I saw Luther out of the corner of my eye. “Get another extinguisher. Find one. Do it now!”
He kicked off the edge of a cabinet and flew to the far side of the corridor, where another small extinguisher was hung, tore the unit free, kicked back in my direction.
“Douse it,” I ordered. “Get inside the wall. Keep spraying until the smoke stops.”
While he did that I opened the service panel. All the little green lights had turned red, indicating that there was damage to secondary systems. I began shutting them down, taking electricity out of the mix. The extinguisher hissed as Luther emptied it into the wall. Suddenly Tony was there too, and he had a second extinguisher. He pushed Luther back and took over, firing a fresh burst.
The fire, fierce as it was, died.
“Tony,” I yelled, “the smoke’s not venting.”
“On it,” he snapped. He let the extinguisher go and dove straight upward to another service panel. “It’s jammed. Wait . . . wait . . . I think I—”
Suddenly there was a clunk and a mechanical gasp and then the smoke began funneling upward into the mouths of two vents in the north wall. I kept working, rerouting systems so that we didn’t lose anything that needed to keep functioning. The lights in the room flickered and half of them went out. I switched to emergency lighting and then shut down every system I thought might be compromised.
By the time I was done the room was clear of smoke. It was inside my lungs, though, and I couldn’t stop coughing. Tears welled but they clung to my eyes, making me waste precious seconds in clearing my vision. Tony came over and helped, and together we got the whole system settled down.
Then I sagged away from the wall and hung there, rubbing at my stinging eyes. Tony was examining the warped panel, bending close to it to study the burned plastic. He removed a penlight and aimed the powerful beam into the wall.
“I don’t get it,” I heard him say. “I don’t get this at all.”
“You don’t get what?” snarled Colpeys as he pushed in beside Tony. “What happened here? How could this happen?”
Tony looked at the melted plastic, then at Colpeys. Neither of them said a word, but I swear I saw them exchange a small, private nod. And after that no one was allowed in that part of the ship.
Later, when I asked Tony, all he said was, “I’m still trying to sort it out. Don’t worry about it, kid.”
People never really mean that. All it means is that they’re worried about something and they’re too scared to talk about it.
Chapter 89
* * *
“Tony was scared?” asked Nirti. We were back in our com-pod. After some careful tinkering I’d managed to turn the reality show camera mounted on the far wall to face the other way and muted the microphone. The port was now one of the few spots on the ship where we could actually be alone. “Are you sure?”
“I know Tony.”
“But scared of what? The fire’s out and you said it wasn’t that bad.”
“It could have been really bad, though. If the fire had spread inside the wall it could have destroyed the backup O2 scrubbers. That would have left only the main system operational for the duration of the flight.”
“Okay, that’s bad,” agreed Nirti, “but it didn’t happen. You, Luther, and Tony stopped this right away, so what’s there to be afraid of?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Yet.”
I tried to ask Tony again, but he was in the workshop with the door locked. I heard his muffled voice talking with my mom via the video-chat, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I’d have to rig some kind of snooper device.
Tony wouldn’t let me do any of the repairs, either. He told me that he’d handle it. He gave me the rest of the day off, which was weird, because I was supposed to be his assistant while Mom was away. There were no days off for engineers. Not right after we had a fire, for God’s sake.
But orders were orders.
So I went to the wheel to work out my frustrations on the ARED.
Why was Tony so scared?
Why was he closing me out?
Why did the fire control systems fault out? Those circuits weren’t in that part of the wall.
“What’s going on?” asked a voice and I turned to see Sophie there. Her hair was a mess and she looked a little scared. Maybe a lot scared.
“Working on something,” I told her. “Can’t really talk now.”
“The fire?”
I glanced at her. “Yeah. And other stuff.”
“The Muninn?”
“Sure,” I said. “That too.”
“I heard that even with the antibiotics they’re having a hard time getting ahead of the infections.”
“Yeah.” It was ugly and true. Three of the team, including Inga, were in very bad shape. Inga was on a respirator and had lost consciousness.
Sophie’s eyes were huge and haunted. “Will they die?”
I added more weight to the ARED and settled back to do some bench presses. “I don’t know.”
As days go, this one truly sucked.
Chapter 90
* * *
That night I locked myself into a com-pod and recorded a message for Izzy.
Actually, I recorded fourteen messages, but I kept erasing, stopping and starting, getting it wrong. Being wrong. Finally I was so exhausted, I sat there for ten minutes and stared at the screen. It took me that long to realize that I was recording myself sitting there. I hit delete on all of the files I’d created, shut the system down, and began ripping open the Velcro straps.
“Damn it, Izzy,” I said.
I hit record one last time.
“Izzy,” I said, “I love you and I guess I always will. I’m sorry for dragging you with me all this way into the black. That’s me being selfish. That’s me being unfair. That’s me being weak.”
The red eye of the camera burned into me.
“You’re braver and smarter than me and you tried to tell me, but sometimes I’m too stubborn to listen. Or maybe too scared. I don’t know. I mean, I heard you, but I’ve been acting and thinking like we’re still together. As if this is somehow going to work out. How stupid is that?” I laughed and wiped my eyes. “So . . . yeah, this is me finally getting a clue. This is me finally—hopefully—managing to say the right thing. But what’s the right thing? How do I say it without being ridiculously corny?”
A couple of seconds burned away.
“Okay, I guess I don’t care if it sounds corny. I’m just going to put it out there,” I said. “Izzy, you were the best thing that ever happened to me. You brought color and light and music and laughter and love into my life. And those are things I can take with me, even out here, even all the way to Mars. I will always love you. Of course I will. But I can’t bear to think of you there in some kind of suspended animation. This is not us being Tristan and Izzy anymore. This is us being us, each in our own world. I love you and you will always be my best friend. You’ve always been a better friend to me anyway. Sorry about that.”
I placed my palm flat on the screen for a long, long time.
And hit the stop button on the recorder.
Maybe half an hour later I was able to record a second video. This one for Mindy. I said most of the same things, but in different ways. I had no doubt they’d edit it into a ratings winner.
Who cares?
I put my face in my hands and as the ship flew through the black I counted all of the things I’d left behind. Weighed them, valued them, and began putting them one by one on the shelves inside my head. Where they would have to be from now on.
Chapter 91
* * *
Next morning I rigged a listening device and attached it to the door of the workshop. Tony was already inside. Then I retreated to a com-pod and set it up as a listening station.
“What are you doing, cher?” asked Sophie, who seemed to materialize out of nowhere. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt, and her hair was in a thick braid. She looked at me, at t
he pod, at the switched-off camera, and cocked an eyebrow. “You are acting very clandestine. Are you doing something sneaky?”
“Good guess,” I said, and then on impulse I pulled her into the pod and shut the door. It was a tight fit. “Can you keep a secret?”
She gave me a sly smile. “I keep secrets very well.”
“Good.” I quickly explained what I was doing and switched on the speakers, leaving the mic muted. We immediately heard Tony in the middle of a conversation with Colpeys.
“Who would do something like this?” said Tony, sounding shocked and scared.
“No one,” said Colpeys. “You were wrong and you need to recheck your findings again.”
“I have checked. Over and over again and it always comes up exactly the same. This could not have been a mechanical fault. There’s simply no way.”
Colpeys dug in. “It has to be mechanical.”
“It can’t be. That’s what I’m telling you. And that’s what Jean was afraid was happening on the Muninn. Why do you think she insisted on going?”
“But . . .”
“Listen, Jurgen, this isn’t us being paranoid, and there is zero chance we’re wrong about this. Someone is—”
“No! Everyone is totally committed to this mission, Tony. Everyone knows that this is a lifelong commitment. Why would anyone try to jeopardize that? It would be pure suicide.”
“Tell that to Jean. Tell that to Inga, for God’s sake. That’s if she doesn’t die.”
“Listen to me, Tony,” said Colpeys, his voice hard and sharp, “you keep your wild speculations to yourself. I let Jean go over because the Muninn needed the medical supplies and parts. I did not send her over there to do a criminal investigation.”
“But—”
“We’re having a run of bad luck. That’s all it is.”
And that was all. Colpeys flung the door open and left Tony alone.
I turned to Sophie, who was staring. “What’s going on?” she whispered. “Do they think someone did this deliberately?”
“Yeah, Sophie,” I said grimly, “that’s exactly what Tony and my mom think.”
“What do you think?” she asked.
I just shook my head. Not as an answer but because I didn’t know what to say. My heart was beating so fast it hurt.
Chapter 92
* * *
While Tony was busy repairing all of the fire-damaged wiring, I sneaked into my mom’s workshop. Door locks on a spaceship are a joke. They’re mostly designed to keep doors from accidentally swinging open. Tony had rigged a spring lock, but Mom had me bypassing that stuff before I was out of grade school. I mean, please.
The workshop was one of the larger single-use areas on the Huginn. It had all sorts of tools, machining gear, a 3-D printer, and bins of raw materials. It was my playground. Mom’s too.
I slipped inside and closed the door. The lights were already on but set low. I could find anything in that room in the dark, though, so it didn’t take me long to find the burned and twisted piece of plastic panel Tony had removed from the wall. It still smelled. Tony had it in a drawer and I removed it and set it on the table, holding it in place with long rubber bands. The panel was sixteen inches by twelve, and it had four screw holes, one on each corner. The four screws were in a plastic Ziploc bag attached to one corner. There were no useful notes that would have given me easy answers. Tony would have entered everything in the computer and I didn’t have his password. All I had was the panel.
I studied it for maybe ten minutes, turning it over, shining light on it at various angles. Then I went over the panel again, taking each item in turn—the weight, the degree of damage, the types of damage: direct burns, smoke smudging, melting from sparks, melting patterns from contact with hot wires, the marks from Tony’s screwdriver scratches from when he removed it, the overall warping from heat buildup inside the compartment.
Then I stopped and stared at it for a moment. I pulled a magnifying glass over on its accordion arm and peered through it at the screw holes. Then at the screws.
“Crap,” I said.
Tony Chu had exactly the same set of tools I had. Same exact make and models. I’d also worked with him enough to know how he approached a job. He’s left-handed and so any scratches he made came in from that angle. I’m a righty, so my scratches would be from a different angle. Most of the time neither of us scratched a screw or plate, not unless it was stubborn. Or, in this case, in a moment of panic, dealing with smoke and fire. But here’s the thing: I could find all of the marks of Tony’s screwdriver, and in exactly the places where I’d expect to find them. Except they weren’t the only marks on the plate. There were marks from a totally different kind of screwdriver. Thinner, narrower blade, and handled differently. Less force but leaving more damage. Not inept, but not as skillfully handled as Tony or Mom. Or me, for that matter.
A second screwdriver.
Tool marks can be as distinct as fingerprints. Mom taught me that. If you know what you’re looking at you can tell the difference between them, and between handheld tools and electric ones. Tony, Mom, and I used electric screwdrivers, so I knew the kinds of scratches they left. But the other marks I saw were clumsier. The kind someone would make using a handheld screwdriver. No doubt about it. And whoever used that tool knew what they were doing but was doing it badly. Nerves? Haste? Maybe both?
All of Tony’s marks were cut over those other marks, and the thin-bladed marks were cut over the last set of electric screwdriver marks. The last person I knew for sure opened that panel was me. With an electric screwdriver. Three and a half weeks ago, during a routine inspection. So who owned that thin-bladed screwdriver? And why had they opened the panel?
Or was that second question too obvious? Way too obvious.
I put the panel back in the drawer and searched for the small switching box that had been the source of the electrical fault. I found it in another drawer. It was so badly melted that it took me a long time to even make sense of it. The core was metal—aluminum-magnesium, copper, and some alloys—but the casing was dense industrial plastic. I spent an hour going over it, tracing each circuit, using the magnifier on each connection, looking at the points where the wires melted onto the housing. This was something Mom taught me to do—to assess damage in order to understand how the damage occurred. It was a kind of forensic science but before now I never expected to be doing it to understand an actual crime.
And that’s what this was. I was absolutely sure of that.
And I was absolutely terrified.
But I was also really freaking furious.
Chapter 93
* * *
I needed to tell someone. Sophie was busy in the galley, so I went looking for Nirti and found her in the wheel, working out on the ARED. Problem was that Luther and Zoé were with her.
“Crap,” I said. “Look, Nirti, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“I’m halfway through my set, Tris,” she said. “Can it wait?”
“Not really.”
She eased the wing bar back into place and sat up. “What’s going on?”
“I just need to talk to you. Alone.”
Zoé shrugged. She was on the stationary recumbent bike and was bathed in sweat. Luther was doing one-armed chin-ups, which looked very cool but the fact was that the wheel was still on Mars gravity. A ninety-year-old man could have done one-armed chin-ups there.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Your girlfriend back home broke up with you because she found out you’ve been sliding it to Sophie Enfers, and you need a shoulder to cry on.”
“Shut up, Luther,” said Nirti.
“Oh, gross,” said Zoé.
“Nirti, please . . .”
“And now he’s begging,” said Luther. “Very manly. Very attractive.”
I wheeled on him. “One more word out of you, and I’ll knock that grin off your face.”
“I will try to be terrified later on.”
I ignored him. “Nirti—?” br />
She stood up. “Okay, Tristan, but you’re being very mysterious.”
“It’s important.”
She wiped her face. “Is it about the fire?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
Suddenly Zoé was interested. “Wait, what about the fire?”
“Look, it’s nothing,” I said. “I just want to talk to Nirti. Is that okay with everyone?”
“Not really,” said Zoé. “Not if it involves what happened to the ship. Everything keeps breaking down. If you have something to say, why not tell all of us?”
“It’s not like that,” I lied.
“Why not?” asked Luther, dropping from the chin-up bar. “This is all your mother’s fault anyway. It’s about time you stopped covering for her and—”
“Stop it,” sobbed Nirti. “Both of you, just stop it.”
I glared at Luther. “You can say whatever you want about me. Joke or not. But you don’t talk about my mom.”
I expected him to come right back at me with something sarcastic, but Luther surprised me and held up his hands. “My bad,” he said. “Sorry. Everything’s been so weird lately.”
We studied each other for a moment, and then Luther held out a fist. I let it hang there for a long time before I bumped it.
Nirti cocked her head at me. “Tristan, what was it you wanted to say . . . ?”
“Okay,” I said after giving it some thought, “but you guys have to promise not to tell anyone. Not your folks, not Director Colpeys . . . no one.”
“What is it?” asked Zoé. “What are you talking about?”
“You have to promise.”
None of them liked it, but they gave their word. I took a breath and then laid it on them. All of it. At first they didn’t believe a word of it, so I took them back to the workshop. And I went through the other things. What happened on the Muninn, too. All the malfunctions and how improbable it was for them to happen the way they happened.