The carbon-crystal blade of my knife made short work of the thin plastic display screen, easily carving out a section about where I expected the junction to be. The wall proved to be made of simple hull-composite. Armor composite was ceramic based, heavy and expensive. Hull composite was cheap, carbon fibre and resin with a honeycomb plastic core.

Using the internal beams from the panels I'd pulled off the navcomp, the metal spoon, my pocket knife, and tape from the first aid kit, I bodged together a crude spear. Hooking my legs around the entertainment console chair, I could use my entire body to drive the diamond point of my knife through the thin, but incredibly stiff, inner skin of the cabin wall.

Perforating all around the perimeter of a roughly square patch of wall took a huge effort and I wasn't exactly in top shape. Tiny globules of sweat were flying off my forehead in all directions before I was done. Once through the inner wall, it was far easier to saw through the foam-filled honeycomb links of the core.

I paused a little before starting on the outer wall. Ideally, the original outer hull of the D-5 would still hold enough pressure that the cabin wouldn't immediately depressurize, but I had no illusions as to the general space-worthiness of the outer hull. It had been hard enough to keep the seals intact when the D-5's were new and the lives of the crew depended on them. Now, I'd be surprised if one of the hatches didn't blow right off when hit with the pressure from the inner cabin.

My first puncture in the outer wall was greeted with a high pitched whistling, closely followed by a sudden bang. Shoved forward toward the hole by a sudden thrust of air, I cracked my elbow on the wall and mashed my knuckles against the sharp filler honeycomb. The square-ish chunk of outer hull I'd cleared had ripped along two sides when I'd broken the structural integrity of the carbon composite skin. It was now flopping loose in the sluggish air current venting from the ship.

Fortunately, the old outer hatches all appeared to be holding. The volume of the inner cabin was large compared to the small gap between the inner and outer hulls, so the initial pressure drop was not severe. However, the cabin would continue to lose pressure as air leaked out through the faulty seals in the outer hull. I could hear the fans go into overdrive, pushing more air into my cabin in an attempt to make up for the pressure drop. That would keep me breathing but it would also use up the reserve oxygen supplies at a ferocious rate.

Having cut through the rest of the outer skin, I used the screen light from my handcomp to check around inside the inter-hull cavity for the conduit. We'd been in full sunlight for much of the journey, so even though there'd been a momentary chill from the drop in cabin pressure, the outer hull was reasonably warm. The occasional gritty drip of melting frost hit the back of my neck or cheek as I searched around for the conduit, trying to avoid the sharp edges of the hole. The D-5 still held some of the 'old-freighter' aroma that I remembered. It made me feel young again.

Then I spotted an armored conduit bulging from the outside of the inner hull and my heart skipped a few beats. Of course, they would have armored the entire cable run, but before I gave in completely to despair, my feeble light illuminated a loop of standard conduit crammed between the two hulls.

I laughed. The armored conduit ended precisely where the D-5's junction box should have been, if you were to look at the original plans, but most of these ships had been built by old-school Martian engineers who felt quite comfortable re-arranging bits and pieces if they figured it would work better that way.

On this ship the junction box had been moved about a meter forward and down 10 or 15 centimeters. Not able to easily cut the armored conduit, the Earther yard dogs had simply worked up some standard conduit to join the two. "Good old Martian cussedness!" I realized I was grinning like mad when my cheeks began to ache. Those muscles hadn't seen much use lately.

Cutting the control cables required that I half-crawl into the inter-hull space. Head down, cutting the cables, I realized I was starting to feel light-headed and groggy. I pushed on until I'd cut through most of the control fibres and dreamily pulled myself out though the ragged hole. Only my years of familiarity with low-oxy conditions kept me focused on my task. If I lost it now, I'd certainly die, and take lots more with me.

Fumbling my way across the cabin, I ripped the flat plastic cover off the bod-pod pack, stood to one side and hit the inset activation switch. The bright red pod began to extend out from its' flattened storage state like an origami caterpillar. By the time I'd fumbled some plastic tubing and the remains of the tape out of the first-aid kit, it was fully extended and waiting forlornly for its occupant. Sticking my hand through the folds of the bag, I located the inflation cord by feel and yanked it. I pulled my arm out quickly before the stiffening end panels pinched closed.

My vision starting to tunnel, I sliced a small hole in the bod-pod's plastic skin and gathered the slippery stuff up around one end of the skinny tube. Holding the bag firmly around the tube, I wrapped it tight with tape. The high-oxy air escaping from the tear had revived me a little, but sucking it directly from the tube felt like sweet wine flowing down my throat and cleared my head like a cold wind.

For a few minutes I just sat there breathing. Glancing over, I noticed that several portions of the navcomp display had gone completely blank. A quick position check with my handcomp showed us just past closest approach with the rift and outbound. We'd followed roughly the course I'd expected and were still, as close as I could figure, on target for the hab. Damn-it. I'd hoped to gain control before we left the rift's influence, but it looked like we'd be out of its' range before I could make any course adjustments.

Feeling somewhat refreshed by the oxygen, I shook myself out of my lethargy and went back to work.

I pulled the remote data plug from my handcomp and crawled back in the hole. It looked like I'd finished severing all but one of the control fibres before I'd had to take care of my air supply. I sagged a bit with relief. Presumably I'd at least managed to prevent the cargo pod separation. I finished off the last fibre, then cut back more of the conduit and pulled the strands out where I could better see them. I hoped that the Earthers had used some reasonably sane color scheme and plugged all the fibre ends into the appropriate ports on my data plug.

Pulling myself out of the hole again just as I started to grey-out, I grabbed the air hose and took a few deep drags. Revived, I re-crimped it, took up my handcomp and ran my old diagnostic programs to test the links. Some of them were bad of course, so I was in and out of the hole a couple more times, swapping fibres until they all checked out.

With the link hardware confirmed, and my heart pounding, I tried connecting to the console. I had no idea what they might have done at the D-5 level. I'd put some not-so legal cracking programs on my comp for this trip but if they'd taken even the most basic security precautions it could take, literally, the rest of my life to break in. I took it as a good sign when the console spat out the familiar D-5 preamble followed by the login prompt.
My luck continued to hold. "Better late than never", I chuckled to myself. I'm guessing the yard techs were supposed to change the D-5's default passwords during installation but they must have just plugged it in, because when I tried the old factory default admin password I was put right through to the main admin page.

Elated, I forced the stiff panels of the bod-pod aside and struggled into it as quickly as possible with the precious fresh air rushing past my body. By the time I re-sealed it from the inside, the pod was depressingly flat but I could still hear a faint hiss from the air unit so I guess I'd be able to breath for a while yet. Tenting the pod wall up on my head and tilting the handcomp so I could see it, I dove into the D-5's command line interface like a fish returning to water.

I set the engine power a couple of points lower and the disturbing rattle slowly eased out of the ship's frame. There was some slight misalignment of injection pumps making it impossible to balance the plasma flows beyond about 1.43 MJ/ml. The port engine had just about shaken itself off its mounts with the uneven power flow. From the way the bod-pod was slowly inflating it looked like the rattling had done for one or more of the outer hull seals but I'd managed to get the two engines stable at just over 116% of their max rated output.

All this power was working to push the ship along almost the same vector as its original course, but with almost twice the acceleration. Rather than curving down Earth's gravity well and intersecting the NorAm hab's orbit, I had gained enough speed to miss the planet, and its fuzz of commercial and residential stations in low orbit. We'd curve around and head back out towards lunar orbit. It felt good to pilot again.

I still couldn't access the net, though I was, finally, able to successfully turn on my emergency strobes and push out the standard emergency/rescue signal on all frequencies. Unfortunately, my high-velocity course meant that any rescue ships would be unlikely to catch up with me before I ran out of oxygen. On the bright side, since the kind of people who had arranged this incident would not have any trouble removing one old Martian, I hadn't expected to survive a rescue anyway.

All I can do is write up a brief account of what happened, with the D-5's sensor and diagnostic logs attached, and store it in the spare data space on the ephemeris chip in my ring. I'd really like to see the bastards that tried this brought to justice.

It's ironic, isn't it, that this is the first time in a long while I've had something to live for?

The End