Bearing

Thane Morrow

Dreams of the Deep

Copyright © 2026 Dreams of the Deep. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: The Job

The grease on his left hand had dried to a crust somewhere between the platform and now. He picked at it with his thumbnail while the recycler cycled and the ship pushed them along at a quarter g, not enough to feel like gravity, just enough to make the coffee in his mug sit at a wrong angle and remind him that rest and a quarter g were different things no matter how similar they looked.

Gray-brown grease. Mineral oil base cut with something synthetic, which told you everything about the platform’s supply chain if you cared to read it: they bought lubricant from whoever came by and whoever came by was mixing stock. The bearing race had worn flat on one side. Not the loaded side, the return side, which meant the housing was out of true, which meant the mount had shifted, which meant something structural underneath the mount had moved in a way that the platform’s people either hadn’t noticed or had noticed and decided to live with. He’d fixed the bearing. He hadn’t fixed the mount. The mount was a three-day job and he’d been there for two hours and the twelve people who lived on the platform processed carbonaceous feedstock for a living and didn’t have three days to shut down their recycler while someone who wouldn’t be there for the consequences decided their infrastructure needed more work than they’d asked for. So he’d fixed the bearing and shimmed the intake and told them to check the housing in six months.

They wouldn’t check it. The last crew he’d told to check a housing hadn’t checked theirs either, different platform, different recycler, same problem, and the reason the network had a file on that platform was because their recycler had eventually seized and the air went sour and someone called for help. Which was how Lev had ended up at this platform, fixing this bearing, telling these twelve people to check their housing in six months.

He should shower. He stayed in the pilot chair and picked at his hand instead.

The ship was the Paran. Rescue vessel, two-person, not pretty. It had been somebody else’s before it was theirs, and somebody else’s before that, and the cockpit had been personalized and stripped and personalized and stripped until it had given up and settled into a gray that belonged to no one. Gray panels, gray deck, a viewport fogged on the outside by a decade of microimpact scarring that nobody was going to fix because fixing it meant dry-dock and dry-dock meant weeks and weeks meant calls they wouldn’t take and calls they wouldn’t take meant, depending on the math, people. So the viewport stayed fogged and Lev looked at the dark through a haze and this was fine because the dark didn’t have details worth seeing.

Something in his left shoulder had been catching since the platform. He’d torqued it reaching into the recycler housing, the angle wrong because the access panel was sized for someone with about twenty fewer kilos of modified muscle than Lev carried. Most access panels were. He rolled the shoulder, felt it catch, felt the second-gen fibers in the deltoid cluster tracking wrong under the load. The shoulder mods were reinforcement layered on his baseline, polymerized fibers woven through the natural muscle in a pattern that was supposed to be self-correcting but in practice needed recalibration every, the manual said six months, Caro said when it hurt, Lev said later. So far this approach had been working in the sense that he could still lift things and not working in the sense that his left shoulder now caught on certain movements and he was compensating in ways he’d eventually have to unlearn.

He’d run the diagnostic later. Same category as the biomarker check that had been blinking at him from the med panel for four weeks. The panel wanted a blood draw and a cellular scan and a thirty-minute readout comparing him to a degradation curve assembled from people who’d undergone similar interventions at facilities that mostly didn’t exist anymore. He was being measured against a standard that was, itself, drifting. The panel blinked. He snoozed it.

He thought about the platform’s coffee. They’d offered him some while he was working. It came out of a thermal carafe that looked older than the station, a dented steel thing with a handle someone had wrapped in electrical tape for grip. The coffee was, objectively, terrible. Brown, thin, tasting like it had been brewed from the memory of coffee beans rather than the beans themselves. But it was hot, and one of the twelve, a woman whose hands said she’d been working processing equipment since before Lev was born, had poured it for him without asking. Held the carafe with both hands. Steady pour. The kind of gesture you made for someone doing work on your home, the same way you’d hand a glass of water to someone fixing your plumbing. She’d waited while he took the first sip, and he’d nodded, and she’d nodded back, and that had been the whole conversation. He hadn’t finished it. He wished he had.

Caro came forward from the bunk compartment with his hair pressed flat on one side and a ration pack in his hand, already open, already being eaten. He sat in the second chair and chewed and looked at nothing.

“Recycler ran clean,” Lev said.

Caro ate.

“I’m going to recalibrate the forward prox sensor.”

“It’s fine.”

“It flagged two seconds late on the approach.”

“It flagged.”

“Two seconds is a lot if there’s a problem with the…”

“It flagged, Lev.”

Lev almost got into it. Two seconds on a proximity sensor wasn’t a preference, it was a calibration issue, and the sensor was calibrated to a spec that had been written at a test facility in cislunar orbit for a sensor operating under controlled conditions that involved, as far as Lev could tell, no actual proximity to anything. The spec described a sensor in a vacuum chamber. The sensor lived on a rescue vessel that made hard docking approaches to stations that were in the process of falling apart. These were not the same operating environment. But the spec was what they had because the spec was what someone had written once and nobody had updated and nobody was going to update because nobody had the funding or the authority or, probably, the interest.

Caro’s position was simpler. The sensor worked. It would continue to work until it didn’t. When it didn’t, they’d fix it. This was Caro’s position on everything including Caro.

“The platform’s bearing housing was rough,” Lev said, instead.

“Mm.”

“I told them six months.”

“They won’t.”

“No.”

“Housing was out of true?”

“Yeah. Mount shifted.”

“So it’ll wear again.”

“Yeah.”

“My mother’s place had the same recycler. Same housing, same problem. She shimmed it with a piece of cargo strap and it ran for three years like that.” Caro folded his wrapper into a precise square and slotted it into disposal. He did this every time, same creases, same order. Lev had watched him do it a thousand times. “People figure it out.”

“How long did you tell them?” Caro said.

“Six months.”

Something moved in Caro’s face. Not a smile. The possibility of one, briefly considered and declined. He knew those twelve people would fix the bearing themselves when it wore again, with whatever they had, the same way they’d fixed it before Lev came, and the only difference his visit had made was that the next failure would start from a fresh race instead of a flat one, which bought them about six months. Which was what he’d told them.

Caro pulled up the navigation display. Their course, their speed, the fuel cache at the staging point. A quarter g was easy. You could almost forget you were accelerating. Almost, except the coffee in Lev’s mug sat at its wrong angle and the surface trembled with the drive vibration if you watched it long enough.

He watched it. The coffee was cold. He drank it anyway. He set the mug down and it caught, the base doing whatever it did, some combination of surface bond and micro-grip that he’d never looked into because it worked.

The network traffic played through the relay in bursts. A comms issue on a hab near 22 Kalliope, requesting technical consult. A cargo hauler out past Hygiea flagging a course correction. The medical ship Okoro repositioning toward Ceres, offline for thirty-six hours during cryo transit. The mid-belt had decent coverage right now, four or five operators within reasonable range of the populated rocks, plus a few haulers who carried the patch and would respond if they were close and the call was bad enough. Which it usually was by the time the call went out, because people out here didn’t call until they had to, which meant by the time the network heard about a problem the problem had usually been a problem for a while. The outer belt was thin. Always thin. Maybe two operators past the 3:1 resonance, and one of them, Fenn, was running a ship that should have been decommissioned two years ago. Lev had told her. She’d told him to buy her a new one.

The network was funded by voluntary contributions. The stations that contributed most were the large inner-belt platforms where the infrastructure was maintained and the modification profiles were current and the rescue calls were rare. The stations that contributed least were the small outer-belt homesteads where the infrastructure was improvised and the mod profiles were guesswork and the calls were constant. The coverage map, if anyone had bothered to draw one, would have been a map of everywhere help was least needed.

He ate standing at the console. The ration pack was chicken, or what emerged when you cultured a protein matrix and seasoned it based on a reference document that was, he suspected, several generations of food scientists removed from an actual chicken.

There was a scrape on the deck plating near the port bulkhead. Maybe ten centimeters long, shallow. He’d noticed it yesterday. Didn’t know where it came from.

Caro was in the second chair running post-checks with the steady focus of someone who’d been doing this on ships like this since before Lev had left home. Sometimes Lev forgot Caro had a decade on him. Then Caro’s hands would remind him: every gesture pared to the minimum motion, everything extra worn away by repetition, no flourish left. Lev still had flourishes. He hadn’t done enough of it yet to lose them.

A comm came through from Verdana. Traffic advisory, supply run inbound, nothing urgent. Lev had been to Verdana twice. The second time was a cryo malfunction. Woman, forty-two, third-gen nerve cluster degradation that the cryo transition had accelerated. Her hands shaking while she signed the discharge. She’d asked him if it would get better and he’d said he didn’t know, which was true, and which was the answer she’d expected, which was why she’d asked him instead of her own bio tech. Sometimes you wanted the honest answer from someone you’d never see again.

He ran the comms check. Frequency sweep, relay handshake, signal integrity. Everything nominal. He ran it again because running it once felt like going through the motions and running it twice felt like. He didn’t have a word for it. Diligence, maybe.

Caro had left a ration pack on Lev’s console. The good kind, the ones with the red label that Caro bought in bulk at Verdana because the standard network-issued packs tasted like they’d been designed by someone who’d lost a bet. Lev hadn’t asked for it. Caro hadn’t mentioned it. It was just there, the way things were just there on the Paran: Caro’s spare socks in the number two storage bin, Lev’s toolkit spread across the mag-table, each piece seated against the hold-surface with that faint tack that let go when you pulled but would pin a loose wrench flat at five g, because Lev always forgot to put it away, the mug that belonged to neither of them and both of them and was always in the wrong chair. Two people in a small ship. You stopped noticing what was whose.

The distress call came in at 0847, already thirty-eight minutes old. The relay had bumped it to priority, which was a judgment call the relay operators made a dozen times a day based on no particular training and no written protocols, because nobody had written protocols for relay operators because nobody had the authority to write protocols for anyone, and so the entire triage system for distress calls across the mid-belt rested on the instincts of whichever volunteer was sitting at the relay console at the time. This was, by any reasonable measure, insane. It also worked about as well as anything else out here.

Audio. A woman’s voice, controlled in a way that was costing her.

“This is Mara’s Prospect, identifier MP-7741, requesting network assistance. We have failures in multiple sections. The atmospheric processing is going and we’ve got pressure problems in the forward ring. We are managing but our capacity to manage is.” She stopped. Started over from a different place. “We need help. Requesting any network asset in range.”

Alarms in the background, turned low. Voices. The hum of systems running wrong.

“Eighty-three people. We have a medical person but no rescue, no dedicated. This is Koss, station authority. Please respond.”

He played it again. Koss. She’d said station authority like she’d picked the words up off a shelf and was holding them at arm’s length. Mara’s Prospect. Homestead, mid-belt, captured asteroid.

The network profile was eight years out of date. Population listed at sixty-one, which was twenty-two fewer people than Koss had just reported, which meant the profile was fiction. Modification records for thirty people, most of them founder generation. The rest blank. Orbital elements updated four years ago. A docking configuration that might or might not still exist. No traffic control frequency, which meant they handled their own approaches or they didn’t get many visitors or both. The file was what voluntary recordkeeping looked like at scale: a snapshot from whenever someone had last felt like it, aging into fantasy.

“Caro.”

He was already in the hatch. Awake, or still awake, or whatever the word was for Caro’s relationship with sleep, which Lev had given up mapping.

“Mara’s Prospect. Systems failures. Eighty-three people.”

Caro came forward and read the display. The profile, the position, the distance. He didn’t ask questions.

“Fourteen hours,” Caro said.

Mara’s Prospect was twelve million klicks out, which in the belt counted as close. Closer to the Paran than to Fenn, closer than to anyone else on the coverage map. Eighty-three people on a rock thirteen degrees above the ecliptic, and the nearest rescue asset happened to be in range. The problem wasn’t the twelve million. The problem was the sixty million after that, the leg from Mara’s Prospect to Karsten Platform for resupply, because Mara’s Prospect was thirteen degrees above the ecliptic where nothing else was and Karsten was back down in the plane. The fuel math wasn’t getting there. The fuel math was getting there, working the call, and getting home. Caro was already running it.

Lev put the call on the relay. Any assets closer, flag it. He already knew the answer. The coverage was where the coverage was, and Mara’s Prospect was where the coverage wasn’t, and the protocol said ask anyway so he asked anyway. He didn’t wait for a response. He pulled what approach data existed for Mara’s Prospect, which wasn’t much, and inventoried the med supplies in his head. Patch kits, atmo sealant, portable recycler backup, pharmaceutical basic. Enough for maybe ten people, moderate injuries. There were eighty-three people on that rock and the call had said multiple sections.

The proximity sensor was still in pieces on the console. He looked at it. Pushed the components into a drawer.

Caro put the burn on the main display. Five g for ninety minutes, eleven hours of coast, flip and decelerate on the other end. Fourteen hours and change. Their bodies could sustain five g for weeks. The tank couldn’t, which was why you coasted the middle and saved the mass for when it mattered. Close enough to what Lev wanted, conservative enough that they’d arrive with fuel to maneuver and margin to get home.

“Harness,” Caro said.

Lev checked the seals, the cargo locks, the med bay restraints. The checklist was short on a ship this small. He ran it anyway because checklists were for the days you were sure you didn’t need them.

He strapped in. The harness settled across his chest, the padding shaped into the impression of him by five hundred burns, which was, if he thought about it, a more current record of his body than the biomarker profile he hadn’t updated in four weeks. He didn’t think about it. The grease was still on his hand. His shoulder still caught.

He was going to spend fourteen hours crossing the belt to help eighty-three people whose station was failing, and his own shoulder was out of calibration and his own biomarker check was overdue and his own proximity sensor was in a drawer in pieces.

“Ready,” Lev said.

Caro fired the drive. Five g settled over him. Everything heavier: arms, chest, the breath he pulled in. His cardiovascular mods adjusted in a few heartbeats, pulse and pressure settling, and then it was just weight. His shoulder caught on the harness strap. Ninety minutes of burn, then eleven hours of coast, then the flip and the work.

The Paran crossed the dark toward the next thing that was broken.

Chapter 2: The Burn

The drive cut at ninety minutes and the weight vanished.

Five g to nothing, no taper, no gradient. One second he was pressed into the padding at four hundred kilos and the next he was lifting off the chair, the harness catching him, his stomach doing the thing his vestibular mods were supposed to suppress. They mostly did. Except for that first half-second where the world didn’t have a floor and his body had to be told there wasn’t going to be one for a while.

Then it passed and zero-g was just zero-g.

He unstrapped. The ship sounded different without the drive: the vibration gone, the low hum that had been in his teeth and his joints for ninety minutes, and what was left was the recycler and the electronics and the small thermal ticks of hull panels cooling as the drive heat bled off. Sounds you didn’t hear when the drive was running. Sounds that would be the ship for the next eleven hours.

Caro unstrapped and pushed aft toward the head. He moved the way he always moved in zero-g, hands and contact points, no corrections, no wasted momentum. Lev was good in zero-g. His proprioception mods made him good. Caro was good because he’d been doing it since before his mods knew what they were for.

Lev pulled up Mara’s Prospect on the main display and spread everything the network had across both screens.

The eight-year-old profile. The wrong population count. Thirty modification records, mostly founder generation. The network’s secondary database added trade records: processed organics and volatiles sold to passing ships, small quantities, irregular intervals. A supply manifest from four years ago listed materials purchased from a hauler called the Devi Anand: hull sealant, atmosphere filters, medical basics, a crate of raw biostock for modification maintenance. The kind of list a functioning homestead would produce. People who knew what they needed and got it when they could and didn’t tell anyone about it because nobody asked and nobody had the right to ask.

The asteroid was designated 1997 QR-4, about 800 meters on its long axis, carbonaceous, claimed by the Koss family. High-inclination orbit, thirteen degrees above the ecliptic, which explained a lot. Thirteen degrees didn’t sound like much until you calculated what it meant in three dimensions: the asteroid spent most of its orbit above or below the main belt plane where the traffic was, the depots were, the other stations were. The nearest supply point was Karsten Platform, and Karsten was four days away at a reasonable burn. The nearest anything else was farther. You didn’t end up on a rock like that by accident. You ended up there because you wanted to be where nobody else was.

The structural diagram on file was from the original claim: the founder’s blueprint, what she’d planned to build when she was twenty-three and carving the first corridor with a rebuilt boring laser. Two and a half generations of expansion would have made this diagram a guide to the station’s core, maybe. Everything built since would be whatever they’d needed, in whatever order, from whatever was available.

He sent a message toward Mara’s Prospect. Network rescue, two aboard, ETA approximately twelve hours, advise on current status and docking approach.

“Forty seconds,” Caro said, without looking up from the structural diagram. Light-speed delay at this range. Maybe forty-five.

Forty seconds came and went. Then a minute. Then five. Lev checked the signal path, checked the relay, checked the frequency. The message had gone out clean, direct transmission, no relay bounce. Mara’s Prospect was receiving. They just weren’t answering.

Caro came back and pulled himself into the second chair. Read the display without touching anything. The profile, the records, the diagram. His eyes stopped on the population count. Eighty-three people on a station whose profile listed sixty-one, eight years out of date. He looked at the number for longer than Caro looked at anything.

“Lot of people for a rock that far out,” he said. Then, after a pause that wasn’t about the forward ring: “Profile’s eight years cold.”

He didn’t say what he was thinking. Lev had never seen that particular stillness in Caro before. It passed.

“Forward ring,” he said.

“What about it.”

“That’s where they expand. New construction, added on. It’s always the newest section.” He looked at the structural diagram, traced the founder’s layout with his eyes. “This is the core. Maybe the first two sections. Everything forward of that is whatever they built after.”

“So we won’t know the layout.”

“We won’t know the layout.”

Caro looked at the display for a while. Then: “They waited before the call. Two, three days.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s what you do.”

Lev had been thinking the same thing. Koss had said we are managing. You didn’t say you were managing unless you’d been managing long enough for the managing to be the problem. The atmospheric processing was going, not gone. The pressure problem was in the forward ring, not everywhere. Those were words from someone who’d watched something develop and hoped it would stop and it didn’t.

Caro looked at the display a while longer after that.

The modification records were the practical problem. Thirty profiles, founder generation, describing the modification suites those people had carried when they came out here. Cardiovascular reinforcement levels. Skeletal density targets. Radiation hardening. Cryo tolerance. Each profile a blueprint for a body, and each blueprint two and a half generations out of date.

The bodies on Mara’s Prospect would not match these blueprints. Modifications passed to children, but not cleanly. Every generation drifted from the specs. What the founders carried and what the third generation carried were related the way a copy of a copy is related to the original: the broad strokes intact, the details shifting.

For a rescue operator, this meant guessing. The protocols said verify the modification profile before treatment, but the distance between a therapeutic dose and a dangerous one was sometimes a question of parentage. Without profiles, you read the body in front of you. Pulse, skin color, reflexes, the densities you could feel through the tissue. You built a rough profile from what the body told you and treated off that. The protocols had been written by people with complete files.

A response came from Koss forty minutes later. Forty minutes, for a signal that should have taken less than one. Audio, brief, the same controlled voice he’d heard in the distress call.

“Paran, we copy. Dock 2, ventral approach, standard orientation. Forward ring is sealed, we’ve pulled everyone aft. Atmospheric processing is on bypass. Situation is holding. We’ll have someone meet you at the lock. Please use the approach we’ve provided. Thank you for responding.”

Situation is holding. She was still managing. But the response had taken forty minutes and it sounded like it had taken thirty seconds. Every word placed. The docking instructions, the sealed sections, the approach, all of it laid out like terms, not a request. It sounded like the end of a conversation he hadn’t been part of.

Lev read it as composure. A station chief running an emergency, taking the time to prepare a precise response. Caro was looking at the timestamp. Forty minutes. His face was doing something Lev couldn’t read, which was unusual, because Caro’s face didn’t usually do anything at all.

He prepped the med bay. In zero-g, everything that would need to be reachable under variable gravity had to be secured: trauma kit, pharmaceutical rack, splints, sealant, the portable diagnostic that could give him a rough cardiovascular read in thirty seconds. He checked the diagnostic’s calibration. Checked it again, because the people he’d be pointing it at didn’t have profiles and the diagnostic’s best guess was going to be the only guess he had.

Caro prepped the approach kit. EVA suits, patch materials, portable atmosphere, cutting tools. He moved through the storage compartments with the efficiency of someone who’d packed for a hundred calls and unpacked after ninety-seven of them without using half of what he’d brought.

When the prep was done, Caro heated two ration packs and handed one to Lev without asking what he wanted. He’d picked the garlic rice, which was Lev’s, not Caro’s. Caro preferred the red curry, which tasted less like curry than the garlic rice tasted like garlic, which was saying something. Lev didn’t know when Caro had learned which pack he preferred. He’d never told him. Caro just knew, the way Caro knew which wrench Lev would reach for next or when Lev had stopped sleeping and started lying in the bunk pretending.

They ate in the cockpit, tethered loosely to their chairs, Mara’s Prospect’s file still on the display and neither of them looking at it. Caro ate his pack methodically, squeeze bottle in one hand, angled to keep the sauce from drifting. The cockpit smelled like garlic and the recycler and the faint ozone of the console fans. They’d done this a hundred times. The pre-call quiet. The hours where the prep was finished and the work hadn’t started and you were just two people in a small ship with nothing left to do about it except eat together and not talk about what was coming. Lev ate his rice.

The hours passed. Lev slept for two of them, or floated in the bunk restraint net and let his body go still and hoped his brain would follow. It didn’t. Zero-g sleep was its own problem: arms drifting up in front of his face, orientation gone, the brain solving problems twelve hours away with data from two and a half generations ago. He lay there until lying there stopped being any kind of rest and then he got up.

He was awake when the nav alarm chimed for the flip. Already strapped in. His neurological mods would keep him sharp regardless, clearing the cortisol, managing the fatigue, keeping his reaction time where it needed to be. This wasn’t free. The mods borrowed against something to do it, ran processes that would eventually show up on the biomarker panel he hadn’t checked in four weeks. But nobody had ever scrubbed a rescue call because their biomarkers were trending in a direction they’d rather not look at. You didn’t check, because checking might tell you something, and knowing might mean not going, and not going wasn’t a thing you did.

The ship rotated. Thrusters fired, the Paran swung 180 degrees on its lateral axis, and the stars tracked slowly across the fogged viewport and stopped. Drive pointed toward where they were going. Nose toward where they’d been.

The drive fired. Five g settled over him again. His shoulder seized under the harness strap. Ninety minutes.

Forty minutes into the deceleration burn, the sensors started resolving Mara’s Prospect. The asteroid first: a dark, irregular shape against the star field, growing on the approach display. Then the station, visible as lights on the surface and clustered at one end. Habitation modules. Docking structures. The glint of sealed viewports. The optical feed sharpened as the distance closed.

Some of the lights were steady. Some were not. A section on the port side, forward of the main cluster, was dark. No lights, no transponder, nothing. The forward ring, if that was the forward ring, wasn’t having pressure problems. It was off.

And adjacent to the dock, toward the dark section, a habitation module that wasn’t sitting right. A few degrees off its mounting against the rock. The kind of displacement that meant something structural had shifted underneath it.

“Caro.”

“I see it.”

The optical sharpened as they closed. The viewports in the dark section were frosted from the inside, ice on the glass. Decompressed. That section wasn’t powered down. It was open.

Koss had said the situation was holding. Maybe it had been, when she’d said it. That was hours ago. A long time for a situation that was already past the point where someone who had never called for help before picked up the comms and asked.

The station grew on the approach display. Lev started the docking checklist.

Chapter 3: Mara’s Prospect

The dock was manual. No guide rails, no automated grapple, just Caro on the approach thrusters lining the Paran up with a clamp that had been rebuilt at least twice from parts that didn’t match each other. The ship shuddered when the clamp engaged. Metal on metal, the sound traveling through the hull, and something in the dock structure groaned under the contact. Lev listened to the groan. Everything a station did was information. This one said the dock’s mounting frame was fatigued, which was probably true of every mounting frame on the station, which was probably something whoever maintained this station knew and had been living with for years, which was probably why they hadn’t wanted anyone here.

The seal pressurized. Green on the board. He checked it against the external pressure reading because green on the board was the dock’s opinion and he wanted his own. The numbers agreed. He trusted the numbers more than the board but less than he would have trusted them on a station whose maintenance history he knew.

Caro set the auto-transmit before they left the cockpit. Standard protocol: you walked onto a stranger’s station, you left a breadcrumb. The Paran would broadcast a status package to the network on a timer. Position, call data, last known conditions. If they didn’t reset it, it sent. The interval was usually twenty-four hours. Caro set it to twelve. He didn’t explain. Lev didn’t ask.

They suited up. Not full EVA. Emergency rigs, sealed, pressure-rated, two hours of independent atmosphere. You didn’t walk onto a station with pressure problems wearing your clothes. The rigs were bulky enough that Lev’s shoulder caught twice getting into his, which he noted and put in the same mental drawer as the biomarker check and the shoulder diagnostic and every other thing about his own body he was going to get to later.

Caro popped the inner lock, then the outer. The air that came through smelled wrong. Not dangerous wrong. Station-in-trouble wrong: the recycler bypass running lean, and underneath it the mineral smell of processed rock that was the station’s bones off-gassing things the primary system would have scrubbed and the bypass wasn’t bothering with. Every carved-out homestead had a rock smell. You usually didn’t notice it. When you noticed it, the atmospheric processing was working harder than it should be or not hard enough.

A woman was at the dock.

She was planted against the grip rail with one hand, the other hanging free in a way that looked relaxed and wasn’t. A man floated behind her. Bigger, younger, arms folded across his chest in a posture that gravity would have made aggressive and near-zero-g made effortful, because he had to brace against the wall to maintain it. He didn’t introduce himself.

“Koss,” she said. “You’re the Paran.”

She’d said we’ll have someone meet you at the lock and the someone was her. She was smaller than her voice had been on comms. Fifties, belt-built, the compact frame and dense joints of second-generation modification and a lifetime in low gravity.

“Harlan. This is Caro.”

Her eyes moved over them. The professional read, fast and automatic. The same assessment Lev was running on her, running on the man behind her, running on everything: the dock, the lighting, the sound of the air system, the temperature through his suit. Everyone sizing everyone up in the first three seconds, all of them pretending they weren’t.

“This way,” she said. “I’ll brief you on the way.”

She led them aft through a main corridor wide enough for two abreast and a cargo pallet, guide rails bolted along both walls at hip height. Past the dock gallery, past the junction nearest the hatch, deeper into the station. The route she’d chosen, the sequence she’d decided on. Systems first. People later. Founder-era construction: sealed rock faced with composite panels, bolted at intervals, the kind of work you did when you had time and materials and believed what you were building would last. Most of the strip lighting worked. A few sections were dim, and the dim ones had been dim for a while. The mounting brackets had that look.

“Atmospheric processing failed thirty-one hours ago,” Koss said. She moved through the corridor without looking back. She knew they’d keep up. “Primary recycler seized. Bearing failure cascaded into the catalytic bed. Breck had the bypass running in forty minutes, which is good, because the alternative was eighty-three people on whatever air was in the sealed sections and that’s maybe four hours.” She indicated the man behind them, who was following at a distance that said escort, not company. “The bypass is running about sixty percent of what we need. It’s holding. It’s not rated for the whole station, so we sealed the forward ring to reduce the volume we’re asking it to handle. That was step one. Step two was moving everyone aft. Step three was calling you, which I did after one and two because I wanted to tell you what we’d already done, not ask you what to do.”

“The forward ring is open,” Lev said.

Koss didn’t slow. “It wasn’t when I sent that message. Secondary seal failed eleven hours ago. We’d already moved everyone aft, which is why nobody was in it when the pressure cascaded through three compartments and the section went to vacuum. The section is open. The equipment in it, including Mirin’s bio lab, is gone. That’s where we are.”

Koss’s face did something when she said the bio lab. Brief. Controlled. Gone before Lev could read it.

“Anyone in it when it went?”

“No. We moved everyone when the primary seal failed.” The flatness in her voice was the flatness of someone who’d been giving this report to herself for eleven hours and had worn through whatever the first version of it had cost her.

The corridor opened into a junction where three passages met. People here. More than the space was built for. Families, equipment, the compression of a community that had retreated into its core and was fitting eighty-three people into the space designed for maybe sixty. Someone had painted the junction wall at some point, years ago. A mural, faded, showing the asteroid from the outside with the station’s lights on it like a constellation. A kid’s work, maybe, or a kid’s work improved by an adult’s hand. It was half-covered by a supply rack now but nobody had painted over it.

A woman was taping a conduit to the ceiling that had pulled loose from its bracket. Two men were running cable along the wall. A girl, maybe nine, was tethered to a handhold by a line clipped to her belt, holding a work light aimed wherever the cable crew pointed. She had the particular focus of a kid who’d been given a real job in a crisis and was going to do it until someone told her to stop. When the cable crew moved to the next section she re-angled the light before they asked, already reading where they’d need it. The cable man reached for a junction box and she’d already shifted the beam to illuminate the connector face, reading the routing pattern, predicting which branch he’d trace next. A nine-year-old tracking electrical topology through a station she’d lived in for her entire life. Lev filed it as belt kids grow up fast. Her free hand was tucked inside her jacket against the cold.

Lev’s eyes moved through the crowd the way they always did. The professional scan, automatic: build, coloring, carriage, how people held themselves in the zero-g. Belt stock, third generation mostly. The adults matched what he’d expect for a homestead population this age. The younger ones, the teenagers and kids, were lighter than his mental model wanted them to be. Not dramatically. Just enough that the number he’d have guessed for their bone density was a few points off from what he was seeing. He filed it. First impressions were unreliable, especially through a suit, especially in a station where everyone had been under stress for thirty-one hours. People looked wrong when they were scared.

Breck was still behind them. Lev was aware of him in the low-level way you tracked someone who hadn’t decided yet whether you were a problem or a solution.

A side corridor branched off to the right, toward what the schematic in his head said should be the lower habitation ring. Koss’s hand hesitated on the rail as they passed it. A half-second grip, maybe less. Her eyes didn’t move but her shoulders did, the faint pull of someone not looking at something. The lights were on. The pressure readout on the hatch frame showed equal atmospheres on both sides. Lev slowed. The corridor was wider than the one they were in, better maintained, and from where he held the rail he could see a second hatch at the far end, closed, with what looked like a keypad lock that didn’t match anything else he’d seen on the station.

Breck was in the gap before Lev caught the next handhold.

“Structural risk past that hatch,” Breck said. “Thermal stress on the framing.” His shoulders were square in the gap and his boots were braced against the frame and he wasn’t moving.

Lev held the look for a second. Then he pushed off and kept moving. Koss, ahead of them, hadn’t turned around. She didn’t need to.

Koss took the left passage. Narrower, newer. The composite panels gave way to bare sealed rock in patches, spray-on sealant that had yellowed with age, conduit runs that were functional and ugly. One section of corridor had been built differently from the rest, the panels thicker, the hatch frame reinforced. Lev read it as storm shelter, maybe. Founder-era caution. The temperature dropped as they moved. The forward ring was leaking cold into the adjacent sections, the rock conducting it, and the thermal management system was losing that fight at a rate Lev could feel through his suit.

“Sixty percent on the bypass,” Koss said, checking a readout on the corridor wall as they passed. “Enough for the aft sections if we keep the volume sealed and the population compressed. I’m planning on thirty-six hours before the filters need servicing, not the forty-eight Breck will tell you.”

“Because?”

“Because Breck is good at his job and optimistic about his equipment in roughly equal measure. I love the man but I plan around his optimism, not with it.”

Behind them, Breck said nothing.

They passed a compartment with the hatch propped open. Inside, someone working at a console surrounded by medical equipment in the kind of dense, organized arrangement you built over fifteen years in a space that was never big enough. She closed something on her console before looking up, a quick gesture, automatic, and then her eyes went to the portable diagnostic clipped to his belt, stayed there for a beat, then came back to his face. She went back to her console.

“Mirin,” Koss said, not slowing. “Medical.”

“I’ll need to talk to her.”

“After the briefing.”

It wasn’t a refusal. It was sequencing. Koss had a sequence, and the order she’d decided on was her briefing first, then the station’s problems, then whatever Lev wanted. He recognized it. The person in charge on site always had a sequence, and fighting that sequence in the first fifteen minutes was a reliable way to lose the next fifteen hours.

Operations was a compartment larger than the corridors, consoles on three walls, a central display showing the station schematic. The founder’s blueprint was there underneath, but what was on the screen was the blueprint plus decades of additions, modifications, expansions, patches. A station that had been designed once and then redesigned by everyone who’d lived in it since. Half the schematic was red. The forward ring and the three compromised compartments. The aft sections were green, except for two amber sections where something was holding but stressed.

Koss pulled herself to the main console and brought up the detail. “Here’s what we have.”

She walked them through it. The primary recycler: a unit rebuilt at least three times from whatever components were available, running to specifications that had drifted from the original because the manufacturer didn’t exist anymore and the specs had been adapted by whoever rebuilt it last, which was Breck, who’d done it well but well for this recycler meant well for the version of the recycler that existed after three rebuilds with non-original parts, which was not the machine the maintenance manual described. The manual described a machine that hadn’t existed in maybe twenty years. The intake bearing had failed. Lev’s hands remembered the bearing race on the platform, the housing that was out of true, the mount that had shifted. Different bearing, different station, same sentence. The seizure had cascaded into the catalytic bed, which was damaged in a way that couldn’t be fixed here.

“Bypass will hold,” Breck said. First words since the dock. His voice was aimed at the space between Lev and Koss. “I built it twelve years ago. Tested it every year. Serviced it on a schedule I keep in my head and on paper because the station’s digital logs corrupted twice in the last decade and I don’t trust them. It has never run as primary for more than four hours because the primary has never failed this badly, because I maintained the primary. The bypass is doing a job it wasn’t designed for and it’s doing it because I built it right.”

“For how long?” Lev said.

“Forty-eight hours on the filters before servicing. After that I clean them and we go again. You want to know what happens when the filters can’t be cleaned anymore, I’ll tell you: I’ll figure something out. That’s what I do here.”

Koss let him finish. She’d heard the speech before. It was Breck’s speech and he gave it when someone questioned his work, which was what Lev’s presence on the station implicitly did. She moved on.

The structural problem was the other front. The displaced habitation module they’d seen on approach. The mounting bolts had stressed when the rock shifted from thermal contraction after the forward ring lost its heat. A seal between the module and the rock face had cracked. Breck had patched it. The patch was holding.

“But the rock’s still cooling,” Lev said.

“The rock’s still cooling,” Koss confirmed. “The displacement is maybe two degrees off true. If the thermal profile keeps changing, it’ll keep shifting. If it shifts past what the patch can absorb, we lose that section.”

“And the section adjacent to it.”

“And the section adjacent to it.”

Two clocks. The bypass filters, thirty-six hours and counting. The structural patch, unknown. Both downstream of the forward ring breach, which was downstream of the primary recycler failure, which was downstream of a bearing that had been rebuilt from whatever was available because the original parts didn’t exist, which was the kind of causal chain that Lev had seen on fifty stations and would see on fifty more because this was how things failed in the belt: one component at a time, each failure revealing the next thing that had been holding on by slightly less than anyone thought.

“The filters I can service and extend your window,” Lev said. “Probably double the time if they’re not scored. The structural patch is the priority. If that seal goes before the thermal situation stabilizes, the volume math for the bypass stops working.”

Koss nodded. She’d run this calculation already. She’d run it hours ago.

“Caro.”

Caro had been at the edge of the compartment, reading the schematic slowly, completely, without asking anyone to explain what he was looking at. He’d grown up on a station like this one. The layout, the jury-rigged additions, the places where the construction changed quality because the materials had changed or the person doing the work had changed or the urgency had changed. Native fluency.

“The mount,” Caro said. He was looking at where the displaced module met the rock. “I need to see it. Welding kit. Whatever stock you have.”

“That’s my welding kit,” Breck said. Not loud. Just said. “My stock. My station. You’ve been aboard twenty minutes and you want my tools.”

“I want to fix your mount,” Caro said. Same flat tone. Not a challenge. A fact.

“I can fix my own mount.”

“You’re running the bypass,” Caro said. “You can’t be in two places.”

Breck looked at Koss. The residue of an argument that had ended before Lev and Caro docked. Breck had lost it. He knew it. Koss knew he knew it.

“Breck will take you,” Koss said. “Show him the stock, show him the mount, and then get back to the filters. That’s the sequence.”

“Fine,” Breck said. He pushed off toward the hatch.

Caro followed him out without a word.

Lev pulled the station schematic to his portable display and started marking. Bypass recycler, structural patch, sealed sections, population distribution. The amber zones on the schematic, where systems were stressed but holding. The locations of the emergency equipment Koss had mentioned, the sealed hatches, the pressure readouts he’d want to monitor. Eighty-three people in sixty percent of a station. The math was tight. Not crisis tight, not yet. The kind of tight where nothing was failing but nothing had room to fail, and if one element slipped the margins didn’t shrink, they disappeared.

He needed to talk to Mirin. He needed whatever she had on the population’s medication profiles, their modification baselines, their health history. If this went past thirty-six hours and people started showing stress responses, he needed to know which pharmaceuticals were safe for which bodies, and right now the only person with that information was the woman in the compartment they’d walked past, who had looked at him the way a clinician looks at a variable she hasn’t accounted for.

“The forward ring has equipment we need,” Koss said. She was watching him work. “Fabrication tools. Mirin’s bio lab. If the structural situation stabilizes, we’ll need to recover what we can.”

The bio lab. In the section that was open to vacuum.

“One thing at a time,” Lev said.

Koss looked at him. She didn’t say anything to that. She didn’t need to. The look was thirty-one hours of one-thing-at-a-time and the things kept adding up faster than she could get to them.

Lev checked the atmospheric readout on his portable. Pulled the bypass numbers, the temperature gradient, the pressure differentials across the sealed hatches. Oriented himself on the schematic. Found the route to Mirin’s compartment.

Two fronts. Caro was already gone.

He went to find Mirin.

Behind him, in the corridor outside operations, Breck was watching him go.

Chapter 4: Triage

Mirin’s compartment was three meters by four. Shelves bolted to the rock walls, labeled in her handwriting, everything reachable without looking. A diagnostic suite older than the one Lev carried but maintained with a discipline he could see from the hatch: calibration stickers current, cables organized. A refrigeration unit humming in the corner, medications stored at temperature. Fifteen years of a clinician building a workspace to fit her hands. But there was a sample centrifuge wedged between the chair mount and the wall because there was nowhere else for it. A rack of culture dishes on the medication shelf, pushed in front of the antibiotics. A microscope clamped to the counter with its power cable running to a splitter she’d rigged from the diagnostic suite. The things you’d find in a lab, except the lab had been in the forward ring when the pressure blew through three compartments on its way to zero.

He popped his helmet before he went in. The aft sections were holding pressure and he couldn’t work a diagnostic through a visor.

She was entering data when he came in. Logging something from the crisis, keeping her records current, because the moment you stopped was the moment it mattered.

“I need your medication profiles,” Lev said. “Modification baselines. Whatever you have on the population.”

“I know what you need.” She finished her entry. Saved it. Turned to face him. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Treat people.”

“My people.”

“Your people.”

She looked at the diagnostic on his belt. Closer now than in the corridor. She was reading the model, the calibration date, the wear on the housing.

“That’s a Veris 4,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“The Veris 4 has a sixty-percent accuracy rate on third-gen cardiovascular profiles.” A specification, not a complaint. “Higher on second-gen. Lower on anything adjusted.”

“I know what it does.”

“So you know it’s going to guess.”

“It’s going to guess. And then I’m going to look at the person and guess better. That’s the job.”

She turned to a second console on the shelf behind her. Pulled a transfer cable from a drawer, plugged one end into the console and held the other out for his portable. On every station Lev had worked, patient records synced. You pulled them to your diagnostic and they were there. Mirin was handing him a cable.

The transfer took a few seconds. What landed on his portable was organized and incomplete. Medication profiles, dosage histories, flagged cases. Fifteen years of patient data built from observation because the automated systems assumed standardized populations and Mara’s Prospect had stopped being standardized a generation ago. It was good data. It was also clearly a subset. The file indices jumped. Whole categories present on her end that hadn’t come across.

“The adults are mostly stable,” she said. “Second and third gen, standard belt profiles with my adjustments. I can tell you what works on whom. Most of the pharmaceuticals in your kit are safe at standard doses.” She glanced at his supplies, cataloging. “The children are different.”

He waited.

“The children I’d want to dose myself. Or at least be consulted.”

“Why?”

“Because their profiles are mine. I built them from observation, not from a spec sheet. I know what I adjusted and why, and I know that a standard second-gen pain protocol on one of my kids will probably overshoot because their metabolisms run faster than the profiles suggest. I’ve been tracking it for years. The metabolic rates, the clearance times, the way they respond to standard dosages versus what I’ve calibrated for them specifically. It’s not one number. It’s fourteen different kids with fourteen different response curves that I’ve built by hand from watching what happens when I give them medication and measuring what their bodies actually do with it.”

“How much faster?”

“Depends on the kid. Twenty percent on some. Forty on others. I can’t tell you exactly why the range is that wide. I have theories. I don’t have a lab anymore to test them.”

Forty percent. On a child, that was the distance between a therapeutic dose and respiratory depression.

“We work together,” Lev said. “You dose the children. I handle adults with your profiles. Anything I don’t recognize, I call you.”

“Fine.”

She walked him through the flagged cases while he scrolled.

“Three adults with cardiovascular complications. Stress-induced, manageable, dosages are in there. Two flags. Sera Tahl, sixteen, red flag. Her cortisol clearance triggers a secondary cardiac pathway that shouldn’t exist. You give her a standard anxiolytic and her resting heart rate drops to forty and stays there. I spent two years mapping that pathway. The dosage in the file accounts for it.”

He scrolled to the red flag. Mirin’s notes ran three pages, handwritten entries converted to text, six dated adjustments over two years. Each one annotated with the reaction, the correction, and what she’d learned. The last entry said: cortisol-linked cardiac suppression confirmed. Standard anxiolytic contraindicated. Use modified protocol attached. Do not deviate.

“The other flag is Dol Vasik. Sixties. His radiation hardening is degrading and his body is using the inflammatory markers to regulate cardiac output. I found this out six years ago when I gave him a standard anti-inflammatory and his blood pressure dropped to sixty over thirty.” She said this flat. Clinical history delivered at the speed of someone who’d been the only qualified audience for her own work for fifteen years. “You suppress the inflammation, you suppress the cardiac regulation. The file has a pain protocol that works around it.”

The detail existed in Mirin’s head and in those files and nowhere else. If she’d been in the forward ring when the pressure blew, this man’s cardiac regulation would have become a mystery again.

He got the shape of her system and moved.

The bypass recycler was in a utility compartment on the aft deck, bolted to the rock wall with brackets that had been welded, re-welded, and reinforced with cargo straps. Lev opened the filter housing.

He stopped.

The housing was built for Kanto-series filters, a standard size across most recycler systems in the belt. The filters inside were smaller. Different seal profile. He looked at the gap between the filter edge and the housing wall. Machined rings filled it, adapter sleeves bridging the size difference, seated with clean welds and proper sealing compound. Good work. Someone who cared about the fit. He ran his finger along the inner face of the nearest adapter. Smooth. Polished, almost. Whoever had made these had finished them like precision parts.

He pulled the first filter out of the housing and turned it over.

The loading wasn’t even. One edge was dark with particulate, dense and packed into the media. It tapered across the face in a clean gradient, heaviest where the airflow entered the cant, lightest on the opposite side. Not the random mottling of a filter wearing out. A pattern. Organized.

He looked at the adapter ring again. At the smooth bore. At the bypass recycler running at reduced volume, pulling air at a fraction of the velocity the system was designed for.

At full capacity, with the right filters, none of this mattered. High velocity meant turbulent flow. Turbulent flow meant chaotic mixing at the filter face. Particulate hit the media everywhere, the surface loaded evenly, and the filter’s rated life was its actual life. That was what the housing was designed for. That was what Breck’s forty-eight hours assumed.

But the bypass wasn’t running at full capacity. It was pulling at maybe forty percent. Lower velocity. Lower Reynolds number. And the adapters, the good adapters, the precision-machined, smooth-bore adapters that someone had spent a sleepless night getting right, were acting as flow straighteners. The air wasn’t tumbling through the housing. It was organizing. Settling into layers. Hitting the canted filter face in a laminar sheet that loaded one edge and starved the other.

He checked the second filter. Same gradient. Third. Same.

The loaded edge of each filter had maybe twenty hours left. The light edge had days of capacity it would never use. Breck’s forty-eight hours was the right math on the wrong assumption. The filters weren’t dying uniformly. They were dying at the edge, and when that edge clogged, the filter was done.

He clipped the filters to the deck grid and looked at the adapters still seated in the housing. Smooth bore. Clean welds. The problem wasn’t that they were bad parts. The problem was that they were too good.

A woman appeared at the hatch. Thirties, belt-built, hands already out. She read the filters clipped to the grid and the open housing and came in.

“Koss sent me,” she said. “I’m on atmospheric.”

“The adapters. Breck made these?”

“Yeah. The right filters haven’t been available for about two years.”

“Where’d these come from?”

“A freighter scrapping out near Hygiea. Breck bought what they had.”

“Dahl,” she said. She had a tremor in her left hand that didn’t slow her down, her right hand picking up the motion her left dropped.

“He machined these at two in the morning,” Dahl said, tapping an adapter ring. “Couldn’t sleep. Said the housing was keeping him up thinking about it. Koss found him in the shop with the lathe running and his dinner pouch still clipped to the bench.” She looked at the gradient on the filter in Lev’s hand. “That’s not even.”

“No.” Lev held up the filter so she could see the taper. “The adapters are too smooth. At bypass rates, the flow organizes instead of mixing. The cant does the rest.”

She looked at the adapter, then at the filter, then back. Working it through. “So at full capacity it wouldn’t matter.”

“At full capacity with the right filters, nothing about this matters. But we don’t have either.”

He unclipped the multitool from his belt. Opened the file. Dahl watched him set the edge against the smooth inner face of the first adapter ring.

“What are you doing?”

“Breaking up the flow.” He scored a line across the polished surface. Then another, crossing it. Rough crosshatching, deliberate, cutting into the finish Breck had put on the part. “The turbulence has to come from somewhere. If the flow won’t do it, the surface has to.”

Dahl was quiet for a moment. “He spent three hours on each of those.”

“I know.”

He scored the second adapter. The file bit into the smooth metal and left ragged lines. It looked like vandalism. It was the opposite of everything the machining represented, the care, the precision, the sleepless hours getting the fit right. He scored the third.

When all the adapters were roughed he re-seated the filters, flipped to put the lighter side into the flow. The rotation would buy some time on its own. The scoring would buy more. The turbulence from the roughened surface would break up the laminar sheet before it hit the media, spread the particulate across the full face, and let the filters wear the way they were designed to wear.

He closed the housing and checked the output. Sixty-nine percent. Up from sixty. The rotated filters putting fresh media into the flow, the roughened adapters spreading the load across the full face instead of burning one edge. The filters would load evenly now, and evenly meant the full surface was working, and the full surface working meant Breck’s rated life was closer to right.

He found Koss in the junction corridor, directing two people reinforcing a hatch seal while monitoring a pressure readout on her portable. She saw him and her face did the math before he spoke.

“The filters were loading unevenly. The way they were, maybe twenty hours. I fixed the distribution and rotated them. Forty hours now, maybe forty-two.”

Koss’s expression didn’t change, but her eyes did. Breck had told her forty-eight. Twenty was a number she hadn’t planned for. Forty was a number she could use.

She was quiet for a moment. Recalculating. Not just the filters but everything downstream of the filters: the work schedule, the evacuation threshold, the structural repair timeline. Every plan she’d made today had forty-eight hours built into it.

She turned back to the hatch seal.

He moved through the aft sections. The community was working. Nobody idle, nobody waiting. A man patching a cable run. Two women reorganizing supply storage to clear corridor space. A teenager hauling water containers to the compartments where families had compressed. Koss had set the work up and the people were doing it with the competence of a community that had been solving its own problems since before the rescue network knew they existed.

He treated people. Checked vitals, read the diagnostic, cross-referenced Mirin’s profiles, adjusted dosages, moved on. A woman with elevated blood pressure, standard for the stress, treated and cleared. A man whose headache turned out to be dehydration because he’d been working the cable runs for ten hours and forgotten to drink.

A man in his forties with a hand tremor that had started that morning. Stress-induced, probably, but the Veris 4 flagged a cardiovascular irregularity underneath it. He checked Mirin’s file, adjusted the blood pressure protocol, watched the tremor settle. The man nodded once and went back to hauling cable.

A teenager next, sixteen maybe. She’d taken a laceration helping move equipment when the forward ring blew. Mirin had sealed the cut, but the girl was scared. Elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, wide pupils. She looked like a sixteen-year-old whose home was falling apart, which she was. He almost moved on. Then he ran the diagnostic anyway, because he was here and the diagnostic was in his hand and you checked.

Mirin was in the corridor. Making rounds of her own, checking on her people while Lev checked on his patients. She saw him with the girl and came over without being asked.

The cardiovascular numbers were wrong. He looked at them for a few seconds longer than he usually looked at anything. Heart rate variability was low, which made sense for someone scared. But low in a specific way that didn’t match the fear response. Fear had a signature. Elevated heart rate, yes, but the variability pattern was rhythmic, the body’s stress system doing what stress systems did, ramping up and regulating in cycles. The body scared but managing.

This wasn’t that. The heart rate variability was flat. The modification-enhanced cardiovascular regulation that should have been there, underneath the fear, smoothing the stress response, keeping the cycle running, wasn’t engaging at all. He pulled Mirin’s profile on the girl. The profile said the regulation should be there.

“Fear response,” Mirin said, reading the numbers from the hatch. “Heart rate’s up, variability’s down. She’s scared.”

“The variability isn’t fear.” He turned the portable so Mirin could see the waveform. “Fear is elevated but cyclic. The stress system engages and the regulation modulates it. You get peaks and recovery, peaks and recovery. This is flat. The regulation pathway isn’t being overwhelmed by the fear response. It’s absent. It’s not engaging at all.”

Mirin looked at the waveform. She looked at it for a while.

“Show me her file,” Lev said.

“The regulation pathway is documented. I’ve tracked it since she was twelve. I calibrated her dosages around it.” She didn’t reach for her portable. “It’s supposed to be there.”

“Let me,” Mirin said. She adjusted the calming agent herself. Her dosage, her protocol, calibrated for this specific girl’s specific response curve. She administered it and watched.

The numbers came back. Slowly. The breathing settled. The heart rate dropped. The variability started cycling again, the regulation pathway engaging late, catching up to a demand it should have been meeting all along. The fear was still in the girl’s face but the cardiovascular system was doing what Mirin’s profile said it should do.

“I should have seen that,” Mirin said.

She was still looking at the waveform on Lev’s portable. The flat section before the regulation kicked in. She looked at it the way Lev had looked at the filter gradient, recognizing a pattern she hadn’t been looking for. Then she closed the file on her portable and moved to her next patient.

An older woman with a bronchial cough from the bypass air quality. Three others with the same symptom. All within Mirin’s profiles. All manageable. All requiring the dose adapted from standard.

He was adjusting on every patient. Each body drifting from the standard in its own direction, the way you’d expect from a population maintaining itself with limited resources over decades. One in five would need adjustment on a station with current profiles. Here it was every one.

A boy, maybe seven, with a cough from the bypass air. Lev ran the diagnostic and called Mirin over. She looked at the numbers, pulled up her profile on the boy. “Bronchodilator at forty percent standard,” she said. Forty percent. He administered it. The cough settled.

A girl, ten or eleven, not coughing but listless. Low energy, pale. He scanned her and the metabolic rate was running high, burning fuel her body didn’t have. Mirin checked her file. “She needs calories, not medication. Her metabolism runs about thirty percent above what your diagnostic thinks is normal.” She handed the girl a ration pack from her pocket. Carried them for this.

Another boy, younger, five or six. Fever. Lev’s diagnostic said treat it. Mirin shook her head. “His baseline runs hot. Thirty-eight is his normal. Thirty-nine is a fever. Your machine thinks thirty-seven-five is a fever because your machine doesn’t know him.”

Every child Mirin adjusted, she adjusted down. The metabolisms running high, the cardiovascular baselines elevated, the temperature set points shifted up. Every adult Lev treated drifted in its own direction, random, individual. The children all drifted the same way.

He didn’t have enough to call it a pattern. He filed it.

The comm from Caro came while Lev was checking the pressure differentials across the aft hatches. Caro’s voice was flat. The situation had stopped being a problem and become a schedule.

“Mount bolts are failing. Two of six cracked. Displacement is still moving.”

“How long?”

“Six hours. Maybe eight.”

He checked the atmospheric readout on his portable. The bypass had dropped to fifty-eight percent. Down from sixty-nine that morning. The filters were loading evenly now but the media itself was degrading under sustained load, breaking down faster than he’d projected. His forty hours were closer to thirty-five. If the structural patch failed and they lost the adjacent section, the bypass volume dropped by a third and thirty-five became something he didn’t want to calculate in a corridor where people could see his face.

The margin he’d spent the morning building was gone.

Chapter 5: 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.

Chapter 6: 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.

Chapter 7: Afterward

The thermal differential stabilized. 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 had improved. Everything had stopped getting worse. In rescue work, that was enough.

He told Koss. She listened the way she’d listened to everything since the recycler seized, absorbing the numbers, filing them into the plan she was already rebuilding.

“The bypass will hold for now,” he said. “The filters need replacing, not servicing. The ones you have are wrong spec and the media is degrading under load. You need Kanto-series, proper fit, no adapters. And the recycler itself needs a full rebuild. New catalytic bed, new bearings, new intake assembly. What Breck has been maintaining is three rebuilds past the point where maintenance means anything.”

“I know what we need,” Koss said.

“You need to update your network profile. Current population, current modification records, current systems status. So the next crew that comes has something to work with instead of a file from eight years ago that says sixty-one people.”

She looked at him.

“And you need to let Mirin request the equipment she needs through the network. Microscopy, culture media, sampling kits. She’s been maintaining eighty-two people’s modification profiles without a lab since the forward ring blew and without proper equipment for longer than that.”

“I know what Mirin needs.”

“Then let her ask for it.”

Koss turned back to her console. She wasn’t going to update the profile. She wasn’t going to open the station to network scrutiny. He knew it while he was saying it. She knew he knew it. The conversation was a formality between two people who understood what the other would do and couldn’t change it.

He left operations. Made it about three handholds into the corridor.

Then he stopped moving.

Not deliberately. His body made the decision. He was in the corridor outside operations, one hand on a grip rail, and he was done because his arms had decided they were done and the rail was what kept him from drifting. His suit was still sealed from the crawl. He popped the helmet. The air was worse than yesterday. Thinner. The coughing he could hear from the junction was more common now, not just the bronchial cases.

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 hooked his feet under the rail across from Lev and went still.

“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 lighting in this corridor had dimmed since yesterday. Nobody had fixed it. Nobody was going to.

“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. They need parts.”

“Supply run.”

“Supply run.”

Neither of them moved. The conversation had been what it needed to be: inventory, assessment, count. One. The logistics would wait for them to let go of the rail.

The Veris 4 blinked its biomarker prompt at him. He snoozed it.

He pushed off the rail. His shoulder caught. He shifted through it.

“I need to get to the Paran,” Caro said. “Reset the auto-transmit.”

“I’ll come.”

They headed for the dock. 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, netted to a storage crate. A woman Lev didn’t know was organizing the crate, sorting packs by type, making sure people took something. She looked up when he approached and handed him one without a word, the way the woman on the platform had poured him coffee. He looked at the pack. She’d given him the good kind, the one with the red label. He didn’t know how she knew.

He ate it moving. Two children were tethered near the crate, sharing a pack between them, one of them talking quietly about something that had nothing to do with the station or the crisis. The other one laughed. It was a small sound in a corridor full of small sounds and Lev heard it clearly.

The dock hatch was sealed.

Lev looked at it. Tried the manual release. Locked. He checked the pressure readout on the frame. Equal on both sides.

Breck was in the corridor behind them. Working on a junction box near the dock passage, or positioned near the dock passage, one of the two.

“Pressure equalization,” Breck said without looking up. “The dock section atmosphere needs balancing after the forward ring event. Standard.”

The dock section atmosphere had been fine when they’d boarded. The seal had been green. The numbers had agreed. That was yesterday.

“How long?” Lev said.

“Overnight. Maybe longer. Depends on the differential.”

Caro was looking at the hatch. He didn’t say anything.

Lev needed to file his call report. Standard protocol: reports went through the ship’s comms array, independent of the station. The Paran’s array was behind a sealed hatch. The station’s comms were in operations, routed through Koss.

He filed through the station.

The call report was clinical. Damage assessment, actions taken, resources used, systems status. One casualty. Nika Vasik, age nine. Third-generation modification failure under environmental stress, enhanced alveolar transfer pathway non-responsive. Resuscitation attempted. Unsuccessful. He included the clinical data from her diagnostic because the report required it.

Koss was at the console when he filed. She looked at the screen.

“We review external reports,” she said. “Station policy.”

She read it. Her eyes moved through the damage assessment, the structural status, the atmospheric numbers. Then they stopped. She read a section again. He couldn’t see which one from where he sat. She read it a third time.

She handed the portable back. “Fine.”

The report went out through station comms.

He found Caro in the corridor outside the dock. Caro was hooked to a rail near the hatch, arms crossed, watching it.

“Two families moved closer to the dock last night,” Caro said. Flat. “I saw them when I came through this morning. Bedrolls, bags. Closer to the dock than they’d been.”

Lev waited.

“Then the dock is sealed.”

Lev waited.

Caro was quiet for a while. Then, quieter than his usual quiet: “My mother’s station. Before she moved us. There was a place near us. Far out. Kept to themselves. Profile hadn’t been updated in years.” He looked at the sealed hatch. “People came. Afterward the station was empty.”

Lev heard it. He was exhausted, he’d held a girl while she died, and the words landed in a place he didn’t have room for them. But he heard them.

“Caro.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you saying?”

Caro looked at him. The flatness was there but underneath it was something Lev had never seen. “I’m saying the dock is sealed and the pressure is fine on both sides.”

He passed a compartment where a man was sitting alone. Not working. Not sleeping. Strapped into 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. Fen Vasik. Nika’s father. He kept moving.

The station was quiet in the way that follows a death. People were talking less. Moving slower. A woman in the corridor had stopped mid-task, anchored to a bracket with a sealant gun in her hand, not using it, not putting it down. After a moment, the man working next to her put his hand on her shoulder. Didn’t say anything. She looked at him and then went back to the sealant.

Lev went to check the structural readouts. Routine. The mount, the thermal differential, the reinforcements Caro and Breck had put in. The monitoring he’d set up was feeding operations, but he wanted to see the mount himself. Trust the instruments, verify with eyes. That was the job.

The service corridor adjacent to the mount was cold. The reinforcements were holding. Caro’s strap anchors, Breck’s secondary anchors over the top. He ran his hand along each one, checking the tension, the seating, the welds.

The third anchor. He stopped.

A line scored into the metal. Clean. Even. Cut with a tool, not stress. Stress fractures were jagged, irregular, the metal tearing along grain boundaries. This was precise. Deliberate. Scored in exactly the right place to create a failure point under lateral stress. When the thermal differential shifted, and it was still shifting, the anchor would fail. The mount would go. The section would open. And Caro worked in this section.

He’d seen this precision before. The adapter rings in the filter housing. The smooth bore Breck had polished at two in the morning. Three hours per ring. The same hands. The same care applied to a different purpose.

He stared at the scoring for a long time. Then he pulled the multitool from his belt, opened the torque driver, and re-secured the anchor. Reinforced the mounting with a cross-bolt from his patch kit. Quietly.

He pulled himself back to operations.

Koss was at the console. The schematic on the display. She was making notes. Planning. The living-in-what-came-next. She looked up when he came in.

“I fixed a strap anchor on the mount,” he said. “Someone scored it. Clean line, right tool, right placement. The kind of work Breck does.”

Koss’s hands stopped on the console.

“I know what it is,” Lev said. “I know what it’s for. If the thermal differential had shifted two more degrees the anchor fails and the section opens and my partner is in it. Network report says structural failure on an under-maintained homestead. Tragic. No questions.”

Koss looked at him. Her face was doing the calculation he’d watched her do since he arrived. Resources, risks, options. Except now the calculation was about him.

“I held your girl while she died.” His voice was level. He could hear the level in it and how much it was costing. “I crawled through your station to reach her. I patched your section. I rerouted your bypass. I fixed your filters. I treated your people. I held your girl while she died and she asked me to stay and I stayed and she died anyway. And you’re killing my partner.”

Koss didn’t speak.

“Your mount is two degrees off true. Every seal on this station was set for an equilibrium that doesn’t exist anymore. Your filters are wrong spec and your bypass is running a distance event it was built for a sprint. Breck is one person. In six months, maybe a year, something else goes. And you call. And nobody comes. Because the last crew that answered didn’t come back.”

He stopped. Breathed. The anger was there and it was the coldest thing he’d ever felt and he was not going to let it be the thing that spoke.

“I know what I’ve seen in your children. The dosage adjustments that all trend the same way. The cardiovascular regulation that isn’t where it should be. The thermostat in the children’s quarters set to eight degrees. A nine-year-old at two degrees who wasn’t cold. I’ve seen it. And I’m not going to report it. I have no reason to. The network has no authority and I have no interest in sending people to a station I just bled for.”

“You get to leave,” Koss said. “We don’t.”

“I’m asking you to trust that I’ll come back. Because you’re going to need someone to come back. And if I’m dead, it probably won’t be anyone.”

Koss was quiet for a long time. The schematic on the display behind her, half red. The station she’d been running since before Lev was born, built by her grandmother, maintained by Breck, kept alive by Mirin. Eighty-two people in a rock, hiding from whatever had emptied the last place like this.

She looked at the scoring tool marks on his hands where he’d re-secured the anchor. She looked at his face. She looked at the schematic.

She didn’t say anything. She turned back to the console. But she didn’t go back to her notes. She sat there, looking at the schematic, and Lev left her with it.

The junction was dimmer than yesterday. The air was worse. A man coughed, then a woman, then a child. The bypass at forty-nine percent scrubbing air for eighty-two people who were breathing and coughing and living in what was left.

At the far end of the junction, a girl was asleep against the wall. Maybe six. She’d pulled a thermal blanket around her shoulders but her arms were outside it, bare, relaxed. The adults near her were huddled. She was comfortable. Eight degrees, and the girl sleeping like it was home.

He found Caro at the dock. Still sealed. Caro was sitting against the wall next to the hatch he couldn’t open, running something on his portable. He looked up when Lev came around the corner. Read his face.

“What happened?”

Lev hooked into the rail across from him. The same position from earlier. Rail, wall, corridor, the two of them.

“Someone scored one of your strap anchors on the mount. A line cut into the metal with a tool. If the thermal differential had shifted, the anchor fails and the section opens.”

Caro’s face didn’t change. The flatness held. But his hands on the portable went still.

“The dock is sealed,” Caro said. “The auto-transmit is at.” He checked the timer on his portable. “Three hours.”

Three hours. If they couldn’t reset it, the Paran would broadcast their position and call data to the network. Someone would know they were here and not responding. Questions would follow. That was either their protection or the thing that forced the station’s hand.

“Koss knows I found the anchor,” Lev said. “I told her.”

“And?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

Caro looked at the sealed dock hatch. He looked at the corridor. He looked at Lev.

“So we wait,” Caro said.

“We wait.”

They stayed in the corridor outside operations. Took turns. Caro hooked to the rail with his eyes open while Lev clipped into a tether and closed his. His shoulder had seized into something specific, a hot wire from the joint into the neck. The station made its sounds around them. The bypass. The coughing. The rock settling into its new shape.

Lev stared at the rock and listened and didn’t sleep.

Breck came through the corridor sometime before dawn. He didn’t look at them. He went to the dock hatch, entered a code, and unsealed it. The hatch opened. The dock atmosphere was fine. It had always been fine. Breck pushed off and was gone.

They went through to the Paran. Caro checked the auto-transmit first. The timer had hit zero four hours ago. The broadcast had gone out: position, call data, last known conditions. Somewhere in the network, a relay had logged that the Paran was docked at Mara’s Prospect and not responding. Caro reset it without comment.

Lev floated in the cockpit and let the ship settle around him. The gray panels. The fogged viewport. The console dark except for the standby lights. After everything, it was good to be home.

Caro came forward and sat in the pilot’s seat. Lev sat in the other one. The padding took his shoulder and the hot wire eased from sharp to dull. The harness hung loose. The console was ready. The fuel was there. The burn profile was still loaded from the approach.

“We could just go,” Caro said. He wasn’t looking at Lev. He was looking at the console. “Seal the hatch. Twenty minutes to burn.”

Through the dock viewport, the station. The corridors where someone was coughing. The junction where the air was getting worse. The compartment where Mirin was working with a broken refrigerator and fourteen charts in a drawer. Eighty-two people who hadn’t decided anything except to live here.

“Yeah,” Lev said. “We could.”

They sat in the chairs that fit them and looked at the console and didn’t start the pre-flight.

Chapter 8: Drift

His shoulder was worse. The Paran’s bunk was better than the corridor floor but the crawl had done something the joint wasn’t going to forgive. He lay in the restraint net and felt the hot wire from the neck to the elbow and listened to Caro breathing in the other bunk and thought about twenty minutes to burn and the fact that they hadn’t taken it.

The atmospheric readout on his portable, synced to the station’s sensors, showed forty-seven percent. Down from forty-nine. The filters were still dying. The station was still dying. He got up and went back through the dock.

He did rounds. Not because the station deserved it. Because a woman in the junction was coughing and her bronchodilator dose needed adjusting, and the man with the cardiovascular irregularity needed checking, and the bypass air was getting worse for eighty-two people who hadn’t decided to kill anyone. He treated them the way he treated everyone, and if his hands were rougher on the equipment and his voice was shorter than it had been the day before, nobody mentioned it.

Three of the four bronchial cases had developed a wet cough overnight. He adjusted doses with medication he was running low on.

He passed Breck in a corridor. Breck looked at him. Lev kept moving.

He found Koss in operations. She looked like someone who hadn’t slept either. She didn’t mention the dock. She didn’t mention the anchor.

“Supply run. Karsten Platform. Four days each way.”

They talked logistics. Filters, medication, the circular dependency of a station maintaining itself with parts that didn’t exist for systems rebuilt past recognition. It was professional. It was also the thinnest professional exchange Lev had ever had with someone whose station he was keeping alive. Every word was measured. Every word was aware of what was underneath it.

When it was finished, she said: “Mirin wants to talk to you.”

Lev looked at her. Koss looked back. Whatever she’d decided overnight, it was in that sentence.

He headed for Mirin’s compartment.

The hatch was open. She was inside, at her console. She heard him and turned around. She was looking at him directly, and whatever Koss had told her had changed the calculation she’d been running since he walked onto this station.

“I need your updated profiles on the bronchial cases,” he said. “The bypass air is getting worse and I need to know where their respiratory limits are.”

“I have them.” She saved what she was working on. Turned. “Come in.”

The compartment was the same three by four meters he’d first seen, every surface working. But the crisis had rearranged her systems the way it had rearranged everything on the station. Gaps on the medication shelves where supplies had been used and not replaced. The refrigeration unit running louder than it should, the compressor cycling harder, and someone, Mirin probably, had taped a note to the side: CYCLING EVERY 40 MIN CHECK TEMP. The note of someone whose equipment was misbehaving in a way she didn’t have time to diagnose but also couldn’t ignore, because the medications inside were keeping people’s cardiovascular systems from doing things the crisis had taught the cardiovascular systems to do.

She transferred the bronchial profiles to his portable. Walked him through the updates, patient by patient. Adjustments she’d made since last night. Limits identified. Where the dosages could go and where they couldn’t. Clinical. Precise. The same professional mode from when they’d negotiated the medication protocols yesterday, which felt like a number larger than one.

They worked through the cases. It took fifteen minutes. Neither of them mentioned Nika Vasik during those fifteen minutes. Different system. Different conversation.

Mirin finished the last profile update and closed the file. She pulled up another record on her console. Looked at it. Looked at Lev.

“Tell me what happened in section four.”

The professional version of the question, asked by someone who needed the clinical data the way Lev needed her medication profiles. Because she was the practitioner who had built Nika’s modification profile, and the profile had failed, and she needed to know how.

He told her. The compartment. The crack in the panel seal, thirty centimeters. Patching it first because the section was draining. Going to Nika after. She’d been breathing thin air the whole time he worked. The mask, the clean air, full oxygen. Saturation at 84 and not climbing.

“Heart rate came down to 130 on the stimulant,” he said. “Your sixty percent. Saturation held at 82.”

“The vasodilator?”

“Low dose. Heart rate 125. Saturation dropped to 81.”

He paused. “There was something else. Her cardiac output spiked through a pathway the Veris couldn’t label. Her peripheral circulation clamped down in a vasoconstriction pattern that doesn’t match any third-gen profile I’ve seen. And her hemoglobin was binding oxygen more aggressively than the standard curve. Three systems doing things they shouldn’t know how to do, trying to compensate for the alveolar pathway that wasn’t there.”

Mirin’s pen stopped.

Mirin was writing. Not on the portable. On paper. She had a notebook. Physical pages. Ink. Paper didn’t sync to a network that might not exist next week.

“The alveolar transfer,” she said. “The enhanced pulmonary absorption. It wasn’t engaging.”

“No. Same thing I saw with the teenager. The pathway absent, not overwhelmed. Except with the teenager, you were there. You adjusted and it worked. With Nika I had your sixty percent but I didn’t have your calibration. I didn’t know which sixty percent for her.”

Mirin set the pen down.

“She said she was cold,” Lev said. “At two degrees. First time.”

Mirin looked up. The clinical significance of that landed before the human significance did, and then both of them were in her face at once.

She was looking at the wall behind her console. The shelves, the labeled bottles, the gap where a bottle had been used during the crisis and not replaced. Whatever she was seeing wasn’t in the compartment.

“I profiled her two months ago,” Mirin said. “Cardiovascular numbers were within my parameters. Heart rate, blood pressure, variability. All where I expected for a nine-year-old third-gen with her parents’ profiles.”

“Within your parameters.”

“Mine. Not the standard. My standard is adjusted for this population. I built it from fifteen years of measuring these people. The standard protocol’s cardiovascular baseline for a nine-year-old third-gen is based on data from stations with full biotech support, regular modification maintenance, controlled environments. Those populations aren’t this one. This one has been self-maintaining for two and a half generations with my resources, which.” She stopped. Started again. “Which were limited before I lost the lab.”

The bio lab. In the forward ring. Open to vacuum since yesterday.

“What did you have in there?”

“Fifteen years of tissue samples. Culture work on the pediatric modification expressions. Growth hormone assays. Bone density series.” She stopped. Started again from a different angle, the way she did when the list wasn’t saying what she meant. “I had a cryo bank with samples from every child born on this station in the last twelve years. Baseline tissue, taken at birth, taken at developmental milestones. So I could compare. So when something changed in a child’s profile I could go back to the earlier tissue and ask whether the change was developmental or whether it was drift, and if it was drift, when it started and what it correlated with. That was the work. That was fifteen years of the work. The equipment to run those comparisons, the microscopy, the culture media, the assay protocols I’d calibrated specifically for this population. I can’t run any of that from a three-by-four compartment with a diagnostic suite and a refrigerator.”

She said it without stopping this time. All of it, in one breath. Not flat. Precise. The precision of someone who’d been composing this inventory in her head since the forward ring blew and was finally saying it out loud to someone who understood what the words meant.

“The records are here,” she said. “Clinical files, profiles, notes. Everything portable. The lab was the part that let me test what the records were telling me.”

“What were the records telling you?”

She didn’t answer directly. She pulled open a drawer beneath the console and took out a stack of paper charts. Physical charts, plotted by hand, grid lines drawn with a ruler, data points in colored inks that corresponded to a legend in the margins. Growth charts. She laid three of them on the console surface, overlapping.

“Three of my pediatric patients. Height and mass, birth to current age. The dotted line is the expected trajectory based on their parents’ modification profiles and the standard third-gen developmental model.”

Lev looked at the charts. He could read growth curves. It was part of the work, assessing whether a child’s development was tracking the modification profile. The dotted lines described clean arcs. The solid lines, actual measured data, followed the arcs closely for the first few years.

Then they diverged.

Not dramatically. A few percentage points per year, the actual values falling below the predicted trajectory. The kind of drift that could be dietary, environmental, the normal variation in a small population. Each individual chart was unremarkable. A clinician looking at any one of them would note the divergence and move on.

Three charts together was different. The same drift. The same direction. The same inflection point, somewhere around age five or six, where the actual curve started pulling away from the predicted curve and didn’t come back.

“I have eleven more,” Mirin said. “Every child on the station born in the last twelve years shows a version of the same pattern. Some more pronounced. Some start later, seven or eight instead of five. One of them, a boy, his curve flattened at four and then partially corrected at nine, and I don’t know why. I don’t know if that’s his particular genome compensating or something environmental that changed that year or just noise. Nika was in the middle of the range.”

He looked at the charts again. The cardiovascular markers Mirin had tracked alongside the growth data, noted in her cramped handwriting in the margins, showed a parallel drift. Heart rate variability declining from the predicted range. Oxygen uptake efficiency below the inherited modification standard. Not by a lot. By the kind of margin that could be explained away if you looked at one chart, or two, or even three.

Fourteen was harder to explain away.

“You adjusted for this,” he said.

“I adjusted for what I could measure. The metabolic rates, the dosage sensitivities, the growth parameters. That’s what the profiles I gave you reflect. My parameters, not the standard.”

“But the alveolar transfer.”

“I couldn’t test pulmonary transfer efficiency without the lab. I could measure saturation, I could measure response to exercise, I could compare against the population I’ve been observing for fifteen years. What I couldn’t do was assess whether the enhanced alveolar pathway was fully expressed, because that requires microscopy and culture work and equipment I no longer have because it’s in a room that went to vacuum.”

She said it without bitterness, because it was a fact.

“Mirin.” He was looking at the charts. All fourteen of them, the solid lines pulling away from the dotted lines. The cardiovascular markers in the margins. The metabolic rates she’d tracked. The dosage adjustments he’d watched her make on five children in one afternoon, all trending the same direction. The thermostat in the children’s quarters set to eight degrees. A girl at two degrees who wasn’t cold. A teenager whose cardiovascular regulation pathway was absent, not failing. And Nika’s body, in a compartment with no air, improvising through systems that shouldn’t exist.

“The drift has a direction,” he said.

Mirin looked at him.

“The adults drift randomly. Every body going its own way, individual variation, the way you’d expect. But the children drift together. The metabolic rates, the cardiovascular baselines, the temperature tolerance. I watched you adjust five kids yesterday and every adjustment went the same way. Every one. And the children’s quarters are set to eight degrees because that’s where they’re comfortable. And Nika was at two degrees and she wasn’t cold, she was suffocating, because the one pathway that hadn’t caught up yet was the one she needed.”

He put his hand on the chart where the solid line diverged from the dotted line.

“This isn’t degradation. The platform is adapting. To this station. To the cold, the thin air, the low pressure. The metabolisms are running high because they’re generating heat. The cardiovascular changes are optimization, not failure. The alveolar pathway in Nika wasn’t absent. It was being replaced by something better suited, and it wasn’t finished. She was nine. She needed more time.”

The compartment was quiet. The refrigeration unit cycling. The station sounds from the corridor.

Mirin was looking at the chart under his hand. Six years of data she’d plotted herself, and she was reading it for the first time.

“I’ve been tracking this for six years,” she said. “I’ve been watching the numbers drift and adjusting for it and documenting it and worrying about it for six years. And you’re telling me it’s not drift.”

“I’m telling you the drift has a direction. You couldn’t see it because you built each profile one child at a time over fifteen years. I saw fourteen at once yesterday afternoon and the pattern was there.”

She sat with that for a while.

“This happens,” Mirin said. “To stations like this one.”

He waited.

“I hear things. Through the supply runs, through the people who pass through Karsten. Belt talk. A station near the 3:1 resonance, six or seven years ago. Third-gen children with anomalous profiles. Someone filed a report, or someone talked, or the data showed up in a network database somewhere. People came. Not military, not government. People with resources.” She said this flat. “They took the children. They took the practitioner. The station emptied out. The families scattered. Nobody did anything about it. Nobody could do anything about it.”

“One station.”

“That I’ve heard about. Maybe others. The kind of thing people talk about quietly because nobody can confirm it and nobody wants to be the one who draws attention.” She looked at the charts on the console. “Koss is afraid. That’s why the profile hasn’t been updated. That’s why the dock has a keypad. That’s why we didn’t want to call you.”

“And now you know why. What you’re seeing in the children here.”

“I can’t believe I missed it.” She was looking at the charts like she was seeing them for the first time. “If someone could study what’s happening on this station. Autonomous adaptation. The platform rewriting itself without intervention.” She stopped. “That would change everything about how modification works. Everything. And the children are the data.”

The charts were on the console between them. Fourteen children. Fourteen curves pulling in the same direction. The direction was this station, this rock, this cold thin air. The modification platform doing what it was designed to do, adapting to the environment, except nobody was controlling the process and nobody was supposed to be.

“If anyone finds out,” Lev said.

“If anyone finds out, people come again.”

The supply run. She needed equipment. Microscopy, culture media, sampling kits. Things that would let her start testing again, start understanding what the modifications were building in her children. But requesting them through the network meant data in a system, a request from a station that had been hiding for two and a half generations.

“The supply list,” he said. “Koss is sending someone to Karsten. I can add equipment.”

Mirin looked at him for a long time. “Microscopy unit. Culture media. Sampling kits. Don’t put my name on it. Don’t put the station’s name on it. Order it as consumables for the Paran.”

“I’ll add it.”

He pushed off from the console. The shoulder caught and he waited it out, which took about two seconds longer than he wanted it to in front of someone who read bodies for a living. Mirin was watching his shoulder the way she watched everything, reading it.

“When did that start?”

“A while ago.”

“Before the call?”

“Yeah.”

She looked at his shoulder and then at the charts on the console. His body. Their bodies. Modifications doing what they were going to do regardless of what anyone designed them to do.

She didn’t push it. He didn’t offer.

He left Mirin’s compartment. Koss was in the corridor. Not waiting for him. Just there. Braced against the rock wall opposite the hatch with her arms crossed and her face carrying whatever Mirin had told her and whatever she’d decided and whatever it was going to cost.

She looked at him. She didn’t ask what Mirin had shown him. She already knew.

The question in her face wasn’t what did you see. It was: was I right to let you.

Chapter 9: Same Materials

Breck was welding. The sound carried through the rock, a high intermittent buzz that Lev felt in his back teeth from two sections away. Structural work. The vibration conducted through the asteroid, through the floor and the walls and the brackets and the conduit runs, because the asteroid was one continuous piece of carbonaceous rock that had been drifting through the belt for four billion years.

The station had been working since someone reset the lighting schedule and decided it was morning, which was as close to consensus as a station without functioning chronometers in half its sections was going to achieve. People in the corridors. Tools. The sound of repair, which was the sound of crisis except slower and without the alarms.

Lev moved through the aft sections checking readouts. Forty-six percent on the bypass. Down from forty-seven. The filters degrading under sustained load at a rate Breck could slow but not stop. The supply run had left at 0600, one of the station’s crew in a utility craft heading for Karsten Platform at a conservative burn. Four days out, whatever time to source parts, four days back. Ten days of Breck cleaning and reseating. Ten days of Mirin rationing medication. Ten days of a bypass recycler running a distance event it had been designed for a sprint.

He found Caro on the Paran, running post-idle checks. The ship had been docked since yesterday and Caro was already running checks. Seals to inspect, systems to cycle, the routine maintenance that didn’t care about station crises and wasn’t going to defer itself.

“How’s the ship?”

“Fine. Fuel’s enough for Karsten.” Caro scrolled through something on his portable. “Forward port seal needs repacking. Not urgent.”

“But soon.”

“But soon.” He was quiet for a moment. Then: “The fuel line on the port manifold has new scoring. Starts at the junction and stops about ten centimeters in. Clean marks. Like someone started cutting and then didn’t finish.”

The anchor. The fuel line. Started but not finished. Koss had called it off, or Breck had stopped on his own, or the decision to open the dock had come before the work was done. Ten centimeters of scoring on a fuel line that would have ruptured under burn stress. The dock sealed overnight. The pressure equalization that took ten minutes.

“These are the same people, Lev.” Caro said it flat, the way he said everything. But he was looking at Lev straight on. “Same kind. Same situation. Whatever you put in that report.”

“I know what I put in the report.”

“Good.” Caro went back to his checks.

Lev went forward.

The sections adjacent to the forward ring were where the repair work was concentrated. Breck had three people: a man cutting structural stock to length, a woman running sealant along the secondary seal, and a teenager holding a brace in position the same way Breck had held the brace for Caro during the crisis. Breck was welding reinforcements to the mount. New straps, new anchors, the same approach as the emergency repair but more deliberate. The crisis version had been fast and adequate. This version was meant to last.

Breck saw him. Didn’t stop. Finished the weld, set the tool down, checked his own work with the focus of someone who trusted himself enough to look for the mistake he might have made.

“The mount,” Lev said.

“Will hold.” Breck wiped sealant residue from his hands. “Thermal’s stabilizing. Two more days and the contraction rate drops inside what the reinforcement can absorb. I added four strap anchors to the ones your partner put in. His were good, for emergency work. These are better, because I’m not doing them at three in the morning while the rock’s trying to pull the module off its mount.” He checked the weld he’d just finished, ran his thumb along the bead. “After that it’s maintenance. Which is my job. Which I’m good at.”

“The seal?”

“New sealant, double layer. Structural adhesive underneath. I put a monitoring gauge on the gap so I can read the displacement from operations instead of crawling out here every four hours, which is what I’ve been doing. It’s overkill. The whole thing is overkill.”

“Overkill is fine.”

“My default.” He almost smiled. Didn’t, quite.

Breck handed him a piece of paper. A parts list, physical paper, folded once. Detailed, specific, written in a hand that knew exactly what it needed: filter housings, seal compound, structural fastener stock in three sizes, a replacement compressor for the bypass.

The man who’d scored a strap anchor to kill Caro was handing Lev a supply list. Lev took it.

Lev pocketed the list.

He made his way through the station. The community was doing what it had done during the crisis, except now the work was construction, not emergency. A woman patching conduit that had cracked from thermal stress. Two men running a replacement cable where the old one had faulted. Someone had rigged a temporary lighting array in a section where the original fixtures had failed: work lights clamped to structural brackets with zip ties, the cables dressed and the ties doubled for redundancy. It worked. Nobody was going to replace it with anything better.

He checked on patients. The bronchial cases were holding, the adjusted dosages managing symptoms against air quality that the filters were managing against load that the adapters were managing against a housing designed for a different filter type. The man with the hand tremor was hauling cable. The tremor was still there but he was working through it. Lev checked the cardiovascular readings. Holding. The teenager from yesterday, the one whose cardiovascular regulation hadn’t been engaging, was running cable with a crew in section three. She looked steadier. She’d been through the worst thing that had happened in her life and she was pulling cable the next morning because that was what you did.

He passed Mirin’s compartment. Hatch open. Mirin at her console, working on patient files. She looked up when he passed. A nod. The nod of a colleague.

Koss was in operations with the schematic on the display, but the display had changed. The red sections were still red. The green was greener. She’d updated the status on the sections Breck had reinforced, the seals he’d reapplied, the conduit that had been replaced. The amber zones were shrinking. The station’s map of itself was slowly, section by section, turning from crisis to recovery.

“Where are we?” Lev said.

“Structural: stable. Breck’s ahead of schedule on the reinforcements, which means he’s on schedule because I build in thirty percent for his optimism.” She scrolled through a list. “Atmospheric: holding. The filters are the constraint. Medical: Mirin says she can manage for ten days if the bronchial cases don’t escalate. Water: fine. Power: fine except for the forward sections, which are a salvage project, not a repair project, and that’s a conversation for after the supply run.”

She said all of this in the tone of someone reading a report she’d already written, which she had. The plan was the plan. Fix what they could fix, source what they needed, continue operating independently, with their own people and their own resources and their own judgment about what was good enough.

“The call report,” Koss said. “I read it when you filed it. The clinical data on Nika. The alveolar pathway.” She was looking at him the way she’d looked at the schematic during the crisis, measuring what she could control against what she couldn’t. “Mirin explained what you told her. What the data means. The adaptation.”

“The report says modification failure under environmental stress. That’s all it says.”

“The growth data. The charts.”

“Not in the report. Not anywhere except Mirin’s drawer.”

Koss exhaled. He’d never seen her exhale before.

“Mirin’s equipment request is on the supply list,” he said. “Ordered as consumables for the Paran. No names. No station reference.”

“I know.” A pause. “She needs it.”

Lev left operations and went to the junction.

The midday food distribution was running, organized by a rotation Koss had set up the day before. The ration packs from the Paran supplemented by whatever the station had, and someone had heated a batch of grain mash with reconstituted vegetable in a sealed warmer, and people were squeezing portions into pouches and eating. The food was not good. It was hot and it was made on purpose by a person who cared whether people ate, and after a day and a half of compressed ration packs the difference between food that was made and food that was manufactured was large enough to matter. Lev ate a portion. It tasted like someone’s kitchen, which it was, even if the kitchen was a junction corridor and the stove was a repurposed equipment heater.

Children were in the corridor. Three of them, doing something with a length of cable that was either a game or inventory or both. The girl who’d been organizing medical supplies was there, the cable wrapped around her arm in a way that suggested measurement. The boy next to her was arguing that the cable was long enough. Long enough for what, Lev couldn’t tell. The third child, smaller, was tethered to a bracket chewing on a ration pack and watching the argument with the expression of someone couldn’t get a word in. The girl unwound the cable, measured it again, and told the boy he was wrong. He said she was holding it crooked. She said holding it crooked was the point because the conduit wasn’t straight. The boy thought about this. The small one ate.

He thought about Nika. The thought arrived the way it was going to arrive for a while, carried in by children in a corridor, and it didn’t go anywhere because there was nowhere for it to go.

He was finishing the food when Fen Vasik came through the junction.

Dark hair, belt build. He was guiding a section of conduit through the junction, one hand on the rail and one on the pipe, moving with purpose. He looked different from last night. Last night he’d been strapped into a bunk with his hands between his knees. Now he was moving conduit. The distance between those two images was whatever had happened inside Fen Vasik in the intervening hours, and Lev didn’t know what that was and it wasn’t his to know.

Fen saw him. Slowed. Clipped the conduit to the wall.

“Harlan.”

“Vasik.”

Fen looked at the conduit. Then at Lev. He had the face of a man who had been through something and was now on the other side of it. The other side wasn’t far enough.

“She was with the cable crew,” Fen said.

“I know.”

“Running the replacement line through four. She volunteered for the toolkit run. She always.” He stopped. “She liked the work crews. She’d see people working and she’d show up with a light or a tool or her hands and just be there until somebody gave her something to do. Since she was maybe five.”

Lev listened. The junction sounds had receded, or he’d stopped hearing them.

“The toolkit,” Fen said. “Arun asked for it and she was closest.” He said the name without weight. The sequence of events, assembled from whatever accounts he’d gathered, laid out flat.

“I got to her,” Lev said. He didn’t know why he was offering this. Maybe because the clinical detail was what he had. “Through the crawl. She was conscious when I reached her.”

Fen nodded. He knew. Koss would have told him, or Mirin, or the station’s network of people who passed information through corridors and compartments until everyone had what they needed to have. He knew Lev had gotten there. He knew it hadn’t been enough.

“Could you.” Fen started. Stopped. He wasn’t asking a question. He was testing whether he wanted to ask it. He decided he didn’t. The answer didn’t change the thing the answer was about.

“She liked it here,” Fen said. “This station. The rock, the corridors, the work. She liked knowing how things worked. Mirin showed her the diagnostic once and she wanted to know everything about it. Asked questions for a week. Drove Mirin crazy and then Mirin started teaching her things.” He almost smiled. Didn’t, quite. “She’d label things. Everywhere. She made labels for Breck’s tool rack because she said he could never find anything, and Breck let her because.” He stopped. “Because that’s what you do when a kid wants to help. You let them.

“I used to think she was cold up there. The forward sections. She’d come back and I’d feel her hands and they’d be freezing and I’d tell her to stay in the aft sections. She’d say she would and the next day she’d be back up there with the cable crew. She didn’t mind it. I just thought she did.”

The details of a life. The things a father knew about his daughter because he’d been watching her live for nine years and now the watching was over and the things he knew were what remained.

“I’m sorry,” Lev said. The words were insufficient. They were what he had.

Fen received them. His expression didn’t change.

“Koss says you’re leaving soon.”

“Once the filters are confirmed stable.”

“Good.” The rescue operators had come, done their work, and were going to leave. The station was still the station.

Fen unclipped the conduit. Guided it ahead of him with the practiced ease of a man who’d been moving materials through these corridors for years. His daughter had moved through these corridors. Had carried a work light through them, a toolkit, her cold hands and her questions and her willingness to be useful. The station had been his home before her and it was his home after her and he was carrying conduit through it because the conduit needed carrying and the station needed fixing and the alternative to fixing it was not fixing it and that was not something Fen Vasik was going to do.

He didn’t say goodbye. He pushed off. The junction absorbed him back into the flow of people working, a man guiding a piece of his station’s infrastructure through the corridor toward wherever Breck needed him.

Lev floated in the junction. The food pouch in his hand, forgotten. He clipped it to the distribution crate.

He’d expected blame. He would have known what to do with blame.

Fen was carrying conduit.

He moved through the corridor toward the dock. The station’s sounds behind him: welding, tools, voices, the atmospheric system’s diminished hum. The sounds of eighty-two people fixing what was broken. Same materials. Same hands. Same approach that had built the station and maintained the station and almost killed the station and was now rebuilding the station, because it was their approach and there wasn’t another one and they hadn’t asked for one.

He reached the Paran. Caro was in the pilot’s seat, running pre-flight diagnostics. He always ran them a day early. The habit was the habit and the habit was how ships kept flying.

“Soon,” Lev said.

“Yeah.” Caro entered something on the console. Didn’t look up. Then his hands stopped. Not a pause between tasks. A stop.

“When I was a kid,” Caro said, “our station lost the primary for three days. My mother kept the galley running on a camp stove she’d rigged from a heating element and a cargo container. Fed forty people out of a corridor. I remember the smell more than anything else. The food was terrible but the corridor smelled like someone was cooking and that meant things were going to be okay.” He looked at the console. Then at Lev. “The woman in the junction. With the grain mash. Same stove.”

It was the most words Caro had said at once since Lev had known him. Maybe since anyone had known him. His hands moved again.

Lev sat in the co-pilot’s seat. The padding took his shoulder and the hot wire in his neck eased from sharp to dull. The diagnostic on his belt hummed its biomarker reminder. Operator health assessment, four weeks and counting. He looked at the prompt. His thumb hovered over the start key for longer than it had before. Then he put it away.

Through the dock viewport, the station’s forward section. The dark compartments, the frosted surface, the displaced module still off true with Breck’s new reinforcements bright against the older construction. Behind it, inside the rock, the sounds of work conducted through the dock structure into the ship’s hull. Welding. Voices. The station doing what stations did, which was holding people alive inside rock and metal and atmosphere while the vacuum waited on the other side of every wall, patient and permanent, not going anywhere.

Chapter 10: 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 anchored stance, the same compact build. Before 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, and whatever was in her face was harder to name than wariness.

“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. She held it a beat longer than he expected. Her hand was warm and calloused and stronger than his, which was saying something. “Thank you.”

She said it once. She held the grip a beat longer than protocol. In that beat was the call she hadn’t wanted to make, the dock she’d sealed, the anchor she’d had scored, the decision she’d made in the dark to let him live, and the drawer she’d let Mirin open. She let go.

“Koss.”

He didn’t say the other things. Be careful. Update your profiles. Call sooner next time. Don’t try and kill the rescue crew. 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.

“Harlan.” Breck set the wrench down. “The port seal on your ship needs repacking. Your partner knows. Tell him not to use standard compound, it’ll shrink in the cold. He should use the marine-grade.” A beat. “I put a tube in your cargo hold.”

Lev looked at him. The hands that had machined the adapters. Scored the anchor. Started on the fuel line. Put sealant in their cargo hold.

Breck unclipped the wrench from his belt. “Fix your shoulder,” he said, and went back to his junction panel.

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. “What you told me. The adaptation.”

“Yeah.”

“If the equipment comes. When I can test again.” She stopped. “I can’t send it through the network.”

“Send it to me.”

A pause. “Okay.”

Two people floating in a hatchway, agreeing to share data that could bring people with ships and resources to a station of eighty-two. Send it to me. Okay. The conspiracy fit in four words.

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 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. It was going to be there after.

He checked the comms board. Routing updates, positioning data, a supply advisory from Karsten Platform. The usual traffic.

One item was flagged as a direct reply to his call report. 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. Specifically the alveolar pathway failure. Specifically the clinical detail on a nine-year-old.

Someone had read his report. Someone near Vesta with an interest in what a child’s lungs couldn’t do.

He thought about Mirin’s voice. Someone filed a report, or someone talked, or the data showed up in a network database somewhere. People came.

He thought about the auto-transmit. The broadcast that had gone out while the dock was sealed. The Paran’s position logged at Mara’s Prospect, not responding, for four hours. His call report with Nika’s clinical data in it. Two signals pointing at the same rock.

He marked the reply for later. Later was going to come whether he marked it or not.

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 guiding conduit through a corridor his daughter had moved 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. 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. A wrench. A panel latch. The sounds of a man working on the ship that kept them alive, because that was the answer, or the closest thing to one.

Lev looked at the comms board. The flagged reply. The name he didn’t know, near Vesta, asking about a nine-year-old’s lungs.

The Paran bearing toward the next thing that was broken.

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About the Author

I write stories I want to read that nobody’s written yet. That sounds romantic until you realize it mostly means sitting alone making fictional people miserable for reasons I can’t fully explain.

I write about people who are stubbornly, specifically human in places designed to kill them. They have philosophical problems they don’t know they have. They make the wrong call. They fix things that were fine and break the things that mattered. Sometimes they figure themselves out. Mostly they don’t.

Nothing here ends happy just because you want it to. It ends the way it should.

dreamsofthedeep.com

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