By Darkness Forged

by Nathan Lowell

Oscella led us down a few blocks and turned at a cross passage. She stopped at a nondescript door that looked like every other airtight door on the station. She pressed a button beside the handle and stepped back. After a few moments the door handle moved and the door swung open.

  “Yes?”

  Oscella flipped her badge wallet open, holding it so the woman behind the door could see it. “We need to use your network.”

  The door swung all the way open, revealing a closet-sized room with a chair, a console, and not much else. “I’m not sure how many of you can fit but ...” She waved a hand. “Help yourself, Captain.”

  The chief stepped forward. “Actually it would probably be best if you ran the equipment. You know it better than any of us do.”

  The young woman flipped a stray lock of hair out of her face and grinned. “Inside and out,” she said.

  “Good,” the chief said. “Correct me if I’m wrong but the environmental network here monitors a wide range of factors?”

  “Yes’m. Air quality, particulates, gas mixtures—”

  “Radiation?” the chief asked.

  “Yeah, that, too, but that doesn’t change much.” She paused. “Well, really, none of them vary much from baseline.”

  The chief grinned. “I know what you meant. Do you have a map overlay?”

  “That shows the various levels at points around the station?” the woman asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Of course, it’s our best tool.”

  “Could we see it?” the chief asked.

  The woman hesitated and looked at Oscella. “Am I allowed to show people?”

  “My authority,” Oscella said. “It’s important.”

  “All right, then.” She dropped into her chair and flipped through a few screens. “Here we go. You want the whole section?”

  “Yes, please. Can you isolate radiation?”

  “Of course.”

  The screen changed to show a schematic of the station.

  “What are we looking at?” the chief asked.

  “We’re here.” The woman pointed to a spot in the middle of the screen. “This is the area I cover. We’re looking at the differential levels of radiation accumulated over the last three stans.”

  “I’m not seeing anything,” the chief said.

  “It’s because it hasn’t changed in—I don’t know how long.” She pressed a few keys. “Here. This is the carbon dioxide layer.”

  A layer of pale yellow overlaid the screen, more opaque over the passageways, making the passages all glow a faint yellow.

  “Yellow is moderate change. Ten percent per stan upward. Green, if there was any, would be a ten percent per stan change downward.” She pointed to the places where there was no color. “These are the passageways and it’s still relatively early in the day. They’re moving from their overnight levels to the daytime levels. The carbon dioxide gathers in the passageways. You can tell how many people are breathing by the density of the color. This passageway here?” She pointed to a corridor that showed only the faintest tinge of yellow. “There are only a few people using that, but it’s a throughway for the cargo carts. The carts put out a lot of carbon dioxide but there aren’t many of them. So the levels are rising at the moderate level, but the overall levels are still low. These blocks here? Those are almost all rooftops. There’s nobody there. So no change.”

  “So when we looked at the radiation overlay, there was no change and a negligible level?” the chief asked, leaning forward over the woman’s shoulder.

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  “Do you have any control over the overlay data?”

  The woman shook her head. “It’s what comes in. I just record it. Watch for hotspots. Once in a while somebody will overheat a cargo hauler. That’s always exciting. Fires are the worst but the suppression systems take care of them real quick.”

  “Can you display an overlay that shows the raw level, not the change?”

  “Well that’s shown in the density of the color, the transparency of the color.”

  The chief nodded. “On the standard overlay, but say I’m looking for very low levels of radiation that aren’t changing at all. Say, a box of radioactive chemicals that fell off a hauler two months ago? It’s not going to be a very high level and it’s not going to have changed for, like, two months.”

  “Is that what I’m looking for?” she asked.

  “No, but it’ll help me calibrate what we’re seeing here.”

  She gave the chief an odd look but started fiddling. After a moment she sat back. “There’s nothing to see because the levels are so low and they’re not changing.”

  “Can you boost the sensitivity? I want to find a few alpha particles.”

  “I don’t know about that, but ...” She tapped some keys and a faint purple haze began covering the screen. “That’s as high as it goes. I have no idea what it’s reading but the actual levels are really, really small.”

  The chief nodded and smiled at her. “That, I believe, is the background radiation from the system primary.”

  “How can that be? We can barely see it from way out here.”

  “Nothing to stop it from here to there,” the chief said. “Even far away that star is cranking out a hell of a lot of radiation. Only a small portion of it is in forms we can see.”

  “You a physicist or something?”

  “Chief engineering officer on a solar clipper,” the chief said. “That would classify as ‘or something,’ I guess.” She straightened up and looked around. “The station has the capability. Can we get this display from every sector?”

  “Oh, sure,” the woman said. “We port all the raw data to environmental main in real time. They’re going to be the ones who can use it by adjusting conditions in various places around the station.”

  “I thought your environmental system was distributed,” I said.

  “Oh, it is. The things that suck crap in and blow air out? They’re all over the place. The control for all of them is environmental main.”

  “Our next stop is environmental main, I guess,” the chief said. She held out a hand to the young woman. “Thank you so much for your time. It’s really helped a lot.”

  The woman beamed. “Glad to help. Not much goes on here. It was a nice change of pace.” She cast a considering glance at her console. “I never thought of doing stuff like that before. I may need to play with this.” She grinned at the chief and turned to her console.

  I took a step back from the door and made room for the chief and Oscella to come out. Oscella swung the door closed and set the dogging handle.

  “Airtight doors?” I asked.

  “If we lose pressure, we want to make sure these stations are safe and can continue to collect, screen, and collate the data.”

  “That seems like a really boring job. Staring at screens that only update once a stan?”

  Oscella nodded. “It’s not a job everybody can do, but it’s a foot in the door of the environmental section. Most of the people who start here move on to improve their skills, get new technical ratings, and—sometimes—leave the station to work for other environmental operations around the Western Annex.” She beckoned us along. “Let’s get some transport and go visit environmental.”

  Chapter 28

  Dark Knight Station: 2376, March 12

  Oscella got a wheeled vehicle with station logos on it to pick us up and take us to environmental main. It had to have been a couple of kilometers from the docks, and I was glad I didn’t have to try to walk it.

  Her badge got us through the door and into a circular control room that had to be ten meters in diameter. Huge screens around the perimeter flashed through various colors and patterns every few seconds. A slender man met us just inside the door.

  “Not prone to epilepsy, I hope.” He grinned at us. “Captain? How can I assist station security today?”

  “Maurice, this is Captain Wang from the Chernyakova and his chief engineering officer, Chief Stevens. C
aptain, Chief, this is the head of environmental main, Maurice Dumaurier.”

  “We don’t get many spacers in here, Skipper. How can I help?”

  I nodded at the chief. “She’s the one who knows. I’m just the comic relief.”

  “We have reason to believe that there’s at least one, possibly two, radioactive devices on the station. We need you to run a radiation level scan stationwide to see if we can spot at least one of them that way.”

  His eyeballs practically bugged out of his head as he looked at Oscella. “Captain?”

  “You heard her. It’s legit. She’s trying to help us,” Oscella said.

  “You’ve got the raw data, I believe,” the chief said.

  He nodded. “Sure. Of course. It’s fed to us in real time.”

  “If you can, run a radiation level filter and crank the sensitivity up to where it begins to show the background radiation.”

  He blinked at her. “I can try. I didn’t know it went up that high.” He looked at Oscella.

  “It does,” Oscella said. “We checked.”

  He shrugged. “All right, then. Let’s give it a go.” He turned and led the way into the control room, barking orders to the duty staff.

  It took a few ticks for all the screens around the room to shift to that same purplish haze we’d seen at the local station. Dumaurier strolled around the perimeter, staring at each screen in turn. “Do I want to know what you’re looking for exactly, Chief?”

  “If I say yes, I’d be lying,” the chief said, following Dumaurier and staring at the screens herself. “If I say no, you’ll know what we’re looking for.”

  Dumaurier stopped in his tracks, turning to stare at her. “I want to say ‘you’re kidding,’ but you’re not, are you.”

  “No, Dr. Dumaurier, I’m not.”

  He nodded and turned back to the screens, walking a little faster. “How did you know I was Dr. Dumaurier?” he asked, an aside to the chief as they continued the circumnavigation of the room.

  “Dr. Maurice C. Dumaurier. PhD, Closed-Ecology Engineering with specializations in Water Recovery Technology and Atmospheric Quality Metrics from University of Ciroda in 2362. Your dissertation was a brilliant examination of water fingerprinting entitled Factors Differentiating Water Source Processing: Suspensions and Solutions.”

  Dumaurier stopped again and stared at her, slack-jawed.

  “Nice pun, by the way. Your undergrad was—not coincidentally—from the CPJCT Merchant Officers Academy at Port Newmar. Class of ’59. Captain Wang was a year ahead of you in the deck officer’s program.”

  “Pay her no mind,” I said. “She’s just showing off. She doesn’t know everybody.”

  The chief laughed and continued on her way around the room.

  “She didn’t answer the question,” Dumaurier said, as if to himself.

  “She doesn’t as a rule.” I shrugged. “Well, no. Sometimes she does and I’ve learned not to ask too many questions for fear she’ll actually answer them.”

  “What’s this?” the chief said, pointing at a screen.

  “Power plant. Primary water treatment facility,” Dumaurier said, his attention refocused.

  “That fusactor needs tuning. It shouldn’t be spilling like that. Put some dosimeters on your people in there to make sure they’re safe until you can get the fusactor serviced.”

  “Oh, holy crap. You’re Margaret Stevens,” Dumaurier said. “I thought you looked familiar.”

  She chuckled and nodded. “Busted.” She moved on to the next screen.

  We made the full circuit without spotting anything else untoward.

  “What are we missing?” the chief asked, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth and staring around the room at the screens that steadfastly refused to show anything out of line.

  Dumaurier’s stance mimicked hers as he stared around the room. “Well, we don’t have the whole station covered,” he said. “Only about ninety percent of it.”

  Oscella perked up at that bit of news. “I thought we had the whole place wired. Where are the open areas?”

  Dumaurier walked to a terminal and typed a few commands. “Here’s the map.”

  Oscella and the chief crowded around while I tried to make sense of what the big ring of screens told me. “Why aren’t the other power plants showing up?” I asked. “Why just that one?”

  The chief straightened up and looked at me. “Yes.”

  “Well they’re pretty well shielded,” Dumaurier said.

  “But we have the sensitivity cranked up so high you’re showing levels of radiation that wouldn’t trigger a dosimeter. Even the best shielding bleeds a particle or five above background levels. They’re not completely covered. How many different fusactors do you have on station? Five? Ten?”

  He shook his head. “I really don’t know. Environmental has three. The station grid uses seven. I don’t know how many backups and other systems might have their own power supplies.”

  “Are those all represented on these screens?” the chief asked.

  Dumaurier nodded. “The main power grid is over there.” He pointed at one of the first screens on the tour. “The atmospheric plant is here.” He leaned in to one of the screens nearby. “The fusactor is in that building.” He tapped the screen.

  “Why is it not showing?” the chief asked, more to herself than Dumaurier.

  “We have two problems,” I said. “Chief, correct me if I’ve missed something. Part of the station isn’t even shown here. Right?”

  Dumaurier nodded.

  The chief said, “Yes.”

  “We need to do a closer search on those parts,” Oscella said. She pointed to the map. “I can have teams covering those areas with radiation detectors by morning.”

  “The other problem centers on this display,” I said.

  “Obviously, it’s flawed,” Dumaurier said.

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not flawed.”

  The chief’s eyes brightened. “Of course. It’s showing us what we asked for. The problem is that it’s not showing us what we think it should.”

  Dumaurier frowned. “We think it’s showing us all the sources of radiation but it’s only showing one.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We can prove that the display is not showing us everything we think it should with a simple test.”

  “Put a Geiger counter beside a fusactor that’s not showing on this map?” the chief asked.

  “Yeah. If there’s enough radiation for a Geiger counter to pick up, it should be on the screen,” I said. “If there’s that much radiation and it’s not showing, there’s a problem in the way we asked for the display to render.”

  “Where’s the nearest fusactor?” the chief asked.

  “The Main Street power station,” Oscella said.

  Dumaurier looked at her. “That’s halfway across the station from here.”

  Oscella pulled out her tablet. “It’s across the street from the security barracks. I can have somebody there with a sensor in two ticks.”

  She was as good as her word. “Reading shows traces. Needle flicking but just barely registering.”

  “Have the deputy take it out in the street,” the chief said. “It’s not much distance but the extra shielding from the building should amplify the fall-off.”

  Oscella typed a few lines and waited. “Yeah. It’s fallen off.”

  The chief looked at the screens around her again and then at Dumaurier. “What are we missing?”

  I crossed to Oscella. “Can you send a deputy to that fusactor in the water treatment plant?”

  “You want to know the levels there?”

  I nodded. “If there’s a radically higher level there, it would be what we’d expect based on what we think we’re looking at here.”

  Oscella nodded. “If it’s not, then that’s another indication that we’re not seeing what we think.”

  “Yeah. There’s something about this that isn’t adding up,” I said.

  Oscella starte
d tapping on her tablet. “I’ll send the same deputy and meter over there. It’ll take a few ticks.”

  I walked over to Dumaurier and the chief where they huddled over a console.

  “You’re sure it’s showing you the current radiation level,” the chief said.

  He nodded. “I’ve taken off the filters that measure change over time. It should be just the level. We’ve got the sensitivity maxed.”

  I left them to walk through the forest of options and started walking around the screens again. I was halfway around when Captain Oscella spoke up. “My deputy says that fusactor at the water treatment plant isn’t very much different from the one on Main Street.”

  The chief straightened up and frowned at the offending screen. “How is that possible?”

  “Why did you think it was leaking?” I asked.

  “Look at those levels. There’s nothing else like it on the board.”

  “That’s the problem. There should be.” I looked at Dumaurier. “What’s different about that particular fusactor?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing that I know of. If the deputy is right, it’s not emitting any more radiation. I can’t tell you anything that’s different.”

  “It’s newer,” Oscella said. “It went in over there, when? A couple of stanyers ago?”

  “Yes, but the only thing that changed is the location.” He looked at the chief. “We rebuilt that treatment plant a few stanyers ago. It’s in almost the same spot but we expanded a couple of the sedimentation pools and made some plant changes to bring up the efficiency. We moved the fusactor across the campus.”

  I walked over to the screen and started going over the area again. A shadow caught my eye when I looked away but I didn’t see it when I looked straight at it. I stepped to the side and looked at an angle. It didn’t look any different but when I got straight in front of it I found the shadow again. “Was it right here before?” I asked.

  Dumaurier came over and looked at where my finger rested on the screen. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “There’s a shadow there. Just a tiny bit but it’s enough to fade out the overlay by just the tiniest amount.” I stepped aside. “Look at it. See if you spot it.”

  He moved into my place and moved his head around a little. “I see it. What the devil ...?”