by Aimee Ogden
The Sei Worldhold was the nearest government body to the systems of the Confederated Worlds. Triz might be reading too much into Belas’ intent expression and oddly stressed words, but hope unfurled inside her, too big and hot to hold for long. She thanked him again, with a tight nod, and fled Justice before she could reach a critical mass of premature optimism.
Chapter Seven
After the station lights shifted over to Third Shift, Quelian would go back to the quadhome—whatever his own thoughts on the matter, the rest of his gonmates always strictly enforced rules separating work time from home time. Kalo and Triz met at the habitation lift entrance at the appointed time, both dressed in the kind of heavy worksuits ideally suited to illicit undercover Scooper repair. They both stood silently as the lift whisked them downward, carefully looking each other in the boots. Triz racked her aching brain for something to say, anything to break the tension. Sorry for kissing you last night before asking you to give up your whole life. Or maybe: Hey, remember how you almost died two weeks ago, want to give it another shot? Or better yet—
“So,” Kalo said, and Triz jumped. “What happened with that lead of yours in Justice? Not that we’re going to need that kind of help, but the gods are more likely to smile on those who prime their engines before launch.”
“I’m going to talk to him tomorrow to see if—”
The lift shuddered around them.
Triz fell on her backside on the lift floor, the wind and the rest of the words knocked out of her. Kalo caught himself on the rail, but his head knocked against the lift wall. Triz reached out for him just as the lift lights died.
She counted heartbeats in the pitch black that now surrounded them. Darkness didn’t bother her, except when it was a symptom of something much worse. Four, five, six: there. Small crackling sounds rippled upward from the floor of the lift to the walls, as emergency release valves deprived of their signals opened. Substrate flooded the tiny tubes lining the edges of the lift, and the bioluminescent bacteria inside got busy. A faint glow began to fill the lift and Kalo’s concerned face came into focus.
“What happened?” He spat blood from a split lip. In the soft blue light, his face was strange and unfamiliar, more ghost than man. “We stopped moving?”
“Feels like it.” Triz regained her footing and moved to the door. The edges of the doors clung tightly together as she tried to pry them apart. As they were supposed to do to prevent a breach. She grunted in frustration. “I need to see where we are.”
“See? I can barely count my fingers in this light.”
“Let me save you the trouble.” She gritted her teeth and tried to wedge her fingers in between the sealed edge. “There’s ten, unless you’re even worse at riding a lift than you are flying a Skimmer.”
A massive impact rocked the lift on its rotors. Triz scrabbled for purchase against the smooth interior of the lift—what was out there? Even if an undetected asteroid had cleared defenses and hit the Hab, it wasn’t as if a storm of space-rocks could be barraging the inside. She put her back against the lift doors and braced for more.
But this time she saw Kalo, limned in blue, kick at the lift railing. The railing gave way, and Kalo ripped it away from the wall. “Thanks for the help counting. Guess you’re the brains of the operation. Now move.”
She scrambled around him as he jammed one end of the railing into the crack between the doors. His shoulders strained as he levered them apart, inch by inch. “Should you be doing that?” she objected. Head wounds and heavy labor didn’t go best hand in hand. But he answered her only with a string of increasingly creative and breathless curses. He didn’t drop dead, so she let him work without further comment.
Finally, the doors opened wide enough to hit their safety catches with a series of soft clicks, and Kalo let the broken railing clatter to the floor. “Well, there’s air out here, so that’s a good sign. Do you think you can get the lift moving again from out there?”
“If the biolights are on, the Hab is running on emergency power.” She ticked off the list on her fingers. “Artigrav, water, gas exchange, the umbilicus band, and the bay in the ‘works.”
He oofed as she elbowed past him and stuck her head out of the lift. “How are people supposed to get around to fix a busted Hab without functional lifts?”
“There’s zero-gee access tunnels on the outside of the Hab,” she said, feeling around outside the lift doors. “About as accessible as you can hope for with a dark Hab.”
“Great. How do we get to one of those?”
“Well . . . we don’t.” They were between floors, and in the dark, she couldn’t tell which ones. But the lack of a standard door within the limited sight afforded by the blue emergency light suggested they were in the guts of the Hab, the busy organs of life support and gravity generation that lay between the Terraria and the very bottom of the Hab where the wrenchworks lay. All right. She could work with that. This was going to be . . . interesting. “They’re built into the skin of the Hab. We’re pretty much right in the middle of the thing.”
“So we wait here hoping, till someone turns the lights on?”
“Not exactly.” She pointed at the lift. “You wait here in the lift. I’m going to see how far I can get.” And she squeezed out between the lift doors and the lift chute.
Behind her, Kalo sputtered in pointless alarm, but the rungs of a narrow maintenance ladder gave her handholds and footholds. Once she cleared the top of the lift car, she reached out in the darkness of the chute and groped against the cold walls. There: another ladder. She stretched her leg and moved sideways. Two more lateral movements brought her to the cold, hard opening of a hatch, slightly recessed into the wall. “Here we go,” she muttered, just as a grunt signaled Kalo’s arrival on the chute ladder. She aimed a lancet-sharp glare into the blackness where the sound had come from. “I told you to wait in the lift!”
“Well, if we’re going to be technical, I’m still in the lift. Just not the lift car. What are we doing out here, and how long are we going to be doing it? I’m not keen on being up here when the lift comes back into service.”
“If it comes back,” she said, and they both hung onto the side in silence for a moment. Then she reached for the hatch handle. “You’re not going to like this.” The handle resisted her one-handed efforts to turn it. She squeezed one arm through the nearest rung of the ladder so she could reach the handle with both hands. It groaned and then grudgingly gave way. The hatch wasn’t open far before a pungent odor hit Triz squarely in the face.
Kalo gagged. “I’m afraid to ask what it is we’re smelling and even more afraid to ask why we can smell it.”
Triz pushed the hatch open and took one last almost-bearable breath in the lift chute. “The hero of Hedgehome is about to become the hero of Recycling Engine 2b.” Her hands found purchase inside the slightly slick opening behind the hatch, and she pulled herself forward to get both knees inside. Crawling on her hands and knees in the wet darkness, she turned back to call over her shoulder. The rising mucus in her throat made her voice thick. “Or you can go back to the lift and wait for either the Hab to come back online or your own death. Whichever comes first.”
“Both appealing compared to what’s in there.” A dull metallic thud and a shadow in the tunnel blotted out what remained of the emergency lights in the lift chute. “Well, this is your turf. Where to?”
Triz’s fingers found an opening in the floor ahead of her, a space where the impenetrable blackness grew even blacker. She grimaced. At least she knew what to expect down there. “Follow me,” she said, and Kalo’s exclamation of dismay echoed after her as she pulled herself feet-first into the tube and began to shimmy downward.
The smell grew stronger and viler by the time they reached the bottom of the shaft and dropped down with a splatter into a chamber full of soft, slick organic foodwaste. When Triz struggled to her feet, the sludge reached past her ankles. “Could be worse,” Triz said, and suppressed a gag. It really could be;
there were big piles of organic waste stacked up beneath some of the disposal chutes. She might just have easily landed in the middle of one of those.
A strange pride rose up in her, along with her gorge, at the ability she’d retained being able to manage in this kind of place. On its heels, a disturbing thought: all these years later and she was still a guttergirl at heart. She peeled a flat, sticky piece of ex-spicefruit off her backside, a bit pointlessly, and let it drop back into the muck. “Can you keep moving?”
“Whatever gets us out of here faster.” He coughed. “The smell notwithstanding, the faster we can find out what’s wrong with the Hab, the better.”
Triz stopped so fast he walked into her back. “The faster we can spring Casne, you mean. This might be our best shot to get her out of Justice.”
“Are you serious?” He grabbed for her sleeve, but she wriggled out of his grip and scrambled down to a low point in the heap of food scraps. Her feet found the bottom of the next mountain of slop, and she started edging upward and forward as he called after her. “At best, the central power conduits are out of commission, at worst the whole station’s fried. Ambient energy’s getting drained every second keeping this place flush with oxygen, and there might be fifty thousand people to evacuate on just three shitting whaleships.”
“You think no one upstairs is working on that? We have our own problems to worry about.” She slipped on a soft spot and landed wrists-deep in sludge. “I need to find the port into Metal Reclamation.”
“I’m not convinced there’s anyone upstairs with the authority and-or know-how to worry about that.” He paused and groped in the dark for the back of her jacket; she switched on her fob’s spotlight to give them something to see by. “Can I just say, I can’t believe you lived in one of these.”
“Lots of kids do, on the big Habs like Rydoine. Probably on the bottom levels of planets like Ro, too. Anywhere people get packed in so tight that they don’t notice who falls through the cracks. Or care. And you get used to the smell.” That last was barely a lie. You couldn’t completely turn off the part of your brain screaming this is not normal, this is bad, this is wrong, even if you’d been mucking your entire life. Triz was born in the sludge and before the Tolvians found her she expected to die in the sludge. But gutterkids learned to ignore that little niggling voice, at least if they wanted to eat another day.
She tripped, and realized the echo of their movements had changed: a muting of their clangs and muttered curses. Something had shifted in the shape of their echoes . . .
Oh, no. Triz stilled, listening. But she felt the dull distant vibrations, rolling up from the floor through her bones, before her ears caught it. Of course. Listening with your feet was an old gutterkid trick; how had she ever managed to forget it? “We need to hurry up.”
Kalo made a retching sound. “No arguments here.”
“No, I mean, we really need to hurry up.” Triz was half-groping, half-running through the sludge now. “Do you hear that?”
“Nine arms of—” He stilled, trying to get a hold of the noise. “Is that the turning arm?”
“Got to pulverize and aerate the waste,” Triz gasped, pawing her way forward. “Come on and help me look unless you want to get shredded!”
“I don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
“A vent, there’s supposed to be a vent here somewhere—”
“What did you used to do when turning happened back when you lived in one of these things?”
“Avoided it.”
They struggled side by side through the muck. They were up to their knees now; higher for Triz, and the sludge had developed a distinct current that threatened to suck them under. She screeched when she slipped, and Kalo caught her by the elbow before she got a faceful of antique food. “It’s getting louder!” he shouted in her ear.
“I know.” Even over the growing hum of the turning arm, her raised voice had echoed oddly. She shifted the light from the fob, turning to her left, it illuminated a stained, pitted wall. “Ha!”
Kalo wiped his face on the shoulder of her jacket, for all the good that would do him. “Please tell me we can get out of here now.”
“I think so. Give me a hand.” He bent his knee, and she planted a foot on it to push upward. When she walked her fingers along the wall above and to her right, the sharp edge of a vent bit into her finger. “Ouch!”
“Triz—” When she flicked the fob light out over his head, she could see the faint outline of the turning arm, whipping through the sludge, grinding spicebread rinds and bioplast wrappers to a pulp.
“Here we go.”She pulled the vent cover free and pulled herself upward with help from Kalo, who scrabbled up close behind with only the assistance afforded by a prolific stream of curses. Once they both made it into the vent duct, they lay still, not quite touching. When the turning arm passed, it splattered them—mostly Kalo—with a last layer of organic gunk. One final indignity.
Finally, after they’d caught their breath, Kalo crawled forward, elbows ringing hollowly against the bottom of the vent, and laid his forehead against her knees. “Gods. Let’s definitely never compare shitty childhoods again because you win, now and forever.”
She ran one hand through his hair and cast aside a greasy strand of organic who-knew-what. “You ready for Metal Reclamation?”
“Does it smell better in there? Then, please, lead the way. We’ve got a Hab to save.”
“A friend to rescue, I think you mean,” Triz corrected. “Whatever’s happening, I think it bumps rescuing Casne up to Plan Alpha.”
“Triz—”
“The Ceebees have got to be behind this.” It wasn’t a question, but his silence answered her anyway. “If nothing else, we need Casne’s help to stop whatever it is they’ve planned. Unless you’re a strategy master, as well as fighter jock now, and just didn’t think to mention it.” With some effort, Triz turned in the narrow space to bring her boots up against the plastic vent on the far side. She bent her knees, then paused. “I should warn you, the Reclamation electrobacteria might damage your fob. They’re hungry little monsters.”
“Oh—um, sure.” Kalo stumbled a little over the sudden change in conversational direction. “Well. I guess fobs aren’t going to be a lot of help to us anyway as long as the Hab’s gone dark. And . . .” A slight scuffling in the duct behind her. “Will they eat any other metal bits on me, I guess? Like, uh.” He hesitated. “. . . Boot grommets?”
“If your shoes come untied I’m not carrying you.” Triz struck hard against the plastic and pushed the broken pieces out of the way with her feet. A glimmer of light painted the jagged opening a sickly green; some devices must have been recycled without being properly powered down first. They still used the Hab’s ambient energy to uselessly light the dark as they waited for Reclamation. Triz edged down into Metal Reclamation and landed atop a chair, which may have been broken before her arrival but which certainly was after. “Ow!”
“Nice place. Great vibes.” Kalo dropped down just behind her, crushing a pile of corroded parts. “Let’s open an art gallery down here.”
Triz began pushing piles of rusty metal out of the way, trying to clear some space on the floor. She grunted as a hulking, antiquated model of food printer resisted her efforts. “A little help here?”
“Not a gallery? Okay, you’re thinking maybe a poetry salon.” He put his shoulder to the printer, and it screeched across the floor in answer to his efforts. A rough edge caught his hand as he straightened; he wiped blood on his trousers. “We looking for anything in particular, or are you just collecting spare parts?”
“A hinge. Or a seam of some kind.” Triz felt around the open space and found nothing but smooth paneling. “There’s a secretion apparatus built into the bottom of Reclamation, where we get wiring and plates extruded into the wrenchworks as we need them. Of course, it breaks about once a cycle, so there’s a way to open the whole thing up for repairs. It’s plenty big enough for us to get into the works
through there.” She groped around into the middle of another pile and came up with a shimmerlamp whose silvery orb still gleamed faintly. She’d found one in the recycling pits as a kid, and successfully defended it in her hoard for a few years before it got crushed by an unscheduled run of that engine’s aeration stir. “It might even let your ego through, with a bit of squeezing.”
“The hero of Hedgehome does not squeeze.” He kicked over a pile of wall panels, which collapsed into a gnarled knot of pipework with a terrific clatter. But something in the wreckage made him stoop for a closer look, and he ran one boot back and forth in the little clearing. “Hey, this seems promising.”
Triz helped him shovel back metal remnants to open a space a meter across. “This is it!” She wedged her fingers into the seam and winced as it resisted her attempts to force it apart. “Can you help me pry it open?”
He got one hand into the gap she’d opened and levered it wide. Inside was a tangle of pipes and parts. Triz groped around it, freeing what pieces of the extrusion apparatus she could remove by hand. While she separated parts from their fittings, Kalo paced. “You’re abnormally quiet,” she said, after a few minutes’ work. “Should I be worried?”
“Please don’t be. If you’re worried about me, then I’ll know something’s really wrong. I’m just—” The sentence trailed off in an embarrassed laugh. “It’s, uh. Not working.” He flapped his left hand once, then let it hang limp at the end of his wrist.
Triz stared at him, trying to guess at his expression through the shadows. His sense of humor didn’t always match hers, but she didn’t think he was joking now. “Your hand isn’t working? What am I supposed to do with a one-handed pilot? You only cut it . . .”