Hell on Earth (2 page)

I didn't think I would face death as well as she. I'd go down in a very nonstoic way, kicking death in the groin if I could only line up my shot.

I looked inside those boxes—big ones, little ones, all kinds of in-between ones—and an idea grew in my head, a few words slipping out.

“I wonder if it still might be possible to seize the objective,” I muttered.

Arlene heard, too. “Huh? What do you mean, seize the objective?”

I was only half listening. The little voice in the back of my head drowned her out with some really crazy stuff: “It seems ridiculous, A.S., but it could work.”

T
he stoic qualities of Arlene Sanders were better suited to facing death than being irritated by her old buddy. “Fly, what the hell are you talking about?” She stomped to where I was going through a box of thin metal cylinders, perfect for the project growing inside my head.

“Yes,” I said, “it really could work.”

Using the special tone of voice normally reserved for dealing with mentally deficient children and drunken sailors, she said: “Tell me what in God's name you're on about, Fly!”

I lifted my head from the box. “When I was a kid, I wanted a car real bad. I mean
real
bad. Real real, bad bad.”

“Here we go down memory lane,” she said with a shrug.

“See, I couldn't afford the car,” I said, “but I wanted one.”

“Real real, bad bad?”

“I mean, I'd have taken anything with wheels and a transmission. If I couldn't have a six, I'd settle for four. Three, anything! But no matter how much I lowered expectations, I still couldn't afford a vehicle.”

“Is this going somewhere, Fly, or do I need to hitchhike back home to Mother?”

“That's exactly right,” I said. “I'm talking about transportation. I couldn't afford a car—but I
could
afford a spare part now and then, and you know how this ended up?”

She put her hands on her hips, head tilted to the side, and said: “Let me guess! You collected spare parts, and collected and collected, and finally you were able to build your own F-20! Or was it an aircraft carrier? Amphibious landing craft?”

I ignored her. “I
built myself a car.
Had a few problems; no brakes exactly, but it ran; and what a powerful sound that baby made when she turned over.”

Arlene finally saw where I was headed. Memory lane dead-ended right here on Deimos. “Fly, you're BS-ing me.”

“No, I really built an auto . . .”

“You
are
insane if you think you can build a freakin' spaceship out of spare parts!”

I literally jumped up and down. “You thought of it too,” I said. “Great idea, isn't it? We can build a rocket and get off this rock.”

She was very tolerant. “Fly, an automobile is one thing. You're talking about a spaceship.”

I looked her straight in the eye. “After all we've been through, you going to tell me we can't do this?”

She looked me straight back. “Read my lips,” she said. “We can not do this.”

“We have nothing to lose, A.S. It can't be any harder than taking down the spidermind, can it?”

“You have a point there,” she said grudgingly. “So how do you propose we start?”

She was always annoyed when I used reality to win an argument. I knew it was possible. But not without a manual.

“We need some tech,” I said.

“Tech?”

“Plans . . . then we can give it to our design department.”

“Don't tell me . . .
I'm
the design department.”

I smiled. “You're the design department.”

“And what are you, Fly Taggart?”

“Everything else.”

We went looking for a manual. Ten minutes later we found one in the most logical place, which was the last place we looked, naturally: next to the coffee maker. I tried to get Arlene to make us a pot of coffee, but she stared at me as if I'd grown a third head.

So I made it myself; I'd forgotten that Arlene didn't indulge, but that was all right with me. I figured since I was the production line, I needed all the caffeine I could survive.

Next we inventoried everything we had to work with. Our best choice was to make a small mail rocket intended for one person, but capable of seating two, if they were really chummy. I wrote a list of parts needed and found almost everything within three hours . . . except for a thingamabob. I knew what it was really called, but I couldn't think of it. We spent another hour searching, and though we didn't come across it, we located more tools that would be of immeasurable value: a screwdriver, a drill bit, a magnifying glass, and a paper punch.

“Enough for now,” said Arlene. “I'm sure the thingamabob will show up before we finish. We'd better get started . . . I have no idea how fast the air is leaking from the dome; we might have a month, we might have a couple of days!”

I wasn't going to argue with an optimistic Arlene. Hell, I hardly ever argued with the pessimistic one. “We haven't looked under all the tarps,” I said, “and there are other rooms to check too. But there is one
more shopping expedition required before we start work. We need enough food and water to hold us through the job; and all the spare liquid oxygen tanks and hydrogen tanks we can find.”

Arlene nodded. We were in a race with a bunch of air molecules, and they had a head start. In addition to oxygen for fuel, we actually needed to breathe now and again over the next few days. Weeks, whatever. It would be cruel fate indeed if I screwed the last bolt and hammered the final wing nut, only to keel over from oxygen deprivation.

My brain was working overtime now: “The pressure is dropping so slowly, we're not going to notice when it gets dangerous. Can you rig up something to warn us when to start taking a hit of pure oxygen?”

“And regulate how much we should take. Yeah, it's a space station . . . I don't think I'll have much trouble finding an air-pressure sensor and rebreather kit.”

She pulled a gouge pad out of her shirt pocket and started taking notes. She thought of something I'd missed: “I'll look for warm clothes too, Fly. The temperature will drop as we lose pressure.”

“Won't the sun warm us? We're no farther away than Earth itself.”

“We're underground. All this dirt makes a great insulator, unfortunately.”

First day, we were good scouts, gathering supplies for our merit badge in survival. I regretted that we couldn't move what we needed to a lower level and seal off one compartment. That would stretch survival by another month. But hauling the tons of material we'd need to build a rocket was impossible.

Arlene scrounged a generous supply of food, most of it produced under the dome with considerable help from the Genetics Department. After watching the monsters produced assembly-line out of the vat, I hesitated even to eat our own—human experiments
in recombinant-DNA veggies and lab-grown “Meet.” But Arlene wasn't queasy. She preferred the Deimos-grown peas and carrots to the real delicacy, frozen asparagus from Earth.

“I despise asparagus,” she insisted.

“All right; so I hate okra.” The slimy stuff was one of my childhood loathings.

On the second day, we ran head-on into our first lesson in Spaceship Construction 101: namely, translating the manual from “techie-talk” into English. Here, what should we make of this?

The ZDS protocol provides reliable, flow-controlled, two-way transmission of unenriched fuel-cell packet deliverables from nozzle to socket. It is a plasma stream (PLASM-STREAM) or packet stream (SOCK-SEQFUELPACKET) protocol. ZDS uses the Union Aerospace Corporation double-sequencing directed stream format. This format provides for
nozzle, spray, and extern-spray (socket)
specification.

NOTE: see the definition for
ZDS-redirect
in Section 38.12.

ACTIVE OR PASSIVE

Sockets utilizing the ZDS protocol are either “active” or “passive.” Nozzle processes must be directed into passive (external spray) sockets. They detect for connection requests from deliverable processes residing on the same or other nodes of the fuel-cell packet path. Socket processes broadcast requests for active (directed spray) nozzles. They sidestep nominal delivery in favor of reverse-directed (acknowledging) packet streams.

ALL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NOZZLES AND SOCKETS MUST BE SET TO DEFAULT ACTIVE OR PASSIVE PROTOCOL DEPENDING ON THE ANTICIPATED FUEL-CELL PATH DELIVERY PROCESS.

WARNING! Failure to follow UAC active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols may result in unanticipated fuel-cell path combustion with undesirable results.

I could translate the final warning pretty well: if we didn't figure out what the hell they meant by “active/passive nozzle-socket connection protocols,” Arlene and I would become a rather spectacular fireworks display.

Arlene was better at figuring it out than I was; she had actually taken engineering night courses during her shore tours. I volunteered the use of my hands and a strong back if she'd turn the technical gobbledy-gook into the kind of instructions a Marine can follow: “Put this part here! Tighten that bolt, Marine!”

“Yeah, just like you to have the woman do all the
hard
work,” she said.

“Just remind me to clean the carburetor before I work on the piston valves.”

“It's not a car, you moron!”

“Huh. I guess in space no one can hear you make metaphors.” Amazingly, she didn't shoot me.

Unfortunately, the rockets used by the Deimos facility—hence all the spare parts—were short-hop, lightweight supply rockets, never intended to carry a single human being, let alone two of us . . . and never intended to fight a gravity well like Earth's.

There were a couple large-bore rocket casings left
over from God knows when, back before we had the MDM-44 plasma motors developed by Union Aerospace, and this was the key: I figured I could hot-rod a 44 into a bigger cousin, cram it inside one of the old casings, and have enough juice to fling us off Deimos, burn into the atmosphere, and brake to a (messy) landing Somewhere on Earth.

My main goal was to keep from blowing us up. After frying our spider baby in JP-9 jet fuel, I had a new respect for the stuff. It beat the hell out of salad oil.

Arlene squatted on an uncomfortable stool translating technical paragraphs into something I could understand. My optimist projection was to finish the task in ten days!

Reality dragged ass.

Starting our
third
week, we ran into the first serious problem. Trying to jerry-rig parts we couldn't find into configurations we couldn't figure out was a bitch, and I insisted we needed to test-fire the motor when I finally got a working model. We didn't have much time, but the motor was life and death, a
must test.
We'd spent two days painfully assembling it, and I do mean “we.” Arlene enjoyed an excuse to get off her stool; besides, it was a two-man job.

We finally ended up with a sleek beauty two meters long and a meter in diameter,
almost
small enough to fit inside the old-model rocket skin. Just a few odd pieces here and there where I thought I could supercharge the system—or where I couldn't find the correct part and had to substitute butter for eggs. A pair of start cables snaked into the machine from ten feet away, where a switch box was connected to twenty-seven fifty-volt ni-cad batteries.

I'd spent half a day welding steel bars together into a framework, sort of, kind of approximating the
interior scaffolding in the mail tube. We bolted the motor inside, mooring it securely to the deck plates. Last, I attached a highly sensitive pressure sensor to the forward edge to measure the thrust. I'd trust Arlene to make the calculations and tell me whether we would make it into orbit or not.

“Want to say a prayer?” she asked before I switched it on.

“Yeah; I wasn't
always
in trouble with the nuns. Maybe I can collect on a few good deeds.” Arlene stationed herself behind a bulkhead; I reached over and flipped the switch, then dived behind cover.

Superheated gases rushed out the back with a tremendous roar . . . and I could tell immediately it was too much force; I'd tweaked my rocket engine too good.

But I couldn't switch it off! It was just a model, designed to burn until the fuel was gone; no cut-off valve.

The scaffolding strained, groaning like a dying steam demon—whoops, remind me later—and I knew what was about to happen. “Get your head down!” I screamed. No use—she couldn't hear anything over the roar of the engine and the scream of steel twisting and ripping free.

The mooring tore loose with a horrible, grinding noise that for an instant even drowned out the 44. My beautiful, working rocket engine broke free, ate the pressure sensor with one gulp, and smashed through a dozen boxes of precious parts before making a smoking hole against the nearby bulkhead, leaving a perfectly straight series of holes, like a cartoon.

D
estroying a bulkhead on a doomed base, or even some spare parts, was no cause for alarm. Destroying the motor was something else again. Arlene screamed something obscene, but I couldn't hear her over the ringing in my ears. We got off lucky. It could have struck the JP-9 and ended everything.

After we extinguished the fire and salvaged what we could of the motor, Arlene looked at me humorlessly. “Flynn Taggart, what deviltry did you do to those poor nuns?”

“Can you rephrase that, after what we've been through?” We were both a little punchy, getting by on shifts of four hours sleep. But no spiderminds were trying to kill us, no imps throwing a wrench in the machinery, no hell-princes setting fires worse than the one we'd just put out. It felt like we were on vacation.

All right, to fill in a bit: an imp is what we dubbed the brown, spiny, leathery alien that throws flaming balls of mucus. Hell-princes looked like the typical “devil” from my troubled youth in Catholic school—red body, goat legs, horns, and they too threw something noxious that killed you real dead; we pretty much decided it had to be an example of genetic engineering, since it was too close to a human conception of evil.