Writers of the Future Volume 31
I knew that I was taking too long. My suit timer showed twenty-two minutes when I finally felt the station tremble. If it had been the reactor, it would’ve been a lot more than a tremble, so that must’ve been the first explosive bolts.
I watched on the screen and confirmed that the mass driver was drifting away from the station, picking up speed as the rockets began to burn. Over ten minutes to figure out the controls.
I hoped I would move faster on the second set.
But I didn’t have to. Wilson nudged me aside and handed me a clear bag containing a computer board. “Sam, I’ve got this. Get that board out of here.”
I looked at Wilson through his suit visor. His face, darker than Leeanne’s, nearly always bore a smile. It wasn’t from humor—though Wilson had a great sense of humor—it was friendliness and confidence. Wilson Gray was happiest when we had a challenge to tackle. So when I saw that his smile was gone, I grew even more worried. “Boss, I’m not—”
“Now, Sam! This wasn’t an accident, and the evidence is on that board. Get it off this station!” And Wilson turned to the superstructure controls, hands moving twice as fast as mine.
Despite Wilson’s orders, I hesitated. He pushed me away, and I tumbled through the air. Wilson didn’t need my help and he wouldn’t be dragged away, and arguing would only distract him. Whatever that board held was important to him, so I had to get it out, like he had ordered. I cycled through the nearest airlock and hoped that he would not be too far behind me.
Just as I pulled myself out of the lock, I felt the whole station shudder. Somewhere inside the big disk-shaped module, the magnetic fields had passed a critical point of imbalance. The laws of physics took over from there: on the one hand, the delicate fusion reaction snuffed itself out harmlessly in the first microsecond; but on the other hand, the cooling system failed and the high-pressure coolants escaped and damaged the ring structure.
In a chain reaction, the massive magnetic coils that had taken person-years to assemble and fit into place suddenly broke free from their blocks and ripped themselves to shreds—giant, fast shreds that tore through shielding, tore through bulkheads …
And tore through the hull!
I fired my jets at max throttle, getting me away as far and as fast as possible. I barely escaped the flying shards of tin and aluminum and carbon compound.
Wilson hadn’t cut the modules apart. The shudder propagated up the girder tunnel, causing it to twist and flex dangerously.
Some girders nearest the R&R Module snapped entirely, something I’d never seen carbon girders do. The lattice structure absorbed the shock, but I had to fly over a hundred meters before I felt it was safe to cross between the rods.
And then I just hung outside the girders, looking back at the wreckage that had been R&R. My best friend’s greatest dream, and now his destruction. I floated silently and waited for his widow to pick me up.
Life in the Settlements didn’t give us a lot of spare time, not even to grieve.
I assembled a crew, and we went into the shattered husk of R&R to retrieve Wilson’s body.
I remembered his last words: This wasn’t an accident.…
I still didn’t know what he meant, so I recorded everything for … well, for evidence, I guess. The scene was horrific, his corpse filleted by the fast-moving shrapnel. I locked down my recordings. No way would Leeanne see these if I could help it.
Then I had to get ready for the funeral. It took me a while to find my cabin in Habitat, since I still wasn’t familiar with the new station. I had only visited my quarters before long enough to stow a small kit bag with clothes and essentials. When I found my hatch, I went inside and sealed myself in.
And then, for a few scarce minutes alone, I cried. Wilson Gray was dead, and people needed me to carry on, but I needed … I needed Wilson. If only I had been here sooner … But that thought led me to a dark vortex I might never escape, so I wrenched myself out of it.
I had to find something to do, some activity to anchor myself. So I opened my kit bag, unzipped the toiletries pouch, and pulled out my razor. I set it for a short trim, just enough to even out my goatee and mustache. As the blades spun and the vacuum sucked away the bristles, I stared at my eyes in the mirror. They were red against pale skin that bagged around them. I wished I had some water to rinse them, but Habitat didn’t yet have water to the residence decks. I would have to live with the red. And with the patches of white in my beard and scalp. When had those appeared? When had my hairline receded so far? This project had made me old, but that day I felt the impact all at once.
I combed my hair, put on a fresh pair of coveralls, and pushed out of my cabin and into the half-completed corridor. Many of the wall panels were missing, exposing conduit and tubes and electronics. There were no signs and no obvious way to navigate, but I didn’t need them. I just followed the other stunned, red-eyed faces as they floated their way to the recycler.
As per his will, we gave Wilson a small ceremony—I spoke, and Kim did, as did a few others as Leeanne floated in tearful silence—and then we fed him to the organic recycler. New crew from Earth had trouble with this concept, but the recycler is our version of the natural order of life and renewal. New recruits understand this on an intellectual level, but it still creeps them out. After you’ve been through a few funerals in the Settlements, though, you start to feel it: Wilson Gray was gone, but his essence would be with us forever.
Most of Gray City attended the service in person or by televisit. The only ones who couldn’t attend were the crew I had assigned to stabilize Habitat. We also had visitors and televisitors from across the Pournelle Settlements, the collection of independent towns and stations inspired by an early aerospace pioneer who was the first to describe the energy efficiencies of mining colonies in the Jupiter system. The Settlements were loosely affiliated in trade and support alliances, but most of them prized their independence. It had taken all of Wilson’s incredible charm and diplomatic skills to unite them in the Refinery Station project. Some had openly called it Wilson’s Folly. They had the good taste not to mention it on that day, but the phrase would soon come back, I felt sure.
By chain of command, Leeanne should’ve directed the ceremonies and the aftermath; but my steely-eyed pilot had finally given in to her human side. She had watched her husband and her future all shredded in an instant. She had made my pick-up like a pro; but after that she had just stared at the wreckage, her eyes sunk in her suddenly hollow face. She had barely mustered the energy to answer simple questions since. I had had to take the ship’s controls, and since then everyone just turned to me as if I were in charge of the entire city. Maybe I was.
I never signed up for this, Wilson. I wasn’t the decision maker. I was the guy who carried out the decisions. That was my part in our triad: Wilson had the wild dreams and sold them to the world, Leeanne was the practical one who told him when his dreams were too wild, and ol’ Sam Pike led the grunt work to make the dreams come true.
Now I had to hope that I could remember the lessons Wilson had taught me as I stepped into his role. That included something that always came natural to him, something I could never be comfortable with: leading meetings.
Immediately after Wilson’s service, as Kim led Leeanne back to her cabin, I called an emergency meeting. Even limiting it to department heads, there were still thirty people gathered in the Atrium of Habitat, and six more by televisit. That was too many for an effective meeting, but I couldn’t guess which department might have a handy miracle or two. We needed every miracle we could scrape up.
The hubbub in the Atrium was more uneasy than I’d ever heard it. Even in the darkest can-we-do-this hours of station design and construction, the department heads had all been on board, drawn in by Wilson’s enthusiasm and quick answer to any problem.
Now I saw them clumping into worried groups, bobbing in the air as they talked among themsel
ves. The faces I saw … Some looked almost as haunted as Leeanne’s. I needed to get them all on task—whatever the task would be.
I pushed off to the chairman’s harness in the center of the atrium, but I didn’t strap in. It just felt too soon for that, and I was still kicking myself for not being at the station when Wilson needed me. So I strapped into my harness next to his.
Then I raised my voice, but not so much as to echo off the walls. “All right, people. Come to order.” Somehow it was easier there in my harness. I could pretend that Wilson was just “away,” and I was running things in his stead as I had done many times before. So I followed our usual routine. “Status reports, people.”
I looked at Hank Zinn from structural engineering, but he hesitated, staring at his hands. Before Hank could answer, the tumult broke out again. This time I did echo: “People!”
They dropped silent again. “Okay, we can’t pretend we’re not shook up. When you get out of here, you all have my permission to panic for an hour. But Wilson Gray hired professionals, goddamn it, and I expect you to start acting like it! Or none of us are gonna last long out here.”
More tumult. Mari’s voice broke over the rest. “We’re not going to last anyway!” There were shouts of agreement.
I looked at Mari: a petite woman with golden skin, red-brown curls, and usually a confident attitude that fascinated me. Even now, stressed and grieving, confidence in tatters, she still appealed to me. She was still the fireball I had fallen for. We had dated for several months before our latest fight, and I really hoped we weren’t over. So I hated to turn on her, but I had to put this down now. I tried to sound cold. “If you believe that, Mari, there’s the hatch. I need a united team. If you’re giving up on us, hitch a ride to Walkerville or Callisto One or Earth, for all I care. I’ll comp the transit costs in your last check. Is that what you want?”
Mari glared at me, and I was coldly sure that our last date had been our last date. But she shook her head and bit her lip. I gave her a second in case she wanted to add something, then I continued. “If we’re going to come out the other side of this, it will be by following Wilson’s troubleshooting protocol: tally our assets and status; define the problem; refine it into a solution; assign tasks to our assets; and design the process and build whatever new assets we need. So it’s tally time, people. Hank?”
Hank turned to me. His voice was steady and calm. Maybe I had handled that right. “We’re in bad shape. Not fatal, but bad. Habitat still has a slight wobble.” We could see that just by looking around. The walls occasionally flexed as a slow standing wave passed through the structure. “We’ll have that under control in a couple hours. But The Tube took serious damage at the reactor end. We can salvage the material, but it’s going to take a month. R&R is worse. The debris is orbiting with us in a cloud, but some of the material is not recoverable at any reasonable cost. The mass driver is safe, but its orbit is unstable in the long run. We have maybe three months to boost it to a stable orbit before it draws too close to Ganymede and tidal force pulls it apart. We can do that, if you’re willing to spend the fuel.”
I nodded. Wilson had given his life in part for the driver. We wouldn’t give it up now. I turned to Mari. “Eco?”
Mari’s voice was bitter. “As I tried to tell you, we’re screwed in the long term. We have consumables enough for now. We can scavenge some, and we can barter with other Settlements. There’s still demand for our batteries, right?” She looked at Sissi Sneve from power management, and Sissi nodded. “But our loads from Earth … Well, we’ve got twenty months in the pipeline. And that may be it. My buyers back on Earth say it was already difficult to get credit before. Sellers doubted Mr. Gray’s plan. Now that the news is out, that credit is drying up. We’ll see gaps in the pipeline twenty months down; and four or five months after that, the pipeline will stop.”
I tried to sound conciliatory. “And can we conserve enough to make the difference?”
“Maybe …” But her expression didn’t look convincing, a combination of a glare at me and a trembling frown.
Discussions broke out again; and for the first meeting in over a year, I resorted to the air horn.
The shriek echoed off the walls, and some put their hands over their ears. When the echoes died, I continued as if nothing had happened. “Then we’ll find another answer, like always. Power?”
Sissi summarized the generator status and the power market—the two bright spots of the meeting—and I moved on to the next topic. By the time most of the departments had reported, I noticed a flash of short platinum hair at the nearest hatch. Kim had returned to the meeting. Her face was even paler than usual, and her delicate face showed—no, not sadness, fury! Oh, shit, what now?
Kim gently squeezed through the crowd to join me, sliding up to my side while trying not to draw attention. She handed me the computer board from the reactor, and she pushed a report to my comp. While I listened to the status reports, I checked Kim’s data.
Oh, shit, I thought again. This was bad. It might be the last straw. Wilson had been right, it hadn’t been an accident. This could break our spirits.
Or maybe … As the last status report completed, I surveyed the room. “Thank you. That’s what I expect from you all: your best effort as professionals. And we need that.” I held out the computer board. “I thought we were dealing with an accident. But it turns out we have a whole different problem: sabotage.” Immediately the room broke into shouts, and I had to use the air horn again. “I’m pushing Kim’s report to you all. It won’t stay secret, so I won’t try. This circuit board that arrived from Earth six months ago has a very clever, invasive virus hard-coded into its core. Ladies and gentlemen, somebody tried to stop us. Maybe kill us.”
This time I let the shouts play out. I wanted them shouting. I wanted them angry. And amid the shouts, I heard two words more than any other: “Initiative” and “Magnus.” Magnus Metals ran an Earth orbit refinery that sapped much of our profits in refining fees; and the System Initiative were the bureaucrats who thought they ran space from cushy offices in Rio de Janeiro. Between their regulations and more fees and fines, they sapped much of the rest of our profits.
Refinery Station had been Wilson’s giant middle finger to both of them: we would do our own refining, and the Initiative were welcome to fly out to Jupiter to try to enforce their regulations where the laws of physics were the only real authority. Either might be our saboteurs, maybe even both. I didn’t need to work out who, yet. It was enough to know that the two things Settlers hated most were the government squeeze and the corporate squeeze. This news had unified the department heads more than anything I could have said.
But Wilson had taught me: some messages are more effective from “the troops” than from the boss. So just as Wilson had often done to me, I tapped out a message and pushed it to Kim. When her comp buzzed, she looked at it. Then she nodded and gently pushed out until she was in among the others, shouting and talking like the others. And as a lull hit, she shouted over the rest. “They tried to kill us!”
The echoes were louder than the air horn. “Yeah!”
“Are we gonna let them stop us?”
This had been one of Wilson’s simplest motivating questions; and the answer this time shook the walls worse than the standing wave. “Hell, No!”
Right then, I knew: I had my team again. We would survive.
Now I just had to figure out how.
That’s what I thought I would do; but I had no idea how my time would actually be spent. I had never appreciated what Wilson had done all day. More meetings. More soothing of frayed nerves. More reviews of plans and schedules. More calls back to Earth, pleading with creditors and suppliers not to cut us off until we regrouped.
More calls to our business agents, too, to try to track down the source of the virus. Yeah, like that was ever gonna happen. Whoever did it had covered their tracks too well.
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There was so much to do, and every day the list grew faster than I could whittle it down. I started sleeping in my office, when I found time to sleep at all. No matter how hard I tried, the work piled up. Maybe Mari was right: maybe Gray Interplanetary was dead like Wilson, and we were just waiting for it to stop breathing.
And Leeanne … Leeanne might’ve been walking dead herself. For the first week, she didn’t come out of her cabin, and she barely ate the food that Kim brought her. Then she started coming out for a few hours at a time, but she spoke little. Her eyes were still wide and red, her face muscles slack and expressionless. One look told you she was still in shock. People tried to engage her, but the conversations always trailed off into uncomfortable silence. Over time she started wandering into the middle of work areas, sometimes talking but mostly watching. People complained to me. They couldn’t say it, since legally she was now the top boss, but they wanted me to keep her out of their hair. As if I didn’t have enough problems. I added that to my list, but not near the top.
Three weeks after the funeral, though, Leeanne pushed herself to the top of the list, floating into my office as I went over power management reports late at night.
She waited for the hatch to close; then for the first time in weeks she found real energy to speak—and she threw it all at me. “Samuel Pike, what the hell are you doing to my company?”
My mind froze. I don’t back down from a fight. Normally a challenge like that would have me shouting back, or worse. But this woman was my boss now, and my best friend’s grieving widow. With Wilson gone, she was the closest friend I had. I felt grateful to see her engaged in something, even if it was chewing me out.
I muttered, “Leeanne … We’re trying … to put something together here.”
“Bullshit!” She waved an arm to gesture at the station, giving her a slight spin until she hit a wall and arrested her movement. “They are trying, but they need direction from you. You are floundering!”