Boundary: Chapter Ten

    "Reactor cooking?"

    "Ruth's doing just marvelously, Joe." Reynolds Jones looked up from the readouts of the large atmosphere chamber. "Producing fuel and oxygen both at near-optimum efficiency in our little simulated Martian atmosphere."

    Jones was a tall, slender, black-haired man with a faint speech impediment that, combined with his prissy schoolmaster's vocabulary and gesticulating conversation style, made virtually everyone sure that he was gay. Or, as Joe's father used to put it, "walked the other side of the tracks."

    Joe had his doubts. First, because he was generally reluctant to typecast people. Secondly, because he didn't think anyone could be that much of a stereotype.

    It didn't matter, anyway. Whatever Ren's sexual orientation might be—and no one at Ares really knew—one thing that was sure and certain was that he was a master mechanical engineer. Better still, he had enough knowledge of chemistry to make him an ideal team member for designing and building all of the chemical reactors that would transform native Martian materials into everything human beings needed to live there.

    That made him, arguably, the single most irreplaceable member of the team. The strategy of the Ares Project pivoted on a premise advanced by Robert Zubrin long before: that an expedition to Mars only needed enough fuel and supplies to get there. Surviving on Mars, and returning to Earth, could be done using the materials found on the planet itself. If that premise proved to be unworkable, everything else became a moot point—and it was Reynolds Jones, more than anyone, who would be the person to make it work. Or find out that it wouldn't.

    "You can actually see the levels going up as we watch," Reynolds added.

    "Ruth," the reactor in question, was deceptively simple. A test version of a close relative had, in fact, been created by Zubrin himself to prove the basic concept. A ruthenium-iron-chrome catalyst in a long pipe combined hydrogen with Martian carbon dioxide, producing methane gas for fuel, along with water and carbon monoxide as useful byproducts.

    The reaction used was a variation of the Sabatier process. Once started, the process produced enough heat to maintain itself. The water was electrolyzed using an advanced solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) unit similar to those developed years before for use in nuclear submarines to produce oxygen and return hydrogen to the catalytic process in the reactor. Meanwhile, the CO was led off to other processes or stored for later use. The various components—attachments for power, tubing for leading the gaseous and liquid products to their destinations of liquefaction, compression, storage, or transfer, the compact shape of the custom SPE unit, and the connections for control circuitry and valves—were carefully distributed to leave the unit clear of obstructions. That was critical, because it operated at significantly high temperatures.

    The simple basic tube-shape was still visible, however. Several other devices, of different construction, were set at separate locations around the atmospheric chamber.

    Jones turned towards Anne Calabrio. "Annie, watch that CO2 flow. We have to keep the pressure just right, and I think the program's not handling the valves properly. Something's wrong, anyway. The ratio's fluctuating more than it ought to."

    "I'm on it, Ren. But with three experiments running at once, it's hard to maintain it all. I know we need to do this, checking for cross-interactions and all, but still, it's getting into pretty chaotic territory here."

    The atmospheric scientist frowned. "Lee, can you throttle Ferris back some?"

    "Throttle it back?" Grimes complained. "C'mon, Annie, I'm just gettin' started here!"

    Anne's blue-eyed glare pinned Lee to the wall. The former Marine Corps lieutenant winced and raised his hands.

    "Okay, okay. Gimme a sec. I was just starting to see some results here—and demonstrating iron production is going to be a pretty major experiment for us when we land, right?"

    "Sorry, Lee," Reynolds said soothingly, "But remember, they're all tied together. We have to coordinate. When you start drawing the gas out of the system, the others have to adjust their timing so that each of us manages to support the other. It won't do us any good at all if you pull down the CO when it's supposed to be used for a cleaning cycle. Or, worse yet, take too much hydrogen out of the main cycle."

    Grumbling, the metallurgy specialist started shutting down the reactor that created iron by two separate paths. One combined hematite—an ore of iron that gave Mars its distinctive rust-red color—with carbon monoxide to produce iron and carbon dioxide. The other used hydrogen in a cycle that produced iron and water, with the water going to electrolysis to get more oxygen and return the hydrogen to work.

    Lee Grimes was justifiably proud of the design. It allowed them to test and demonstrate both methods for producing usable iron, in a very small space footprint.

    "Part of the problem," Lee said, his tone conciliatory, "is that we're not really on Mars now. The damn chamber isn't big enough for us to drive things at full speed, at least not without a lot more ramp-up testing."

    "Well, that's what we're all here for." Ren turned to Buckley. "Joe, what do you think?"

    "I'd like to see if you can get Lee's experiment running again," Joe admitted. "Sure, our fuel-oxy reactor's big enough for primetime and combines reactions efficiently, but it's nothing spectacular. Making iron from Martian materials, now... That's going to be a demo that will make more investors really start thinking. And I'd like to see a demo of the ethylene reactor and the brickmaker, too."

    "Ethylene coming up!" Anne said cheerfully. "Lee, once I get Ethyl running, you can restart Ferris. Use the hydrogen reaction, so I can grab the CO from Ruth. Once I get that all balanced, we can try Porky."

    "'Porky'?" Joe repeated, puzzled.

    Lee gave an explosive snort of laughter. "You haven't heard that one yet, have you?. The heat cycle on the brickmaker was hogging all the energy, since we haven't got a nuke reactor right now. To use the waste heat to cook the bricks, we need to pull it off the mains and use electric heaters. When I said that to Annie, she said to me: 'Well, yeah, it's the Third Little Piggie.'"

    "Lee didn't get it immediately," Reynolds chuckled. "Until I pointed out it was making our house out of bricks."

    "You do realize we'll need more respectable names for our advanced technology than Ruth, Ferris, Porky, and Ethyl?"

    "Joe, stop worrying about the damn investors." Anne coded in several instructions to the system, causing Ruth to increase production and Ethyl to start in. "We've got perfectly good, dull, respectable names full of stupid acronyms for them."

    Meryl Stephenson and Bryce Jennings from the next lab poked their heads in. "Hey, guys, can we use some of the— Oh, hi, Joe. Big demo for the boss, eh?"

    Joe smiled. "Something like that. Look, I'll be by your lab in an hour or so. We need to—"

    A buzzing noise sounded from one of the panels. Reynolds' head snapped around. "That's—"

    Joe was just turning towards the panel when the world split open.

    Even through his headphones, A.J. heard the sharp boom of the explosion, and felt the floor jolt under his feet. The phones shut off as A.J. leapt from his chair and dashed for the door.

    "What happened?"

    "I don't know," said Melanie Sherry, standing indecisively. "But it sounded like it came from Engineering."

    Other people in the hallway blurred past as A.J. sprinted towards the doors. He burst out into the open.

    As he ran towards the testing area, he could see that it was bad. Black billows of smoke, lit from beneath by orange flames, curled upwards from the shattered Engineering wing, near the Atmospherics Testing area. He felt his stomach tighten. Joe had been planning to test some of the catalytic generation processes today.

    He skidded to a halt in a scattered jumble of stone and brick. A few others were hesitating, like him, before plunging into the yawning, smoke-belching ruin.

    "Joe!" he shouted. "Reynolds! Annie! Lee!" He could hear the distant wailing of fire and emergency medical vehicles approaching.

    Setting his jaw, A.J. started in. But then, startled, backed off almost immediately.

    Something loomed up in the smoke, emerging slowly, backlit by the flames, seeming almost to materialize like a monster in a bad action movie. It was too wide and squat to be human. A broad, blocky silhouette that wavered like a black ghost...

    A.J. gave a shout and charged forward. "Joe!"

    Joe Buckley gave a faint grin through the soot on his face, as did Reynolds Jones from beneath the reflective heat blanket the two had around their shoulders. "I don't believe it. We made it out alive."

    "Christ, what the hell happened? Never mind!" A.J. interrupted himself and reached for the blanket. "Give me that. The EMTs will be here soon."

    Wrapping the blanket around himself, he plunged into the building, ignoring the shouts of people behind him.

    Acrid chemical vapors spiked into his lungs as he reached into his pouch and grabbed a small, somewhat malleable ball. With all his strength he pitched it into the darkness ahead of him.

    His VRD lit up almost instantly, matching the data now coming in from the sensor motes being scattered through the shattered interior by the ricocheting "scatterball" against the filed building plan. The data was patchy but good enough to work with.

    The air was bad, very bad, but it wasn't going to kill him right away. Atmospheric chamber gone kablooey. Bodies...

    There! And alive!

    A.J.'s eyes stung terribly, but he blinked and fought the tears away. Then, suppressed a cough with desperate effort. If he started coughing now, he might not stop until he'd finished himself off.

    A.J. tapped out commands on the virtual control panel in front of him as he stepped over a sensor-outlined block of rubble to get nearer to the body. The ad-hoc network was coming up and trying to link in with the emergency vehicles' frequencies. There! Got it!

    As he squatted next to Anne Calabrio's unconscious body, A.J. broke into the EMT frequency. "I've got a live one in here. We may have a few others. I think..."

    He almost started coughing, then rasped out: "I think I can get out with her, but tie in with... local net... maps..."

    He stopped talking and got Anne's limp form over his shoulders. The body was damnably heavy, even though Annie wasn't at all fat. A.J. just didn't seem to have much strength. Unusual, for him.

    It was puzzling. And the VRD wasn't focusing right at all. What the hell was wrong with it? It was supposed to project straight to the retina, focus shouldn't be... a problem...

    A.J. stumbled and almost fell. Oh, shit. I'm the one having trouble interpreting.

    He could make out some symbols showing that the conditions were already far worse than they'd been when he entered. His head was spinning. Which way was out?

    He couldn't tell. Black smoke was everywhere. Light, he needed... needed to find...

    He was on the ground, blood in his mouth, hurting. He'd realized he'd fallen. Someone... Anne... was on top of him.

    Got to get up. Get up, dammit!

    Light drew him. Orange flickering light. No, he realized, that was bad. Fire bad! Fire bad! The words came into his head from some long-distant movie.

    With a supreme effort, A.J. forced himself upright. The VRD had failed. Maybe the fall, maybe soot on the optics, who knew? It didn't matter. A.J. doubted he could have understood it at this point, anyway.

    He dragged his feet forward, one step at a time. Just one step more. Now just another step.

    It's a building, not a catacomb! You only have a few...

    The wall smacked him in the face.

    He knew that wall texture, though. He was near the back of the Atmospherics area. He'd gotten turned around and headed in just the wrong direction.

    A hacking cough hijacked his breathing, forcing him to stop and almost drop Anne. Disembodied knives stabbed deep into his lungs. Somehow he got the pain under control, and manage to turn around.

    But there looked to be flames everywhere! He'd have to run through...

    Running seemed out of the question.

    A dull explosion punctuated his oxygen-deprived panic. Move! Have to try!

    A. J. managed a sluggish trot. It was already stiflingly hot, but every step towards the flames seemed to double the heat. The pain in his lungs...

    I can't die yet, dammit. The Faeries haven't flown.

    Then he was falling.

    A.J. stirred slightly. Joe came alert, looking down at his friend's reddened skin, scorched hair, and streaks of black soot that even scrubbing hadn't yet managed to eradicate. The blue eyes opened slowly.

    "J... Joe?" The normally exuberant voice was barely a whisper, almost a hiss.

    "Take it easy, man. You were really touch-and-go there for a while. You crazy sonofabitch." He extended a small cup to A.J. "Try to sip a little water."

    A.J. sipped, grimacing at the pain in his throat, but sipped more anyway, trying to rehydrate the nearly cooked tissues. "Anne?" he finally managed, his voice now more of a croak.

    "Alive. And so are Lee, Susan, and Lindy. Meryl and Brice, too. Anne's doing fine. She'll have a scar on her head from where a chunk of metal hit her, but the concussion was minor and because she was unconscious and not doing heavy work her lungs are in decent shape. She didn't inhale much. Lee, well... he lost his left leg."

    A.J. winced. "Oh, hell."

    "Come on, A.J.," Joe almost scolded. "He's lucky to be alive. Wouldn't be—neither would most of the others—if it hadn't been for you."

    "Me? Ha. I went charging"—he coughed slightly and his eyes watered at the pain—"charging in there like an idiot and got myself trapped. Anne, too. And never did anything at all for Lee."

    "You certainly did, you moron," Joe retorted, with a touch of affectionate exasperation. "You also tied all your sensors into the local net, and with that the firefighters and EMTs who just happen to also have masks were able to navigate through the mess and find everyone in jig time. Apparently they caught you just as you were about to fall into the fire. So you did land yourself in the hospital, but you almost certainly kept the rest of us out of the morgue."

    A.J. looked somewhat gratified, if still embarrassed over having turned himself into a victim.

    "Still. With a leg gone, Lee's hopes to be on the mission are over."

    That was true, but Joe wanted to change the subject. Obviously, A.J. hadn't yet figured out the implications of Joe's earlier statement that Anne's lungs were okay.

    A.J.'s... weren't.

    His good looks had miraculously come through untouched, except for a small scar on one cheek that would just draw more attention. But A.J., unlike Anne, had been breathing heavily in that holocaust.

    The air in there hadn't simply been "bad," toward the end. It had been toxic. There'd been almost no oxygen left in the interior of the building. Instead, it had been filled with poisonous vapors from burning plastics, chemicals used in the engineering experiments, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides from the intense heat, particulates—a sheer witches' brew that would have felled most men with a single breath. Joe knew the doctors were astonished that A.J. had survived at all, much less managed to move around as much as he did. Under the flamboyant exterior, the man was about as tough as any human being could get.

    A.J. finished the cup of water as a nurse came in, checked his IVs, and went to get the doctor.

    "What happened?" he asked, after she left.

    "Not quite sure yet," Joe admitted. "It'll be a while. I think that we had a leak somewhere that caused oxygen to get into the mix, and once it started running away on us... anyway, we'll know in a couple days."

    "Play merry hell with our schedule," A.J. said gloomily. Then, obviously trying to cheer up: "Hey, how'd you and Ren get out, anyway? I thought you were a goner!"

    "Damn near was. I don't remember it all clearly, and neither does Ren. Near as I can figure, when the tank went up, the shockwave threw both of us towards the wall that blew out. A fire blanket was in the mess next to me, so I threw it over myself and Reynolds, and managed to get him to wake up so we could get out."

    "You seem to make a habit out of this kind of thing."

    Joe grinned weakly. He had a reputation for nearly getting killed—a climbing accident in which a belaying rope gave way, an explosion in a model rocket when he was a kid, going off a cliff in a car with no brakes, and a few other less spectacular but no less dangerous events.

    "It doesn't get any less scary, let me tell you. If anything, it's worse—I'm sure that somehow, somewhere, fate is saving me up for a really spectacular finish."

    "Well, I guess this one wasn't quite good enough." A.J. leaned back as Doctor Mendoza came in. By the time Mendoza finished his examination, A.J. had actually fallen back to sleep.

    "He must be exhausted."

    "He's got a ways to go yet, Mr. Buckley," Mendoza said briskly. "We'll be keeping him here for at least a few days for observation. With all the fumes he inhaled, and the high temperatures, he has significant damage to his lungs. Hope for the best of, course, but Mr. Baker is very lucky to be alive. I will be surprised if he comes out of this with more than 80% of his former lung capacity."

    Joe grimaced. Eighty percent...

    That would be enough to knock A.J. off the Mars mission. You didn't send people with respiratory problems into space.

    "Please do what you can, Doctor. He's on the short list for the mission."

    Mendoza nodded. "I know, and I will. But I can't do miracles. He'll have to do that himself."

    Joe couldn't help another smile. "Well, as he'd say himself, that's his main job. Making miracles."