Chapter Text
“Warning. Oxygen saturation levels critical. Increase airflow or replace tank. Warning. Oxygen saturation levels critical …”
“Computer, cancel audio warnings,” Maren snapped. She hated to waste precious air on speaking, but the droning voice of the suit computer was driving her nuts. I got the point the first thirty-six times you said it, she thought as she shoved her way through another snow drift.
It was getting dark. She had been chasing the sun, but it had outrun her. Now it was dipping low on the Western horizon, and according to her helmet display, the temperature was beginning to drop.
Inside the EV suit was a different story. Sweat beaded up on Maren’s forehead and trickled down into her eyes, making them burn a little. She was trying hard to control her breathing and not use too much air, but it was a losing battle. There just wasn’t enough air to breathe.
She was pushing herself harder than she ever had before, and despite the dizziness, fatigue, and nausea, there was something exhilarating about it. Euphoria is a symptom of hypoxia, she remembered from her training. She glanced up at her biomonitor readout. Blood oxygen level 81 percent. Shit, she thought. Below 80, and she would run the risk of brain damage or cardiac arrest. She wasn’t exhilarated. She was hypoxemic.
Still, she kept pushing forward. She had to be close. She’d been moving fast for an hour now, and she still had almost fifteen minutes of air left as long as she kept the flow reduced. Assuming you don’t pass out by then, she thought.
As the sun dipped beneath the horizon and passed out of view, Maren reached up to activate her suit’s headlamp. She hoped it hadn’t been damaged by the bear cub’s strike. As she did, she caught sight of a string of glittering lights flickering to life up ahead.
Alert? She hoped so. But then she reminded herself: Hallucinations are also a sign of hypoxemia.
Hallucination or not, her spirits were lifted at the sight. She forced herself to pick up even more speed. The snow was a lot shallower here, which she thought was a good sign. It also made it much easier to move. Her muscles screamed at her for mercy, and her extremities had long since gone numb, but she broke into a run anyway.
If those lights were Alert, then success was within her reach.
****
“Her blood oxygen level is seventy-nine percent and dropping, sir,” Lira said.
Icheb stared at the tracking monitor. They’d lost visual on her when the sun went down, but he could see she was moving fast, considering the icy conditions and the weight of her EV suit. “She’s running,” he said.
“She’s a little under two kilometers from Alert, and she’s got more than ten minutes left in the tank,” the Trill said. “She might actually make it.”
Icheb kept staring at the dot that represented Maren. “Before, or after she suffers permanent cerebral damage?” he asked. The question was rhetorical. There was no way to know how badly the diminished oxygen would affect Maren. Her stamina was above normal for the human body, and she had trained for low-oxygen situations, just like everyone else in Starfleet. But this level of deprivation hadn’t been part of their training. Schmidt was right; she was being reckless.
Beside him, the commander sat quietly monitoring Maren’s readouts. Every few seconds, his PADD would light up with a message, and he would reply by text. Icheb’s enhanced vision enabled him to read the messages without Schmidt noticing. Someone was checking on Maren – probably Commander B’Elanna Torres, whom Icheb thought was likely to kill Schmidt with her bare hands in an act of pure Klingon vengeance if anything permanently damaging happened to her protégé.
“Ensign Lira, give me a status report on the shuttle,” said Icheb.
“They’re following her at a distance of 2500 meters,” Lira said. “Ready to intercept if she goes down.”
“Can they see her?”
Lira’s fingers flew across the console in front of her. There was a pause, and then she put her fingers up to the comms earpiece she was wearing as she listened to whatever the co-pilot or medic was telling her. She turned to Icheb and Schmidt. “Confirmed, they have a visual on her,” she said. Then, suddenly, she frowned. “Sirs, they say she just collapsed.”
Icheb’s eyes flew up to the biomonitor. Maren’s heart rate was 161 BPM, her breathing fast and shallow. Her blood oxygen level was down to 76 percent. According to the sensors in her suit, she wasn’t moving at all, aside from the rapid rise and fall of her chest. She’s unconscious, he thought.
“Tell them to prepare for intercept,” he ordered the Trill, his voice calm and steady despite the panic he felt rising in his chest.
“Wait,” said Commander Schmidt, raising a hand. “Belay that order.” He pointed back to the tracking screen. “Look. She’s moving again.”
****
Maren blinked groggily, trying to clear her vision. All she could see was a gradient mixture of black and gray and white, illuminated at the top by a light she couldn’t identify. Her forehead was resting against something cold and hard. She struggled to pick up her head. It was then that she noticed the words and numbers – glowing orange and floating all around her, dimly recognizable but too blurry to read.
Her head was pounding, and she felt dizzy, like she was about to pass out from lack of – Oh, God, she realized, as she remembered where she was and what she had been doing before she collapsed. I’m not about to pass out. I already did. She was lying on the ground, facedown in the snow. As she struggled to push herself upright, she tried to make sense of the blurry letters and numbers in front of her. One reading stood out from all the rest: Blood oxygen: 72 percent.
“Computer, restore default airflow,” she ordered. Her voice sounded raspy in the thin air.
“Unable to comply,” the suit computer replied. “Insufficient oxygen reserve.”
“Increase airflow by ten percent,” she said, her pitch rising as she used every bit of her strength to force herself back to her feet.
“Unable to comply. Insufficient oxygen reserve.”
Shit, she thought. Better get moving, then. She brushed the snow off her broken faceplate and tried to get her bearings.
Ahead of her, the lights of Alert looked like something out of a fairytale through her impaired vision – soft and blurry, like sprites dancing in the night. At first, she even thought she saw them moving, but then she realized it was only her perception – she had the spins. It felt a lot like the first night she had ever gotten really drunk, except that night, she had been in the safety of her own dorm room, with Rachel holding her hair back while she vomited. Not here in the middle of the frozen sea, just within reach of safety but feeling too weak to get there in time.
Haltingly, she took a step forward. She stumbled, but caught herself and managed to stay upright. Her head was swimming. I need air, she realized. She eyed the settlement ahead and tried to gauge the distance. She wished she had Icheb’s perfect vision and enhanced analytical abilities to help her. All she had was her gut. I’m guessing 1.5 kliks, she decided. She glanced up at the external temperature readout. -40.1 C. But that was without windchill, and she couldn’t get a sense of the wind through her EV suit. The snow didn’t seem to be blowing around too much, so that was good.
Last chance, she realized. Without the extra weight from the helmet and the oxygen tank, I can be there in less than five minutes. Of course, that was how fast she could run under normal conditions. But she wasn’t thinking clearly anymore. She needed air, and she needed to get to Alert, and the only thing she could think of to do was take off her helmet and run.
Somewhere in the deep recesses of her memory, she recalled that hypoxemia led to poor decision making. The thought was fleeting. Bracing herself for the pain, she released the seal on her helmet, took it off, and dropped it in the snow. She winced as the cold hit her face, almost instantly freezing the sweat that had been glistening on her skin. Then she shed her oxygen, water, and nutrition tanks, and ran for her life.