The terminal outside his door spotted her, scanned her, and asked her to wait. This, too, was normal, and soon enough Creedy’s voice came through the speaker. “Lamb? Come in.” The man’s voice always seemed to have an edge to it, as if the next person requesting entry might be security wanting to arrest him. Opal hadn’t found any dirt on him yet, and she’d tried.
The door slid open, she stepped through. A smooth desk sat in the middle of the floor, cluttered with terminal screens and heads-ups, handhelds stacked to one side. Creedy hunched over the desk, hands folded together, peering at one of the screens as if he didn’t trust it. A display on the back wall scrolled through stock images of planet-side scenes from Earth, oceans and mountains, as different from the station as one could hope for.
She tapped her wrist pad to transfer a data file to him. “Good morning, sir. There’s today’s requisitions list. Unfulfilleds rolled over from yesterday as usual.”
He barely glanced at it. “It keeps getting longer.”
“Supply’s always been an issue. We make do.”
“Can’t you do something about it?”
Her lips quirked a smile. “Once you sign the list I can submit it to requisitions. After that I’ll do what I can.”
Grumbling, Creedy pressed his thumb to the screen of his terminal.
She added, “You might think of calling the director—”
“I can’t just call the director.”
In fact, he could: it was part of his job. Opal had called the director, who was as overworked and under pressure as everyone else on the station. And no one could magically raise the power rations or manufacture a new set of laser welders until someone higher up the chain – maybe even the Trade Guild BoD – realized that Tennant Station needed five more fabrication units at least, as well as more solar generators and batteries. At least, it did if it was going to do its job properly.
Tennant was too big to function efficiently, but too small to get the attention that would make it function efficiently. An odd middle ground, out here on the frontier.
She tried again. “If we could implement the inventory software stationwide instead of doing it piecemeal by department...” She suspected there was an extra fabricator sitting in storage, in a carbon fiber crate that no one had bothered to label or open. If only they could track it down...
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” Creedy mumbled at his terminal, which he continued peering at skeptically, probably only to avoid looking at Opal.
Her kingdom was made up of ten repair bays. Creedy’s was the entire dockyard of Tennant Station. He seemed to exist in a state of constant, vague desperation.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, sir,” she said—not heaving a frustrated sigh today—and turned to leave.
“Lamb!”
“Yes?”
“How long has Marigold been here?”
Marigold, Henry’s problem child in Bay Four. Opal checked her wrist pad. “Four days.”
“And it still isn’t ready?”
“If the captain hadn’t brought her five years past her scheduled maintenance refit, it wouldn’t take us a week and four crews to put her back together.”
“So it’ll take a week. I can tell that to Captain Ray?”
Opal’s smile curled sharper. “Tell him two.”
OPAL’S OFFICE WAS nothing like Creedy’s actual room with an actual desk and a door that closed. Pretty pictures for the wall and places for visitors to sit. Her nominal office was an open closet with a fold-down surface, a terminal display mounted to the wall, and a swivel chair bolted to the deck. At any given moment the terminal was flashing with messages and conference requests, and data files sent to her by everyone on the station. Often actual components and broken pieces of equipment were left on the desk. Everyone had some new example of metal stress failure to show her. She was cataloguing them in one of her databases.
Not that she spent much time at her cozy, cluttered station. Most of the time she had incoming messages and data fed directly to her headset. Saved time.
Morning rounds finished, she left the dockyard and took a lift three sections down. A more interior deck of the station, her steps were a little light here, the curve of the corridors a little steeper. The atmosphere was just as industrial, the air heady with the smell of oil and heat. The temperature was up from the dockyard. Further from the skin, further from the cold.
“Afternoon, Shelby,” she announced herself, approaching the workstation of her counterpart in Fabrication.
“Opal. Right on schedule.” He was a big man sitting cramped up on the bolted down stool in his own office cubby-hole. His headset was off his ear and hanging down around his shoulder. “What d’you need today?”
“Whatever you can get me.”
He sat back from his terminal and the data he’d been looking at. “Well, that’s non-specific.”
Behind him, beyond shielding windows, drone fabricators worked, but the Fabrication Department was on power rationing, too. Three-quarters of their drones were operating and they didn’t have enough raw material to supply every request.
“It’s one of those days, but I think laser welders are a priority today. We’ve got a couple of ships in for refit that are sucking us dry.”
“Only going to get worse,” he muttered.
She cocked her head. “What have you heard?”
He hesitated a moment, which told Opal this wasn’t offhand gossip. This was the result of threads of data Shelby had followed and considered. He talked to everyone on the station, he knew it all.
“You know we’re not really the edge, right?” he said softly.
“Edge of what?” she said skeptically, leading. She knew what he was talking about, but drew him out.
“The universe isn’t flat. You don’t go off in one direction and hit the edge. There are other frontiers, where other people and other ships went out. We catch flashes of them—we always have. What happens when we run into them full force?”
“Myths and rumors,” she said, unconvincingly. Unauthorized colony ships, lost explorers from hundreds of years before, planting flags and building their own unknown territories. Trade Guild kept good records. Nobody could get this far out without leaving a trail. Unless, of course, they had. Empires, lying in wait. The shipping lanes were filled with stories. “We’d know,” she insisted. “We’d be talking to them.”
He shrugged, as if to say, maybe.
“People have been telling tales for years. What are they talking about now?” she asked. There’d always been ghost stories, captains and crews coming in talking about being shadowed, blips on their scanners that might have been stray asteroids or might have been other ships, powered down: sensor outposts where they shouldn’t have been; drones that didn’t look like Trade Guild’s. Shelby could tell any one of those stories and it wouldn’t mean anything.
“Com traffic from MilDiv’s up twenty percent,” he said, and that made her stomach drop. Military Division—again, could mean anything. They were running exercises in the area. They were scouting for new outpost sites. But that was a hard piece of information she hadn’t had before, and data made rumors real.
“Right, okay. If you hear anything more, maybe let me know?”
Shelby turned back to his monitor, offhand, as if it didn’t mean anything.” Yeah. Likewise. Now, what did you say you need? Laser welders? Machinery like that takes a while to fabricate, especially if our power ration gets cut—”
“I don’t need whole laser welders. Just the lenses, and the kids upstairs can put ’em back together.”
He nodded. “Hold on a sec.” Clambered up, went around the corner to a set of coded cabinets. Held his headset up to his face, consulting a file before tapping the code into the right drawer. Popped it open and drew out a small, innocuous plastic box, which he handed over to her like a prize.
She thumbed open the latch and found her welder lenses, of various sizes and calibrations, nestled in padded slots. Henry was going to cry.
“Thank you very much,” she said, resisting an urge to hug the box to her chest.
“It’s because you’re the only one who ever comes down to ask for things in person,” he said.
“Gives me a chance to stretch my legs.”
BACK UP IN the dockyards she was so focused on getting the lenses to Henry and so happy to be able to do so that she didn’t notice Captain Ray of the Marigold lying in wait at her work station. Arms crossed, shoulder up against the bulkhead, he spotted her and charged.
“Chief Lamb! I need my ship!”
Not even a hello, first. “Captain, I understand you’re anxious, but the status is the same. We’ll finish when we finish, we don’t do rush jobs here.”
“It’s been four days already—”
“And what you said was standard maintenance turned into a major refit.”
“That’s a load of—”
“You really ought to talk to Creedy about this, if you have a complaint about our work.”
He stopped, took a breath. Managed to collect himself, which he didn’t often bother to do when speaking to dock workers. “Lamb. I really need to get Marigold and crew out of here and inbound before... we just need to leave as soon as possible.” He hitched a thumb over his shoulder in a direction meant to be away.
Marigold had burned out part of its drive getting here, making a two-week run in ten days. Henry had asked the pilot why the hurry, and the woman, her eyes shadowed, shook her head and said this was safer. Was that rumor, or data?
“She’ll be ready as soon as possible, sir. If you’d talk to Supervisor Creedy—”
“I already did, he said to talk to you.”
Of course he did.
“Captain, I’ll keep sending you daily reports. All right?”
His expression trembled, simmering at the unfairness of the universe. He pointed. “I’ll be waiting for those reports.” Steps pounding on deck plates, he stalked away.
“That’ll teach you to skip maintenance checks,” she muttered after him.
Touching her wrist pad, she raised the heads-up on the Bay Four external vid feed and confirmed that yes, it would take at least a week to finish Marigold. Her external drive was dismantled. Only one laser welder was throwing off a functional glow. Well, she could fix that, at least.
She hopped between several other external feeds, including a couple from some of the drones working further out from the station. Swept them across the traffic lanes, curious about how busy they really were, how much was really incoming. Nothing looked particularly unusual. Distant hulls flashed, reflecting the light of their home star. Colored running lights blinked in the dark. Yes, they were busy. Busy, but orderly. Not quite at full chaos, and she hoped to keep her little kingdom in that state.
ON HER WAY back to docks a comm request came through, and she paused at the side of the corridor to answer it. The image of Astin, engineering chief for the entire station, appeared as a small bust in the upper right corner of her display.
“What’s wrong?” Opal asked, because something must be.
Astin, a slender woman with close-cropped black hair and a serene gaze, blinked back at her. “Nothing. Why? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing apart from the usual. I think.”
“Well good. Because I thought I was calling with good news— we’re raising your power ration. You should be able to move up some of those repair timetables.”
“Oh, that’s excellent,” Opal said. “You’ve increased capacity then?” Life support and food production always got first dibs on what power the station’s generators and solar cells produced. The dockyards might have been a big part of Tennant’s reason for existing, but they ended up pretty far down the priority ladder on necessities. Couldn’t do much else if they couldn’t stay alive.
Astin’s smile turned wry. “We’ve done some reorganizing. So just to warn you, the ration increase may not be permanent. Might want to use it while you can.”
“Right, I’ll pass that along. Any other reorganizing that might trickle down to docks?”
Her gaze narrowed, her lips pressing tight. Instantly suspicious. “Why, what have you heard?”
“What do you mean, what have I heard? Nothing, that’s why I am asking.” Nothing, but Ray’s anxiety and Shelby’s hints and her own general growing sense of tension.
“What has Creedy told you?”
“Nothing,” she said, curbing frustration. Creedy would be the last person to know if anything was going on.
“Everything’s status quo. Except for some bureaucratic shuffling, we’re fine.” She said this firmly, like she wanted it to be true.
Opal fished. “Any word floating around up top about MilDiv?”
Now the look in the woman’s eyes was fear. Tamped down and managed, but still there. Tautly she said, “Nothing at all, Chief Lamb. Signing off now. Have a good day.” This sounded like a threat, somehow.
“Yes, same to you,” she replied, but the comm line had already closed, the image vanished.
Henry actually hugged her when she handed over the welder lenses, which he’d never done before. Rather than making her feel appreciated, the gesture added to her sense of unease. She felt like she was waiting for something large to break.
When he let her go, she said, “And would you believe we’ve got an increase in our power ration?”
He frowned suddenly. “What’s wrong?”
“You know, that’s exactly what I was thinking. I don’t know. Might be nothing. It just... feels off, you know?”
Henry shrugged. He was still clutching the box of lenses in both hands, and Opal focused on that, that something had gone right today.
“Just something in the air,” he said. “It’ll pass.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it will,” she said.
“It’s like Kay over on Team Two says. Nothing to worry about until MilDiv shows up.” He chuckled, but Opal didn’t.
“If MilDiv shows up we’ll have more to worry about than just... well, worrying, won’t we?”
The levity disappeared. “Do you think it’s if or when? For MilDiv, I mean.”
She considered her own fears nesting in the primal part of her brain, the part that said to run, knowing full well that out here on a place like Tennant there was absolutely no place to run to. Just keep turning in circles until the atmosphere gave out. What a way to live.
Ships were better, a lot of space-faring folk believed. At least ships were a moving target.
“Let’s just see if we can get Marigold out of here ahead of schedule. At least then we won’t have to keep hiding from Captain Ray.”
“Found you, did he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Right. Priority: getting Ray off station.”
She smiled her thanks.
BACK AT HER closet office she sat for a moment to catch her breath, update the task list, and have a quick snack and a pouch of coffee. Already staring at her terminal, she got the new traffic alert as soon as it came in. This was how she kept on top of incoming repair jobs—by listening in on sensor feeds from traffic control. She knew what was inbound before the official requests came in. Gave her just an extra few moments to plan, to find the space, to assign the crews.
She tapped into traffic control to get a better read on the arriving ship—size, name, crew, whatever maintenance history they had on file. And the feed shut down. The whole terminal crashed. A couple commands on her wrist pad revived her general computer access, but traffic control was still down.
Down, or blacked out?
She messaged traffic control ops directly over her headset. “Hey, guys, I’m trying to get a transponder reading off an incoming ship, but your system went down. Is there a problem?”
The response—voice only—sounded like it came from Ain, one of the shift chiefs, but stress made him sharp. “We’ve just gone on security lockdown, Opal. I’m sorry, can’t talk.” The line shut off.
Opal waited for the sirens to sta
rt. They didn’t. Not yet anyway. Her shift was close to wrapping up, but she didn’t log out of the terminal or start her last rounds. She sat on her stool, waiting.
The next call came from Shelby. Opal jumped at the beep, then pressed her headset to her ear as if that would make his voice any clearer.
“Opal? Is it true we’re on security lockdown? Do you know what’s happening?”
“I thought it was just traffic control on lockdown, not the whole station. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“Surely station ops would send out an all-hands if something was wrong. Wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know.” Nothing had ever gone that wrong before, not in the three years she’d been here. “Traffic control signaled an incoming then went into lockdown. That’s all I know.”
“The incoming—hostile?”
“I said I don’t know. I’ve got to go, Shelby. If I find anything out I’ll message.”
The whole station would be filled with rumors. Well, if the station director didn’t want rumors flooding the place, then ops ought to make an announcement. She’d try to keep the gossip out of the dockyards as long as she could, for no other reason than to prevent distraction. ‘Get Ray off station as soon as possible’ was an admirable goal for the moment. Apart from that, she’d wait for the chain of command to kick in. Which meant waiting for Creedy to pass along news and orders. Which might or might not ever happen.
She couldn’t stand not knowing. She ducked into an out-of-the-way repair bay, one of the ones with its drones shut down. She didn’t want anyone to find her in the next few minutes. In the relative peace and quiet, she called up vid feeds from her external repair drones. Jumped between several of them, most of which focused on Marigold and restoring its external drive. Other drones worked at ships further around on the station cylinder, but these seemed to be closest to the blip she’d found on the traffic feed before getting locked out.
One of the drones was on standby, waiting for the next step in the repair and not involved in anything critical at the moment. Opal sent commands, and turned the drone’s camera eyes outward, to the black. Turned up the magnification, set the scanners to search.
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