by Aaron Bunce
“An olive branch,” she whispered, and quickly swept through the room, picking up, tidying, and dumping the dirty clothes in the auto-wash.
A maintenance bot hummed down the hallway as she swiped her wrist across the controls, locking the door to their quarters. The dog-sized machine cleaned and polished the floor, purring quietly in the confined space.
She skipped the habitat elevators and turned left at Spire Tunnel three, the relatively narrow conduit connecting D ring to the Ops and Support Spire at the station’s center. She stepped into the elevator, banks of flat lights bathing the confined space in a blue-green glow.
“System Operations,” the elevator said as she stepped onto the magnetic pad, the door closing behind her. The capsule shot up the tunnel, her knees bending as gravity increased. The overhead lights dimmed as the solar shade adjusted, the black void of space hovering just beyond the elevator capsule and its transparent tube.
It never ceased to amaze her – the sheer scope of…blank space. C ring rotated below them, the shielded ceramic and titanium skin dotted with flood and marker lights, stars twinkling against the black backdrop beyond it.
It would never feel like home to Anna, but it was peaceful and quiet, not to mention blissfully removed from the frantic rat race of earth’s social mosh pit, where wealth, station, and social integration meant more than basic survival. The new migration race off world just made it all worse. Corporate and colonial expansions were supposed to relieve some of the stresses of overcrowding and social warfare. Unfortunately, it only exacerbated existing issues, and created a host of new ones.
“They can keep that madness,” she said, genuinely happy to be away from that particular brand of chaos.
Taking a deep breath, Anna watched the station zoom by, until the capsule slowed and docked with the spire. The doors opened with a whoosh, just as the magnetic pad turned off. Anna stepped into the hall, automatic lights flickering to life as she entered the spire’s atrium. She passed walls of lockers, a decon shower, and a wall of Kravinski escape pods. She couldn’t fathom cramming her body into one of the spherical lifeboats and willingly jettisoning herself into the cold vacuum of space. There was a better chance that someone asphyxiated to death before they were retrieved. It was the stuff of nightmares.
Her shoes padded quietly against the clean, almost sterile floor. Gravity was heavier here than in D ring, by at least a tenth of a percent. Perhaps it was a coil out of calibration, or a dozen other sensitive components in the spire’s gravity generator. Most couldn’t differentiate a difference, but for some reason, Anna could.
She made her way down the narrow stair, curving around and around towards The Hive, the station’s nerve center. Tall acrylic windows shone to her left, sleek, blade-like servers dominating the center of the spire, their polycarbonate bodies connected by a complicated series of coolant lines and fiber cables. They fascinated Anna, in no small part due to their logic based AI, which was responsible for every action, consequential reaction, light, outlet, solar cell, and computation on the station.
A far cry from Medieval Literature and Foundational Cultural Studies, she thought. Logical AI and quantum computing had become more than a way to fill the quiet hours while Jacoby worked. She downloaded schematics, theoretical papers, and even user manuals to learn more. She applied for a server technician post – after all, everyone on station had to work. The system auto rejected her application, responding with recommended posts, because everyone had to work the allotted minimum hours each cycle, or risk reassignment or a profit share decrease.
“No dead weight,” administrator Evans wrote in her monthly communique. In the end, Anna took a Maintenance Operator position – it was administrative work, but she knew the department head, Lana, from social circles back home, and it afforded her a point with which to work and learn. Maybe someday, she thought, jumping off the last step and walking through the Hive’s fire door.
The Hive was a single, round room, a semi-circular desk dominating its center. Flat, transparent monitors hung all around the desk, constantly cycling data from hundreds of different sensor points – reactor temp, solar panel generation, water filtration output. All station data flowed to this point. A half dozen technicians worked at the circular station, talking into cheek mics, typing on keyboards, or watching monitors. The room was warm, loud, and to Anna, awesome.
Lana’s head popped out from around a monitor, her face brightening as she approached.
“Thank…God!” she gasped, rocking back in her chair.
“I’m here,” Anna said, sheepishly, holding her arms out in a self-conscious “ta da”.
“Girl, you just saved my life. Everyone is getting sick with this damned virus that schmuck brought on the last freighter. I can’t man a shift without someone running a fever or puking their guts out. We’re behind on monthly preventative maintenance and have half the water recirculation system offline and in need of new pumps and liners.”
“How can I help? Point me where you need me,” Anna said.
“Any other day, I’d say grab a code scanner, grease gun, and a pair of pliers, and start fixing some doors around here, cause nothing breaks more, but shit, our usual problems are the least of our worries right now.”
“I wouldn’t know the first thing about fixing a motorized door, but if you gave me a schematic and some time, I could probably figure it out.”
“That’s why I love you, girl…straight to the point and always willing to learn!” Lana replied, pulling her into an uncharacteristic hug. “Most of the techs around here complain if they have to work on something too simple, and then in the next breath complain if they have to work on something more complicated. Today, it is the oxygen recirculation unit on C ring. It faulted out last night, just like it did last cycle, but it was always bad code or a motor driver failure. We’ve been able to keep it running despite itself with little fixes and resets. But this time it popped a high-pressure alarm, and then a compressor coil failure, so we’re worried that there might actually be something wrong with it this time. We shut the whole module down and isolated the circuit, but we need to get in there and check it out before we can risk powering it up again. Habitats in C ring are already getting a little stuffy…scrubbers are working, and we’ve diverted breathing air from B and D, but they aren’t meant for that kind of volume. Maintenance pods one and two are assigned on other critical tasks, uh, pod three is out of service, so you’re in pod four.”
“You weren’t joking. Everything’s falling apart around here,” Anna said, one of the techs turning and throwing her a not-to-subtle scoff.
“Welcome to Planitex Sys Ops, where everything is older than it should be and getting new parts is like asking for somebody to hand over their kidneys. It’s like firefighting, except you’re floating in a vacuum, the fire doesn’t follow the rules, and you can’t use water!” Lana said, laughing sardonically.
“That sounds horrible!” Anna laughed, but her mirth died away quickly. “Wait, pod four isn’t the…?” she started to ask, but Lana’s expression told her everything she needed to know.
“It has been cleaned and sanitized. I promise.”
“I don’t do puke. It makes me sick…”
Lana squeezed her arm, just as her cheek mic lit up. “You’ve reached Lana, goddess of fiber and silicone-based processing, go for Sys Ops,” she said, dropping into a seat and swiveling back towards the monitors. “Did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in?” she asked with a laugh, but turned and mouthed “I’m sorry”.
Anna cringed as a barking voice rang back out of the ear mic. Someone’s not in the mood for jokes, she thought, and headed for the dark ready room, a solitary red light glowing just above the doorway. Cots lined the walls to her left. The closest ones were empty, but a dark form filled the last in the line.
Probably the on call service tech from the previous night’s shift, she figured, turning right and stepping into the small maintenance dock. A spherical service p
od sat to her left, its spider-like tool arms retracted next to its body. “Ace” had been painted over the small hatch.
She pulled on her emergency EVA suit, hooked a helmet seal to her neck flange, and pulled her helmet out of its cubby. Anna walked over to hatch four, the L.E.D indicator above the portal glowing green. She turned the wheel, pulled the hatch open, and stepped inside the service pod.
Once in the seat, Anna strapped in and waved her wrist over the control console. The pod hummed to life, the H.U.D appearing on the clear, polycarbonate shell. After a brief warmup, the solar shade lightened, the black shell turning transparent. Space loomed before her, the habitat rings curving around the spire like the wheels of a massive wagon.
“Two thousand people living in a compressed can way out here in space,” she whispered, taking it all in.
A sync notice popped up onto her H.U.D. She accepted and her mic crackled in response.
“My display says Anna is my operator. That can’t be…can it? I know Anna, but she hardly ever works,” a man’s voice filled her ear.
“Yes, Brad. It’s Anna,” she said, manually guiding her pod up the spire’s length, the rigid umbilical connecting her pod to the station groaning slightly. “They asked me to work since everyone is getting sick.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Brad grunted, his service pod coming into view, its spider-like arms already extended.
“So we’re servicing the Charlie ring oxygen re-circulator unit?” she asked, eager to get Brad on point. He was a nice guy, but also flirty, and at times, crude.
“That’s the rumor. I’ll line up now, why don’t you pull the blueprints, conduit diagrams, and procedure. I’m syncing to you now.”
Anna ran her finger down the display on her right, selecting subsystems and document folders, while commanding the pod with her left. She came to a docking clamp, secured the pod in place, and extended the umbilical out to its full length. A moment later, a large technical schematic appeared on the shell of her pod, the transparent polycarbonate awash in a complicated maze of marked wires, coolant lines, and oxygen feed pumps. She’d never worked on anything so complex, let alone guide a sensitive repair on one. The feed from Brad’s pod popped up next, filtering through a ticker of sensor data and his suit’s bio readouts.
“This is a far cry from high frequency beacons and point to point laser comm arrays,” she said, nervously, skimming through the shutdown and startup procedures. Unfortunately, most of it was in Taiwanese. The portion of it that was in English wasn’t much better.
“It’s a piece of cake, Anna. You just feed me the information I need as I ask for it. Easy peezy,” Brad replied, his pod moving into position before the modular re-circulator. It looked like a house-sized box on the inside of the ring, massive, red explosive placards visible even from her distance.
“Pump two shows a fault, and pump three tripped its breaker on a low coolant alarm. The procedure says to ‘isolate the affected pump from and the break circuit. Purge pump coolant lines, vent work space, then make initialize manual rotation for to ensure pump bearings is not frozen’. Jesus, who writes these things?”
Brad laughed. “People who never have to service these things in vacuum, that’s for sure!”
Anna watched the feed, the camera inside Brad’s pod knocked askew and showing only the side of his head and one arm. She considered asking him to adjust it, but thought better of it.
“The Com fiber was broken. That’s most likely the problem. These units are designed to fault out if they become disconnected from the network. Give me a sec, then we can power it up and see if it faults out again. By the way, how have you managed to not get sick?” Brad asked, working the delicate controls to guide the tool arms.
“Sounds good,” Anna said, reading more of the schematic, and struggling with how to answer the question. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just lucky.”
“Okay? How about Jacoby? Is he okay?” Brad grunted.
“He’s…well, fine.”
“Fine as in ‘there’s some shit going on I don’t want to talk to you about, Brad’, or like, ‘he’s fine fine’?”
“He’s under a lot of pressure. I think his supervisor is screwing him around,” Anna said, and immediately regretted it. Brad had a nasty ability to get her talking about stuff that wasn’t his business.
“My ex used to call those ‘rough patches’. Of course she was usually complaining about me. She wouldn’t talk to me for days, sometimes weeks at a time. She said I was pulling away from her,” Brad laughed, but it was a hollow sound. She heard his pain. “Ain’t that some shit? She said I was pulling away from her, when she was the one who wouldn’t talk to me. Then I come home one day and find her blowing some maintenance guy in my bed. Guy has the gall to look over to the nightstand, see the picture of me, and then look right at me and act surprised. I mean, who do you think the guy in the picture is, ya know? The one watching you get your knob polished?”
“That’s…horrible,” Anna said, continuing to scan down the document. He’d done it again. He’d gotten them talking about his failed relationships.
“Yeah, and I didn’t even kick his ass. I just grabbed my shit and left…okay. I’ve got the broken section of fiber cut. I’m going to patch it now.”
Anna watched Brad through the camera; the tech slumped over the controls, a water bulb floating just over his shoulder. She paged down through more of the poorly written instructions, a series of three-dimensional icons hovering over lines of text and blocking some of the words. She looked back up to the camera as one of the pod’s service arms lifted up a cut section of fiber optic cable, another appendage working to splice it in place.
“Why didn’t I bring my coffee? This is like reading a dictionary for fun.”
Brad laughed, his voice breaking up over the radio.
“You stop laughing. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing,” she scolded him.
“I could splice fiber in my sleep. That leaves me plenty of attention for you, baby,” he said, baiting her.
“I’m not your ‘baby’, Brad,” Anna said. The last thing she needed was for word getting through sys ops that she was flirting with Brad. The guy had the kind of reputation that could give a girl an STD.
“Hold on, this section titled ‘For make safety restart operations’ says to purge O2 lines as well as the compartment case before restarting,” she said, paging down to another section. “Make sure you ventilate the unit and purge the lines before you finish the splice and restart the unit.”
“I’m…done,” Brad said, grunting. “It’s okay. It was just a broken fiber. I’m going to let the unit power up now.”
“Brad I don’t think that’s a good idea…” She watched the service pod’s arms extend out, tuck the fiber back into the compartment, and pull back again.
A new data thread appeared on her H.U.D as her computer read the data streaming in from the O2 separator unit.
“Already done, sweet thing. Just relax. Don’t make this repair more complicated than it really is. We’ve got a whole laundry list of things after this, so no time for unnecessary steps today. You and I are gonna…” Brad went silent for a moment, and she watched as he typed on the keyboard in his pod, the dash alight in bright buttons and gauges.
“What is it?”
“The unit is powering up. Pumps one through four are showing green, pump five is not responding. I’m showing positive pressure at two times atmosphere. Can you confirm?”
Anna swiped her screen over and a new window appeared almost immediately. She tapped on the status icon and a number of smaller windows popped up, streaming through lines and lines of data. She watched C ring’s atmospheric composition slowly tick towards green.
“Flow is good. But I’m not getting any data back on pump number five either…”
“I hear something. Maybe one of the pumps is malfunctioning,” Brad said, just as a red light flashed on her screen.
“Brad, I’m showing an over tem
p alarm on pumps five and six,” Anna said. Her screen suddenly lit up like Christmas, white and green gauges flashing crimson. She looked up just as a distant pop sounded, the oxygen recirculation unit exploding in a cloud of expanding gas and metal fragments. The armored, ceramic outer skin pealed open like an over pressurized soda can, a secondary explosion sending a geyser-like plume of metal and broken shielding shooting violently into the void.
“Oh my god! Brad, are you all right?”
Brad’s service pod spun back towards the spire, its multitude of tool arms all extending and contracting.
“A..a I…ca..t c..trol.” Her radio crackled, every other word drowned out by the violent hiss of static.
“Lana, the oxygen unit…it exploded,” Anna yelled into her mic, but there was no response.
A large chunk of debris bounced off the station next to her pod, the resounding thunk reverberating through the metal all around her. She spun away, shielding her face as smaller pieces of debris peppered her solar shield, clattering against the thick acrylic like rain. Panic tightened her chest. Her gaze swept over her H.U.D, the pod controls, and her radio panel.
A window popped up on her display as Brad’s pod continued to drift towards the station.
“Anna…Anna, can you hear me? What in the fucking hell is going on out here? I’m showing complete atmospheric loss in one, two…no three sections of C ring from compartments one through four and the panel for oxygen generation has gone black. We lost three cameras, too. I can’t see anything.” Lana’s face popped up on the video window, a crowd of other people standing behind her.
“The oxygen module is gone! It…it exploded! And I can’t get through to Brad on his coms.”
1100 Hours
Jacoby wandered around after his meeting with Janice, drifting from corridor to corridor, aimlessly walking. He drifted into the commissary, strolling through shop after shop, picking through racks of criminally overpriced merchandise.