Bare metal, p.1
Bare Metal, page 1
BARE METAL
WILLIAM ESMONT
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Stories by William Esmont
About the Author
CHAPTER
ONE
Command Capsule, Station Bravo
Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean
700 Meters below Sea Level
“Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.”
Emmett Pierce lowered himself to the rubberized floor and began counting to fifteen in his head.
“Emmett?” A soothing voice sounded above him.
Emmett winced at the interruption. “Yes?”
“Your heart rate is slightly elevated. Remember to pace yourself. You still have two more sets to complete.”
“Copy that,” Emmett said as he levered himself into plank position. “Slower, it is.” He drew a deep breath and sank to the floor in a carefully controlled descent. Then, with an explosive exhalation, he launched himself up and held for a count of three before repeating the process.
The voice returned. “Much better.”
Emmett grunted his acknowledgment and continued his workout. When he completed three more push-ups, a piercing electronic warble shattered the silence. The LEDs in the ceiling flickered at a nausea-inducing frequency. He flopped to the floor and covered his ears with his hands and squeezed his eyes shut. He could barely hear himself think over the racket.
“Report to the operator console immediately,” the computer said in a commanding voice, an unmistakable note of urgency replacing its earlier conversational tone. “Human intervention is required.”
Emmett staggered to his feet and lurched across the narrow room to his desk. He shoved his chair aside and stabbed at a button to move the work surface to a standing height. Perspiration cascaded across his brow, burning his eyes and blurring his vision. His heart thundered against his sternum. He scrubbed away the sweat with the back of one arm and scrutinized the constellation of alerts clamoring for his attention. Meanwhile, the alarm blared, and the lights pulsed.
Annoyance flared inside him. “Jesus Christ! Can you kill the goddamned alarms already?” He swiped his fingers across slippery glass as he searched for the manual override. But before he could find it, the volume dropped by half and then by half again.
The computer had beat him to it.
“Thanks,” Emmett muttered, squinting.
“Of course,” System said. After a slight pause, it continued, “The problem is in Sector Three. Number Twelve is not responding.”
Emmett pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to recall any recent issues with that particular bot. Nothing came to mind. He cursed.
“Show me where it was when we lost contact.”
His primary screen switched to an image of the seafloor where his crew of automatons were working. Twenty-one green icons represented healthy equipment. Two yellow dots denoted machines that would need service soon. One more green dot should have been there. “What the fuck?” he said under his breath. “Is there any video?”
A new window appeared, but Emmett couldn’t even begin to decipher the moiré pattern of grays and browns. He cocked his head. The harder he looked, the less sense the image made.
“Can you clean that up?”
“I’m sorry,” System said, “but there’s significant turbidity in the water. This is the best I can do.”
“Damn it. Okay. Do you know when we got this?”
The AI responded without hesitation. “This recording occurred two minutes and forty-eight seconds prior to loss of signal.”
Emmett scratched his chin as he considered what he knew so far. The support drones roamed among the larger excavator robots continuously, delivering supplies and performing routine maintenance. They never remained in one place for long, though, and only blind luck had led to this one being in the vicinity of the rogue excavator.
An idea came to him. “Show me a topo view. Maximum resolution.”
The map shifted and zoomed. The last known location for the AWOL robot was at the base of a bright-red feature that rose nearly two hundred meters straight up, an undersea escarpment.
“Looks like a landslide,” Emmett said, tracing the tip of an index finger along a tight grouping of contour lines. “We’re going to need to dispatch a repair mech right away.”
“I concur,” System said. “Two service units and a replacement excavator are en route to the site. I estimate minimal impact to quotas.”
Emmett nodded to himself. He was running ahead for the month. He could absorb one day.
“What’s your confidence level in recovery?” he asked.
“Ninety-seven point nine eight percent.”
“Really?” Emmett replied, surprised. “Why so—”
“I just got a solid transponder lock, and I’ve initiated retrieval. You can relax. Everything is going to be fine.”
As though on cue, the alarms fell silent, and the lights returned to normal.
Emmett breathed out a great sigh of relief and dropped into his chair. The emergency had resolved just as quickly as it had begun.
He sat there, listening to the rise and fall of his own breath as he contemplated the events of the past few minutes. Once he had the timeline laid out in his head, he lowered his desk and got to work dictating his version. When he was finished, the station intelligence would combine his findings with its own then send everything to a facility on the mainland, where an even more powerful artificial mind would sift through all the various decision points and devise new procedures to prevent similar occurrences in the future. To Emmett, the answer was simple: don’t dig at the foot of a cliff. But what do I know?
He got up from his chair and crossed the cramped space to the small kitchenette. The refrigerator opened with a soft pop, and he pulled out a half-full bottle of chilled water and drained the contents in a single gulp. He leaned against the wall. That was the most excitement he’d experienced in months, and part of him was disappointed the crisis hadn’t been a little more long-lived. That was to be expected, though. He was little more than a caretaker, babysitting gear several orders of magnitude more intelligent than he. Two more tours on the bottom were all he needed to have enough money in the bank to buy a decent place of his own—three if he wanted a little extra cushion. He disposed of the empty container and returned to his workstation. Not a day passed when he didn’t marvel at how much he was being paid to sit down there and suck oxygen.
“How’re we looking now?” Emmett asked.
“All readings are nominal.”
“In that case,” Emmett said, rubbing his hands in anticipation, “I’m going to finish my—”
The room plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER
TWO
Command Capsule, Station Bravo
Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean
700 Meters below Sea Level
Emmett cocked his head and listened to the darkness, searching for any sounds that would give him a clue as to what was going on. The only thing to reach his ears was a faraway creak, a not-so-subtle reminder of the trillions of tons of ocean pressing down on him from above.
“System?” he said, barely holding back the quaver that threatened to creep into his voice. “I need a situation report! What in the hell is going on?” He held his breath for a count of three then exhaled long and slow through pursed lips. “System?”
The computer offered no response. Emmett tried once more, with the same result.
He closed his eyes and visualized the layout of the capsule, seeing it as a neat grid of squares on an architectural blueprint. The habitable area measured a mere five square meters. Only three, maybe four strides would bring him to the nearest emergency flashlight, attached to the far wall.
Using his console as a guide, he turned until he was aiming in what he believed was the right direction. He extended his hands before himself and shuffled through the void until he bumped into the wall. From there, locating the light took only a moment. He ripped it from its bracket and stabbed the power button.
Nothing.
The flashlight was dead, just like everything else.
Emmett cursed and wiped greasy sweat from his forehead. A shiver coursed through his body. Is it my imagination, or is it getting colder? He didn’t know how much time had elapsed. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. That wa sn’t long enough to affect the temperature. Or is it? With a sinking feeling, he realized he didn’t know how long he could last without the HVAC or the atmosphere exchangers to regulate his environment. Do I have an hour? Two? A day? He tried to remember the protocol for a total system failure, but he was drawing a blank.
The enormity of his predicament made him want to vomit. The very act of breathing had suddenly become an activity with an expiration date.
He hugged himself. He had to evacuate, and he had to do it right then.
He pitched his head back and looked up at where the ceiling would be if he could see it. Salvation was so close that he could almost taste it. Less than a kilometer separated him from the endless expanse of Arctic sky. His resolve strengthened. He could do it. He wracked his brain, trying to remember how the evacuation process was supposed to work and chiding himself for not having reviewed the operating procedures since his first tour despite having attested to doing so. Fragments from a lecture with a long-ago instructor came to him, something about taking his time and ensuring he didn’t make any rash decisions and something about donning protective gear before he did anything else. A lot of somethings—too many.
Emmett put his fingers to the wall on his right side and crept forward until he arrived at the primary storage locker. The door opened on silent hinges, and he wrestled out an unwieldy bundle of rubberized fabric encased in crinkly plastic, his immersion suit. The noise as he unwrapped the garment sounded like gunshots in the tomb-like silence. He stripped away and discarded the packaging then ran his fingers over the bulky outfit, reacquainting himself with its features. He’d worn a similar getup once before, during training, but that had been years before. A chunky zipper ran from the neck to the crotch. A beefy D-ring sewn into the center of the chest provided an attachment point for a safety tether. He unfolded the stiff carapace on the floor, sat, and climbed inside, shoes and all. Once he was situated, he zipped himself to midchest. He got back to his feet and stretched. The fit was snug but not overly so.
Satisfied with his progress, he made his next move. Two steps to his right put him before the main hatch. He found the lifeless electronic keypad with his fingertips and passed his wrist over the proximity reader. As he expected, the door didn’t respond.
Okay, Emmett told himself, closing his eyes and conjuring up his instructor’s visage once again. “In case you lose juice, activate the manual override in the compartment adjacent to the sensor panel.” He ran his fingers along the bulkhead, stopping when he detected a break in the wall at chest height. He felt around but could find no obvious means of access. In a burst of frustration, he slammed his open palm against the door, only to have it spring open with a sharp click. Encouraged, he probed the interior of the shallow cavity. He didn’t know exactly what to expect, but in his mind’s eye, he pictured something like a plumbing shutoff.
He froze. Shit. Two mechanisms were there, oriented one above the other.
Emmett considered his options for a moment before mentally flipping a coin. To his surprise, the top handle turned easily, completing two full revolutions before coming to a stop and refusing to go any farther. He moved to the next one. It wouldn’t budge, not even a millimeter. Emmett threw all his weight into the effort, to no avail. Nerves frayed and his patience running dangerously low, he took a deep breath and rolled his neck as he evaluated the problem. An ominous ker-chunk startled him back into the moment. Tentatively, he reached out and seized the stubborn control again. That time, he encountered no resistance.
Some sort of mechanical interlock must’ve been jamming things up, he decided.
Stale air wafted toward him as the airlock swung open.
Emmett slipped into the narrow chamber and from there into the Emergency Ascent Module. The EAM was his only way out. Engineered to spirit one person topside as quickly as possible, the claustrophobic vessel was a true option of last resort.
Refamiliarizing himself with how everything functioned took a few seconds. A bank of stubby toggles and two protrusions shaped like pistol grips were mounted directly overhead. The toggles controlled the heater, the incident locator beacon, and a few other functions that escaped him, while the handholds operated the vehicle release. Emmett flipped each switch to no effect. He poked around some more until he located the air-supply nozzle. A quick clockwise twist with his thumb and forefinger triggered a frigid blast of oxygen against his face.
The details were coming back to him. He lowered a thinly padded bench from the wall and straddled it. Reaching over his shoulders, he threaded his arms through a pair of thick nylon straps. A separate strap buckled across his sternum completed the ensemble.
With nothing left to do, Emmett sat in the stygian gloom for almost a minute, collecting himself and trying to imagine what he would find when he got to the surface. Once he launched, turning back would be impossible. If he emerged into a storm, he would probably be shaken like a rock in a can. He could die. But if he stayed put, death through freezing or asphyxiation was a certainty.
The choice was easy.
He grasped the release handles and squeezed with all his might. With a muffled bang, the pressure triggers detonated the explosive bolts binding the EAM in place. Slowly at first but with increasing speed, Emmett lifted off from the seafloor and accelerated toward an uncertain future.
CHAPTER
THREE
MS Glacial Adventurer
Somewhere in the Arctic Ocean
Simone Rousseau beat a fist against the locked stateroom door while she frantically jiggled the master key in the lock with her other hand. “Chloe! Are you in there? It’s me! Let me in!”
Between strikes, she thought she heard something. Footsteps. A person.
She stopped knocking and tried to calm her racing heart. “Chloe? Is that you?”
No answer.
At that moment, the dead bolt finally slid free. Simone put a shoulder against the formerly impassible barrier and shoved with all her might. A man’s voice cried out in alarm, and through the widening gap in the door, Simone caught a fleeting glimpse of her sister’s boyfriend, Scott, backpedaling then toppling onto his rear end. His head cracked against the floor with a painful whack.
“Oh no!” Simone said, rushing to his side and kneeling. She grabbed Scott’s hand and drew him into a seated position. “I’m so sorry! Are you all right?”
The pungent tang of old shit and sweat wafting off his unwashed body made her gag. Scott had a faraway look in his eyes, and he couldn’t seem to focus on anything. He wore the same jeans and blue fleece sweater he’d been wearing the last time they were together, but now a thick layer of stubble covered his jaw, and his hair was a matted, greasy mess. He looked and smelled like he had been sleeping on the streets.
Simone snapped her fingers before his eyes. “Talk to me. What happened? Where’s Chloe?”
A viscous string of drool spilled over Scott’s lower lip and stretched to his lap.
“Scott? What’s going on here?” Simone looked past the catatonic man, scanning the room for any sign of her sister. Her eyes were drawn to the nearby bed, where she spied a hint of black hair amidst the tangle of sheets and blankets. “Chloe!” she shouted, forgetting all about Scott and scrambling across the mattress to her sister’s side. “There you are! It’s me, Simone.”
Chloe’s limp body offered no acknowledgment.
Simone didn’t even have to touch Chloe to feel the fever radiating off her. “Scott!” she shouted, twisting around. “Can you find something I can use to bring down her temperature? I need—” The words stuck in her throat when she noticed Scott was still sitting where she’d left him, still staring off into the distance. “Scott!” she screamed.
