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. Send Lev to the mount and the bypass lost its only other set of hands. Keep him on atmospheric and the mount failed and they lost a section and the bypass math stopped working anyway. 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. His suit readout showed the temperature dropping through the sections: fourteen, twelve, nine. The lighting thinned. A woman in the corridor had her arms wrapped around herself. A child next to her was coughing, short and dry, the bypass air getting to the youngest first. Their breath was visible. 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 thirty years of knowing where the forces went in this specific rock.
“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. The rock cooling unevenly, vacuum temperature on the forward side and habitable on the aft, eight hundred meters of carbonaceous stone contracting at different rates along its length, and the mounting surface underneath the module shifting as the internal stresses redistributed. 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.
Caro and Breck worked the mount. Lev set up monitoring. Sensors on the seal and a displacement gauge on the rock face, all feeding his portable so Koss could watch the numbers from operations. Then he ran the thermal model. The cooling rate through the rock, the contraction curve, looking for when the rate would flatten. He’d seen the profile on forty stations. Every rock had the same shape to it, fast at first and then tapering. This one was still in the fast part but slowing. He gave Caro a number. “Twelve hours, maybe fourteen, before the contraction rate drops below what the reinforcements can handle. After that it’s maintenance, not emergency.”
Caro kept welding.
They’d been at it 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 was part of the bypass circulation loop. Intake vents and return vents, air pulled out and clean air pushed back in. With the leak, the bypass was pumping processed air into section four and the crack was dumping it into space. The system was feeding a hole. At fifty-eight percent capacity and falling, the bypass couldn’t afford to lose air through a crack it couldn’t seal.
Shutting off section four from the loop stopped the waste. It also cut off the girl’s air supply. The bypass was the only thing replenishing what the leak was taking. Close the valves and she was on whatever remained in a sealed section with a crack in the wall.
The reroute to secondary meant fifty percent capacity for the rest of the station. Eighty-two people generating CO2 faster than half a system could scrub it. And the filters he’d scored and rotated this morning, the ones buying them forty hours instead of twenty, would be running on air from a different intake at a different volume. The loading math he’d fixed would shift. He was holding three problems in his head and they were all connected.
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. “One of the kids was with the crew. Nika Vasik. Nine years old. She went to the far end to pull a toolkit from storage. The hatch sealed before she came back.”
Vasik. The same surname as the old man with the cardiac condition in Mirin’s files. He thought of the girl in the junction, the one tracking the routing pattern with her work light.
“How long?”
“Alarm went ninety seconds ago. The hatch on the far end sealed on the pressure drop.”
The automatic seal. The pressure protocol that every station ran, triggered on the rate of change, not the level. When the crack first opened, the pressure had spiked down fast enough to trip the threshold. Then the leak settled into a slow bleed and the bypass started compensating, but the hatches were already sealed. 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 still pressurized.
“Atmosphere in four?”
Koss checked. “Dropping. Maybe ninety minutes before it’s not breathable. The bypass is still cycling through four, so she’s getting some replenishment.”
Ninety minutes for the girl, as long as the bypass kept feeding the section. But the bypass was pumping processed air into a room with a crack in it. Every minute it ran through four was capacity the station couldn’t spare.
“Override the hatch and go through four.”
“Open that hatch and three and four are one volume. The leak drains both sections. We can’t lose three.”
“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, and I’m telling you right now, it was built for conduit, not for a person. I’ve been through it once, to run cable, and I barely fit.”
“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 a girl at the far end of a section that was losing atmosphere, with ninety minutes that would become a lot less the moment he shut off her air supply to save the station.
“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 stopped. He was looking at the schematic on Lev’s portable, the route from here to section three. “The fastest way through is the lower ring corridor.” He stopped again. “The keypad code is 0-7-1-4.”
Breck looked at the pressure reading from section four. “The shutoff is a quarter turn. The reroute valve is three meters past it, overhead. Both are labeled. And watch the cable runs past the junction, they’re not secured. I’ve been meaning to fix that for a year.”
“Three meters past the shutoff. Overhead.”
“Yeah. And Harlan. The far end of four where the girl is, the hatch sticks. It’s a thermal issue, the frame warps when the temperature drops. You might have to force it.”
Lev sealed his suit, checked the atmosphere readout, checked the seal integrity. Ninety minutes of breathable air for the girl, minus whatever the shutoff took from her. Minus the crawl to the shutoff. Minus the shutoff and reroute. Minus the rest of the crawl to the far end. Minus a hatch that might not open. Whatever was left was what he had to find her, assess her, and get her out.
The route to section three went through the lower ring corridor. The hatch with the keypad. The corridor Breck had blocked with his shoulders square and his boots braced, blocking during the tour. He punched in 0-7-1-4 and it opened.
It was the children’s quarters. Bunks along the walls, small ones, personal items clipped to netting, drawings taped to the rock. Five or six kids were inside, younger ones pulled back from the working sections but not pulled all the way aft. A boy was sorting fasteners from a mesh-covered bin with bare hands. A girl was splicing a cable, her fingers steady on the connectors. They looked up when he passed and went back to what they were doing.
His suit readout showed the temperature. Eight degrees. He looked at the environmental panel by the hatch. The thermal control for this section was set independently from the rest of the station. The setpoint read eight. Not a failure. Not bleed from the forward ring. Someone had dialed it there. This was the temperature they kept for the children.
The adults in the aft sections were huddled at fourteen and coughing. These kids were in their bunks at eight and none of them were shivering. The girl splicing cable had bare arms.
He didn’t stop. Nika was running out of air. But the thermostat setting stayed in his head longer than the rest of it.
Section three. The storage racks were latched to the port wall, half-empty. He moved them. The service crawl hatch was behind them, stenciled with a faded identifier he didn’t bother reading.
He opened the hatch.
It was tight.