Mara's Prospect
The dock was manual. No guide rails, no automated grapple, just Caro on the approach thrusters lining the Paran up with a clamp that had been rebuilt at least twice from parts that didn’t match each other. The ship shuddered when the clamp engaged. Metal on metal, the sound traveling through the hull, and something in the dock structure groaned under the contact. Lev listened to the groan. Everything a station did was information. This one said the dock’s mounting frame was fatigued, which was probably true of every mounting frame on the station, which was probably something Breck knew and maintained and had been maintaining for years, which was probably why Breck hadn’t wanted them here.
The seal pressurized. Green on the board. He checked it against the external pressure reading because green on the board was the dock’s opinion and he wanted his own. The numbers agreed. He trusted the numbers more than the board but less than he would have trusted them on a station whose maintenance history he knew.
They suited up. Not full EVA. Emergency rigs, sealed, pressure-rated, two hours of independent atmosphere. You didn’t walk onto a station with pressure problems wearing your clothes. The rigs were bulky enough that Lev’s shoulder caught twice getting into his, which he noted and put in the same mental drawer as the biomarker check and the shoulder diagnostic and every other thing about his own body he was going to get to later.
Caro popped the inner lock, then the outer. The air that came through smelled wrong. Not dangerous wrong. Station-in-trouble wrong: the recycler bypass running lean, and underneath it the mineral smell of processed rock that was the station’s bones off-gassing things the primary system would have scrubbed and the bypass wasn’t bothering with. Every carved-out homestead had a rock smell. You usually didn’t notice it. When you noticed it, the atmospheric processing was working harder than it should be or not hard enough.
Koss was at the dock.
She’d said we’ll have someone meet you at the lock and the someone was her. She was smaller than her voice had been on comms. Fifties, belt-built, the compact frame and dense joints of second-generation modification and a lifetime in low gravity. She was planted against the grip rail with one hand, the other hanging free in a way that looked relaxed and wasn’t.
A man floated behind her. Bigger, younger, arms folded across his chest in a posture that gravity would have made aggressive and near-zero-g made effortful, because he had to brace against the wall to maintain it. He didn’t introduce himself.
“Koss,” she said. “You’re the Paran.”
“Harlan. This is Caro.”
Her eyes moved over them. The professional read, fast and automatic. The same assessment Lev was running on her, running on the man behind her, running on everything: the dock, the lighting, the sound of the air system, the temperature through his suit. Everyone sizing everyone up in the first three seconds, all of them pretending they weren’t.
“This way,” she said. “I’ll brief you on the walk.”
She led them aft through a main corridor wide enough for two abreast and a cargo pallet. Founder-era construction: sealed rock faced with composite panels, bolted at intervals, the kind of work you did when you had time and materials and believed what you were building would last. Most of the strip lighting worked. A few sections were dim, and the dim ones had been dim for a while. The mounting brackets had that look.
“Atmospheric processing failed thirty-one hours ago,” Koss said. She moved through the corridor without looking back. She knew they’d keep up. “Primary recycler seized. Breck got the bypass running in forty minutes.” She indicated the man behind them, who was following at a distance that said escort, not company. “The bypass is holding but it’s not rated for the whole station. We sealed the forward ring to reduce volume.”
“The forward ring is open,” Lev said.
Koss’s pace didn’t change. “It wasn’t when I sent that message.”
“How long?”
“Secondary seal failed eleven hours ago. We’d already moved everyone aft.” A beat. “Pressure failure cascaded through three compartments. The section is open.”
Eleven hours. The frosted viewports, the dark section, the shifted module. Eleven hours of vacuum eating heat out of a section that had been someone’s Tuesday morning.
“Anyone in it when it went?”
“No. We moved everyone when the primary seal failed.” The flatness in her voice was the flatness of someone who’d been giving this report to herself for eleven hours and had worn through whatever the first version of it had cost her.
The corridor opened into a junction where three passages met. People here. More than the space was built for. Families, equipment, the compression of a community that had retreated into its core and was fitting eighty-three people into the space designed for maybe sixty. A woman was taping a conduit to the ceiling that had pulled loose from its bracket. Two men were running cable along the floor. A girl, maybe nine, was tethered to a handhold by a line clipped to her belt, holding a work light aimed wherever the cable crew pointed. She had the particular focus of a kid who’d been given a real job in a crisis and was going to do it until someone told her to stop.
Lev’s eyes moved through the crowd the way they always did. The professional scan, automatic: build, coloring, carriage, how people held themselves in the zero-g. Belt stock, third generation mostly. The adults matched what he’d expect for a homestead population this age. The younger ones, the teenagers and kids, were lighter than his mental model wanted them to be. Not dramatically. Just enough that the number he’d have guessed for their bone density was a few points off from what he was seeing. He filed it. First impressions were unreliable, especially through a suit, especially in a station where everyone had been under stress for thirty-one hours. People looked wrong when they were scared.
Breck was still behind them. Lev was aware of him in the low-level way you tracked someone who hadn’t decided yet whether you were a problem or a solution.
Koss took the left passage. Narrower, newer. The composite panels gave way to bare sealed rock in patches, spray-on sealant that had yellowed with age, conduit runs that were functional and ugly. The temperature dropped as they moved. The forward ring was leaking cold into the adjacent sections, the rock conducting it, and the thermal management system was losing that fight at a rate Lev could feel through his suit.
“The bypass recycler is running about sixty percent capacity,” Koss said. “Enough for the aft sections if we keep the volume sealed and the population stays compressed.”
“How long at sixty percent?”
“Breck says the filters hold forty-eight hours before servicing. I’m planning on thirty-six.”
“Because?”
“Because Breck is good at his job and optimistic about his equipment in roughly equal measure.”
Behind them, Breck said nothing.
They passed a compartment with the hatch propped open. Inside, someone working at a console surrounded by medical equipment in the kind of dense, organized arrangement you built over fifteen years in a space that was never big enough. She looked up when they passed. Her eyes went to the portable diagnostic clipped to his belt, stayed there for a beat, then came back to his face. Then she went back to her console.
“Mirin,” Koss said, not slowing. “Medical.”
“I’ll need to talk to her.”
“After the briefing.”
It wasn’t a refusal. It was sequencing. Koss had a sequence, and the order she’d decided on was her briefing first, then the station’s problems, then whatever Lev wanted. He recognized it. The person in charge on site always had a sequence, and fighting that sequence in the first fifteen minutes was a reliable way to lose the next fifteen hours.
Operations was a compartment larger than the corridors, consoles on three walls, a central display showing the station schematic. The founder’s blueprint was there underneath, but what was on the screen was the blueprint plus decades of additions, modifications, expansions, patches. A station that had been designed once and then redesigned by everyone who’d lived in it since. Half the schematic was red. The forward ring and the three compromised compartments. The aft sections were green, except for two amber sections where something was holding but stressed.
Koss pulled herself to the main console and brought up the detail. “Here’s what we have.”
She walked them through it. The primary recycler: a unit rebuilt at least three times from whatever components were available, running to specifications that had drifted from the original because the manufacturer didn’t exist anymore and the specs had been adapted by whoever rebuilt it last, which was Breck, who’d done it well but well for this recycler meant well for the version of the recycler that existed after three rebuilds with non-original parts, which was not the machine the maintenance manual described. The manual described a machine that hadn’t existed in maybe twenty years. The intake bearing had failed. Lev’s hands remembered the bearing race on the platform, the housing that was out of true, the mount that had shifted. Different bearing, different station, same sentence. The seizure had cascaded into the catalytic bed, which was damaged in a way that couldn’t be fixed here.
“Bypass will hold,” Breck said. First words since the dock. His voice was flat and aimed at the space between Lev and Koss. “I built it.”
“For how long?” Lev said.
“Long enough.”
Koss continued. The bypass recycler had been installed as an emergency backup system twelve years ago. It had been tested annually, serviced on a schedule Breck kept. It had never been run as the primary system for more than four hours, because it had never needed to be, because the primary recycler had never failed this badly, because the primary recycler had been maintained. It was now thirty-one hours into a job it was designed to do for maybe forty-eight, being asked to keep eighty-three people breathing in a volume it was rated for sixty, and the filters that would need servicing had been manufactured on a station that was, Lev was fairly sure, no longer operational.
The structural problem was the other front. The displaced habitation module they’d seen on approach. The mounting bolts had stressed when the rock shifted from thermal contraction after the forward ring lost its heat. A seal between the module and the rock face had cracked. Breck had patched it. The patch was holding.
“But the rock’s still cooling,” Lev said.
“The rock’s still cooling,” Koss confirmed. “The displacement is maybe two degrees off true. If the thermal profile keeps changing, it’ll keep shifting. If it shifts past what the patch can absorb, we lose that section.”
“And the section adjacent to it.”
“And the section adjacent to it.”
Two clocks. The bypass filters, thirty-six hours and counting. The structural patch, unknown. Both downstream of the forward ring breach, which was downstream of the primary recycler failure, which was downstream of a bearing that had been rebuilt from whatever was available because the original parts didn’t exist, which was the kind of causal chain that Lev had seen on fifty stations and would see on fifty more because this was how things failed in the belt: one component at a time, each failure revealing the next thing that had been holding on by slightly less than anyone thought.
“The filters I can service and extend your window,” Lev said. “Probably double the time if they’re not scored. The structural patch is the priority. If that seal goes before the thermal situation stabilizes, the volume math for the bypass stops working.”
Koss nodded. She’d run this calculation already. She’d run it hours ago.
“Caro.”
Caro had been at the edge of the compartment, reading the schematic slowly, completely, without asking anyone to explain what he was looking at. He’d grown up on a station like this one. The layout, the jury-rigged additions, the places where the construction changed quality because the materials had changed or the person doing the work had changed or the urgency had changed. Native fluency.
“The mount,” Caro said. He was looking at where the displaced module met the rock. “I need to see it. Welding kit. Whatever stock you have.”
Breck’s jaw moved. The welding kit was his equipment. The stock was his supply. Everything about this was his station, his responsibility, and now someone who’d been aboard for twenty minutes was asking for his tools. Lev watched him almost say something and then not.
“Breck will take you,” Koss said.
Something moved between Koss and Breck. Brief, charged, the residue of an argument that had ended before Lev and Caro docked. Breck had lost it. He knew it. Koss knew he knew it. Neither of them looked at the other long enough for it to become a conversation.
“Fine,” Breck said. He pushed off toward the hatch.
Caro followed him out without a word.
Lev pulled the station schematic to his portable display and started marking. Bypass recycler, structural patch, sealed sections, population distribution. The amber zones on the schematic, where systems were stressed but holding. The locations of the emergency equipment Koss had mentioned, the sealed hatches, the pressure readouts he’d want to monitor. Eighty-three people in sixty percent of a station. The math was tight. Not crisis tight, not yet. The kind of tight where nothing was failing but nothing had room to fail, and if one element slipped the margins didn’t shrink, they disappeared.
He needed to talk to Mirin. He needed whatever she had on the population’s medication profiles, their modification baselines, their health history. If this went past thirty-six hours and people started showing stress responses, he needed to know which pharmaceuticals were safe for which bodies, and right now the only person with that information was the woman in the compartment they’d walked past, who had looked at him the way a clinician looks at a variable she hasn’t accounted for.
“The forward ring has equipment we need,” Koss said. She was watching him work. “Fabrication tools. Mirin’s bio lab. If the structural situation stabilizes, we’ll need to recover what we can.”
The bio lab. In the section that was open to vacuum.
“One thing at a time,” Lev said.
Koss looked at him. She didn’t say anything to that. She didn’t need to. The look was thirty-one hours of one-thing-at-a-time and the things kept adding up faster than she could get to them.
Lev checked the atmospheric readout on his portable. Pulled the bypass numbers, the temperature gradient, the pressure differentials across the sealed hatches. Oriented himself on the schematic. Found the route to Mirin’s compartment.
Two fronts. Caro was already gone.
He went to find Mirin.