Kruger indeed yanked mightily, throwing the door open just enough that he might conceivably slide through, and was sucked through so quickly that when the door slammed shut on his hand, it left the tops of three of his fingers behind.

For the first time since the crisis began, there was dead silence at gate seven.

“What the fuck just happened?” bellowed Mothudi, breaking the silence.

“There’s a vacuum on the other side of that door,” Schmidt said, and then saw the blank expression on Mothudi’s face. “There’s no air. If you try to go in there, you won’t be able to breathe. You’ll die before you get down the ramp to the escape pods.”

“Kruger’s dead?” asked another of the soldiers, the one called Goosen.

Unless he carries his own oxygen supply, you bet, Schmidt thought, but did not say. What he said was, “Yes, Kruger is dead.”

“The hell with this,” said the third soldier, the one named Pandit. “I’m going to gate six.” He bolted toward the gate at the end of the section, where people had queued to make their way to the escape pods. Mothudi and Goosen joined him a second later, followed by a yelling mass of humanity from gate seven who finally got it through their heads that there might not be enough spaces on the escape pods for all of them. A riot had begun.

Schmidt knew that for survival purposes he should be in the fray at gate six, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He decided he’d rather die as a fundamentally decent human being than live as the sort of asshole who’d tear out someone’s liver to get into an escape pod.

The thought brought him inner peace, for about five seconds. Then the fact that he was going to die bubbled up again and scared him shitless. He leaned his head back against the bench Kruger had thrown him into and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and looked forward. Into the back of the gate attendant’s lectern. Which among other things had a large first-aid box slotted into it.

Schmidt looked over at Kruger’s fingertips for a second, snerked and reached over to the box. He pulled it out and opened it up.

Inside, among many other things, were a foil blanket and a very small oxygen kit.

Hey, look, your very own oxygen supply, Schmidt’s brain said to him.

“Yeah, well, don’t get too excited,” he said, out loud, to his brain. “You still can’t get that door open without losing your hand.”

Gate six exploded.

In the immediate aftermath, Schmidt wasn’t sure if he’d been deafened by the pressure blast blowing out his eardrums or all the air in the section that contained gate six and gate seven being sucked out into space, along with Goosen, Pandit and Mothudi and everyone else who had been raging at gate six. Then he felt the air in his lungs seeping out through his lips and nose and decided it just didn’t matter. He grabbed at the first-aid box, wrapped the blanket over the top half of his body as tightly as he could with one hand and with the other covered his face and mouth with the mask of the oxygen kit.