Inflow ✔️

3 - Impacts

With the arrival of the dark, bad had taken a swift turn to utterly screwed. Wyatt backed into the open suitport on the exterior of the portable hab module, clicking his backpack into place against the hab and locking the seal. A moment later he had opened the hatch, the backpack parting with it, and hauled himself out of his EVA suit and back inside, leaving all Martian dust on the red plains where it couldn't ingrain itself within his equipment. The whole system ran much smoother than a normal airlock (though one of those could be found on the side of the cramped living space as a backup measure – redundancies being highly valued by the colonies).

Wyatt slammed his fist down onto the built in workbench, rattling the few tools he had spread upon its surface. The immediacy of the sound came as a comfort, and he relished in its volume. Outside, the air pressure held at 1% of the hab's internal pressure. Although technically you could hear, sounds outside of your suit environment came across muted at best, and even that much sound meant you were in intimate proximity to its source. Typically Wyatt appreciated that quiet, but today it reminded him of his isolation – not his self-imposed exile, but the imminent feeling that all the powers that be had come together and begun colluding against him.

Even nature.

***

He had arrived at kilometer 37 of Inflow Two about an hour prior. It had taken him 30 minutes to disembark from the rover to the hab, gather up his testing and monitoring equipment, slide that through an equipment port, then slip into the suitport and disembark from the habitat.

From there he'd tripped on the hitch hooked to the dolly of larger supplies. As he'd landed mask first into the dirt, he'd immediately shifted into QA procedures, examining every inch and seam of the suit for tears, abrasions, or cracks. Finding no cause for concern, he had shuffled to the equipment port, opened the seal, and grabbed the bag that held all of his testing equipment.

Rummaging through it, he pulled out a baton-like pole with a flat protruding disc centered on one end, and flicked a switch at its base. The bottom with the disc telescoped out, then locked into place. Wyatt gripped the walking stick, tapped on a helmet light, and ascended the lip of the Red Horizon's crater.

Ten minutes later had had scrambled down into the bowl, where, at the western edge, he found the exposed Inflow Two pipe – the repair stretch. The pipe measured roughly a meter across, though half of that width came from shielding and sensory systems, leaving only half a meter for water flow.

Wyatt laid his hand on the sixty-year-old replacement, resting it on the soft layer of insulation bound around the inflow pipe. Even through his gloves, he could feel the warmth radiating from the line.

At least the heating conduits are still working, he thought. All their water mains had heating systems built in. Otherwise the extreme temperature fluctuations of the Martian environment could lead to major breakages with the contraction and expansion playing hell on the joints, and the freezing and unfreezing of the water only exacerbating the problems. Of course, the temperature maintenance would work a lot better if the original engineers had reburied the line in the first place.

Now to check on the obstruction.

Wyatt ducked under the pipe, which ran along elevated trusses, then righted himself, standing between Inflow Two and Outflow Two. Running parallel to one another, the lines had been easier to lay down and it made visual inspections that much easier, as well, but the whole elevated system still stank of corrupt politics and savings over safety.

When the repair line had been laid, those in charge had sought after every potential budget reduction that they could. Besides narrowing the line, and leaving it open to the elements, they had also constructed these awful metal supports every fifty meters, which now themselves had to be maintained and periodically replaced. The line, now elevated, kept level with its entrances into the opposing slopes of the crater, cutting straight through the bowl – two metal scars transecting the circular impact into two-lopsided divisions.