I stepped slowly back—so as not to crack it more—and aimed my hose where the sulfur plume was shooting from the ground. The foaming chemical concoction was cold enough to turn a human into a Popsicle in five seconds, but it barely made a dent in the heat that was coming up from the ground.

After five minutes, the crust re-formed. The chemicals left a clear film over the patched spot.

I sprayed the surrounding area, and then looked back to the bay. My heart dropped into my toes. We’d only made it about fifty yards from the elevator.

How was that even possible?

The idea that I was supposed to hose down and somehow stabilize the whole area around the base was not only absurd, idiotic, and dangerous, it was hopeless.

Jason Murtagh had given me his version of a Sisyphean task, and the longer I was out here, the more I wondered what his end game was. Why this particular job? What was he trying to accomplish? If he wanted me dead, there were much quicker and easier ways.

But maybe that was the point. A slow, painful, boiling end to my existence.

Suddenly, it wasn’t just the suit making me hot. I’d find a way to end Jason Murtagh if it was—

“You gotta keep moving. Remember what I said.” Tyler’s sharp tone cut through my rising anger. “Walk slow. Spray as you go. This whole area you see has been stabilized by the ice bots, and it needs to stay that way. The pylons cool the area under the base. That area is off limits. Lots of tech doing its thing underneath it, even if it doesn’t look too impressive from here, but we have to do it along the perimeter of the base if we want to keep everyone safe. Lava’s tricky. It’ll find a way to take down the whole area if we give it any room. Your job is not to give it that room. We can’t lose the base.”

I almost laughed. Unlike SpaceTech’s most beloved base, my life was expendable. The ground had opened under my feet six times in less than two hours. “I’ll do my best, but bots would be able to cover all the ground in no time. If I was working in twenty-four hour shifts, I might be able to do a full lap around the entire bottom of the base, but that isn’t as far out as you said the base needs. And I can’t work every day, all day. I won’t even make a dent in this.”

Tyler’s sigh hissed through the tiny speaker in my helmet. “You’re right. I don’t know why they decommissioned the bots. It’s just plain bullshit.”

I agreed with him. This was bullshit. “SpaceTech has a long-standing history of doing completely horrible things to all kinds of people and species.”