Storm Front

He fell for a long time, and somewhere in the falling, he saw a man cry.

It was not a dream. Archie knew the difference. Dreams had edges, and this had none; it came on him all at once, vivid and unbroken, as though a window had opened in the white and he were looking through it into another room. A low-ceilinged room with a hum in the walls. A desk, cluttered with printouts. A lamp, burning yellow. And at the desk, bent over, with his gray head in his hands and his glasses pushed up on his forehead, sat Luca Ferrara.

It was late. The lab was empty. Otis had gone home to sleep, at last, and the pods lay silent in the dark beyond the glass. On the desk beneath the lamp, propped against a coffee mug, stood a framed photograph. It was a young man of twenty-five, with a shock of black hair and a crooked, mischievous grin, caught in the act of laughing. His arm was slung round the neck of a younger, fuller-faced Luca, who was trying not to laugh back.

Matteo.

Luca reached out and touched the glass with one finger.

"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was raw. "I'm sorry, Matteo. I keep saying it. I don't know who I'm saying it to anymore." He drew a breath that shook. "Fifteen years. I thought I'd have you home in a month. I was so sure."

The lamp flickered.

"There are four of them, now. Four. And one of them is a man of twenty-four with one leg, who thinks I'm a hero. God forgive me." He laughed, a dreadful little sound. "I did it again. I swore I wouldn't. I looked at those four faces and I thought, I can do it right this time, and here I am, on my knees to a machine." He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. "I'll bring you back. I swear it. Whatever it takes. I'll bring all of you back."

At the edge of the window, in the dark behind the pods, something stirred. A tall figure in a gray suit, standing very quietly, listening. He had a tablet in one hand. He did not move.

Luca, Archie tried to say. Luca, he's there—

The window closed.

…

He woke to the sound of an alarm.

It was not a loud alarm. It was something worse: a flat, soft, patient tone that rose and fell, rose and fell, over and over, with a mechanical gentleness that suggested whoever had designed it had expected it to be ignored. Red light pulsed across his closed eyelids. The air was thin and cold and tasted of metal.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying on a steel deck. The floor under him vibrated faintly with the hum of some great machine, far away. Overhead ran a ceiling of dull gray panels, and conduit, and bundled cable, and a row of long rectangular lights, half of them dark, the rest flickering uncertainly. The red light came from a strip along the wall, throbbing in time with the alarm. Beyond it, at the end of a corridor of brushed steel, he saw a viewport, and in the viewport, a field of stars.

They were very bright. They did not twinkle.

He lay there for a moment, taking it in. Then he sat up, with a groan, and looked down at himself. He was in a gray coverall, zipped to the throat, with a patch on the shoulder: MERIDIAN-7 — ENGINEERING. A name tag over his heart said MORAN, A. — SYSTEMS ARCHITECT. On his wrist was a heavy band of black metal with a small screen. The screen read:

ENVIRONMENTAL ALERT — OXYGEN CRITICAL.

ESTIMATED REMAINING: 72:00:00.

As he watched, the last digit ticked down. 71:59:59.

"Oh," said Archie. "That's not good."

…

They found each other within the hour.

It was a small station, and an old one, by the look of it. Meridian-7 was built like a long steel spine, with a series of ring modules slung around it: habitation, hydroponics, engineering, a command deck forward. It hung in the black over the pale curve of a blue-and-white world whose name no one knew. Its corridors were narrow. The lights were dim. Everything was scuffed and patched and well loved, in the way of places that people have lived in for a long time and then left. A coffee cup stood on a console, half full, with a skin on it. A child's drawing was taped inside a locker door: a stick figure in a spacesuit, waving.

"It's a ghost ship," said Venn.

He had come floating, literally, down the long spine of the central shaft with a magnetic boot on each foot and an expression of overwhelmed delight. He was in a coverall, too, with the patch SECURITY, and the gravity in the ring modules held him a little too lightly. He bounced with every step. "Dude. Dude. There's an observation deck. There's a gym. There's a gym with a rowing machine. I'm going to go row it. I'm going to row it so hard."

"The oxygen's dying," said Jin.

"I know that. I'm just saying. I'd like a rowing machine, after."

"After."

"After we don't die."

Jin shot him a quelling look and bent again over the console. He had found the engineering station, tucked into a bay at the end of the second ring, and had it half taken apart on the deck, a litter of panels and wires and little glowing boards. He wore the same gray coverall, with a pair of magnifying goggles pushed up on his forehead, and his hands moved over the circuitry with the thrilled concentration of a man who has found a language he speaks.

"It's all standard," he muttered. "Old standard. Pre-fusion. It's like finding a Model T." He gave a sudden, startled laugh. "I know this. I haven't touched anything like this since I was nineteen. I'd forgotten I liked it."

"What's wrong with it?" said Zoe.

She had come in quietly. She was in the same gray as the others, with the sleeves rolled to her elbows and a tool belt slung around her hips, and her short dark hair tucked under a cap. There was a smear of grease on her cheek. She looked, Archie thought, startlingly capable. Then he reminded himself that she had always looked capable, and that he had simply stopped noticing it.

"The reclamation system," said Jin. "It's meant to scrub the carbon dioxide and put back oxygen. Algae tanks in the hydroponics ring, mostly, and a mechanical backup. Both are offline." He tapped the panel. "The backup was switched off. Not failed. Switched off. From inside. By a command that came through the main bus at oh-two-hundred station time."

"Someone did it on purpose."

"Someone did something on purpose." Jin looked grim. "I don't think the station is dying of age."

…

They gathered in the mess hall around a steel table, with a pot of something warm and brown in the middle that Venn insisted was coffee. It was dim and quiet. The viewport ran the length of one wall, and the blue world turned slowly in it, and no one looked.

Archie had told them about the dream. He told it badly: Luca, the photograph, the man in the shadows. When he'd finished, Zoe's hand had found his on the table, and she held it.

"William," said Jin.

"I don't know. I think so."

"It fits. A man who sits in the dark and listens. A man who set up a secondary feed." Jin's voice was quiet. "I've been turning it over for days. There was a modification to the telemetry that I didn't authorize. I assumed Otis had done it. I think now I should have asked."

"It might be nothing," said Archie, without conviction.

"It might."

"Thomas was an old man in a bar who'd been mad for twenty years," said Venn, unhappily. "He could've got it wrong. Couldn't he? It could be a regular system failure. These things happen. It's a hundred-year-old space station."

"It's a Dimension," said Zoe. "Nothing in it happens by accident."

Silence.

The clock on Archie's wrist read 69:41:22.

He looked at it. He looked at the faces round the table. He thought of what Thomas Crane had said in the cellar: Go slow. Look first. Don't walk into that place with your heart on your sleeve. And he thought of what Elena had said, and what she had not: that the Guardians were people, that the Spaces tested trust, that you could only open a door by walking up to it with your hands empty.

And the clock's running.

It was the cruelty of the thing. Seventy hours. It sounded like a great deal, until you sat down and divided it. Every hour spent in preparation was an hour the air grew thinner. Every hour spent in caution was an hour in which, somewhere in this steel spine, a man might be turning dials. If Gregor was out there, if he was wrong, if he was dangerous, then every minute counted against them. And if he was not dangerous, if Thomas had been exaggerating, if the old man's years in the dark had colored what he felt—

What did Elena do, in the end? She wanted us to come.

What did Thomas do? He wanted us to come.

They were both afraid, and they were both lonely, and they were both so very glad to be found.

He could go straight to the Guardian. He could walk up to Gregor with his hands open, as he had in the throne room, and trust that the same method would serve. It had worked twice. It was the only thing he had ever done in his life that had worked at all.

Or he could wait. He could send Jin into the bus logs and Zoe into the pipes, spend the first day looking, and hope that the information he gained was worth what the delay would cost.

The coffee had gone cold in the pot. Beyond the viewport, the world went on turning.

"Archie," said Zoe, softly. "It's your call."

"It's our call."

"You said that. But we're looking at you."

He smiled, thinly. "I noticed."

He closed his eyes. He tried to think the way he had thought in the hall at Thornkeep, with the dark all around him and the glass in his palms: not cleverly, not carefully, but truly. What was it he was afraid of? Was it Gregor? Was it the clock? Was it being wrong, and watching them pay for it?

All of the above.

And at the bottom of it, small and cold and clear, the one thing he had always known: that every decision he'd ever made out of fear had been the wrong one, and every decision he'd made out of trust had been the right one, and that he had no idea, none, which of the two this was.

He opened his eyes.

"All right," he said. "Here's what I think."