by S. Walker
"Wow. Wonder why, genius. Try having someone stand on your chest for a bit, see if you feel like having a conversation." Their short Comm technician took over the transmission for a moment. "Wait it out until the other end, THEN panic if they stop responding."
"We should still be able to hear them, even if they cannot talk normally. But the sound levels are completely max- oh."
Emilia pealed laughter. "Did you just forget rockets are loud?"
"Clear the line, please." Siers killed the back and forth with a tense command. "Less than twenty seconds left. We don't want to miss anything when it ends."
Every second felt like eternity. She blinked once, absolutely sure an entire year passed in darkness, then opened her eyes to see less than a three second time difference. Muscle groups started failing, tensed at full strength for long enough to get tired under load. Jamet caught one last quarter-breath, then wheezed outwards and got nothing in return as her diaphragm halted under strain. She lost vision a few seconds after as brain tissue jealously hoarded the last bits of unassigned oxygen in her blood, fighting depletion in a desperate bid to retain consciousness. But she could still hear; still listen to the rumble and roar of rockets burning through their entire fuel supply in giant, greedy gulps.
She also heard Janson start convulsing, acceleration couch creaking with every spasm.
"fuuuhhhhhhkkkkkk"
Lifetimes passed. Then ages, followed by eons in darkness without breath or sight as she started losing hearing as well. Jamet held on past all rational reason, struggling through a grey twilight of consciousness without any input to cling onto. Panicked for herself, terrified for Janson, she fought to the very end in a pointless, soundless conflict.
Oxygen suddenly returned in enormous, whooping breaths as the entire universe decided not to sit on Jamet's chest any more. She sucked in air like a hull breach, chest heaving and lungs screaming in a glorious, lifesaving exchange of gasses. Hearing snapped back on, followed moments later by sight and the burning tingle of recirculation in every limb.
The moment Jamet had enough control to move an arm she was fumbling with the releases, hitting the latches and lurching sideways out of the couch. She smacked onto the deck, then hauled hard on the couch back to stand upright, lurching for Janson's silent form. "-ack! Gah! ey, ey EY! an-sahn!" She almost collapsed into his lap, then brought a limp wrist around to pat his bearded face. "Ake up! Wake, gah, wake up!"
He stirred, arms coming up to fend her off. "S'right. Ees aye." He tried again, head lolling upright and eyes half open. "Ease... ee. El tee. M'kay."
"Lieutenant! I would greatly appreciate a status check!" Siers was more concerned than she'd ever heard before. "Or any details at all, please!"
Janson answered for them both. "S'okay! Wuh alright, cap'n!" Then he grunted and opened both eyes, staring at Jamet with bloodshot sclera. "Let's snot oo tha again, kay?"
She laughed, nearly headbutting him on accident. "Ayy can purr-ohmiss thaht." Both hands pressed on his cheeks, steadying the big engineer's head. "Yer ayess are okay, ah think. Blud shawt, though."
He tried to nod. "Did ahh re-boot. S'good."
"Lieutenant, how is our friend looking? Can you check vitals? How are his pupils?"
Jamet wobbled upright, then almost fell backward over her own couch. "Good!" She fought upright, awkward as a newborn colt and taking steadying breaths. "I theenk wuh made it. 'old on. Gah." Console screens flicked away, bringing up a mostly-filled checklist. Jamet tapped one of the last items on the long list, moving 'Don't Let Janson Die' firmly into the completed section. "Ah- sorry, I-- think we're on course. Navigation looks good."
"Good to hear, you had us worried. We're looking at a system map now and you're practically on top of the smelting station. Can you see it?"
Emilia sounded excited. "Any more images? Is it crawling with drones ready to tear the entire lifeboat apart the second you dock?"
Jamet froze for a full second as waning adrenaline surged to new highs, then scrambled to pull up a visual from the boat's crappy sensors. "What??"
"Emilia? Remind me to limit your entertainment feed selections."
"Oh come on! We were all thinking it!"
She got an angle on approach showing the smelting facility. A thankfully drone-free facility, although the schematics hadn't done the smelter any justice. "Forwarding you imagery now. And no, nothing seems to be waiting." Jamet studied the picture, frowning. The smelter looked like a barbell turned on end, with both rounded ends cartoonishly big for the relatively slender cylinder running between them. Size comparisons put the end pieces at nearly five hundred feet in diameter, making the attached central portion about a quarter mile long. "Odd design."
Janson coughed, then pulled himself free in a shower of releasing buckle clasps. He leaned over the pilot seat, big arms on either side of her head as they studied the facility. "Eh. Non-standard. Looks like they modified it a bit on the living quarters side."
"I thought it looked different." She pulled up the schematics, putting them side by side with the image. "What's changed?"
He put out a thick finger and pointed to the bulbous end farther away from them. "Well that's the ore intake. Bunch of hatches open to vacuum, automated haulers dump raw ore in by the ton. Then a miniature Krepsfield singularity busts it up into pieces, sends it flying down the shaft." His finger traced down the central stem. "This here's a magnetic bottle, got a plasma plume going through th' middle that keep the whole thing heated ta nearly thirty two hundred degrees. Ore floats by on either side, metals and such smelt right out." He mimed spinning the tube with his hand. "Local gravity pulls the heavy metals out, leaves the lighter rock behind."
Jamet pointed to the opposite end. "And this? It's a larger uh... donut shape."
"That's the bottle generator. Also got some living quarters there for maintenance workers." She could tell he was frowning by the way his beard moved overhead. "But it's modified. Little bit irregular, looks like th' power plant is farther out with room underneath for somethin' else. Wonder why?"
"Is it going to cause a problem with docking?" Siers wanted to know. "If I am reading this right you're nearly on fumes for the rockets, lieutenant. I'd rather have you both safely on that facility than flying right by it." He delivered that last with all the worried concern of a parent monitoring their children going into the world for the first time. She smiled just to hear it and felt Janson's chuckle through the seat.
"Shouldn't be a problem, sir." Highlights popped up on the workstation display, marking off four separate personnel docks. Only one of them seemed to be operable, but thankfully it also happened to be the closest. "I've got an easy approach and we're already moving slow enough for attitude retros to do the rest. Looking like..." She brought up a callout window for confirmation, then compressed it into an icon and dropped it into the comm link. "There. Six minutes until docking. I'll do the manual bits heading in."
"Wouldn't have it-" Siers started.
"-any other way, LT." Janson finished, then patted her shoulder. "Doin' good, ma'am."
Jamet couldn't help smiling: It felt good to be appreciated for what she could do for people, instead of assuming people would do things for her. It was the complete opposite of cutthroat me-first Management style, a departure from her old life that felt clean and fulfilling. Like not realizing how dirty she was until the sanitizer hit, then wondering later how anyone could ever live any other way, walking around filthy and never even knowing. It was an immeasurably good feeling, like... she struggled, trying to put the feeling into words. Wholesome wasn't enough. Complete came close. But she finally settled on Belonging and decided to stay. That seemed to fit.
She belonged here, doing this. It was wonderful.
Emilia spoiled it. "Aww, isn't that cute."
Jamet hammer fisted the comm toggle hard enough to bruise her hand. "You dirty rotten visor goblin! When I get back- argh!" She refused to acknowledge Emilia's peal of laughter or Paul's dry, toneless quip
s. "Running docking checklist now! Shut it!"
The link closed, cutting off any possible clever commentary. Jamet growled at it, then pulled up manual navigation controls. "I swear..."
Janson patted her shoulder one last time, then took a seat. "Ah know. She likes ya, is all. Glad Em finally came around; any longer and ah might have considered making some friendship brownies. Everyone likes mah brownies."
The sound of small retros firing alternated through the cabin as she adjusted their course slightly. "Really? So they're not... you know, uhhh..."
"Actually," he sounded thoughtful. "They're more like 'blackies' than 'brownies'. But mah heart's in em and everyone appreciates that." Harness straps clicked into place. "Never heard a single complaint."
Jamet chose not to comment.
∆∆∆
"Well... shit." Jamet looked around the dark room, skinsuit facemask turning in every direction. Several toolboxes rested on the cold deck at her feet, contents splayed in every direction like meteor impacts. "Guess that's why the schematic didn't match."
Janson made a wordless sounds of agreement from flat on his back and halfway inside an open console. Both thick legs stuck out into the control room, occasionally kicking or turning slightly as he reached farther inside the access hatch. "Can ah get the circuit tester again?"
"That's the blue one with the leads?" She grabbed it off the console top, handing it downward into his groping hand. "Need the patch kit, too?"
"Nah, just testing the bypass. Give me a moment."
She nodded, then went back to pointing her handheld light around with a concerned look. On schematics the inside of a smelting facility's main control area was supposed to be a large room, primarily used to house an oversized generator attached to an equally heavy-duty magnetic bottle system. The bottle machinery itself took up nearly a third of the space, attached permanently to the far wall and aimed outward through the long tube towards the ore crushing sphere on the other end. Monitoring and control equipment was supposed to surround the containment generator, regulating output and keeping fields tight around a plasma plume that ran nearly a quarter mile.
While in use the entire facility floor housed around half a dozen technicians from an attached living quarters, working in tandem from two separate backup stations in case of failure. Each separate workstation controlled either magnetic containment or plasma generation, but both could be used to effect an emergency shutdown of the entire system if needed. Which made sense to Jamet considering an uncontrolled plasma bottle intersecting a Krepsfield singularity meant bad news for anything in a fifty thousand mile radius. She'd seen after-action reports of smelter accidents during quarterly budget meetings, even witnessed borderline suicidal Executives struggling under years of debt from asset loss. Asteroid smelting was a hell of an efficient operation to run... but at the same time it was also very sensible to have precautions if something went wrong.
In reality "sensible precautions" and "Corporate efficiency" turned out to be antonyms.
Jamet's immense surprise could have generated a singularity all on its own.
The first thing they'd seen when entering the station was a hastily scrawled notice of termination from the previous occupant. It would have been hard to miss: They'd used a permanent marker and wrote it completely over the entire interior hatch surface, occasionally running over onto the bulkhead to either side. They both read it silently, eyes going downward until they hit the signature scrawled halfway across the deck in long, looping letters. A crude drawing of a middle finger next to the angry text really accentuated the effect.
"That's... not good, is it?" Jamet backtracked to the middle, pointing and reading out loud. "'-and as a final FUCK YOU for sixteen months alone here-' sixteen months? Alone?" She stood on tiptoe to look through the inset panel on the hatch. "It's dark inside, I can't see anything. But there's no way one person ran this whole setup, right? It's huge!"
Janson made motions like he wanted to stroke his beard, but ended up pawing the outside of the suit instead. "Shouldn't be. Not without a load of automation an' round the clock monitors. Ah'm more worried about this part here that mentions sanctions for," he squinted hard. "'Unavoidable fucking exhaustion downtime, you heartless, soulless, taint licking Corporate'-"
Jamet waved her arm. "I get the point! Thanks."
"Just readin' what it says, ma'am. Ah'm sure they'd have a change of mind if you ever met." She could tell he was grinning inside the helmet. "Let's open 'er up, see about getting the power on and systems unlocked."
With previous experience working together on the Kipper it only took a minute to set up the crude emergency airlock. Jamet handled the latches across the bottom of the hatch while Janson got the top, then they each grabbed a corner of the frame and pulled until it slid outwards and clicked into place. A long red handle popped out inside the temporary enclosure, freeing a hinged door that slowly banged into place. Put together the frame and door became a secondary, airtight compartment big enough for one person to stand inside and work the manual air compressor.
Janson looked significantly from the hatch to Jamet, then back to the hatch again. She did the same, confused for a moment before the light dawned and she whacked him on the shoulder. Hard. "Oh come on! I didn't blow the lock last time, why do I have to go first again?"
He held up both gloved hands in mock surrender. "Ah wasn't thinking that."
"So you go first, then!"
"...ah might have been thinking that. But ah didn't say it. Ma'am."
She stomped into the airlock, slamming the door behind her and furiously pumping the handle. "I swear I'm going to get you for this one day."
Janson watched with amusement until the pump handle locked downward in place, freeing the manual hatch pull for his lieutenant to force open. The big portal popped once, then slid to the side far enough to let her squeeze through. "It's clear! There's atmosphere!" She turned in place, hands fisted on both hips. And I didn't blow the hatch."
"Never doubted, ma'am." He reversed the airlock process, folding the door back and pushing the frame into the bulkhead around the hatch. "Just makin' sure is all. You know: Better safe than sorry. In fact, ah think maybe next time I'll be the first-" he finally caught a glimpse through the open hatch and came to a stop, face pulling downward into a scowl visible from a distance. "Aw, hell."
Jamet turned around, hands dropping to both sides. "What? Is it- oh." She looked up, down, then pointed her light left and right. "Well... that explains a lot about why he took time to write on the outside of the hatch."
On their installation schematic the living quarters for a dozen technicians and the actual working floor were separate, partitioned things. In practice the main airlock opened directly into a tiny area barely twice the size of Jamet's room on the Kipper, ten foot ceilings seemingly too low to support a spaghetti-like maze of piping encrusted with signs of serious rust. Conduit, panels, consoles and control surfaces crowded outward from nearly every surface, prominently labelled for individual systems and universally grimy from too little cleaning.
Absolutely everything was wallpapered in crude diagrams and notes about emergency maintenance patches. Several panels were removed entirely, sitting on the floor with long streamers of cabling pouring through them in a rat's nest of bright colors. A tiny stained cot and a single overstuffed chair built directly into the deck were the only concessions to comfort, both of them surrounded by waist-high stacks of printed reading material.
She was almost at a loss for words. "Fourteen months alone, in this..?"
"Sixteen, ma'am." He said it like a death sentence.
"That's even worse. Do you really think he ran the whole facility from this?" She waved around the dark space, flashlight probing into each dirty corner. "There is not enough pay in the universe to make me do that."
"Ah would say the same," Janson looked haunted. "But you might consider they didn't have a choice. Indebted contractor, maybe with family on the habitation ring. They w
ork here, family gets a better life in return."