“We are to stuff our patching materials into any hull breaches,” Trixie the bunny-girl continued. “However, if you say to pull out, we are to run for it just as fast as we can. If you say to run for it, it’s because you think the holes are too big to fix.”
“Right,” I agreed. I’d run them through the procedure over and over again, until I was absolutely certain that everyone understood. “I’m going to open the hatch now. It will seem very frightening, but actually it takes quite a long time for a place as big as the Henhouse to lose enough air to really matter through just a few small holes.” I turned and put my hand on the control lever. “One, two… Three!”
Convulsively I closed the override switch, and the door began to rise. Sure enough, the wind howled and blew, snatching varied bits of trash and sucking it greedily under the door. I felt my own body surge towards the opening, but was easily able to hold my position without depending on the cuffs despite being closest of all. Perhaps requiring everyone to lock themselves in place had been overkill, I now judged. However, I hadn’t had any way to know for sure until the door actually opened.
The wind was still blowing hard when the hatch was half-open, but not so hard as to indicate that, say, an entire section of hull had been blown out. Carefully I unlocked myself, then ducked under the still not fully raised door. The lights were still working, I could see at once, which was a major blessing. There were two significant holes in plain sight, each perhaps three or four centimeters in diameter. They weren’t enough to account for all the air wastage, not by half. Still, they were as good a place to start as any. “Come on in!” I roared against the gale, pumping my arm in the up-and-down gesture that we’d agreed upon. “Come on in and get these leaks plugged!”
The girls leapt into action almost instantly, and in thirty seconds or less Michelle was hanging beside me trying to stuff a can of hair spray into one of the holes. It didn’t fit, being too large, so Michelle stood aside and let Trixie have a try. She was carrying a double-handful of oddly shaped cosmetics bottles, and one by one she tried stuffing them into the breach as well. All were too small. Then something long and hard was pressed into my hand from behind. “Here!” the Dragon called out. “Try this!”
I looked down; the Dragon had just passed me a neon-blue plastic phallus. I turned towards her “What in the hell am I supposed to do with this?” I cried out over the shrieking wind.
“Stuff it in the hole, you young idiot!” she shouted back, balling up her fists angrily. “Don’t you know anything?”
I shrugged and turned back to face the breach. Sure enough, the shaft of the phallus fit the hole almost perfectly, and the base served as a very nice seal. “Latex!” I cried out. “Latex here!”
Georgia stepped forward dutifully, brush at the ready. While she was slathering away, I turned my attention to the next hole, just a meter or so away. It was about the same size as the first. “Get me another dildo!” I demanded, still shouting over the roar of the wind. “I need another dildo, fast!”
The second patch worked as well as the first, and then we used up two more phalluses on similar-sized holes located behind the suit storage locker. Once we had these last major breaches plugged, I knew that the fight was essentially won. “All right!” I declared again. “Ladies, you need to use your ears! Listen for whistling sounds, then home in on them. Stuff something appropriate in the hole, and then call for latex. I’m going to get to work.”
“Right,” the Dragon agreed. “Georgia, stand back and wait for the command. Loretta, you go back and hunt down more patches. Trixie, use those big ears, all right? Point out the leaks for us.”
I nodded appreciatively at the dominatrix, who seemed to have things well in hand, and then turned my attention to the radio. It had not been damaged that I could see by a few minutes exposure to hard vacuum. Whatever had made the holes in our hull, however, had taken out the speaker box along the way. Reflexively, I opened up the emergency cabinet and pulled on the backup headphones. Instantly a sea of voices surged into my head.
“No, Jim! Move the boom the other way!”
“The goddamn hatch is frozen solid. Has anyone got a torch? This one is hot, people! I’ve got trapped victims!”
“Fucking blueberries!”
Carefully I clicked my mike. “Mayday, Mayday” I declared as calmly as I could. “This is the Marvin Mackleschmidt in command of the Henhouse, declaring a Class One emergency. We have sustained catastrophic structural damage, and are short on air. There are three hundred souls aboard. Mayday, Mayday!”
“Get off the emergency frequency, Henhouse!” an angry-sounding female voice declared. “This channel has been allocated for rescue workers for the duration.”
“Roger that, Henhouse” a new voice said, from what was clearly a more powerful radio. “Son, we’re glad to hear from you. You need to go to channel four, however. All emergencies are being declared there.”
“Roger,” I acknowledged, feeling vaguely guilty even though there was no way that I possibly could have known. Using the emergency channel for rescue work wasn’t in the procedure books, not at all. Though it made sense, I supposed, given all the little emergency-channel-only handsets that were distributed all over the place for occasions like this one. By the time that I had flipped my set over, the new voice was waiting for me.
“Henhouse,” it asked. “Marvin, are you there?”
“Yes,” I replied. “This is Marvin.”
“Thank God,” the man on the other end said wearily. “Marvin, this is Colonel LeClerc of Traffic Control. At least there’s one bit of good news today. Frankly, son, when you vanished off the air we thought that we’d lost you all.”
“You still might,” I replied. “Sir, I am officially reporting a Class One emergency. We are heavily damaged, as you’ve probably already seen, and have lost gravity. We’ve also suffered at least four major hull breaches in addition to the structural failure. My instrumentation is not reliable at this time; while I am showing no other breaches on the Christmas tree I frankly doubt that this is the case. There’s just too much debris out there for us not to have caught at least a couple more small pieces. Additionally, there has been, ah… A chemical spill, let’s call it. Our air is foul, and growing fouler. The passengers are rioting, and we’ve been unable to restore order in large parts of the station.”
“Roger, Henhouse” the Colonel replied. “Your emergency is formally logged. However…” He sighed. “Marvin, I’m going to be totally honest with you. I don’t have a single damned thing to send your way. We’ve experienced some kind of explosion at the South Pole refining facility, and things are way past the nightmare stage. There are thousands of dead here, Marvin. Thousands. There are more thousands trapped in isolated airtight compartments, most of them without radios or beacons.” He sighed. “Plus, we’re evacuating the whole station. We don’t project that a single sector is going to remain habitable.”
My beak snapped shut angrily. “There’s three hundred souls trapped here!” I shouted. “Look, damnit! Just because we’re a goddamned whorehouse doesn’t mean that-”
“Whoa!” the Colonel interrupted me. “Hold your horses, son! If you’d called in right away after the blast, I might have been able to vector something out to you. But there’s debris drifting all over God’s creation now, and navigation has become an unholy nightmare close in. You’re a pilot, son! How fast would you push your pod in this mess? And we can’t afford to lose a pod just now, not a single one.” He sighed. “If I could help you, I would. But the fact is, in the time that it would take me to get a pod out to you I can shuttle seven or eight hundred refugees out to where we’re setting up emergency shacks.” He sighed again. “I’m leveling with you, man to man. The fact of the matter is, we’re not going to get everyone out of Lagrange proper in time, much less anyone else. No one ever foresaw a disaster this big. Therefore, we’re not prepared for it.” He sighed wearily. “Son, you’re on your own.”