Two Fronts
Koss was in the junction. She’d heard Caro’s transmission on the station comms. She was already redrawing the numbers on her portable, reallocating people, adjusting the plan she’d been adjusting for thirty-two hours.
“The structural front,” Lev said. “If we lose that section, the atmospheric numbers stop mattering.”
“I know.”
“I need to get to Caro.”
She looked at the atmospheric readout. The fifty-eight percent that was becoming fifty-seven. She was weighing the same math Lev had already run: send the rescue operator to the structural problem, leave the atmospheric problem to a bypass that was slowly failing. Both options were bad. One was worse.
“Go,” she said.
The station got colder as he moved forward. Each section a few degrees less, the rock pulling heat toward the vacuum in the forward ring. The lighting thinned. The sounds changed: fewer people, more station. The hum of systems working at the edge of what they could do.
The displaced module was four sections forward, through two sealed hatches. Breck had written pressure readings on the hatch frames in grease pencil, updated every time he came through. Lev read them without slowing. Stable on both sides.
He found Caro and Breck in a service corridor adjacent to the mount. Cold here. Deep cold, conducted through the rock from the vacuum on the other side. Caro was welding the failing bolts with the focus of someone who understood what the bolt was doing and what the rock was doing and how much disagreement there was between them. Breck was next to him, holding a brace in position. A piece of structural stock he’d cut and shaped to fit the gap between the mount and the rock, sized by eye, taking the lateral stress off the remaining bolts. It was smart. It was also the kind of thing you only knew to do if you’d lived inside this station long enough to know where the forces went.
“Two bolts holding,” Caro said without looking up. “Reinforced. Two cracked, bypassed with strap anchors. Two gone.”
“The rock?”
“Still moving. Slow.”
The mount was where fabricated structure met carved rock, and everything wrong with the station was concentrated here. Thermal contraction pulling one way. The module’s mass pushing another. The patch on the seal between them taking load it was never meant to carry. Lev pulled up the structural schematic on his portable. The remaining bolts, the strap anchors, the shim, the rate of displacement. It would hold. He didn’t know for how long.
Someone had scratched a mark into the rock face behind the mount. A line, maybe a measurement reference from the original construction. He looked at it and then he was looking at the schematic again.
He worked alongside Caro and Breck. Reinforcing the strap anchors. Running sealant along the cracked patch where the stress was opening it. The sealant would buy hours. Everything was hours now. Breck worked without speaking, without looking at Lev more than necessary, his hands sure on his own station. The resentment was still in him but the station was in more immediate trouble than his pride and he knew which one mattered.
They’d been working for forty minutes when the pressure alarm went.
Not this section. Adjacent. Section four, one compartment aft. The alarm was a steady tone, not the rapid pulse of blowout. Slow leak. Another seal failing from the same thermal stress that was pulling the mount apart.
Caro’s hands didn’t stop. Breck looked up.
“Section four has the bypass intake,” Breck said. Flat. But his face had changed.
Lev checked the schematic. Section four. The intake ducting for the bypass recycler ran through it, pulling air from the aft sections and routing it through the filter housing. If section four lost pressure, the intake was compromised. If the intake was compromised, the bypass stopped pulling. If the bypass stopped pulling, eighty-three people had whatever atmosphere remained in the sealed sections, which was maybe four hours at current population density.
He opened the comm to Koss. “Section four. Pressure alarm.”
Koss came back clipped. “We’re evacuating. Cable crew was in there. They’re coming through.”
“How many?”
“Six in the section. Five through.” A pause. “Nika Vasik was with the crew. She went to the far end to pull a toolkit from storage. She hasn’t come back through.”
The girl with the work light.
“How long?”
“Alarm went four minutes ago. The hatch on the far end sealed on the pressure drop.”
The automatic seal. The pressure protocol that every station ran, designed to contain a breach by sealing hatches when the differential hit threshold. The protocol had done exactly what it was designed to do. It had sealed a nine-year-old on the wrong side of a hatch in a section that was losing air.
“Atmosphere in four?”
Koss checked. “Dropping. Slow. Maybe ninety minutes before it’s not breathable.”
Ninety minutes for the girl. Four hours for the station if the intake stayed compromised. Both clocks running.
“Is there a secondary access?”
Breck answered. “Service crawl. Runs from section three to the far end of four. It’s not pressurized but it’s sealed. You’d need a suit.”
“The intake ducting. If I get to it and isolate the breach, does the bypass keep running?”
Breck was already in the systems he knew. “Manual shutoff on the intake, midway through the section. Close it and reroute through secondary. The bypass pulls from five and six instead. Lower volume. Maybe fifty percent.”
“Fifty percent for how long?”
“Until the filters give out or I run out of things to hold together.”
Fifty percent. Enough to keep people breathing. Not enough to keep them warm, not enough to scrub the air properly, not enough for anything except alive. And ninety minutes to reach a girl at the far end of a section that was losing atmosphere, through a crawl built for conduit, wearing an emergency suit, in a space not designed for a person of any size, let alone his.
“Caro. Can you hold the mount?”
“I’ll hold it.”
“Breck. I need the crawl access and the reroute procedure.”
“Section three, port side. Behind the storage racks. Hatch is marked.” Breck looked at him. Something had shifted in his face over the last forty minutes of working in the cold on a station that was trying to come apart. The resentment was still there. But under it, or beside it, was something that looked like the calculation of a man who knew his station and knew what was about to happen to it if nobody went into that section. “The shutoff is a quarter turn. The reroute valve is three meters past it, overhead. Both are labeled.”
“Three meters past the shutoff. Overhead.”
“Yeah.”
Lev sealed his suit, checked the atmosphere readout, checked the seal integrity. Ninety minutes. Minus the four that had already passed. Minus the crawl. Minus the time to find the shutoff and reroute. Minus a girl who might be injured, might be behind a jammed hatch, might be in a compartment that was already below what her lungs could use.
He went through the hatch into section three. The storage racks were against the port wall, bolted down, half-empty because the community had already pulled most of the supplies aft during the first evacuation. He moved the racks. The service crawl hatch was behind them, stenciled with a faded identifier he didn’t bother reading.
He opened the hatch.
It was tight.