Daelen hushed her, attempting to place her finger over her lips, but she was so frustrated her fingers simply balled into a fist.
"What if the Captain finds out!?" Margo asked.
"I don't know. Why don't you go tell him?" An awkward silence wiggled between them, and Margo flushed with embarrassment, suspecting she'd overstepped the bounds of their relationship. Margo revered her mentor. They had worked together a lot since she started the internship weeks ago, the day the Atlas last left New Earth. But she didn't think they were friends yet.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Lund."
"It's all right." Daelen offered a reassuring smile. Margo felt a little better, but then her own self-interest set in. Like Daelen in her early years, Margo obsessed over practicing medicine, and she began to worry about what would happen to her internship if Daelen were grounded.
"You can't keep a file like that on the server," Margo blurted. "I mean, should you keep a file like that on the server?" Her voice rose in a forced innocent tone.
"Why not?"
"Someone might find it."
"Like who?"
"The Captain." Captain Gordon Pierce always had a way of leaving a first impression of intimidation, but he was a good man. A principled man.
"Please," Daelen said. "Gordon would never snoop on his crew. It would violate his code."
"Stellan know?"
"No."
"When are you going to tell him?"
"I haven't decided."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I haven't decided."
"Haven't decided what?"
"Anything, really."
"Are you going to keep it?"
"I haven't decided," Daelen said with a sigh that bordered on boredom. "That's enough about me. What's wrong with you?"
Margo didn't want to talk about herself because her future was through Daelen; however, she felt the floodgate of information close on her teacher. Margo didn't want to push any harder because she didn't want to insult Daelen. She thought she should have been thankful Daelen had let her stick her nose so far into such private matters.
"Nothing," she said. "Why?"
"You're sleeping on an exam table," Daelen said, motioning with her arm.
"Oh yeah, that," Margo said, stretching her back. "It was really supposed to be a short nap."
"That's usually how it starts," Daelen said, crossing her legs and adopting the posture of an attentive doctor.
"I've just been feeling run down," Margo said. "Don't know why."
"Maybe you're working too much."
"I have been working a lot," Margo said with a self-promoting smile. Daelen shook her head dismissively and laughed.
"Even though I was exhausted, I just couldn't sleep last night. Most nights, it seems, anymore," Margo said with a sigh. "So I came down to do a little more work on those blood samples we took from the crew as we were leaving orbit."
"Find anything?"
"Everyone is clean."
"Good. Look at them again, and when you're ready, we'll examine them together." Margo turned eagerly toward the microscope on her desk, which pinned down a slide with a blood sample, as if holding it at gunpoint. She wiped her eyes again and looked into the lenses.
It pleased Daelen to see the zeal with which Margo went back to work, especially when the lesson she was teaching her had nothing to do with the blood but the folly of repeating a process too many times, of the inefficiency of too many redundancies and safeguards. It was a lesson she'd better learn now rather than later if she was going to practice on New Earth.
Anything looked wrong if you stared at it long enough, and she hoped to force Margo into making a mistake or at least thinking she'd made a mistake. There was time for her to learn how to determine when the job was done and to walk away with certainty and confidence.
Before she moved onto that lesson, however, Daelen wanted to teach Margo something else about space living and the human anatomy.
"No you don't. You," Daelen said and kicked the back of Margo's chair. "Talk."
"I don't know. I've just been really tired and haven't been able to sleep for the last couple of weeks. I get headaches sometimes. And that hum," Margo said, pointing to the ceiling, "makes it all worse."
Yes, Daelen thought, the pulse of the light drive, the beautiful song of her unborn child. She cocked her head sideways to listen, and she lost any affection she had for it. It seemed different to her now. It seemed unnatural, like the rolling sound of the siege weapons of Hell, and she felt dirty for ever thinking otherwise.
"Sometimes, I wonder if it's something serious," Margo said.
"You ever notice the Atlas has no windows?" Daelen said passively, as if she hadn't even heard the last thing Margo said. In fact, she didn't really pay attention because she already knew what was wrong with Margo. "They'd be structural weaknesses on the hull. There really isn't much to look at out there anyway. Just black."
Margo looked around the lab and blinked with confusion.
"There's no night and day out here, and our bodies need that," Daelen said.
"Didn't they do something to the environment systems that would help us maintain our circadian rhythms? Something with the lighting?"
Daelen raised an eyebrow. "It helps, but to varying degrees. I'm sure you're aware we all don't have the same physiology."
"So why would they tell us they took care of the problem when they really only mitigated it? That's very deceiving."
"Yes," Daelen said. "It is."
Margo was quiet. She reflected on how Daelen spoke ill of anything regarding New Earth and the Council that ran it. She wanted to know what had gotten her mentor, a rising star in the medical field, to forsake her career for a post that normally was occupied by second-rate physicians and those who'd done something to deserve punishment.
"Why do you stay here?" Margo asked. "I mean, you could practice anywhere, yet you choose the Atlas. Why?"
"Is love an adequate answer?" Daelen asked and supposed not, since she didn't think Margo would understand it. "You haven't practiced medicine on Earth, so I'm going to level with you," Daelen said, leaning forward and placing her elbows on her thighs. "It's boring. You're a mechanic following directions. The first thing they give you at any practice or hospital is a book, and then they tell you all the answers are in that book. You're expected to follow it to the letter."
She bent to open a cabinet beside her desk and ducked her head in. Some medical supplies fell out with the sounds of plastic packaging crinkling. Her voice reverberated like she was in a cave.
"The other part, perhaps the worst part, is nothing is ever easy. Everything's complicated. No one uses intuition anymore because that means liability, and because of that, things tend to take much longer than they should. People get sicker. People stay sick longer. Sometimes, it just makes sense to jump to the obvious conclusions. And here, it's fairly obvious you're not getting enough sun. You're probably also not getting enough exercise, since you're here all the time. And, I know your diet isn't exactly healthy."
She emerged from the cabinet and closed its doors, two bottles of pills rattling in her hand.
"On Earth, we'd be running a gamut of tests, and it might take weeks just to come to the conclusion I've already come to because we always have to be one hundred percent certain of a diagnosis. All the while, you're suffering from your symptoms. Here, I can tell you to take these vitamin and melatonin supplements, get some exercise, and let's see how you feel in a couple of weeks. Your body is probably just having difficulty adapting to this unnatural environment." A smile stretched her face, but when Margo took her pills with wonder of the simplicity of it all, Daelen's smile faded.
"That's it?" Margo asked.
"It's actually quite common out here. You find ways to deal with it."
Daelen realized she loved these moments, using her own mind to solve problems for patients. She loved pulling out an answer and showing her patients everything would be all right, ev
en if it meant forgoing proper procedure. With a child, she would be grounded and perhaps lose the privilege to practice medicine altogether, everything she'd worked for her entire life.
As much as her colleagues scoffed at where she chose to practice, Daelen found value in its simplicity. Unfortunately, it had become complicated.
Ultimately, she didn't know what she was going to do. For the time being, she thought she would just have to keep smiling. No one could know. Not yet.
Six
The gravity cranes in cargo bay seventeen boomed like hand grenades. They pumped their mechanical arms and bobbed like oil rigs, stripping the very air. When the Atlas reached its destination, the cranes would fire bolts of energy designed to manipulate gravity and pull large bodies of earth into the bays. Until then, the engineering crew serviced and cleaned them, hoping to keep them pulling for another half century or more. It was how they lived between worlds.
Wendy struggled against the bulkhead hatch door, pushing with her shoulder and grunting. Even on well-oiled hinges, the doors were almost too heavy for her to open. Finally, the door swung wide, and the pounding of the gravity cranes struck her like a blow to the head. She had forgotten to put on her hearing protection, so her hands quickly covered her ears. She had to abandon one to search through the small sack she carried on her back for her earplugs. With her head tilted to her shoulder in an effort to keep some of that eardrum-rattling noise out, she nimbly wiggled her hearing protection into one ear and then the other in between crane pounds.
The gravity cranes continued their rolling onslaught, but they sounded far away, faded. The earplugs made it bearable. More importantly, they protected her hearing. At a distance, even within the bays, the cranes weren't so bad, though their pounding was still eerie. Working so close to them and even underneath them, the noise could blow eardrums.
"Stupid!" she cried, smacking herself on the forehead.
When she reached to close the door, a hand touched her arm. She turned, and the face she saw was as familiar to her as her father's. Rough and unshaven, Rick Fairchild smiled. The pallid skin of his long face and thin neck stretched up to his dark, short hair, resembling a spent match.
"Allow me," he said.
"No!" Wendy shouted. "I got it!" She took a deep breath, and the smell of the cargo bay, a mixture of grease and coolant fumes, calmed her like coming home. It reminded her of the repair shop her father had owned on New Earth, where she learned she loved to build and fix machinery, an affinity that had alienated her from the other girls and left her in the company of middle-aged men who spit, cursed, and smoked but who brought her presents on her birthday and listened when she started to fawn over boys.
After remembering their faces, smiling even through exhaustion and filth, pulling the door closed didn't seem so hard. The door closed, the hinges turning easier that way, like it wanted to close.
Rick playfully stretched her headphones apart and placed them over her ears, pulled down the microphone arm, and placed it near her mouth.
"Better?" he asked, grasping her small shoulders. His voice sounded smoky in the radio with a touch of static in the channel.
"Much," she said, and they exchanged a warm smile.
"So what's it going to be, boss?" Wendy asked, tightening her ponytail, the spotlighting in the bay reflecting off her dark, sleek hair like water. "Where do you want me?"
"How many times do I have to tell you all I'm not your boss?" Rick said almost indifferently, placing a cigarette rolling paper on the palm of his hand and tapping some tobacco onto it.
"You're the senior."
"That's just the Captain's way of reminding me I'm old," Rick said, rolling and sealing the cigarette with the tip of his tongue. "One seventy-seven won't start; a cable in the back is loose. No one is able to reach it."
Wendy pointed at him and hopped with excitement. The fact of the matter was Rick knew what needed to be done, and the rest of them knew he had the answers. So they followed his lead. Whether he issued orders or not, he ran the engineering crew, and everyone knew it but him.
"What?" Rick said. "Okay, I get it. Come on."
"Yessir!" she said with an animated salute.
They walked the line of gravity cranes as if they were cannons on a castle rampart. The cargo bays each had ten cranes, and they were numbered by the bay in which they were located. Crane one seventy-seven was the eighth crane in bay seventeen, if you counted crane zero, which had fallen beyond repair and was awaiting replacement, scheduled for the next return service at New Earth.
"I've been wondering for a while now," Wendy said. "Why do you do that?" She pointed to the self-made cigarette hanging in his mouth.
"What? Smoke?"
"No, roll your own."
"Because I never let anyone do for me what I can do myself," Rick said. "And it's cheaper and tastes better. The ones you can buy taste like dirty air."
Wendy grabbed the cigarette from between his fingers and puffed it. She wasn't a smoker. Very few people smoked anymore. The health risks had all been mitigated or become curable, but it was an inconvenient habit because smoking wasn't allowed on public property on New Earth. Smoking also wasn't allowed on the Atlas, but a lot of what went on in the cargo bays was overlooked.
She didn't like the cigarette taste in her mouth, though she liked being around a smoker. It was another thing that reminded her of her father's repair shop, along with the men who disgusted most people. To her, the smoke and fumes in the air weren't contaminants. They were elements of character and depth only someone like her could appreciate and understand.
When Wendy and Rick passed crane one seventy-four, it hissed, spewing a cloud of white smoke from underneath. Then the manifold under the frame fell off, slamming the deck with a solid, unyielding sound of heavy metal on metal. A small shockwave set Wendy and Rick off balance; Wendy almost fell, but Rick caught her arm.
"You idiot!" Thomas Foster yelled from the back of the crane. Another man, Edward Stone, his jumpsuit bulging at his midsection, his shoulders and bald head slumping, stumbled away from the side of the crane. His eyes drooped, and he nervously rubbed his arm.
"I'm sorry!" Edward shouted.
Beneath the crane, a dark liquid poured onto the fallen manifold in spurts, like one of the machine's arteries had been severed.
"You're so damned worried about 'where we're going this time'," Tom said mockingly with a lazy, almost drunk, sway of his head and hips, "that you forget to watch what the hell you're doing."
"It's not that," Edward said timidly. "I don't know."
"You don't know what?" Tom said. "We're going to Hell, and there's nothing you can do about it. So, you might as well hold on tight and do your job."
"Hang on a minute, Tom," Rick said. "Accidents happen, and it's just lubricant. We have plenty of time to fix this."
"Accidents? Plenty of time?" Tom said. "There's enough work around here that I don't need someone to create more for me. We'll be lucky to get this bay online at all, and we've certainly had our share of accidents."
"Take a break," Rick said. "I'll help Edward with this after Wendy and I tend to one seventy-seven."
For a moment, Rick thought Tom might actually stay, but the man was eager to get to his second job of holding down a barstool.
"Fine," Tom said. He dropped his tools on the deck and walked off toward the end of the bay and the bulkhead door with his familiar limp, an injury that reminded them all to be ever mindful.
"Hey, boss," Edward said. Rick turned to Edward patiently, containing his annoyance. "I don't mean to be a nag or nothin', but where we going?"
"It doesn't matter, Eddie," Rick said. "Every planet's the same. The universe's trash is our treasure." Rick forced a smile, a pleasantry he reserved for someone whose mind was slow, someone who wouldn't be able to tell the difference between genuine friendliness and sympathetic compassion or even pity. Though Edward didn't seem to notice the disingenuousness of Rick's expression, he also didn't seem sati
sfied with the answer. He stood still, timidly rubbing his forearm, a look of concern wrinkling his round and aged face.
"Plug up that leak, Eddie," Rick said.
"Oh, right," Edward said. He jumped into action, sliding on his back under the crane, his stomach pressing against the edge of the frame.
"I'll be back in a few minutes."
Wendy and Rick continued down the line to crane one seventy-seven. The last embers of Rick's cigarette dimmed, and he flicked it out into the bay.
On cursory inspection, crane one seventy-seven looked to be in good working condition. The frame and panels shined, which was a rarity among cranes; even brand new cranes didn't remain clean for long. Yet, it stood unmoving, a long, dead arm hanging out into the wide-open bay, like a dead man's finger breaking topsoil.
"Here we are," Rick said. "I think one of those docking station all-stars at Earth tripped over something during inspection." Rick and Wendy shared a quick laugh at Rick's sarcasm. The dockhands at New Earth weren't as inept as the engineering staff on the Atlas claimed, but it had become an inside joke that unified them. If she were honest, Wendy might have admitted that she tired of the joke, but it reinforced the crew's unity, as if humans banding against other humans was a natural behavior they couldn't deny.
They slid under the crouching four-legged giant and pushed all the way to the back, where the crane was nearly flush with the wall. They pulled themselves by the far lip of the machine's frame, as if peering over a ledge, frightened by what they might find.
"See it?" Rick asked.
"Oh," Wendy said in surprise, as if to question that this minor problem was what these experts couldn't fix. "Yeah."
She spun sideways and pushed her shoulder against the wall. Her slender arm squeezed up behind the machine's frame, and her fingers wrapped around the loose cable. She pushed it in until it snapped into place.
"You get it?" Rick asked.
"Yeah."
They listened. Nothing happened.
"Let me see," Rick said, nudging Wendy out of the way.
"Maybe it just needs a rest," Wendy giggled. "Maybe it should sit this one out, too."
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