"Hurry! That way!"
"Somebody bring the drill over here! The drill!"
People were yelling at each other from various locations around Tau Rubycon. Before I knew it, from the top of a hill made out of some ash piled next to a wall, I was overseeing the efforts to extract the undamaged air-tight compartments of the passenger ship.
This was only about fifteen minutes after I had decided that this would be where I died.
The wind was blowing as strongly as ever, towards the hole on the side of the cylindrical city, thinning out the atmosphere slowly. The clock was ticking.
"Captain!" some middle-aged man yelled at me from the bottom of the ash hill. "We almost got to the bottom sections of the air-tight compartments. The decks below level 3 are damaged, we can't use them! They would leak!"
"Cut them off at level 3 then." I replied. "Move, quick!"
The man nodded and returned to his work site.
Despite all the bad decisions I had made up to that point, once I left Mei and returned to the crash site to help out the survivors, the passengers had silently agreed among themselves that I would lead the emergency efforts. They trusted me, calling me the 'captain' of the ship that no longer really existed. I had no heart to tell them that it was my final duty and we would have no way to escape this hell...
But eventually, somebody asked the hard question. "Captain, where shall we take the survivors? The city is falling apart!"
Trying to keep everyone's hopes up at the final moments, I had come up with a quick plan to keep people busy. We would gather tools from the debris and the intact parts of the city around us, and we would cut the ship apart to extract undamaged air-tight decks. The ship was quite large after all, and the innermost sections were quite protected. We would then take shelter in them and wait for rescue.
I did not have the slightest hope in that plan working out... at the beginning, that is. But now, seeing how enthusiastic the survivors still were, I was starting to fool myself as well.
"Captain! Captain! Somebody fell into the gap between the avionics room!"
The words washed away my thoughts. I ran downhill and towards the debris field to see the situation. A man was crying in pain, from somewhere deep down in the remains of Tau Rubycon.
"That looks quite deep." I said. "Do we have a rope?"
"We do." somebody said. "But we were extracting the crew cabins with it. If we are to use that rope to get him, we will have to lower the cabins and release the makeshift winch system."
"How long would it take?" I asked.
"Lowering the cabins back could take up to five minutes, say, ten more minutes to make up for the progress we will lose."
"We don't have fifteen minutes to spare..." I said, helplessly. "Damn it."
I looked at people's faces who gathered around the accident site.
"Well, what are you looking at? I don't need everyone here. Get to work!"
Except for a handful of people, everyone ran back to their duties.
"What will we do, sir?" a passenger asked. "About the man down there?"
"Can you hear us?" I yelled down the gap.
"Yeaa- ah! Ouch!" was the answer.
"When we lift all the crew cabins, it will be easier to get to you. If you can climb, climb. If you can't, wait for us!" I shouted.
"Arr-right! Ah!"
Somebody then touched my shoulder.
"Sir, a shuttle!"
The shuttle that was searching for something in the government building was finished orbiting the skyscraper. It was leaving the area, as if its pilot was completely unaware of us. Was Mei with them - I had no way to know.
Thinking of it again, I did not care about Mei anymore.
"It flew past us." a woman said. "Impossible! Did they not notice us?"
"Maybe they thought there would be no one still alive here." a man said.
"Forget about the shuttle." I said. "We need to extract those compartments, fast!"
Everyone hurried back to their jobs. Some portions of intact air-tight decks were extracted from the body of the passenger ship. They were small, but with a bit of difficulty, I thought we could actually fit all the survivors in those. These structures would have no means to move around or re-generate resources such as food or water, but they could act as protective pressurised shelters for a while.
"Sir!" a man said. "The wind! It is getting stronger!"
Indeed, the wind had suddenly increased speed. Light materials from the nearby buildings were getting ripped apart, and it was getting very difficult to stand up.
"Everybody lay down!" I shouted. People left whatever they were doing and laid down face-first onto the ground. After a debris cloud of composite materials from nearby neighborhoods flew past above us, I gave the final command.
"Board the compartments! Everyone, board the compartments!"
All survivors rushed into the pressurised air-tight compartments. The personal living space was definitely inadequate, but with everyone scared for their lives, people had managed to fit inside somehow.
"Sir, the guy who fell..." a man next to me said. "We left him in the-"
"Brace!" another man interrupted us. "Brace for the wind!"
The wind abruptly got even stronger - the hole must've been getting larger somehow.
"Oh no."
Our shelters were being dragged on the ground by the force of the wind, slowly inching towards the hole on the side of the city.
"We are going to get sucked into outer space!"
"Time will tell how air-tight these cabins really are." I said. "If we don't make it, I just wanted to say that how proud I am of this-"
"Holy mother of hell!"
The shelter had been lifted off of the ground and was now rapidly accelerating towards the hole, caught into the jet of air escaping the city.