They keep the Inquiry feed open, I said. Even though nothing comes through. Or, they think nothing comes through. There are hundreds of channels—
I know all this, he said. There were smoke rings around his eyes.
I told him more about the liquid waste processor that the Sundew and Inquiry shared and about the interference I’d discovered on the Inquiry feed.
I pressed play on the recorder and white noise filled the room. Right there, I said, as the channel was broken by a low hum and seven snapping pops. That’s G1 and H2.
He frowned.
I named them at school. In between classes I used to listen to the static on the Inquiry feed, to record the different sounds I heard.
He smiled slightly.
NSP has always said the inconsistencies in the static are interference, I said. That they’re random. But G1 and H2 aren’t random. They come every three days.
I switched recordings. Now this is the urine processing unit being vented on the Sundew, I said, and pressed play.
When the rush of static and the snapping pops came, he blinked.
If they were dead—
—nothing would be being vented. He finished my sentence.
The patter of silt came from the porthole.
Now it’s your turn, I said, and pulled my blanket tighter around my shoulders, moving my burnt arm gingerly. Tell me about the fuel cells.
They shut down, he said. At around three hundred and seventy-five days. They start to sound funny a few days before. Then—like a switch has been flipped—they power down. When I try to start them back up, they only run on quarter power.
Why?
A combination of things. He rubbed the scars on his knuckles. But mostly—vibration, plus time.
But you accounted for those factors.
We did. Or, we were. But when Peter got sick— He was quiet for a minute and I felt the weight of his body at the other end of the bed, a solid mass. I told them we needed more time, he said. But NSP didn’t want to postpone the launch timeline.
What have you done since then?
Reduced the heat problem, some.
What about the vibration issue?
He shook his head.
But you’ve tried—
A strangled sound came from his throat. Tried and failed.
The wind shifted outside and silt hit the portholes in uneven waves.
I picked up the recorder and rewound the feed, played it again, turned it up loud.
Sometimes I imagine where they are in the ship, I said. What they’re doing. Eating, sleeping, doing a job.
I used to do that, he said. I pictured Anu working on the cell. I saw the four of them puzzling over it, talking back and forth. Then I stopped.
You were friends at school.
But we were pitted against each other. They said it wasn’t a competition but of course it was, between my team and Anu’s. They did things like schedule training tests on the same day—
Like the simulated water crash, I said. I watched with my uncle. Your crew did everything right.
I thought so too, but then I stuck around and watched Anu’s team.
I didn’t see their test—
It was a disaster. Or, it could have been a disaster. The drill supervisor dropped the helicopter into the water at a weird angle. They were upside down and struggling. Anu pushed herself out first, but when she surfaced her face was bloody. Everyone else was still submerged. Missy’s leg seemed to be snagged in the helicopter door, and Dimitri was swimming the wrong way, down instead of up. Lee was able to roll himself into a ball and float out of the helicopter, and he was trying to extricate Missy’s leg.
The trainer should have hauled the helicopter back up but the tow crank wasn’t working. Anu dived back in, grabbed Dimitri—he had hit his head—and pulled him up. Lee came up for air too, and then the two of them dived back in for Missy, who was still stuck. Together they tried to torque the door and release her leg, and at the same time Dimitri set to work on the broken tow crank. But all this was taking too long. Divers went in but Missy still wasn’t free. Finally Anu and Lee extracted her leg, and together they dragged her to the surface. She was still conscious, which was incredible.
That’s a crazy story—
It was supposed to be us, he said. Everyone said it would be. Amelia, Theresa, Simon, and me. But when I saw that I knew their team would be chosen. They didn’t work like individual people under that water but like one body with many limbs. Afterward, on the drill deck, when they were dripping and hugging each other, they seemed huge. Superhuman. Bigger than anything space might throw at them.
He stood up and started pacing the room, his limp making his stride uneven.
I’ve tried every angle, every possibility, he said. But every change I’ve made to the cell has been incremental, and Inquiry needs something more than incremental. It needs something revolutionary, and I know only one person who could make that kind of leap.
My uncle.
That’s right.
I felt the big, empty, sprawling station around me. Its twisting blue-lit corridors, dark airlocks, empty bunks, and dusty control room. There was no one in this place but the two of us. Well he’s not here, I said. But we are.
39
We stood across the table from each other in the workshop, where the smell of machine oil and air canisters mixed with the hot plastic smell of a 3D printer. A long metal table had a mess of parts on top of it, and the walls were lined with shelves full of tools, equipment, and materials. James made a space in the middle of the table, put a half-built cell in its center, and told me what he’d done. He spoke slowly, methodically, in a kind of monotone.
He had developed a modified venting system, he said, and a new kind of sealant that protected the cells from temperature fluctuations. He’d reduced the size of the cell by nearly half.
You’ve done a lot, I said.
But there’s still the core problem, he said. These cells have to function as part of a moving object. They have to withstand acceleration, deceleration. And vibration. Always vibration.
I picked up the cell. It was much lighter than my uncle’s, but at the same time, I felt the weight of all the hours James had worked on it. When I was younger that would have seemed like some kind of paradise—a problem that needed to be solved, access to a wide range of materials and tools, and almost complete solitude in which to solve it. But I didn’t feel that way anymore. Now it just seemed incredibly lonely.
Can we take it apart? I asked.
Yes. Sure. He began to dismantle the cell and lay all the pieces on the table, each plate and board and screw. I watched his scarred hands. They were careful, but there was a finality in the way he set the parts down on the table with a tap or a snap or a tunk. Like he didn’t want to pick them up again. As he did this he explained the modifications he’d made. What he’d tried. What had worked and what hadn’t.
I asked questions and he gave short answers. I picked things up and put them back down and proposed a different configuration for the cell’s O2 connectors. He said it wouldn’t work. I described how I thought it could succeed, and he explained why it wouldn’t. His voice had an edge of irritation, and when I pressed the idea, he pushed the pieces of the cell aside, grabbed a big sheet of paper and a marker, and drew the problem as he saw it.
I took the marker and sketched what was in my mind, or tried to. He leaned over the paper, his head close to mine and I smelled smoke on his skin. He asked me a question. I thought hard and answered. He took the marker back and drew again.