The Cost
The crawl was conduit space. His shoulders scraped both walls. The suit added bulk the space hadn’t been designed for because the space hadn’t been designed for a person. Cable runs and conduit brackets on every surface, no orientation, every direction a potential snag on the suit fabric. He pulled himself through hand over hand, his own breathing loud inside the helmet.
The first cable snag caught him thirty seconds in. A loose run Breck had warned him about wrapped around his arm as he pushed past, and he had to stop and work it free without tearing his suit. Fifteen seconds. He could hear himself counting.
His shoulder caught on the next bracket. The fibers in the deltoid seized under the angle and his arm stopped working for a three-count. He braced against the conduit wall and waited, breathing into it, letting the muscle release. It released. He kept moving.
The crawl narrowed where a conduit junction took up half the space. He turned sideways, leading with his good shoulder, his helmet scraping the wall, his suit fabric pulling against a bracket behind him. He couldn’t see what was behind him. He pulled. The fabric held. He pulled harder and it freed and he was through and the crawl opened back up to its original width, which was not wide enough.
The shutoff was where Breck said it would be. A junction where the crawl crossed the intake ducting, the valve handle recessed into the wall. He could feel the duct vibrating under his hand, the bypass still pulling air through section four. Still feeding the leak. Still keeping Nika’s ninety minutes alive.
Quarter turn. He turned it. The ducting shuddered and went still. The vibration stopped under his palm. Nika’s ninety minutes were gone. Whatever was left in that section was what she had.
Three meters past. The reroute valve. He found it by feel, his gloves running along the conduit walls, because the crawl was too tight to turn around. His fingers found the handle. He opened it. Somewhere behind him, the bypass recycler would be pulling from the secondary intake. Fifty percent capacity. Half a system keeping eighty-two people alive while one breathed what was left in a sealed box.
He kept pulling through. Faster now, arms burning, the suit catching and freeing, catching and freeing. Every meter was time he was spending from a supply he’d just shut off.
The far end of the crawl terminated at the section four hatch. He reached for the handle. It didn’t move. The thermal warping Breck had warned him about, the frame contracted in the cold, metal gripping metal. He tried again. Nothing. He braced his boots against the conduit behind him and put his shoulder into it, the bad shoulder, because the crawl was too narrow to switch and the handle was on the left. The fibers seized. He pushed through the seize. The handle gave a centimeter. Two. Then it freed all at once and the hatch swung open.
The storage compartment at the end of section four. Emergency lighting only, red strips along the walls. Thermal pings from the cooling rock. And a sound from the port wall that wasn’t a hiss. Louder than that. Air moving through a gap he could hear from the hatch.
His suit readout showed the section temperature at two degrees. The partial pressure was dropping fast. He checked the number, checked it again. Maybe ten minutes of breathable air left in here.
The crack was on the port wall. He could see it from the hatch, a split in the panel seal where the thermal stress had pulled it apart. Thirty centimeters, maybe more, the edges still moving. Not the slow seep from a hairline fracture. A seal that was failing.
“Nika.”
She was against the far wall. Wedged between a supply rack and the bulkhead, knees drawn to her chest, hands tucked under her arms, a toolkit tethered to the rack next to her. The toolkit she’d come to get. Her breathing was fast. The compartment was two degrees. She looked uncomfortable. Not distressed.
Her eyes were open and she was watching him come toward her. She’d been watching the hatch. Waiting for someone to come through it.
The crack first. Then Nika. Ten minutes.
He pushed off toward the port wall. Pulled a pressure patch from his kit, the large one, peeled the backing. The crack was longer than the patch. He pressed it over the widest section, held it while the adhesive bonded, pulled a second patch and overlapped the first. The sound from the wall dropped. He ran his hand along the remaining edge, found where it was still leaking, pressed a third patch. The sound stopped.
The pressure in the section stabilized. He checked the readout. Low. The partial pressure had dropped to the point where breathing was work, not reflex.
He went to her. She’d pulled her knees tighter while he worked on the wall. Watching him with his back to her. Watching him come back.
“The toolkit,” she said. Her voice was thin. “Arun needs it for the cable run.”
“We’ll get it to him.”
He put the emergency atmosphere mask over her face. Clean air, full pressure, full oxygen. She didn’t fight the mask. Her hand came up and held the edge of it against her cheek, keeping it close.
He pulled the diagnostic. The Veris 4 hummed. Third-gen cardiovascular, estimated. Heart rate 140. Oxygen saturation 84 percent. Low. She’d been breathing thin air for twenty minutes. But she was on clean oxygen now. The saturation should climb.
It didn’t.
He watched the number. 84. Then 83. She was on full oxygen and the saturation was dropping. The mask was working. Her lungs weren’t.
He’d seen this two hours ago. The teenager in the corridor. Heart rate variability flat, the enhanced cardiovascular regulation not engaging. Mirin had been right there. Mirin had the dosage, the profile, fifteen years of calibration for that specific girl. Mirin had adjusted and it worked.
Mirin wasn’t here.
The enhanced alveolar transfer that was supposed to be part of Nika’s modification suite wasn’t engaging. The pathway that let third-gen children absorb oxygen efficiently in thin atmospheres. Her lungs were doing baseline work. Baseline with a mask should hold 95, 96. But her body was demanding more than baseline could deliver, the elevated metabolism Mirin tracked at twenty to forty percent above standard, and the pathway that should have bridged the gap wasn’t there.
He adjusted. Cut the stimulant to sixty percent of standard, Mirin’s number. Administered it. Heart rate came down to 130. Saturation held at 82. Mirin would have cut it differently. Mirin would have known which sixty percent, calibrated to this child, this body, this specific response curve. Lev had a number. Mirin had a patient.
Vasodilator. Low dose. Open the pulmonary capillaries, give the oxygen more surface to cross. Heart rate: 125. Saturation: 81.
Wrong direction.
She was looking at him while he read the numbers. She couldn’t see the diagnostic. She was reading his face instead. He kept his face still.
Saturation: 79.
The Veris 4 was showing him something else. Her cardiac output had spiked, but not through the standard cardiovascular modification pathway. The diagnostic couldn’t label what was driving it. Her peripheral circulation had clamped down, shunting blood to her core, but the vasoconstriction pattern didn’t match anything in the third-gen profiles. And her hemoglobin was binding oxygen more aggressively than the standard curve predicted, grabbing at whatever her lungs could transfer and holding it tighter. Three systems improvising around a fourth that wasn’t there. Keeping her at 79 instead of 60. But they couldn’t close the gap.
Heart rate 118, and the rhythm was wrong. The Veris 4 flagged an irregularity. The cardiac function was losing coherence.
Her hand was still holding the mask to her face. Her fingers were small and steady. The same hands that had held the work light for the cable crew, re-angling it before they asked.
She said something behind the mask. He leaned closer. “Cold,” she said. The first time.
He tried. He went through what he had and used it and adjusted it and watched the numbers and none of it was what Mirin would have done because Mirin’s adjustments lived in fifteen years of watching this child grow and Lev’s adjustments lived in a protocol written for a population that didn’t exist here.
“Are you going to stay?” she said. “Don’t leave.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m going to stay.”
Her grip on the mask loosened. He pressed it back against her face. Her fingers closed around his for a moment, holding on. Then they didn’t.
Her eyes stayed on him while her breathing changed. Slower. The rhythm on the diagnostic going ragged. He watched her watch him and he couldn’t tell when she stopped seeing him. Her eyes were still open when the Veris 4 flagged the cardiac irregularity, still open when the rhythm went flat and he started compressions, his shoulder seizing on the third one, and he shifted his grip and kept going and the rhythm didn’t come back.
The Veris 4 showed a flat line and a timestamp.
He let go.
Her eyes were still open. He closed them. Then he held onto the rack next to her and stayed, because there was nowhere to be that was more important than here.
The toolkit was tethered to the rack beside her. She’d come to get it for the cable crew.
He opened the comm. “Koss. The intake is rerouted. Section four is patched and sealed.”
A pause.
“Nika?”
“No.”
Koss didn’t say anything. Then: “Copy.”
Hand over hand. Faster going back. He knew where the snags were. He left the toolkit where it was, but Nika’s words followed him back through the crawl.
He came out in section three. Pulled himself through the hatch. Replaced the storage racks against the wall. His hands did this. He watched them do it. The racks went back where they’d been and the crawl was behind them and section four was behind that and Nika was behind that, in the red light, with a toolkit nobody was coming back for.
Caro’s voice on the comm. “Lev.”
“Yeah.”
“The mount’s holding.”
“Stay on it.”
He pulled himself back to the main junction. The station was still here. The bypass was running at forty-nine percent. The filters were holding. The numbers on the display were bad but they were numbers, and he had said he was going to stay.