Power Down

by Sam Renner

  Keith continues to stare at the code. Rebecca leans over, a hand on Keith's shoulder, and investigates too. They are staring at the screen when it goes black. The code comes back a second later, but it's different this time. More is missing.

  The screen blinks again. Now more code is gone.

  Once more and even more of the code has disappeared.

  Rebecca: "What the …"

  Keith backs out of the code and goes back to the control view. It's different. Three more dashboards are missing.

  Keith and Rebecca look at each other then Keith looks at a still muttering Grey.

  He hesitates before saying anything. He wants a break in her diatribe, but it's not coming. Even though it's quieter, it hasn't stopped.

  He stands, hoping that something moving at the edges of her vision will shake her free from whatever has grabbed hold of her.

  It doesn't.

  "Ma'am," he says.

  "Ma'am?" A little louder.

  She's still looking out into the big screen and muttering to herself. He approaches from behind and puts a hand on Grey's shoulder.

  She whips around and stares him in the face.

  "What?" She barks. She's back.

  "There's something you should see."

  She follows him to his computer. Rebecca explains the situation as they walk.

  "We were looking at the base code of our internal systems’ management software to figure out what happened to our dashboard. While we were in the code, we lost thee more dashboards.”

  Rebecca and Keith wait for some kind of explosion. For the top of Grey's head to open up and send a tower of flame out of the top of Zulu.

  But it doesn't.

  She doesn't react. She looks to the screen, sees the missing dashboards, and apologizes.

  "I'm embarrassed, and I'm sorry," she says. "I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said the things I said, especially about you all. I know you're doing the best you can. We are in new territory for all of us. Stations aren't supposed to do this. It's a little stressful for me."

  "We're all here, ma'am," Rebecca says. "We're all feeling it."

  "You more than any of us," Keith says. "We understand."

  Grey nods her thanks then asks "So what do you two think is happening to Zulu? Why is our station dying? Why is it slowly going to sleep on us?"

  An idea hits Keith, suddenly right there in front of him. Something he should have seen all along.

  "What?" Grey asks.

  "Sleep," he says. "I don’t want to make any promises, but I might have an idea about what's going on."

  TWELVE

  Lebbe’s heart races. It’s working its way up from his chest and into his throat. Here she is. Sarah. Little girl lost is little girl found, and she’s standing right in front of him. She’s beautiful, and she's not so little.

  She was always beautiful, of course. But here, in the dark of this ring she’s glowing. Her energy is lighting up all of this space.

  “Sarah,” he says.

  She smiles. “Hi, dad."

  He hears her say it. She calls him dad. It’s been years since he heard anyone use that word in reference to him. Mindy always said “their father.” She didn’t call him the girls’ dad. And the girls never called him that, mostly because they never called him.

  But Sarah’s here, and she’s said it. She’s said dad. It sends his mind sprinting back in time, all the way back to before Sarah was born. He’s replaying the moments in the delivery room with Mindy. He’s holding her hand and helping her breathe through a contraction. They are coming faster now, but Mindy is laughing in between them, because they both know they are soon going to meet the little girl they’ve been anticipating for nine months.

  Then his head skips forward a few days and Sarah is sleeping in her carrier as he takes her to the car, Mindy in a wheelchair being pushed to the exit. He turns to look at her, and she has a smile on her face. She hasn’t stopped since Sarah arrived. She even sleeps with a small grin.

  Another jump, and he’s sitting at his desk in the precinct, a newly tapped detective. He’s brought a picture of Mindy and Sarah with him, and he’s holding it in his hand. He stares at it, at them.

  Then it’s the first day of school. Sarah is wearing a backpack that wants to knock her over. She’s smiling, but Lebbe can see she’s anxious. He walks her to class, and the teacher greets them. The woman points Sarah to a desk with her name on it. She sits and looks around. Lebbe kneels in front of his girl and says some joke that he’s forgotten now, but it works. Sarah giggles and throws her arms around his neck. He hugs her back and kisses her on the cheek.

  The memories start getting more spread out. Sarah starts getting older. There’s a dinner after her first day of second grade. Then a phone call to tell him about a big moment in a softball game. Then it’s more things he’d missed, and now Lebbe’s memory is full of the consequences of bad decisions. She’s on a screen and he’s in a small cabin, the feed from Earth struggling to make it to some small station where he’d taken a job without consulting Mindy. Then conversations with Mindy about Sarah but not with her.

  His mind is overrun with regret and shame. He should never have run from them, any of his girls. He should have been the man that they clearly needed him to be. His eyes begin to swell with tears, and he pinches his eyes shut to try and keep them from wetting his cheeks.

  “Dad,” Sarah says again, and Lebbe opens his eyes. She’s still here. He reaches out, arms wide, to hug her. She puts up a hand to stop him. She shakes a no.

  “I can’t believe it. How are you?” he asks.

  “I’m good. Busy.”

  “I’m sure. I see that things are crazy back home.”

  “Yeah.”

  The conversation stalls. Lebbe stares at Sarah. She just smiles back. After a moment he asks “Are you in school?”

  “Taking a semester off. I’ve got some friends. We are involved in a couple of things. Protests. Making change. That kind of thing.”

  Lebbe nods. “Good. Good. I knew you’d be passionate about that kind of stuff. You were always the one who fought for others when you were little.”

  “Mom wasn’t too surprised either when I told her it’s what I wanted to do.”

  “How’s your sister?”

  “Good. Also involved in the movement.”

  “I figured.”

  “And you? How is life ...” she pauses to look around the ring. “How is life out here?”

  “I miss you guys. I miss your mom. Overall, I’m surviving, but it’s a long way from home.”

  “How long have you been on Zulu?”

  “Year and a half. Before that I was on a little fueling station halfway between Earth and Mars. Makes enough money for me to send some home to your mom for you girls. If you want, I can show you around."

  She shakes no.

  They sit in silence again before Lebbe says “She’s worried about you, you know. Your mom, I mean. She’s sent me videos."

  "I know she is. And you're worried too if you've seen the videos."

  Lebbe nods. "She's torn up, Sarah. A wreck. Never seen her so bad."

  "I know she is. And she should be. It's not good, dad."

  Lebbe squints his eyes and gives Sarah a look like she's speaking gibberish.

  "You're here," he says. "We just need to let her know. Although, if you're here now you must have been missing a long time. That she's just now letting me know doesn't make me happy."

  Lebbe pulls his datapad from his pocket and starts tapping on the screen. “But let’s send her a message and let he know you’re safe.”

  Sarah reaches out to stop him. “Dad, no. We can’t.”

  “Sure. Just let me get this app pulled up.”

  “Dad, no. We can’t because I’m not here. Not really.”

  Lebbe looks around the dark ring. “Is it cameras or something? Are you some kind of hologram?” He reaches out to try and touch her. Sarah takes a step back to avoid the swipe of
his hand.

  “I’m in your head, dad. But I need you to focus now. I’m not safe. I need you to find me, but you can’t find me if you are stuck in here. You have to get out of here. Can you do that for me?”

  Lebbe nods. “I can.”

  “I love you. I need you. Find the door. You know where it is.”

  “I’ll get out of here. I’ll find you. I promise.”

  He reaches one more time for her, but her image begins to fade like someone disappearing into a shadow. The tears that had been in his eyes fall freely now. She’s gone. His beautiful girl is gone, if she can really be gone. She was never really here. It was all some kind of illusion. Some mental trick that his subconscious played on him. It was a cruel joke. He hopes that his lesser demons have enjoyed their fun, because it’s over now.

  He drags a finger across his cheek and dries the tears that are there. They are replaced with determination. If his girl needs him, real or not, he’s going to find her. He’s going to get out of these rings.

  THIRTEEN

  Malvaughn sits in the dark, just the glow of the computer screen lighting his face. He’s alone again. Finally. He doesn’t know where Maldonado went, and he doesn’t care if it means he doesn’t have to listen to the guy go on and on about another food stand he’s found.

  The guy should have been wearing a red flag as a hat because that’s how Malvaughn saw him when he’d heard Maldonado had also been tapped for this operation. Not just a hat either. Maldonado should be wearing a shirt and pants made out of red flags. Some kind of flowing robe too.

  Maldonado wasn’t smart enough to pull off something like this. A mission to gain access to the system controls of a space station needed smarts, and technical savvy. Buckets of that stuff. It needed brains, not brawn. At least that was Malvaughn’s thinking. But this wasn’t his operation to plan. He had a role to play, and he’d been reminded of that. Repeatedly.

  “You’re the critical piece to all of this,” he’d been told. “I can get a dozen guys to go in and get violent. But we both know that there’s no one better for the physical side of this than Maldonado.”

  Malvaugh had conceded the point. He just didn’t like the guy. But he didn’t like most guys, not those who spend their lives out here this far doing the kind of work they do, breaking their backs and spirits trying to pull every last strain of ore out of these flying rocks. Not that his job had been much better. There’s surprisingly little technology on an asteroid being mined for ore. Outside of the suits the miners wear, it’s mostly just big machines that can lift a pull huge amounts of weight. For a 5-year-old boy it’s Heaven. For a grown man like Malvaughn, it’s all kind of a bore. He’d always found things behind a screen much more interesting. He didn’t want to control the lifters and diggers and drillers. He wanted to run things like the station he was poking around in now.

  He wanted to command a team of technicians that kept a place like Zulu spinning smoothly out here at the edge of the galaxy, staring out into the deep, unknown black during his down time. But life doesn’t always work out like you hope it will, and instead of working his way up to being the technical lead on a place like Zulu, Malvaughn sits on this thin-cushioned couch and digs around the insides of Zulu trying to figure out ways to bring it down. Or, if not bring it down, make it seem a whole lot like that’s where it’s headed.

  He puts his legs up on the coffee table and crosses them at the ankles. He sets the computer on top of his thighs and types a line of code into the command line. He thinks about the chaos that he's causing on Zulu, and he smiles. A small chuckle. That chuckle grows into actual laugh.

  The door to the hall opens and Maldonado returns, some kind of Styrofoam food container in one hand and two brown bottles of something in the other.

  He takes a seat on the love seat across from Malvaughn then leans across and pushes one of the brown bottles in front of him. The Styrofoam squeaks as he pops the top off his container.

  The sound sends a shiver down Malvaughn’s spine. He watches Maldonado take three quick stabs at whatever is inside then bring the full fork to his mouth. The large bite of food bulges his cheek.

  "What was so funny?" he asks.

  Malvaughn picks up the brown bottle. He inspects its label then cracks the cap.

  “What’s this?”

  “Something a local whips together. It’s good. Try it.”

  Malvaughn puts the bottle under his nose and sniffs. A moment later his head snaps back like he’s been given a bottle of rotting sludge.

  “Oh, God,” he says.

  Maldonado laughs. “You’re supposed to drink it, not smell it.”

  Malvaughn puts the bottle to his lips and takes a hesitant drink. It tastes about like it smells. Whatever this is, it’s bitter and stings the back of his throat.

  He shakes his head after he’s swallowed all of it, no small task, and places the bottle on the table.

  “It grows on you,” Maldonado says.

  Malvaughn turns his attention back to the command line on his screen and starts typing in lines of code and directions. “I’ve never understood that,” he says. “If something is awful, why do you want it to grow on you? Why don’t you want to not have that experience again.”

  Malvaughn ignores the question and asks again: “What was so funny when I came in?”

  “Just messing with the people over on that station.”

  “What do you mean messing with them?”

  “I’m messing with their life support systems.”

  “Their what?”

  Malvaughn is still putting all of his attention into the code on his screen. “All the stuff that makes the place livable, like air handlers and water recyclers, is all wobbly. And wobbly is generous. A lot of it is about to wobble all the way to failure.”

  Maldonado scrapes the last bites of food from his take out container, and the fork squeaks again against the Styrofoam.

  “Right about now,” Malvaughn continues, “I’d imagine that the leaders over there are in a panic. Whoever is in charge is probably standing over the shoulder of some poor, low-level schmuck screaming in panic about the station dying. Asking this guy to do something.”

  Malvaughn stops for a moment and stares over the top of his computer screen into the middle distance with a sloppy grin on his face. He’s lost in the moment he’s creating.

  He continues: “Guy is punching keys trying to figure out why everything is failing. Why it’s all cascading on them, one system following the other.”

  He types more code into the command line and smiles to himself after hitting enter. “And now I just took down the management software that schmuck needs to do anything.”

  Maldonado leans forward and slides the now-empty food container onto the coffee table then collapses back into the cushions of the love seat. “Wow, man. You’re mean. Don’t you think that’s cruel?”

  Malvaughn points to Maldonado’s knuckles and says: “Don’t know that I need to be told I’m cruel by a guy like you.”

  Maldonado balls his hands into fists and inspects the cuts from his short fight the night before. “At least I got these in a fair fight.”

  “How do you figure that fight was fair? Have you seen you?”

  Maldonado grabs his food container and stands, looming over Malvaughn.

  “It was fair because it was face to face. The other guy could have backed down and backed out if he wanted to.” Maldonado takes the container and drops it into a trashcan, letting it balance on the top of an already mounding stack of food containers from his other excursions out into the Manhattan.

  He continues as he comes back to the couch. “What you’re doing, though, is mental torture. They all think that their station is dying. They think that this isn’t going to stop until everything shuts down. Until all their systems have crashed.”

  Malvaughn doesn’t say anything. He just looks to Maldonado, expecting him to say something else, to accentuate his point with something that’s actually convincing.
He doesn’t.

  “I guess I don’t see the difference,” Malvaughn says.

  “Torturing them. That’s what you’re doing.”

  “Eh. I’m not perfect. I can live with it.” Malvaughn turns back to the computer on his lap and buries himself back into what’s on the screen there.

  Maldonado picks up his datapad and taps the screen, bringing the device to life. He gets lost in whatever is showing there. Malvaughn can’t see it, but he can hear it. It’s the same voices making the same bad jokes that he’s heard since they got to the Manhattan.