It was a lot of weight, and he did wobble getting Jacob into position. But he managed. “What happened?”

  “Electrical burst from the breakers,” she said, pointing at the offending machinery. “Knocked him out.”

  “We’ll take care of him first. Then I’ll get someone out here to look at the problem,” he said. “Now, I need you to stand on my feet.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I can’t hold him and hold you and still steer this thing. I need at least one hand free to control the thruster pack. So I need you to stand on my feet and hold on tight to me. You OK with that?”

  “Yes,” she said. Gingerly, she stepped up onto his suited feet. The boots were reinforced, though, and she remembered that she weighed almost nothing out here. She wasn’t going to hurt him. Hanging on though – to what? She reached around his side – there was a handle on his hip. She grabbed on to that with her left hand, and then slipped her right hand up under Jacob’s still form. She wrapped those fingers into the spacesuit fabric as best she could.

  Standing on his feet, she was as tall as he was. They were almost nose to nose, only the glass of their helmets dividing them. And why was that thought making her pulse race even more than thinking about flying?