Daniel was also on clean-up duties, although his team was working another section of the Field. Noa spotted him several times as the morning wound on. Once, he waved.
Ségolène and Peter were doing maintenance in the engine rooms on the other side of the Palatine. It was the sort of work that required close supervision by the only two atomic engineers on the ship and endless checklists. No one messed around with fusion engines. Ségolène didn’t mind the work, while Peter just found the constant checks tiresome.
Lizette was currently working somewhere in the Palatine and Cai was at the bottom of the Field, doing a different sort of maintenance.
It helped, knowing where everyone was throughout the ship. It made her feel not quite alone as she worked up in the silence and warm air at the top of the ship.
She heard the sound of the gathering before she saw it. The Cavers chant was unmistakable.
From her viewpoint at the top of the Field, Noa could see the phalanx of dirty people pushing through the shoppers in the Capitol marketplace. There was a clear space between them and everyone else. A tall man was leading them, only from up here, Noa couldn’t see his features clearly enough to identify him. She wondered if it was Farnell Acardi.
“Don’t get distracted, Doria,” Leuthar Peyton said in her ear, via the work unit’s commlink. He was three stacks away, right up against the hull and had a clean line of sight to where she was working.
Noa glanced at him. “There’s something happening down in the market. A really big group of Cavers just showed up.” She kicked the irritating tether out of the way and moved closer to the end of the semi-circular platform collar she was standing on, to see more. “I think it might be more than the usual chanting thing.”
“You can’t do anything about it up here,” Leuthar told her. “Besides, they’re entitled to their say.”
“They’ve had their say, over and over,” Daniel said.
Now she was at the very corner of the platform, looking down upon the Capitol, she couldn’t see Daniel’s position anymore. “They have more say than most,” she agreed. “Like last night.”
“I repeat, don’t let it distract you,” Leuthar said. “C’mon, people. We’ve got three sections left at this level. Let’s look industrious, shall we? If you want to talk about the Rational Nativity Dissonance Theory, you can do it once you’re clocked off.”
Noa swung around the central column of piping the platform hugged, to look at Daniel, twenty meters away, startled. Had she imagined the slight emphasis in Leuthar’s voice? No one used the formal name for the Cavers’ central tenet. If they bothered to name it at all, they called it the nutters’ conspiracy theory. She had also heard Cai call it the Cavers’ delusional construct. Cai was probably the only person on the ship to have read the Cavers’ literature who wasn’t actually a Caver himself.
Yet Leuthar had used the proper name.
Noa could see Daniel tilting his head to look at Leuthar. He was closer to him. “Hey, boss, are you…you know, a Caver?” Daniel asked carefully.
“They’re Rationals, not Cavers,” Leuthar shot back.
Wow. Noa shook her head in disbelief and reapplied the scraper to the top of the horizontal pipe she had been working on. Dust had to be scraped off, up here, where the moisture and heat had baked it into clay.
As she worked, she glanced at the markets, below, and wondered about Leuthar’s real feelings. It had not occurred to her until now that Cavers might be found among more “normal” people, with jobs and housing and respectable lives. The Caver beliefs weren’t dependent upon social status, finances or success—or the lack of it. Anyone who truly believed the Endurance was a building in a cave deep inside Terra was a Caver by definition.
So Cavers, whether they marched or not, could be anyone she knew.
She couldn’t wait to see everyone, so she could ask Cai what he thought of the unsettling idea that Cavers could be among them, that they could be people they respected. He’d probably thought of it a long time ago.
Not that any of her friends were Cavers. She knew them all too well. Or did she?
She hadn’t realized her boss was a Caver in spirit, even if he wasn’t into chants, rallies and throwing a fist or two when no one was looking.
This was a whole new thing.
It kept her mind occupied as she worked. So did constant glances down at the marketplace. Whoever it was out the front of the Cavers had halted and was possibly speaking, for he was throwing out his arms and gesturing.
Something cracked, sharp like ballistics, with a crunch of metal. It came from behind her yet Noa heard the air sing next to her, too. Shocked, she dropped the scraper and glanced down, her heart thudding. Had someone started firing a weapon down there? Were the Bridge guards armed?
Screaming sounded.
At the same time, she rose in the air, her feet leaving the platform. She was weightless.
“Grab your tethers!” Leuthar yelled over the commlink. She could hear him in person from here, too. “Pull yourselves in, make sure you’re on something solid when the gravity kicks back in!”
Something had happened to the generator in this section, then. Everyone in the Capitol was still standing in normal gravity. It was just the Field.
Noa used her tether to turn herself around to look in the direction the loud hissing was coming from, her heart slowing as she put together what had happened. It was a gravity generator kink, that was all. Engineers dealt with such problems all the time. They would fix it and go back to work.
Then she saw what was causing the hiss and her heart slammed into her chest. Her breath held still as the fright tore through her with cold fingers.
There was a hole in the side of the ship. It was about the size of both her hands held together. The metal had been punched inward, leaving jagged peaks. That was where the hissing was coming from.
Through the hole, Noa could see something she had never seen before in real life, that she recognized from images she had studied as a child.
Deep blackness, interrupted by dozens of white pinpricks of light.
Stars. She was looking at the space on the outside of the ship.
The hissing, then, was the breathable air in the ship escaping into the vacuum of space.
* * * * *
He was already running hard, so when the gravity went out, Haydn threw himself forward and gripped the nearest projection. As it turned out, it was a pipe bending at a right angle, to run straight down into the deck, to the service areas under it.
His grip halted his forward momentum. His feet flipped out over the top of him, doing a full, slow cartwheel, before he could right himself in relationship to the floor. He hung, gripping the pipe, breathing hard.
From behind a base platform of piping and machinery that made up the Field of Mars, a small boy rose in the air, his breath whistling out of him in shock. He must have been hiding behind the equipment, or playing there—braver kids liked to dare each other to play in the Field. The kid flailed his arms and legs, which just made it worse.
Haydn pulled himself forward and gripped the kid’s sleeve. “Calm down,” he told him gruffly. “It’s just zero gravity. You make a move, the opposite happens, unless you anchor yourself. Here, grip this.” He pulled the kid toward him, until the boy could reach the pipe he was holding for himself.
The kid blew out a heavy breath, holding the pipe with white knuckles. His eyes were wide.
Haydn gave him a small smile. “You’ll be fine. Just don’t let go.”
The kid nodded.
Haydn looked around, to see if he could figure out what had happened.
At the far end of the alley, he could see the Capitol marketplace, the swirl of Cavers and ticked off Wallers. He had been running to get away from both of them. He could hear them screaming and fussing, yet they were all on their feet.
He looked in the other direction and spotted, at the far end, someone peering in.
So, the gravity loss was confined jus
t to the Field.
Soft hissing drew his attention upward. He couldn’t see anything. He craned, stretching his arm to ease higher. Still nothing. Making sure he had a grip on something at all times, he moved over a few feet, his boots waving in the air behind him. Then he stretched out his arm and looked up at the top of the Field once more.
“Oh, shit…” he breathed.
“What’s wrong?” the kid asked sharply, panic edging his voice.
Haydn swallowed. The hole in the fuselage was a deep black against the ochre and brown sides of the ship. He could see steam venting through it. There were more steam vents between where Haydn hung and the hole itself, blasting out of the tops and sides of pipes and other conduits. He could line them up in a straight line, from the hole. Something had made the hole. Something had punched through the side of the ship, hard and fast enough that the solid material of the ship had not slowed it down at all. It had clipped more objects on its way through the Field, creating holes and digging trenches.
The line of its trajectory was perfect. Nothing had stopped it or slowed it, or changed its direction.
What the hell had happened?
Later, he told himself firmly. He turned himself around, picking out the rest of the object’s trajectory down toward the floor. There were more steam vents, more holes, including one through the corner of a squat, dark green box.
Haydn recognized the box from lectures on shipboard life when he was a kid. Everyone knew what they were. They dotted the ship. People sat on them, kids climbed on them. They were overlooked, ignored and hidden in plain sight.
Haydn pointed at it. “Know what that is, kid?”
The boy looked. “Gravity generator,” he said shortly and shrugged.
“We’re going to have to fix it,” Haydn told him. “I’ll need your help. Come on.” He pulled himself toward the box.
“Me?”
“There’s no one else,” Haydn told him. “Engineers won’t be able to reach this place for a while. We can help them.”
“You know how to fix them?”
“Didn’t they teach you that?” Haydn said. “Gravity is critical to ship functions. They make it so the nearest idiot can fix things.” He drew himself down to grip the handle on the side of the box, then pulled on the handle. As planned, the rest of his body floated down, instead of the box lifting. He pulled until his feet were against the floor, then he heaved.
The lid came up. It was hinged on one side and rested up against the pipes next to it. Inside the lid, instructions were painted. There was also a tether coiled up and clipped to it.
Haydn plucked the tether out, wound it around his waist and fastened it. That left his hands free.
“They put the stuff in there for anyone to use?” the kid asked curiously.
“That’s right. The generators are simple enough. It’s the magnetic diodes that are tricky, so they put spares in there, too.” He opened the smaller box attached to the inside of the lid. Three thick, stumpy diodes, each as long as his forearm and twice as thick around, were strapped in.
The kid pointed. “That one is leaking.”
Haydn looked into the guts of the generator. The round, shining tops of six diodes were ranging in a neat circle. One of them was cracked, holed by whatever had passed through the ship. He could see another neat hole drilled into the bottom of the generator and straight through the floor beneath. That was another problem that would have to be taken care of later. For now, nothing could be done until gravity was restored.
He gripped the top of the diode and the edge of the casing and wrenched it. It didn’t move.
“Is it welded?” the kid asked.
“Nah. They make it easy to swap them out. I just can’t get enough leverage to unscrew it. Hang on.” He pulled himself back down to the floor with the tether and jammed his knees on either side of the case, the corner between his thighs and squeezed, holding himself steady. Then he gripped the diode again and applied sideways pressure, trying to turn it.
It made his stomach muscles hurt, reminding him of the beating he’d put up with last night.
Then the diode shifted.
He took a better grip and yanked again. This time, it turned easily. He pulled the diode out of the circle and held it out to the kid. “Here, hang on to this for me.”
The kid hesitated.
“It’s dead,” Haydn assured him. “It’s just a lump of plasteel and circuits.” He put it in the kid’s hands, then carefully eased a fresh one out of the spares.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” The demand came from behind him and higher up. There were usually at least one bunch of mechanical engineers working in the Field every day. This had to be one of them.
Haydn didn’t look up, because the movement would make him drift away from the box. “Fixing shit,” he said shortly.
“You can’t be touching that!”
Haydn shook his head a little. Idiot. He concentrated on screwing the new diode back into place.
“It’s his civic duty to fix it!” the kid shouted back.
Haydn grinned. The kid was a fast learner. He worked the diode. It had to be properly seated and fully in contact with the generator core to work. When it wouldn’t tighten any farther, he risked a look up and over his shoulder.
The engineer was floating at the end of one of the long tethers they used up in the higher levels. He’d hauled himself down one of the towers and clung to it with one hand.
“You’d better find a foothold,” Haydn told him. “When the gravity kicks back in, you don’t want to be floating ten meters above the floor like that.”
“Not yet!” the man said, throwing his hand up, as Haydn pressed his fingers to the trip switch.
The man was pointing at something up near the roof.
Chapter Four
“Um, boss…?” Noa’s voice was weak. All of her was weak, even her knees.
“Just hold tight, Doria,” Leuthar snapped.
“Look behind you. Look up,” she urged him.
Leuthar turned slowly, using his tether just as she had. They’d all trained in zero gee, using the tankball arena’s gravity controls, yet this was the first time in her entire life Noa had been forced to use the dusty lessons for real. Leuthar was just as clumsy as her.
“What is that?” he demanded.
“It’s a hole, boss. Someone had better patch it damn quick, before all the air leaks out.”
“A hole?” He sounded amused. “So what?”
Noa realized with a start that someone who believed Caver theories would not think a hole in the side of the ship to be the disaster it was.
The sharp, high whistling of air racing through the hole said she didn’t have time to argue. Noa looked around. There wasn’t much up here. Tools were kept below and brought up with them when they needed them. Everything had a use up here. Everything was spoken for.
She spotted the cover on the digital dashboard of the column she had been working on. Most of the time she didn’t notice the covers, because messing with the computer chips and AIs was a job for software engineers. The protective cover on the dashboard was flat plasteel and looked to be the right size.
Noa hauled herself down to the platform once more, for she had drifted upward toward the hole. She realized that the venting air was pulling her very slowly toward the hole. It was creating a current.
She didn’t bother with trying to wrench the cover off. It was plasteel and she had no weight and therefore no leverage right now. She hooked her knee under the casing beneath the cover, pulled out the everything tool from her thigh pocket and selected a flat blade. She got the edge under the hinge pin and knocked the pin out. The motion unhooked her knee from the casing as the pin slid out and floated away. She gripped the cover with her other hand while she stuffed the everything tool back into her pocket.
She was already floating upward again. This time, she let herself drift toward the hole, paying out more tether length so she could reach it.
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“Doria, what in hell’s name are you doing?” Leuthar demanded as she floated over his head.
“Fixing the hole,” she told him, fighting to sound calm and in control, despite her heart ramming against her chest. Her throat was dry and tight, too.
“If the gravity comes back on while you’re up by the roof, you’ll kill yourself,” Leuthar warned her.
“If the hole isn’t fixed, we’ll all die.”
“It’s just a bloody hole, Doria!”
“To you, that’s all it is.” She didn’t bother with arguing further. She needed the energy. This close to the hole, the whistling venting of air was too loud to hear properly, anyway.
She was being tugged toward the hole now she was closer. She didn’t have to aim herself at all. So she held up the cover in front of her, like a shield, lining it up with the hole itself.
Through the hole, she could see more stars. The space around them was not all black, either. There was a rosy glow around some of the more thickly clustered stars. It looked beautiful.
Then her view was blocked by the cover she was holding up. It was sucked toward the hole and she slammed into the roof, the cover slapping over the hole with room to spare.
The shriek of air stopped immediately.
Noa tugged at the edges of the cover. It would take huge force to move it, when the air of the ship was pressing on it as it was. Only, she wasn’t a physicist or an advanced engineer. She wasn’t certain what would happen when gravity was restored. Would the cover drop away again?
She had to make certain it would stay in place.
It was easy enough to hold onto the little raised edge of the cover with her fingertips, while she pulled the sealer out of her jacket pocket. Quickly, she ran the sealer around the edges, then flipped it and rammed the bead of sealant into the angle between the wall and the cover. It would dry in sixty seconds and become a permanent plasteel bond.
As she worked, she grew aware once more of the chatter on the commlink, which she could hear, now. The rest of the unit were shouting at each other. Something about waiting to bring gravity back on line.
Junkyard Heroes Page 3