Chapter 17
The radio chatter slowly picked up throughout the morning. It took about an hour until he realized there was something unusual going on. Something serious was going on. He decided to skip the next two mounds he was planning to sample, and instead climbed out of the crater and back to the hopper for better reception.
Some frequencies were requesting help from anyone around. Some were reporting casualties and injuries and some were directing hoppers with medical crews from other habitats nearby. They were talking about Siderotil. He left the core drill on site and jumped in the cab of his hopper. He was dusting off while already on the move.
It took him about an hour to get back, and he had to land on the regolith, and hop awkwardly over the sands to get to the side of the stopped and beat up ground-wheel of the habitat. On the way he heard that the number of fatalities was less than twenty, but that there were many injured and many more still unaccounted for.
Medical teams were all over the place, and engineers with welding tools were cutting up broken pieces of metal and steel cables, with what seemed to be volunteers lifting debris out onto hoppers that occasionally took material out of the way. No one paid him any mind, and he didn’t see anyone that he could interrupt to ask about his crew. So he scrambled up the side of the ground-wheel, at the point where it had crashed into the ground, and then carefully made his way through a broken window into depressurized hallways.
Thankfully, the bodies were already taken out by the time he arrived. A section of hallway and one of the hab-units was compromised, and all its contents were blown out to space. There was enough blood and scattered belongings to realize that there were no survivors here. But this hab-unit wasn’t where they lived. He had to climb back out and come in through an airlock to get to the still-pressurized hallways leading back to his own hab-unit. Where his crew would be.
Moving in the tunnels under low gravity, and also tilted in the wrong direction, was tricky. He kept his vac-suit’s helmet locked, as did everyone he met. They were escorting the last survivors out of the habitat, and in some of the units already clearing out the air. He noticed some Prime Council officers had been orchestrating the evacuation with resident manifests in hand, making sure that no one was unaccounted for when they depressurized each unit. You can never be sure that you got everyone into a vac-suit before taking the air away. But if the hull ruptures, the air itself might kill everyone in the unit, vac-suit or not.
He continued around the habitat. He got further away from the area that collapsed, to where the pressure doors between sections were still functioning. As he got nearer to his own hab-unit the damage seemed less severe. But he could still see people needed help getting into suits and out of their units. There was a lot of equipment scattered all over the place. During normal operations, they’d sometimes stop the wheel for maintenance, causing all sort of problems and minor injuries across the habitat. But that was under controlled conditions, where the rotation very gradually slowed down. This was something else, entirely.
When he finally made it to the right section, he found Mani in an over-sized vac-suit, helping some kids suit up and collect their things for evacuation. There was still air in the hallways, but everyone was wearing their suits and helmets.
“Are you alright?” Diggs asked. Mani seemed relieved to see him, but was otherwise distracted. He seemed to be ok. “Where are the others?” Diggs added.
“Lukus got banged up a little, but he’s ok,” he replied. “And Cassy is somewhere around these units, making sure we got everyone out.”
He found her on the top floor of one of the neighboring buildings. She was half limping, half hovering from stall to stall, banging on locked doors and checking their status lights at the same time.
“Cassy,” he called her. “Are you ok? You look like you need to get on a medical hopper yourself!”
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“Dan! I wasn’t sure if you were still here…” She swept her eyes across the common room once more, and seemed satisfied that no one was passed out in any of the locked stalls. “I’m fine, I’m fine, I saw people way worse than me getting pulled out of here today. And we were lucky that we didn’t lose pressure in the entire habitat.”
“It looks pretty bad,” he said, looking for something reassuring to say. “I heard on the comms that there weren’t any children in the section that crashed.” They couldn’t tell that for sure, he thought. The few teenagers that lived in the mining district were all dropouts, living in the alleys behind the buildings, and they weren’t always registered on any of the PC lists. The fact that none of them showed up among the bodies that were recovered was encouraging, though.
Cassy nodded but her eyes were staring into space. “That’s great. I’m really happy to hear that.” She passed him and started floating besides the stairs towards the direction that used to be down. “Come on, we should make sure everyone is accounted for before we get ourselves out, too.”
“Do you have any idea what the hell happened?” He was following her, stepping awkwardly on the hand-rails and leaning occasionally on the light fixtures.
“There was a batch of cables that tore, and the mass of the wheel was too much for the remaining strands. I don’t know if the hopper tore a hole into the hull or if it just ripped when it hit the ground, but there’s a section that lost pressure right away, from what I understand.”
Diggs was trying to keep up. “What do you mean? What hopper?”
She stopped and turned to look back at him. “I saw it happen. There was a hopper that crashed, got hit by another hopper passing too low, or the first one moved too high. I don’t know what exactly happened. But it spun out of control and took a bunch of cables along the way. It looked like a cargo drone. I don’t know if anyone was in there, or if they were manually driving it.”
“That wouldn’t make sense, so close to a habitat,” he thought out-loud. She nodded. “And even then, there would be safeguards on close passes!” He added.
“That’s not all of it,” she said, but she bit her lip and turned away from him. They left the habitation dome and were moving slowly down the hallways back towards the airlocks, but she was moving slower than before, hesitating. “I saw something else, right near the point where the two hoppers hit each other.”
“What,” he looked at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “What else?” He said, patiently.
“I think there was a third hopper.” She could see the puzzled look on his face when she finally met his stare. “It didn’t have any lights on it, and I’m pretty sure it was colored black, to intentionally be hard to spot. I’m not even sure it was a hopper, but it was about the same size, and I think it was really close to where they collided.”
Diggs looked up through the window and saw nothing but stars and the communications mast. “Are you sure about this? How would you even see something that dark?”
“I have good visual memory,” she said as a matter of fact, “and I can remember exactly where the hoppers were. The one that crashed was moving South, and the other one went up and to the West. But right above them there was a patch of stars that were missing. Something was blocking them out. Something dark, and deliberate, trying not to be seen.”
