by A Keuser
The doors opened as Elodie finished her speech, and Nala didn’t dare move as the two partners stared at each other, their faces masks of grim determination.
“Fair enough,” Chadha conceded, crossing her arms over her chest as her eyes narrowed further. “But it will not come to an evacuation.”
Nala shared a wary glance with Turan as they left the lift. Stress, responsibility and fear was an odd cocktail… some didn’t handle it well.
They stopped at the access to the aspersion hub and the three women let her pass. None of them followed her down the ladder into the massive, noisy space, but Eri was already there. Nala took the ladder rungs one at a time, listening to the odd hitch in the hub’s usual hum. It was hotter than it had been the last time she’d come down, too.
The normal power hub sat dormant, the red dampening collar around it still glowed with its power stores. The aspersion hub beside it vibrated with the colony’s energy, and Nala frowned as she looked at it. Aspersion hubs were dangerous and Nala wanted nothing more than to find a way to remove their dependence on it.
She couldn’t think of a colony in recorded history that had changed over to one, even for momentary use, yet here she was, one of the people responsible for putting it in place.
Eri stared at the dampening ring, her face blank, as though she had not even noticed Nala’s arrival. She stood perfectly still, her hands clasped behind her back.
“I’ve sorted through the problem and set up the change algorithm already,” Eri said, absently, eyes still locked on the ring. “It’s really an ugly thing, isn’t it?”
Nala looked up at the ring as she moved to the console. “I don’t think anyone who cripples a colony’s power cares about the beauty of the design.”
“It’s like a boil…. If only we could lance it,” Eri said.
“Do that, and you’ll do more damage to the colony than any bomb builder could hope for.”
“Then we should keep bomb builders away from it, don’t you think?” Eri laughed mirthlessly. “I’m heading back up, my permissions are already in… and I know you prefer to work alone. I’m sorry I was so pushy earlier.”
Nala didn’t know what to say, so she let the apology stand on its own and pulled up the changes as Eri climbed up the ladder and out of the hub’s overly hot chamber.
The string of code was long, but easy enough to read. Most of each strand was formatting; the meat of the command sat at the back end and she scrolled through the lines with relative ease. After twenty lines, she’d seen noting that needed to be fixed.
She paused, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose against the irritation of reading so many alphanumerical sequences.
“Klef!” Turan said sharply and Nala spun around.
From her position at the entrance to the hub access, only Turan’s head and shoulders were visible. “Sign off on the changes and get out of there. I want our comms back up and running,” she sputtered, “yesterday!”
Turan’s head disappeared, but her continued grumblings echoed down. With half of Eri’s protocols left to look over, Nala pursed her lips and hesitated. Her hand hovering over the keys, she considered ignoring Turan. A lot could go wrong with a single mistake in this much code. With a heavy breath she reminded herself that Eri was a perfectionist. She would double and triple check her work. With a decisive nod, she took the woman’s skill on faith. At least, if something did go wrong, she couldn’t be blamed.
Tapping in her passcode, she waited long enough to see that the changes were in effect and jogged back to the ladder. The rhythmic hum of the hub had shifted, it was a half-step quicker… or maybe she was imagining things. Shaking away the thought, she took hold of the ladder.
Hand over hand, she crawled out and rejoined the partners in the corridor. Eri was notably missing, again. “Partner Dendrond couldn’t be bothered to remain?”
“She said she had work to do and headed toward the C Tower.” Chadha glanced toward the unseen, distant edifice with a scowl. “Is everything back to optimal?”
“I think so. Turan told me to close out and get back up here, so if Dendrond made a mistake with her program language we’ll have to do this again soon, but it should hold for the time it takes to get outside and make repairs to the array.”
“Good. I’ll keep someone here to watch for changes. If we have any more problems, it will be nice to be able to ping you rather than sending a runner.”
“While I’m gone, make a list and prioritize it.” Nala stuffed her work gloves and tablet back into her bag. “When I get the antenna fixed and I get back here, I’ll look through to see if there’s anything I can talk someone through over the comm. Anything super easy on the list is going to result in me handing someone a manual.”
“It would be nice if we had a bigger maintenance staff,” Elodie grumbled under her breath.
Nala shot her a look. She had to stop herself before she lunged at the woman. “That’s rich, coming from the woman who blocked me from hiring more people.”
Chaha held up a hand, cutting off any potential for a spat. “We don’t have time for fighting. Get outside, get it fixed. Then get back here so we can deal with the next problem.”
Turan nodded toward the lift and Nala was happy to leave the other partners behind. Her fists clenched, she focused on the sting of her nails biting into her skin, and not her urge to punch Elodie in the face.
The suits they put on only looked bubbly. The interior fabric clung to Nala’s legs and bunched her shirt sleeves. Time necessitated lack of proper undergarments. Necessity dictated a lack of complaints.
Turan’s disgusted expression told Nala the woman would have agreed in the event she had voiced any of those complaints.
“I hate surface walks,” she said when she caught Nala looking. “I know Chadha thinks I need supervision now, but I promise you I can manage this on my own.”
“You think I want to get yelled at by her? She’s the meanest of us and she has no problem throwing her weight around.”
Nala tried not to sound accusatory when she said, “She does seem like she’s in charge.”
“She’s been here the longest, and she’s not afraid to be the authority in a tough situation.”
“But it’s still a democratic council, right?” Nala glanced at her through the thick plastic of her facemask.
“She doesn’t argue when she’s overruled.”
“Good.” Nala swung herself up into the passenger seat of a LTV and waited as Turan climbed in to drive.
The partner wove the LTV into the airlock and pressed the controls on the steering wheel. The lock closed behind them and Nala bit her tongue in the awkward silence as they waited for the airlock’s sequence to cycle through.
“You look nervous,” Nala said when the partner glanced back at the colony door for the third time. “I hope it’s not the company.”
The laugh that echoed to her through the suit’s close range comm circuits wavered. “I’ve had nightmares since I got here. The sort that involve getting stuck out on the surface with no one to call for help, no way back, and the inevitable, slow death from asphyxiation. I’d be a bomber’s victim any day.”
“You should have told me earlier. I can give you a list of things that are more likely to kill you than getting stuck out here. It’s not the twentieth century anymore, Turan.”
The partner’s unsteady laugh died as the exterior doors opened and, after a brief pause, she stomped on the accelerator. They lurched onto the hard packed lunar soil. Turan’s confident driving seemed at odds with her earlier attitude.
The lunar surface spread out ahead. It was artificially smooth in a large diameter around the colony, and then the lumpy, crater marked ground continued off into the distance. Overhead, Earth was a dark bubble speckled with the glittering lights of the cities they’d chosen to abandon.
“Do you miss it?” Turan asked.
Nala looked back down to the surface. Embarrassed she’d been caught, her movemen
ts were too quick. “No, Earth had its freedoms, but it also had its cages.”
“We’ve got those too.”
Nala shrugged. “But they’re different, a little less historically grounded… and this is as far away from my mother as I could get.”
Turan laughed and steered them around a boulder toward the antenna array on the edge of the colony’s perimeter.
The spindles reached into the air like fingers of some buried metal titan, the tips blinking red and blue, a reminder that said “hey we’re here, please don’t run into us.”
A redundancy.
If someone flew this close to the colony this far from the landing pad… they wouldn’t care about destroying the comm towers – they’d probably be there to do just that.
From all outward appearances, the antenna array was operational and in no need of repair. Partner Turan commented on as much when she feathered the brakes and drew the LTV to a halt alongside the antenna.
Set apart from the colony, the antenna array was connected to the power source by a silver slick of half-buried conduit. A decorative lattice work of struts and piping dangled over top in a piece of art the engineers claimed was for protection. If the antenna wasn’t fully operational, its internal diagnostics programs should have sent a maintenance request.
Nala swept a cautious glance around the area quickly before they stepped out of the LTV. What if Diana was out here waiting to ambush whoever came to clear up her latest mess?
Satisfied they were truly alone, Nala grabbed her tools and crawled atop the wide cement base on which the equipment sat.
Turan took the time to walk around to the far side where steps had been cut into the base.
By the time the partner rejoined her, Nala had connected her diagnostic tools and was halfway through the process of sniffing out the glitch.
The device in Nala’s hand belched out an ugly series of beeps and she looked at the data, perplexed.
“Shit.” Nala hit the device, hoping brutality would provide her with an alternative answer.
Turan turned, her boots sending tiny moon rocks flying off the side of the base. “How bad is it?”
“Worse than you might think.” Taking a breath, Nala looked over her shoulder at the colony. “The antenna array isn’t malfunctioning.”
“Then why can’t we call out?”
“Someone with a high security clearance told it to go into lockdown.”
Movement caught Nala’s eye and she looked to the protective lattice that connected the antenna to the colony. The dangling pipes oscillated noiselessly, their movements like wind chimes in a hurricane.
The supports beside her shuddered and the antenna base shimmied. Nala grabbed hold of the antenna array to keep herself upright as one of the support struts strained against its bolts. The trembling was worse this time around, and Nala only barely held on.
Partner Turan was less fortunate.
She fell backward over a bunch of coiled tubing and hit the lunar surface long moments later as the lower gravity lay her gently down. Her muted curse reached Nala’s ears as a puff of dust rose from around her as if in slow motion.
The colony moved silently, as did the antenna via its umbilical connection. The ground beneath Turan’s feet did not tremble.
“Looks like Dendrond was right,” Turan said as she pulled herself to her feet. “She’ll be unbearable once she knows.”
Nala looked back toward the colony as the tremors ceased, and though she heard Turan’s grumblings, she couldn’t agree.
She was too busy trying to figure out what about the colony’s third tower was wrong. The lights had flickered and faded in all of the towers and, while they were back on now, Nala had a bad feeling. The tower was still upright and straight, and she couldn’t see any blown out viewports… but something was wrong. The exterior lights were off. That was the answer she finally settled on. That was the oddity that drew her attention.
“We should get back. Help with damage control… and figure out who put in the command to shut down the comms. It will be easy to override that command once we’re back inside, assuming that tremor didn’t take out any other systems.”
Nodding, Turan went back to the LTV while Nala packed up her things. She could fix this…. she just had to get ahead of the problems instead of being ten steps behind.
Turan steered the LTV back toward the airlock as fast as its electric motor would take them. Dodging boulders, the vehicle jostled Nala as her own inertia in low gravity caught up to the movement of the LTV. She felt like water in a cup wielded by a toddler.
When they dodged another rock the size of a baseball, she finally told Turan to slow down. “At this rate, you're going to knock me out of the rig, and then you'll waste all that time coming back to get me."
Turan didn't answer, but she eased off the throttle.
The airlock slid open too slowly, and closed with the same lack of urgency. When the interior lock began its torturously lax opening, Turan hopped out of the driver seat and pushed her way through on foot.
From her place in the LTV, Nala considered doing the same. She made herself wait.
Switching over to the driver's position, she drove the LTV back inside the Colony. Forcing herself to go through the lockdown procedure, she shut down the motor and went through the entire checklist before she pulled off her suit and stowed it with the others in a locker. A final glance at the hundreds stored there reminded her how many lives were at stake.
Turning to the stair doors, she let her tensed breath out in a long sigh and reminded herself that they hadn't fired her yet.
***
Nala stepped out of the stair well on the colony’s main level and into chaos. So many people crammed into such a small space made her shiver with feelings of claustrophobia.
Angela stood in the mix, holding her daughter on her hip. When their gazes met, Angela wove through the crowd to her.
“Look Susie, I told you Aunt Nala was fine. She just took a little drive on the surface, see?” Angela’s words didn’t have as much effect on the six year old as physically seeing her.
Her tiny fingers flicked through signs asking why Nala had gone outside.
“It’s really cool out there,” Nala said, signing a few of the words as she spoke, even though Susie could hear her. “Maybe you’ll get to take a trip outside today, too.”
Susie’s eyes lit up. Her other worries seemed to disappear as she turned her attention to the nearest viewport. Angela shot her a murderous glare, but didn’t argue. They both knew if Susie went outside today it would be for all the wrong reasons.
In the crowd around her, Susie was the only one smiling. The other faces were tense or sorrowful. As she scanned through the throng, she met one face with a stern set to her mouth. Intent was the only way Nala would describe it.
Turan gesticulated wildly as she pushed through the throng and when she reached her, the partner dragged Nala out of the crowd. “We have problems.”
“I had noticed,” Nala said.
“The C Tower has completely lost life support function, and we can’t figure out why.” Turan glanced around her to see who was listening. “Luckily it was evacuated before functions ceased.”
Nala pursed her lips to keep from mentioning just how lucky that was. Even in her head it sounded callous. “Has anyone checked into why?”
“That’s why I’ve come to collect you.” Turan all but shoved her into the lift and stabbed in the commands to send them up to the top level.
Before the door closed, Angela slipped in beside them and Susie glanced back and forth between them, reminding Nala just how much children perceive.
The lift sped upward through A Tower and Nala stared at the number on the level indicator.
Behind her, Angela hummed a soothing tune. Turan crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, a look of dejection on her face. Nala thanked her lucky stars the ride would not last long.
The control center was abuzz and Nala flinched as two
arguing guards stepped into the lift without looking. Turan pushed out past them after muttering a curse in their direction. Nala moved quickly behind her, staying far enough away from the woman’s hand to avoid being dragged out.
She ignored questions – both vocalized and those sent to her via a curious look – and went straight to the comms panel. She fished her tools out of her bag as she went.
As she dug out her flashlamp, a crowd gathered behind her. With the communications panel propped open, she could see exactly what the problem was. She could also see a new bomb.
The gasps and curses of the audience behind her were the last thing she needed.
Using her flashlamp to move wires gently to the side, she knew in a moment that the bomb was not of her making. Breathing a heavy sigh, she couldn’t decide if its lack of familiarity was a relief, or one more nail in their proverbial coffin.
She calmly put her tools back in her bag and moved aside to let Angela have a look. There was no timer, so Nala did not feel the need to rush. “Do you want me to take Susie with me when I head downstairs?”
Angela’s eyes never left the bomb. With pursed lips, she nodded silently.
Pointing to Turan, Nala jerked her thumb, directing the woman toward the side wall and spoke to her in hushed tones.
“I know Chadha doesn’t want to consider evacuation, but we need to have a plan set in place. Once our comms are back up and running, you need to consider putting out a call for help.”
“It’s why I demanded that communication be our first priority.” Turan’s expression was impassive. “Can you do anything before she deals with the device?”
Nala shook her head. “Not here, but I don’t have to be here for this to get sorted out. Once Angela defuses the bomb, all you have to do is reconnect the wires it’s using as a power terminal and you’ll be golden to call out or in.”
“You’re leaving?” the control tower supervisor asked as she broke from the crowd. Her eyes darted between them frantically.