Read Second Chance for Free Online Page B

followed him out, buck naked and holding his coverall in one hand.
    As I hung slack-jawed at this development, Bobb zipped up his coverall and moved to a wall panel, where he stilled the klaxon. In the ear-ringing silence that followed, the whistling hiss of escaping air was very loud. Bobb cocked his head, listening, then kicked off from the airlock door and shot through the port into the work bay above. Matt and I followed.
    The hiss was coming from behind a monitor at the gamma ray spectroscopy station. The monitor itself was black, its screen cracked in a jagged Y, and there was an acrid smell. I popped open the access panel at the base of the station and flipped circuit breakers—a fire now would only make things worse. As I worked, I prayed hard, over and over: “Lord Jesus preserve us, Lord Jesus preserve us...”
    Bobb and Matt, meanwhile, were trying to remove the monitor from the wall, so they could repair the hull breach behind it. But though Bobb strained at the wrench handle, it wouldn’t budge. “We’ll have to saw it loose.”
    “Too slow,” said Matt, and pulled a heavy prybar from the tool box. The tool’s momentum made his free-fall movements awkward, but he tucked his legs into the work station’s restraint and smashed the prybar repeatedly against the broken monitor’s casing. But the casing was made of the same tough plastic as the hull, and apart from sending a few additional glass fragments sailing into the air, this had no effect.
    By now Nuru and Mari had appeared from their rooms in Gamma hab, and Bobb had briefly explained the situation to them. “You’re just wasting time with that,” Nuru said to Matt. “We’ve already lost almost fifty pascals of pressure. I want you and Chaz to prep for EVA.”
    Matt and I exchanged a glance of deep concern. But Nuru was right, as usual—it was beginning to look as though we might not be able to even see the hull breach, never mind repair it, from inside any time soon.
    We pulled the emergency air barrier across the port between Gamma work and habitation bays as we passed through it. The barrier’s translucent plastic bellied taut as soon as it was sealed, pointing out the seriousness of the leak. Then, after crossing the habitation bay and entering the airlock, we closed and dogged the inner airlock door behind us. The latches snicked into place with disturbing finality.
    I called up the decompression checklist on the airlock’s little monitor. It had one hundred and ninety-seven steps and, even under emergency conditions, took a minimum of two hours and twenty minutes. While Matt unshipped the lock’s two exercise bicycles, I pulled two oxygen masks from their sterile wrappers.
    As I inserted the oxygen hose connectors into the socket on the wall, I was uncomfortably reminded of the situation I’d encountered just before the impact alarm. Matt and Bobb had both been in Bobb’s room. In the middle of the night. With the lights off. Naked.
    What had they been doing in there?
    I had some idea—I wasn’t naïve. But the very thought made me queasy.
    I shook the image out of my head and fastened one of the masks over my nose and mouth, then handed the other mask to Matt. Once he’d donned his mask, I programmed the airlock for EVA stepdown, then fitted my feet into the bike’s pedals and began to pump.
    It seemed insane that, with the ship losing air and an emergency spacewalk on the agenda, the first thing we had to do was work up a sweat. But our EVA suits were run at a fraction of the ship’s air pressure—it made it possible for them to be much lighter and more flexible—and if we subjected ourselves to that lower pressure too quickly we’d get the bends. Nitrogen bubbles expanding in our bloodstreams could cause severe pain, neurological disorders, and even death. So we had to get all the nitrogen out of our blood before decompressing, and the fastest way to do that was to exercise vigorously while breathing pure oxygen.
    We pedaled