Power Down

by Sam Renner

  It didn’t matter what was really happening in the cartoons. Sarah and Lebbe would make up their own adventures, and they always ended the same way, with Sarah in giggle fits on the couch. Lebbe would be trying to quiet her laughing so she didn’t wake her mom or her sister.

  After that was over and they’d each finished their cereal, Sarah would put her head in Lebbe’s lap. They’d watch the cartoon that came on next before Lebbe helped Sarah get ready for school.

  At the door, Lebbe tries to put a finger into the area between the jamb and the door. It’s barely wide enough to get the tip in there. Next, he grabs the handle and turns. It doesn’t move, not an inch.

  Of course it doesn’t. Power’s down.

  He steps back and considers his options, because I am going through that door.

  From the other side of the door he hears something. A voice.

  “Hello!” he shouts. “Someone. Can you hear me?”

  The voice gets louder. He shouts again, his voice cracking from the effort.

  “HELLO! ANYONE? HELLO!”

  A moment later the voice gets louder. It’s Sarah. He can hear her better now. It sounds like she’s just on the other side of the door.

  “Think, dad. You have to get out of there. I need you to get out of there, dad, because I need you. And I need you quickly.”

  Sarah continues, but her voice begins to fade.

  “Mom can’t find me. She wants to, I know that. But this is why I have you for a dad. I’m convinced of it.”

  He presses his ear firm into the door, straining to hear her quickly disappearing words. He pulls out his data pad and pulls up a picture of Sarah. He stares at her face. He studies it and smiles. She’s all grown up in this picture, but underneath all those teenage features is still the little girl who danced on his feet and giggled at his goofy cat voices.

  He turns his screen to the locking mechanism on the door. It’s a pretty simple construction. His data pad chirps, and he flips it over. The power indicator is flashing red now.

  He turns the pad off and grabs for the handle again. He gives it one more jiggle, like maybe somehow the act of him investigating the lock caused it to mysteriously come open. The handle doesn't move.

  He steps back from the door and raises a leg. He taps a toe near the locking mechanism. Hes gauging distance, like a fighter in the ring who's throwing soft jabs just to figure out exactly how far he has to go to land a knockout blow. He brings his leg down and takes a slight step back. He breathes in. He breathes out. He takes a shuffle step and puts all of his might into the kick he gives the door.. A pain rockets from his heal up through his knee and into his hip. It drops him to the ground. He instinctually grabs for the joint and rolls over so it's not touching the ground

  He tries to stand and puts what weight he can on the hip and takes another step back. He gauges the distance. Shuffle step. Kick. More pain.

  He gets up to one knee and scoots toward the door to investigate whether he’s done any damage. He’d use the data pad again but must save what little battery is left in case this doesn't work.

  He rubs a hand along the door right near the handle and the lock its dented. The damage is minimal, but it's definitely dented. He exhales and decides one more time to give it a kick. He struggles to stand and the hip is more than painful now. One more kick. One moe about of pain, and he drops back to the floor. This time he rolls to his back and that's when he feels it. It’'s just a little pinch. But he'd forgotten it was there. It's the gun. He’d gotten in the habit of carrying it around with him after Grey made a smart comment about walking the floor. It was all out of spite. A big middle finger to Grey and all of her rules.

  He smiles to himself and reaches around his back and grabs the handle of the gun with his right hand. He pulls the gun out and feels the weight of it on his arm. He reaches in front of him and tries to find the handle on the door. He grabs it tries one more time to open it for good measure. Then he aims the gun at the handle and pulls the trigger three times

  SEVENTEEN

  Grey comes through the doors back into Zulu’s control room. Keith and Rebecca are still working. Both have returned to their own terminals and are furiously typing on their keyboards.

  “How's it going?” Grey asks.

  “The same,” they say in near unison.

  “Stop,” she says. “Quit working.”

  Keith stops typing. He looks up at her like a confused child, like mom has just asked him to do something that she's told him a million times not to. Rebecca continues to type, like Grey hasn’t even asked anything of them.

  “Rebecca,” Grey says, but Rebecca continues. Grey calls her name again. Still nothing.

  Grey walks over and puts a hand on top of Rebecca’s. Grey pushes and mashes the keys under Rebecca’s hand. She looks down at her young engineer. Rebecca snaps to, like she’s been sucked out of the tunnel that’s kept her singly focused on her terminal and the station that’s dying all around them.

  She looks up to Grey. “Let’s have a conversation,” Grey says then steps back to the center of the room.

  “Talk this through with me,” she says.

  “Right now may not be the best time for talking,” Keith says. “We need to be…”

  Grey cuts him off. “Don’t worry about it. At least not for now. You guys are great, but if Zulu is dying then Zulu is dying. You two digging around her systems isn’t going to stop the inevitable.”

  Rebecca’s eyes go wide: “So we are calling this inevitable now?”

  Grey nods. “For the moment, yes.”

  Tears begin to pool in the corner of Rebecca’s eyes.

  “Don’t,” Grey says. “If we think that Zulu is too far gone to save then we’ll all get out of here. But we aren’t there yet.”

  “But you just said …”

  Grey pauses. Not the time for this.

  “I know what I said, Keith. Failure is the position I’m operating from, but, between us, I still have some hope that we can save this place. I just need the two of you to think about this from the 30-light-year level, pull way back and look at the whys of it all. So far we’ve just been chasing this thing. Going everywhere it’s just been. Air is shutting down? Let’s go look there. We just lost water? Go look there. We can’t stay on defense. We have to attack it, get in front of it and stop it. If we don’t switch how we are thinking we can’t do that. So, pause for a second, get out of your terminals, and think this through with me.”

  “So don’t dig into the systems anymore?” Rebecca asks.

  Grey shakes her head. “Not for at least a few minutes. I don’t want you all just rummaging through things. I want you in places for a reason chasing down theories, not just digging into code with a flashlight hoping you find something.”

  Keith: “A little deep space detective work.”

  “If that helps you think about it differently then sure.”

  The three of them sit in silence for a moment, Grey is waiting on them to start tossing out ideas, but they don’t. So she asks.

  “Thoughts?”

  Again, it’s quiet. She feels like a teacher in front of a classroom of reluctant students. If she wants either of them to offer any kind of ideas she’s going to have to pull it out of them individually.

  “Rebecca, you go first.”

  “If we’re just throwing out ideas, I wonder if it’s something wrong with the core. Could it be melting down or failing in some way?”

  Keith shakes his head. Grey tells him to stop. “No bad suggestions here. Let’s not write something off immediately until we’ve talked it through.”

  “It’s not a bad thought,” Keith says. “I’m open to any ideas. Really. But the core is probably the most stable thing we have on this ship. It melting down would be chaotic, but not here. Not in the systems. Melting down, it’d start pulling the ship apart from the inside out.”

  “And that’s not what’s happening here? Feels kind of like that to me,” Rebeccas says.


  “No, it’s not. The core goes then this ship would come apart at the seams. Literally come apart. Besides, if that were happening we’d have known about it already. There are alarm bells tuned to start ringing if the core exhibits even the slightest change. The core’s warning system would be triggered long before we got any of the alerts we’ve seen today. The physical systems alarms allow for a lot more variation in efficiencies than the core’s does, and for good reason.”

  “OK, good things to know,” Grey says. “So if it’s not the core then what do you think it is?”

  Keith adjusts his seat, sitting up, like he’s giving some kind of formal presentation. “I think that what we’re looking at is cascading failure. The weight of one issue triggers another. Failing water stresses the system, so it takes down air. Now the weight of two systems being down brings down the rest. It’s how you ultimately lose power generation and then the whole ship.”

  “No,” Rebecca says. “That doesn’t work.”

  Grey turns to face her then asks: “Why not?”

  “There’s no interconnectivity between the systems. One isn’t reliant on the others. And the way that they are separated inside the power structure, one pulling more power doesn’t mean others are getting less.”

  She turns to Keith. “The premise that your whole theory is built on doesn’t actually exist.”

  Grey: “There’s no way that theory works?”

  “Power is my thing, and I can’t see how it does.”

  Grey is nodding. “So, it’s my turn. What do you guys think of the idea that someone has triggered all of this? That it’s not an accident.”

  “An attack?” the two of them ask in near unison.

  Keith and Rebecca turn and look at each other. Rebecca speaks first. “I mean, it’s a little broad, but that theory works better than either of ours.”

  Keith: “I don’t know. How do they get in? These networks are impenetrable.”

  “Nothing is impenetrable.”

  “Practically, these are.”

  “Sure, our defenses are good. We’ve got a really high and really thick wall around everything on this station, but it’s not infinitely high and infinitely thick. Someone knows what they’re doing, they can get in.”

  “They’d have to be some kind of advanced network engineer to be able to even know where to start looking for vulnerabilities.”

  “Or …” Grey says and interrupts their little party. Keith and Rebecca both turn and look. Grey continues. “What if they don’t need to figure out a way to get through initial protections put in place?”

  “Somebody on the ship? In the network?” Rebecca asks.

  Grey starts to pace the room. She’s debating on whether or not to float Lebbe’s name. She’s still not fully convinced that he could be the one behind this. Yes, he’s been her biggest headache ever since she got to Zulu. He’s the sand in her shoes. The pea under her mattress. But would he do something like this? She’s had this debate, though. She’s talked this through. He has motive. He has opportunity. If she’s a cop, those things make him a credible suspect, so she throws the name out there.

  She stops and looks at Keith and Rebecca. “Lebbe.”

  There’s almost no reaction from either, nothing for Grey to read and assess. That’s good? No, not good. I don’t want this to be true. It’s not a game to be won.

  Keith is clearly thinking this through. He’s lost in thought, then he relaxes and speaks. “If we concede that it’s not someone breaking into the network from outside, and it’s someone who lives here, then I can’t think of a reason to exclude him.”

  Rebecca: “The only thing I can think of is that he doesn’t have the skills needed to dig around into the systems and start putting things in place that would cause the kind of issues we’re seeing.

  No, it’s not a game, but Grey can’t help but feel like she’s won. Her theory works. At least on a high level, it does, and it feels good. It feels like leadership. She’s about to ask that if they are working under the assumption that it’s Lebbe, how would that change their approach to looking at what’s going on, but she doesn’t get the chance. The whole conversation is interrupted by what sounds like three quick explosions.

  EIGHTEEN

  The shots echo down these empty halls. Lebbe’s ears ring like a siren. He opens his mouth wide to try and readjust the pressures inside his ear drums. He steps forward and checks the handle.

  The door doesn’t open. He pulls harder on the door, hoping that he can make something inside the lock snap or bend enough that the door swings open. He yanks. He tugs. But nothing.

  He takes a step back. He leans forward and grabs the handle with two hands. He puts a leg up on the wall for leverage and puts everything he has into trying to overpower this door. The door wins the fight.

  He leans close and inspects the locking mechanism. With the little bit of light that’s now there he can see that the whole thing has been damaged. Not enough to force the lock to release, but it’s something. He runs a hand along the door and the wall around it and can feel where his kicks had damaged the wall earlier. It’ll make the pain bloom in his hip anew, but he knows that kicking it again is the only way he’s going to be able to put enough force on that wall and on that lock to even have a chance to get it open.

  He takes a step back and a deep breath.

  Whispers: “I’m coming, Sarah.”

  He steps a kick into the wall. Again, pain shoots up his leg, but he shouts it back and stays standing. He brings his foot back down and shouts and kicks again. A tear rolls down his cheek, and he kicks again.

  The shouting is constant now, and Lebbe kicks the wall over and over. He shouts louder when he feels the metal start to give way under his pounding heel. The metal around the lock buckles and bows. The pillar of light coming between the door and the jamb distorts and widens.’

  He stops kicking and drops to the ground. He lays on his back and closes his eyes. A smile grows, and he begins to laugh. He feels more like a dad than he has in years, and neither of his girls is here to appreciate it.

  He’s also breathing harder then maybe he ever has. He can’t remember the last time he exerted that much energy. He definitely wasn’t on Zulu when he did it. May have been a lifetime ago when was still a cop and some do-nothing-right tried to outrun him. But nobody outran Jiim Lebbe, not when he was young and spry and had a little too much pride. You stood no chance of getting away. Apparently, that applies to doors as well.

  The door. Don’t celebrate too much. You still aren’t out of here.

  Lebbe runs his hand between the door and the jamb, and he can get more than a fingertip in the gap now. Much more. Enough that if he works them hard enough he can actually get his fingers in to the first knuckle.

  He pushes. He grimaces. And one hand goes in. Push. Grimace. The other hand is in.

  He takes a deep breath, and then tightens his stomach, forcing all of his strength out to his arms. He pulls with everything he has. His forearms shake as the door fights back. ROpey muscles want to burst through his skin. He leans back and puts everything he has into pulling the door enough to disengage the lock, but the door doesn’t move.

  He stops and everything in his body seems to go slack.

  Breath is coming in short gasps, and Lebbee falls to his back and lets his body recover.Those last few kicks when he felt the metal buckle lets him know this door will come open. How long he has to go at this, pulling and tearing and ripping Zulu apart to get out of this set of tunnels, he doesn't know. But he will get out. He needs to be out. Sarah needs him out.

  He pushes himself to a sitting position, pauses a beat and then stands. He wiggles his fingers. The tips already ache. He can feel them going raw. They hurt. They pulse, every beat of his rapidly pumping heart feels like it’s going to explode out the ends of his fingers. But he knows this is pain that he must withstand, and he steps forward and jams the fingers back in between the door and the jamb.

  Again, he returns to
pulling and tugging and trying to tear the door open. He knows it doesn't have to come all the way unlocked. He just needs enough space to crawl through.

  So, instead of concentrating on getting the door all the way open, he just pulls the top down. He’s going to fold it like a piece of paper, like he’s dog-earing the page of a book. He lets out a grunt that echoes through the halls. The door moves slightly. Again, this time letting out in elongated yawl that causes the door to move even more. The metal is starting to give. Lebbe is winning this battle. He WILL be the victor in this fight.

  His fingers don't hurt anymore. Making this space, bending the metal means they're not crammed in between the door and the jamb now. He moves his hands to get a better grip on this door. He hunches down, getting his arms extended way above him. He screams louder than anything he’s screamed in ages. He pulls down and the door folds.