Tracer

by Rob Boffard

  There’s nothing I can do about it now, not unless I’m willing to waste time searching the sector for her. With one eye on the entrance, I scan the screens again. I’m looking for a login box, something that requires a password, something I can input the word Iapetus into and find out what it does.

  But each screen I look at appears to be logged in already; they all display various options, ranging from Dock Access to Thruster Management to Aeronautics. Most are in English, but several seem to be in Hindi and Chinese as well. One of them shows a static radio frequency, and there’s a little dust on the controls, like no one has used them for a long time. Can’t say I blame them; in the decades after the nuclear war, we could still pick up radio signals from Earth. One by one, they all faded. Fifty years ago, the planet went completely silent.

  I stop in front of one of the screens. I debate pulling a chair upright, but decide to stand – if Okwembu comes through that door, I want to be ready.

  Hesitating – but only for a second – I place my finger on one of the touch-screens and start to navigate through the system. There are lots of false starts, and I find myself staring at incomprehensible readouts and dead-ends of reactor kilowatt graphs. Cursing, I find my way back to the main menu screen, and methodically begin to trawl through the options. It’s strange to think that right now I have an enormous amount of control over even the tiniest details of Outer Earth. No wonder Darnell and Okwembu wanted to take this place for themselves.

  It takes me a lot longer than I want, but I find it, hidden in a sub-menu: Convection Systems. I tap the option, and the screen flashes with even more graphs and readouts. One catches my eye. Average module temperature: 46C.

  Forty-six degrees Celsius. I’ve got to turn these things back on now.

  Forcing myself to be patient, I scan through the display. I find it at the bottom of the screen. Convection fin status: Inactive. I tap the option, hoping that’s all there is to it. My heart sinks as another menu opens up: a circular diagram of the station, showing the location of each convection fin with a small green triangle. There look to be about a dozen, scattered across the station hull.

  I lean forwards, squinting to make out the detail. Each little triangle is empty. I reach out, tapping one, and it turns solid green. On the bottom of the screen, a text box flashes up: Fin 6E1 active.

  Smiling, I start hitting all the triangles, breathing a huge sigh of relief as they turn green. But the breath catches in my throat as an error message flashes up, freezing my finger halfway to the screen.

  Warning: ice crystals detected in convection system. Temperature at sub-optimal levels.

  Numbers and letters pop up underneath the message. They must be convection fin locations. The error message is slightly transparent, and as I look closely I can see that all of them are on one side of the station, covering Gardens, Chengshi, half of Apogee.

  Convection pump system may malfunction if exposed to extreme temperatures, reads the message. Continue?

  I rest my head on my arms, growling in frustration, and I can feel helplessness pulling at me.

  I raise my head, looking at the screen. The ice in the pipes … it has to be there because the pumps are shut down. The liquid that was on the outside when they got turned off hasn’t moved. It’s been exposed to the cold in space for too long.

  I can’t pump it back into the system yet. But what if I can melt it somehow? Raise the temperature of the liquid in the convection fins just enough so I can circulate it back in?

  Circulate …

  Maybe it’s not the liquid in the pipes that I need to get moving.

  Maybe it’s Outer Earth itself.

  70

  Riley

  It takes an age to find. I have to keep moving between touch-screens, looking for the right menu, and on the one occasion I glance at the heat readouts, I see that the internal temperature of the station has risen another half a degree.

  “Come on,” I say, cutting through a tangle of readouts and obscure options. “I know you’re here.”

  I actually scream for joy when I find it. Rotation speed. I know that thrusters on the hull keep us spinning, slowly turning like a wheel. If I can increase the spin rate, I can move those iced-up pipes into direct sunlight.

  It’ll ramp up the gravity. The G-forces will increase, pushing me into the floor. But what other choice do I have?

  Another model of the station has appeared, showing position relative to the Earth, moon and sun. I spot the controls for the rotation rate, and I crank them right up.

  I expect to hear something – a dull boom, perhaps, as the thrusters power up. Instead, I feel a pressure between my shoulder blades. It goes from mild to excruciating in seconds, forcing me to my knees. There’s no pain, but my hands are heavy – like I’m having to force them down simply to keep them sliding off the control panel. Raising my head – it feels like my neck is going to split down the sides – I see that the on-screen station has begun to rotate faster. I need to spin it a full one-eighty to get the frozen pipes in the sun.

  The gravity seems to get even heavier, and this time there’s real pain: a headache so intense that I cry out. I lose my grip on the controls, and my body thuds to the floor, sending an arrow of pain into my arms when they hit the deck.

  It would be so easy just to lie here. My entire body feels as if huge weights are pinning it to the floor. But I push myself up, groaning with the effort. I get my right forearm on the control panel, and raise my eyes to the screen. Chengshi has moved – it’s in direct sunlight. But the station is still spinning too slowly. If I don’t make this happen faster, I’m going to pass out. There’ll be nobody to slow the spin rate.

  Gritting my teeth, I reach upwards – it feels like my wrist is connected to the floor with huge rubber bands – and push the spin control right up.

  71

  Prakesh

  Madala is more spry than he looks, hobbling along in an odd, loping gait. Prakesh and Indira have to jog to keep up. And he has friends. As they move down the levels, he stops to rap on hab doors. Their little group swells. First it’s joined by a family – husband and wife, their teenage son – and then a thick-set man with long, pale dreadlocks falls in alongside them, shouldering a steel bar like it was made of foam rubber.

  Dreads passes around a canteen, and everybody takes a long swig. Sweat is running into Prakesh’s eyes, stinging hot, and he has to keep blinking it away.

  “So what we do?” says Madala, turning to Prakesh.

  “What do you mean?”

  There’s a shout from behind him. They all turn to see two men fighting, slamming into the corridor walls, tangling over what looks like a single protein bar.

  Madala gestures. “That. What we do about that? About everything?”

  “I don’t …” Prakesh says, but he can feel everyone looking at him. He drops his eyes for a second, and only raises them again when the man with the dreadlocks speaks.

  “Madala says you saved him,” the man says. “He trusts you. That means I trust you. Tell us where to go.”

  The rest of the group murmurs assent. Indira nods vigorously, pounding her fist into her palm.

  The words are on Prakesh’s lips, out before he can stop them. “We can’t do anything about the big fights. But maybe we can break a few of the smaller ones.”

  “What good will it do?” The question comes from someone Prakesh didn’t even know was there, a skinny young woman with a stern face and short, spiky hair. She reminds him of Riley a little, and he has to force himself to answer.

  “We stop a small one, we get more people. Maybe we can stop one of the bigger ones.”

  “You heard Darnell. We’re all gonna cook. We should be heading up to Apex and—”

  “No,” Prakesh says firmly. “Apex is taken care of. Our job is down here.”

  Dreads says, “Why don’t we go down to the mess? It was crazy when I was there earlier.”

  Prakesh nods. “All right.”

  The woma
n with the spiky hair shrugs. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  The Apogee mess hall is on Level 2, a square room with lurid orange walls – a misguided attempt, early on in the station’s life, to make the place cheery. There are big metal tables and benches scattered across the room. Some of the tables have been overturned, as if to act as barricades. And there are people, dozens of them, clustered around the long food service counter and spilling out of the kitchens at the back of the room. The noise is cacophonous – the sound of people gone beyond fear and rage, into a kind of helpless panic.

  Once more, Prakesh feels everyone looking at him, and when he reaches inside himself to figure out what to do, he’s surprised to find the answer waiting for him.

  He turns to the two biggest people in the group – the man with the dreads, and the teenager. “You two. Go break up as many fights as you can. Don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t try to hurt you. Everyone else, find something to make noise with. Pots, chairs, utensils.”

  For a moment, nobody moves. Then Dreads grabs the boy and starts jogging towards the kitchen. Madala and Indira and the others begin hunting, picking up anything that looks like it can make a noise.

  Prakesh rights a table, kicking it down with a bang. The sound cuts through everything, but not one of the looters so much as glances in his direction. Ignoring the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, he climbs up on the table, cupping his hands around his mouth.

  “Everybody – listen to me,” he shouts. He tries to be as strident and authoritative as he can, but he might as well be trying to shout a message to Jupiter. Nobody pays him any attention.

  He looks back at Madala, intending to tell everyone to start making as much noise as possible to focus the looters’ attention. He feels a twinge in his shoulder blades as he turns, ignores it, and then the twinge grabs on and pulls.

  Prakesh cries out, dropping to one knee on the table, his hands flying to his neck. At first, he thinks someone hit him with something, but through sweat-stung eyes he can see that everyone else is feeling it too. The looters are screaming in pain. Madala and Indira are flat on the floor, reaching for each other.

  The pressure increases, pushing Prakesh down onto the metal surface of the table. His head is pounding. It’s the gravity, he thinks. Darnell’s going to spin us out of control.

  Just when it seems like the pressure can’t get worse, it does. As his vision shrinks to a tiny bright spot at the end of a dark tunnel, Prakesh hears glass cracking, and the pained sound of metal beginning to bend.

  72

  Riley

  The weight between my shoulder blades pushes down harder, and my raised hand slams back onto the panel. What must it be like in the rest of the station? People pushed to the floor. Metal beginning to kink and grind as the gravity forces it outwards. The trees in the Air Lab, bending under the pressure, branches snapping.

  One of the screens on the other side of the room is flashing red. A calm voice echoes through the control room: “Warning. Horizontal thrusters overheating. Reduce rotation rate immediately.”

  Come on.

  For the second time, I push myself up. My muscles feel like they’re going to tear apart. One arm. Two. Even raising my eyes to the screen takes an effort, like they’re being held in a vice.

  And as I look, I see that Apogee has slipped into the sunlight. Gardens and Chengshi are already there. With a final burst of energy, I slam my finger onto the screen, pulling back the rotation rate.

  This time, there is a noise – like a giant fan powering down. I slide to the floor, gasping for air. Gradually, the weights that have been placed across my body lift off.

  It’s a few minutes before the gravity is back to normal. When I get to my feet, I realise that my legs are trembling. I have to steady myself using the control panels, and it takes me a little while to get back to the other side of the room. The temperature has risen another degree, to 47.5 Celsius.

  I try to activate the convection fins again, tapping the tiny triangles. The same error flashes up. Extreme temperatures.

  I force myself to wait. A minute passes. Two. I try again.

  This time, there’s no error message. The green triangles all flick to solid. After another long minute, the average temperature reading drops to 46.

  I’ve done it. The fins on the hull will be working again, venting the heat back into space. It’ll take a while, but the temperature will come back down. The enormous amount of heat generated by the million or so people here will vanish. Whatever happens now, we’re not going to roast to death.

  I’m too exhausted to cheer. I just smile. And all I can think is: you might make smoke bombs, Carver, but I bet you’ve never spun an entire space station.

  But something nags at me. I haven’t had to use Iapetus, the piece of information Grace Garner and Marshall Foster died for. I’m missing something.

  I need to get the Apex doors open – if I can get some stompers in here, this will all go a lot faster. I’m more confident now, and it doesn’t take me long to find the screen which controls the doors. A wireframe model of the sector appears on screen, with red markers for where each door is. I tap the option to Open All.

  The screen flashes red, firing up another error message. I very nearly put a fist through the glass, but instead, I take another deep breath, and make myself read the message.

  Temperature imbalance detected.

  The names of the sectors are scrolling underneath it – all over 40 Celsius, except for Apex, sitting at 22.

  Access to sector will remain restricted until temperature balance has been restored. Lift restriction when this occurs?

  I hit Confirm. No telling how long that’ll take, but it’s a start. As soon as the convection fins have done their work, the doors to Apex will spring open. Now I just have to figure out what to do until then.

  I’m about to step away from the screens when one of the other menu options catches my eye. Comms.

  I open it up. A list of sectors appear – numbered, not named – and they’re all set to Inactive. I change that, then speak as clearly as I can. There’s no way of knowing if my words are going out – there’s no microphone visible. But I say the words anyway.

  73

  Prakesh

  Prakesh comes back.

  He’s lying on the floor of the mess, and the pain between his shoulder blades is slipping away. The inside of his mouth is dry, as if he’s woken up with a killer hangover.

  He raises his head, blinking against the light. Madala and Indira are unconscious, splayed out next to each other. Prakesh gets to his knees, fighting off a sudden burst of nausea, and sees Dreads slumped against an upturned table. The man is staring up at the ceiling, as if daring it to fall on him.

  Prakesh uses a chair to pull himself up. His legs feel like they’re made of mashed potato, and for a second he’s not entirely sure where he is. Then he catches sight of the serving area and the kitchen beyond, packed with groggy people swaying to unsteady life, and it all comes rushing back.

  Prakesh grabs the table he kicked upright, and pulls himself onto it. It’s all he can do not to lose his balance – the world goes woozy for a second, and the black tunnel threatens to come back, feathering the edges of his vision. He pushes past it, raises his hands to his mouth.

  “Everybody – listen to me.”

  In the stunned silence of the mess hall, his voice is impossible to ignore. Dozens of eyes turn towards him, surprise and hostility pinning him to the spot. He pushes past those, too.

  “This is what he wants,” he says, jabbing a finger at the ceiling. He should have pointed at the comms screen, sitting in a top corner of the room like a malevolent god, but it doesn’t matter. They know who he means.

  “He wants us fighting. He wants us to hurt each other. And if we keep doing it, then he wins. Simple as that. There’s enough food for everybody, if we work together.”

  More silence meets him. The crowd is recovering from the effects of the gravity increase now, a
nd he can see them starting to mutter to one another. One or two are even turning away, back to the kitchens and stores, as if to get a head start on the others.

  “I know everyone is scared,” Prakesh says, but it’s no use. More and more of them are turning away. In desperation, Prakesh hunts through the faces of the crowd, eventually stopping on a young woman. She’s about Riley’s age, with a red shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She’s got a child pulled close to her, a little boy, her hands on his shoulders. Both of them are looking back at him, and it’s not anger that Prakesh sees in their eyes. It’s confusion, and fear.

  He tries again, speaking to the mother, to the little boy. “I know everyone is scared. You want to feed your families. You want to get back some control. You want to protect the people closest to you.”

  He pauses for a second. The table creaks under him, and he feels someone moving to his side. Dreads. He glances at Prakesh, and gives a short nod.

  “Right now,” Prakesh says, “the woman I love is in danger. She’s risking her life for us – for you – to stop Oren Darnell. And that scares the hell out of me, because I don’t know how to help her, and she might not make it back. But you can’t just care about the people closest to you. That’s what Outer Earth has been about for so long: look out for you and yours, and screw everyone else. We can’t do that. Not now. The only way we make it through this is if we help each other.”

  For a long second, Prakesh is sure he’s blown it, that the crowd is going to ignore him. But the silence stretches on, and even those who were heading back towards the kitchens are staring at him.

  The comms system crackles to life.

  A horrified gasp ripples through the crowd. Even Prakesh jumps, glancing up at the comms screen, expecting Darnell’s face to appear. But there’s no image. There’s just a voice. And as Prakesh hears it, his heart almost explodes out of his chest.