After years of brute demolition, basic rending and tearing, Janahara’s team is learning for the first time (unwillingly but quickly) the art of incremental, non-destructive deconstruction.
The briefing (another weird new concept) in the management compound at Madhom had a core message: fuck up the decon and there would be no bonus. It turns out that reducing an International Space Station life support module (now Iqbal’s casual, urbane reference to the ISS becomes clear) to its component, fiscally useful, parts and materials was no cake walk. The sandwich of steel, Kevlar, ceramics and assorted exotic fabrics which kept the cosmonauts protected in space only retained its salvage value if it was removed layer by painstaking layer. To breakers who normally used brute suit power to reduce ships and platforms to easily sellable scrap, the thousand taka bonus is starting to look a little lean.
Iqbal has even gone as far as putting together a Power Point presentation to ram home the message; unfortunately he is apparently a novice with basic office applications and has saturated each slide with so much swoop-in animation and ambiguous font choices that it is largely meaningless. Still, sitting in an aircon office watching their bloated employer fumbling with the controls of a laser projector beat trudging around in mud in forty plus, so he had an attentive audience. In the end though it was clear: decon the module, remove the components of the laminate skin in sheets no smaller than one meter square, try not to get the pieces muddy, do it by Saturday noon.
So Janahara finds himself, at 1500 on day-one of the deconstruction, working with uncharacteristic finesse inside the nadir airlock of the ISS module, delicately removing gossamer sheets of Kevlar from the floor(?)/roof(?) of the structure. It’s still horrible, sweaty, endless work, and as the module is still suspended from the salvage crane that had hoisted it from the tug flatbed, gentle oscillations in the crane cable means Janahara is suffering from intermittent inner ear nausea. It’s not all bad though, the module offers some shade from the sun and the lack of gross mechanical movements keeps the fatigue to a manageable level.
Even Janahara’s suit seems to approve. Normally gnomically taciturn, it has actually expressed an opinion about the day’s work: “I’ve got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in our work”, and has even asked after Janahara’s well being, “How can I help you during this important transition?” This second comment was a bit random, but Janahara still feels absurdly pleased with his dolt of a partner; he couldn’t remember a time when they had ever conversed about anything but the basic details of the job at hand.
It is during a particularly difficult removal of the buckled inner airlock door that the accident happens. The module is in a pretty sorry state after its prolonged soak in the Andaman Sea, and kelp and other oceanic verdants have invaded every possible gap and chink in the warped structure. Janahara is using a relatively new carbide buzz saw with an insanely capable RPM rate to cut through the titanium hinges on the nominally ventral side of the module when the crane cable gives way. A sickening moment of freefall, a brief warped mirroring of the thousands of graceful arcs the module had sketched in low earth orbit, the scream of a runaway power tool, and then a crushing impact as the module concertinas into the compacted mud of the dry dock. Janahara hears an oof, a muted shriek and a flare of agony in his legs; then darkness takes him away for a while.
ISS modules are built for restraining fifteen bar of internal air pressure, not load bearing over ten tons of mass at half terminal velocity. Janahara regains consciousness and enters a world of pain, heat, atomised seaweed, an Escher house of collapsed bulkheads and the bleeping complaints of numerous automatic user warranty invalidation alerts from his suit. He chins the alarm kill switch and takes stock. Incredible searing pain from both legs: check. Visibility: zero. On board suit systems: non responsive. Water tank, suck: empty. Janahara slumps back in despair, he’s seen a hundred yard accidents, and the outcome is never good. A worker in Europe would, at about this stage, likely to be hearing the wail of emergency service vehicles and the reassuring voice of a sober foreman. This is Chittagong, all he can hear is the uninterrupted roar of decon machinery all around and the impatient shouts of profit temporarily suspended.
He hears the still, small, calm voice of his suit AI.
“Janahara, I can help you.”
A sharp burning pain in the right side of his chest. A brief, condensed, hypochondriac moment of heart attack anxiety. Then, only darkness.