Something had damaged the pipes.
“You haven’t seen it,” Solomon said. “Whatever caused this problem.”
“Emil thinks it would be safer if we investigated the area with one of Jake’s robotic probes, in case whatever’s in the pipes is… infectious or whatever.”
“‘Infectious’ implies you think the cause is animate.”
“I don’t think anything, Lange. I’d know a lot more if you’d wake up your fuckbuddy in there so he can do his job.”
“We were not having sex,” Solomon said, only because he thought McCreery would appreciate the clarification.
“As long as you didn’t kill him, I don’t care what you were doing,” Kit said. “And if you won’t go get him, I will.”
Solomon should have expected the topic to come up. “I am sorry. I regret that I hurt you. I don’t intend to hurt you or anyone else again.”
Kit narrowed his eyes. “But you didn’t ever intend to, did you?”
“No. I was—” something caught in his throat when he tried to speak about that painful, fragmented time “—not rational.”
“Yeah,” Kit said emphatically. He didn’t say apology accepted, as McCreery had, but some things were too much to hope for.
How absurd that Solomon had once mistaken his body for the worst of his burdens; it was his actions that weighed on him. Nothing could lift that.
Solomon tried to breathe the way McCreery had in sleep, deep and slow. His guilt would keep, and right now there was bad news to face. But he could handle this. They could handle this together. “It is unwise for me to travel via the Nowhere. I will wake McCreery and we will return to the facility in the pod.”
“Who said anything about both of you returning?” Kit asked. “I came here to get Jake. We don’t need you.”
That might have stung, had Solomon not already arrived at a different, more troubling conclusion. “Unfortunately for all of us, I think you do.”
When Jake drifted out of sleep, there was white sunlight reflecting off the snow outside the windows, a third cat in the bed, and no Lange. He knew he hadn’t dreamed last night only because there was no other explanation for why he’d be in Lange’s bed. And there were still dozens of books on the floor.
Lange came in while Jake was studying the cat asleep next to his feet—the one that had appeared some time in the night in total silence. It was a tabby and, if he recalled correctly, the only female of the three.
“This one doesn’t like me,” Jake said. “She glares a lot.”
“That’s not a glare, that’s just her face,” Lange said. “Lise Meitner wouldn’t have slept next to you if she didn’t like you.”
“Oh.” Jake swallowed. He’d been so swept up in last night that he hadn’t accounted for the inevitable awkwardness of waking up in Lange’s bed. They had to fit this into the framework of their strange new relationship. Friendship. Allegedly.
Lange saved him from answering in the worst possible way. “I made coffee. You should probably drink some, because we have to go back up. There’s a problem with the breach.”
“What?” Jake sat straight up. “Fuck. That’s bad. What happened? Is everyone okay?”
Lange handed him the mug and went through his questions methodically. “As far as I know, no one is hurt. They want you to go back up because there has been a flood in the greenhouse and your robots were deemed the safest method of investigating the area.”
“Shit. It’s not as bad as it could be, but I don’t like it. What makes you so sure it’s related to the breach?”
“Process of elimination, mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“The C,” Lange said.
It took Jake a moment to parse that statement as anything other than the sea, and either way it barely made sense. Lange must be talking about the sounds he’d heard coming from the breach. Jake opened his mouth, unsure what question would come out. He had too goddamn many.
Lange spoke first. “We have to go. I’m going to feed the cats.”
“You’re going to leave them here?” Jake risked petting Lise Meitner. She would have fucked him up for trying if she’d been awake. In sleep, she purred.
“The trip down distressed them so much, I can’t make them go back up. And I don’t want them in danger,” Lange said. “One of the runners will feed them if we’re gone long.”
“You know people who can travel across the universe in the blink of an eye and all you want from them is to feed your cats.”
“It’s a better use of their talents than Quint would have made,” Lange said, and Jake couldn’t disagree with that.
He’d been in the military, so he was no stranger to working for a massive institution whose goals were at odds with his values, but having worked for Quint was such a gut-punch of guilt. Jake hadn’t known about Quint’s secret prison cell, but shit. He’d worked for a guy who’d built a secret prison cell.
That didn’t say much for his judgment.
He got up. It took no time to get ready since he had nothing with him. The only preparation Lange made was to leave extra food for the cats—and to give each of them an elaborate and solemn goodbye, which Jake had to stop watching because it was making his face do things he couldn’t control.
Half an hour later, they were hiking down to the pod, leaving boot prints and robot treads in the slushy snow. Lange had brought his guitar, which Jake wished was just an attempt to reconnect with his old life and not a link to the eerie music of the breach.
The woods were quiet. No birdsong. Jake thought of finding A Field Guide to Arctic Alaska among Lange’s books as their path wove through the pines.
The pod was covered with snow. Jake began to clear it with his hands, and then the layer coating the fuselage simply slid to the ground.
“Thanks,” Jake said. He lifted the canopy, reached inside, and picked his helmet up from where he’d dropped it on the floor after their near-crash landing. He’d wanted to leave then. That felt like a long time ago.
Jake swallowed. “You know, I—I liked it here more than I expected to.”
What a useless thing to say. He shoved his helmet on and turned away from Lange. “You ready to go back up?”
“Of course not,” Lange said. He took the helmet that Jake passed him.
“Can I ask you something?” Jake said, stopping before he got into the pod. “If you’re so outdoorsy, didn’t you hate living in space?”
“False premise.”
“You’re trying to say you’re not outdoorsy?”
“What I like about nature is the sense of peace I get from observing something outside myself,” Lange said. “That feeling is readily available in space.”
“Okay, I get that.”
After a pause, Lange said, his voice soft, “It was the first technique I learned, as a lonely, depressed teenager, that worked. It sounds so simple as to be useless: ‘look at a bird.’ But when you’re suffering, sometimes picking something from your surroundings to stare at is the only thing you can do. And sometimes it helps.”
“Yeah, I—I think that’s why I took up building stuff. Fiddling. Using my hands.”
Lange accepted this blundering confession, which was maybe thirty percent of what Jake wanted to convey, with grace. He’d fixed his attention on the tree line, sparing Jake the ordeal of being looked at. “I came to like the wilderness for its own sake, I think. As you did.”
It wasn’t the wilderness Jake liked, but if he said so, they might have to reexamine their delicate new friendship. Talk about a false premise. So instead he ran through his pre-flight check, turned on the antigrav, and launched the pod into space.
11
Leak
Solomon had burned hot and cold with anxiety since the asteroid that housed Facility 17 had come into view. Now that they were standing in the dripping greenhouse, the useless and overpowering sensation would not leave him.
He could hear the A flat and the G of the breach.
No. No
matter how eerie, he refused to let the dissonance of the lab haunt him. He would simply focus his attention elsewhere. He was here in the greenhouse. With McCreery.
The air smelled like dirt. Cloudy, brown water sluiced off the plantings and table edges to pool ankle-deep under the hole in the ceiling. A length of green, patinated copper pipe hung down like a dead limb. The remaining plumbing was too shadowed to see.
The hole was in the white plastic part of the ceiling, which extended halfway across the room before meeting the windowed steel construction that comprised the majority of the greenhouse. Every windowpane was covered with a UV-filtering blind that turned the near-constant sunlight red.
“It was sudden,” Singh was explaining. “One day it was a small leak and then a flood came pouring through the ceiling. I’ve never seen a pipe break like that.”
McCreery nodded and tapped at his tablet to direct the robot up the wall and toward the problem. He didn’t speak to the robot when other people were watching; he’d been embarrassed when Solomon and Dax had caught him in the lab.
The robot’s treads had been magnetized, so it managed to climb the interior wall and the ceiling with no difficulty. Once it reached the site of the damage, McCreery paused to study his tablet, which was showing whatever the robot’s camera picked up. He offered it to Singh, and the two of them bent their heads over it.
Solomon didn’t like their closeness. The feeling itself was uncomfortable, and so was the recursion: he didn’t like not liking it. He shifted his weight, focused on the droplets of water falling by ones and by twos, and tried not to think about McCreery or the sound.
“I think these other pipes are damaged,” McCreery was saying. “It’s almost like they were corroded.”
“What could do that?” Singh asked.
Instead of answering, McCreery walked over to Solomon and held out the tablet, saying, “Lange, take a look at this.”
It startled him to be included, and to have McCreery’s shoulder brush his own, but nothing was as much of a shock as McCreery saying, in a low voice, “You doing okay?”
“What will you do if I say no?” Solomon murmured.
“Dunno. Depends what you want, I guess.”
What Sol wanted was to be back in the cabin with McCreery, preferably in bed, not here in this damned facility where every breath was a labor. He wanted not to feel responsibility dragging down his shoulders when he looked at the hole in the greenhouse ceiling.
And he wanted very much for the tablet screen in McCreery’s hands not to show any evidence of the breach’s influence.
He wasn’t going to get any of those things.
“Worry about this, not me.” Solomon tapped the screen, which now showed the dangling pipe in close-up.
McCreery switched from the live video feed to a control screen. A moment later, one of the robot’s metal arms extended to take hold of the pipe. The thirty-centimeter-long piece broke away entirely, loosing water onto the tables and floor below. The robot brought the fragment closer to its lens, manipulating it so the camera stared down its hollow length. As green down the inside as it was on the outside, the pipe looked like a normal piece of copper tubing to Solomon—excepting its ragged edges.
The robot raised its camera and swiveled it. Solomon braced for some horrible revelation, but the tablet screen showed only the cramped, wet interior of the ceiling, the pipes grey in the darkness.
His mind spun possible theories. Some kind of emanation from the breach, something he couldn’t see or sense, might be the cause. Radiation. A local spatial distortion. Or perhaps time was passing faster in this one spot, causing the pipes to degrade? He needed to narrow the possibilities.
McCreery switched the camera off and the screen went dark. The robot retreated from the hole and rolled back down the wall until it stopped at McCreery’s feet, still carrying the length of pipe. McCreery’s fingers moved over the tablet. The robot put a second arm on the length of pipe and snapped it in half.
“She shouldn’t be able to do that, not so easily,” McCreery said. “Something weakened those pipes. We should watch for leaks in other parts of the facility.”
Why had the leak emerged in this spot and not elsewhere? Was it random?
McCreery pulled his spacesuit gloves out of his pocket, put them on, and crouched down. He lifted one piece of pipe out of the robot’s grip and said, “This is way lighter than it should be. And there’s some kind of residue coating it.”
Sol’s heart seized at the sight of McCreery examining the pipe. Even an arm’s length away was too close to his face. There was no telling what he was breathing in.
Equally worrisome, Solomon doubted that an emanation from the breach would leave residue. But a biotic explanation presented itself.
An alien.
A living being did not necessarily have motives, but his shift from a physical explanation to a biotic one raised the question. Why would an alien come through the breach and cause a leak?
A strange method of sabotage, if that’s what it was. If one wanted to cause destruction by weakening metal, surely the greenhouse’s steel provided a more logical target. Breaking the greenhouse windows wasn’t the most efficient method of killing everyone in the facility, if that was the goal, but it would drastically interfere with their safety. And if whatever was in the facility corroded copper or other metals, it could do far, far more damage to the asteroid that housed them.
Not wanting to incite panic or draw attention to his own grim reasoning, Solomon only said, “We should be wearing protective gear.”
Singh nodded. “Good point. Let’s get that sample to one of the labs. We’re short on personnel due to, uh, putting our two senior scientists in prison, but I’ll do what I can.”
“McCreery and I have the least exposure, if there is a contaminant in the air. We can suit up and gather data using McCreery’s robot.” Solomon took a deep breath. “We’ll start with my lab. You and the others should keep close watch on yourselves for any possible symptoms.”
Singh drew his brows together. “Did you just—never mind. Thank you for volunteering.”
“It’s necessary. I am responsible for what has happened here and for what might happen next. This facility contains the breach. We can’t evacuate until it’s closed. And we should consider keeping it open, since we may need to send something back through it.”
“Evacuation will be a last resort, but we will if we have to,” Singh said. His tone was agreeable, but it was clearly a disagreement. And an assertion of his authority.
Solomon bristled. Did these people want him to accept responsibility or not? “You cannot—”
“Hey, let’s maybe cross that bridge when we come to it, okay?” McCreery said. “Nobody’s hurt. It’s just a leak. As soon as we figure out what’s causing it, I’ll start work on repairs to the water recycling in here. Not saying we shouldn’t be cautious or think ahead, but… one step at a time. Let’s find out what we’re dealing with here.”
“Right,” Singh said and followed McCreery and the robot out the door.
Solomon shut it behind them, blinking at the change in color. Unlike the red interior of the greenhouse, the hallway was cold, fluorescent white—until the low hum of electricity coalesced into a buzz and the lights went out.
Jake didn’t even have time to turn on his tablet’s flashlight before the hallway lights came back on. Still, that split second of darkness had set his heart racing.
“There’s a backup fuel cell,” he said, not sure who he was reassuring. The backup didn’t matter, not if something had broken the wiring like it had broken the pipes.
His tablet had a map of the facility’s electrical wiring. He opened it to find it scattered with flashing red. Fuck. That was a lot of open circuits for one man to fix.
Lange peered over his arm and said, “That’s useful as a map of its movements.”
“Great. There’s an ‘it,’” Jake said.
“If we assume it came from the breach,�
�� Lange started. He touched the screen to trace a winding path through the map. “It’s meandered through the electrical wiring and the pipes all up and down the left side of the facility. If I had to guess, it was last here.”
He tapped the medical exam rooms at the top of the map, both of which were encircled with red, and asked, “Why stop there? Why hasn’t it moved down the right side of the map?”
“An important question, but we’d better suit up before we figure out where the fuck it went,” Jake said. “And I think we should cut the power before this gets any worse. That means we’ll lose everything, including the gravity generator.”
“The thermal management system will stop working,” Lange said. “As will the machine.”
“No comms, either,” Emil said. “I’ll find the others and make sure they know.”
But first, he walked back to the greenhouse and touched the door so it slid open. “Carbon dioxide scrubbers,” he said, gesturing at the plants. “I’ll leave that open just in case.”
“I need you to shut off the water, too. And that’s a good reminder that every door in this place has a goddamn electronic lock,” Jake said. “Better leave them all open. Whatever it is we’re dealing with, it’s in the walls anyway. Doors will only hinder us. Emil, if you gather everyone in Heath’s lab, we’ll find you after we flip the breaker.”
Emil nodded and walked off. Jake and Lange went back to the dock to fetch their helmets out of the pod. The lights went on and off twice on their walk, and the third time the hallway stayed dark. Jake flipped the flashlight on his tablet and tried to ask Eliza to turn hers on, but she wasn’t responding to his tablet anymore because the goddamn comms were down. Fuck.
He swallowed. “Eliza, lights?”
She obliged him right away.
Out of habit, he said, “Good girl.”
“You don’t talk to her in front of other people.” Lange paused briefly before her, like he’d considered saying it and then changed his mind, which Jake wished didn’t mean so much to him.
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