The Tesserene Imperative (Book Two of The Imperative Chronicles)

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

Cap called a meeting in the Commons. The utter lack of ornamentation in the room presumably was intended to make it seem larger, but at the moment the walls felt like they were closing in on us. We hadn’t eaten in hours, so I prepared a light meal of sandwiches. Not surprisingly, no one seemed hungry.

Cap brought us up to date on our situation. Most alarming to me were the creases beneath Cap’s receding hairline. They were deeper than I’d ever seen them.

“Here’s how things stand: if we don’t replenish our oxygen supply somehow, we’ll be dead in less than seventy hours.”

His words hit me like a sucker punch, taking my breath away. The blood drained from Tom's and Sparks’ faces, as I’m sure it did from mine. It’s one thing to hear that you’re going to die “soon.” It’s quite another to have someone timestamp it for you.

“We lost some food in the galley strike, but not more than a couple of weeks’ supply. We still have months worth, and plenty of fuel,” Cap continued, “but none of that matters if we can’t get the engine working again to purify the air and water. Carbon dioxide levels are rising to the point where CO2 poisoning will probably kill us before the lack of oxygen does. We have to figure out a way to scrub the air we have now, and we need to find a new source of oxygen—which doesn’t seem bloody likely out here. The maneuvering thrusters can’t take us far.Consequently, we can rule out reaching a planet with an oxygen atmosphere. Any suggestions?”

Guido went first. “Could we use the pods as tugboats? You know, tow Shamu to a planet?”

This time I was the one to break the bad news. I shook my head. “Won’t work. They’re too flimsy to take the strain of towing something as massive as Shamu. Imagine two fleas trying to drag a Great Dane across a room by his whiskers.”

A heavy silence settled over the cabin.

“How fast can we peddle?” Sparks asked.

The jest earned him only a few grunts, but it lightened the mood a bit. Sparks has a knack for defusing a tense situation.This time, though, the usual twinkle was missing from his eyes. That told me better than words how worried he was. Although we’d survived the initial crisis, our prospects for continued survival looked grim.

“Not fast enough to get us home in time, I’m afraid,” Cap replied. He managed a tight smile for his old friend. “Any useful suggestions?” He looked at each of us in turn.

Silence. And then more silence. The air was heavy, and the lack of noise from the now-silent life support system made my heartbeat throb in my ears.

Finally, Guido spoke up again. “Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why can’t we just use the refinery to recycle the air? You know, pump the CO2-contaminated air into it and let it separate the air into carbon and O2? Isn’t that essentially what it does? Or maybe crack some of our water into hydrogen and oxygen?”

I responded. “It’s not a stupid question at all. Unfortunately the equipment doesn’t work that way. Believe me, I wish it was that simple.”

Then I went into lecture mode. The other guys knew how to operate the equipment, but not necessarily the fine points of how it all worked. “The refinery can only take crushed ore from a conveyor belt as input, not liquids or gasses. Waste gases produced as byproducts are sucked out of the chamber, separated into their base elements and stored for future use. Right? But there’s no way for me to pump the ship’s atmosphere directly into the chamber—which is deep in the guts of the equipment. It has to be produced by the refining process itself in order to end up in the right place at the right time. With enough time, I could probably dismantle the refinery and modify it to take a gaseous or liquid feed, but we don’t have that kind of time.”