Max considered ignoring the command, but according to regulations, Doc was right. Anyone who wasn’t Vacuum and Radiation qualified was designated an orderly to help treat those who were. Plus it gave him an alibi. He jumped toward the bottom of the Black Forest and joined Noyes.
“Here, carry this kit,” Noyes said, handing over a box of radiation gear as he went back across the hall to grab another.
“Where is it?” asked Max. He held the gear close, covering the rip in his pants. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t know. The com’s down again. But it has to be the reactor.”
Nobody guarded the main hatch to Engineering so the two men went straight in. A crowd gathered in the monitor room, spilling out into the corridor. Noyes pushed straight through, and Max followed along behind him. Chevrier was shaking a crewman by the throat.
“-what the hell did you let him in there for?”
“He ordered me to!” the man complained. It was DePuy.
“There’s water everywhere!” another one of the men yelled, coming back from the direction of the reactor room hatch. “The reactor’s over-heating fast!”
“It’s already past four hundred cees,” said one of the men at the monitors.
Chevrier tried to fling DePuy at the wall, but they just flopped a short distance apart. The chief engineer turned toward the rest of crew in disgust.
Rucker, the first lieutenant, showed up behind Max. “Captain wants a report-the com’s down again!”
“That’s because the reactor’s overheating,” Chevrier said. “The cooling system’s busted.”
“My God,” said Rucker, invoking a deity he probably didn’t believe in, thought Max.
Noyes slapped a yellow patch on the first lieutenant’s shirt. “Radiation detectors, everyone. When they turn orange, you’re in danger, means get out. Red means see me for immediate treatment.” He handed some to Max. “Make sure everyone wears one.”
“We’ve got to go in there, fix the pipe, and cool the reactor,” said Chevrier. Some of the men started to protest. “Shut the fuck up! I’m asking for volunteers. And I’ll be going in with you.”
Rucker wiped the blond cowlick back off his forehead. “I’ll go in,” he said. Six other crewmen volunteered, most of them senior engineers. Max slapped radiation badges on those men first.
“Here’s the plan.” Chevrier pointed to pictures on the monitors. “We’re going to shut off these valves here and here, cut out and replace this section of pipe-”
Noyes, looking over his shoulder, said, “That man in there ought to come out at once. He looks unconscious.”
“That man is dead,” said Chevrier, “and it’s a good thing too, or I’d kill him. Then we’re going to run a pipe through here, from the drinking water supply-”
A moan of dismay.
“-shut up! We’ll take it from the number three reserve tank. That ought to be enough, and it won’t contaminate the rest of the water. Once we get the main engine back up, we can make more water off the fuel cells.”
Everyone had a badge now, and Max hung back with Noyes.
“I’d like someone to go in there and turn off these,” Chevrier tapped spots on one of the monitors, “here, here, and here, while I get the repair set up.”
“That’ll be me,” Rucker said. Like any junior officer, Max thought, trying to set a good example.
Chevrier gave him a nod. “This one here is tough. It’ll take you a few minutes. It’s right next to the reactor, and it’s going to be hotter than hell.” He gave Rucker the tools he needed and sent him off down the tube to the reactor room.
“I’ll need a shower set up for decontamination,” said Noyes.
Max found the air shower over by the other clean room, and showed him where it was. Noyes started setting up the lead-lined bags for clothing and equipment disposal.
By the time they went back to the monitor room, Chevrier had diagrammed his repair. His volunteers double-checked the equipment lined up in the hall. He sent others, who hadn’t volunteered, to run a connector line from the freshwater tank. They were just getting ready to go in, when Rucker staggered back out. He looked… cooked. Like the worst sunburn Max had ever seen. His clothes were soaked, and glowing drops of water followed through the air in his wake. Noyes was there, swiping the droplets out of the air with a lead blanket. He wrapped Rucker in it, and started leading him toward the shower.
The lieutenant’s badge was bright red.
One crewman bolted, another threw up. No one said anything about the smell, but one of the men took off his shirt and tried to catch the vomit as it scattered through the air.
Chevrier ripped his badge off. “Won’t need this. Just one more distraction. If we’re going to go swimming, we might as well go skinny-dipping.” He stripped off his clothes and the other volunteers followed his example. “Can’t handle tools in those damn vacuum suits anyway.”
Anger, fear, those things were contagious, Max reflected. But so were courage and foolhardy bravery. He hoped the price was worth it.
He supposed he ought to be at decontamination, with Noyes, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the monitors. There were no cameras aimed directly at the spot where the men were working with the pipes, but they passed in and out of the vids. The radioactive water pooled in the air, drop meeting drop, coalescing into larger blobs like mercury spilled on a lab table and just as poisonous. Or perhaps more like antibodies in a bloodstream. The men splashed into them as they moved and the water clung to their skin, searing wherever it touched.
Simco appeared at the door demanding a report for the captain. Max ignored him. Paint peeled off the overheating reactor, curling like bits of ash as it burned away. Water that hit its surface boiled away into steam, but the steam hit the other water, and became drops again instantly, a swirling rain that never fell. And, except for the dead tone of the radiation alarms, it all happened in silence, with no one in the monitor room speaking for long minutes, and no sound at all from the reactor room.
Noyes appeared beside Max. “That man needs to come out right now to have those burns treated,” he said, tapping at one of the monitors. Glowing circles spun in slow lambent spirals on one man’s buttocks.
Max laughed, a sound that came out of his mouth only as a breathless sigh. Those are tattoos, Doc. Jets. Lightning bug juice impregnated in the subdermal cells.”
“I’ve… never heard of that,” said Noyes.
“It’s supposed to bring a spacer safely home again.”
It’s an abomination,” blurted Noyes. The people of Jesusalem were against any mixing of the species. “Let’s hope it does,” he said.
“Indeed,” replied Max.
DePuy stood beside them, shaking his head. “They’re not getting it fixed.”
Max began to think he’d miscalculated badly. He hadn’t wanted anyone to look too closely at Lukinov’s corpse. He wanted the ship to turn around and head back home. But with the main engine down and the back-up scuttled, they were in big trouble.
The hatch flew open and two men came out.
“They’ve been in there almost an hour,” said Noyes, checking his chrono and calculating the damage to them.
“Is it done?” the men in the monitor room demanded. Max heard his own voice blurt out, “Is it fixed?”
But their faces were mute. The blistered flesh bubbled off as Doc wrapped them in blankets. Noyes helped one toward the shower, and Max took the other. “This is hopeless,” Noyes said, trying to clean the men. “You have to go back there now and get the other men out before they die.”
“I think we all die with the ship if they fail,” said Max.
Rambaud, one of the troopers, appeared in the door. “Message from the captain, Doc. He wants you on the bridge.”
“Tell him no.”
The trooper’s eyes kept flicking nervously to their badges. Max noticed his own was a sickly orange color. “Beg your pardon, Doc, but he’s getting ready to abandon ship. If it’s necessary.”
“If he wants to give me an order, he can come down here and do it himself,” said Noyes, shooting the burned man full of painkillers and starting an IV pump.