Chương 14: Chapter 13: Surface Preparation

The EVA suit hung in Equipment Locker 4, suspended from its shoulder hooks like a second skeleton. Model MCS-59, manufactured by Hartmann Aerospace in Stuttgart, Earth, serial number 59-0847-M. Shipped to Mars in 2061 aboard the colonial transport Aeon. Worn twice — both times by Chimamanda Okonkwo, the previous archivist, whose personnel file had been deleted from every database except the suit's own maintenance log. Ethan pulled the suit from the locker and laid it across the workbench.

The outer layer was orange — the international standard for high-visibility pressure garments — faded now to a pale rust color from twenty years of hanging in the dark. The fabric was a multilayer composite: an outer abrasion layer of woven silica fiber, a middle pressure bladder of polyurethane-coated nylon, an inner comfort liner of cotton mesh. Each layer had a different failure mode. The outer layer abraded. The bladder developed pinhole leaks.

The liner hosted bacterial growth if the suit's internal environment stayed warm and moist for too long. He had inspected this suit during the station survey three months ago. A cursory check then — no visible damage, seals intact, life support backpack removed and stored separately. Now he needed a full certification. The suit was not a piece of station equipment he could repair if it failed. It was the only barrier between his body and an atmosphere that would kill him in ninety seconds.

The pressure bladder inspection came first. He attached the suit to the test manifold — a portable compressor salvaged from the maintenance bay, fitted with a pressure gauge and a soap solution spray bottle. He pressurized the suit to 30 kilopascals above ambient and began spraying. The soap solution was twenty years old, its surfactant degraded, but it still formed bubbles where air escaped. The left glove attachment ring bubbled first. A slow leak that produced one bubble every three seconds.

The O-ring had compressed permanently during storage, losing its elastic memory. He replaced it with a new ring from the suit maintenance kit. The kit was labeled EMERGENCY EVA REPAIR — 12 UNITS. He had opened it for the first time today. Eleven units remained. The right knee joint bubbled next. The joint was a constant-volume bellows design whose concentric rings flexed without changing internal volume, maintaining suit pressure during movement.

The bellows had developed a pinhole at the flex point, invisible to the naked eye. He patched it with a self-adhesive seal patch from the kit, smoothing the patch edges with a roller tool. The patch would hold for the rated twelve hours of continuous use. Longer than he needed. He worked methodically, moving from the boots upward. The suit had eighteen seal interfaces: two boots, two glove attachments, one helmet ring, six joint bellows, seven access zippers for the internal plumbing.

Each interface was a potential failure point. Each failure point would kill him if it opened on the surface. The math was simple: eighteen points multiplied by a per-point reliability of 99. 5 percent yielded an overall suit reliability of 91. 4 percent. Roughly one chance in twelve of a failure. He needed that number higher. Two hours of inspection. Four O-rings replaced. Three patches applied. The retest showed no bubbles. The suit held pressure at 30 kilopascals with a leak rate below 0. 1 kPa per hour.

Within specification. The life support backpack sat on a separate bench — a rectangular unit the size of a small suitcase, designed to mount between the shoulder blades. He opened the maintenance panel. The CO2 scrubber cartridge was the primary concern. Lithium hydroxide absorbent, canister design, rated for eight hours of continuous operation. The canister installed in the pack was date-stamped 2059. Twenty-two years past manufacture, seventeen years past its rated shelf life. He unscrewed the canister housing.

The lithium hydroxide granules inside were supposed to be white. They had yellowed, the color shift indicating chemical degradation from trace moisture exposure. Yellow absorbent meant reduced CO2 capture capacity. Reduced capacity meant CO2 buildup in the suit. CO2 buildup meant confusion first, then unconsciousness, then death. The timeline from first symptom to fatality was approximately twenty minutes at exertion breathing rates. He discarded the old canister.

The spares were in the suit locker's lower drawer — three canisters in vacuum-sealed pouches, military specification, date-stamped 2061. He tore one open. The granules were white. The vacuum seal had held for two decades. The oxygen bottles mounted to the backpack's lower frame. Two cylinders, carbon-fiber overwrapped aluminum, each holding 0. 8 kilograms of compressed O2 at 20 megapascals. The pressure gauge on bottle one read 10. 2 MPa. Bottle two: 9. 8 MPa. Half pressure. Not enough for a full surface excursion.

He connected the bottles to the station's O2 charging manifold — a remnant of the colonial EVA preparation system, still plumbed into the atmospheric processor's oxygen separation stage. The processor split atmospheric CO2 into carbon and oxygen, dumping the carbon as graphite dust and storing the oxygen in a buffer tank. The buffer tank fed the station's internal atmosphere and, through this manifold, the EVA bottles. The compressor chugged for twelve minutes, filling both bottles to 18 MPa.

Not quite the rated 20, since the compressor's seals were old and the final pressure stage was bleeding efficiency. But 18 MPa gave him roughly five hours of breathing oxygen at resting metabolic rate, four hours at moderate exertion. Four hours of surface time. The cooling pump was the last component. He powered it from a bench supply and listened. The pump was a centrifugal impeller design, circulating water-glycol coolant through a network of tubes woven into the suit's inner liner.

At startup, the impeller produced a grinding noise — the sound of bearings running dry after two decades of stasis. He injected lubricant into the bearing port, ran the pump for ten minutes, injected more lubricant. The grinding softened to a whine. The whine persisted. The bearings were pitted from corrosion, the race surfaces microscopically rough, the damage irreversible without replacement parts he did not have. The pump would run. It would make noise the entire time.

And it would eventually fail — the question was when, not if. He calculated the remaining bearing life at approximately twenty hours of cumulative operation. Four surface expeditions of five hours each. Or five expeditions of four hours. A consumable with a known expiration, like the O2 bottles and the scrubber cartridges and his own tolerance for risk. He reassembled the backpack, mounted it to the suit's back frame, and connected the plumbing. Oxygen lines. Coolant lines. Power and data cables.

The suit was not a garment so much as a wearable spacecraft — a self-contained environment with its own thermal control, atmosphere management, and communication systems. Putting it on was not dressing. It was docking with a vehicle. The helmet sat on the workbench, its visor reflecting the overhead lights. Polycarbonate, three millimeters thick, coated with an anti-scratch layer and a gold-tinted UV filter. He inspected it under a magnifying lamp. No micro-fractures at the mounting ring.

No delamination at the edges. A single scratch across the right side — shallow, cosmetic, not structural. The scratch had been there when he arrived. Okonkwo's scratch. Okonkwo's suit. He checked the suit's internal log. Two previous EVAs. The first: six months before the collapse. Surface inspection of Comm Relay Six, duration three hours twelve minutes, no anomalies. The second: three weeks before the collapse.

Surface retrieval of an external sensor package, duration one hour forty-five minutes, left glove heating element intermittent. And then nothing. Okonkwo had hung the suit in the locker, logged the maintenance, and never worn it again. Ethan stood in the equipment bay and looked at the suit. It had protected its previous occupant. It would protect him, or it would fail.

The distinction between those outcomes resided in eighteen seal interfaces, four O-rings, three patches, and a cooling pump with twenty hours of bearing life remaining. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. The next morning, he put it on. The process took forty minutes. The inner liner first — a one-piece garment with integrated cooling tubes, stretching from ankles to wrists.

The outer suit second — stepping into the boots, pulling the torso section over his shoulders, sealing the front entry zipper. The gloves third — locking each wrist ring with a quarter-turn, feeling the O-ring compress and seal. The helmet last — lowering it over his head, engaging the locking collar, hearing the click of eight dogs seating into their grooves. The suit pressurized. His ears popped as the internal pressure rose to 30 kilopascals above the station's ambient.

The ventilation fan started — a low hum that pushed air across his face and down through the suit body, carrying away exhaled CO2 and body heat. The cooling pump whined in his left ear, the bearing noise conducted through the helmet structure. His breath fogged the visor, then cleared. The suit's atmosphere was dry — the scrubber pulled moisture as well as CO2. His lips started chapping within minutes. He walked to the airlock. The suit restricted every movement.

Each step required overcoming the pressure bladder's resistance. Each arm motion bent against the bellows joints. He moved slowly, deliberately, the way Okonkwo must have moved, the way every EVA operator had moved since the first pressure suit was invented. The surface access airlock was on Level 1, at the end of a short corridor past the vehicle bay. It was a horizontal cylinder four meters long and two meters in diameter, designed for one person at a time. The inner hatch was open.

Red dust coated the floor — decades of surface particulates tracked in on suit boots and never fully cleaned. The dust had a texture like fine flour, soft under his boots, billowing in tiny clouds with each step. He stepped inside. The inner hatch closed behind him. The airlock controller was a simple panel with two buttons — DEPRESSURIZE and REPRESSURIZE — and a pressure gauge graduated in kilopascals. He pressed the first button. The pumps activated.

The sound was deep and mechanical — a piston compressor pulling atmosphere out of the chamber, storing it in a buffer tank for reuse when he returned. The pressure gauge dropped. 85 kPa. 70. 50. The suit inflated slightly as the external pressure fell, the bladder expanding to maintain its internal set point. 30 kPa. 10. The pumps changed pitch as they approached vacuum, the air too thin to compress efficiently. Zero. The outer hatch indicator turned green. PRESSURE EQUALIZED WITH SURFACE.

He turned the manual release handle. The hatch swung outward. Beyond it: Mars. The surface stretched to the horizon in every direction. Red regolith, fine as powder, shaped by ancient winds into ripple patterns that had not moved in a million years. Rocks of every size littered the ground — basalt mostly, dark volcanic stone, sharp-edged and unweathered by the rain that never fell here. The sky was a pale brown haze, the color of old dust suspended in thin CO2.

The sun was a small white disc directly overhead, smaller than it appeared from Earth, brighter despite the haze. A thermometer on the airlock exterior read minus fifty-five Celsius. No clouds. No movement. No sound except his own breathing and the cooling pump whining in his ear. He stepped onto the surface. His boot sank two centimeters into the regolith, leaving a print with sharp edges — no moisture to collapse the walls.

The print would remain there for a million years, until the next impactor churned this patch of ground, until the slow grind of thermal cycling erased it grain by grain. He took another step. And another. The suit's heaters strained against the cold, the warmth uneven across his body — his torso comfortable, his fingers going numb, his toes cold where the boot insulation was thinnest.

The temperature gradient was a design compromise: the colonists had prioritized core warmth over extremities, accepting numb fingers as the price of battery efficiency. Communications Relay Six stood eight hundred meters northeast of the station. He had seen it on the surface imagery a hundred times — a small prefabricated structure the size of a shipping container, mounted on a concrete platform braced against the regolith.

The relay was part of the colonial surface communication network, a chain of microwave transceivers that had linked the stations together until the network went dark in 2061. He walked toward it. Eight hundred meters in 0. 38g took twelve minutes. His pace was slow — the suit limited stride length, the regolith was loose, the cold was numbing. He counted steps. One hundred. Two hundred. The station receded behind him. The relay grew ahead. Between them, the empty red plain. The relay's exterior was intact.

The prefabricated structure had weathered two decades with only minor degradation — the paint faded, the seals cracked at the corners, dust piled against the windward wall. The antenna mast on the roof had collapsed, its mounting bolts sheared by thermal fatigue. The mast lay across the roof, still connected by its signal cable. The access hatch was a manual design — a wheel-operated dog mechanism, no power required. He turned the wheel with both hands, the suit's gloves making the motion clumsy.

The hatch opened inward. The interior was dark. His helmet light activated automatically. The beam swept across a control console, a rack of electronic equipment, a maintenance panel on the back wall. Everything was coated in red dust — finer than the surface regolith, a powder that had infiltrated through the seal cracks over decades. The dust hung in the thin atmosphere, disturbed by his entry, glowing in his light beam like a constellation of rust. He went to work.

The backup power cells were in the bottom drawer of the equipment rack — four lithium-ion units, military specification, each the size of a thick book. He tested each one with a portable multimeter he had brought in his thigh pocket. Cell one: dead, voltage zero. Cell two: dead. Cell three: 2. 1 volts — severely discharged but potentially recoverable. Cell four: 11. 8 volts out of a rated 14. 4 — eighty-two percent capacity. One good cell. The real prize was in the maintenance panel's lower compartment.

Six lithium hydroxide scrubber cartridges, vacuum-sealed in foil pouches, date-stamped 2061. He lifted one out. The pouch was intact, the seal unbroken, the contents shifting inside with the dry rustle of active absorbent. Each cartridge would extend his surface time by four hours. Twenty-four additional hours of EVA capacity. Enough to reach every nearby site and return.

He found the signal amplifier in the relay's transmission rack — a solid-state microwave amplifier, colonial military specification, designed for point-to-point communication between stations. The amplifier was the heart of the relay. Without it, the relay was just an antenna and a box. With it, Station Seven could potentially re-establish contact with other nodes in the network. He unbolted it from the rack, wrapped it in anti-static foam from the relay's maintenance supplies, and placed it in his cargo carrier.

The power coupling came next — a high-voltage connector that bridged the relay's solar array to its internal power bus. The station's own coupling was failing, the contacts eroded from years of arcing. This one was pristine. Straight swap. He loaded everything into the cargo carrier — a collapsible aluminum frame with mesh sides, designed to be towed behind an EVA suit. The carrier was light enough in Martian gravity, but its mass added to his metabolic load.

He was breathing harder now, the exertion pushing his O2 consumption above baseline. The suit's CO2 monitor showed 0. 3 percent — well below the 1 percent threshold for symptoms, but rising. The walk back took longer. The cargo carrier dragged through the regolith, its skids leaving parallel grooves in the dust. The station grew ahead of him, its regolith-covered roof barely visible against the brown sky. The cooling pump whined louder — or he was noticing it more.

The bearing noise had changed pitch, a higher frequency now, a harmonic that suggested worsening pitting. The airlock outer hatch was still open, waiting. He pulled the cargo carrier inside, sealed the outer hatch, and pressed REPRESSURIZE. The pumps reversed, pulling atmosphere from the buffer tank and pushing it into the chamber. Pressure rose. His suit deflated as external pressure returned. At 85 kPa, the inner hatch indicator turned green. He opened the hatch and stepped into the corridor.

The air of the station hit his face when he removed the helmet — warm, metallic, the scent of recycled atmosphere that had passed through the same scrubber beds a thousand times. He stood in the corridor, the helmet in his hands, the cargo carrier at his feet, the suit's cooling pump still whining. The cargo held twenty-four hours of additional EVA time, a functional signal amplifier, a replacement power coupling, and one good lithium battery. The first surface expedition of his life was complete.

The relay had given him what he needed. Three more sites waited within the oxygen radius. He had four hours per trip. The arithmetic was tight but the tolerances held. He plugged the suit into its maintenance port. The compressor chugged through its recharge cycle, filling both O2 bottles to 18 MPa. The scrubber cartridge clicked into its housing. The suit hung from its shoulder hooks, orange surface faded to rust, seventeen seal interfaces verified, ready for the surface. Twenty-six more items on the list.

Four hours of breathing oxygen. He would start with the nearest site — an old maintenance depot twelve kilometers east, mapped but unsurveyed since the collapse. The depot's manifest listed electrical cable, hydraulic fittings, and a backup atmosphere processor. The manifest was twenty-two years old. The depot might be intact, looted, or buried under two decades of Martian dust. He would find out tomorrow.