Afterward

The thermal differential stabilized at 0347. A number on the readout that had stopped moving. The temperature in the aft sections had dropped four degrees since the forward ring blew and now it held. The rock had found whatever equilibrium it was going to find. The contraction that had been cracking seals and shifting mounts had slowed to a rate the remaining structure could absorb.

He watched the number for five minutes. It held.

The bypass was running at forty-nine percent. The rerouted intake pulling from sections five and six, the filters degrading but holding. The mount was stable. Caro had reinforced the remaining bolts, and with the thermal shift slowing, the lateral stress had plateaued. The structural patch wasn’t going to fail in the next hour, or the next six.

Nothing was good. Everything had stopped getting worse. In rescue work, that was the same thing.

He told Koss. Processing, updating, already thinking about the next thing. The next thing, for the first time since the primary recycler seized, wasn’t a crisis. It was logistics. How to feed eighty-two people in sixty percent of a station. How to run atmospheric processing at half capacity for however long it took to source parts from places that were weeks away. How to live in what was left.

Lev sat down.

Not deliberately. His body made the decision. He was in the corridor outside operations, his back against the rock wall, and he was on the floor because his legs had decided they were done and the floor was where that left him. His suit was still sealed. He should unseal it. The station air was breathable, barely. He’d been on his own supply for four hours. He popped the helmet. The air tasted like the bypass and the rock and the cold.

His hands were shaking. He put them on his knees and waited. They stopped after about a minute.

Caro came through the corridor. He looked the way he always looked after a call: the same. Whatever happened during the work stayed behind the flatness of his expression. He sat down against the opposite wall.

“How many?” Caro said.

“One.”

Caro looked at the corridor. Nodded.

They sat. The station made its sounds. The bypass, the fans, the thermal settling of rock that had finished contracting. Voices from the junction, Koss directing work, people moving. The sounds had changed. Lower. Slower. The urgency gone and something heavier in its place.

“The mount?” Lev said.

“It’ll hold. Breck’s on the secondary anchors.” A pause. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“Yeah.”

“The filters?”

“Bad. Thirty-six hours, maybe less. They need parts.”

“Supply run.”

“Supply run.”

Neither of them stood up. The conversation had been what it needed to be: inventory, assessment, count. One. The logistics would wait for them to get off the floor.

The Veris 4 was still on his belt. He unclipped it and the screen was showing the biomarker prompt, the one he’d been snoozing for four weeks. The diagnostic didn’t know what it had been used for today. It ran its schedule. Operator health assessment, thirty-one days overdue. He snoozed it and put it away.

He stood up. His shoulder caught. The same catch from the platform, from the Paran, from before the call. It had been there for days. He shifted through it.

The aft sections were full of people doing the slow work of aftermath. Someone had set up food distribution in the junction: ration packs from the Paran’s supplies and whatever the station had, laid out on a storage crate, people taking what they needed without talking. Lev took a pack. He didn’t check what it was. He ate it standing against the wall because the corridor was where the room was and the wall was what was available.

Breck was near the operations compartment. Working on a pressure relay, or a junction box, some piece of the station’s systems that needed him. He saw Lev. His hands slowed for a moment. Not a stop. Then he went back to his work. Lev couldn’t read what was in Breck’s face. It might have been the residue of forty minutes on the mount together. It might have been something else. The station had lost a child and Breck maintained the station and there was a calculation in that for both of them.

He passed a compartment where a man was sitting alone. Not working. Not sleeping. Sitting on a bunk with his hands between his knees, looking at the wall. The hatch was open. Lev saw him for maybe two seconds. Dark hair, belt build, the stillness of someone who had stopped moving and might not start again for a while. Vasik. The name from the comms exchange with Koss, from the roster in his head. Fen Vasik.

He kept walking.

Mirin’s hatch was closed. She was in there or she wasn’t. He didn’t knock. Whatever was going to happen between them about what happened today wasn’t ready yet. Not for him. Probably not for her.

He checked the atmospheric readouts at each hatch. The pressure differentials. The bypass holding at forty-nine percent. The filters degrading at a rate he could model: maybe thirty-six hours before they needed servicing, which meant thirty-six hours before a problem he didn’t have an answer for became a problem he needed one for. Thirty-six hours was thirty-six hours.

The station was quiet in a way that wasn’t the systems. People were talking less. Moving slower. A woman in the corridor had stopped mid-task and was standing with a sealant gun in her hand, not using it, not putting it down.

He went to the operations compartment. Koss was at the console. The schematic on the display, half red, the rest green and amber. She was making notes. Planning. The crisis behind her. The living-in-what-came-next starting.

Lev pulled up the log on his portable and started the call report. Damage assessment, actions taken, resources used, systems status. The report would go to the network, where someone would file it into a database where it would become a data point among other data points that described, in aggregate, everything that was failing across the belt and recommended, in aggregate, nothing.

The section he didn’t linger on was short. One casualty. Nika Vasik, age nine. Third-generation modification failure under environmental stress. Resuscitation attempted. Unsuccessful.

The words fit on one line.

He closed the log and looked at the schematic. The red and the amber and the green. The station still here. Still running. Full of people who were going to wake up tomorrow and start fixing what was broken with whatever they had.