Triage
Mirin’s compartment was three meters by four and every surface was working. Shelves bolted to the rock walls, labeled in her handwriting. A diagnostic suite older than the one Lev carried but maintained with a discipline he could see from the hatch: calibration stickers current, cables organized. A refrigeration unit humming in the corner, medications stored at temperature. She’d built this workspace over fifteen years in a space that was never big enough, everything reachable without looking, everything labeled for the day it might not be her reaching for it.
She was entering data when he came in. Logging something from the crisis, keeping her records current. Keeping her records current. The moment you stopped was the moment it mattered.
“I need your medication profiles,” Lev said. “Modification baselines. Whatever you have on the population.”
“I know what you need.” She finished her entry. Saved it. Turned to face him. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Treat people.”
“My people.”
“Your people.”
She looked at the diagnostic on his belt. Closer now than in the corridor. She was reading the model, the calibration date, the wear on the housing.
“That’s a Veris 4,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“The Veris 4 has a sixty-percent accuracy rate on third-gen cardiovascular profiles.” A specification, not a complaint. “Higher on second-gen. Lower on anything adjusted.”
“I know what it does.”
“So you know it’s going to guess.”
“It’s going to guess. And then I’m going to look at the person and guess better. That’s the job.”
She pulled up her records. Not the station’s records, which were eight years old and fiction. Hers. Fifteen years of patient files, modification profiles built from observation, medication responses tracked by hand because the automated systems assumed standardized populations and Mara’s Prospect had stopped being standardized a generation ago.
“The adults are mostly stable,” she said. “Second and third gen, standard belt profiles with my adjustments. I can tell you what works on whom. Most of the pharmaceuticals in your kit are safe at standard doses.” She glanced at his supplies, cataloging. “The children are different.”
He waited.
“The children I’d want to dose myself. Or at least be consulted.”
“Why?”
“Because their profiles are mine. I built them. I know what I adjusted and why. A standard second-gen pain protocol on one of my kids will probably overshoot. Their metabolisms run faster than the profiles suggest.”
“How much faster?”
“Depends on the kid. Twenty percent on some. Forty on others.”
Forty percent. On a child, that was the distance between a therapeutic dose and respiratory depression.
“We work together,” Lev said. “You dose the children. I handle adults with your profiles. Anything I don’t recognize, I call you.”
“Fine.”
She transferred her medication files to his portable. He scrolled through them while she talked him through the flagged cases. Three adults with cardiovascular complications from the stress. Two teenagers she was watching. An older man whose radiation hardening was degrading and who should not be given standard anti-inflammatories because Mirin had found, through six years of trial and error, that his inflammatory response was linked to a cardiovascular compensation pathway the standard protocol would suppress. The detail existed in Mirin’s head and nowhere else. If she’d been in the forward ring when it blew, this man’s medication file would have gone with her.
He got the shape of her system and moved.
The bypass recycler was in a utility compartment on the aft deck, bolted to the rock wall with brackets that had been welded, re-welded, and reinforced with cargo straps. Lev opened the filter housing.
The filters were the wrong type. Not damaged, not degraded. Wrong. The housing was built for Kanto-series filters, a standard size across most recycler systems in the belt. The filters inside were smaller, different seal profile, packed into the housing with adapter rings someone had machined to bridge the gap. Breck, probably. The adapters were good work: clean welds, proper sealing. But the filters sat at an angle the housing wasn’t designed for, which meant the airflow across the media wasn’t uniform, which meant one side of each filter was loading faster than the other, which meant Breck’s forty-eight-hour estimate assumed even wear that wasn’t happening.
He pulled the first filter. The loaded side was dark, clogged, maybe twenty hours of life left. The clean side looked new. Thirty-six hours of capacity in a filter using eighteen.
He could rotate them. Flip each one, let the clean side take the load. It wouldn’t double the life, the loaded media was already compromised, but it would buy ten hours, maybe twelve. He started rotating.
A woman appeared at the hatch. Thirties, belt-built, hands already out. She read what he was doing and started pulling filters from the bottom rack.
“Koss sent me,” she said. “I’m on atmospheric.”
“The adapters. Breck made these?”
“Yeah. The right filters haven’t been available for about two years.”
“Where’d these come from?”
“A freighter scrapping out near Hygiea. Breck bought what they had.”
Different recycler, different spec, adapted to fit. The filters worked. They just didn’t work the way the housing wanted them to, and the housing hadn’t complained until the filters started failing. He could write a technical note on asymmetric loading in non-standard filter housings and submit it to the network’s review process, except the network didn’t have a review process, because nobody had established one, because establishing a review process required an authority that didn’t exist to review procedures that nobody had written for equipment that varied from station to station so completely that any standard would be fiction before the ink dried. He rotated the filters.
The woman, her name was Dahl or something close to it, worked efficiently. She had a tremor in her left hand that didn’t slow her down. She compensated for it automatically, her right hand picking up the motion her left dropped.
When the filters were re-seated he checked the output. Sixty-two percent. Up from sixty, but not what he’d wanted. The loaded side of the media was partially blocked even after rotation. The forty-two hours he’d told Koss was closer to forty. Not the doubling he’d estimated.
He found Koss in the junction corridor, directing two people reinforcing a hatch seal while monitoring a pressure readout on her portable. She saw him and her face did the math before he spoke.
“A few more hours. Not what I estimated.”
She nodded. Another revision of a bad number. She’d been absorbing these all day.
He moved through the aft sections. The community was working. Nobody idle, nobody waiting. A man patching a cable run. Two women reorganizing supply storage to clear corridor space. A teenager hauling water containers to the compartments where families had compressed. Koss had set the work up and the people were doing it with the competence of a community that had been solving its own problems since before the rescue network knew they existed.
He treated people. Checked vitals, read the diagnostic, cross-referenced Mirin’s profiles, adjusted dosages, moved on. A woman with elevated blood pressure, standard for the stress, treated and cleared. A boy with a bruised rib who didn’t want to sit still, treated and cleared.
A man in his forties who’d been thrown into a bulkhead when the secondary seal blew. Right forearm, probable fracture. The Veris 4 gave him a skeletal profile: third-gen belt standard, bone density within range, though within range for third-gen covered a spread you could park a hauler in. He checked Mirin’s file, confirmed the pain protocol was safe, set the fracture, splinted it. The man sat with the pain the way belt people sat with most things.
A teenager next, sixteen maybe. She’d taken a laceration helping move equipment when the forward ring blew. Mirin had sealed the cut, but the girl was scared. Elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, wide pupils. She looked like a sixteen-year-old whose home was falling apart, which she was. He almost moved on. Then he ran the diagnostic anyway, because he was here and the diagnostic was in his hand and you checked.
The cardiovascular numbers were wrong. Not the numbers he’d expect from fear. Her heart rate variability was low in a way that had nothing to do with the crisis. The modification-enhanced regulation that should have been there, underneath the fear, smoothing it, wasn’t engaging. He pulled Mirin’s profile on her. Adjusted cardiovascular parameters, noted in Mirin’s notation.
He cut the calming agent twenty percent below protocol. Administered it. Watched her for two minutes. The breathing settled. The fear was still in her face but the numbers came back to where Mirin’s profile said they should be. Still not where the standard protocol said they should be. But close enough for here.
An older woman with a bronchial cough from the bypass air quality. Three others with the same symptom. All within Mirin’s profiles. All manageable. All requiring the dose adapted from standard.
He was adjusting on every patient. Not by a lot. Not in the same direction. But every body he put the diagnostic on needed the protocol reconsidered, the dose recalculated, the approach shifted from what the standardized numbers said it should be. On a station with current profiles and maintained modification suites, he’d adjust on maybe one in five. Here it was every one.
The comm from Caro came while Lev was checking the pressure differentials across the aft hatches. Caro’s voice was flat. The situation had stopped being a problem and become a schedule.
“Mount bolts are failing. Two of six cracked. Displacement is still moving.”
“How long?”
“Six hours. Maybe eight.”
He checked the atmospheric readout on his portable. The bypass had dropped to fifty-eight percent. The rotated filters were degrading faster than he’d projected, the damaged media breaking down under load. His forty hours were closer to thirty-five. If the structural patch failed and they lost the adjacent section, the bypass volume dropped by a third and thirty-five became something he didn’t want to calculate in a corridor where people could see his face.
The margin he’d spent the morning building was gone.
Koss was in operations. She needed to hear this.