The Left-Footed Jackass of the Gods
by Douglas A. Van Belle


It was at that moment I realized that human languages continuously evolved because no man or woman, living or dead, had ever managed to find the words that completely captured just how much of an infuriating jackass your boss could be. Even on one of Stan's best, sanest and least crusty days, there was no possible combination of sexual, scatological and genealogical references available in any language that could possibly express the degree to which he was a pain in the ass. And today was about as far as anyone could get from a good day.

"Damn it Constance, is this another one of your prissy little girl things or what? Hell, Larry the retard has got bigger breasts than yours and he never bitched about something this simple."

"There has got to be a spare downstairs," I shot back.

"Quite likely, but that is not what I asked you to get, now is it?"

"Stan." I hated the whiny sound in my voice, but sometimes it worked on him.

"Just bring me that computer core," he snapped. "And move it. They're already dropping out of orbit."

Swearing silently at the jackass, I snapped off my com and tossed the welder on the floor. To Hell with Stan's your tools are your life crap. Spraying a quick coat of scab, the aluminum-polymer foam we used for emergency repairs, over the door I tossed the sprayer next to the welder and then kicked them both for good measure. Taking two steps down the corridor, I stopped, checked the reference number stenciled next to the door and realized I had just scabbed off the only reasonably short route to the computer network service hub.

"Son of a bitch." It was as close as I could come to that missing piece of language. The jackass had purposely waited the five extra minutes for me to finish.

Climbing over barricades and dodging nervous men with guns, none of whom were actual soldiers, I ran to the cafeteria then cut back toward the administration section of the base. Built into a natural cavern, the base twisted and wound its way deep into the mountain, the longest meanders shortcut by passageways painstakingly cut through the stone. Sixteen hours of welding the doors and coating them with thick layers of scab had eliminated pretty much every one of those shortcuts, transforming the base's bewildering maze of passageways, stairs, common areas, airlocks, labs and all that, into an even more bewildering, winding and lengthy maze that was chock full of dead ends and defendable nooks.

Not that it would do much good.

Soldiers, hundreds of them, well trained, well armed, and more than capable of off-handedly sweeping through the best fight that a bunch of miners and scientists could muster, were minutes away.

I tried not to notice the people, I tried to shut it all out, concentrate on the task at hand or even just think of something else, but it assaulted my every sense. I could actually smell the fear, a biting stench of onion, sweat and vomit that cut through the industrial tang of plasma welders, grinders and curing scab. Ducking into a small room full of computers, I located the appropriate panel and pulled out that one core that Stan just had to have right this minute.

Stan said we were just a training run. Hitting this small, out of the way and scantily defended research station gave them a chance to hone their battle skills before taking on one of their real objectives. I'm not sure if the jackass meant that observation to be reassuring or infuriating.

As I worked my way back from the computer network hub the only way I could distract myself from all the half-panicked chaos around me was by contemplating the coincidence that the computer core had just about the right heft for smacking Stan upside the head. I played the imagined sound over and over in my mind, savoring the hollow "thonk" every time.

"Here's your damn computer core," I said when I finally got back to Stan's lair.

Stan looked up from behind the rat's nest of miscellaneous parts, wires and tools that covered what everyone assumed was some kind of workbench. "It's about time, woman."

I glared at him. "You know damn well that I'd have been back a half hour sooner if you had asked for the core before I welded and scabbed that last door."

The slight arch of his eyebrow was the only hint that he had not intended to make me take the long route. I didn't care.

"This is a Hell of a time for your stupid little games," I said.

"I do not play games," he said, indignantly

I pulled up the spare parts inventory on my computer terminal. "There are a half-dozen cores exactly like this one in the storage. What's so almighty important about this one?"

He took the core, placed it lovingly in his pile of crap, picked it up, adjusted its location again then set his cup of coffee on it. "You tell me."

I was ready for that. In his own twisted way, Stan treated absolutely everything as a learning experience or a test for his apprentices and I knew his ego wouldn't let him stop, no matter how eminent our demise.

"Since you wanted this specific core and not one of the identical spares, I would guess that it is not the core itself that is important, but what it was doing."

Stan nodded, turning away from me as I spoke and starting to work on something on his computer.

"But that is where it really gets confusing. The maintenance administration computer doesn't do much of anything. It basically serves as a communication and data node for all of the different maintenance systems. It tracks equipment and tools checked out, work orders, maintenance schedules and all that crap."

"It also administers all the atmospheric subsystems," Stan said.

"So?"

He raised an eyebrow at me and twisted his lip into something like a sneer.

I glared back "This place was designed with multiple redundancies and you have worked your apprentices to death turning that into ridiculous over-redundancies. Every subsection has its own environmental unit, a back up and an emergency system. The only thing the administrative computer does is keep them all coordinated, maintaining the same pressure and mix in all the different subsections so people don't blow out their eardrums every time they pass through a pressure door, but even that has a back up system."

Stan pointed at a wall of computers, one of which had an access panel removed and its core pulled out.

"And the back up has a back up. There is a program for manually controlling the environmental units if both the primary and the backup computer should somehow fail, and even if absolutely every piece of computer equipment in the universe fails, the damn things will keep running on standard settings as long as they have power."

"That they will," he said, smiling almost wickedly. "But it is the manual control program that is important and it won't kick in unless both the administrative computers are offline."

The dull whoomp of a distant explosion knocked Stan's devilish smile right off his face.

"Equipment bay?" I asked.

"No, the transport hangar," he said, pointing at his monitor.

I punched up a couple of video feeds from the hangar. Heavily armed soldiers poured in through the warped and twisted remains of the external door. Quickly, methodically, almost mechanically, they secured the area and began shooting out the security cameras, hitting a camera with every shot.

"It's like they know where all the cameras are." I couldn't believe how unerringly accurate they were.

"I'm sure they do," Stan said.

In response to my shocked look he shrugged. "This is just a research station; it's pretty easy to get detailed plans. I downloaded a set the day I got this job."

"Oh." I felt lost, fighting a surge of panic as the last security camera in the hangar blinked out.

"Is the mining rover still in the hangar?" 

"Uhh."

"Check the maintenance stall umbilicals."

"Yes, it's plugged in to number six."

"Can you pull up the view from its nav video without activating any of its other systems?"

"Yes, here." A video feed from the mining rover expanded to fill my screen. The soldiers had secured the airlock that led the station proper and were already cycling through it in small groups.

"Good." He brought up the feed on his monitor, froze the picture and zoomed in on a single soldier. After studying the image for a long minute, he nodded to himself then looked over at me. "Send the feed up to our beloved Colonel with my compliments."

"Done," I said.

"Now help me bring the pressure up in sections four through nine."

"Hunh?"

"Most of our guys are set up beyond the bulkhead in Section ten so I want you to open up the emergency environmental control program and bring up the air pressure in sections four through nine." Stan looked over at me, his patented patronizing glare rolling down his long crooked nose. "Do you think you can manage that?"

"Uh, yeah." I opened up the control program, stared at it for a second, then sheepishly said, "No."

"You have to open the file for each air handler and adjust its pressure setting individually."

"Okay. How far do you want me to bring them up?"

"We want the ones in section nine up to at least five atmospheres."

"Five?"

"Five." Stan closed his eyes, thought for a second, then nodded to himself. "Yes five, but we will have to step up to that from subsection to subsection."

"Will they go up five?"

"They are all standard units, originally designed so they could be used for small, one and two room stations." Stan couldn't help but lecture at me. "Each one should be capable of providing a hyperbaric environment for treating decompression injuries in the field. They are rated to six but they can probably to go up to eight or nine atmospheres." 

Stan swept some of his precious crap off a table, exposing an outline map of the station beneath. "The passageway doors will automatically lock up if the pressure differential is greater than one tenth of an atmosphere, right?"

"Right. So, if we adjust the pressure we can lock every door in a way that they won't be able to override."

"No, we want to keep the differential under one tenth," he said. "We don't want the doors locked. Start in the area around where they are coming through the air lock and bump it up by just under tenth with each pressure door as you move back towards us; we want them to gain a tenth on their way through each door all the way up to section nine."

I must have had some kind of look on my face, because when he glanced over at me he frowned and spoke very slowly and distinctly, as if to a slow-witted child. "They step through a door, a puff of air and maybe a bit of ear pop, nothing that would seem out of the ordinary for a soldier used to jumping on and off ships all the time, nothing to make them suspicious."

I still had no idea what in the hell he was trying to do, but I had long ago learned which questions not to ask. I quickly dove into making the pressure adjustments he wanted, finding it easy to stay ahead of the disappearing security cameras.

The soldiers were in no hurry. Having gained entry unopposed, they now seemed most interested in getting through this, through us, with all their favorite body parts undamaged. Over and over, each time exactly the same, they burst through a door as it opened, positioned themselves in defensive crouches all around, then checked for booby traps and shot out the cameras. A few minutes later another group would leapfrog past and into the next room. In each section they carefully searched every single room, every storage closet, every place even a single person could have been waiting in ambush.

"I'm up to five atmospheres, do you want me to keep bumping it up by a tenth till I get to section nine?"

"Where are you?"

"Right here." I pointed to the map on Stan's table. "Right where everything narrows down before the administrative section."

"The first of the booby traps are right in that area, aren't they?"

"I think so. Some of the miners were working on things around there this morning."

"Just make it five atmospheres from there on through section nine," Stan said.

I finished that task in just a few minutes. "Now what?"

"Now we wait."

For the last day, almost twenty-four hours exactly, I had worked at a pace just short of torture and had bitched about it, silently at least, every second. All those aches, pains, the exhaustion and of course Stan's ceaseless mind games, were nothing compared to the agony of being told to just sit and wait. With nothing to focus on, my mind ran wild, the standard horror stories about women at the mercy of soldiers giving it plenty of fuel.

"Don't we have to set something up to blow out the air in those sections?" I asked when I finally couldn't take it any longer.

"No." Stan frowned at me as if to question my sanity

"Oh. I figured you were setting them up for some kind of trap when they moved into section nine. You know, blow open some secret vent shaft and depressurize the whole section or something."

"Even if there was a secret vent shaft, their pressure suits would protect them from explosive decompression and give them enough time to realize they had pressure problems. That's the last thing we want. This will only work if it is subtle and they don't notice what's happening."

"They have pressure suits," I said to myself, furious for not realizing that simple fact. "What the hell good is all this fiddling with the pressure if they have pressure suits?"

"Their pressure suits are designed for space, for boarding ships, for shooting guns in rooms that might decompress at any moment. Those suits can stop a bullet, deflect a plasma blast, withstand pretty much anything caustic and filter out just about any toxin we can put out there, but they are made to hold in one atmosphere of pressure, to protect against a vacuum. They can't do much of anything about a gradual increase in external pressure. They just aren't designed for that. It takes a hard-shell suit to hold back pressure, like those power-assisted mining jobs you hate working on so much. The military versions are too big, bulky and awkward for interior fighting."

"They missed a camera." I said, interjecting it primarily to avoid further lectures on the wonders of pressure suits.

Stan perked up. "Where?"

"Just past the shop."

"Before they have even gotten up to five atmospheres, good."

"They missed another camera two doors down. And they look..." I glanced over at Stan, trying to figure out what was going on. "They don't look the same."

"Lethargic, distracted, maybe a bit disoriented and hopefully a bit careless." Without looking down at his monitor, Stan described the changes better than I could have

"One of them just tripped over his own feet."

Stan suddenly changed the subject, "Did I ever tell you about diving off the Great Barrier Reef?"

"I have suffered through at least a thousand detailed versions of your imaginary tryst with a busty dive instructor." I glared at him. "Right now I rather you told me what was going on."

"Floating through the water, a wall of florescent living coral, fish like snow in a blizzard and nothing but dark, clear water below." Even as he talked about the dive I knew he was imagining his fantasy girl and the naked scuba.

"Stan!"

"Nitrogen narcosis," he said quietly. "Divers used to call it the rapture of the deep."

"Nitrogen?"

"At more than three atmospheres the nitrogen in regular old air does something to your head. It's kind of like the best parts of being drunk, very calm, euphoric, confused. It causes coordination problems, short-term memory loss, and sometimes provokes irritability. It sneaks up on you. It's not like drinking where you can feel yourself getting drunk; with narcosis you don't know it's happening to you. It's tough enough to recognize and tough enough to deal with when you're expecting it. If you don't realize it's happening..."

An explosion flashed silently across one of the monitors.

"Booby trap," I said, unnecessarily.

Stan didn't answer. He just stared at the carnage wrought by the jury-rigged mining explosives. I wasn't sure if he was upset about the physical damage to his precious base, or the men that had just been killed by a bomb he had designed.

"So that's why?"

"No," he said, then tore his eyes from the screen. "I thought it might happen, hoped it might happen I suppose, but this isn't it."

I stared at him until he decided to elaborate. For a guy that lectured about everything, he picked odd moments to refuse to explain himself.

"Divers deal with narcosis by training, intense, repetitive, task-oriented training, just like these soldiers train. Narcosis should slow them down and cause them to make a few mistakes, but they'll fall back on their training and narcosis alone won't be near enough to stop them."

He looked at me, stared at me for a long time. Not that leering kind of look you would expect from him, just a look. It was as if he were memorizing me, logging my image in with everything else he remembered about me.

"My still is in the tool crib," he said.

"What?"

"My still is in the tool crib, behind the hanging tools. The right-hand section of pegboard swings out and there is a hollow behind it, an accident where the last construction crew got sloppy."

"Stan."

"It's not on any map of this station and there is enough room in there for a small person to hide."

"The fighting's started," I changed the subject rather forcefully.

Stan checked his watch, got up and started pacing.

The first barricade, built across the corridor connecting the machine shop and geologic labs to the administrative section, was positioned so the defenders could fire at the attackers coming through the pressure door as well as cover the locations the attackers had to reach to disarm the booby traps. It was also far more substantial and imposing than most of the barricades I had climbed over on my way to get the computer core. On the attacker's side of the edifice, cheap metal and plastic cafeteria chairs had been stacked against a pile of office furniture and scabbed into place with their legs pointing out and sharpened to create a haphazard phalanx.

For a while it looked as if it might even hold. The attackers seemed disinclined to try to charge at it and it didn't seem to take much effort for the defenders to keep them at bay. I soon realized that that was more of an illusion than reality; a delay while the assaulting troops brought some bigger weapons forward. It only took a few rounds from a tripod mounted blast cannon to destroy the barricade blow the men behind it backward into the larger common area of the administrative section.

Stan swore, checked his watch, then swore again.

"They'll probably just leave an old man alone, but you..." his voice trailed off.

"Stan."

"The latch is halfway up on the outer edge of the pegboard, behind that calendar you bitch about so much. Plenty of room for a small person." He looked at me again, he had something more to say, but couldn't.

The fighting slowly spread beyond the remains of the first barricade. The administrative section, with a spacious common area that was open to several levels, had been chosen as the first serious point of defense.

We sat, helpless as the fight kept unfolding, silent, surreal, on the screens in front of us. I had never thought that the haze of war was anything more than a metaphor but smoke and dust obscured everything making it hard to tell exactly what was happening. Still, from what I could see, it didn't look like we were winning. None of the bodies I could spot was in military gear. Stan paced, swore and agonized over something while I just watched, not wanting to think about any of the things rushing through my mind.

It took quite a while, probably more a result of caution on the attackers' part rather than the heroics of our defenders, but eventually the bulk of the fighting advanced down the main passage leading to the cafeteria. It also became horribly clear that we were losing. The common area of the administrative section, the heart of section nine, was crowded with invading soldiers, all of them alert, all of them at attention. Not one of them looked scratched.

"Pull up the system reset for the environmental administration program." Stan suddenly said.

It took me second to realize he was talking to me, "Hunh?"

He was behind me, working on the computer he had disassembled earlier. "When I replace the core in the back-up computer hit the reset sequence and keep hitting it."

He slipped the computer core into place. A small green light was the only indication that the machine had come back to life.

"That's it?" I asked while repeatedly sending a reset command.

"Just keep resetting it until all of the pressures are back to normal. We don't want any safety protocols to kick in and slow it down."

It took about five or six minutes to bring all of the rooms back down to normal pressure. I hit the reset a couple times after they had all bottomed out, just in case.

"They're all at normal. Anything else?"

"That's all that we can do," Stan said. Checking his watch he added, "let's hope two hours is enough."

"Enough for what?"

He ignored me, staring at video feed with a blank, distant look in his eyes.

"I'll be damned," Stan said a few minutes later.

"What?" I came around the desk and stood behind him, trying to see what he saw, but it took a couple of minutes before I noticed a soldier doubled over. There was another clutching his arm, two more fell on their way to help.

"What's happening to them?"

"Caisson disease," Stan said. There was a grim set to his jaw, but his eyes had come back to life.

I went back to my terminal and punched up the library computer.

"Don't bother. They're just bent. Underwater construction crews used to call it Caisson disease."

"Decompression syndrome?" Now I was really confused. "But they've got a full atmosphere of pressure."

"Hitting a vacuum is not the only way to get bent. Any substantial drop in pressure can dissolved nitrogen to gasify in your blood. Diving instructors treat it like the monster under the bed."

The horde of soldiers in the administrative commons had become a mass of invalids, men hunched over, falling down, crawling, lying on the ground and writhing in agony. Many were still functioning, but just about all of those were limping, staggering or otherwise leaving no doubt they were in pain.

"You wiped them all out."

Stan shook his head. "Disabled a bunch of them, for a while. Painful as all Hell, but you can treat it the same way you treat someone who gets bent in a vacuum. It's just like the bends. It is the bends."

The scene on the monitor changed as our makeshift little army started pouring out of section ten and rushing into the common area of the administration section of section nine.

"The Colonel has seen it."

Stan nodded, glumly watching our men attacking the disabled soldiers. They were brutal, savage, no hint of mercy or professionalism. It was twenty-four hours of living in the horror of impending death suddenly set free to run amok. Watching the gory spectacle both sickened me and made me giddy with relief.

"The Colonel is going to love you for this." I said, switching off the feed from the security camera.

"No," Stan said. "The computers were damaged in the fighting. Just a lucky accident."

"Stan."

He stared at me, a whirlpool of conflicting emotions dancing across his face. "Just a lucky accident."

I nodded. I considered doing a lot of things, from crying, to hugging the cranky old jackass, but in the end all I could do was sit there and nod.

