Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  Lightning bolts of blue, bright sparks of molten fire, the small creatures from the marsh take leave of the earth and climb the sky on trembling wings, tiny hunters on the wind at last.

  Working on Cloud Nine

  John M. Olsen

  There aren’t a lot of luxuries on a space station. That’s why it annoyed Loralee when the radio links all died.

  With only four of them on the prototype waste recycling station, they each wore a lot of hats. She was the station chemist, biologist, and botanist. She floated in the command center of the Cloud Nine station with Penelope Devonshire, the station electronics and radio guru. “Pen, you told Phil to be careful on his EVA. I heard it.”

  Pen nodded her head. “Yes, I told him.”

  Loralee thought Pen’s British accent gave a classy touch to everything she said. She liked Pen, even though she alternated between a prim professional and an alter ego that swore like a sailor.

  She drifted near the station’s status displays for the rotating one-gee ring. The whole station was a prototype designed to make space stations self-sustaining.

  Pen continued, “He even managed to take out the local radio and intercom. Remind me again why we let managers touch expensive things?” Pen wasn’t angry yet.

  Loralee rubbed a hand across her stubbly head, having shaved it the week prior for a hair sample. The others said she was impulsive, but she preferred to think of herself as efficient. She had grown her hair out for months for that experiment.

  She spread her arms out wide and rolled her eyes. “It gets worse. If Cloud One is on their toes, they’ll have a shuttle on our doorstep within twenty hours. Once they launch, they’ll come all the way over even if we fix the com system.” Travel between the nine geosynchronous satellites of the Cloud network didn’t take much work since they all shared the same altitude in the Clarke belt. All it took was one well-aimed rocket boost to get going, and another to slow and stop at the destination. The trip only used a lot of fuel if you were in a hurry to cover the thirty-seven thousand clicks between stations. Solar sail tugs worked well but had much lower acceleration. A complete loss of communication would put them on a fast track visit from Cloud One even if their telescopes saw no signs of damage. She didn’t want that kind of attention because of her unauthorized research.

  Pen gave a resigned sigh. “I’d better send the spider over to the dish cluster to see if I can put a camera on what he ruined.” She looked at a screen showing a view outside the station on the opposite side from the antennas. “Wireless still works, but it will take two hours for the spider to crawl around.” She typed some commands, and the robot stretched out its limbs and crept through the vacuum along the guiderails on the outside of the station.

  Loralee brightened. “Hey, maybe you can use the spider to fix whatever he knocked loose. It’s a regular Swiss army knife with legs.”

  Pen said, “It depends on what he broke. I’d better see if Roger has eyes on Phil. If not, he’ll be half way suited up with a rescue kit in hand. And here I thought you and Phil would enjoy a quiet shift.”

  “Yeah, thanks. I’ll be in the ring for a bit, but I’ll meet you back here when he comes in.” Loralee gave a cheery wave as Pen left to check on Roger. Roger Adams handled the mechanical systems, and propulsion, and watched Phil’s lifeline and vitals at the airlock data station.

  Loralee had her work cut out for her to prepare for an unexpected visit from Cloud One. She pulled herself through the halls at full speed to the ring. Everyone acknowledged her as the champion hall flyer. Even scientists needed to invent games from time to time, and nobody could traverse the station as fast as she could. Roger had sprained a wrist once trying to match her, and had earned a reprimand from Phil.

  The one-gee ring took up the center of the station, and consisted of a tube with a ten-meter radius, extending thirty meters along the hub. It spun fast enough to generate one gravity on the inside surface. She climbed into the ring’s shuttle, a cab about a meter square, and gave it the command to spin up and synchronize with the ring. The crew could only enter and leave the ring via the cabs.

  Exercise equipment helped to stave off bone loss, but she had repurposed most of the space on their ring, crowding the fitness equipment into one small area. She walked out between rows of dark mulch to the narrow running track exposed along the middle of the ring. To either side grew her prized fruit trees, apples to her left and oranges to the right, with room for two more rows near the outside of the ring to increase the variety. High yield grains and small vegetables surrounded the trees at ground level.

  The humid air inside the ring carried a faint smell of both loam and blossoms. She loved working in the ring, and she spent as much time as possible with her plants and trees.

  She checked on the status of the newest apple seedlings. She had almost enough now to duplicate her ring of apple trees in each of the Cloud stations. Rather than sit directly in the rich loam, the seedlings sat in rows of makeshift pots.

  The older trees on both sides of the aisle reached to within a meter of the center of the ring due to the enhanced growth she had stimulated in them. The plants had responded well to the gravity differential as they reached from standard Earth gravity on the ground to zero at the center of the ring. She had spliced the tree tops together as they grew, sharing nutrients in the critical upper reaches. Based on her research, the low gravity environment would improve fruit production by almost an order of magnitude above that of a ground-based tree. Her initial experiments had verified she was on track.

  Loralee checked on the approved projects first. Oxygen production and carbon sequestration through the growth of “green slime” as they called it, did as well as expected, but some of her vegetable crops matched the oxygen production of the slime and had the benefit of both looking and tasting better.

  She finished an inventory of her rogue project and figured it would have to do. She could use a few more months to assemble a presentation, but didn’t have that luxury. With the emergency response ship on the way, she couldn’t hide her off-hours research. If they ran an audit, they would find everything. She had to beat them to the punch. She might get in less trouble for having hid her private research if she shared it all now.

  Loralee headed back toward the ring shuttle but stumbled over Phil’s exercise bag near her storage lockers. It wasn’t like him to leave it here. Station training demanded you never leave anything loose because zero gravity could turn any loose object into a lethal projectile. The discipline carried over into the ring, even with the force holding everything down to the floor.

  She decided to take it to him and remind him not to leave it in the ring, so she picked it up. The weight of the bag surprised her. Setting it back down, she unzipped the bag and saw labeled seed samples from her private research stacked inside with gym clothes and a book.

  Something was up. Loralee didn’t know what, but she knew it was big. First, Phil had somehow cut off their communications, and now he planned to do something with her seeds. She scowled. If communications were up, it would be awkward for her to report the theft of unauthorized research materials. This loss would have crippled her plans.

  Time was short. Phil must know she would discover the missing seeds soon. Whatever he had planned, it would be in the next few hours.

  She stored the seeds with meticulous care, locked the rack, and loaded the duffel with matching empty containers. She also grabbed a quarter liter jug of ninety-five percent ethanol from a fuel refining experiment. Phil would sometimes ask her for samples of her cleaning fluid, as he called it. After the first few times, she realized he must drink the stuff.

  Loralee didn’t know Phil’s plans, but she knew she would do whatever it took to stop him. It was time to find out what he was doing. She dug through the first-aid kit until she found the sedatives she was after and dropped a heavy dose into the alcohol and swirled it until the tablets dissolved.

  She took the duffel and the jug with her to the command
center to wait.

  Within a half hour, everyone had gathered back in the command center. Loralee had stored the alcohol in a cabinet and clipped Phil’s exercise bag to a wall ring. She seethed inside as she waited for her chance to act.

  Phil frowned as he looked around at the team hanging from various handholds around the room. “The plug-in module seated when I replaced it, so I’m not sure what went wrong. I’ll check the wiring on the inside first to see if we blew any breakers. Roger and Pen, you two are late for your sleep shift. I need you to be alert and ready eight hours from now if Loralee and I don’t fix everything while you sleep.”

  Roger unclipped a little mirror-tipped pen from his shirt pocket to twirl around as he drawled, “Well, if’n you think you won’t have it fixed on your shift, I’ll be ready to suit up and see if I can fix whatever got tore up.” When they had first met, Loralee had mistaken his slow southern speech for a sign of ignorance or laziness. She’d soon discovered neither was true. Roger had proven himself as one of the best and brightest rocket scientists and mechanics she’d ever met.

  Phil scowled at Roger. “Are you implying something? I don’t want to hear it. Get out of the way, get some rest, and I’ll tell you what to do in eight hours.”

  Roger held his hands up palm out and floated toward the door. “No problem here. Just said I’d be ready to go when you need me.”

  Phil seemed as surly and demanding as ever, and even more on edge than usual. Loralee wanted to say something to confront him but waited. She looked over as Pen pulled herself out into the hallway after Roger. Once out of sight of Phil around the corner, Pen pantomimed and mouthed something to Loralee about two hours, and made a walking spider motion with one hand on the other. Pen would check on the spider when it got around to the dish side of the station, but didn’t want to incur the wrath of Phil since she wouldn’t sleep through her full rest cycle.

  Loralee gave Pen a satisfied nod. She waited to let Roger and Pen get to their respective rooms, then took a breath and hoped to sound casual.

  “I saw your exercise bag in the ring, so I brought it back here for you.” She pointed at the bag hooked to the wall. “Oh, do you need some cleaning solution while you do your inspection?”

  Phil looked up, scowl gone. “Oh, thank you for bringing the bag. And yes, I’ve run out of cleaning fluid again.”

  Loralee pulled the drugged alcohol out of the cabinet and tossed it to him. Phil licked his lips as he stowed the small jug into a large plastic toolbox.

  Loralee asked, “So, do you have any idea what to look at first?”

  “I said I’ll check the breakers in the far hall first. I need to get some tools and supplies together.” Phil glided to the tool storage locker and loaded things into the portable tool box, then unhooked it from the wall.

  Loralee said, “Let me know if you need help with anything.”

  Phil pushed his oversize load out into the hallway along with coils of conduit and pressure tubing. In zero gravity, a bigger load only meant you had to slow down to steer a larger mass. There’s no actual lifting involved; it’s all pushing and pulling.

  Now she needed to wait and see if his self-control was as weak as she hoped it was. Loralee hated waiting but gave him an hour to settle in and get drunk. She had nearly decided to go hunt him down when a low-pressure alarm sounded. The methane storage tank monitor blinked, having lost a significant amount of gas. The methane was compressed and stored for use as shuttle fuel. She checked the station air mix on the displays, and it was within normal tolerances. It wasn’t a leak.

  Her worry became panic as she remembered the pipe and conduit Phil took with the toolbox. What had he done this time?

  She hauled herself hand over hand through the main hall and looked down each side passage as she flew past.

  She found him tucked partway into an access passage leading to a large unused storage compartment. “What did you do, Phil? I have a huge pressure drop!” She gave him a tentative poke.

  He didn’t respond. Loralee tugged him from the access hall by his feet and spun him to face her. She caught a strong whiff of alcohol on his breath. He was out cold. Her quarter liter jug floated from his grasp, empty. Well, thank goodness for small favors. Her plan had worked, aside from not preventing whatever disaster he’d pulled off in the past hour.

  “This has got to take the cake as the stupidest, most dangerous thing you’ve ever done.” She listened for any leaks to see if he’d opened a flow valve nearby and heard nothing. Good. She switched her attention to Phil. Based on his size, he would be out for several hours. Even if this methane leak was the only thing reported, he was done on the station. They’d send him down, and he’d never go back into orbit again. That suited Loralee just fine. She considered sending him in an emergency pod to but figured the real evidence against him was enough.

  She hauled him by the collar to his room a short distance down another side hall, and then hooked his jumper’s belt to the wall to keep him from drifting. For good measure, she sealed and locked his door from the outside with her personal lock code. She continued to think about what had happened and realized the consequences might not end with him. She might get grounded herself if someone went on a witch hunt because of her special projects. All her work and all her success to prove stations could become self-sustaining could come down to mean nothing. She was the first to grow full size producing fruit trees in orbit. Up in smoke. And all the optimizations to their experiments? They might keep everything she’d done, but they’d sweep her under the rug. She had wanted to show off, and make the big flashy announcements rather than produce the slow, plodding by-the-rules experiments.

  She had only one real choice now if she wanted to come out of this with her career intact. She had to get Pen and Roger and tell them what she knew about Phil and work to keep the team from getting taken down in the fallout when the repair crew arrived and took stock of the degrading situation.

  Loralee knocked on Pen’s door first, suspecting she was awake to track the spider on her personal console. Pen opened her door almost immediately. “What’s up? Did you find something?” Pen saw Loralee’s expression. “What’s wrong?”

  Loralee held up a hand to hold off the questions until she had knocked on Roger’s door and woken him up. He came out into the hall rubbing his eyes. “Ain’t this a bit too early?”

  Loralee took a deep breath and said, “I, um, drugged Phil. He’s passed out, and I locked him in his room.”

  Pen and Roger stared, trying to parse what Loralee had said. Finally, Pen said, “Drugged? What were you thinking? He’ll have you grounded so fast your head will spin for a week.”

  Loralee interrupted, “He’s done something dangerous, and the sedative got him out of the way. I’m pretty sure the dish failure wasn’t an accident. He tried to steal all my latest generation of seeds, and he caused a methane pressure drop I can’t locate.”

  Roger sighed and said, “Whoa, backup. That’s a big load to dump on Phil’s back. I’m not ready to accuse him of anything, but we can work on this while he sleeps it off. We got to get the station working before visitors get here, anyways. Sleep time’s over, I recon.” He took a deep breath and rubbed his face. “We’ll get through this. Where was he working?”

  Loralee told him where she had found him. “He was scheduled only to check wiring, so I wasn’t worried. I didn’t hear any leaks near him and the air mix is good.”

  Roger floated down the hall and said without turning back, “I’m on it. I’ll see what he was up to.”

  Pen said, “I was about to check the spider anyway. I’ll head to the command center with you and connect from there.”

  The spider had made it far enough to aim its camera at the dish assembly, so Pen stopped its march and made it focus in at maximum zoom on the dishes and their access panels. Plain as day, Phil had cut the cables not once, but twice with a piece removed. They would have to splice in a new length of multi-strand cable to get communication back up, w
hich would take several hours in a space suit. It would be hard, tedious work.

  Pen smacked her fist into a bulkhead and said through clenched teeth, “I hate to say you were right. He had to have done it on purpose. Is he trying to get us all grounded, or is it worse than that?” She continued with a string of scatological curses aimed at Phil which would have shocked a marine. She had, in fact, surprised Roger with her ability to maintain a stream of unrepeated curses, and he had served as a Marine before he joined the Cloud Consortium.

  Loralee looked at the blinking methane gauge which had leveled back out at a constant but lower pressure and said, “Good. The pressure is stable. What’s the chance your spider can fix the cable cuts to the dishes?”

  Pen said, “It has tools, but not the supplies it would need. I’m sending it to the airlock for storage. It won’t do us any more good out there.”

  Loralee pushed off toward the door. “I’ll go see if Roger has found the pressure drop.”

  Pen said, “Right. I’ll keep an eye on everything here.”

  A half minute later Loralee was looking over Roger’s shoulder.

  Roger complained, “I don’t know what he thought he was doing here. I looked through his tool box and found a few non-standard doodads. He’s got some wireless switches in his bag.” He tossed a switch from hand to hand and then spun it in the air in front of him before he picked it back out of the air and tossed it into the toolbox for safe keeping.

  Loralee said, “Well, he sure wasn’t fixing the wiring. The spider got a good picture finally, and Phil chopped the cables to the dishes in two places.”

  “Well, being right don’t mean the job changes any. But yeah. I’ll grant you got it right.” He continued to inspect Phil’s work.

  Loralee asked, “Anything on the gas leak yet? He had some tubing that could hold high pressure.”

  Roger sniffed. “Huh. I was wondering what was. It smells like he’s got a tiny methane leak. I’m surprised you didn’t catch it. Our methane’s got some leftover smell from the compost.” He traced the new lines, aligned to blend in with the existing piping. “See back here? He tapped into these two lines. This top one comes right out of the methane refueling line. Then they go down that way and through the wall. It looks like he tied it into some one-way valves in a junction box in the empty storage room. It’ll be a pain, but we can pump the gas back out of that room once we get some equipment hooked up.”