The Depressurized Run

Loviisa pressed her ear to the bulkhead's cold rib, tracking the resonance of Toralt's transmitted voice through the shuddering alloy. On her side of the door, her battery gauge was down to seven percent, and the air in her dead-end corridor tasted of scorched lithium. Fifteen cycles back, Toralt had faced the same drop in pressure, and his voice carried no mercy for rusted steel.

"When a sector loses seal," Toralt's rasp came over the channel, "the air does not leave polite-like. It tears the meat off your ribs if you give it a gap."

Fifteen cycles earlier, the corridor outside Block Six was an ice storm of venting mist.

Toralt slammed his shoulder against the secondary access frame, gripping the dog-latch with both gloved hands. The negative pressure on the far side was a physical wall, holding the heavy plate sealed with tons of vacuum suction. Frost crawled across the inspection viewport in jagged white feathers, fed by atmospheric moisture flash-freezing as it bled through hairline fractures in the gasket.

Through the cloudy pane, the cultivation block was a silent nightmare. The main gravity plates had dropped offline when the surge tripped the substation breaker, leaving dead tomato vines, broken nutrient trays, and frozen droplets of gray water floating in midair like suspended shrapnel.

Two maintenance crewmen lay drifted against the far intake grille, their limbs rigid, skin mottled purple by rapid hypoxia. Further back, tucked beneath the reinforced overhang of a germination bunker, a yellow emergency strobe flashed in a rhythmic, frantic pulse. Someone was inside the seed locker, hammering on the reinforced acrylic with an empty oxygen canister.

Toralt did not haul on the handle. Brute force against half an atmosphere of differential pressure would snap a pry bar and shatter his wrists.

He dropped to one knee, scraped away the frost covering the auxiliary equalization tap, and unslung his cold-weld torch. The ship's original builder manuals claimed these secondary equalizers stayed operational for three hundred cycles. In practice, every deckhand knew the copper seats seized after three.

He slotted the flat edge of his wrench into the equalization spindle, struck the wrench handle hard with his palm, and twisted.

A sharp metallic crack echoed through the frame. The frozen valve yielded a fraction of an inch. A shriek of air tore through the equalization line, whistling shrill as pressure began to bleed between the chambers.

Toralt ignited the cold-weld torch. A bright chemical flame bloomed from the nozzle, spitting blue-hot spark against the seized outer dogs. He traced the line of the frozen locking pins, heating the alloy just until the expansion broke the ice weld holding the hinges fast.

When the differential gauge dropped to two tenths of a bar, Toralt kicked the release pedal and threw his entire body weight against the dog-arm.

The hatch gave with a wet, sucking gasp.

Atmosphere violently rushed past him into the dead block, pulling at his harness. Toralt lunged through the breach, his magnetic work boots clacking against the steel floorplates to keep him anchored against the zero-gravity drift. He pulled the secondary hatch half-shut behind him, looping his steel retrieval tether through the dog-ring so his exit path would not seal permanently.

Inside Block Six, the cold was immediate and vicious. It bit through his insulated coveralls, turning his breath to dense crystals inside his rebreather mask.

"Two minutes," he muttered to himself, watching the digital countdown on his wrist rig. His rebreather scrubbed ambient vapor, not hard vacuum; the diaphragm would stiffen and seize if he stayed past three.

He pushed off a floating hydroponic rack, gliding through the debris field. He swept past the two lifeless cultivators at the intake, his jaw tight beneath the rubber seal. He could do nothing for them. Every second spent grieving cost calories and liters of breathable mix he did not have.

He hit the germination bunker door with his boots, absorbing the recoil with bent knees, and slapped his palm against the bunker's manual release.

The seal broke with a dull thud.

Inside the two-meter steel locker, huddled among stacks of sealed seed canisters, two young cultivators clung to a shared emergency canister. A lanky young man with grease-smudged cheeks, Arto Nieminen, was holding the regulator to the face of a trembling girl, Helmi Vanamo. Helmi’s lips were already blue, her eyes wide with animal panic as her chest heaved against thin air.

"Drop the bottle," Toralt ordered, his voice echoing through the bunker. "Move. Now."

Arto blinked through frost-rimmed lashes, his knuckles white around the dying regulator. "Toralt? The intake blew. The other sixteen—the blowout tore them straight through the hull breach before the safety doors slammed. We barely made the locker."

"I see it," Toralt said. He pulled a dual-feed umbilical splitter from his utility vest, clicked it into his own rebreather's auxiliary port, and shoved the secondary masks into their hands. "Breathe shallow. We have seventy seconds before this whole block vents to zero."

He did not wait for them to stand. He grabbed Helmi by the collar of her work coat, hauling her into the drift, and gripped Arto's harness with his other hand. Toralt kicked hard against the bunker wall, propelling all three of them through the floating cloud of shattered composite trays and frozen nutrient brine.

The outer hatch was shuddering. The auxiliary equalization line was whistling its final dying breath, ice choking the orifice.

Toralt slammed into the access frame, shoved Helmi through the narrow opening first, then hoisted Arto through the threshold. He dragged himself through after them, kicked his retrieval tether loose, and slammed the heavy hatch shut.

He threw the master dog-lever down with both hands. The steel teeth bit home, sealing Block Six and its dead behind an airtight wall of cold iron.

The three of them collapsed onto the deck of the maintenance artery, gasping. Warm, grease-heavy air from Sector Four's lower bypass rushed into their lungs. Toralt ripped his mask off, spitting phlegm onto the grated deck, his chest burning from the sprint.

Helmi curled on her side, coughing violently as color slowly returned to her cheeks.

Arto sat against the bulkhead, his chest heaving, his hands trembling as he stared at the sealed hatch. He looked up at Toralt, his voice cracking with fury and terror.

"It wasn't a surge," Arto wheezed, wiping blood from his nose where the pressure drop had burst the capillaries. "It wasn't an accident, Tor."

Toralt paused, his wrench resting across his knee. "Speak plain, boy."

"Ilmari's technicians were at the secondary junction ten minutes before the alarm," Arto whispered, clutching Toralt's sleeve. "They didn't just plug in the manifold. I saw the tall one take a tungsten cutter to the main return loop. They severed the relief bypass on purpose before they sent the pulse."

Toralt looked at the boy's bloodied collar, then down the dark stretch of Conduit Nine. The council elders had believed Ilmari's sweet talk of observation rights and balanced yields. Paavola was probably thanking the emissary right now for an unfortunate industrial failure.

Toralt stood up, wiped the frost from his visor, and hauled Arto to his feet.

"We aren't going to the council chamber," Toralt said, his grip like an iron clamp on the cultivator's shoulder. "We're taking you to Mother Spore."