Moral and Orbital Decay

by J. S. Morin

  Esper searched the floor, hoping not to find a smear of scratchy gray skin among the human debris.

  But on the far side of the holo-projector, she found not only Rai Kub but Carl as well. The captain of the Mobius lay sprawled on the floor, splattered in gore. In his upturned palm, Rai Kub stood fretting.

  The tiny stuunji looked up at her. “All things considered. I think I could be in worse straits.”

  Carl picked himself up from the floor, carefully keeping his hand level. “Told ya. Not a 100 percent drunk. Still got my piloting reflexes.”

  “Let’s get back to the ship,” Esper said.

  “All over it,” Carl agreed. “Yo, Amy… Dammit. Comm went dead.”

  Mort snorted, though only Esper heard it. “Of course, Cedric just told the universe to go fuck itself and take Tweedledee and Tweedledum with it.”

  They headed out of the theater by the magical glow from Esper’s hand.

  Everything was dead.

  No lights.

  No whoosh of environmental controls.

  No tech.

  Anywhere.

  Carl gazed up. This wasn’t one of the concourses listed as having a proper view of the station move, but the planet was visible overhead through the concourse’s glassteel ceiling.

  Mobile Excavating Station YF-77 was tumbling in orbit.

  # # #

  Dembe Maroun was late for his shift. It wasn’t that the alarm on his chrono didn’t go off. He had just been sleeping in Jedda’s apartment instead of his own. For all he knew, the damn thing was still going off back at his place.

  The lift ride was eight levels down, but at least the front was glassed in and had a sweet view of the planet as he rode. Most people didn’t think much of Karafuto IV, but he’d always found minerals fascinating. Karafuto IV was nothing but a bunch of minerals. There was something honest about a planet that didn’t need life forms crawling all over it.

  He flipped open his datapad and tapped in Jedda’s ID.

  She spoke the second they connected. “You make it on time?”

  “Nah,” he said, trying not to sound worried. They’d ding him on his annual review, but Dembe wasn’t in danger of getting fired. “I’m on the lift down now. Almost worth playing a little hooky to watch the move.”

  “You are such a dork. It’s a mobile station. It moves. This is what, the fiftieth time since we’ve been dating?” she asked.

  “Forty-fourth,” Dembe answered.

  Outside, he could see the ion glow as the station began reversing its descent toward the nadir of its orbit.

  “Well, you just be sure to—”

  The connection went dead. Dembe’s lift slammed to a halt as power-off emergency brakes kicked in. The sudden stop hit his shins like a hammer. Cursing, he dropped his datapad to the lift floor.

  Outside, the ion trail flickered and winked out. The slow, careful maneuver of YF-77 turned into a pressurized hose without anyone holding onto the nozzle.

  Dembe’s mouth gaped at the sight. He’d never seen anything quite like it. He’d never wanted to. As he pressed against the glass front of the lift car for a better view, he recoiled.

  The glass had turned spongy. As he pulled his hand away, the surface clung, releasing a springiness reminiscent of gelatin.

  “What the hell just happened?”

  Dembe had never met a wizard before.

  # # #

  Marcy Dakota was working the kitchen at the Dancing Cricket, one of the few restaurants on YF-77 that served human-cooked food. They were too far out for authentic Sol ingredients, but the substitution of colony-grown, pasture-raised pork and chicken was good enough that few patrons ever noticed the difference.

  A notification chimed, and she sidestepped to the deep fryer. A load of potato fries came out, and she hit the button for the grease recycler. The fryer drained with a gurgle and refilled seconds later; the same grease was now clean, and the shortfall from the cooking process had been topped off.

  She checked a pan on the induction cooktop, flipped the breast for an order of Turbo Chicken, and turned down the heat.

  This was all second nature. The chaos of the kitchen was comfortable for Marcy. The restaurant’s other chefs were her daily dance partners. They moved like a Victorian ballroom set ablaze with nary a dancer getting burned.

  “Behind you,” Tobin said briskly.

  Marcy held still for the split second it took him to pass by before taking her pan to check on her sauce. As she transferred the Turbo Chicken to a patron’s plate, Manheim took the empty pan and handed her a freshly filled sauce gun. Marcy squirted an intricate artistic pattern of chili and peanut oil across the meat’s surface.

  “Phillipe,” Marcy called out to one of the waiters. “I’ve got—”

  The lights in the kitchen went dark. In an instant, a ball dance became a burn ward as kitchen staff crashed into one another, spilling dishes, knocking into cooktops, and sending plates shattering to the floor.

  There was cursing and shouting—a general cacophony of ill-mannered confusion. Marcy found herself on hands and knees, crawling through lemon pepper sauce and scattered shrimp.

  The shrimp began to glow a pale blue. As she stared in disbelief, the glowing seafood rose from the floor as if gravity had washed its hands of shrimp. The kitchen hushed. The staff of the Dancing Cricket watched by shrimp-light as the tiny shellfish floated lazily into the air.

  The kitchen door burst open. Karloff, the maître d’, shouted, “We’ve got guests complaining that their shrimp is blue and floating away.”

  Marcy didn’t know what to tell him. She wasn’t even certain anymore that she was awake. So, she gave him the advice that came reflexively when a guest wasn’t happy with their meal. “Offer them free dessert.”

  # # #

  Ted McAllister had the most exciting dull job on the station. He was stationed in an observation bubble, visually monitoring the station’s ion thrusters during the move. Why? He had no idea. The YF-77 had a mass comparable to one of Earth Navy’s heavy cruisers, even if it was gangly and spread out by comparison. Far larger vessels managed to maneuver just fine without someone babysitting them.

  That was the problem, really. Maho Saigai Mining Concern considered YF-77 to be a structure, not a vessel. To them, the station was a hover-bridge with a star-drive, which made for some indigestion among the board of directors any time it moved.

  Popcorn crunched as Ted chewed. Despite the console of readouts and graphs, none of this required his attention. He snacked while he waited for the reverse burn to start. The plan was to continue snacking during the show, but his bag was already more than half empty and the move was a few minutes behind schedule.

  The bubble auto-dimmed as the station’s Quadrant 4 thruster sprang to life. After a few milliseconds for adjustment, the bubble settled into a comfortable luminous range for the human eye.

  “Yup,” Ted said with an artificial buttery sigh. “That’s an ion engine.”

  He was ten meters from an ion stream that could vaporize him in a nanosecond. Any of a number of system failures could result in his death before he was even aware that something was wrong. The first few times had gotten his adrenaline pumping like a hydraulic hammer. By now, the reality of modern safety standards had settled in and sitting next to the ion engine as it blazed away felt safer than astral travel.

  “Quadrant 1, reporting all systems normal.”

  “Quadrant 2, same here.”

  “Quadrant 3, matching thrust. All systems nominal.”

  Ted swallowed quickly and wiped his hand on his pants before hitting the comm to report in. “Quadrant 4, clean burn. Clear sailing.”

  Swiveling in his seat, Ted could make out the Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 thrusters firing happily along. His view of Quadrant 2 was obscured by the mining laser array at the central axis of YF-77.

  Ted glanced at one of the graphs and watched the station’s orbital radius drop. They were still eight minutes from their target or
bit. Then, after a grueling three-hour shift, he could get back to some real work.

  The ion stream flickered like a candle flame, wavering wildly for a horrifying split second before puffing out in a wisp of blue smoke.

  Ted choked on his popcorn. Coughing and gagging and taking a long swallow of cherry soda to clear his throat, Ted wondered what the hell had just happened. The initial panic of seeing the ion engine go haywire had flashed premonitions of a grisly death in front of his eyes. After that, he was left befuddled.

  “What in all the cosmic blazes…?”

  There was no reason in the galaxy that an ion engine should be emitting smoke. There was technically nothing burning. No oxygen was involved in the reaction. If one of the internal systems had failed, any smoke that filtered into the vacuum would have dissipated rapidly, not wafted away like a campfire’s plume on the wind. And even in the unlikely event that it did, there was no reason for it to be blue and even less for that blue to shimmer.

  “Quadrant 4 here. We’re off line. Thruster control, please verify status.”

  But the comm was dead. Ted’s words never left the bubble. The console was dark as well. Ted’s only light came from the sunlight reflected off Karafuto IV.

  Even the chair retractor that would lower him from the bubble was offline.

  Ted checked the popcorn left in his bag and wondered if he should start rationing.

  # # #

  Fujita Hiroko sat at her desk at the pinnacle of Mobile Excavating Station YF-77, reading reports. Production was down from last quarter, which had been stagnant from the quarter before that. Karafuto IV just wasn’t as bounteous as the geologists had predicted. Planets just weren’t made of solid molybdenum like they ought to have been.

  She pressed the comm button on the arm of her chair. “Kendra, can you chase down Ferguson and find out why I haven’t gotten the final tally from Site 71 yet?”

  They were nearly in position to set up a new borehole. The excavator captains were chomping at the bit to get down to the surface and bring up new loads of ore. The bonuses for Site 71 weren’t going to be worth much; those captains wanted their payday and the base salary of an ore hauler wasn’t anything to make a living at. They profited when Maho Saigai Mining Concern profited.

  A readout in Hiroko’s desk console showed the graph of the station’s move. Behind schedule, as always.

  Why couldn’t she have been assigned to YF-48 when the two mining platforms had come up with open positions at the same time? Surely her brother Shinzo wasn’t having the kind of troubles she was. YF-48 sucked hydrogen out of gas giants—if that could even properly be called mining. There was nothing to go wrong. Tankers showed up, the station filled them with pressurized gas, and they left.

  Hiroko’s comm crackled. “Ferguson says that Smelter 7 was down for maintenance. They’re behind on finishing up the last loads of ore for the tally.”

  With a sigh, Hiroko added her own comm to the list of maintenance tasks but only gave it a priority C grade. She could live with Kendra’s voice gargling more than she could put up with faulty smelters.

  Tapping the comm button, she had one more task for Kendra. “Follow up with corporate on the requisition for five more mechanics. If that can’t get at least one out of them, bump the request to eight.”

  “Actually, corporate was planning on sending two. They were just scheduled to come in March.”

  “Tell them that won’t do. I need them here…”

  Everything had gone dark. Hiroko was enjoying dim LEDs and planetlight in her airy, glass-domed office, but the terminal in her desk was blank. The comm controls were off. She was talking to herself.

  Pushing back from her desk was an effort with the power-assist offline. Hiroko stormed off to find out what had gone wrong with the power to her office.

  “Kendra!” she shouted when the double doors wouldn’t open. “Get maintenance up here ASAP. I’m going to ship them to corporate in the next load of ore if there isn’t someone working on this in the next five minutes.”

  There was a clatter from behind the doors. Then a metallic thump. “It’s not just your office, ma’am,” Kendra called through the door.

  A grunt came muffled through the doors. Something scratched and grated on the steel from the far side. With an eloquent symphony of straining noises, a gap opened between the two steel panel slabs.

  “Mind giving a hand, ma’am?” Kendra asked through the gap.

  Seething a sigh, Hiroko rolled up her sleeves and picked the side opposite the one Kendra hooked her fingers on. Between the two of them, a minute’s effort slid the door wide enough to squeeze her through.

  “What’s going on?” Hiroko demanded.

  “Can’t say for sure, ma’am,” Kendra replied, brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. “But have a look out there.”

  Hiroko followed her assistant’s pointed finger and gasped. The station was tumbling end over end.

  “Find someone from operations. Get me answers. Ancestors protect us; what has just happened here?”

  # # #

  Roddy paced. There wasn’t room for a human to pace, but he was making do with laaku-sized footsteps. His species was optimized for close-quarters pacing. Today, he needed it.

  Here wasn’t the place to be.

  Yomin was busy, or at least she was doing her best to pretend she was. She was mostly into long-range operations, the kind where nothing plugged into anything else. She did her best work running algorithms and sitting back to watch the results. By contrast, Roddy did his best work on systems that were all hardware, no software.

  Archie was the man for this job.

  “I know I can split my attentions between your incessant questioning and the task at hand,” Archie groused. “But this whole endeavor would pass in a pleasant silence if the two of you could just shut up.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Roddy protested. “I would have kept saying nothing if you didn’t accuse me of saying things.” Without beer, arguing with a robot wasn’t something Roddy was equipped for.

  “Slap, slap, slap with those gloved feet of yours. Back and forth. Forth and back. Give it a rest,” Archie snapped.

  It was never a good sign when a hacker got rattled. Breaking into layer after layer of the stations systems had gotten them access to passenger manifests. If they were to be believed, there were wizards on this floating rock-collector besides the one they’d brought and the one they were looking for. As far as pinning down a location for any of them, Archie was coming up dry.

  “Just let him vent,” Yomin advised. She looked at Roddy with one eye covered by streams of backward data that faced only her direction.

  Roddy turned and threw his upper hands in the air. “Fine. Just find Rai Kub so we can get off this death trap.”

  There was something about seeing the maintenance logs of a place in as grave disrepair as YF-77 that gave Roddy the willies. He was certain that he could construct a whole, smaller space station out of this one’s malfunctioning systems.

  “Just give me a moment,” Archie scolded. “Once I get the maintenance requests matched to the station’s automated error reporting system, I’ll—”

  The access room suddenly went dark.

  Yomin’s datalens turned blank.

  Archie slumped forward and crashed into the exposed guts of the terminal.

  “Archie!” Yomin shouted, heedless of the fact that they were hiding from station personnel.

  “Bullshit,” Roddy muttered. He dug into a pocket and lit a glow-rod that he kept around for Mort’s antics. Months after the wizard’s demise, Roddy had been starting to wonder if there might be space for something more useful in that pocket.

  Instead, Roddy’s preparation for wizardly shenanigans paid dividends. He ambled to the door Esper had overloaded for them and peeked outside.

  “Whole station is dark,” he reported.

  Yomin didn’t acknowledge him. “Archie? Archie! Answer me!”

  Roddy swal
lowed past a lump in his throat. Something dark and wizardly had transpired. He had more experience than just about anyone when it came to magic mucking up tech.

  Yomin had pulled off Archie’s borrowed EV helm and ripped open the front of his jacket. She pulled off his ventral access panel and peered inside.

  Roddy wasn’t one to pry. He didn’t look away when Yomin was working on Archie in the common room, but neither did he make it his business to gawk. Still, he remembered their being a lot more lights and a faint whirr of motors when he was opened up.

  “Archie? This is no time for joking around. Wake up.”

  Roddy put a hand on Yomin’s shoulder. She looked haggard by the pale green of the glow rod. “Easy kid. It’s magic. Archie’s probably the most advanced thing on this rust heap. ‘Course he took it bad.”

  “What do you mean, magic?” Yomin asked. “None of them were anywhere near here.”

  “Yeah,” Roddy said with a slow, grim nod. “I think finding Rai Kub just dropped down our list of priorities. We might not have a working ship anymore. We’ve gotta head back.”

  Yomin grabbed him by the back of his collar as Roddy tried to leave. “We can’t abandon him here,” she protested.

  Roddy wanted to tell her that Archie was a lost cause. Magic like that didn’t stampede past without leaving scars. Mort had killed holo-projectors and food processors with magic that wouldn’t have hit a whole space station.

  “We can come back for him,” Roddy promised.

  “What if someone else finds him?” Yomin demanded. The look in her eye told Roddy he wasn’t winning this argument.

  “He’s heavy…” Roddy whined.

  “Find a maintenance locker with some EZ-Lube. We’ll grease him up.”

  Roddy hung his head. He could have lied and said that the sprayer wouldn’t work with the tech all gummed up by magic. But if simple compressed gas wasn’t functioning, the odds of anyone surviving the station’s tech outage were slim.

  As it was, Roddy was pretty sure they were screwed anyway.

  # # #

  Esper lived out her nights in a dream world of her own making, where every meal could taste like chocolate and the weather was always sunny with little puffy clouds dotting the sky. And yet, as she stared through the transparent dome high above, watching a planet drift past every ten seconds or so, alternating with the system’s sun, she could hardly believe it was real.