Lagrange Read online

  It took several long minutes for me to get things cleaned up, and I used the time to try and plan ahead. The blower motor in front of me was the last one of any size aboard the Henhouse, I knew; the rest of the big ones had all been located on the station's other half. So had the rest of the filters. The filter box itself had been a rather complex bit of plumbing, with a high-pressure inlet and four outlets that led to other levels. The filter box was gone, utterly gone; there was simply no way that I could get into the Control Room anytime soon. Somehow I'd have to improvise both the filter and the plumbing. But how?

  I'd almost finished scooping dust when there was a clatter at the door. It was my toolbox, thank heavens, the hard metal objects inside rattling about freely in zero-gee. "It's only about half-full," Michelle explained contritely as she held it out to me. "I don't think we found everything."

  Indeed they had not, but they had done a far better job than I'd hoped for. I had a screwdriver, a large pair of locking pliers, and several wrenches to work with. "Thank you!" I replied sincerely, looking up and smiling. I floated the box conveniently nearby, then turned back to confront the gaping hole in the air system with new confidence.

  No ideas on how to actually make a repair, however, presented themselves.

  After a long moment, the Dragon spoke up. "You are fixing this, yes?" she asked.

  I nodded. "Yes. I must fix it. But I'm not quite certain as to how. I'm missing a major part."

  There was a long silence, then the Dragon edged up alongside of me to where she could get a clear view. "You need a part for where the air blows out," she said, "to get it into those other four pipes?"

  "Right," I agreed. "Plus, we need to improvise some kind of filter media. It doesn't have to be sophisticated, just enough to get most of the crap out of the air."

  "Hmm." She looked thoughtful for a moment, then went darting away.

  The damned pipes were in just about the worst of all possible configurations, I mused to myself while she was gone. They emerged from the filter box at ninety-degree angles. How was I going to handle the junctions? I might be able to rig up a box as a filter, but…"

  Just then the Dragon returned, thrusting something soft and pink into my face. "Try this!" she ordered. "Will it work?"

  I clicked my beak together angrily, then inhaled and exhaled a couple of times to maintain self control before looking at what the dominatrix had brought me. It was an inflatable toy sex doll. For a moment I wanted to laugh, then realization set in. I had to go from a main trunk to four vents…

  My eyes widened; by god, it just might work at that! "Maybe," I answered cautiously. "There's going to be a lot of air pressure…"

  "Guys bounce up and down on these things all of the time," Michelle said. "They're made tough. They have to be!"

  "Hmm," I said thoughtfully. "We could stuff the torso with pantyhose, and maybe make a filter that way. But how about the seals?" I pointed to the stub-pipe coming off of the main blower. "How am I going to make that work?"

  There was a long moment of silence, and then Georgia came through. "Latex!" she declared. "Liquid latex! I have some of the really good stuff for a special client. I'll go and get it!" And she was off.

  Pretty soon most of the girls aboard the Henhouse were off collecting pantyhose, while the Dragon and I cut and pasted and stuffed as appropriate. The stub-pipe indeed proved to be the most difficult connection; we applied latex lavishly and thought nice thoughts about the modern chemical industry. Then finally everything was dry, and it was time to test our repair. I looked over at the Dragon. "Here's hoping," I said, my hand on the switch.

  "It will hold," she declared flatly. "It will."

  I nodded; of course, a mere rubber dummy would never defy the express wishes of the mighty Dragon! I turned our improvised system on, and slowly the motor began to turn. "Plastic Patty", as her packaging declared her to be, began to take shape almost immediately. First the limp head stood erect and looked out over the world with unblinking blue eyes, and then her breasts began to inflate with excitement over the never-ending flood now pouring into her crotch. Almost immediately she began twitching and bouncing up and down, her mouth a little circle of eternal surprise, as air and more air flooded in and was filtered in her ample belly, only to go pouring out of her truncated arms and legs.

  I shook my head sadly at the sight; the obscene thing would have gotten expelled from piloting school in a heartbeat, that was certain enough. But it seemed to be working, and for the moment that was plenty good enough.

  "All right," I said, turning away just as soon as I was fairly certain that the repair would hold for a while. "That's the best we're going to do here, I think. Now, we've got work on problem number two."

  "And that is?" the Dragon asked.

  "Getting back into the Control Room, so that we can call for help."

  There wasn't any elegant, safe method of regaining access to the Control Room, or at least there wasn't one that any of us could think of. Instead, we had to do things the hard way. "All right, everyone!" I declared. "Are you all tied down?"

  Up and down the corridor, attractive feminine heads nodded in the affirmative. Each and every one of my helpers had been issued a pair of fur-lined handcuffs with matching key, and each and every woman was now firmly attached to the handrail. A hurricane was about to blow down the hall, and I didn't want to lose anyone.

  "All right," I repeated. "Does everyone have their patching materials ready?"

  Again the heads bobbed solemnly, some of the ladies holding up various oddments that we thought might suffice to plug a leak. "One last time, then" I continued. "When I give the word, and only when I give the word, you are to do what?"

  "Release ourselves," the Dragon said for the rest. "Then follow you into the Control Room."

  "We are to stuff our patching materials into any hull breaches," Trixie the bunny-girl continued. "However, if you say to pull out, we are to run for it just as fast as we can. If you say to run for it, it's because you think the holes are too big to fix."

  "Right," I agreed. I'd run them through the procedure over and over again, until I was absolutely certain that everyone understood. "I'm going to open the hatch now. It will seem very frightening, but actually it takes quite a long time for a place as big as the Henhouse to lose enough air to really matter through just a few small holes." I turned and put my hand on the control lever. "One, two… Three!"

  Convulsively I closed the override switch, and the door began to rise. Sure enough, the wind howled and blew, snatching varied bits of trash and sucking it greedily under the door. I felt my own body surge towards the opening, but was easily able to hold my position without depending on the cuffs despite being closest of all. Perhaps requiring everyone to lock themselves in place had been overkill, I now judged. However, I hadn't had any way to know for sure until the door actually opened.

  The wind was still blowing hard when the hatch was half-open, but not so hard as to indicate that, say, an entire section of hull had been blown out. Carefully I unlocked myself, then ducked under the still not fully raised door. The lights were still working, I could see at once, which was a major blessing. There were two significant holes in plain sight, each perhaps three or four centimeters in diameter. They weren't enough to account for all the air wastage, not by half. Still, they were as good a place to start as any. "Come on in!" I roared against the gale, pumping my arm in the up-and-down gesture that we'd agreed upon. "Come on in and get these leaks plugged!"

  The girls leapt into action almost instantly, and in thirty seconds or less Michelle was hanging beside me trying to stuff a can of hair spray into one of the holes. It didn't fit, being too large, so Michelle stood aside and let Trixie have a try. She was carrying a double-handful of oddly shaped cosmetics bottles, and one by one she tried stuffing them into the breach as well. All were too small. Then something long and hard was pressed into my hand from behind. "Here!" the Dragon called out. "Try this!"

  I looked d
own; the Dragon had just passed me a neon-blue plastic phallus. I turned towards her "What in the hell am I supposed to do with this?" I cried out over the shrieking wind.

  "Stuff it in the hole, you young idiot!" she shouted back, balling up her fists angrily. "Don't you know anything?"

  I shrugged and turned back to face the breach. Sure enough, the shaft of the phallus fit the hole almost perfectly, and the base served as a very nice seal. "Latex!" I cried out. "Latex here!"

  Georgia stepped forward dutifully, brush at the ready. While she was slathering away, I turned my attention to the next hole, just a meter or so away. It was about the same size as the first. "Get me another dildo!" I demanded, still shouting over the roar of the wind. "I need another dildo, fast!"

  The second patch worked as well as the first, and then we used up two more phalluses on similar-sized holes located behind the suit storage locker. Once we had these last major breaches plugged, I knew that the fight was essentially won. "All right!" I declared again. "Ladies, you need to use your ears! Listen for whistling sounds, then home in on them. Stuff something appropriate in the hole, and then call for latex. I'm going to get to work."

  "Right," the Dragon agreed. "Georgia, stand back and wait for the command. Loretta, you go back and hunt down more patches. Trixie, use those big ears, all right? Point out the leaks for us."

  I nodded appreciatively at the dominatrix, who seemed to have things well in hand, and then turned my attention to the radio. It had not been damaged that I could see by a few minutes exposure to hard vacuum. Whatever had made the holes in our hull, however, had taken out the speaker box along the way. Reflexively, I opened up the emergency cabinet and pulled on the backup headphones. Instantly a sea of voices surged into my head.

  "No, Jim! Move the boom the other way!"

  "The goddamn hatch is frozen solid. Has anyone got a torch? This one is hot, people! I've got trapped victims!"

  "Fucking blueberries!"

  Carefully I clicked my mike. "Mayday, Mayday" I declared as calmly as I could. "This is the Marvin Mackleschmidt in command of the Henhouse, declaring a Class One emergency. We have sustained catastrophic structural damage, and are short on air. There are three hundred souls aboard. Mayday, Mayday!"

  "Get off the emergency frequency, Henhouse!" an angry-sounding female voice declared. "This channel has been allocated for rescue workers for the duration."

  "Roger that, Henhouse" a new voice said, from what was clearly a more powerful radio. "Son, we're glad to hear from you. You need to go to channel four, however. All emergencies are being declared there."

  "Roger," I acknowledged, feeling vaguely guilty even though there was no way that I possibly could have known. Using the emergency channel for rescue work wasn't in the procedure books, not at all. Though it made sense, I supposed, given all the little emergency-channel-only handsets that were distributed all over the place for occasions like this one. By the time that I had flipped my set over, the new voice was waiting for me.

  "Henhouse," it asked. "Marvin, are you there?"

  "Yes," I replied. "This is Marvin."

  "Thank God," the man on the other end said wearily. "Marvin, this is Colonel LeClerc of Traffic Control. At least there's one bit of good news today. Frankly, son, when you vanished off the air we thought that we'd lost you all."

  "You still might," I replied. "Sir, I am officially reporting a Class One emergency. We are heavily damaged, as you've probably already seen, and have lost gravity. We've also suffered at least four major hull breaches in addition to the structural failure. My instrumentation is not reliable at this time; while I am showing no other breaches on the Christmas tree I frankly doubt that this is the case. There's just too much debris out there for us not to have caught at least a couple more small pieces. Additionally, there has been, ah… A chemical spill, let's call it. Our air is foul, and growing fouler. The passengers are rioting, and we've been unable to restore order in large parts of the station."

  "Roger, Henhouse" the Colonel replied. "Your emergency is formally logged. However…" He sighed. "Marvin, I'm going to be totally honest with you. I don't have a single damned thing to send your way. We've experienced some kind of explosion at the South Pole refining facility, and things are way past the nightmare stage. There are thousands of dead here, Marvin. Thousands. There are more thousands trapped in isolated airtight compartments, most of them without radios or beacons." He sighed. "Plus, we're evacuating the whole station. We don't project that a single sector is going to remain habitable."

  My beak snapped shut angrily. "There's three hundred souls trapped here!" I shouted. "Look, damnit! Just because we're a goddamned whorehouse doesn't mean that-"

  "Whoa!" the Colonel interrupted me. "Hold your horses, son! If you'd called in right away after the blast, I might have been able to vector something out to you. But there's debris drifting all over God's creation now, and navigation has become an unholy nightmare close in. You're a pilot, son! How fast would you push your pod in this mess? And we can't afford to lose a pod just now, not a single one." He sighed. "If I could help you, I would. But the fact is, in the time that it would take me to get a pod out to you I can shuttle seven or eight hundred refugees out to where we're setting up emergency shacks." He sighed again. "I'm leveling with you, man to man. The fact of the matter is, we're not going to get everyone out of Lagrange proper in time, much less anyone else. No one ever foresaw a disaster this big. Therefore, we're not prepared for it." He sighed wearily. "Son, you're on your own."

  V

  In Command Navigator training, there is a short classroom segment on the art of leadership in an emergency. I inhaled and exhaled twice rather than scream obscenities at Colonel LeClerc the way that I so badly wanted to. I was not alone, after all, and the women who surrounded me were all working hard under my orders, doing their very best to salvage this impossible situation. So instead of cursing I simply signed off in calm, correct terms.

  "When is the shuttle coming?" asked the Dragon as soon as I removed the headset. "How are they going to dock onto us?"

  I smiled carefully. "Things are kind of busy back on Lagrange," I explained. "I'm not sure when they're coming. In the meantime, it might be quicker for me to try and go get Aphrodite myself."

  The dominatrix cocked her head slightly to one side and scowled, but said nothing. "All right," she agreed. "Where is your suit?"

  "Well," I said slowly. "There's just one wee little problem there…"

  "Beauregard!" Michelle hissed. "He was too cheap to buy you a special suit after he made you change your body, wasn't he?"

  "No!" I corrected her. "He bought me three, just like regulations required. One of them is over in Aphrodite," I explained.

  "A lot of good that one will do you," Georgia observed. "Where are the other two?"

  "One is kept in each control area. So, that means that one went with the other half of the station."

  "Right," Michelle agreed, looking around and not finding what she sought. "So the last one is right here in this room. Great!" She smiled. "Where?"

  I smiled weakly and pointed. "In that cabinet right over there. The one with the two great big shrapnel holes in it." Carefully I reached over and tried to open the door; it fell clean off of its hinges. Then a cloud of broken helmet-fragments drifted out, followed by a severed suit-hand.

  There was a long moment of silence as the girls digested the situation. Clearly, my suit was beyond salvage. "However," I said slowly, pointing to another very similar cabinet on the other side of the room, "there's another suit in there. I can't wear it, but a normal unmodified human can."

  Michelle spoke up again. "But… But none of us are suit-qualified. We can't go EVA!"

  "No," I agreed. "You can't. Especially not under these conditions. Nor could you pilot the pod back once you got there." I turned to face the Dragon. "We'll be docking to the emergency airlock down here; it's not as big as a standard lock, but in a pinch it will work. I've done it before in t
raining." Then I turned to face the rest of the group. "There's someone who can both go EVA and pilot a pod, however, up in the saloon. Commodore Tottson is sitting up there right now." Merely thinking about his always calm and cool features made me feel better deep down inside. "He's been in worse spots before."

  "He'll be stoned out of his mind," Georgia predicted. "Marvin, you haven't been up there. It's a madhouse!"

  "Have you seen him with your own eyes?" I demanded. "This is Commodore Tottson that we're talking about here! He's the most resourceful man in space. He probably saw what was happening and rigged up some kind of filter for himself." I suddenly believed in Commodore Tottson like nothing else in the universe, believed in him so deeply that I actually smiled for real. "We're incredibly lucky to have him on board." Next I turned back towards my console and rang up the saloon. "Arnold?" I barked. "Are you still there?"

  There was a long silence. I flipped the switch again. "Arnold, can you hear me?"

  This time he answered. "Marvin!" he cried out. "Thank God you've called! It's a madhouse up here! An absolute madhouse!"

  "What's going on?" I demanded reflexively.

  "There's fights going on, men raping men, others masturbating out in front of God and everybody… It's incredible! The waitresses and I have given up on keeping things under control. I'm hiding them under the bar and trying to keep the cattle off of the women. So far I've had to hurt a couple of them pretty badly." The Chief Steward paused. "Marvin, I conked a man in the head a few minutes back with a bottle to keep him off of Miriam. He hasn't moved since, and I'm afraid that I might have killed him. I didn't mean to! Really I didn't!"

  Jesus! "All right," I declared. "We're coming up just as soon as we can, Arnold. The cavalry is coming."

  "Thank God!" he answered, the relief evident in his voice. "Bring weapons and plenty of restraints."

  I clicked my beak, thinking things over. If we were going to evacuate the Henhouse, then eventually we'd have to restore order in the saloon; it was that simple. Whether the Commodore was in a position to help or not, we absolutely would have to have order when it came time to evacuate. Even assuming that Arnold could hold out indefinitely, there just wasn't time to wait for the drugs to wear off. "Right," I agreed. "There's one more thing, Arnold. Have you seen Commodore Tottson lately?"