“According to the specs, we’re looking for a panel marked X326C,” Kate announces, once the airlock door has closed. “In incredibly small print, most likely.” She sounds exasperated.
“You ever think it’s not the print but the elderly eyes trying to read it?” Suresh offers with a snicker.
“You ever think about what happens if I decide to leave you behind next time we’re out?” Kate says sharply.
An odd beat of silence holds, a sudden tension thickening the unbreathable air.
“Sorry,” Kate says after a moment, her voice strained. “I wasn’t thinking. I—”
“Shut up,” Birch snaps.
This has to be about Ava. Ophelia’s interest sharpens.
But the moment is over as soon as it begins.
“Let’s focus on finding the panel,” Severin says, once again with that calm she can’t quite decipher. Does he truly not feel anything for his lost team member? Or is he burying emotion so deeply that it can’t leak out? Even with limited interactions with him so far, she suspects it’s the latter.
Their blue-white helmet lights cast jumping and twitching shadows as they spread out, and boots scritch-scratch across the metal floor as everyone shuffles around inside the airlock, ice and snow in the treads gritting with every exploratory step. The noise is eerily familiar for some reason.
Ophelia freezes, all thoughts of Severin vanishing. A shiver runs down her spine, like someone unfamiliar tracing their fingers along the skin there. She knows that sound.
Not from frozen moisture on the floor but from a mix of dirt and rock that made it through the decon process.
When she looks down, as best as she can in her helmet, she’s greeted with a glimpse of her childhood in gunmetal gray.
Pinnacle is famous for its brand individualization measures, including working with custom suppliers in bulk across multiple projects. Apparently, this squashed octagonal-patterned floor is one of those corporate identity tactics. The raised edges of the little oddly shaped indentations are meant to keep people from slipping, and they do, but without frequent and vigorous cleaning, the indentations are like tiny bowls that catch and hold everything.
Stray bits of rock. Clumps of dust.
Miniature lakes of blood.
Ophelia forces her gaze up, away from the floor.
“Over here,” Liana calls from the far wall, near the empty rover charging bay. “I’ve got it.”
Kate crosses the airlock to join Liana and pops the panel open. “No power,” she says after a moment, with a frown in her voice. She consults her handheld. “Main genny’s dead. I can’t even get an automated response from my ping. They must have let it run down to nothing. I hope they haven’t fried it.”
“Better to find out now,” Severin says, undisturbed. He is in his element now, it seems. “Manual.” He gestures to the oversize crank near the interior airlock door.
Suresh groans, but he makes his way over to join Severin and Birch.
They get to work, and after several minutes of harsh breath sounds and muttered swearing over the comm channel, something mechanical rumbles in the distance, like a creature awakened after a centuries-long nap, and the interior door releases with a hiss.
A sliver of thick darkness waits in the gap between the edge of the door and the frame. Ophelia senses open space on the other side, even though she can’t quite see it. It should be the central hub, according to the schematic on her helmet display. The common area used for meals, meetings, and emergency shelter.
“I’ve got to get to syscon to see what we’re dealing with, if I need to replace parts or the whole thing,” Kate says, putting the panel cover back in place. “Should be on the north side of the central hub.”
Severin nods in acknowledgment, and Suresh steps up to pull the airlock door wider. His helmet light slices through the inky blackness, revealing nothing but an empty section of room, and then …
A metal-framed mess hall chair is facing the airlock door as if placed there deliberately, in a sentry position.
Only now it’s tipped over, on its right side and slightly askew. Like the previous resident had been in such a hurry to get away that their feet had tangled with the chair’s legs in their rush. On the floor behind it, meal-paks lie scattered, spilling out from a plastic storage bin in a near-perfect arc, as if dropped in surprise.
At first, the screams sounded like laughter, just loud bursts of punctuation in an otherwise rowdy conversation during the evening mealtime. But then people started running, their chairs tumbling over behind them as they shoved away from tables to flee. Her bare toes were pressed hard against the dirty ridged floor, ready to push off, to bolt, but she couldn’t move.
Ophelia’s breathing quickens at the memory, and she shakes her head, as if that will jar the images loose and send them fluttering away, back to the dark corner they came from.
“Creepy fuckers,” Kate mutters.
“Oh, they’re going to have to try much harder than that,” Suresh says.
Ophelia frowns at him. Who is going to have to try what?
Suresh shoves forward through the airlock door, pushing the chair out of the way. The meal-paks skitter away under his booted foot, making a slithering noise against the floor.
“Nothing else here,” he pronounces after a moment. “But … this place is huge.” He gives a whistle as he spins around the common hub, his light touching on neatly stacked tables and chairs on the opposite wall, near what appears to be a galley and food prep area on the far end. Then smaller airlocks on the right and left, draped in white plastic sheeting, presumably where the central hub connects to the smaller hab pods, the labs and living quarters, most likely.
Just from what she can see, the space would easily hold fifty or sixty people. That’s, what, ten R&E teams? Way beyond standard mission accommodations. Why would Pinnacle have needed that much space? There was no way Lyria 393-C was intended for colonization. Maybe a more permanent science station? But then why would they sell the rights to Montrose? It doesn’t make any sense.
Moreover, something about it, about this place, feels … wrong. Goose bumps creep along her spine and down her arms, despite her temp-controlled suit.
Or you’re just being paranoid, reflecting decades-old, irrelevant trauma on current events. Which do you think is more likely?
“Kate, see what you can do in syscon,” Severin says.
“On it,” Kate says, slipping through the airlock entry, past Suresh and into the inky blackness.
“Birch, go with her,” Severin continues.
Birch nods and follows Kate’s path. The central hub grows slightly brighter from the force of their lights together as they head off for the far side of the hub. Syscon—the systems control room, where all the environment controls and generators and essentially anything required to keep them alive here can be accessed—appears to be somewhere behind the galley. Ophelia’s schematic isn’t that detailed.
“Liana and Suresh, take the east side, confirm structural integrity on the outer units. I’ll take the west side.” Severin pauses, then glances over at Ophelia. “Doctor, you can just wait—”
“I’ll come. I can help,” she says firmly.
His expression says he very much doubts that. But he tips his head in acknowledgment. “All right.”
Liana and Suresh lead the way in, followed by Severin.
Ophelia crosses the threshold into the central hub behind him, careful not to catch her boot against the raised ridge of metal where the airlock is joined to the central hub.
Once inside, her sense of the emptiness, the wrongness, only grows. But maybe it’s just that sensation of overwhelming space around her, feeling tiny in an overly large environment. Exactly the opposite of what she expected here.
Ophelia trails after Severin, stepping where he steps, as if they’re cutting a path through potential quicksand, but taking a good look around as she does. The squashed hexagons on the floor stretch out before her in an endless sweep of dull metal glinting in her helmet light. Scrapes and scratches indicate former activity. Tables being set up, chairs being pushed in. Carts and crates being dragged into position.
But Suresh was right; there’s nothing else in here. The stillness, in place of what must have once been a hive of busyness, feels almost like a physical pressure.
Ahead of them, Liana and Suresh break off, heading toward the draped airlock on the right side.
She picks up her pace to catch up with Severin as he veers to the left. He lifts up the plastic sheeting, revealing an open airlock—the door completely pulled back—and dark corridor beyond.
The airlock on this side, and presumably the opposite side as well, are smaller than the one on the opposite end, but it’s not as if Pinnacle would have needed to get the rover through one of them. These airlocks are probably only intended for use in the event of an emergency. The teams could seal themselves in the central hub and cut off the outer units if one or more of them were damaged or if they needed to conserve power.
That still doesn’t explain why Pinnacle needed so much space.
Ophelia frowns, trying to think through any of the missions she’s read or heard about, not that she’s connected in any way to the inner circle there anymore, if she ever was.
Her grandmother would have had a fit about the unnecessary expense. She was, until the end of her life, obsessive about every detail when it came to Pinnacle, even those well below her pay grade. One time the media ran with a story about her ordering the removal of an entire park’s worth of deciduous trees on Pinnacle’s campus because the leaves were causing more work for the groundskeepers (which meant more money spent on something she didn’t particularly care about). She replaced them all with bioengineered low-maintenance, low-scent, no-shed evergreens. Like a farm full of fake Christmas trees.
Uncle Darwin, on the other hand, never met a “business” expenditure he didn’t like, and—
“Doctor?”
Ophelia looks up to find Severin staring at her, dark eyebrows raised.
She realizes, then, that she’s stopped again. Right at the threshold from the central hub, leaving Severin waiting just inside the corridor beyond. Darkness and the unknown, lurking just behind him.
Ophelia’s heart is pounding, and her subconscious is doing that tricky bob-and-weave maneuver again, bringing up old memories without her consent.
So many corners, so many shadows. Where are you hiding, Little B ird?
Goddammit. “I’m coming,” she says a little too loudly.
Severin turns to the left first. He hunches slightly to avoid the ceiling. The connectors, white, semirounded tubes that attach to each other and to the individual units and central hub to create a passageway, rise over their heads, but Severin just barely clears it with the added centimeters from his helmet.
Coffee, or some other dark liquid, is sprayed all over the wall, a discarded cup in a frozen puddle of the same on the floor. A disposable fabric shoe, the kind designed to be worn inside the hab, nearly identical to the set Ophelia was given for this mission, lies flipped up on its side, as if someone ran out of it and didn’t bother to come back for it.
“Looks like they left in a hurry.”
“Or they didn’t care,” Severin says, kicking a pile of fabric out of the way on his side of the corridor. It’s a shirt, dark stained and stiff with cold. Maybe someone used it to mop up the coffee. “We’re placeholders, waiting for someone more important to arrive. Not sure that leaving the hab pristine is anyone’s top priority.”
Despite his level tone, that feels like a dig at her. “Listen, I feel like we got off on the wrong foot,” she begins.
“There is no right foot, Dr. Bray. You’re not needed here.” He pulls open the first door on their right. It’s unlocked, despite the impressive bolt across the outside of it.
Dim light filters in through three tiny round windows, so it’s easy to see that this unit is a lab. Or it was. Most of the equipment—she recognizes a mass spectrometer, but that’s about it—is still in place on the lab tables. But shards of polymer vials and tubes glitter all over the floor.
Severin steps inside, carefully avoiding the worst of the sharp pieces. “We look out for each other. That’s all that’s required.” He makes a circuit around the outer wall of the unit, visually checking for leaks or weak spots. Then he checks again with a handheld, similar to the one Kate used earlier. Ophelia doesn’t know exactly what the devices do, but she’s not going to advertise her ignorance by asking.
He is protective of his team, his responsibility to them. That makes sense. He’s accustomed to that role. From what she read in his file, he’s the oldest of five children, raised by a single mom in the cheap seats of Luna Valley on the moon. That’s the one where the whole colony was originally underground in an old lava tube.
“I understand that,” Ophelia says. “And it’s admirable, it really is. But there are things that I can help with that you may not—”
He straightens up from his position near the tiny porthole windows. “Doctor, we’ve agreed to your presence and your ‘sessions.’”
He doesn’t make the gesture, but she senses the exasperated air quotes, nonetheless.
“I’m not sure what else you want.” He moves past her and back out into the corridor.
“What else I want?” she demands incredulously, following him. “ERS can be contagious. Like suicide ideation or even attempts at it. Not that you seem to care.”
Apparently, Suresh isn’t the only one here who can’t resist under-the-breath observations better left unsaid.
“Uh, guys?” Liana speaks up in Ophelia’s ear.
Kate is more direct. “Oi, Commander. You and the doctor are on the common channel. You’re aware of that, yes?”
Shit.
But Severin doesn’t seem disturbed. Not about that, anyway.
He spins around on her, closing the distance between them until he looms over her and she has to fight not to step back. “Don’t you dare make assumptions about us. You don’t know anything about us, about our lives. Do you even know what happens when you tag us with a PBE issue?”
Ophelia lifts her chin to meet his gaze. “Yes. You get treatment and the help you need to—”
He shakes his head, his skin a pale blue beneath the interior light of his suit. “Once you’re tagged as questionable, no one wants you on their team. You’re basically unemployable. Nobody wants to take the chance of another Bloody Bledsoe on their watch.”
The nickname clangs through her, a harsh, discordant assemblage of syllables that makes her skin crawl.
“So forgive us for our lack of enthusiasm,” he adds.
“At least you’d still be alive,” Ophelia says, jaw tight.
His dark-eyed gaze searches her face and then he shakes his head with a sigh, some of the tension easing out of his frame. “This work is dangerous in any number of ways. We accept that when we sign on.” He looks at her with what can only be described as gentle pity. “I realize someone with your resources may not see the difference, but for us, this job is everything. It’s what keeps our families fed and our bills paid, better than anything else out there on offer.”
The heat of humiliation races up her neck and into her face. He thinks she doesn’t know what it means to need purpose? To need a regular paycheck? Or to worry about how many meal-paks are left before the next shipment of supplies, or what it feels like to dig under the cushions, hoping for lost water voucher coins? She may not know this team, but he doesn’t know her, either. He can’t. No one does.
She has to bite her tongue to keep from saying any of that, all of it.
“My family’s money is not—” Ophelia begins, working for calm.
Severin holds up his hand. “You have a job to do, I understand that,” he says. “Neither of us can do anything about that. But I don’t want to spend the next twelve months fighting with you on different planets.” He attempts a smile, his mouth thin and tight. “I’m happy to cooperate as much as is feasible. You just … stick to your side of the road and let us do our jobs, okay?” He walks away, heading down the corridor to the next unit.
Fury leaves her with fists clenched, staring sightlessly after him. She’s tempted to storm off, leaving Severin to his “side of the road.” But that feels like giving in, and of all the character flaws she’s been accused of having, near-pathological stubbornness is close to the top of the list, and the most accurate. Not to mention, she needs this to work.
She continues after him and steps inside the unit, and the back wall flashes her helmet light back at her, drawing her attention. Dozens of clear, sealed sample boxes are shelved in neat orderly lines, six across and six down, their contents a shadowy mystery.
Another lab unit, then. The metal lab table on her left confirms that suspicion.
But …
Ophelia squints. Two of the sample boxes, the end ones on the third and fourth rows, look strange. Cloudy. Almost as if condensation has coated the inside of the clear surface, but in a vaguely circular pattern.
“Almost done in here, Doctor,” Severin says from his position over the window on the far right. “Weak spots near the floor seam are tricky sometimes. Syscon pops the locks on all the hab units if a leak is detected, to let personnel escape, so we need to make sure there’s not a reason the doors are unsecured here.”
Ignoring him, she moves closer to the back wall, trying to work out what she’s seeing.
Halfway into the room, she realizes the sample boxes are broken. The polymer has shattered at an impact point, like a fist punching into the front of the box. Anger? Or someone trying to get something out? But why not just unseal them?
How biz—
The rest of the thought instantly evaporates when her foot collides with something soft on the floor.
She glances down and freezes.
White-gloved fingers rest against her ankle. Those fingers are attached to an envirosuited hand and arm, which lead to a torso and a blank-faced helmet, partially under the lab table but staring up at her.
A body. There’s a body on the floor.