Prepared

[PREVIOUSLY ON...] Aboard the dying station Meridian-7, with seventy hours of air left on his wrist and Thomas Crane's warning in his ears, Archie Moran looked around the steel table at his three friends and chose the harder thing. He chose to be afraid out loud. Before anyone walked up to the Guardian of this Space, they would look first.

…

"Four hours," said Archie. "Then we regroup. If any of you finds something that changes the plan, you shout. If any of you finds Gregor, you do not talk to him. You come and get the rest of us."

"And if he finds us?" said Venn.

"Then you run."

"I can run now."

"I know," said Archie. "That's why I'm sending you to be a decoy."

Venn stared at him. Slowly, a grin spread across his face. It was the first real smile Archie had seen on him since they woke. "A decoy," he said. "You're making me the bait."

"The bait. The distraction. The loud one."

"I've been preparing for this role my entire life."

"I know you have," said Archie, and found, to his surprise, that he was smiling too.

It was not a plan. It was something looser and stranger: a conversation. He had stood at the head of the steel table in the mess hall and asked each of them what they could do, and then he had listened to the answers. It had taken a long time. It had also, he thought, been the most useful hour of his professional life. Because it turned out that the answers were not what he'd assumed. Jin knew more about control systems than anyone alive. Zoe, who had designed packaging for a living, had spent a year learning how fluids moved through pipes, because a client had wanted a self-cleaning bottle. Venn had, in an earlier career as a very young man, worked two summers in a restaurant kitchen and knew how ventilation worked in a closed space.

And they had looked at him, as he asked, with a sort of startled respect, as if no one had ever bothered to ask them before.

That's the whole trick, he thought. You just ask.

…

Jin found the first log within the hour.

It was in the command subsystem, buried under three layers of old encryption, and he worked at it with the unhurried delight of a man picking a lock for sport. He sat in the engineering bay with a wrist-pad open on his knee and a clutter of discarded panels around his feet. He had traded his usual dry irritation for a kind of scholarly calm.

"It's very clever," he said. "Somebody wrote this a long time ago. Whoever designed Meridian-7 designed it to be repaired. There's a repair routine in the code, a self-diagnostic that runs every six hours and flags anything out of tolerance. Which is how I know the oxygen failure isn't natural." He tapped the screen. "The diagnostic recorded it. Look. Here. Oh-two-hundred station time, the main bus issued a shutdown command. Reclamation unit one. Reclamation unit two. The hydroponics pumps. In that order. From the command deck."

"Gregor."

"That's what it looks like." Jin scrolled. "Except—"

"Except what?"

"Except the shutdown command isn't signed. It has no author tag. Everything on this station has a tag. Every command, every log entry, every sandwich order, they're all stamped with the user. This one is blank." His brow furrowed. "And there's a second thing. Underneath."

He turned the pad toward Archie.

It was a block of code, a few hundred lines, pale gray on black. To Archie it meant nothing. To Jin it plainly meant a great deal. He traced the lines with a fingertip.

"This isn't station code. The syntax is wrong. The style is wrong. It's modern. It's clean. The way a good contractor writes." He swallowed. "It was inserted into the shutdown routine at the moment of execution. As if someone was riding along with Gregor's hand."

"William."

"I haven't said that."

"I know," said Archie. "I did."

For a moment they looked at each other. It was a long look. There was no triumph in it. Then Jin sighed, and shut the pad.

"We were right to wait," he said quietly.

…

Zoe found the plant room.

She'd gone looking for it after Jin explained the loop. The station had algae tanks, he'd said, a green farm aboard, a vast circulation of living water to make breathable air; and if the mechanical systems were dead, then the living ones, in theory, could carry some of the load. It was only a matter of finding the tanks and turning the pumps back on.

"It's in the third ring," Zoe said. She'd come back to the mess hall with a tool belt round her hips and a streak of green down one cheek, breathless and elated. "Archie. Archie. You have to see it."

He followed her.

The hydroponics bay was at the end of a long corrugated tube, behind a door that stuck. When Zoe wrenched it open, a breath of warm moist air rolled out to meet them, and the smell hit him like a hand. Green. Wet. Alive. After hours of cold steel and recycled dust, it was almost unbearable.

The room was enormous. It was a drum, three stories tall, lined with racks of troughs, and every trough was full of a deep lush green. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Rows of pale beans climbing on strings. Great trailing banks of ivy. Long glass tubes ran from floor to ceiling, thick with some cloudy emerald fluid, and they glowed softly in the light of a hundred amber lamps. Everything was dripping. Everything was growing.

"It never died," Zoe whispered. "It's been growing in here for fifteen years. Nobody came. Nobody picked it. It just kept going."

He stood very still, and then, to his own surprise, he laughed.

"What?" she said.

"I love it."

"It's a garden."

"It's the best thing I've seen all week." He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "I think we found our oxygen."

They stood together at the edge of the green for a long moment. A drop of water fell from a leaf above them and landed on Zoe's cheek, and she brushed it off with the back of her wrist and said, in a small, shy voice, "The pumps are off. That's the problem. The tubes are fine. The algae are fine. It's only that the circulation's been shut down."

"Can you fix it?"

"I can't fix it from here. The valve layout is a mess. It's all in the wrong order, the pipes loop back on themselves, they've been patched too many times. I could reroute it. I'd have to redraw the whole network." She looked at him sidelong. "But I could do it. I think."

"Can I help?"

"You're an architect."

"I'm a systems architect now," said Archie, turning over his name tag. "It's on my chest."

She laughed. It was a good laugh, startled and warm, and it rang off the curved glass walls and the dripping green, and he thought, absurdly, I would like to hear that again for the next fifty years.

…

They worked through the night.

It was a strange, bright, domestic labor. Archie had found the original station plans in a locker, a yellowed roll of drawings that someone had sketched before the first bolt was laid, and he spread them on the floor of the plant room under the amber lamps with a set of wrenches for weights. The drawings were beautiful. They had the rough, loving quality of work done by a human hand: no CAD, no grid, only ink on linen and an engineer's faintly comic notes in the margin. Don't trust this valve. It lies. Ask Priya.

He worked with Thomas's pencil. He hadn't intended to; it had simply been in his pocket. He used it to pencil in the redrawn pipe network, and found, with a strange lift of the heart, that his hand knew exactly what to do.

Zoe knelt beside him with a flashlight in her teeth, reading the pipes off the wall. "That one goes left," she said around the beam. "No. Right. No, down." She took out the flashlight. "Why would anyone put a manifold there?"

"Because someone was in a hurry."

"That's not a reason, that's an accusation."

"That's most of architecture."

She grinned at him, and ducked back into the pipes, and he watched her go with a feeling of such sweetness that he had to look away.

By dawn, the first pump hummed.

It started low. A throb in the floor, a shiver in the walls, a deep warm heartbeat from the heart of the room. The amber lamps brightened. The glass tubes began to glow, and in them the cloudy green fluid stirred, rolled, and started to climb. Somewhere overhead a vent clicked open. A soft fresh draught of wet air stirred Zoe's hair, and she looked up with her mouth open.

"It's working," she said.

"It's working."

"It's working!"

She threw her arms around his neck.

It was quick. It was joyful. She hugged him hard, her face against his collar, and he stood stock still with his hands in the air like a man being arrested. Then, slowly, awkwardly, he lowered them, and settled them in the small of her back, and held on.

"Thank you," she said into his shoulder.

"For what?"

"For asking me."

"I only—"

"You asked," said Zoe. "Nobody ever asks."

…

Venn, meanwhile, was having the time of his life.

He had been told to make noise. He took the order with a seriousness that would have embarrassed a general. By midmorning he had located the station's public address system, which still worked, and was running it from a bank of switches in the observation deck, playing a series of increasingly improbable announcements in a mock-NASA voice. "Attention, crew. This is your captain speaking. We're experiencing a slight delay in the delivery of fresh towels. Please remain calm. Please remain fabulous." He turned the volume up. He played, at one point, an entire minute of what appeared to be a hand-clapping rhythm.

He wondered, briefly, if it was reaching Gregor. Then he decided it was and went on.

From the command deck, three levels up and four pressure doors away, a single speaker clicked. A heavy, tired man in a faded naval jacket sat very still in a big black chair and listened, with his hands on his knees, to a boy declaring that the station would now be playing the Hits of the Seventies.

He did not smile. But the corner of his mouth, just for a moment, moved.

"Well," said Gregor, to the empty room. "That's new."

…

In the evening, the four of them met in the plant room.

They sat on upturned crates among the tomatoes, with a pot of something that Venn had fried on the galley stove, a mush of beans and leaf and a single heroic egg, and they ate it off the lids of tins. The lamps had dimmed to a warm gold. The air was heavy and sweet. On Archie's wrist, the clock read 58:13:07. It was ticking up, not down. For the first time in two days, the number was rising.

"Eighty," said Jin, tapping his screen. "In another day. Perhaps ninety. We'll have air for a month."

"Then what?"

"Then we talk to Gregor."

"Not negotiate," said Zoe.

"No." Archie put down his tin. "Not negotiate. Understand."

They were all looking at him again. He found that he could bear it, this time. He found that it did not feel like a weight. It felt like what it was: a small circle of lamplit faces, in a room full of green, waiting for him to speak.

"Thomas said Gregor was going wrong," he said slowly. "He said it'd take a long time, and he was right. Fifteen years alone in a steel tube. No people, no weather, no day and night. Nothing but a machine that obeys you." He turned the tin in his hands. "I think he's been trying to stay useful. It's the only thing a man like that knows. As long as the emergency lasts, he's got a purpose. He's got something to fix."

"So he breaks it," said Jin, "so he can fix it."

"Maybe."

"That's grotesque."

"It's human," said Archie. "It's just what we do, when we're afraid of being nothing." He looked down at the red-barreled pencil stub in his hand. "I'd know."

Silence.

Then Venn, who had been licking his spoon with great seriousness, said: "Okay, so what's the play?"

"We find out who he is," said Archie. "Before we meet him. We read what he left behind."

He looked at the drawings spread on the floor, at the half-erased pipe diagrams, the notes in the margins. Ask Priya. Someone had been here once. Someone had loved this station enough to leave it a joke. And someone, fifteen years ago, had been brought to it in a sealed pod, alone, in the dark, and had never been able to leave.

We're coming, Gregor, he thought. We'll be slow. But we're coming.