Chapter Eight

[68841] Frederik

SSV Ergo Infinitum

Ergo flared to life with fusion power, burned hard with the main engines until it entered the planned transfer orbit, and spun up around its central axis to bring hab zero-one and zero-two up to a two-thirds of standard gravity. All in a brisk seven hours.

Control’s walls and vents hummed with the rhythm of Ergo’s main reactor. Exhausted, Frederik floated in his acceleration flat, alone on the Control deck and kept in place in microgravity only by the webbing straps as Ergo free-fell along its orbital path.

Ergo’s crew split each twenty-four-hour Ergo day, as opposed to the longer Celosian day, into three eight-hour shifts and seven duty sections—cargo and EVA, waste and recycling, life support systems, astrogation, Control, medical, and engineering. The eight crew—short by two since Diya and Charles had remained behind—each had an on-duty shift, an on-call shift, and eight hours reserved for sleep, ideally, but Frederik often found managing the personalities on Ergo cut into his sleep schedule. Control oversaw all critical functions on Ergo, so that duty section always assigned two crew members to the ship. One crew member would be on-duty and physically present, while the other would be on-call. Engineering and medical, however, only had one qualified crew member each.

In principle, Frederik could handle Ergo for the rest of the trip by himself. He would need to skip out on even more sleep and the maintenance debt on various systems would stack up, but it would be possible. Ergo never ran like that for more than a few hours simply because a full crew would be able to fix and maintain systems in flight, reducing maintenance and downtime costs at stations and ensuring a lot could go wrong before a contract had to be abandoned.

Frederik was on-duty, taking over for Kirk, and Taliya was on-call. She might be anywhere on Ergo, but he knew she was likely either in the med bay keeping Edouard company, or she would be on her way to keep Frederik company. He knew all the habits of his crew under normal circumstances.

Larsen would spend every spare moment in the mess or exercise room attempting to strike up a conversation, then talk to anyone he found for as long as they would politely listen. Vasquez, the elusive engineer of Ergo, kept a strange duty schedule to avoid everyone completely. Instead, he worked in his cabin or went out on an EVA between burns when it was safer to repair or tweak Ergo’s thrust systems. The rest of the crew usually fell somewhere between these two extremes of social and anti-social. Edouard—who was always grouchy except in the middle of a medical emergency—apparently appreciated Taliya’s company, while Taliya was sociable enough to host guests in her otherwise single-occupancy cabin. Io’s assignment was limited to orbital control for both on-duty and on-call, so she, like Frederik, only had downtime in theory.

There was a creak as the thick storm cellar hatch hinged open, from the hab zero-two side, and Taliya floated into Control.

“Hao fa,” Frederik greeted her.

“Hao fa,” Taliya said curtly.

She seemed agitated as she reached the flat next to him.

“How are our guests settling in?” Frederik asked, just to make conversation.

“They’re fine,” she snapped as she pulled herself into the flat and buckled herself down.

“Anything on your mind, Taliya?”

“With all respect. That was some bullshit.”

“What was?”

“Disarming them, Eff. They have every right to defend themselves.”

He groaned at the long-running argument. “Unsecured weapons are a danger to the integrity of Ergo Infinitum.”

She snorted. “You think they’d be dumb enough to endanger their own air?”

“It’s not just about that.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“As I have said many times, Ergo isn’t a military craft. We shouldn’t carry around weapons like we expect a fight to go down in our spin habs. Who are we going to fight,” Frederik scoffed. “The fish? The algae?”

“Ha,” Taliya laughed. “It’s less about expectations, and more about preparedness, about principle.”

He sighed and said. “I know you keep weapons in your bunk, Taliya, and that’s fine as long as you don’t openly carry them when we have guests, and you keep those things secured.”

“Understood,” Taliya said with a military precision like she was taking orders.

“Are we still good?”

She smiled warmly, creases forming at the edges of her eyes as she swept a strand of gray hair behind her ear. “Of course we are, Eff,” Taliya moved her hands over her ears like she was putting on a headset. “Mind if I…?”

“Ye, neva palava.”^{[60][Di Lingua]: Yeah, no problem. ↑}

Taliya nodded, pulled two ear buds from a pocket, and waved at an invisible personal EAR as she hummed along to her music. Frederik ran through various diagnostics as he waited for his shift to end. Taliya hummed and murmured along to her songs.

Ergo emitted a musical tone, and Frederik’s EAR and the large ink display above him jittered with yellow warning splash screens, showing a warning advisory. Frederik pulled up the warning on the overhead ink display using his EAR.

[Micrometeoroids and Orbital Debris Danger Advisory]

[68841-06:36 JinLT]

A debris generating event was reported to have occurred on 68841-05:40 JinLT, at Ya Ke Stationary Orbital Facility Ya Ke Juliet Sierra-014 [Absolute Horizons Registered Space Station]. If you are receiving this advisory, your orbital trajectory has been determined to have greater than 1 in 100,000 odds of a significant debris collision.
See attached data sheet.

[Data Sheet Attachment]

[End of Advisory]

“A debris warning?” Taliya wondered as she pulled out an ear bud.

“Ye, our next stop seems to be the source,” with a pinch of his fingers and a flick of his wrist, he pulled the accompanying information packet and shuffled it to Taliya’s EAR. “Let’s double check their numbers.”

Independently, Frederik and Taliya ran orbital calculations through Ergo’s computers and autonomous prediction systems. Their goal was to each use a different way of approaching estimations, given the data they had received, and see if there were serious mistakes or under-estimated odds hiding within the limits of the data. If there had been serious errors by the Absolute Horizons station when they had sent out the advisory, their estimated odds of a damaging space junk collision could be very inaccurate.

“I am getting one in twenty-six thousand odds,” Taliya announced.

“Agreed,” Frederik sucked air over his teeth as he pondered the odds. “Not quite high enough to justify a correction to our trajectory.”

Taliya nodded. “Looks like our highest chances of a collision are just after our shifts, Eff. Should we bump our orbit now?”

“No,” he said. “We still have a main braking maneuver before our cargo pickup. Unless the odds turn against us after spinning down and orbit matching, we’ll stay on this course.”

Frederik flicked open the data packet that had come along with the advisory on the overhead ink display. It was a cone of debris emanating from the Absolute Horizons junkyard. A tight cloud of sizable debris moving with a lot of relative velocity compared to Ergo. Errors and gravitational perturbations meant the debris cloud intersected with Ergo, but only at the edges where probabilities of collisions were miniscule, even lower than the reported odds. With an intersection in a little less than two hours, they might increase their odds of a collision if they deviated from their orbit, but the chances were still low, hence it had been an advisory, not even a strong suggestion or an emergency dictate.

“Oke¸ Eff. I will keep it on my EAR. Let you know if anything changes.”

***

“Orbital matching looks good,” Frederik announced to the crowd on Control.

Bracing against foldable acceleration flats behind Taliya and himself, Kirk and Io waited to take over at the shift change.

“It’s all yours,” he said with a smile.

He planted his feet to the deck, stretched his hands to the ceiling, and popped his back under the slight gravity-like force of Ergo’s forward thrust from reaction control systems. It was a careful dance of braking burns using steam heated by the main reactor, pushed out of resistojets all along Ergo, delicately nudging the spinning Ergo to match the station’s velocity and stop its spin without tumbling.

“Anything of note?” Kirk asked as he took Frederik’s place in the acceleration flat.

“Debris advisory,” Taliya said with a yawn as she made her way to the elevator to hab zero-two. “Very low odds, and they have only gotten lower.”

Io slipped into the acceleration flat under the overhead ink display next to Kirk. “I’ll keep it on my EAR.”

Frederik yawned.

“Go get some sleep, Eff,” Io ordered.

He chuckled and gave her a sly smile before he hopped to the elevator exit, ducked under the thick outer doors of Control, and squeezed himself awkwardly into the elevator heading to hab zero-one. It was only awkward because of the slight thrust and simultaneous spin.

Built for spin-gravity, where out from Control was down, the thrust and simultaneous spin caused him to feel pinned to the side of the elevator. With a quick order sent over EAR, and a jerk and the chug chug of the water pumps balancing out Ergo’s mass distribution, the elevator lurched toward hab zero-one.

Every meter out from Control, the spin gravity increased—mixing with the acceleration from thrust—and producing a feeling like he was somersaulting sideways toward the ground. It was uncomfortable, and he gritted his teeth and held himself steady in the small elevator capsule. Two meters out from Control, or about ten seconds into the elevator journey, a window appeared on his EAR.

[Acclimation Exercises]: Yes [Recommended]/No

Frederik clicked “yes,” and dots appeared over his field of view.

[Move arm as directed]

Frederik moved his hand toward his nose, then to each of the dots which were at specific, apparent distances. As he performed these exercises, it was as if an unseen force deflected and pushed at his arm. For the first thirty seconds of the exercise, he had trouble clicking on the dots. This effect got worse as the elevator moved down, but his mind also adjusted. As he continued the high-RPM acclimation exercises, it became trivial to click the dots.

In just under a minute, the elevator came to a stop, and he no longer felt a fictitious force push and pull at his body. Up and down were parallel to the elevator, with only a slight tickle of his inner ear from thrust. He opened the door, breaking the vacuum seal with a sucking hiss, and stepped onto the deck of hab zero-one.

It was well into the morning of Ergo’s day shift, around zero eight hundred Jin local time. The dim blue light of artificial night faded into an early yellow white for Ergo’s day. He oriented his mental map around Io’s cabin and her flag and entered the hallway. He heard the gentle hum of air flow through life support systems, the pleasing bubbles of the aquaculture tanks, and the subtle whirs and clicks from the maintenance and fabrication antechamber to the primary airlock as, probably Larsen or Vasquez, worked through a list of tasks in off-duty time.

Frederik quietly approached the accordion door of his cabin. Carefully, he slid the door open, and was ready to creep into his cabin and up onto the top bunk to grab some sleep.

Personal cabins on Ergo were austere, but comfortable. While the crew usually maintained the distinction that some cabins were single occupancy, and others were double occupancy, the cabins were all designed with two bunks stacked on top of each other. They each had a double bunk bed, a double stowage locker, one desk that would unfold from the wall next to the locker, and one folding chair that would pop up from the floor in front of the desk. The exact layouts varied slightly between the cabins depending on their location on the spin deck, but besides crew personalization, each cabin was the same thirteen-meter cubic box. It was just long enough for Frederik to lie completely flat, though he would take up much of the floor space.

Sharing this space with Diya was familiar, and the overhead lights in his cabin were still off, so it had taken him a few moments to realize it was not his daughter standing at the desk in his cabin, but the guest introduced as Vermilion Special.

He reflexively jerked back when recognition finally clicked in his mind, feeling suddenly self-conscious and a little surprised. He straightened his back, put his feet shoulder width apart, and did not know what to do with his hands. Then he saw she had found his family’s Martian shawl and was scrutinizing it.

“Erm, hao fa?”^{[61][Di Lingua]: Erm, hello? ↑} Frederik said, his voice sounding quiet and tired at the guest in his cabin, but stern. “Can you put that down, please?”

“This looks very old, for a replica.”

He reached his hands out to demand the shawl back and added forcefully. “It’s not a replica.”

“Oh!” she turned to face him, her arched brows twisted in embarrassment and concern. She bowed her head and presented the shawl to Frederik with both hands. “I am sorry.”

“A sizable amount of us in Ya Ke have ties to Grond myawn,” he said as he accepted the shawl. “Especially around Jin.”

“I meant nothing by it. I am sorry.”

“Neva palava,”^{[62][Di Lingua]: No problem. ↑} he said to acknowledge the apology.

She lifted her head up and straightened her back. There was a sudden fierceness in her dark eyes and a canyon forming in the frown on her forehead. “This has a shawl pattern from Terra Cimmeria. Is your family from there?”

He raised his hand to turn on the overhead lighting. The guest winced as the lights turned on. She had warm bronze skin and was tall—only a head shorter than Frederik—and lissome in a simple high-collared black tunic. She was effortlessly good-looking, with a heart-shaped face, full lips, and deep-set eyes. In a tunic, instead of a biosuit, Frederik saw the fringes of tattoos on her neck and wrists—the rough textured cloth covered everything else.

He raised an eyebrow. “Yu gah stellah steh dey?”^{[63][Di Lingua]: You’re from Sol (excluding Earth and Mars)? ↑}

She shook her head. “No. I am from Mars. Terra Cimmeria.”

He stiffened, feeling a sudden social formality fill the room like a cloud of gas in the face of the stubborn Martian cultural trait of avoiding Di Lingua around strangers. Di Lingua was for Grond myawn and close acquaintances, only. Though it seemed like there were a lot of arbitrary exceptions. Frederik didn’t understand the point, especially with EAR translators being ubiquitous.

“My family lived there three generations back,” he said. “Before they came to Ya Ke and helped build Domot Get Grond Dey.”

“Nawa oh!”^{[64][Di Lingua]: Wow! ↑} her face softened. “My family is from Campbell, and yours?”

“Chronius Mons,” he paused and the tense silence greeted him, building until he couldn’t stand it anymore. “So, you’re the one they called Vermilion Special, ye?”

This triggered a genuine sounding laugh.

“Hah! It wasn’t my choice, and it’s hardly clever…you don’t need to call me that nonsense handle,” she held her hand out, palm down. “My name is Silva, Vis-viva. Vis for short.”

His eyebrow shot up to the top of his forehead before he could control his facial muscles. “Oh? Just like that?”

Vis tilted her head. “Just like what?”

“Your colleagues have a lot of interest in privacy, it seems.”

She withdrew her hand and crossed her arms. “They’re not my colleagues, I am just a…fellow traveler.”

“A sputnik, huh? Hmm,” he lifted the shawl and nodded to the open stowage cabinet. “Where did you find this?”

She opened the cabinet door of the stowage locker and nodded at Diya’s poster gecko gripping the inner surface of the left stowage door.

“I thought this side of the cabinet was for guests.”

“It is. Was this there?”

“Ye. I was just moving it, but the pattern caught my eye.”

He saw Diya’s clothes haphazardly stuffed into the very bottom compartment of the left half, and a handful of towels neatly folded at the middle level.

Frederik looked at the poster. It depicted a regally poised, six-armed, female artist with a large afro and exceptionally long, golden claws. She was wearing a scant raiment of ornate golden jewelry and no other clothing.

“Sorry. Those are my daughter’s clothes.”

He flushed with embarrassment at the sight. He pulled her clothes out, stuffed them in a compartment on his side of the stowage cabinet, and wrapped the shawl over his shoulders.

“It’s fine,” Vis smiled politely as she took a step toward the bunks, pushed aside the privacy divider on the bottom bunk, picked up her rucksack, and squeezed it into Diya’s half of the stowage space.

She pointed at the poster. “Who’s this?”

“That’s Epiphany. My daughter’s favorite streamer.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Sixteen in Solar. Almost eight full revolutions of Jin around Ya Ke. Do you have any kids?”

“No, no kids. Is your daughter back on Skarda?”

“Ye, with a pik dibrat.”

“Not with her mother?”

He shook his head. “No, she passed.”

“I am sorry,” she said, her face twisted with sorrow.

“It happened years ago but thank you.”

“What happened?” she asked tepidly.

“I don’t want to talk—”

The cabin’s lights flickered, then turned off, replaced by the urgent pale yellow of emergency lighting. Whooping alarms sounded in every room.

“Eff!” Taliya said over the EAR comms. “Space junk incoming! Definite collision in less than three seconds.”

Only something difficult to see on sensors would have been this close, or from a secondary collision in the debris cloud. Either way, Frederik sprang to action.

“Close all the hatches!” Frederik said to Taliya over the EAR comms even as he was already half-way to the cabin door.

He pulled the accordion door shut, waved his hands over the top and bottom to activate emergency seals. With a pinch on his skin from his seal bracelet, he verified his identity, and the gum-like lips in the door jamb pulled the accordion door taught.

“What’s going—”

A loud pop cut Vis’s question short in the corridor. A fist-sized hole burst through the cabin door. Sparks flew done from the ceiling as a conical shower. Vis flinched, cowered, and gasped. Frederik closed his eyes. It was already over.

Air sucked out of the cabin through the jagged hole in the cabin door. He wrapped the Martian shawl around his fist and shoved it into the hole. The loose edges of the shawl got sucked into place. Friction between the boron filaments and the serrated edges along the hole in the accordion door formed a jury-rigged vacuum seal. Martian weaving intentionally created a gecko grip-like effect under the pressure differential.

He held his breath as he gently pulled his fist free. The seal held. He slumped to the floor and let out a sigh of relief.

“Vis?” he asked over the loud hiss coming from the other side of the cabin door as the hallway depressurized.

She was on the floor, panting and obviously shocked, but she was responsive. “I’m oke. Just startled. What happened?”

“Space junk.”

With a glance toward the ceiling, he noticed a fist-sized dent in the aluminum panel. He rose to his feet, licked one of his fingers and placed it on the dent. He did not feel any wind, so the cabin was likely still airtight.

On his EAR, he waved open status reports. Messages from the guest and crew exploded over the local network, statuses from Ergo splashed warnings and advisories, but nothing more serious than startled nerves and disturbed sleep was being reported. There was a fist-sized hole in the antispinward elevator between control and hab zero-one—and Ergo’s rotational motion had caused the trajectory of that object to tumble into Frederik’s cabin and up into the ceiling. Likely, the worst was over.

“If our emergency patch holds,” Frederik said as he gestured to the shawl-plugged hole. “Then we have nothing to worry about. Everyone on this deck got sealed up tight—even the fish are safe.”

Vis’s posture and facial expression notably relaxed, but her hands and legs shook as she pulled herself onto the lip of her bunk, using it as a chair. “Was it just…unflagged space debris?”

“Ye, likely got missed in Absolute Horizons’s report—their station was the source event. Probably something no larger than a toe. Something hard to catch if it’s moving fast enough.”

She was panting and shivering again.

“Are you alright?”

“My chest hurt,” she choked out the words between wheezes. “Trouble breathing,” she was now laying in her bunk and sucking down air in raspy gasps.

He twirled his fingers on his EAR interface, saw the doctor was in the medbay, and opened a line to Edouard.

The doctor answered calmly. “I didn’t see any reports of casualties—”

“Edouard, can you get across the hall to my cabin?”

“Eh…air’s too thin now. I’d have to use two emergency airlocks—what’s the situation?”

“Guest is having chest pains, heavy breathing,” Frederik went to his locker, pulled out a stream camera, powered it up and connected to the EAR network. “Sending you a stream now.”

“Oke…got it. Patch me into the audio, ye?”

“Vis,” he said as he leaned over her. “Vis, can you open an audio channel with me?”

“Ugh…I…I think so,” she held out a shaky hand.

“Oke, doc, patching you in now.”

“What’s the patient’s name?”

“Vis.”

“Vis? Can you hear me?” Edouard asked, his tone exuding a kind of warm patience that it had lacked when he had first greeted the guests.

“Ye…ye, I can hear you.”

“Can you describe your symptoms to me?”

“Can’t…breathe…chest feels like…under hard thrust…so…cold.”

“She’s covered in sweat, too,” Frederik added.

Edouard sucked as his teeth. “Oke, Eff, it sounds like a panic attack.”

“Oke, what can I do?”

“Is Vis still in a biosuit?”

“No.”

“Tsow, oke^{[65][Di Lingua]: Fuck, okay… ↑}…I’ll send you a one-pager on how to do some medical diagnostics, but in the meantime just stay with Vis, keep calm, establish a quiet space, and have a conversation.”

“Just thought I’d double check.”

“Ye, that’s all we can do, really. Maybe try to find out what triggered the panic attack, but keep Vis distracted.”

“Oke, got it.”

Vis was visibly careworn. She had curled up in her bunk, with the privacy divider left wide open. He pulled up the folding chair from the floor and sat down. He kept most of his attention on the Martian shawl holding in their air.

“You know, that’s usually my daughter’s bunk.”

“What’s her name?”

“Her name’s Diya.”

“Ah, that’s a powerful name. Sorry she couldn’t be here.”

Frederik pointed up at the dent in the ceiling. “I’m glad she’s not here.”

Vis chuckled. “I suppose I would prefer not to be here myself.”

“I miss her, though.”

Vis grimaced and made a single sobbing gasp. Frederik immediately stood up and tried to gesture comfortingly.

“Nawah oh, oke oke.^{[66][Di Lingua]: Woah, okay okay. ↑} It’s oke, Vis.”

She wiped tears from her eyes. “I just miss her and hope she’s alright.”

Frederik sat back down, thinking Vis was talking about Diya. But he realized she meant someone else. He nodded as if he understood.

“But last time I saw her,” Vis sobbed again. “It’s hard to believe anything will be oke.”

“Was she…still alive?”

“I think so.”

“That’s something, then, right? There’s still hope.”

Vis nodded and wiped a few tears from her cheeks.

“When Diya’s mother died, I felt hopeless, but it really helped to just talk about her, before everything happened. Maybe you could try it?”

“Chaeyoung,” Vis gasped a little, as if she was gulping air and stifling a sob. “Her name was Chaeyoung.”

“Tell me about her.”

She smiled at him. “It’s a long, strange story.”

He gestured toward the vacuum sealed door patched with a Martian shawl and gave her a warm smile. “I’ve got nowhere else to be.”

“First thing you need to know about Chaeyoung is that she was—is—an exobiologist. She dreamed of going out beyond the places we had already explored, to go way out there into the wider uninhabited, unexplored universe, and to see it for herself. She thought it was the universe she thought was teaming with life,” Vis sighed and smiled. “I met her in a little stellah steh bar in Tiantang when we were both a bit lost…and I fell in love with her, and her dream, almost immediately.”