Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — THIRTY-THREE DAYS
Sarah reached the corridor turn ahead of the meeting and had to wait, because Aisha Benton was up on the step with a marker, redoing Thursday on the child rota where somebody had smudged it with a shoulder.
“Two minutes,” Benton said, without turning round.
“Take four. I’m early.”
“You’re always early. It’s a whole personality.” Benton wrote THU — Benton / Kaur (seated work only) and put the cap back on the marker with her teeth, which was a thing she had started doing in April, when the gloves came in.
Morning was what the clocks said. Outside it was the dark it had been since the eighteenth of March, when the sun went out over Hart at about half past five in the afternoon, in a clear sky, two fingers above the western hills, with everybody who was out in it dressed for March. It would be the same dark at noon and the same at nine.
The wall at the turn was the only stretch of block two corridor wide enough to stop at without blocking the sleeping arm, and it had the one lamp on that stretch that stayed on all day. Shower hours were on it. Duty swaps were on it, in four hands, with two of them crossed out and rewritten by a fifth. There was a food notice about the Tuesday soup that had been up for nine days and that nobody had taken down because the joke had outlived the soup.
And above all of it, in Navarro’s own writing, on a piece of print stock she had cut square with a knife:
16 JUNE. 18 PEOPLE. NO PLAN.
Navarro had put it up on the second of April with an instruction: it was to be read out at the start of every meeting until somebody could take it down. Six weeks on, people read it the way they read the shower hours. Sarah had watched Danforth stop in front of it two days ago with a clipboard under her arm, for no reason connected to water, and then go on.
Under the wall line, in a column of its own, in Redding’s hand: seventeen names, under a heading that said NOT ACCOUNTED FOR.
Benton came down off the step. “You want the marker?”
“No. I want the board.”
The media board was at the far end of the wall, and it read 2 and it read 11 MAY.
Sorensen was standing in front of it with his coat still on and a night behind him, and another man from the south arm was standing with him, and Sorensen was saying, “—all I’m asking is what the second one’s for.”
“It’s for a defrost.”
“Right. So what defrost.”
“Whichever one we can’t get out of.”
“So what defrost.”
Sarah went past them without slowing. Block two ran at a number nobody liked, and everybody in the south arm knew it, and Ortiz had run it that way since April rather than spend a drum of scrubber media, and one had gone anyway on the eleventh of May. People could feel it in a room at the end of a shift. They had learned to call it the drum.
The School Ring auditorium had lost its roof lighting in March and had never got it back, so morning meetings happened on the bench seating at the front under two lamps run off the wall, with everyone bunched in the first four rows like a badly attended concert. Everybody kept their coats on. Somebody at the back was working through the end of yesterday’s bread out of a pocket, in pieces, small enough that everybody could go on ignoring it.
Redding read the wall line first. He did it the way he did everything, which was to say it once, flatly, without inviting anybody to feel about it.
“Sixteenth of June. Eighteen people. No plan. That’s thirty-three days.”
He went straight on without looking up. “Seventeen on the column. One change since Friday and it isn’t a person. The block six roof void’s been searched. Two names that were provisionally against it go back to nowhere.”
“Understood,” Brooks said, and wrote it down.
Ortiz had come in late and stayed standing at the end of the second row with her coat on. When Navarro got to plant, Ortiz reported from where she stood.
“Block seven’s exchanger has about two weeks in it, and Brannan will tell you the same thing in two weeks. You’re hearing it now while it’s cheap.” She looked at Navarro. “I’ve got five people who can do skilled work. That hasn’t changed either and it isn’t going to.”
“Nobody’s asking it to,” Navarro said.
“Somebody will by lunchtime.”
There was a small laugh, four or five people, and it was real, and Ortiz stood through it and let it finish.
“Bishop. State.”
Sarah stood, because standing meant people at the back could hear.
“Common state’s current to yesterday’s window. Nothing’s moved on the count.” Sarah kept her eyes on the front row. “A hundred and twenty-eight reachable on the ground, eighteen on the station. Forty-one confirmed dead, and every one of those has a place, an hour and somebody who stood there. The seventeen in the column have none of the three, which is why they’re in a column and not in the forty-one, and I’m not moving them across to tidy the sheet. The rest of this world is out past anywhere a person can walk to, and I haven’t got a figure for it and I’m not going to invent one.”
“Station’s giving me their endurance figures the same as always,” Sarah said. “But Lieutenant Commander Okonjo’s asked for the full window this afternoon instead of the short one, and she hasn’t said why.”
Brooks looked up.
“It’s the only fact I’ve got,” Sarah said. “She’s never asked for the full window before.”
“Fine,” said Navarro. “Fifteen hundred?”
“Fifteen ten. That’s when the geometry’s good.”
The fabrication bay ran a queue, and the queue had an owner, and the owner was Imani Price.
Sarah found her in the doorway of the bay with a sheet held against the frame, eating something out of a wrapper with her free hand, standing up, the way a person eats when it is the fourth thing they are doing.
“Morning.”
“It’s not. It’s got another five hours of morning in it.” Price folded the wrapper into her pocket. “What.”
“Machine time. Reference frames for exterior work. Six of them, and they don’t need to be good — they need to be flat and they need to be the same as each other.”
Price took the sheet off the frame and went down it with one finger, and let Sarah watch her do it.
“Six frames takes Kim’s cabinet seals off Thursday.”
“Then not six.”
“That’s what everybody says. And then they want six.”
“Two,” Sarah said. “Two frames, and I do the rest by hand, and it takes me a week instead of a day, and Kim keeps Thursday.”
Price stopped with her finger halfway down the sheet.
“That I can do.”
“Good.”
“You’d have got the six if you’d pushed. Navarro would have signed it.”
“I know.”
“So why didn’t you.”
“Because it’s your queue,” Sarah said. “You’ve got Kim on that sheet. I hadn’t.”
Price wrote it at the bottom of the sheet with the time beside it.
“Tuesday afternoon,” she said. “And if you come back on Wednesday and tell me you actually needed six, I will remember this conversation, and I will enjoy it.”
“Fair.”
“Do them flat. Two frames that aren’t the same as each other and you’ll spend the week measuring your own hand.”
Down the bay, past the benches, the lathe sat under a cover with a shelf beside it, and on the shelf there was a turned part with a docket on it in two hands. In Lask’s, what the thing would do. In Ortiz’s, underneath, that it was to be kept for a pump that had already failed.
Route and Node had four rooms in the old works, and three of them were storage, and the fourth had Liu in it.
Liu was at the long bench with the watch book open and the previous fortnight spread out either side of it, and a mug at her elbow that had gone cold about an hour ago and that she drank from anyway. She kept reading when Sarah came in, which was normal, and she kept reading a long while after that, which was new.
“Sit down.”
Sarah sat down.
Liu turned the watch book round so it faced her, and put one finger at the top of the right-hand margin, where the initials went.
Sarah looked at the column of her own initials going down the page.
“Mine,” she said.
“All of them. Since March.” Liu left the finger where it was. “You’re doing it again.”
Sarah got as far as saying that she had the channel list written out in two places, which was true and was answering a different question, and stopped in the middle of it.
“I should have told you.”
“You should have handed it over. If you go under a crawler on Thursday that list goes with you, and there is nobody else on this planet who has ever sat it.” Liu turned the book back round. “Aguda gets it. Friday. All of it, in your hand, and then it’s his and not yours.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t.”
“Sorry.”
Liu closed the book and pressed the heel of her hand into one eye and left it there a second.
Sarah picked her papers up and stood there with them.
At the door Liu said, “It’s a good list.”
“It’s an old list.”
“It’s a good old list,” Liu said. “Friday.”
The array link ran off a shed on the western edge with two people and a vehicle slot in it every day since the twenty-fourth of March, which was the most expensive standing commitment on the ground and which everyone had stopped mentioning.
Falzon had the shed door open and a lamp on the bench and was doing something to a connector with her back to the room, in fingerless gloves, with her breath showing.
“Fifteen ten,” Falzon said. “You’re early. It’s a whole—”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Somebody’s said that to you today already.”
“Benton.”
“Benton’s right.” Falzon put the connector down and got both hands round the lamp housing for the warmth of it. “Link’s good. Better than Monday. Don’t ask me why, I’ve changed nothing.”
The window opened a few minutes late, which was close enough, and Okonjo’s voice came into the shed the way it always did, half a second behind itself.
“Hart, station. Bishop?”
“Bishop. Good afternoon, ma’am.”
“Who’s with you.”
“Falzon on the link. Commander Redding and Miss Brooks are on the relay at Main Base. Chief Ortiz has the plant and said she’d listen if she could.”
“Then she isn’t listening,” Okonjo said. “Fine. I’m going to give you endurance first, because you’ll want to write it down, and then I’m going to give you something else, and I’d like you not to react to the second one until I’ve finished it.”
Sarah put her pen on the page. “Go ahead.”
The endurance figures came the way they came every week: food, consumables, what was left of the redundancy in the maintenance, and the running list of things that had broken and stayed broken. Four separate shapes, and never one number, because Okonjo had said in March, with some force, that anybody who added them into one was doing arithmetic on eighteen people.
Then she stopped, and there was the half second, and then:
“Station engineering has closed enough work to say the recoverable inhabited core can be brought down.”
Falzon’s hand went still on the bench.
“Say again,” Sarah said.
“You heard it. It’s a designed recovery path. It’s what the core was built to do at the end of its service. Somebody drew it in a room on Earth about forty years ago and it has sat in a manual ever since, because nobody has ever been in enough trouble to want it.”
“Understood.”
“There’s one condition and everything’s inside it,” Okonjo said. “It’s a controlled return for exactly as long as we’ve got healthy reserve to fly it on. If we spend the reserve waiting for the ground to make its mind up, it stops being a controlled return and becomes something else, and I will not put eighteen people on something else.”
Brooks’s voice came through the relay, thinner. “How long is healthy?”
“Longer than a week. Shorter than the sixteenth. I’m not going to be more precise than that in a window, because a precise number is a thing people plan against, and I’d have to invent one to give it to you.”
“Thank you,” Brooks said, and meant it.
Redding came in then, and went straight past the descent to the thing underneath it.
“Ma’am. When there’s no station, who commands your people?”
There was a pause that was longer than the half second.
“I don’t know,” Okonjo said. “That’s the right question and it’s a week ahead of where I was. I’d like to bring you an answer at the next window.”
“That’ll do.”
“Bishop. What does the ground need from me to decide.”
Sarah looked at her own page, which had almost nothing on it, because she had stopped writing at the second sentence and had not started again.
“Bring us what it costs,” she said. “And what you have to leave behind. The second one’s a decision you only get to make the once, and we need it on paper before it’s made.”
“You’ll have both.”
“Ma’am — one more thing. Your maintenance craft.”
“Are vacuum craft,” Okonjo said. “They were in March when I told you and they are now, and there is no configuration of them that puts a person on the ground alive. If anybody down there has spent six weeks quietly hoping I was being modest about it, please disabuse them today rather than on the sixteenth of June.”
“Nobody’s hoping that.”
“Somebody always is.”
The window ran out on the geometry a few minutes later.
Falzon shut the link down.
“Is that good,” she said.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not what I asked. I asked if it’s good.”
Sarah folded the page in half.
“This morning they were a countdown,” she said. “Now somebody has to decide something. So — yeah. I think so.”
Falzon picked up the connector again and turned it over twice without doing anything to it.
“That’s good,” she said.
Main Base had four people in the pit that evening and the kettle Aguda had put on the local bus in March, which still tripped a heater, and which nobody had moved, because arguing about moving it had become one of the settlement’s few reliable entertainments.
Brooks got to Sarah before Navarro did.
“Sorensen went to the bay this afternoon.”
Sarah put her papers down. “For what?”
“Machine time. Frames and packing pieces for a landing site, on the strength of the station coming down. Your window closed at twenty past three. He was at Price’s door before five.”
“Price said no.”
“Price said a good deal more than no, and then had the sense to come and find me. And then he went to the plant and asked Chief Ortiz for two of her five.”
Ortiz came in from the yard door with her coat still done up, which meant she had walked from plant, which meant she had wanted to.
“Two of my five,” she said, from the door. “So Brannan has block seven on his own, and Brannan thawed the block two exchanger by hand in March and has been telling me since Tuesday that this one wants two people on it. And nobody walks the south arm loop for a week, which is the week I’d have found out whether those two gauges have started lying to me again.”
“He’s not wrong that it’s urgent,” Sarah said.
“No,” Brooks said. “He’s wrong that urgent means yes.”
“And I’m not disciplining him, before anybody asks me to,” Ortiz said. “He’s been on nights since March and he thinks eighteen people coming down is eighteen more pairs of hands. He’ll find out.”
Navarro came out of the back of the pit with her sleeves down, which meant she had been outside, and got the end of it from Brooks and the middle of it from Ortiz and read Sarah’s page after both of them, all of it, which took a while. Nobody said anything until she was done.
“Ground answers them at the next full window,” she said, “and not a day earlier to be helpful.” Then she put the page down and looked at Ortiz. “And nobody starts preparing a landing site until you have told me what this settlement stops doing to pay for it.”
“You’ll have it Tuesday.”
“Then it’s Tuesday.”
Navarro picked her coat back up and went out through the pit, and the door took two goes.
On the way back through block two the corridor wall had the lights on it, because the lights on that stretch stayed up until nine so people could read the swaps. Somebody had taken the Tuesday soup notice down at last. In its place, in a stranger’s hand: Hart Primary reading group, Sunday, south arm. Anybody. Four books.
Above it, Navarro’s square of print stock was where it had been since April.
Thirty-three days.