“What is?” Viktor’s brow wrinkled.
They sprang to the external video. Tumbling away into the blackness was a sharp piece of ragged painted metal and a bolt attached to it.
“Damn!” Viktor said. “Cowling fractured.”
Raoul studied the dwindling shape. “Must be those bolts didn’t come free easy, stressed the frame, tore it.”
“So we spin up, we run into it.” Viktor wrenched his mouth around, as he always did when a piece of inanimate matter did not behave.
Marc glanced at the cockpit board. “We got a light on the internals.”
They all turned as one. Julia was still cradling the glass she had not drunk from.
“Water pressure,” Marc said. Plumbing was one of his subsystems, though Raoul had responsibility for the overall ship systems, plus their integration.
“We’re losing it,” Raoul said. He punched in a question and the systems inventory showed them digits declining. “That’s a pressure drop.”
They looked at each other, each reaching the same conclusion as Viktor: “Cowling punch a hole in outer habitat jacket.”
The hab was a cylinder with water-filled walls that functioned also as a radiation shield. Once they landed, the water would also provide thermal protection against Mars’s bitter cold. Ingenious, but the designers had not anticipated the danger of collisions to the precious water supply.
“It’s that thin?” Marc asked. “Just a piece of metal—”
“Moving a few meters per second, yes, could,” Viktor said. “Did.”
Raoul had done a quick calculation. “Dropping, but not fast. This is a tiny leak, maybe as big as a thumb.”
“We can’t live with that,” Marc said.
“Got to go EVA.” Viktor scowled at Raoul. “We.”
It would have taken a month to lose their water through the hole, which was halfway up the habitat outer skin. Which meant that they would die perhaps four months before reaching Mars.
Raoul went outside first. They had to use the surface suits not really equipped for this kind of repair—the downside of going lean and mean. It was worse than a zero-g excursion—the only kind any of them had ever performed—because they could not de-spin the habitat. The hydrazine was gone. Their mission profile provided for losing their angular momentum as they approached Mars by simply blowing the cable, setting the upper stage and cable into a long orbit into the solar system. There was no propellant to adjust their centrifugal gravity up or down after they had reached the 0.38 level.
Raoul had to go out the main lock with Viktor. They rigged a line around the lock lever and stepped out into the 0.38 g pull. Julia had watched it all on the video, her heart thumping. This was an utterly untried exercise, something nobody had ever done, not even in the station trials.
They worked their way around to the handholds thoughtfully set in the habitat skin. Progress was slow. Raoul gave a yell when he saw the thin plume of water foaming into a white fountain from the jacket.
Julia could barely see him on the forward vid screen, around the curve of the habitat. Nobody had thought of this problem, of course, and nobody had thought of how crazily the stars veered when you were wheeling around in a big circle every minute. The sun’s glare swept like a spotlight across the hab’s skin, followed by a thirty-second night. The swift change in the light levels alone was disorienting. Add to that the pinwheeling stars… It was hard enough watching it from inside.
Raoul got to the spot while Viktor played the line out. “Some of the debris from the manifold bolts is stuck in here. I’m pulling it out.”
She could see more water billow out, turning to vapor, making it hard to work. He worked for ten minutes on the job and then said over comm, “I can’t make a patch hold against the pressure. These weren’t made for positive pressure at all, y’know.”
“Got to be can block it,” Viktor insisted.
“You come up here and try.”
This was not a jibe, but a legitimate request. EVA operations were legendary in zero g. Done in a suit not optimum for the task, clinging to a wall in 0.38 g’s—as they all agreed, it was an astro-nightmare. Viktor tried and failed, too.
They were running out of suit time. The Earth link was full of non-advice, the sort of hand-wringing that was Mission Control’s first reaction to the unexpected.
“I don’t think we’ve got anything aboard that can take positive pressure in a vacuum for long,” Marc said.
A long silence. Julia could hear Viktor’s labored breathing over her suit comm.
Julia said slowly, “I can think of a trick. Let me look into it, guys. Hold on.”
“Is what we are doing.”
“I’ve got to check some things.”
“Make it fast,” Raoul sent, voice filled with knotted frustration.
She found a circular sealant layer in the maintenance kit. The hardest part of the operation proved to be climbing up to the hatch opening, near the habitat ceiling. There she opened the emergency access to the water system. The entire habitat was sheltered by a layer of water a hand’s length deep. Water’s hydrogens give, ounce for ounce, the best shielding against the solar wind and cosmic rays that lance through the inner solar system. Not that their water blocked all of the speeding particles. But since water is also the great essential in the life-cycling system, Axelrod had sprung for an ample supply. Every kilogram of the stuff had cost more than a normal astronaut’s annual salary to launch to Mars, and every minute one of those kilograms was fizzing off into the vacuum outside.
She felt tight apprehension as she dropped the brilliant blue patch into their water supply. It sank.
“We can live with the taste,” she said airily. It came out brittle and high-pitched.
Her idea was that the suction of the leak would draw the patch to the inner part of the puncture. Long moments ticked by. The digits on the internal monitor showed steady loss. Raoul and Viktor clung to the hull, watching their vital supply vent into pearly fog, then nothing. Julia waited with them.
“Hey! Is stopped.”
The fog thinned.
“Here, slap this on again,” Raoul said.
