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 along the floor, conduit brackets overhead, every surface a potential snag on the suit fabric. He moved on his forearms and knees, his own breathing loud inside the helmet.
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. Quarter turn. He turned it. The ducting shuddered as the airflow cut.
Three meters past. Overhead. The reroute valve. He found it by feel because the crawl was too tight to look up. His gloves 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-three people alive.
He kept crawling.
The far end opened into a storage compartment at the end of section four. He pushed through the hatch and the space was larger than the crawl and worse. His suit readout showed the partial pressure dropping. Maybe thirty minutes of breathable atmosphere left. The temperature had dropped below what the readout displayed as a number. Emergency lighting only, red strips along the floor. The section sounded like metal under stress: thermal pings, a slow hiss from somewhere to port.
“Nika.”
She was against the far wall. Sitting on the deck with her back to a supply rack, knees drawn up, a toolkit next to her. The toolkit she’d come to get. Her arms were wrapped around herself and she was shaking, but her eyes were open and she was watching him come toward her.
Conscious. That was good. Shaking. Cold, fear, shock, some combination. Her lips were blue. Her breathing was fast and shallow.
He reached her in four steps. Pulled the emergency atmosphere line from his suit and put the mask over her face. Clean air, full pressure, full oxygen. She didn’t fight the mask. She breathed.
He gave her thirty seconds on clean air and pulled the diagnostic. The Veris 4 hummed. Third-gen cardiovascular, estimated. Heart rate 140. Oxygen saturation 84 percent. Low. But she was on clean air now. The saturation should climb.
It didn’t.
He rechecked the mask seal. Good. The air was flowing. She was breathing it. Her lungs were moving it. But her saturation held at 84. Then 83. Her blood was carrying the oxygen. Her tissues weren’t using it at the rate a third-gen cardiovascular profile should have allowed. The enhanced oxygen uptake that was supposed to be part of her modification suite wasn’t there, or wasn’t working, or had never worked the way the protocol assumed it did.
He adjusted. Cut the stimulant to sixty percent of standard, where Mirin had said the children’s metabolisms ran. Administered it. Watched the numbers. Heart rate came down to 130. Saturation held at 82.
Vasodilator. Low dose. Get the blood moving, give the oxygen somewhere to go. Heart rate: 125. Saturation: 81.
Wrong direction.
He checked the mask. Checked the air supply. Checked the calibration. Everything working. Everything right. The equipment was right. The protocol was right. The body wasn’t.
He adjusted the stimulant again, matching the diagnostic’s real-time read of her response rather than any profile or protocol, because the profiles didn’t describe her and the protocols hadn’t been written for what she was. He watched the numbers.
Saturation: 79.
Heart rate 118, but the rhythm was wrong. The Veris 4 flagged an irregularity. The cardiac function was losing coherence under the stress.
He tried. The compartment was cold and red-lit and quiet except for the hiss and the thermal pings and his own breathing and hers, and he went through what he had and used it and adjusted it and watched the numbers and at some point her eyes closed and her breathing changed and the diagnostic showed the rhythm going irregular and then going flat and he ran the resuscitation protocol and her chest rose and fell under his hands and his shoulder caught on the third compression, the fibers seizing, 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 sat back.
The storage compartment was quiet. The hiss from the breach. His breathing in the helmet.
The toolkit was next to her on the deck. She’d come to get it for the cable crew.
He checked the atmospheric readout. Twenty-two minutes remaining. He sealed the compartment behind him. Found the breach: a crack in a panel seal on the port wall, slow, steady. He patched it with sealant from his kit. The hiss stopped. The pressure in the section stabilized, but the air remaining wasn’t enough to sustain anyone not wearing a suit.
He opened the comm. “Koss. The intake is rerouted. Section four is patched and sealed.”
A pause.
“The girl?”
“No.”
Koss didn’t say anything. Then: “Copy.”
He went back through the crawl. Forearms and knees. Faster going back. He knew where the snags were.
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.
He checked the atmospheric readout on his portable. The bypass was running at forty-nine percent on the rerouted intake. The filters were holding. The structural readout showed the mount still in place. Caro was still on it.
Caro’s voice on the comm. “Lev.”
“Yeah.”
“The mount’s holding.”
“Stay on it.”
He walked back to the main junction. People, the compressed community, the station’s diminished hum. Koss was at her console. The atmospheric numbers on the display were bad but they were numbers and numbers meant the system was still running.
He checked the pressure readouts across the aft hatches. Checked the filter status. Checked the bypass capacity. There was work to do.