“Inga,” said Colpeys calmly, trying to dial it all down, “tell us exactly what happened. What malfunctioned?”
“It was the shutoff valve,” said Inga. “It snapped.”
“ ‘Snapped’?” barked Mom. “How does a brand-new high-grade steel valve snap? It’s behind a panel in the wall. What could possible make it break?”
Inga shook her head. “I don’t know. The alarms went off and I got there in under a minute. Water was shooting out from around the panel. I opened it to get to the valve assembly and saw that the handle was just floating there. I had to shut the water off at the main.”
“Can it be repaired?” asked Colpeys.
“I’ll have to install a new valve assembly, but that’s not the problem,” said Inga. “We have two hundred gallons of drinking water floating around the hab and trapped inside the walls. It’s already caused electrical shorts in several systems. We were able to stop it from frying everything in the hab, but there is a lot of damage.”
Colpeys’s face turned gray. “How much damage?”
Inga’s eyes drifted away as if she didn’t want to look at us while she gave the bad news. “We’re still assessing it, but . . . it’s not good. The water shorted out the east wall.”
Because there was no up and down anymore, the hab—and the whole ship—was oriented by compass points. The north wall was where “up” used to be. The west wall had the wiring for lights, temperature, some communications, and a few other systems. The east wall of the hab was lined with food freezers and microwaves.
“What did we lose?” asked Mom. Her fists were balled on top of her desk.
Inga shook her head. “Two freezers. The big one and the left-hand one. But the small one and the main day-storage refrigerator are still on line.”
“God,” began Colpeys, but he shut up when he realized with horror that Inga wasn’t finished.
“We lost all of the microwaves.”
“All six?” gasped Colpeys.
“Yes.”
“What’s your timetable for repairing them?” demanded the director.
It took Inga so long to answer that I knew it was even worse than I thought. She shook her head.
“I may be able to scavenge the others for parts and get one repaired.”
“One . . . ?” said Colpeys in a small, shocked voice.
“How soon?” I asked.
Inga shook her head again. “Once we’re done fixing the water system? Two, three days.”
Colpeys closed his eyes and sagged back. Mom narrowed hers and leaned forward.
“Forget the microwave. Keep the main freezer shut for now. It’ll retain enough cold to buy you a day. If we have to we can transfer bulk supplies to an airlock and let the big black keep everything cold.”
It was a good plan. During an EVA, with nothing protecting you against solar radiation, the heat could get extreme, but inside a metal airlock with no heat being pumped into it, the temperature would drop all the way down. If it got too cold we could make some adjustments.
And I knew we had plenty of food packs and protein drinks that didn’t require either refrigeration or cooking. No, that wasn’t why Colpeys was freaking out. In the back of the main freezer, locked inside a kind of vault, was blood. Hundreds of pints of it. Our blood. Harvested from each person on the mission and stored for long-term used. Plasma, too, and other vital materials that required long-term cold storage. The blood was too fragile to store in an airlock unless the temperature could be adjusted perfectly. That was math we might have to figure out soon. And moving that precious supply was downright dangerous.
We did not have replacements for this stuff. The fact that we had multiple freezers and microwaves on board was a ready-to-go redundancy. Each could get by with two working microwaves—one in a pinch—and one freezer. The others were installed as ready-made replacements. No one foresaw this kind of electrical problem because it pretty much couldn’t have happened. I mean . . . it shouldn’t have happened. The water leaks? And now the flooding and shorting of the wiring inside the walls? That was so far outside of worst-case scenario as to not be in the playbook at all. If it wasn’t happening right now I’d have sworn that it couldn’t. There is no way on Earth—or in space—that something like this should have been able to happen. It was supposed to be a design impossibility. Lansdorp and his teams did not cut corners when it came to crew safety. Not one.
So why was it happening?
I cut a look at Mom and even started to speak, but she must have tuned in on my line of thought and gave me a tiny headshake. Later, it said.
I nodded.
Mom leaned closer to the screen and began talking very fast. Sometimes she ripped people apart and sometimes she didn’t. The deciding factor, I long ago realized, was what was needed in the moment. Inga didn’t need a kick in the ass. She needed to know what to do, how best to do it, and that the full resources of her boss were at her immediate disposal. Mom outlined a strategy and even as she spoke Tony Chu was typing it down so that there would be a digital copy they could send. Inga had an assistant and there were other engineers aboard—not as good and not trained by Jean Hart, but able to make basic repairs.
That wasn’t the problem. If it was just a matter of fixing the plumbing Inga would have done it and told us later.
Partly it was the fact that so much of their precious water was now floating around the ship. Thousands of globules of it, in all shapes and sizes, that would have be chased down and caught. The rest of the crew could do that, but the water they collected would probably no longer be pure. It would have to be purified again. That was a problem.
But it was a long, long way from the worst problem. There was water inside the walls of the ship, where all of the delicate electronics were. Inga told us about the damage that had already been done, but she left more unsaid. That water, most of it anyway, was still there. It was still capable of doing more damage.
God.
The Muninn was in real danger.
The ship and everyone aboard.
Chapter 79
* * *
Mom stayed on the video call all day and into the next night. She talked Inga through a dozen different steps to fix the problem, including setting up a new freezer unit to store the blood supplies. After sixteen hours of intense work the entire valve system had been completely overhauled.
Since Inga was burning through a lot of time trying to remove the broken valve stem, I suggested that Inga drill through it, insert two high-grade metal rods, wrap them in duct tape, and turn the stem into a new handle.
It worked.
In situations like these, whenever all problems are equally bad, you have to find solutions without burning away time on theories. There are no do-overs out here. The blood stores were every bit as important as the water. I made a pretty radical suggestion. Tony shook his head, but Mom stared at me for a two count, and then she was back on the video call. It took some outside-the-box figuring, some definitely off-the-books monkeying around with tools, and about a gallon of sweat for Inga to disconnect the entire blood safe and move it—the generator, temperature regulator, and all—to the auxiliary airlock. The key was keeping the generator hooked up the whole time, which meant running a crazy network of wires everywhere. She managed it, though, and didn’t lose a single pint of blood or plasma.
Tony gave me a high five that almost sent us both flying against opposite walls. Mom wore one of her thin, calculating smiles.
“You may have just saved everyone on that ship,” Mom said. She said that in front of Inga, Colpeys, and Tony Chu.
“I—” I began, but Mom cut me off.
“Now we need to isolate that part of the plumbing system and reroute to another valve. The whole unit has to come out but we need to conserve water. There are thousands of gallons floating around in the hab, and five months’ worth of food particles, snot, metal dust, and other particulates in the air. Even if they reclaim all that’s lost it’ll be impure and the puri
fier’s not going to be able to clean it for weeks. The Muninn’s already critically low on pure water.”
“And people are still getting sick,” said Inga. “We were only just getting ahead of the bacterial infection when this happened.”
Mom turned to Tony. “You’re on diagnostics. Use our system and the computers and give me five reasonable explanations for why this happened and each one better have a practical solution. Go.”
He was out of there like a shot, taking his laptop with him.
Then Mom turned to me. “Tristan, we need to amp up the water purifier. I want a fix for capacity and a minimum ten percent bump in filtration time. Don’t come back to me until you have a way for them to scrub their water at a faster rate.”
“But—”
“Don’t disappoint me, Tristan—” she began, but this time I cut her off.
“No,” I said, “I already have that part figured out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Colpeys said. “That filtration system was designed by experts.”
Mom’s head swiveled around like a praying mantis’s and she gave Jurgen a truly icy stare. “And what exactly do you think my son is, Jurgen? You want to see how you’d stack up against him in a mechanical challenge? Do you have a solution for this?”
Colpeys opened his mouth but said nothing.
Mom turned back and jabbed me in the chest with a stiffened finger. “Talk.”
“We can use the galley,” I said. “We may not do much cooking but we have heaters, right? We can rig stills to superheat the water, run it through used O2 filters, trap the clean steam, and then run that through the purifier. It would only take one pass at that point. Right now we’re going to have to run it through the filtration system three or four times to remove all the particulates.”
“No,” said Colpeys, “you can’t refine all of the polluted water that way.”
“It doesn’t have to be all,” I countered. “The main purification system will do most of it, but we could maybe clean a couple of hundred gallons a day. That’ll take the strain off the main system. It’s not a replacement; it’s an addition to the system we already have.”
“All that boiling will raise the humidity in the hab.”
“Sure, but the water reclaimers will suck it up. Those systems aren’t damaged.”
Mom swiveled to face Inga. “You get all that?”
“I did,” she said. “I’m on it.”
She vanished from the screen.
I looked at Colpeys. “Setting up the stills, managing it, collecting the floating water, keeping the whole thing working right, that’s going to keep most of the crew busy.”
“Day and night,” he complained.
“Well, sure,” I said, “but that’s time they’re not sitting around going nuts worrying. And this way everybody gets to be part of how they’ll all survive this. I mean . . . that’s a win, right?”
“You’re saying you can talk them through the procedure?” Colpeys asked me.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation.
Colpeys studied me like he’d never seen me before. Then he glanced at my mom. “You were right about him, Jean.”
“I know I was,” she said.
Colpeys nodded to me. “Do it.”
Chapter 80
* * *
Inga and her assistant kept working on the plumbing while the rest of the Muninn’s crew set up the stills. I came up with an improvement while they were doing it and told them to move the stills to the wheel and up the wheel’s rate of spin to full, which would give them three-quarters Earth gravity. That would increase the drip rate of the reclaimed water. When I told Mom she kissed me on the head and told me that I was brilliant.
Erecting the stills was complicated and awkward, though, but the crew had a real incentive program. I talked one of the crew members through the process via the video screen. Sophie sat with me for a while and listened. She tried to hang out with me whenever I was doing some repairs aboard the ship, and she was learning fast. Very fast, actually, and a couple of times I asked her if she was messing with me because it seemed like she already knew how to use the tools. She said she was a quick learner. Even so, the problems on the other ship were way beyond her. She wanted to know everything she could about it, though, and she listened closely to everything I said.
“Will it work?” she asked when the tech put the call on hold to make some of the adjustments I recommended.
I chewed my lip for a moment. “I think so.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “You’re a genius, you know that?”
“I’m just a mechanic,” I said, and I could feel my face going red-hot.
“No, cher, you and your mother are so much alike. You can see into all these machines. You’re already smarter than Inga and Tony. You’re going to be smarter than your mother. She knows it. I’ve heard her tell people. She’s so proud of you.”
“Please stop,” I begged. “That is really not helping. I’m just trying to be useful.”
The tech suddenly came back on the screen and from the expression on his face I knew that something was wrong.
“Didn’t it work?” I asked.
“It’s not that,” he said grimly. And he laid more bad news on us. Inga’s assistant had collapsed. He’d been trying to bull his way through a bacterial infection, but it caught up with him and between fever, chills, and seventy-seven hours without sleep, his body just couldn’t do it anymore. That left Inga as the only qualified mechanical engineer. There were others who could hold a wrench, but there was no one else with her level of skill. That put more of a demand on my water reclamation project.
The tech ended the call and we stared at the blank screen. I felt like I’d been gutted.
“Are they all going to die?” whispered Sophie.
“No,” I growled. “No way. The stills are going to work. We’re really good at this. It’s why they selected us above all of the other engineers who applied.”
“How can they survive with only one mechanic?”
Instead of answering I got the tech on the screen again and began working with him to build a to-do list of adjustments and repairs that might help them get ahead of their growing problems. Mom and Tony were on the call for a while, but they dropped off to work on specialized aspects of the repair protocol, leaving me to do this part. It was problem solving, and that was something I was good at. I kind of zoned out, forgetting Sophie and everything else on this ship. Hours passed and we covered everything. The more I looked at the problems, the more sense they made, and the more obvious the fixes became. I wished I was over there because—egotistical as it sounds—I knew I could do some of this faster even than Inga. It was frustrating not to be able to get my hands dirty on this, to work the problem with tools instead of words.
Chapter 81
* * *
“It’s working,” I told Nirti and the others. We were sprawled on the low-gravity floor of the wheel, sipping tea from little sippy cups. Luther lay on his back and Zoé had her head on his flat stomach. Nirti sat cross-legged, her fingers twisting and knotting in her lap.
“A still?” mused Luther. “Did you used to make moonshine back in the States?”
“First off, dumbass, no. I don’t drink and they make moonshine in the mountains of Kentucky. I think. We lived in Wisconsin.”
“Kentucky, Wisconsin . . .” He shrugged as if it were all the same. “Wisconsin is near Illinois, and that is where Chicago is.”
“So?”
“Prohibition. Al Capone. Bathtub gin.”
“Jeez . . . how do you even know about that stuff?”
“I read. You should try it.”
“Bite me,” I suggested, and he laughed. “And Prohibition was like a hundred years ago. And besides—”
Zoé interrupted. “Will it work? Will they be able to purify enough water?”
“If the other systems come back on line? Sure. And it’ll help them until then. It’s only supposed to be a temporary f
ix. Inga’s fixing the whole filtration system.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Nirti, her voice dropping to an almost conspiratorial whisper, “is how it happened in the first place. My mom was talking with Dr. Sakai aboard the Muninn and you know what he told her?”
We all bent closer to listen.
“Dr. Sakai thinks somebody did that to the water system.”
Luther frowned. “Did what?”
“Messed with it.”
“What—deliberately?”
Nirti nodded.
“No way,” said Luther, shaking his head and smiling. “That’s paranoid. We’re on spaceships with no escape craft. Who in their right mind would do something like that? And why?”
Nirti chewed her lip. “People can go crazy out here.”
We all stared at her.
Zoé frowned at her. “You’re serious?”
“I’m just telling you what my mom heard from Dr. Sakai.”
“Which makes it third-hand paranoia,” said Luther. “Sure, let’s all panic.”
“Do you have a better explanation, Mr. It’s All Fine?” demanded Nirti.
Luther’s eyes clicked over to me. “If a machine that shouldn’t break down breaks down, ask the person who inspected it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Nirti.
“Ask him,” Luther said, nodding toward me. “His mom’s the one who—”
I pointed a finger at him. “You’re going to want to be real careful how you finish that sentence, Luther.”
Luther pushed Zoé aside and began to sit up. I started to get to my feet.
And then the alarms went off.
It jolted all of us, and then my mom’s voice boomed from the speakers. “Tony and Tristan, report to the workshop. Now.”
I shot to my feet. I wanted to leave Luther with some kind of gritty one-liner, like “this isn’t over” or “later, your ass is mine,” but instead I ran to the edge of the wheel, leaped out of the partial gravity, and soared toward the other end of the ship.