Competition/Rivalry

Blown Away

Renée Gendron (@ReneeGendron)

Senior Mechanical Engineer Sara Herrera’s breath lodged deep in her throat. Dark blue and purple clouds moved quickly on the weather radar. In less than one hour, the largest storm of the year would crash against the colony’s dome.

“We’ll need repair crews.”  Mechanical Engineer Connall Deegan tapped a cloud on the screen. “We’ll need six rotating crews to ensure their frostbite isn’t severe and to prevent exhaustion.” He stood confident, but uncertainty flashed in his beautiful brown eyes.

“Crews are already on standby. I’ve told them to eat and rest.” Spend time with their families because this storm will last for days and be a killer. Sara toyed with the locket on her necklace, which held a picture of her husband of twenty years, Emilio, of twenty years and their two children. Miguel was now fifteen and Teo seventeen, but Emilio had died three years ago in a storm less severe than the one that was coming. Sara angled her gaze away from the screen, but tears still pooled in the corners of her eyes. She fought against years of pain and loneliness, then straightened. Senior Mechanical Engineers had responsibilities to the tens of thousands of souls struggling to survive under the dome. “We’ve got the first tour. Priorities are keeping the electrical grid operational and heat. The storm’s centre will be minus one hundred and seventy Celsius.”

Connall drew in a long breath and held it. The freckles on his cheeks brought out the copper highlights in his ginger hair. He released a slow, measured breath. “The environmental suits aren’t designed to handle those temperatures.”

At minus sixty Celsius, drawing a breath was akin to thousands of sharp daggers stabbing the lungs, making it too hard to breathe. The environmental suits were tested to be good until minus one hundred and thirty, with a safety threshold of plus or minus ten degrees safety.

But at minus one hundred and seventy? There was no guarantee the seals would last, the air pumps would circulate oxygen, or the insulation would protect against freezing to death.

“Have everyone wear triple thermal undergarments,” she said. “Have them store two thermal packs in their boots and gloves. We’ll need to keep everyone moving and fingers nimble to effectuate repairs. Have everyone eat high-fat foods before going on shift to keep their metabolisms up.”

Another nasty blob of the deepest  blue and dark purple appeared on the screen, blotting all directions for hundreds of kilometres.

“Before and after shifts,” she said. “Repair crews get priority for fats and proteins over everyone except the neo-natal units and the sick.”

Connall swiped his wrist computer and added the items to the crews’ pre-shift checklist. He swiped something else in his wrist-comp. “I’ve advised the command staff, and they’ve relayed the nutritional directives to the feeding units.”

Sara clasped her hands behind her back and stared at the screen. Not that the blob of a monster storm or its terrifying parameters changed—cold not experienced since the first decade after the corporations left the planet, wind speeds not experienced since the earthquakes caused new mountain ranges to appear fifty years ago, and floods brought warm waters from the south.

One cold bead of sweat trickled down her hairline under her tight, regulation bun, down the nape of her neck, the curve of her back, and the base of her spine. It trickled slowly, ensuring every fine hair was touched along the way.

Connall left the room and returned a few minutes later with a food tray.

Sara closed her eyes. She had faded memories from decades ago, as a toddler of her sitting on her grandfather’s knees in a kitchen filled with spicy food. Her father cooked delicious meals of wild four-tusked hogs and buffalo harvested by hunters that fed twenty families for a month. The planet’s mines were active and the veins rich, and spices from fifteen systems had been exchanged for ore.

She opened her eyes. Now. Decades later. The veins of the mines were depleted, and with the abandonment of the Consortium’s resources to prospect for more ore, the colony had lost its ability to purchase extra foodstuffs and spices. Its food was Basic Protein, synthesised through elaborate laboratory processes that offered no taste or texture but sufficient calories and nutrients to keep the colonists alive.

Barely.

“Here.” Connall placed the tray in front of her. “No sense in issuing orders if you don’t follow them yourself.” He smelled of engine grease and the possibility of a pleasant future.

Sara tipped her chin towards the tray.

Connall popped a protein ball into his mouth, and then Sara took one and ate it. The protein ball lacked flavour, was too mushy, and made her gag, but it kept her alive. If that. After the storm season passed, she’d allocate more engineering resources to rebuild hydroponics bays and energy cells to synthesise more meat so as not to have to eat the  goo the agriculture department created.

Flavours. Additional resources would be granted to restore flavours. The dome’s residents needed various flavours, bursts of sweet and sour and spicy on their palates to spur them to eat better and build a better world. No one wanted to live in a world where everything was mushy and gushy and lacked a basic salty flavour.

“Take another.” Connall pointed at a ball of goo. “First shift is in twenty minutes. We’ll be out there for hours.”

Damn her orders. How dare a colleague follow her instructions? She swiped the protein ball from the tray and shoved it into her mouth. If she swallowed it without biting into it, she wouldn’t be reminded of how awful it was—until the hard ball of synthetic protein hit the floor of her stomach with a hard plop. All that nothingness taste, all that hard lump of food, all that disgusting blandness shot back up her throat.

She swallowed back bile and vomit, then refocused on her mission. “Gear up.”

Connall walked to the far end of the engineering department. Everything about him was measured, his even strides, the slow swing of his arms, the way he removed his environmental suit from its locker and stepped into it.

Sara swung her gaze to the metal deck. Not that it had changed in the last two hundred years since the colony had been constructed, but its lattice was worn and needed change. She put on her suit, then checked each gauge and computer system, double-checking that the environmental controls were operational.

Connall stood in his EV suit with his helmet tucked under his arm. He punched the suit’s arm computer and executed the protocol. “Magnetic boots?”

Sara walked two paces on the deck, the magnets in her EV suit boots clinging to the floor. “Check. Yours?”

Connall walked two paces. “Check.”

They confirmed the status of  the internal environmental controls, oxygen supply, oxygen recyclers, suits’ computers, and communication systems. Everything was operational.

Tool kit magnetically sealed to her wrist, Sara stepped into the airlock. Connall was two steps behind her, holding his encased tool kit.

A series of angry red lights flashed in the engineering room. Each indicated a systems breakdown, a breach of protocol and a systems-wide issue. Every flashing red light was insignificant and could be repaired after the storm, every red light except for life support and communications. Five oxygen scrubbers had stopped working, and six air vents had obstructions.

Priorities.

Sara downloaded the map to the life support array into the off-net drive of her wrist-comp, closed the airlock to the engineering room, released the pressure from the airlock, and opened the outer door. A blast of wind shot through the open door, pushing her back against the far wall. Connall steadied her, then helped her back to her feet.

She leaned into the wind, hunching forward until she was almost bent in two. She forced one leg forward. Hours in the high gravity gym were a poor training exercise for the real wind’s force against her. She secured her metal clip to the ten-centimetre-thick cable that looped around the station and mustered her strength to walk outside.

The wind would not get the better of her. She pressed forward.

“I’m behind you.” Connall’s voice was grainy but right in her ear.

She wanted to hear more of his voice, less tinny, more intimate during a private dinner over goo and small talk. Connall Deegan’s family arrived on the colony six generations ago, when things were even rougher than they were now. True pioneers they were, and not one of them had taken the opportunity to leave when the evacuation shuttles arrived two years ago. The colony had lost almost half of its population, but not one Deegan had left. Every last one of them had stood by the shuttle landing pads, calling out those who left, calling them traitors, cowards, and deserters for not staying and finding a way to make the colony work.

A part of Sara’s heart had trilled in delight that day. So proud and true the Deegans stood, each with their particular shade of ginger hair, eyes ranging from light brown to dark, mesmerising brown. Each Deegan woman, man, and teenager called out the evacuees for their cowardice and lack of pride in staying with their homeland. A new ore vein would be discovered, new technologies developed and sold, and upgrades to the dome could be done with the tools and know-how of the colonists.

Corporations had long abandoned the planet for being unprofitable, and imperial powers had no interest in such a distant ice rock. Still, this outpost on a near-barren planet was home to the people who survived here, who scratched out a living. And with effort, the planet could be terraformed into verdant fields and forests.

The blast of the wind shoved all such memories from her, and she stepped into it and fought her way past the opening of the airlock. “With me?”

“Always, partner.”

A wave of heat washed over Sara. She struggled against the implication and double meaning.

Always. Always she felt it, since Connall had transferred into the department three years ago, a few weeks after Emilio’s death. Always. Partner.

Sara leaned further into the blasting wind, away from the death of her husband and further still from the pleasant feelings that bubbled in her every time Connall entered the room.

Survival or death. Such storms blotted everything else in the landscape and required precision focus. Survival or Death.

She bent into the wind, one hand on the cable clip, the other on the handle of her tool kit. Her muscles burned, but her body was cold. Two hundred meters near the edges of the ferocious storm, and her environmental suit had failed at the task. “What are your systems?” She walked a few steps, eye on the horizon, body leaning towards it, and the tool kit magnetically attached to her hand pushed behind her. She struggled against the force of the wind but resigned herself to keeping the tool kit tucked behind her. She took two steps forward, then the wind knocked her back one. “Report.”

“Environmental suit is functional. Tools are secured.” Connall’s voice was strained.

She marched on, attaching a new loop to her suit belt, then removed the last. She turned a corner around the habitat’s dome and walked towards the communication array. Her legs and lower back hurt, but she refused to let the storm win. “Transition to new cable series complete.” She tried to turn to look behind her, but the fierce winds kept her looking forward.

“Cable transition complete,” Connall said. “Computer, what is the first repair requirement?”

Something snapped and blew past Sara. She wasn’t sure if it was a part of the dome structure, a communications antenna, or something else.

“What was that?” Connall’s voice was sharp and alert.

“I don’t know.” Cold seeped through Sara’s suit, slicing against her cheek and down her neck. “Keep moving. The suits won’t last long in this.” She raised her leg and stomped it against the frozen ground. The movement strained every muscle in her calves, thighs, and hops. She pressed forward. She took another step, the heat from her movements insufficient to keep up with the heat leaching from her environmental suit. She checked her body temperature on her wrist-comp. Point two degrees colder than what she had been not five minutes earlier.

“Understood.” Connall sucked in heavy breaths.

She stepped forward, her body aching from the resistance of the brutal wind and the heat from her suit fast fleeing. Snow and ice crystals swirled around her, reducing visibility to near zero. She switched to an infra-red view screen in her helmet, and the structures of the habitat dome came into view. Her body cooled, then turned cold, and her fingers numbed. She squeezed against the chemical heat packs in her palms, flooding her fingers with temporary warmth. She stomped forward against the fierce thrust of the wind.

Something large flew past her, then another, followed by a cascade of thousands of smaller debris pinging against her face shield.

Connall reached for her arm and turned her to face him. He leaned his helmet against hers. “Communication is down.”

“Life support is the priority.”

She nodded, then walked the length of the dome to the ventilation system, and hooked her suit to the outer ladder railing, then detached her cable from the dome’s rail. She reached for the ladder’s first rung, stepped onto it, and connected her magnetic boots with the metal railing. She reached for another rung, but a wind gust shoved her flat against the ladder. The wind pummeled her back, and she lay sprawled against the ladder.

The wind shifted direction, and she drew in a full breath. She looked over her shoulder and down, and Connall had completed his cable transfer to the ladder rail. He pointed to the top of the dome, and she nodded and continued her climb.

Each ladder rung took more effort. The cold was bone-deep now, and she tried to move faster to generate some heat, but the wind was too violent for her to go any faster. Finally, she climbed over the edge of the ladder, secured her toolkit to the cable line, and switched to the roof’s system of cables.

Connall finished his climb and did the same.

She led them to the ventilation system and opened the diagnostic panel. A series of yet more angry red lights flashed, each needing urgent repair. Trace back to the origin of the problem, then work your way back to the smaller repairs. The mantra. The oxygen scrubbers. There was no point in fixing the ventilation system if it pumped carbon dioxide instead of oxygen into the air.

Her organs felt like they were encased in ice. She broke another heat pack in her feet but kept the second pack in her hands intact. She’d need to feel her fingers to conduct repairs and wanted to hold onto the second pack longer.

She motioned for Connall to step closer, and he did. Then she leaned forward, and their helmets touched. “I’ll start working on the oxygen scrubbers, and you start working on the air pumps.” It was a shame she couldn’t smell him through the EV suits.

He nodded.

Connall walked to the other side of the diagnostics panel and set down his toolbox.

Sara ran a diagnostic on the scrubbers but knew the answer. It was too cold for the chemical reaction to occur. Heat. The entire planet needed heat. Although it was the farthest planet from the system’s sun, it had once had the highest mineral content that the corporations needed for space travel. A cosmic joke.

She wiped a layer of frost away from her wrist-comp and tapped its screen, but it remained dark. She tapped it again, but the computer didn’t respond. She walked to Connall and leaned her helmet to his. “I will redirect power from the living quarters to conserve energy. Let Command know.”

He tried his computer, then shook his head. “Mine’s frozen.”

The nearest hard-wired communication port to Command was four hundred meters away. In normal conditions, it would be a five-minute walk. In these conditions, twenty minutes would be record breaking. Her suit flashed a warning on her screen that her body was losing too much heat.

“I’ll do a gradual shutdown of the living quarters,” she said. “I’ll start by flashing the lights in the corridors and rooms. Hopefully, people will see that as a sign to evacuate. Then I’ll decrease life support to a minimum.”

“That’s risky. Some people are sleeping and won’t see the signal, and the intercoms are down. They could freeze to death.”

She knew that. She was too aware of the thousands of lives that depended on her. “Can you tap into communications?”

He shook his head.

Neither could she, and she had worked every system in the dome. At the next senior Command meeting, she would raise the need for a protocol to allow engineering to do repairs when communications were done. For now, she had to risk it. “I’ll lower the temperature by two degrees. That might wake people up if they’re cold, giving them time to add more layers and go to communal areas that always have more heating.”

He grunted.

She straightened and went to the diagnostics console. She reduced the temperature in Blue Sector first. The screen flashed a series of confirmation requests, followed by her engineering password. She repeated the process for Gold, Green, Red, and Purple Sectors, then rerouted the power to the oxygen scrubbers.

Nothing happened. Not one blip or spike.

She stomped and rubbed her hands, but the cold remained as biting as before. Three minutes had passed, not enough time for people to realise the message or get to their quarters to wear warmer clothing. Not even enough time for people to wake up cold.

Oxygen content in the air dipped below eighteen per cent. Nineteen per cent was considered the lowest safe range, and she had no idea how long it would take the oxygen scrubbers to heat. A new type of cold gripped her, filled with dread and worry.

Death from hypothermia or from asphyxiation. Neither was pleasant. She lowered the temperature by another four degrees in the habitation areas and three degrees throughout the dome, except for the medical facilities and the agricultural areas. Adding hunger to a growing list of problems was not ideal.

Connall approached her, and she tipped her head towards him.

“Pipes are blocking and bursting.” His voice was a professional calm, and his eyes held grit.

“Which systems?”

“All.”

No problems were too big or too small for an engineer to repair, except when all problems happened at the same time. “Pipes can be repaired. We must focus on the oxygen scrubbers.”

His handsome features didn’t twitch or show frustration. Always professional. “Understood. I’ll work on getting communications back up. If I do, what are the orders to Command?”

“Have off-duty and non-essential personnel move to the common areas of their respective habitats and work repair crews in thirty-minute shifts to prevent major hypothermia.”

“Understood.” He returned to his console.

Sara’s screen flashed a warning that she had been exposed to inclement weather for one hour. Inclement weather. She needed to change the warning to ‘standing in body-numbing cold with her bum freezing off’. She stomped her feet, then wiped the frost from the console. Oxygen levels continued to fall.

She rerouted additional power from the defence grid. Corporate rivals hadn’t attacked in months, and their equipment and weapons would fail in this weather. Wolves never attacked the dome, only people taking out buggies to collect supplies or stragglers walking far behind the miners on their return to the dome.

She rubbed her hands together, but the movement stung. A painful creeping sensation like a thousand pins and needles crept up her toes, feet, and legs. She opened the second heat pack in her gloves, and the prickly sensation worsened. She grimaced and shook her hands, encouraging blood flow, but the sensation spread up her fingers to her arms.

Everything hurt. Cold air stabbed her lungs. Her joints were stiff, her mind fuzzy, and her muscles tense. She trembled but never seemed to have enough heat. She gave her head a little toss to clear her mind, but her thoughts remained slow.

She wiped the frost away from the computer terminal and focused on the numbers. Oxygen levels were at eighteen and a half per cent. She pounded her fist against the terminal. On any other day, they could open the vents to let in the planet’s air. Today, it would kill everyone in the dome.

Connall approached her and rested his helmet on hers. “The dome is venting atmosphere from damaged pipes.”

“Have you reached Command?”

“No. Communications are still down.”

The sensation of sweat formed on her brow, and she wanted to wipe it away with her hand. Strange, feeling that. There was no possible way she could be sweating. And yet, the sensation was there. “Command will know something’s wrong. We repair the systems. They should see someone is accessing these panels. More power isn’t fixing the oxygen scrubbers. Suggestions?”

Connall pressed his lips together, and even though the helmet plating, she could see that they were blue. “We need to insulate the walls around the scrubbers with heat shields. Give the scrubbers a chance to thaw.”

“It’ll take too long to remove heat shields from other areas.”

Connall straightened, walked around the area, and came back. “Snow.”

“A snow fort?”

“Yeah. There’s plenty of it around, and we can build a wall to block some of the wind. That’s all we need. Give the extra power time to work.”

“The wind will blow away the snow. Except—” She reached into her tool kit and removed an oil container. “This will keep the snow together.”

Connall nodded, removed a few oil containers, walked towards a snow drift, and spread the oil.

Sara removed a collapsible shovel from her tool kit and shovelled the snow towards the exhaust vent of the oxygen scrubbers. Despite the exertion, her body didn’t warm. No sweat formed on her brow, the ache in her muscles didn’t ease, and her joints turned stiffer.

She and Connall built an oily snow fort, and then she went to the console. Oxygen levels had stopped dropping. She leaned against the console, needing heat, food, and three days of sleep. She focused on the numbers, willing the system to kick in.

Connall collapsed next to her. She knelt beside him, shaking him and yelling to open his eyes. But his lips were a deeper shade of blue. Tears pricked her eyes, and she shook him some more. “Use your heat packs. Crack them open.”

No response. His eyelashes rested against his cheeks like he was in a peaceful dream.

“Get up.” She shook him some more but received no response.

The wind picked up, knocking her back, and she scrambled beside him. She hadn’t the strength to get him back into the airlock to get help. She reached for the terminal handle and pulled herself to her feet.

Communications. She needed to contact Command to send a rescue team. She stepped towards the other console, and her knee gave way. She clutched the railing, pulled herself forward, and focused on the screen.

A layer of ice covered it. If she hit the screen, she’d shatter it. She couldn’t use oil to melt the ice. She had no torch, no thermal packs.

She hauled in heavy breaths, then went to her console. She wiped the frost off it. Oxygen levels were rising.

She had vanquished the wind.

She tried to get Communications working through her terminal but couldn’t. The edges of her vision darkened. Each movement caused her pain, and she collapsed next to Connall. Her world turned dark and cold.

****

Sara woke next to something warm and firm but remained frozen to her core. Equipment beeped and whirred, and muted conversations surrounded her. She opened her eyes, but the intense light of the room hurt, and she closed them again. She tried to open her mouth, but her lips were chapped and painful.

She ran her hand over her naked body. Naked body? She opened her eyes and looked over her shoulder.

Connall lay next to her, his chin near her shoulder. His eyes were closed, his breathing measured, and colour had returned to his lips. “How are you feeling?”

Alive. “Okay. You?”

“When I thought of waking next to you naked, this isn’t how I imagined it.” His cheeks curved in a smile.

Neither had she. “Hypothermia protocol?”

“Body heat is the best heat.”

A doctor removed a penlight from her breast pocket and flashed it in Sara’s eyes. “How are you feeling?”

Thinking of many ways of generating body heat with Connall. “Blown away.”

---

August Team Showcase

Heather Wickers’s first poetry collection, Tiny Little Wishes, has just been published on Amazon. Her novel Just One Night (under the name Heather Melo) was published last year. She tweets her poems regularly on Twitter,

Renée Gendron‘s A Gift of Stars: Book 1 The Nearer Realm Tales is available for pre-order on Amazon. Her Golden Hearts: Book 2 of Frontier Hearts and Two Hearts on the Backspin, Novella 2 of her Heartened series, are also available there. The second book in her Outdoorsmen series, The Officer’s Gamble, was published on October 18. Book 1 of the Outdoorsman Series is available as is her Ninth Star, Jaded Hearts, and Seven Points of Contact, Heads and Tales, a supernatural/mythological anthology. to which Renée contributed a historical, supernatural, romance. Shopkeeper & Spoon, Beneath The Twin Suns: An Anthology, Heartened by Crime, and In The Red Room: A crime anthology with heart, all edited by Renée Gendron, are also available now.

Marian L Thorpe‘s newest installment in her wonderful Empire series, Empress & Soldier, has been released. (Empire’s Daughter is the first part.) She has numerous titles available; they can be found at her aptly-named website, MarianLThorpe.com. Her books are listed at Books2Read.

David M. Simon has published The Wild Hunt: Novella 2 of The Wild Hearts and Hunts Duology (Part 1 is Renée Gedron’s Ninth Star) as well as Trapped in Lunch Lady Land, a middle-grade fantasy adventure.

Louise Sorensen has contributed to numerous anthologies that are available on Amazon, and is the co-author, with Misha Burnett, of Duel Visions.

Joseph P. Garland‘s The Omen at Rosings Park will be published in early August. This novella is a Pride and Prejudice Variation. A sample appeared in AMBR’s May edition. An audio version of his Becoming Catherine Bennet is expected in md-April. He has a blog and information on his books and those bits of classic literature that he has republished at DermodyHouse.com.

 

---