The blast hatch leading to Sector Three was warped into a concave bowl of twisted steel, its emergency pressure seals spewing a furious, freezing plume of boiled away coolant into the hall.
“Manual overrides are offline!” Toby shouted, coughing wildly as he wrestled with the emergency dog-latches, his suit’s tactical lights cutting through the thick, swirling fog. “The impact snapped the main high-pressure pipe hub! O’Neil and Kowalski are trapped inside! Their vitals are flatlining on the test board!”
Through the heavy check port, Arthur saw the nightmare unfolding inside the engine bay.
A three-ton slab of glass-fused dark rock had punched clean through the crawler’s outer pressure hull. The lunar empty pocket, combined with the extreme heat of the surrounding mantle, had created an instant explosive depressurization. Inside the bay, heavy test consoles, tools, and metal grating were floating in the chaotic rough churning of escaping air.
Sergeant O’Neil and Engineer Kowalski were pinned beneath a crushed heat-exchanger trunk. Their outside suits had burst across the chest plating. In the violent pressure drop, their lungs had suffered acute blast barotrauma. The rapid spreading of trapped lung-sac air ripping through their gut-deep lung lining, tearing lung tiny blood vessels and flooding their chest cavities with blood and high-pressure gas.
