Prophetic

The Chosen One is dead.

I paused on dead and lowered the wrench. Tertia-3 slipped last week and Ara was there and now she isn’t anywhere, and the one person in the Imperium who could fight The Slip just died of something the broadcast didn’t identify. In months, The Slip will be here and I’ll find out where my cousin went. Or I won’t. I stood there in two inches of sewage holding my breath, the wrench shaking in my hand. The rotted pipe wasn’t going to stop leaking because the Chosen One was dead. The Slip is a Primus problem. Mine’s the toilets. The cochlear implant continued.

did not survive the unsuited space walk.

It clicked. “And the Chosen shall walk the void unclothed in fear, for providence is their garment and the stairs their witness.” The Panyric never makes sense until it does. Then it clicks.

The Panyric had prepared the way. A new Chosen One had been selected.

My shoulders relaxed and I sighed and my hand stopped shaking because number twenty-three would save us and I’ll fix the toilet.

And now, a word from our sponsors.

Commemorative witness medallions for Chosen Number Twenty-Three are now available through all licensed kiosks. Limit two per household.

I brought the wrench back over my head and slammed it on the elbow where the pipe turns. Again, again, clang, again. Someone was yelling. The rotted pipe feeding the elbow went from a seepage to running. Then it snapped, the elbow fell, and it poured. A hundred meters of life support above me kept flowing, not knowing I just sabotaged its sewer pipe. And I stood there with my feet on the floor or a wall with the void on the other side. And just like that, two inches became three.

I still heard the bang, bang, bang in my head, but the wrench had already stopped, its job done. I climbed the ladder to the maintenance observation bubble. Rung, step, bang. The bubble was empty except for a crate that was now my seat and my footprints that led to it. The Primus emergency dispatch objective is thirty seconds. This was a Quartus life support section, so I had five minutes to kill and think about my life’s choices that led me here: I was born. I wasn’t always Quartus. I was born and for six hours I had no Classification. I just was. It’s our basic human right to Classification within four hours and for the violation my mom received an official written recognition in both Common and Old Formal of the incident. I grew up with it over my bed and now it’s in a box under it.

“Quartus section one one nine tech, control is reporting pressure loss in damaged sewage main. Investigate and report immediately.”

My eyes had been on the pipe, but now I was looking. Here at the edge of the hab the spin created about half a g. The eight-inch main was at a one-and-a-half percent grade, which I’d already measured to get the replacement right for a four-foot-per-second flow rate. By my estimate, that was about twenty-four hundred gallons dumped into the maintenance corridor. “Two minutes out,” I replied. Another twelve hundred by the time I got there. Twenty-four hundred gallons sounded like a lot, but it was only about a foot and a half. It was a blue-black bruise in the 5000K lights. That was more comforting than what it was.

“The pipe blew! You have to cut it now, Halen!” I yelled into the comms as I sat on my crate staring at the floor.

“Negative, techie. Elaborate the risk so we can perform a loss analysis.”

“If you don’t shut it off now I’m going to come up there and drag you out of an air lock and we’ll find out whether one of us is the damn Chosen One.” I caught myself holding my breath and realized I hadn’t thought this part out. I was counting options on my left hand when Halen squawked in my ear and I started breathing again.

“Loss analysis requires emergency shutoff. Section communication for alternate facilities has been sent. Triage update required in one hour.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, but just to myself.

I flagged the section on my wrist and marked it under investigation. I added pictures of the pipe, the floor, and the crate. “The pipe had a slow leak that was not severe enough to warrant requisition of replacement parts for a Quartus sanitation main so I smashed it with a wrench until it broke off to escalate the repair,” I said out loud, while I entered “Arrived on scene and found sanitation main to be fully ruptured and spewing sewage. Escalated with Control for immediate shutoff.” I switched to inventory and marked a one-foot section of eight-inch, self-fusing, poly-laminate pipe. I already had the pipe waiting on the other side of the access door to the corridor. The stock room is full of them and they don’t actually keep a count, you just check them out. It prevents waste.

I thumbed over to the atmospheric and safety controls for the corridor and activated the sequence for the airlock. Which was, I decided, on the floor at the end of the corridor underneath the pool. I verified there was no active risk to any Primus or Secundus personnel in the vicinity, and a voice asked the sewage if it had any objections, which it didn’t.

A vortex started cavitating above the airlock as the void sucked and gravity pushed the bruise out. Outside, the vacuum vaporized the liquid and froze the solids into a plume of ice crystals. I paused the door; too wide and the airlock comes up for air and I have a frozen pond to clean up instead of just the residue. I didn’t know exactly how open was too open. It was 0800 standard time. An eighth open sounded as good as anything.

I started doing the math on my right hand. Probably about two hundred gallons a second. Sure, sounds good, about thirty… outside my bubble the pool dropped into the airlock door, pressure crossed vapor, and flashed the remaining sludge into crystals, half out the hole, half at me, and then mine back out… seconds.

The Slip Rite. One hundred twenty credits, paid once, observed always. Halcyon Memorial. Ask your local chapter.

One hundred and twenty credits. Who the hell had one hundred and twenty credits. I wondered if my cousin had bought it before she slipped. I held the level at one-and-a-half percent as the pipe fused. I thought about how there’d been a pool here and thirty seconds later there wasn’t and I was the only one who knew where it went. I ran dye through the cleanout and checked for weeps. I took pictures of the repaired main. One foot of shining black pipe where it fused in the middle of the old stuff was the only evidence it had ever been apart. Other than the residue on the floor that was starting to thaw. I made sure the photos had both.

I called Halen. “The main is ready for operational testing. Standing by.”

“Copy. Disengaging shutoff.”

The hazard kit would make quick work cleaning the leftovers. For whatever reason, they modeled it after the gun rigs that Primus soldiers use. I sprayed the floors and the walls and covered it in a smooth white foam. I was transported to a padded room and felt a calm that should have bothered me. Then the foam started eating itself and the station came back. I heard the four-foot-per-second hit the new main. I took another picture of a clean maintenance corridor without a rotted pipe that looked more like a Primus facility than the one it had been. I removed the flag on the section. My shoulders hung heavy as I gathered my wrench and hazard kit.

“Pressure sensors read normal operation and flow.”

“Yeah,” I responded.

“Everything look good on your side?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey Soren.”

“Yeah?”

“Good job.”

“Thanks.” This time I said it.

I waved my wrench good-bye to the crate and went back out the access door.

The whiskey glass was on the table with one hand around it and the other on the straw, and I chased a black grape around a globe of ice. Are there systems with a frozen barycenter? I wondered what kind of life would live there and came up with nothing. Black tendrils oozed into the brown space where I stabbed the grape and stained the ice sun. Dropping the straw, I slouched in my chair.

Even though I had been in a sealed work suit and there’s no possible way, I could still smell it. No one looked at me but I’m sure they could too. The news reels showed spot after spot of twenty-three, a gorgeous Secundus who had been preparing since she was born, and the half-filled cantina ignored it. A table behind me had a loud pair, with several empty glasses, that didn’t have time to poke at grapes because they were on a mission. They were talking about girls, and I suspect there were no girls in another part of the station talking about them.

Tertia-3 was a hab full of millions and one people gone and the one is the only one that bothers me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ara. We weren’t particularly close, but she always told me the funniest jokes:

You can’t make a Primus a Quartus. But a Quartus can pretend to be a Primus. He just has to stop working.

She told me that one at her wedding. I was thirteen when I traveled through four ring gates to Tertia-3 for her wedding. Each ring gate, the same forty-five minute ceremony. The first one I laughed because I was thirteen and didn’t know they had to have a Tertius perform a ceremony for a ring gate. The fourth time I was indignant. I thought they probably let the Primus just go through. A drunk engineer told me it was thermodynamics and the ceremony prevents the gates from blowing up. Faith saves lives.

Kira elbowed my shoulder from behind and took the seat across the table. She had two hands for drinking two beers and two arms for taking notes. A new grease pen entry near her left wrist that I could read upside-down had today’s date for a level two water pump with a 27 PSI. I ate the grape.

“So, it’s your fault my shower pressure sucks?”

She looked at her wrist and then her eyes rolled the other way. “Can’t get parts. It’s a ten year maintenance-free pump that’s twelve years old in a Quartus section that’s… you already know this.” She took a sip of one beer, then the other.

“Have you considered smashing it?”

She snorted and choked on the beer. “You know, you know that might actually work?”

“Yeah, I’m just kidding. But my shower pressure, fix it, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, what makes you so special?”

“I have the record for longest Classificationless citizenship. Least they can do for me is good shower pressure. Minimum thirty.”

She snorted again. “I’m sorry, I forgot I was in the presence of the divine. Your eminence, I’ll get right around to that eventually. You hear about the Ordo? They’re sending a delegation here. Rumor is they’re looking for a Chosen.”

“Here? It’s a mostly Quartus colony. And they just picked twenty-three.”

“She doesn’t have a chance. The Secundus never have Primus support. Last Secundus was assassinated.”

“That’s just a rumor. They went through a ring gate too soon.”

“Yeah, how often does that happen? Never. Doesn’t matter, didn’t you see on the feeds? There was a prophetic miracle on the hab today.” She could barely keep a straight face. Kira pulled up a feed on her wrist — freighter footage from this morning. I watched the video as plumes of ice in a cloud of mist sprang out of the station for thirty seconds. “‘The plumes shall lift the Chosen, and the stairs shall receive them.’ They’re losing their minds in the feeds!”

My heart. Stopped.