His face falls. “Tell me.”
“He cut our ration by twenty percent.”
Eight groans.
“I know,” I say. “This would be bad even if there were only one of us. As it is, the next however long is gonna be really, really rough.”
He leans back against the wall, tilts his head back, and closes his eyes.
“You think? This is a disaster, Seven. I just came out of the tank. I am literally starving to death right now. If I don’t get some calories in my belly, I’m liable to bite your arm off and eat it while you’re sleeping.”
I run my hands back through my hair. They come away with a light sheen of oil, which reminds me that I haven’t showered in almost a week.
“Did you get anything to eat this morning?”
He opens his eyes, looks away, and scowls. “If you want to call it that. I grabbed a paste-and-slurry smoothie on my way past the caf.”
“Nice. How many kcal did you burn?”
“Six hundred, I think.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too. That leaves us another four hundred total for the day.”
“Good freaking lord,” he moans. “Two hundred apiece?”
I breathe in deep, hold it, and then let it out. “You can have it.”
His eyes widen. “Are you serious?”
“I’m giving you two hundred kcal of slurry,” I say. “Don’t make this a thing.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Don’t push it. Tomorrow we’re back to fifty-fifty.”
He sighs. “Yeah, that’s fair. In fact, it’s more than fair. Thanks, Seven.”
I clap one hand to his knee. “No problem. It’s probably the least I can do after you decided not to kill me this morning.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s true. That was pretty magnanimous of me, honestly. Sure you don’t want to give me the whole card for tomorrow?”
I give his leg an almost-painful squeeze before letting go. “Again,” I say, “don’t push it. I’m pretty sure the next time one of us gets a full day’s rations, it’ll be because the other one is dead.”
He lies back and folds his hands behind his head. “There’s something to look forward to.”
“Yeah.” I’m about to go on about how at some point scrubbing out the reaction chamber might not seem like such a bad idea when I remember my conversation in the caf. “Hey—while I’m thinking about it, did you happen to run into Berto on your way back up here?”
“No. Why?”
“I saw him in the caf this morning. He sort of implied that you did. I think he’s got some suspicions about us.”
He shrugs. “Well, if we have to tell him, we have to tell him. It’ll probably gross him out, but it’s not like he can go crying to Command. He’s as much to blame for this as anyone.”
“Truth.” I start to say something more, but have to stifle a yawn. Eight’s eyes are already closed.
I give him a nudge. “Scoot over, huh?”
He slides over to the edge of the bed. I pull off my boots and lie down beside him. It’s a little weird sharing a bed with myself, but I guess we’ll have to get used to it.
I’m just drifting off when my ocular flashes.
<Command1>:We need you at the main lock immediately, Barnes. We have a problem.
My heart gives a sudden lurch. Did Berto slink back to Marshall’s office and turn us in?
No. If Command knew about us, they wouldn’t have just pinged me. They would have sent Security up here with cable ties and burners. I turn my head to look at Eight. His eyes are still closed.
“I think they want you, friend,” he says.
I sit up. “This is a summons, Eight.”
“Yeah,” he says. “If it’s a terminal job, it’s on you, right? If it’s just some scut work, that should be on you today too, because I just came out of the tank.”
“What if it’s one of those in-betweens? Are we throwing hands?”
“Nah,” he says. “I think you owe me this one.”
He rolls onto his side and pulls the sheet up over his shoulder. I waste a few seconds glaring at the back of his head, then swing my legs over the edge of the bed, sit up, and pull my boots back on. He’s already snoring when I latch the door behind me.
008
I DO A lot of things around the dome. I’m not attached to any particular section, so they generally rotate me every couple of days to wherever they need a bit of extra grunt labor. I’ve tended to the rabbit hutches for Agriculture. I’ve stood sentry for Security. Once I even filled in for Marshall’s admin while he took a sick day that I found out later was actually the result of his having made an attempt at homemade booze that went really, really wrong. Those jobs, though, were just random assignments from the semiautonomous system that runs HR for the colony. When I get a direct summons from Command, it’s not because they need somebody to help move boxes. It’s because they need me to do my actual job.
What my actual job is was impressed on me pretty clearly right from the jump, beginning with my first day cycle on Himmel Station. I’d managed to find a bathroom by then, and after a couple of painful and messy errors had more or less figured out how peeing works in zero-g. I’d found the room where they were handing out food packets. I’d even found a sling to call my own, strung up with forty or so others in what appeared to be a conference room. The smell wasn’t great, but I was already starting to get used to it. All in all, I felt like I was settling into my new life pretty well.
I was napping, wrapped in my sling, finally almost able to imagine that I was floating rather than falling, when something hard and pointy dug itself into my ribs. I batted at it, which sent the sling spinning on its long axis. I opened my eyes to see floor, then wall, then ceiling, then the person who had poked me. She was tall, dark-skinned, and hairless, dressed in the shapeless gray jumpsuit that all the permanent station personnel wore. She reached out to grab me, braced her feet against the floor, and stopped my spin.
“You’re Barnes, right?”
I blinked up at her. “Maybe. Who’s asking?”
She grinned. “I’m Jemma. Get up. It’s time to get to work.”
* * *
FOR ALMOST ALL of my stay on Himmel Station, I liked Jemma. She was an excellent teacher. She was funny, and kind, and weirdly thoughtful. When we had morning sessions, she brought me bulbs of hot chai. When I had trouble picking something up, she slowed down, backed up, and repeated herself until she was sure I understood. If at any time during this process she got it into her head that I was a dimwit, she made a point not to ever let it show.
That first day, we started with the schematics for the Drakkar’s engine systems. I learned where the antimatter was stored, how it was contained, where they kept the reactants, how they brought the two together, and (this was the part Jemma emphasized) what would happen if any of these components broke down.
“We can skip a breakdown in the antimatter containment unit,” she said. “That problem solves itself.”
We were sitting across from one another at a card table in what looked to be a disused storage closet. Jemma gave me a half smile and waited. After five seconds or so, her face fell.