The Job

The grease on his left hand had dried to a crust somewhere between the platform and now. He picked at it with his thumbnail while the recycler cycled and the ship pushed them along at a quarter g, not enough to feel like gravity, just enough to make the coffee in his mug sit at a wrong angle and remind him that rest and a quarter g were different things no matter how similar they looked.

Gray-brown grease. Mineral oil base cut with something synthetic, which told you everything about the platform’s supply chain if you cared to read it: they bought lubricant from whoever came by and whoever came by was mixing stock. The bearing race had worn flat on one side. Not the loaded side, the return side, which meant the housing was out of true, which meant the mount had shifted, which meant something structural underneath the mount had moved in a way that the platform’s people either hadn’t noticed or had noticed and decided to live with. He’d fixed the bearing. He hadn’t fixed the mount. The mount was a three-day job and he’d been there for two hours and the twelve people who lived on the platform processed carbonaceous feedstock for a living and didn’t have three days to shut down their recycler while someone who wouldn’t be there for the consequences decided their infrastructure needed more work than they’d asked for. So he’d fixed the bearing and shimmed the intake and told them to check the housing in six months.

They wouldn’t check it. The last crew he’d told to check a housing hadn’t checked theirs either, different platform, different recycler, same problem, and the reason the network had a file on that platform was because their recycler had eventually seized and the air went sour and someone called for help. Which was how Lev had ended up at this platform, fixing this bearing, telling these twelve people to check their housing in six months.

He should shower. He stayed in the pilot chair and picked at his hand instead.

The ship was the Paran. Rescue vessel, two-person, not pretty. It had been somebody else’s before it was theirs, and somebody else’s before that, and the cockpit had been personalized and stripped and personalized and stripped until it had given up and settled into a gray that belonged to no one. Gray panels, gray deck, a viewport fogged on the outside by a decade of microimpact scarring that nobody was going to fix because fixing it meant dry-dock and dry-dock meant weeks and weeks meant calls they wouldn’t take and calls they wouldn’t take meant, depending on the math, people. So the viewport stayed fogged and Lev looked at the dark through a haze and this was fine because the dark didn’t have details worth seeing.

Something in his left shoulder had been catching since the platform. He’d torqued it reaching into the recycler housing, the angle wrong because the access panel was sized for someone with about twenty fewer kilos of modified muscle than Lev carried. Most access panels were. He rolled the shoulder, felt it catch, felt the second-gen fibers in the deltoid cluster tracking wrong under the load. The shoulder mods were reinforcement layered on his baseline, polymerized fibers woven through the natural muscle in a pattern that was supposed to be self-correcting but in practice needed recalibration every, the manual said six months, Caro said when it hurt, Lev said later. So far this approach had been working in the sense that he could still lift things and not working in the sense that his left shoulder now caught on certain movements and he was compensating in ways he’d eventually have to unlearn.

He’d run the diagnostic later. Same category as the biomarker check that had been blinking at him from the med panel for four weeks. The biomarker panel wanted a blood draw and a cellular scan and a thirty-minute readout that would tell him how his modification suite was tracking against its projected degradation curve, which was a statistical composite assembled from the profiles of people who’d undergone similar interventions at facilities that mostly didn’t exist anymore, running protocols that had been revised three times since his were installed. He was being measured against a standard that was, itself, drifting. But the panel still blinked, and he still snoozed it, and the curve still projected, and this was how modification maintenance worked for a rescue operator in the mid-belt: a machine he didn’t have time for comparing him to a benchmark nobody trusted using data from a world that had moved on.

He thought about the platform’s coffee. They’d offered him some while he was working. It came out of a thermal carafe that looked older than the station and it was, objectively, terrible, but it was hot and it was coffee-adjacent and one of the twelve, a woman whose hands said she’d been working processing equipment since before Lev was born, had poured it for him like she was doing him a favor. She was. He hadn’t finished it.

Caro came forward from the bunk compartment with his hair pressed flat on one side and a ration pack in his hand, already open, already being eaten. He sat in the second chair and chewed and looked at nothing.

“Recycler ran clean,” Lev said.

Caro ate.

“I’m going to recalibrate the forward prox sensor.”

“It’s fine.”

“It flagged two seconds late on the approach.”

“It flagged.”

“Two seconds is a lot if there’s a problem with the…”

“It flagged, Lev.”

Lev almost got into it. Two seconds on a proximity sensor wasn’t a preference, it was a calibration issue, and the sensor was calibrated to a spec that had been written at a test facility in cislunar orbit for a sensor operating under controlled conditions that involved, as far as Lev could tell, no actual proximity to anything. The spec described a sensor in a vacuum chamber. The sensor lived on a rescue vessel that made hard docking approaches to stations that were in the process of falling apart. These were not the same operating environment. But the spec was what they had because the spec was what someone had written once and nobody had updated and nobody was going to update because nobody had the funding or the authority or, probably, the interest.

Caro’s position was simpler. The sensor worked. It would continue to work until it didn’t. When it didn’t, they’d fix it. This was Caro’s position on everything including Caro.

“The platform’s bearing housing was rough,” Lev said, instead.

“Mm.”

“I told them six months.”

“They won’t.”

“No.”

“Housing was out of true?”

“Yeah. Mount shifted.”

“So it’ll wear again.”

“Yeah.”

Caro folded his wrapper into a precise square and slotted it into disposal. He did this every time, same creases, same order. Lev had watched him do it a thousand times.

“How long did you tell them?” Caro said.

“Six months.”

Something moved in Caro’s face. Not a smile. The possibility of one, briefly considered and declined. Caro had grown up on a station like that platform, had lived with housings that were out of true and mounts that had shifted and recyclers that sounded wrong in ways you learned to sleep through. He knew those twelve people would fix the bearing themselves when it wore again, with whatever they had, the same way they’d fixed it before Lev came, and the only difference his visit had made was that the next failure would start from a fresh race instead of a flat one, which bought them about six months. Which was what he’d told them.

Caro pulled up the navigation display. Their course, their speed, the fuel cache at the staging point. A quarter g was easy. You could almost forget you were accelerating. Almost, except the coffee in Lev’s mug sat at its wrong angle and the surface trembled with the drive vibration if you watched it long enough.

He watched it. The coffee was cold. He drank it anyway.

The network traffic played through the relay in bursts. A comms issue on a hab near 22 Kalliope, requesting technical consult. A cargo hauler out past Hygiea flagging a course correction. The medical ship Okoro repositioning toward Ceres, offline for thirty-six hours during cryo transit. The mid-belt had decent coverage right now, four or five operators within reasonable range of the populated rocks, plus a few haulers who carried the patch and would respond if they were close and the call was bad enough. Which it usually was by the time the call went out, because people out here didn’t call until they had to, which meant by the time the network heard about a problem the problem had usually been a problem for a while. The outer belt was thin. Always thin. Maybe two operators past the 3:1 resonance, and one of them, Fenn, was running a ship that should have been decommissioned two years ago. Lev had told her. She’d told him to buy her a new one.

The network was funded by voluntary contributions. The stations that contributed most were the large inner-belt platforms where the infrastructure was maintained and the modification profiles were current and the rescue calls were rare. The stations that contributed least were the small outer-belt homesteads where the infrastructure was improvised and the mod profiles were guesswork and the calls were constant. The coverage map, if anyone had bothered to draw one, would have been a map of everywhere help was least needed.

He ate standing at the console. The ration pack was chicken, or what emerged when you cultured a protein matrix and seasoned it based on a reference document that was, he suspected, several generations of food scientists removed from an actual chicken.

There was a scrape on the deck plating near the port bulkhead. Maybe ten centimeters long, shallow. He’d noticed it yesterday. Didn’t know where it came from.

Caro was in the second chair running post-checks with the steady focus of someone who’d been doing this on ships like this since before Lev had left home. Sometimes Lev forgot Caro had a decade on him. Then Caro’s hands would remind him: every gesture pared to the minimum motion, everything extra worn away by repetition, no flourish left. Lev still had flourishes. He hadn’t done enough of it yet to lose them.

A comm came through from Verdana. Traffic advisory, supply run inbound, nothing urgent. Lev had been to Verdana twice. The second time was a cryo malfunction. Woman, forty-two, third-gen nerve cluster degradation that the cryo transition had accelerated. Her hands shaking while she signed the discharge. She’d asked him if it would get better and he’d said he didn’t know, which was true, and which was the answer she’d expected, which was why she’d asked him instead of her own bio tech. Sometimes you wanted the honest answer from someone you’d never see again.

He ran the comms check. Frequency sweep, relay handshake, signal integrity. Everything nominal. He ran it again because running it once felt like going through the motions and running it twice felt like. He didn’t have a word for it. Diligence, maybe.

The distress call came in at 0847, already thirty-eight minutes old. The relay had bumped it to priority, which was a judgment call the relay operators made a dozen times a day based on no particular training and no written protocols, because nobody had written protocols for relay operators because nobody had the authority to write protocols for anyone, and so the entire triage system for distress calls across the mid-belt rested on the instincts of whichever volunteer was sitting at the relay console at the time. This was, by any reasonable measure, insane. It also worked about as well as anything else out here.

Audio. A woman’s voice, controlled in a way that was costing her.

“This is Mara’s Prospect, identifier MP-7741, requesting network assistance. We have failures in multiple sections. The atmospheric processing is going and we’ve got pressure problems in the forward ring. We are managing but our capacity to manage is.” She stopped. Started over from a different place. “We need help. Requesting any network asset in range.”

Alarms in the background, turned low. Voices. The hum of systems running wrong.

“Eighty-three people. We have a medical person but no rescue, no dedicated. This is Koss, station authority. Please respond.”

He played it again. Koss. She’d said station authority like she’d picked the words up off a shelf and was holding them at arm’s length. Mara’s Prospect. Homestead, mid-belt, captured asteroid.

The network profile was eight years out of date. Population listed at sixty-one, which was twenty-two fewer people than Koss had just reported, which meant the profile was fiction. Modification records for thirty people, most of them founder generation. The rest blank. Orbital elements updated four years ago. A docking configuration that might or might not still exist. No traffic control frequency, which meant they handled their own approaches or they didn’t get many visitors or both. The file was what voluntary recordkeeping looked like at scale: a snapshot from whenever someone had last felt like it, aging into fantasy.

“Caro.”

He was already in the hatch. Awake, or still awake, or whatever the word was for Caro’s relationship with sleep, which Lev had given up mapping.

“Mara’s Prospect. Systems failures. Eighty-three people.”

Caro came forward and read the display. The profile, the position, the distance. He didn’t ask questions.

“Fourteen hours,” Caro said.

“We could do ten.”

Caro looked at the fuel readout. Ten meant longer burns, and longer burns meant less reaction mass on the other end. Less to maneuver with on approach, less for contingencies, and a return trip that depended on Mara’s Prospect having fuel to sell them, which a station in the middle of a systems failure probably didn’t. He didn’t say any of this. He sat down and started calculating.

Lev put the call on the relay. Any assets closer, flag it. He already knew the answer. The coverage was where the coverage was, and Mara’s Prospect was where the coverage wasn’t, and the protocol said ask anyway so he asked anyway. He didn’t wait for a response. He pulled what approach data existed for Mara’s Prospect, which wasn’t much, and inventoried the med supplies in his head. Patch kits, atmo sealant, portable recycler backup, pharmaceutical basic. Enough for maybe ten people, moderate injuries. There were eighty-three people on that rock and the call had said multiple sections.

The proximity sensor was still in pieces on the console. He looked at it. Pushed the components into a drawer.

Caro put the burn on the main display. Five g for ninety minutes, eleven hours of coast, flip and decelerate on the other end. Fourteen hours and change. Their bodies could sustain five g for weeks. The tank couldn’t, which was why you coasted the middle and saved the mass for when it mattered. Close enough to what Lev wanted, conservative enough that they’d arrive with fuel to maneuver and margin to get home.

“Harness,” Caro said.

Lev checked the seals, the cargo locks, the med bay restraints. The checklist was short on a ship this small. He ran it anyway because checklists were for the days you were sure you didn’t need them.

He strapped in. The harness settled across his chest, the padding shaped into the impression of him by five hundred burns, which was, if he thought about it, a more current record of his body than the biomarker profile he hadn’t updated in four weeks. He didn’t think about it. The grease was still on his hand. Something in his shoulder still caught.

He was going to spend fourteen hours crossing the belt to help eighty-three people whose station was failing, and his own shoulder was out of calibration and his own biomarker check was overdue and his own proximity sensor was in a drawer in pieces.

“Ready,” Lev said.

Caro fired the drive. Five g settled over him. Everything heavier: arms, chest, the breath he pulled in. His cardiovascular mods adjusted in a few heartbeats, pulse and pressure settling, and then it was just weight. His shoulder caught on the harness strap. Ninety minutes of burn, then eleven hours of coast, then the flip and the work.

The Paran crossed the dark toward the next thing that was broken.