The Arrows of Time

There was a sudden high-pitched noise from behind him, like something large and brittle being snapped. Not the ominous groan of a machine part under pressure gradually yielding – just instant surrender to an overwhelming force. It was over in a flicker or two, and though the screech itself was unforgettable the lingering impression offered no clues as to its source. Ramiro dimmed the cabin and switched on the exterior lights. Through the window he could see a trail of debris drifting off to his right, small grey rocks spinning in a haze of dust. They could only be fragments of the hull’s hardstone, torn free by a collision of some kind.

An alarm sounded. The pressure in the Surveyor was dropping.

He grabbed his helmet and dragged himself back towards the crew’s sleeping quarters. Agata emerged from her room, strapping on her jetpack, helmet in hand. Ramiro could see her tympanum moving but he couldn’t hear a sound; the pressure was already too low. He put on his helmet and she did the same.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Something’s hit us,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what. Is your cabin holed?’

‘No.’

Ramiro clambered past her and opened the nearest door. There was a jagged slot half a stride across missing from the far wall; the rock along the edges was shattered unevenly, but the course of the damage was unswerving. Sheets of paper were fluttering through the gash, out into the void. Azelio was motionless, tangled in his bed’s twisted tarpaulin. Ramiro approached, switching on his helmet’s coherer to supplement the safety lights, and saw three holes in the tarpaulin, each the width of his thumb.

Agata’s voice came through the link. ‘Tarquinia’s gone!’

‘What?’

‘I’m in her cabin – she must have been blown right out.’

Ramiro stared at Azelio, imagining Tarquinia tumbling through the void in the same condition – carrying no air, insensate, her flesh pierced by splinters of rock.

‘I can see sunstone spilling out,’ Agata said. ‘From the cooling system.’

Ramiro was paralysed. What did he do first? If they couldn’t run the cooling system, they were dead.

Agata shouted, ‘I can see Tarquinia! I’m going after her!’

‘No! I’ll get her!’

Agata hesitated. ‘You can see her too?’

‘No, but—’

‘Ramiro, I can do this,’ Agata insisted. She sounded impossibly calm. ‘She’s not that far away, and I can still see her clearly. I’ve got her cooling bag here, air tank and all. I’ll get it to her. She’ll be all right.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Do it.’

Agata said nothing more, but then he caught the flash of her coherer as she jetted across the trench of stars behind Azelio’s wall.

Ramiro shook himself out of his stupor. Azelio’s cooling bag was missing from the clamp beside the bed, but the spare was in the cupboard. He took it over to Azelio and worked it up over his limp form, then he opened the valve on the air tank and held his hand against the fabric to check that there was a flow across the skin. There were five deep wounds in Azelio’s thigh and torso, but his skull seemed to be untouched. The injuries might be survivable – so long as his flesh didn’t denature and ignite.

Ramiro dragged Azelio into his own cabin; abutting the opposite side of the hull, it appeared to be completely undamaged. He got Azelio under the sand bed’s tarpaulin, and brought two straps across to be sure he wouldn’t drift away.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll be fine.’

He dragged himself back into the passage and headed for the cooling system.

Whatever had grazed the side of the Surveyor had left a single long gash in the hull running all the way from Azelio’s cabin via Tarquinia’s to the gasification chamber. Looking out through the opening where the gash had breached a narrow maintenance shaft, Ramiro could now see what Agata had reported: pieces of sunstone tumbling into the void like gravel spilling from a torn sack. The feed supplying the decomposing agent should have shut off when the pressure plummeted – and if it hadn’t, the result would have been spectacularly worse. But the sunstone would continue to react with the agent already present in the chamber. There was no way to render the swarm of jostling rocks perfectly motionless, so nothing would keep them in the chamber while there was a wide-open path into the void.

‘Can you still see Tarquinia?’ he asked Agata.

‘I’ve nearly reached her!’ Agata declared. ‘How are things there? Is Azelio all right?’ Once she’d moved away from the Surveyor she would have looked back and taken in all the damage at a glance.

‘He’s safe,’ Ramiro assured her. ‘He’s got some small wounds, but I’ve put him in my room to recover. Please, just concentrate on Tarquinia.’

‘All right.’

Ramiro leant against the side of the shaft. How was he going to seal the chamber? They had stone plugs prepared for holes up to the size of his hand, but no one had envisaged anything like this.