Artemis (27 page)

I pulled off my shoe and left it in place to keep the hatch open. I returned to the rover. Dale and Sanchez were completely unconscious at this point. Goddamn. Note to self: Don't take the mask off.

Both of them were breathing steadily. I closed the rover's inner airlock hatch to seal them in, then returned to the ISRO inner door. I shoved it open again (much easier because my shoe kept the door from re-sealing) and fell into the lab.

I retrieved my shoe and the hatch shut automatically against the rushing air.

I was in.

I sat on the floor and put my shoe back on. Then I checked the seal on my air mask. It seemed good. And I wasn't puking or passing out, which I figured was a good sign.

The ISRO lab was littered with unconscious scientists. It was an eerie sight. Four of them had passed out at their desks, while one lay on the floor. I stepped over the one on the floor and made my way to the hall.

I checked my Gizmo. It had been twenty minutes since the chloroform leak started. So, if Sanchez's estimate was correct, I had forty minutes left to fix the city's air or everyone would die.

And it would be my fault.

I needed Rudy. Or, more accurately, I needed Rudy's Gizmo.

Remember, Life Support is a secure area. You have to work there to get in—the doors won't open unless they recognize your Gizmo. But Rudy's Gizmo opens any door in town. Secure areas, homes, bathrooms, doesn't matter. There's
nowhere
Rudy can't go.

His office on Armstrong Up 4 was just a few minutes' run from the ISRO lab. And holy shit was that a surreal trip. Bodies littered the halls and doorways. It was like a scene from the apocalypse.

They're not dead. They're not dead. They're not dead….
I repeated the mantra to keep from losing my shit.

I took the ramps to get from level to level. The elevators would probably have bodies blocking the doors.

Armstrong Up 4 has an open space just near the ramps called Boulder Park. Why is it called that? No clue. While passing through, I tripped over a guy lying on his side and face-planted onto a tourist holding her unconscious toddler. She'd curled her body around the boy—a mother's last line of defense. I got back up and kept running.

I slid to a stop at Rudy's office door and barged in. Rudy was slumped over his desk. Somehow he looked poised even while knocked out. I searched his pockets. The Gizmo had to be in there somewhere.

Something caught my eye and bothered my brain. I couldn't figure out what. It's one of those warnings you get that's more a sense of “wrongness” than anything else. But hell, everything was “wrong” at the moment. I didn't have time for subconscious bullshit. I had a city to save.

I found Rudy's Gizmo and slipped it into my pocket. My inner Jazz made another appeal to me, this time with more urgency.
Something's wrong, goddammit!
it screamed.

I spared a second to look around the room. Nothing awry. The small, Spartan office was just as it had always been. I knew the place well—I'd been in there dozens of times when I was an asshole teenager, and I have a very good memory. Nothing was out of place. Not a single thing.

But then, as I left the office, it struck me: a blunt object to the back of my head.

My scalp went numb and my vision blurred, but I stayed conscious. It had been a grazing blow. A few centimeters to the left and I would have been leaking brains. I stumbled forward and turned to face my attacker.

Alvarez held a long steel pipe in one hand and an oxygen tank in the other. A hose ran from the tank directly to his mouth.

“You fucking kidding me?!” I said. “One other person awake and it's
you
?!”

He took another swing. I dodged away.

Of course it was Alvarez. That's what my subconscious had tried to tell me. Rudy's office was the same as I always remembered. But it was
supposed
to have Alvarez locked up in the air shelter.

The whole sequence of events played out in my mind: The shelter had protected Alvarez from the chloroform. Once Rudy conked out, the now-unsupervised murderer had wrenched a meter-long pipe loose and used it to force the hatch handle. The lock and chain on the other side stood no chance against that kind of torque.

Alvarez might not be a chemical engineer, but it wouldn't have taken a genius to work out something was wrong with the air. Either that or he'd spent a second almost passing out before realizing. Either way, the shelter had air tanks and hoses. So he'd rigged up a life-support system.

And hey, as an added bonus, the pipe had a jagged, sharp end where he'd broken it off. Wonderful. He didn't just have a club. He had a spear.

“There's a gas leak,” I said. “Everyone in town will die if I don't fix it.”

He lunged without hesitation. He was an assassin with a job. Got to admire his professionalism.

“Oh, fuck you!” I said.

He was bigger, stronger, a far superior fighter, and armed with a pointy metal stick.

I turned as if to run, then kicked backward. I figured it would throw off his attack and I was right. He ended up swinging the pipe around me instead of bashing my head in. Now I had his hand in front of me and my back to his chest. I'd never get a better shot at disarming him than this.

I grabbed his hand with both of mine and twisted it outward. Classic disarming move, and it should have fucking worked, but it didn't. He just reached around me with his other hand and pulled the pipe up to my throat.

He was strong.
Very
strong. Even with the injury to his arm he easily overpowered me. I got both my hands between the pipe and my neck, but it still dug in. I couldn't breathe. There's a special kind of panic that overwhelms you when that happens. I flailed uselessly for a few seconds, then used every ounce of willpower I had to get myself under control.

He'd either break my neck or choke me out and then break my neck. The breather mask was useless—it couldn't force air through a closed throat. But the air tank on my hip might help. Solid metal blunt object. Better than nothing. I reached down for it.

Pain!

Taking my hand off the pipe was a terrible idea. It got rid of half my resistance. Alvarez dug it deeper into my throat. My legs gave out and I sank to my knees. He followed me down and kept the pipe perfectly in place.

Darkness closed in around me. If only I had another hand.

Another hand…

The thought echoed in my increasingly foggy mind.

Another hand.

Another hand.

Too many hands.

Alvarez had too many hands.

What?

My eyes shot back open. Alvarez had too many hands!

A second ago he'd had the pipe in one hand and an air tank in the other. But now both hands were on the pipe. That meant he'd set the tank
on the floor
!

I summoned the tiny amount of strength I had left, coiled my legs, and lurched forward. The pipe dug into my throat even deeper but that was okay—the pain helped keep me awake. I pressed again, harder this time, and finally brought him off balance. The two of us toppled forward, me on the bottom, him lying atop me.

Then I heard the sweetest sound I'd ever heard.

He coughed.

His grip relaxed slightly and he coughed again. I got my chin under the pipe and finally my throat was free! I wheezed and took great gasping breaths from my mask. The black fog around me receded.

I held on to the pipe with both hands and pushed forward, dragging Alvarez with me. He held on, but his grip grew weaker with every passing moment.

I wriggled out from underneath and finally turned to face him. He lay crumpled on the ground and coughing violently.

Just as I'd hoped, he'd put the tank down to strangle me. When I'd dragged him forward, the air line had popped out of his mouth. He could either hold on to the pipe or grab the air line. He'd chosen the pipe. He'd probably hoped he could choke me out then get the air back before falling unconscious himself.

He reached back with one hand for the air line, but I grabbed his collar and dragged him along the floor. He gasped again and the color drained from his face. I reached down and pulled the pipe out of his hands once and for all.

His face fell to the floor—he was finally down for the count. I panted for a few seconds, then stood up.

The rage boiled inside. I stepped forward with the sharp end of the pipe ahead of me. Alvarez lay helpless on the ground—a known murderer who had just tried to kill me. One thrust between the fourth and fifth ribs…right into his heart…I considered it. I
really
considered it. It's not something I'm proud of.

I stomped his right upper arm with my heel. The bone crunched underneath.

That was more my style.

I didn't have time to waste, but I couldn't let that asshole escape again. I dragged his unconscious body into Rudy's office. I shoved Rudy aside and rummaged through his desk until I found handcuffs. I handcuffed Alvarez's good arm to the air-shelter handle and threw the key out into the hall. You're welcome, Rudy.

I checked my Gizmo to see how much time I had left: thirty-five minutes.

And it wasn't like I had until 0:00. That was just an estimate. Hopefully a little on the safe side. Nevertheless, with over two thousand people in town, some were sure to die ahead of schedule.

I “sheathed” the pipe by slipping it between my belt and jumpsuit. Alvarez was knocked out, breathing chloroform, had a broken arm, and was handcuffed. But I still wasn't taking any chances. No more fucking ambushes.

I ran toward Life Support. I wheezed harder and harder and my throat swelled up—still pissed off about the recent strangulation. I probably had a hell of a bruise there but it hadn't swollen shut. That was all that mattered.

I tasted the bile on my breath, but didn't have time to rest. I powered through the obstacle course of bodies. I cranked up the flow rate on my air tank to get more oxygen into my aching lungs. It didn't help much (that trick doesn't work when the entire atmosphere is already oxygen). But at least the slight overpressure kept me from sucking in chloroform-riddled air around the edges. That was something.

I reached Life Support and waved Rudy's Gizmo at the door. It clicked open.

Unconscious Vietnamese guys lay everywhere. I glanced at the main status screens along the wall. As far as the automated systems were concerned, everything was hunky-dory! Good pressure, plenty of oxygen, CO
₂
separation working perfectly…what more could a computer ask for?

Mr.
Đ
oàn's seat at the main panel was empty. I hopped into it and looked over the air-management controls. The writing was in Vietnamese, but I got the general idea. Mainly because one wall showed a map of every pipe and air line in the system. As you can imagine, it was a pretty big schematic.

I gave it a long, hard look. Right away, I picked out the emergency air system. All its lines were marked in red.

“Okay…where's the actuation valve?” I said. I traced my finger along various red lines until I found one that entered Life Support itself. Then I found something that looked like a valve icon. “Northwest corner…”

The room was a maze of pipes, tanks, and valves. But I knew which one I needed now. The third from the left in the northwest corner. On my way there, I passed Mr.
Đ
oàn lying on the floor. From the looks of things, he'd tried to get to the valve himself, but hadn't made it.

I grabbed the valve with both hands and turned. The throaty roar of pressure release echoed throughout the room.

My Gizmo rang in my pocket. It was so unexpected I drew my pipe, ready for a fight. I shook my head at the silly move and re-sheathed my weapon. I answered the call.

“Jazz?!” came Dale's voice. “You all right? We passed out there for a minute.”

“Dale!” I said. “Yeah, I'm fine. I'm in Life Support and I just opened the flush valve. You okay?”

“We're awake. Feel like shit, though. No idea why we woke up.”

Sanchez spoke in the background. “Our lungs absorbed the chloroform out of the rover's air. Once the ppm's dropped below twenty-five hundred, it stopped working as an anesthetic.”

“You're on speaker, by the way,” said Dale.

“Sanchez,” I said flatly. “So glad you're well.”

She ignored my bitchiness. “Is the flush working?”

I ran back to the status screens. Each bubble now had multiple blinking yellow lights that hadn't been there before.

“I think so,” I said. “There are caution and warning lights all over the place. If I'm reading this right, they're probably the relief valves. It's venting.”

I prodded a technician in the chair next to me. He didn't stir. Of course, even with perfect air, it would take these guys a while to wake up. They'd been breathing nineteenth-century anesthetic for half an hour.

“Hang on,” I said. “I'm going to take a sniff.”

I pulled the mask away from my face for a second and took a very shallow breath. I
immediately
fell to the floor. I was too weak to stand. I wanted to puke but resisted the urge. I held the mask against my face again.

“…no good…” I murmured. “…air still bad…”

“Jazz?” Dale said. “Jazz! Don't pass out!”

“ 'm'okay,” I said, getting up to my knees. Each breath of canned air made me feel better. “I'm…okay…I think we just have to wait. It takes a while to replace all this air. We're good. We're doing good.”

I guess the gods heard that and laughed their asses off. No sooner had I said it than the sound of air through the pipes quieted down and fell silent.

“Uh…guys…the air stopped.”

“Why?” asked Dale.

“Working on it!” I shot a look at the status screens. Nothing obvious there. Then I went back to the line schematics on the wall. The main valve was right there in Life Support and it led to a staging tank in that room. It read empty.

“Ugh!” I said. “We ran out of air! There's not enough!”