K. Ball: Flotsam

“No!” she said. “How do you figure to do it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the damned hotshot mechanic, aren’t you? That’s the line Dierker handed us when she pulled Jen and stuck us with you. But I haven’t seen you do squat since you came on board except screw up every little thing you touch. You figure how the hell to get us moving or I swear I will haunt you to your grave. Pull your weight, goddamn it!”

“That’s not—” The speaker system crackled.

“Mary Shelley.” Quin recognized the voice. It was Marg Dierker.

“Mary Shelley, do you copy?”

Quin turned away from Jill’s anger and kicked himself out of his saddle. Three weeks’ practice hadn’t given him much grace, but it had taught him accuracy. He caught a handhold as he approached the far wall of the cylinder and pulled himself to the communications panel.

“This is Torres, Cayley Station,” he said.

“Sorry I’ve been delayed, Mary Shelley,” Dierker said. Her voice was corporate cool, but Quin could hear nervous conversation rolling in the background, under the operations manager’s thick German accent. “I was on a conference call with home office. What is the situation there?”

Quin glanced toward Jill. She still looked upset and distracted, still ready to chew off his ears. This was his to handle, whether he was ready to do so or not.

“We’ve finished initial inspection, ma’am,” he said. “We might not be able to get back to you on our own.”

Quin might as well have been on his own aboard Mary Shelley.

The work schedule was four weeks out and then two or three days off duty at Cayley Station before starting the cycle all over again first of the month. If these first weeks were any indication, it would be a long and lonely six-month tour.

He had been told his whole life that he had an easy way with people, but try as he might, he couldn’t win Zoe and Jill over. He always seemed to be in the way, and while they didn’t ignore him or keep important information from him, Zoe remained distant and judgmental while Jill picked at him over little things he could never fix. He was clumsy. He was slow. He smelled wrong, for God’s sake. Not bad—wrong.

The two women hated his music too. So his off-duty time passed on the stationary bike, logging required hours of exercise, or in his bunk. Ear buds in place, he composed his own music on the SoundStik that had taken up most of his personal-allowance weight, or listened to recorded music on his audio pod.

Quin loved the old-gold rock his father had played while working in the family’s auto- repair shop in Key West, and his favorites were by a bunch of Brit rockers known as Queen. He spent hours in his bunk whispering the words of “We Will Rock You” or “Fat Bottomed Girls” along with lead singer Freddy Mercury.

But his love for music wouldn’t be enough to carry him through six months. He would go crazy if something didn’t change; Quin knew that. Even so, he had no idea what he would have to do to make that happen.

Marg Dierker was all business and never asked about Zoe’s condition or how Quin and Jill were holding up. All she wanted to know about was damage sustained to Mary Shelley. Quin reported his findings, sending video data via microwave uplink as he spoke.

“What do you think, Cayley Station?” Jill asked.

Silence.

“Cayley, are you still there?”

“Here.” It was Emil Teague, the station’s maintenance chief. “Marg got called away again on other business.”

“Typical,” Jill muttered. She brushed loose hairs from Zoe’s forehead and offered up the squeeze bottle once again.

“How bad is it, Emil?” Quin asked.

“I had hoped for better news.”

“Oh?”

“We’ve been studying the equipment telemetry. Your visuals confirm our data. I can try to talk you through repairs to the ion engines, but I don’t think there’s much hope.”

“Can’t you send another ship?” Quin asked.

“Edwin Abbott is preparing now to initiate first burn on a Hohmann transfer orbit.”

“How soon will they be here?” Jill asked.

There was no response. Jill pushed away from Zoe’s bunk and caught a handhold on the fly, pulling herself into position next to Quin.

“Answer me, Emil! How soon?”

“Without the engines, you can’t start home,” he replied at last. “If you can’t change your own orbit, there’s no way they can rendezvous with you in less than fifty hours.”

“Zoe can’t make it that long!”

“That’s not our first concern,” Emil said.

“What do you mean?” Jill demanded.

She was inches from the comm panel speaker now, ready to wrap her fingers around Emil’s throat. He was silent again. When he spoke, his voice was hushed and conspiratorial.

“I shouldn’t tell you this. If Marg finds out, she’ll chew on me until I’m raw. She’s been talking to the bean counters back on Earth.”

“So?” Quin asked.

“They may decide to abort the rescue effort. Marg told them you’ll be dead before Edwin Abbott can reach you.”

“God damn it!” Jill said. “Why would she say that?” She was crying in her rage. Quin pushed close and put his arm around her. She didn’t pull away.

“Look, your electrical system is on battery standby now,” Emil said. “And your engines are just so much scrap metal.”

“I can replace the solar arrays,” Quin said.

“You can replace one of them,” Emil said. “That’s all you have on board. Any more just wouldn’t have been cost-effective. One array can’t generate enough electricity.”

“The initial data said breathable atmosphere was good for seventy-two hours!”

“It will be,” Emil said.

“Well—” Quin began.

“Emil?” It was Zoe. Her voice lacked volume, but it was steady. “What don’t we know?”

Jill launched herself away from the comm panel in an instant. She was clutching Zoe’s hand before the answer came.

“There were cost-cutting measures implemented when the work vehicles were built.” Emil sounded defensive. “The electronics always overgenerate heat. Insulation was reduced to allow the heat-dispersal system to be downsized.”

“It doesn’t matter how much air we have, does it?” Jill said. Her voice was icy calm now. “With only one collector we’ll have to shut down a lot of equipment. It’s going to get damned cold in here.”

“No one considered this sort of contingency,” Emil said.

“How long?” Quin asked.

“Within thirty hours it will be one hundred below in there.”

Another six hours passed. Quin installed the spare solar collector and then moved on to the engines. Emil had been right. Even with the engineer looking over Quin’s shoulder via video camera, pouring all his technological expertise through Quin’s headset, it was beyond what the two of them could manage. At last, they were forced to admit defeat.

“You did everything you could, Quin,” Emil said.

“Why doesn’t that make me feel better?”

Quin was ready to throw tools, to snap the tethers and hurl the offending metal into the void, the way his father so often had hurled a wrench across the garage when a customer’s automobile refused to give in to his attentions. Quin drew a cleansing breath.

“Thanks for trying, Emil,” he said. “And for telling us.”

Dierker returned to the radio once in those six hours to tell them that Edwin Abbott was on the way and to admit to the coming cold. She didn’t explain the reasons for the temperature loss though, and neither Quin nor Jill had pressed the matter.