The Question
Koss was at the dock.
She’d been at the dock when they arrived. She was at the dock when they left. The same grip rail, the same planted stance, the same compact build. Four days ago she’d been managing their arrival with the controlled wariness of a station chief who’d called for help and wasn’t sure she should have. Now she was managing their departure with the controlled something else of a station chief who’d received help and was taking her station back.
“The filters should hold until the supply run,” Lev said. “Dahl knows the rotation schedule. If the atmospheric drops below forty, seal section three and reduce the volume.”
“I know.”
“The bronchial cases need monitoring. If the coughs go productive, Mirin has the dosage adjustments on file.”
“Mirin has them.” Koss was taking it back. The station, the authority, the decisions. The handoff was clinical, practiced, the professional protocol of a rescue close-out that neither of them needed to think about.
“Harlan.” She held out her hand. Belt grip, firm, brief. “Thank you.”
She said it once. She wasn’t going to say it again or elaborate on it or turn it into a moment. The two words carried what they carried and that was enough.
“Koss.”
He didn’t say the other things. Be careful. Update your profiles. Call sooner next time. She knew all of it and would do what she’d decided to do. Run this station with the judgment of the person who knew it best.
Breck was in the corridor near the dock. Working on a junction panel that happened to be adjacent to where they’d pass, with the transparent coincidence of a man who would not admit he’d come to see them off. He looked up when Lev passed. A nod. One beat longer than the nods from the first day. Lev nodded back and kept walking, and behind him Breck went back to his junction panel, and the wrench sounds resumed.
Mirin was at the hatch to her compartment.
“The microscopy unit is on the supply list,” Lev said.
“I know. If they can source the sampling kits, I can start the tissue work within a week of delivery.” She paused. “The culture media too.”
“I’ll follow up from the network side.”
She looked at him. The same assessment from the first day, the one that went to his equipment before it went to him. Except now it wasn’t assessment. It was the look of someone who had opened a drawer and shown him what was inside and was deciding what that meant now that he was leaving.
“The growth charts,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t have a theory. Just data.”
“I know.”
“If the equipment comes. When I can test again. If the data shows something I can.” She stopped. “I’ll send it through the network.”
“Send it to me.”
A pause. “Okay.”
It was the most either of them was going to say about fourteen children whose growth curves were drifting from the line. The rest of it lived in a drawer and a supply list and whatever Mirin would find when she had tools to look.
Caro had the Paran ready. Seals green, systems online, the pre-flight complete. He was in the pilot’s seat with the console lit and the ship doing the quiet thing it did when it was ready to go.
Lev sealed the inner lock. Then the outer. The clamp released, the sound traveling through the hull, metal letting go of metal. The ship was free of the station and the station was free of the ship.
Caro brought them off the dock on maneuvering thrusters. Slow, controlled, the same competence as the approach four days ago but in reverse. The station rotated in the viewport. Mara’s Prospect. A captured asteroid, eighty-two people in a rock, named by a woman who’d been twenty-three and convinced she was building something permanent. From outside it looked the same as arrival except the heat signature in the forward ring was gone and the lights in the aft sections were brighter, more of them, the sections Breck had repaired coming back online. The displaced module was still two degrees off true, but the reinforcements held it and the thermal contraction was slowing and it was going to stay where it was, which wasn’t where it was supposed to be but was where it was going to be from now on. The station had absorbed its new shape.
“Burn in ten,” Caro said.
“Yeah.”
The g-seats took them. Five g, the ship’s frame taking the load, the blood pressure regulation adjusting in the two heartbeats it always took. His shoulder compressed into the padding and the hot wire flared and then settled into a constant, the joint’s new opinion of him. Ninety minutes of this. Then coast. Then ninety minutes on the other end, and wherever they were going.
The station shrank in the aft camera. A rock in the dark. Then a point. Then coordinates on the nav display, numbers that increased as the distance increased, a place becoming a data point.
Ninety minutes. The burn ended. Zero-g.
The ship was quiet. The same quiet from before the call: the recycler, the electronics, the thermal ticks. Sounds that had been the ship for years and would be the ship for years more. Lev unstrapped and floated in the co-pilot’s seat and for a moment the ship felt unfamiliar. Someone else’s air still in his lungs. Then it passed and the ship was the ship.
Caro ran the post-burn checks. Fuel, trajectory, systems. His hands on the console, the motions pared down, the routine unchanged. He’d run these checks after the burn in. He’d run them after every burn since before Lev started working with him. The checks were the work and the work was the thing Caro did instead of whatever else there was to do, which was think about things, which was not something Caro spent time on if there was a check to run.
The co-pilot’s seat had a tear in the left armrest padding. It had been there since before Lev started on the Paran. He’d reported it once, early on, and the report had generated a work order that had generated a requisition that was, he assumed, still making its way through whatever procurement process the network maintained for non-critical equipment repairs, if the network maintained one, if the work order still existed, if the system that held the work order still existed. The tear was about eight centimeters long. It wasn’t getting bigger. It was going to be there forever.
He should eat. He should run the post-call log. He should check the comms board for network traffic, see what had come in during the four days they’d been docked. He should do the things you did after a call, the routine that turned a crisis into a record and a record into the space between one job and the next.
He didn’t do any of that yet.
The viewport showed the dark. The belt. The scattered points of light that were rocks and stations and habs and ships. Each one a place where people lived inside machines, maintained by people who did what they could with what they had. The Paran was between them, in the dark, in the gap.
The call report was filed. One line for Nika Vasik. The growth charts were in Mirin’s drawer, fourteen curves on paper, plotted in colored ink. The filters were holding at forty-six percent. Fen Vasik was carrying conduit through a corridor his daughter had walked through. Breck was welding. Koss was running the station the way her grandmother had built it: with what she had, for as long as it lasted.
Caro was still. Not working anymore. Just sitting. His hands resting on the edge of the console. Not working anymore. Not about to. Just present in the quiet between the last thing and the next thing. He’d grown up in a place like Mara’s Prospect. He knew every part of what they’d seen. The gray market bio, the adapted filters, the children whose profiles drifted from spec, the parents who stayed anyway. He knew it the way Lev knew rescue: from the inside, where the numbers were people and the problems were home.
“What would happen if we stopped?”
He said it. Not to Caro. Not to anyone. The words came out because they’d been in him for longer than this call, maybe longer than Braga, and the ship was quiet and the dark was outside and a girl was dead and her father was carrying conduit and the station was rebuilding itself the same way it had been built and there was nobody to blame and nothing to fix and the next call was already out there, forming, on a station he hadn’t been to yet, where someone was looking at a recycler that sounded wrong and deciding to live with it.
Caro didn’t answer.
The ship hummed. The console lights steady, the trajectory plotted, the fuel numbers ticking. The dark outside.
After a while Caro unstrapped and pushed off toward the aft compartment. The forward seal, the one he’d flagged for repacking. His footsteps in the corridor, then the hatch, then the small specific sounds of a man working on the ship that kept them alive: a wrench, a seal tool, the sounds of maintenance.
The comms board had a light on it. Amber. He pulled himself forward and scrolled the queue. Routing updates, positioning data, a supply advisory from Karsten Platform, a fuel depot status change near Hygiea. The usual traffic that accumulated while you were docked and working and not checking.
One item was flagged as a direct reply to his call report. He almost scrolled past it. Call reports went into the database and the database held them and that was usually the end of it. But someone had read this one, or the system had flagged it, or both. The sender was a name he didn’t know, routed through a network node near Vesta. The preview showed one line: a question about the third-generation modification data in his incident summary.
He’d get to it.