Read Marsquake! for Free Online

bellowed, reeling toward a compartment at the end of the row of hydroponic tanks.
    Sean followed him, fighting for balance. Then everything went dark, and a reverberating
crack!
echoed in the dome. Sean heard the whoosh and rush of air, felt the wind in his face. The dome had ruptured. Air was rushing out of it.
    Sam had wrestled the compartment open and tossed Sean a dark green pressure suit, with a slim yellow oxygen “candle” attached. Then he pulled out one for himself.
    Already the air felt thin. Sean could hear twangs and pops as parts of the dome hull blew outward, losing their battle against air pressure. He pulled the pressure suit on with haste. Like all the colonists, he had drilled for emergencies like this. But his lungs were burning by the time he got the oxygen flow started, and when Sam switched on his suit light, Sean realized that dark splotches were dancing in front of his eyes. He fumbled with numb fingers, found the light switch, and turned on his light too.
    Sam was giving him a palm-up gesture—sign language for “okay?”
    Sean nodded and gave him a thumbs-up sign. The quake had ended. Cold was flooding into the dome.
    Turning back to the compartment, Sam wrestled out an emergency light, a large one, and got that turned on too. Holding its portable generator in one hand, he turned the beam toward the inner surface of the dome. Sean’s eyes followed the light, and he felt his chest clench. A twenty-meter-long rip, at least a meter across at the widest part, snaked up from the far side of the dome. The plants that the light touched were already dead, frosted and glittering in the cold semivacuum.
    Sam turned and motioned with his head. The emergency suits had radio connections, but they didn’t have time to turn them on. The suits wouldn’t hold body heat for very long. Already the temperature in the dome had dropped to twenty below zero. They had to move quickly or die.
    They reached the airlock into the connecting corridor, and Sam cycled it. They both crowded in. Thedoor closed, air rushed in, and with it came a return of warmth that brought stabs of pain to Sean’s toes and fingers. He hadn’t realized how cold he had been.
    Sam wrestled the helmet of his suit off. “You okay?”
    “Yeah. A little frozen, but okay.” It was dark, but the control panel of the airlock was working, and it showed yellow on the corridor side. That meant there was oxygen on the other side, though the corridor connected to spaces that opened to the Martian surface.
    They stepped into the corridor and joined a cluster of others who were heading back into the colony. “You have a blowout?” Cassandra Agate asked Sam.
    “Bad one. You?”
    “No, but I’m worried about the loss of power. Lights are gone, and the temperature will drop.”
    Someone way up ahead cheered feebly, and light washed over them. The dome into which the corridor fed still had light and power, from the look of it. They straggled in, two dozen people with the frightened look of refugees, all of them talking at once.
    Harold Ellman met them, his own face tense, his perpetual scowl touched with sharp worry. “Everyoneokay? Town Hall. Emergency briefing in ten minutes. Sam, you all right? Sean?”
    Sean was surprised to see the concern on the man’s face. Ellman never had a kind word for the Asimov Project, and more than once he had hinted that he thought Sean was here only because of his connection to Amanda Simak—that on his own, Sean would never have made the grade.
    But Sean swallowed hard and said, “I’m all right, Dr. Ellman. We lost the dome, though.”
    “Tech is getting lights and heat back as soon as they can. Town Hall, everyone. Hurry up.”
    Town Hall had been one of the earliest domes on Mars. Years before, when Marsport was still in its first phase, that dome had suffered a blowout, a deadly one. The dome had been repaired and strengthened—in fact, it was made into a double dome and was probably one of the safest places