Power Down Read online

  Suddenly the hall is filled with light, like someone has jammed a spotlight into the hole Lebbe’s created. Lebbe turns to shield his eyes. He puts his back to the door and lets himself slide all the way to the ground. He’s overcome by exhaustion. Every muscle in his body hangs limp and loose.

  He’s made his corner. He’s marked his page. He forces himself to stand back up. Creating this hole wasn’t the goal. Crawling through it is. He steps back and looks at what he’s done.

  Not too shabby, old man.

  Now he just has to get himself up and through his opening. It's not much but, if he contorts himself just right, he can slide through.

  He puts a hand in the opening and grabs the wall. He puts a foot on the door handle, hoping that will now hold his weight after being shot and kicked repeatedly. He pushes himself up and puts his head through the hole. He dips a shoulder and pushes that through too. He twists himself so the other shoulder comes through and lets himself lean back. He holds onto the door jamb. It’s the only thing keeping him from going head-first onto the floor behind him.

  He pauses a moment then let’s go and begins to fall. He twists his knees so they don’t catch on the opening he’s created and extends his hands above him. He tumbles back. His palms hit first and his legs fall naturally behind him, landing him gracefully, like there was no other way that the whole thing could have gone. Like it had been planned that way the whole time.

  He looks around. He’s in one of the long corridors that leads out to the points where ships can dock with Zulu. He looks down one end of the hall toward where the ships would connect to Zulu. He looks toward the main floor. For a moment he considers walking out to the far point, to continue walking every inch of the station like Grey had asked before. That’s when he notices something that he should have seen before. Something that should have been so obvious, if not for the commonality of it all.

  He turns and heads, instead, to Zulu’s main floor and its full complement of lights. These

  Aren’t some reserve fixtures that have kicked on in an emergency. These are things-are-fine lights. And if those are the lights that are on then whatever’s happened on Zulu doesn’t have her totally lost.

  NINTEEN

  Grey, Keith, and Rebecca stop their conversation. They each wait for something else, for another set of explosions, but nothing comes.

  “What was that?” Grey asks. “Find out what it was.”

  Keith and Rebecca have already turned to their terminals before Grey finishes speaking.

  “You look at cameras,” Keith says. “I’ll dig into the systems and see if something was triggered there”

  “You think something just happened at a system level?” Grey asks.

  Keith doesn’t turn away from his terminal. “I don’t know what it was, but considering everything that’s happened today, we need to look at everything.”

  Grey nods. “Fair point.”

  Keith and Rebecca loss themselves in their terminals again. Grey watches them work, trying to steal glances of whatever they’re looking at. Again, none of it makes much sense to her. It’s not until Rebecca pulls up security cameras that she can actually see anything she recognizes.

  “Can you put those up on the big screen?” she asks.

  Rebecca does, and suddenly the room is filled with over-sized pictures of Grey’s station. It looks funny from this perspective. The cameras are mostly mounted in the high domed ceiling, so everything is odd angles. There’s The Quickstop, but not like she’s ever seen it. And the convenience store, the same thing. Small groups of people mill about the main floor. They stand and talk. They walk aimlessly, just trying to make extra minutes pass between when they arrived on Zulu and when they can leave.

  Will these be the last people to actually come here? Are these Zulu’s final groups of guests?

  Guests. Like she’s been running some kind of hotel. She isn’t. This place is a galactic truck stop. You come in for a few minutes, stretch your legs, get a meal, pick up some extra supplies, then you head back out. But Grey can’t think of them like that. It’s the kind of mindset that works for someone at the convenience store or the team at The Quickstop. They need to think about that kind of thing--customer service. Grey’s concerns are bigger than that. She has to think about Zulu on an operational level. Ships coming and going. Schedules. Itineraries. Failing physical systems.

  Someone is cutting across the main floor, walking with a purpose that makes them stand out from all the other people Grey can see. This person is so unique that they might as well be glowing.

  It’s Frank from The Quickstop. He doesn’t know what’s happening to Zulu. She’ll have to tell him, and it should be soon. Now, to be fair. She should be telling them all now. Yes, she told Keith and Rebecca that she thought they could save this place. And give them enough time, she still thinks that. But they may be working against a clock that can’t be beat. If that’s the case then she should be down there talking to the people who call Zulu home that they may not be able to do that much longer. They have things here, lives built that will need time to be packed up. Plus, these are friends. Not best friends, no. But they are people she’s come to know and come to like. Most of them.

  Where is Lebbe?

  “Nothing is odd here,” Keith says. “At least it’s no odder than it has been. Things still aren’t good, but they aren’t demonstrably worse.”

  Keith starts to continue his thought, but the doors to the control room swing open and McKibbon comes in.

  “Whatever it is that we heard,” Keith says after a moment, “it wasn’t something that happened inside of any of the systems.”

  “It was gunshots,” McKibbon says.

  “Gunshots?” Rebecca asks.

  “Guarantee it.”

  “No one here has a gun,” Keith says. “You don’t bring a gun to a place like this. It’s too dangerous. That makes no sense.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard. Makes sense or not, that was someone shooting a gun.”

  McKibbon puts a hand on Grey’s back and asks how everyone in the control room is doing.

  “We’re fine,” Grey says. “It didn’t happen up here. It’s something out there.”

  She points to the camera feeds still showing on the control room’s big screen. She spins and puts a hand on McKibbon’s forearm. She rubs his arm with her thumb.

  “How are you all? Your team good?”

  He smiles at her and nods while he says “We’re soldiers. Takes more than a couple of gun shots to get us rankled.”

  “Good,” she says through a smile then turns back to face the room. Keith is still staring into his terminal. Rebecca has been watching Grey and McKibbon. McKibbon walks to the rail that rings the upper portion of the control room. He leans against it and looks into the displays on the big screen.

  Grey looks at Rebecca. Rebecca tips her head toward McKibbon then smiles and nods. Grey smiles back then puts her finger to her lips in the galactic sign for “Quiet.” Rebecca nods.

  Grey asks McKibbon what he’s thinking as she walks to join him at the rail.

  “I’m thinking that you've got an issue on your station."

  "Just one?"

  McKibbon politely chuckles. "You been able to see anything on these yet?" He points to the display in front of him.

  "Nothing yet," Rebecca says. "But we haven't looked long."

  McKibbon squints his eyes to try and focus the pictures.

  "Don't try too hard," Grey says. "At that size they are going to be naturally fuzzy."

  "Why would someone be shooting on Zulu?"

  Keith clears his throat. "Disagreement spilled over from onboard one of our docked ships."

  McKibbon turns to look at Keith as he speaks. He nods along as Keith shares his theory. "That can work. Feels obvious, but obvious isn't bad. What else?"

  Rebecca offers her thought next, a variation on a theme. "Rival crews?"

  McKibbon: "That's a thing?"

  "Oh, ye
ah," Grey says. "Lebbe breaks up more fights between crews than almost anything else. One crew snakes a load out from under another. They look for the first chance they can find to exact a little revenge."

  "And it can bring out guns?"

  "It's brought out knives before. Guns is just a step past that.”

  McKibbon continues to look at the screens then asks: “How far back can you guys roll this footage?”

  “We can go back six months,” Grey says.

  “How hard is it to see before the shooting?”

  Keith pushes some buttons and the footage on the screen starts rewinding itself, everything going backward in quick flashes.

  “Hit play,” McKibbon says. The footage pauses for a moment, and they watch as what happened 20 minutes ago begins to play on the screen in front of them.

  Nothing is happening. People are eating at The Quickstop. They are walking the floor. They are sitting on the benches under the main dome. It’s all boring until everything stops. Those who know better drop to the ground. Those who don’t snap their heads or crane their necks in the same direction, trying to look hard down one of Zulu’s halls.

  “Sohow us that hall,” McKibbon says to nobody in particular.

  Keith and Rebecca look at each other. Neither of them are trained to operate these cameras. Nobody is. The cameras are automated, programmed to pick out suspicious looking activity, so no one is actually monitoring them. Zulu doesn't have the staff for that.

  “You're gonna have to give us a minute,” Rebecca says.

  McKibbon turns to Grey, looking to her for an explanation. She shrugs her shoulders.

  The sounds of typing fills the room. Rebecca is staring at her screen as she works. Everyone is watching, when she sits up straight in her chair. Here eyes go wide and she brings a hand to her mouth. “Oh my god,” she whispers.

  “What?” Grey asks.

  She shakes whatever she’s just seen out of her head and starts typing again. All the displays on the main screen go blank for a second then new views come up.

  “I rolled this footage back to before the shooting. Just … watch.”

  Everyone focuses on the new footage. It looks like still images if you aren’t watching the time stamp in the upper left corner work its way up. Then there it is. Three bursts coming from the wall of the station. It looks like someone has planted three small charges on Zulu. Bits of wall explode out three times.

  “Just wait,” Rebecca says.

  The room is heavy with anticipation. They’ve all leaned in, toward the main screen. No one is breathing.

  The powdered bits of wall kicked loose by gunshots have settled. The screens appear almost still again. Then the wall starts shaking. It’s only a bit at first, like it’s pulsing. Then the pace picks up. It becomes more violent until it’s virtually just a blur on the camera.

  “What the …?” Grey asks.

  “No,” Rebecca interrupts. “Just wait.”

  The room goes quiet again. All that shaking has opened a small gap in the wall. It looks like a dark gash from this angle.

  Rebecca inhales quickly in anticipation of what’s to come. And suddenly there it is. Something comes sticking out through the gap.

  McKibbon: “Are those …?”

  Keith: “They’re fingers.”

  The room watches in silence as whoever these fingers belong to starts pulling and tugging and straining to widen the gap all that shaking opened up.

  The gap in the wall gets wider, like some kind of mouth being pried open. Whoever is behind the wall pushes more of their hands out, to the palms now. The hands grip tight on the wall and peel it back like some kind of can.

  The gap is wide now, and everyone in the room watches as one arm comes through the hole, then a head and torso. And it’s at this moment that everyone realizes who this is that’s slowly appearing.

  “Oh my God,” Keith says.

  “It’s Lebbe,” Grey says.

  “What’s he doing?”

  Grey continues to watch as Lebbe pulls himself through the hole in the wall. “I have no idea. The man’s always been a little … off. But ...”

  Just then the door to the control room opens.

  It’s Lebbe and he looks to the screen in time to see himself fall to the floor, get his bearings, and then walk out of the view of the camera.

  “Yeah, that looks weird,” he says. “But I can explain.”

  TWENTY

  “What the hell is going on, Jim?”

  Lebbe hesitates. The truth about the rings is still his, and there’s no way he can explain what they’ve just seen on that screen without giving it up. He takes a deep breath then begins.

  “You told me to walk the floor, so I determined that if you wanted me to do that then I was going to walk every damn inch of this place. So, I did. I set out to put a foot print on every bit of floor in this station that I could. Be able to report back that the floor had been walked. Doing that, I stumbled across something. Some office space out in the rings. I’d gone back out there to keep walking the rings, and then everything out there shut down. No power. No air. No anything.”

  He reaches behind him and pulls out the gun from his waistband and sets it on Keith’s desk.

  Keith pushes his chair away.

  Grey shouts: “Jim!”

  “Calm yourselves. I’m just setting it down. We’re all adults here.”

  McKibbon steps forward and takes the gun. “You had to shoot your way out?”

  “Yes. There was no power and no air, and I had to get out to …”

  He almost says “save my daughter,” but he doesn’t. He can’t tell them that he’s seen her. That he talked to her. That he’s promised her that he’ll help find her.

  “... had to get out.”

  “That was us,” Grey says. “We shut all of it off.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  Keith: “Zulu’s dying.”

  “Not dying,” Grey says. “That was me being dramatic. But something is happening with the station. Our support systems are acting …. wonky.”

  “This isn’t wonky,” Keith says. “It’s cascading failure. We are losing all of them.”

  Grey concedes that this is more than wonky. “Zulu is in the middle of a systems failure that we can’t figure out how to reverse.”

  “What do we know?”

  Keith fills Lebbe in with a summary that boils down to: “We don’t know much.”

  “And this isn’t just the natural cycle of a station, right? This place isn’t exactly new.”

  Grey is shaking her head. “A thousand years. We have a thousand year core. So, unless we tell Zulu to shut itself down, it should just keep spinning out here.”

  “And no one told it to shut down?”

  “Anyone who could have entered those codes into the system is in this room.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “As sure as I can be. Besides, why would someone want Zulu to shut down?”

  Lebbe holds out a hand and starts counting off reasons on his fingers.

  “They need it out of the way, although there are easier ways to physically remove a station. So maybe they don’t need it out of the way, they just need it empty. We don’t offer much of a physical threat to anyone …”

  He looks to McKibbon. “No offense, but those aren’t the stoutest guns you all are shooting down there.”

  “None taken.”

  Lebbe continues going through the reasons that someone might want to take Zulu offline. “Presumably, if they can take it down then they can spin it back up again. Maybe they are hoping we’ll leave and leave then a perfectly good space station.”

  He moves on to fingers three, four, and five. “Need me to go on?”

  “No,” Grey says. “Point is taken. But just because you have a bunch of hypothetical reasons…”

  WOOOOONG!

  An alarm interrupts their discussion.

  WOOOOONG!

  All eyes turn to focus on
the big screen where Keith’s screen is still being displayed.

  The air handler isn’t shutting down anymore. It’s gone. Keith and Rebecca scramble to try and bring it back online. They work and the others watch as the percentages on the water recycler continue to fall.