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  The pilot slides forward on the bed and asks: “So what’d you do then?”

  You want more?

  “After that the company that owned the station where we were living were generous enough. They let me stay in our place rent free for a bit. But, really, when I think back on it, it’s not like they were doing me any great favors. The place was tiny, just one room and a bath. Mom and I were crowded in it just the two of us. When dad was back it was almost unbearable. I spent most of my time out in the common areas of the station.”

  “And what about your sister?”

  “My … oh. She was off at the academy. She’s 11 years older.”

  Grey pauses and looks to the ceiling, appearing to be caught in a memory. But, in reality, her mind is frantically spinning up the next chapter of this story.

  “After a month or so on my own, I started getting antsy. I knew that my living situation was temporary at best. I ran into a recruiter for a station management company. She told me about opportunities to make some money that didn’t involve putting on an exo-suit and digging into some distant rock. So, I signed up with her, and here we are.”

  “I wish I could remember that much.”

  “Things still not back?”

  “They’re coming. Slowly. Funny, but the farther back it is the easier it is to recall. Like my memory is rebuilding itself from the bottom up.”

  Grey laughs. “What’s coming back so far?”

  “Well, I know the stuff I told you about. My childhood. Things like that. I also have a sister. I remember that. I can see her face, but I can’t tell you her name.”

  “What about you? Can you tell me who you are?”

  “Glory. I think.” She pauses and thinks for a moment then nods. “That feels right.”

  “What a lovely name.”

  “I hated it.” She stands and pulls a cup off the side table next to her bed. She goes to a machine in the wall and pushes a button. Ice falls into the cup. She hits another button, and the cup fills with water.

  “Too much fodder for kids in school?”

  She sits back on the bed and adjusts her gown. “You have no idea. I got a lot of ‘Good morning glory, Glory.’ and it only got worse as I got older and the kids became wiser to the world.”

  The conversation lulls, and Grey fills the silence after a few moments. “So, we’ve been on your ship,” she says. “We've taken a look around. I don't know that I have the best news for you.”

  The woman wrinkles her nose and tips her head to the side, like a dog being asked to do an unfamiliar task. “What do you mean ‘not the best news?’ ”

  Grey settles herself into the chair. “Best we can tell,” she begins, “is that you were hit by pirates.”

  The woman nods knowingly, and Grey realizes that she’s not giving her new information. The only thing she may know about the last month of her life was that she was piloting a ship hit by pirates.

  “Last time we talked, you said you had a crew, right?”

  “I believe so. I vaguely remember a couple of other faces.”

  “There’s a lot of blood in the hold. We think they were killed. At least hurt.” It’s all out of her mouth before Grey realizes that the news could land wrong.

  The woman brings her hand quickly to her mouth as Grey speaks. Tears gather in her eyes.

  She draws in a short breath then apologizes. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I just told you that I don’t have memory of these guys. Why am I crying?”

  Grey stands and pulls a tissue from the box on the table next to the woman’s bed.

  “Because you’re human,” Grey tells her. “And maybe you don’t have physical memories of them now, but your subconscious does. Your haven’t really forgotten these people. This reaction is normal.”

  What do you know about her reaction, you fraud?

  The woman gives her head a quick shake, widens her eyes to try and dry the tears, and sits up straighter. “Thank you.”

  Grey begins to talk about what they found in the cockpit, but she can see that her revelation about the crew has shaken the pilot. The woman’s eyes are focused at some point on the floor. She looks up, but she still doesn’t look at Grey.

  Grey gives her a moment then stands. “Are you going to be OK?” she asks.

  The woman snaps back into the moment. She wipes a tear from her cheek and says she will. “I’ll be fine in a bit, just … processing right now.”

  “I understand. I did want to ask you about …” She pauses. Everything about the woman being found in a fully insulated flight suit that allowed her to survive what was a surprise attack is about to come spilling out. Grey is set to channel Lebbe. But she doesn’t. She swallows the words and pauses again.

  “There’s a bit more,” she says instead, “but I’ll give you some time. We don’t need to talk about all of it right now.”

  The woman is nodding as Grey speaks. “I appreciate that.”

  Grey leaves. She heads toward the doors that will take her back out to the main floor of Zulu and the datapad in her pocket chimes. It’s Rebecca. Another alarm has tripped.

  Grey taps a three word response (“On my way.”) and heads back to the control room.

  +++++

  She bursts through the door already asking questions. “What are we seeing?”

  Keith and Rebecca are again huddled over Rebecca’s screen. Grey joins them.

  “It’s the air handler.” Rebecca starts.

  Keith finishes: “Efficiency is down. Down in a way that’s outside the norms.”

  Rebecca continues. “If it continues to operate at this level we could have issues in the next day or two.”

  “Has it seemed to stabilize?”

  “No,” Keith says.

  “Will it?”

  “I mean … anything is possible,” Keith says.

  “I don't have time for semantics, Keith. I realize that in all the world of possibilities this is one of them.”

  Rebecca interrupts. “It could stabilize. Will it? I doubt it. We have a problem.”

  She punches keys on her keyboard and the room lights up when an image appears on the big curved display that covers the wall in front of them. It's schematic drawings of Zulu. Rebecca has the air handling system highlighted in a deep red.

  “If things continue to operate at the levels they are at now,” she says, “then everything should be fine. But…”

  Grey talks over her. “What if things don’t continue to operate at those levels. If it gets worse, what then?”

  Rebecca turns back to her keyboard. “Oxygen levels go down, and eventually Zulu isn’t able to support the number of people who are here now.”

  Grey looks to her tablet. She pulls up the day’s manifest. She starts adding up the number of people on those ships already hanging off of Zulu’s locks. She then adds up all those who could be on the station after the rest of the day’s schedule arrives. The number is surprising. Stunning, actually. She tries not to react.

  “OK,” she says, her calm regathered. “What’s the plan if things get worse?”

  Rebecca is back at the keys. A few strokes and large sections of Zulu’s rings go dark. “First thing we do is shut down vents in all non-essential areas. No need to push oxygen to places people aren’t.”

  “And that gets us…”

  “A few days,” Keith says. “If we do something else.”

  “What?” Grey asks and looks down at her pad. She knows what they are going to tell her, she just doesn’t want to hear it. She’s trying to will it to be anything but that.

  “We shut Zulu down to incoming traffic.”

  Grey is shaking her head as they say it. “Wrong answer, guys.”

  “It’s the only answer,” Keith tells her. “If things get worse, we won’t have a choice.”

  “Worst case it for me. If things continue to decline at the current rate, how long do we have before we are evacuating everyone off the station?”

  Rebecca begins to answe
r, but the sound of her voice is drowned out by an alarm from Keith’s machine.

  Grey whips around to see where the noise is coming from then asks, “Oh, dear God. What now?” as Keith slides in behind the monitor.

  “It’s the reactor,” he says. “Numbers are down and dropping.”

  “Critical?” Grey asks.

  “Not yet …”

  “But …”

  “Yeah, not good.”

  “What the hell is happening?”

  Rebecca: “Catastrophic failure?”

  Grey turns to Rebecca. “You think that’s it? Is Zulu dying?”

  “Dying?” Keith repeats.

  “You have another word for it?”

  Rebecca remains focused on her screen. “She’s not dying. It’s too early to say that. But something is wrong.”

  Grey begins to pace wide circles between Keith’s and Rebecca’s terminals. She’s stuck. Her station is sick, really sick, and she doesn’t know how to diagnose it. This isn’t what she’s trained to do. Stations are just supposed to run. If something starts to go wrong, the systems are programmed to fix themselves. They self correct. Stations can wobble for a moment, but they don’t fall down. That’s what makes putting them out this far possible. So what’s behind this?

  “Do it,” Grey says.

  Keith and Rebecca look to her for extra instruction. “Do what, ma’am?” Rebecca finally asks after a few moments of weird silence.

  “The rings,” Grey says. “Shut them down. Probably should have done that years ago.”

  Keith raises a finger while Grey speaks. When she’s done, he says “The soldiers are out there.”

  “Then shut everything down but the soldiers,” Grey says.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Rebecca says. “Zulu’s systems are broken into two parts. Half the rings are on one system. Half are on the other. It’d be best if we shut both of those down. Can we call the soldiers back in here?”

  Grey: “For a couple of days we can find places to put them. I’ll let McKibbon know that we’re going to be bringing them into main Zulu.”

  Grey begins to pace. While she paces she thinks. Shutting down the rings buys her time, but it doesn’t solve her problem, and it’s a problem that still doesn’t make sense. She needs to talk this through. As much as she doesn’t want to admit it, she needs Jim. She stops walking and then looks to Keith.

  “Get me Lebbe.”

  NINE

  He’d planted himself back in the corner of the room where he’d spent nearly all of his morning, deep in the outer rings of Zulu. He’s sitting on the ground, his knees bent at a 45 in front of him and his tablet resting against his thighs. He’s lost in the videos from home again. He’s back to watching the crowds, scanning faces and walking the streets. This time it’s in Fort Worth. Protests in Dallas have spilled over the 30 miles it takes to reach its western neighbor.

  He’s not as familiar with Fort Worth, but that doesn’t stop his mind from slipping him into the screen and letting him mentally walk beside those protesters. He hears the shouting. The spittle from their fiery shouts peppers his face. He jostles with the crowd to one side and then to the other as everyone loses themselves in the noise and the shouting. The crowd is beginning to move as a single unit that seems to slowly lurch forward.

  These faces are all kids. This group of protesters is screaming something about bots and bodies and equality. It’s all ridiculousness to Lebbe, but he supposes that he’s too old to really understand. He grew up when bots were simple faceless machines. They helped you do small tasks. They made life easier, but they weren’t transformative like they had been for these kids. They’d grown up with them, first the kind with the cartoonish faces--oversized eyes and painted-on smiles. Then it became the more realistic bots, the ones that had been programmed as much for empathy as they had been for service. These bots weren’t bots; they were friends. So when people started arguing about rights, civil and otherwise, these kids took sides. Then, as the conversations turned toward what was, at least in Lebbe’s mind, a needed separation between what was human and what wasn’t, these kids took action.

  It wasn’t an argument that he understood. Not at all. But if this is what Sarah cared about, he didn’t feel like he needed to understand it. He just needed to find her. So he pushes his way through the crowd in an organized pattern that should let him see every face, as long as they didn’t leave.

  Or the news feed didn’t switch to a different story.

  A disembodied voice booms overhead. It mentions something about Kansas City, and suddenly the street where Lebbe’s walking is different. The faces he’s seeing are new. The shouts, the chants, those are new too. This group of protesters aren’t worried about bots and bodies. Their concerns are environmental.

  A million protests. A million reasons to protest. It all started with real issues. Real political stuff that set two sides against each other. But those fires threw sparks and those sparks became the embers that bubbled up these other protests. Some of them became nothing, little embers that died from a lack of oxygen. But others, like the stuff about the bots and these environmentally focused protests, were the embers that landed in the dry brush. They found fertile ground to become raging infernos. Even if Lebbe didn’t understand them.

  Don’t they realize that the environment was broken and boiled years ago?

  But if it’s what Sarah was upset about enough to resist like this, then it’s as good a reason as any.

  Even though he’s never been to Kansas City, Lebbe’s mind is quickly drawing up streets and crowds that he can push through. He doesn’t think Sarah will be here. She’s a good girl; passionate. But she’s not that driven. She wouldn't travel almost 10 hours from home just to stand and shout. Would she? The truth was he didn’t really know. Maybe she would now. It’s been more than five years since he’s seen her. Kids change. Especially when they aren’t kids now. She’s nearly 20. Or is she 20? Lebbe doesn’t know for sure. But she’s old enough to make her own decisions. She could decide that this is important enough to travel for.

  He shouts her name, and his call bounces around the empty offices and halls of Zulu’s outer ring. Blood rushes to his cheeks, and he starts to go warm from his toes up. It’s embarrassment, the kind that overtakes you even when no one else is around. He’s not there, not really in Kansas City pushing through a crowd of unwashed kids more interested in protesting than good hygiene.

  He stands. He shakes his head. He comes back to Zulu. The tablet is in his hand, hanging at his side and still playing a video. He lifts the datapad to his face and continues to watch, efforting to keep himself on Zulu, this side of the screen. It’s hard. There, in his imagination, walking the streets he feels productive. This way, just watching, feels detached, reminding him that he’s light years away from the most important thing he should be doing.

  His office suddenly goes dark except for the light from his screen. The video still plays there. He takes a step or two, expecting the lights to react to his movement and pop back on. They don’t. He steps into the hall, letting the light from his datapad guide his way. He walks through the halls and the lights still don’t kick on. Then out into the main rooms of the outer rings, the wide open space. He points the screen up and tries to get some light on a suddenly quiet Zulu. The hum, it’s different. There’s a note that’s missing. Something isn’t right.

  He stops the video from playing to kill the noise from the commentators. That’s all it is anyway--noise, a distraction. That’s when he hears it. Zulu’s hum isn’t different. It’s gone.

  Gone? It can’t be gone. Gone is bad. Gone is very bad. No air. No water. No waste processing. Gone is a dead station.

  He listens again. Harder, if that’s possible. Focused. Concentrating.

  No. It’s gone. Does Grey know? She has to know. There are systems built into systems to alert people to things like this. Still, I should find her.

  He points his datapad in front of him, the little bit
of light coming from the screen looking like some kind of billion-watt beacon in the pitch of Zulu’s rings. Lebbe hustles to the main door that led to these open areas of the rings. He tries the handle, but it doesn’t move. No up. No down. Not even a jiggle. It’s like it’s set in stone.

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls his ID badge. He runs it in front of the security pad mounted to the side of the door. No reaction. The pad’s not even active. The possibilities run through his head.

  Has the station been compromised? Has some crazy-eyed captain stepped off his ship and blown a couple blasts into the domed roof over Zulu’s main floor? Did people scatter? One of Frank’s boys try to play hero and get a bolt from a blaster square in the chest, dropping him to the floor? Now, does he lays there as an example for everyone else, proof that this guy means business? Is Grey shutting down as many non-essential areas of Zulu so this guy has fewer places to flee?