There was a power fluctuation to stabilize and she was going to fix it. Saving this place and its people was the only thing that mattered.
Thirty-Nine
Holly woke in the dark and couldn’t remember what day it was.
The dome’s lighting system had developed a fault three days ago, and no amount of diagnostic work had brought it back online. The outpost existed now in a perpetual twilight, lit only by the reddish glow of the gas giant that hung in the sky beyond the dome and the more distant sun, which provided illumination about as useful as a candle in an abandoned freighter. The lampposts in the square still worked, their small pools of warm light the only reliable brightness left, but they were designed for ambience, not full illumination. The station felt like a place operating on its last reserves, which it was.
It was also cold. Holly hadn’t fully appreciated how much warmth the dome’s lighting system generated until it stopped. The temperature had dropped steadily over three days, not dangerously, but enough that she slept in layers and Bean had taken to burrowing under the blankets rather than sleeping on top of them.
She sat up and reached for the bowl of water on the bedside table. There was no running water. Sam had rigged a manual collection system from one of the emergency reserves, and eachresident received a daily ration in containers that Cody, of all people, delivered each morning.
Holly dipped a cloth in the bowl and wiped her face, neck, and armpits. The water was cold. Everything was cold. She wrung out the cloth and draped it over the bowl’s edge and sat there for a moment, cataloguing her body. Her eyes burned from lack of sleep. Her shoulders ached from hunching over console three in the control tower for hours at a time. Her hands were rough and dry. She had slept maybe three hours, and that was the longest stretch she’d managed since the night of the festival. The night she’d spent in Rasker’s arms, a night that felt like it belonged to someone else’s life.
“You look awful,” Luv said, rolling over to take the dirty cloth and do…something with it. The Homeboti could not stop cleaning things, even though dirt was the least of anyone’s worries.
Anyway, Holly did not need this right now. “Gee. Thanks, Luv.”
“I’m being honest.” She rolled up and blinked her optical scanners at Holly. “Your under-eye circles have under-eye circles. You have a pimple on your chin and you’ve barely eaten anything in five days.”
Holly pulled a thick sweater over her head. “I’m aware of all these things, Luv.” Okay, she hadn’t noticed the pimple.
Luv’s optical sensors tracked her as she moved through the dim room. The robot’s tone was different these days. Less sharp. More careful. As if she understood that the woman she’d sworn to protect was approaching a limit. “You need to eat a proper meal. And sleep. Also, properly.”
“I will. After.”
“After what? After the water comes back? After the lights come back?” Luv rolled closer. “Holly. You cannot fix everything by refusing to take care of yourself.”
Bean emerged from beneath the blankets, his nose first, followed by the rest of him in a slow, reluctant unfurling. He blinked at Holly, yawned enormously, and shuffled to the edge of the bed where he waited to be lifted down. She obliged, and he pressed his warm body against her shins while she laced her boots.
“Hey, buddy.” She scratched behind his ears and he leaned into her hand with a soft grunt. “I know. It’s cold. I’m sorry.”
Bean looked up at her with his steady brown eyes, and she felt the ache in her chest that had taken up permanent residence there. This dog did not care about water systems or lighting faults or spaceport power grids. He cared about her, and about his meals, and about whether his blanket was warm enough. The simplicity of his needs was the only thing keeping her tethered some days.
“Walk him for me?” she asked Luv.
“On one condition.” Luv extended a metal arm and dropped a bowl of hot, joyless porridge on the table. “Eat something before you leave.”
“Fine.” Holly sat and ate it, looking out the window. She watched Luv walk Bean accross the square and disappear into the trees. The reddish light from the gas giant threw long shadows across the stone paths. The broken fountain was a dark silhouette. The garlands on the lampposts, Harry’s festival decorations, still hung there. No one had taken them down, Harry least of all. He was struggling to keep his mushroom crops alive, with the temperature issues and lack of water.
She thought about the past five days. About the cascade of failures that had arrived one after another, each one explainable, each one devastating.
The water system had been first. Sam and Holly had spent two days rerouting emergency reserves and attempting to access the flooded caverns. Rasker had swum through the submergedpools to reach the water station and recorded everything he could see. The footage showed a ruptured main conduit. Failures like this happened when old pipes were subjected to pressure they weren’t built for. Fixable, but not while the caverns were flooded, and not without parts they didn’t have.
Then the dome’s lighting system developed a fault in the central relay that controlled the daylight cycle. Holly had traced the problem to a junction box buried in the infrastructure above the dome’s highest support beams, accessible only by maintenance scaffolding that Sam had to assemble from parts. By the time they reached the junction, the relay was burnt beyond repair. They needed a replacement, and the nearest supplier was a week’s transport away.
She’d stabilized the spaceport force field, rerouting power from secondary systems to keep the grid steady. It held for a day and a half. Then it began flickering again, the same rainbow ripple Holly had seen on her first arrival, and nothing they did from the control tower would hold it. Sam eventually hard-wired a bypass that kept it functional, but it drew power from the residential grid, which meant the heating systems in the outer living units dropped to minimal output.
Then the repair bots. All of them, simultaneously, simply stopped. No error codes. No diagnostic flags. They just powered down and would not restart, as if someone had flipped a switch. Sam took this hard. He loved those bots, and had pulled one apart to find nothing noticeably wrong with it. Holly wanted to run their software through a debug program she had, but kept getting pulled to other projects. She’d do it today, if nothing else decided to blow up.
Each failure was explainable on its own. Aging systems. Deferred maintenance. Bad timing. The kind of things that happened to old stations that had been neglected for years. Holly had told herself this, and Sam had told himself this, but neitherof them fully believed it. The timing was too perfect. The pattern was too familiar.
But knowing something felt wrong and proving it were different things, and Holly had neither the time nor the energy to pursue the feeling. She and Sam had worked themselves into the ground, moving from one crisis to the next, sleeping in shifts when they slept at all, eating from NuProd units that produced meals with the enthusiasm of machines that had given up on flavor.
The others weren’t sitting on their hands, either. Everyone who had even the slightest technical knowledge was given a task, even if it was small. Even Tyer had been roused from his pondside home to assist in installing fresh code to the power grid. He wasn’t an expert, but he followed directions well. It was obvious that he, too, didn’t want to leave.
Even her cousin had appeared, sleeves rolled up, asking what needed doing. Holly had been too stunned and too exhausted to question it. She gave him tasks. Deliver water rations to the residents. Move cargo by hand, since the transport bots were down. Salvage what could be saved from the garden where the water dump had flattened crops. He did all of it without complaint, moving through the station with an energy she had never seen from him.
“Bad luck, cuz,” he’d said, passing her in the square on the third day, a water container in each hand. “But you’ve fixed worse.”
