Martin Greenberg: Space Stations

Or could it be that the missing Ranger Wimbley was hiding in there? Getting a grip on his gun, Sjuende pulled the door open—

To be greeted by a puff of moist and oddly fetid air. “What’s that smell?” Attende asked uneasily from behind him.

“I don’t know.” Sjuende reached for the light switch, twitched his hand back again as he remembered the faulty electrical circuits that had fried Sjette. Using the edge of his insulated flashlight instead, he flicked on the lights.

He was expecting to see the drab gray and the grim, no-nonsense metal and ceramic of a Space Force weapons room. What he got instead was Garden Club Headquarters.

“What the hell?” Attende gasped, crowding in beside him.

“It’s a hydroponics room,” Sjuende said with a twist of his lip. He glanced across the row of torpedo tubes “Uh-oh,” he muttered.

“What?” Attende demanded. “—oh. Oh.”

“Oh, indeed,” Sjuende agreed tightly. All eight tube covers had been flipped all the way back to accommodate extra rows of various vegetable-looking plants. Even from across the room, he could see that years of neglect and careless watering had rusted every single cover solidly in place.

“Let’s try another room,” Attende suggested. “Numbers Two, Seven, and Eight are still available.”

“Hardly,” Sjuende said, shaking his head. “Two’s tubes are open to space, which means the covers are pressure-sealed; Seven is being used as a junk storage room, with more stuff in there than we could possibly move out in three days; and Eight has no floor.”

“No floor?”

“Part of the big renovation, I suppose.” With a sigh, Sjuende lifted his thumb. Forste, he knew, was not going to like this.

Forste didn’t. “I suppose you’d better get busy and clean it all off, then,” he said when he was finished swearing.

“You don’t understand,” Sjuende said. “I’m not talking about a little rust. I’m talking about a whole lot of—”

“Then it’s going to take you a whole lot of time, isn’t it?” Forste cut him off. “There’s a storage locker at the corridor intersection near Rooms Three and Four—Annen said there were some spray bottles marked ‘Rust Remover’ in there. Get busy.”

Sjuende sighed. When he’d signed up for the revolution, this was not exactly what he’d had in mind. “Yes, sir.”

“Yes, there are hydroponics in here, too,” Annen told Forste, looking around the Number Six Torpedo Launch Center. “Vegetables, mostly. Considering the selection we found in the galley pantry, I don’t blame them for growing their own.”

“Very charitable of you,” Forste growled. “Now, can we concentrate on the problem at hand?”

Over by the Disabler, Femte muttered something under his breath. “Of course,” Annen said, giving an annoyed glare of his own at his thumbnail. Pressure or not, Forste had no call to be so sarcastic. “Everything’s rusty, but it doesn’t look bad enough to have damaged the tubes. We’ll have to move some of the plants out to confirm that, of course.”

“Well, then, do it,” Forste snapped. “Call me when you’ve got good news. And not until you’ve got good news.”

“Yes, sir,” Annen said stiffly, shutting off the radio with an unnecessarily hard snap.

“Testy, isn’t he?” Femte commented.

Annen took a deep breath. “Things are not going exactly as planned,” he reminded the other. “Come on, let’s get these plants out of the way. You pick the tube you think looks cleanest; I’ll pick the one I like best. Between us, we’ll hopefully get one that’ll work.”

They set to their task, lifting the planters out of the tubes and tube covers and carrying them across to the far wall where they could be set down out of the way. Femte continued to mutter under his breath as he labored, his half-heard diatribe against welfare and the cod industries punctuated by grunts as he hefted a particularly heavy load and the occasional curse as an overfull planter spilled dirt or water onto his bulkyjacket or the floor. Annen, for his part, worked in silence.

Which was probably why he was the one who first noticed the gentle hissing.

He froze in place, eyes narrowed and head swinging back and forth as he tried to locate the source of the sound. It was a leak, of course; but was the gas coming into the room or going out? Either way, it could be very bad news indeed. Across the room Femte grunted again as he lifted another planter—

“Quiet,” Annen snapped. “Listen.”

Femte paused, the planter cradled in his arms like a green leafy baby. Then his head jerked up, and a second later the planter had been heaved across the room and he was making an Olympic-class dash for the door. “Wait!” Annen shouted, diving around the end of the tube in a desperate attempt to cut him off.

But he was too late. With visions of either leaking air or poisonous gas clouding his vision, Femte was unstoppable.

Unstoppable, that is, until he hit one of the patches of muddy water between him and the door.

“Looks like you’ve got a mild concussion,” Bob told the man, flicking off his pupil light and reaching for the bandages. “Must have hit the wall pretty hard.”

“I’m all right,” the other insisted, wincing as Bob applied the bandage to his still-oozing head wound. “Just give me a shot of something.”

“Sure,” Bob assured him. “I’ll do that; but then I think you should sleep for a while.”

“Sleep?” Forste put in suspiciously. “You want to sedate him, too?”

“It would be the safest thing to do,” Bob said, pulling the sedative and painkiller hypos out of their slots in the first-aid kit. “The medpack has another—” he peered across at the countdown display, “—fifty-nine hours to go, and until it’s free, we can’t do a complete diagnosis. He’s probably okay; but if he isn’t, and we don’t make him rest at least overnight, he could die.”

“Just overnight?” Forste asked. “That’s all you want?”

“What I want has nothing to do with it,” Bob countered. “I’m just trying to deal with the reality of the situation.”

“Of course,” Forste said. “You’re never responsible for anything around here, are you?”

With a sigh, Bob set both hypos down on the table. “It’s your call,” he told Forste. “You tell me what to do.”

Forste looked down at the hypos; and as he did so, there was a click from his thumb.

“Forste,” he said, raising his hand to his lips.

“It’s Sjuende,” a faint voice came back. “I found the leaking canister.”

Forste’s gun lifted an inch closer to Bob’s face. “Poison gas?” he asked.

“Nitrogen,” Sjuende said, sounding disgusted. “I’ve shut it off.”

Forste frowned. “Nitrogen?”

“To make nitrates for the plants,” Bob explained, frowning to himself. There was something odd about Sjuende’s voice. A faint slurring, perhaps? “I already told you there wasn’t anything poisonous in that room.”

Forste took a deep breath, let it out. “All right, Sjuende,” he said. “Stay there. Annen’s on his way back; help him get Disabler One in place.”

“You sure?” Sjuende asked. “Attende and I still have a lot of work to do before Disabler Two can be set up.”

“Disabler One can be in place in thirty minutes if Annen has enough extra hands to help him,” Forste snapped. “Let’s try to get at least something ready to go before we quit for the day, shall we?”

“Yes, sir,” Sjuende muttered.

Forste tapped his thumbnail and turned to Annen, who was glowering silently over by the door. “Well? Get going.”

“Yes, sir.” Annen sent one final glower toward the injured Femte, then turned and left.