Hours passed. Eddy got up, extruded a meal, and passed the containers around the netting. Chara and Treasure slipped out of the room. Vula was only half-present—she was working in her studio, sculpting maquettes of popped bladders and painfully twisted corpses.
Eddy yawned. “How long can these whales live without feeding?”
I forced a stream of breath through my lips, fluttering the fringe of my bangs. “I don’t know. Indefinitely, maybe, if the crews can figure out a way to provide nutrition internally.”
“If they keep their whales fed, maybe they’ll just keep stumbling around, crashing into each other.” Vula’s voice was slurred, her eyes unfocused as she juggled multiple streams.
“I’m more worried about nightfall, actually,” I said.
Ever since we’d dragged ourselves out of my hammock, Ricci had been trying to pry information from emergency response up the beanstalk, from the supply ship crews who were circling site, and from the whale crews. They were getting increasingly frantic as time clicked by, and keeping us informed wasn’t high on their list of priorities.
I rested my palm on the inside of Ricci’s knee. “Are the other crews talking to you yet?”
She sat up straight and gave me a pained smile. “A little. I wasn’t getting anywhere, but Jane’s been giving me some tips.”
That woke everyone up. Even Vula snapped right out of her creative fugue.
“Is Jane helping us?” Chara asked, and when Ricci nodded she demanded, “Why are you keeping her to yourself?”
Ricci shrugged. “Jane doesn’t know anything about whales.”
“If she’s been helping you maybe she can help us too,” said Eddy.
“Yeah, come on Ricci, stop hogging Jane.” Bouche raked her fingers through her hair, sculpting it into artful tufts. “I want to know what she thinks of all this.”
“All right,” Ricci said. “I’ll ask her.”
A few moments later she fired Jane’s feed into the room and adjusted the perspective so her friend seemed to be sitting in the middle of the room. She wore a baggy black tunic and trousers, and her hair was gathered into a ponytail that draped over the back of her chair. The pinnas of her ears were perforated in a delicate lace pattern.
Treasure and Chara came barreling down the access sinus and plunged through the hatch. They hopped over to their usual spot in the netting and settled in. Jane waved at them.
“We’re making you an honorary crew member,” Eddy told Jane. “Ricci has to share you with us. We all get equal Jane time.”
“I didn’t agree to that,” said Ricci.
“Fight over me later, when everyone’s safe.” Jane said. “I don’t understand why the other crews are delaying evacuation. Who would risk dying when they can just leave?”
Everyone laughed.
“This cadre self-selects for extremists.” Eddy rotated her finger over her head, encompassing all of us in the gesture. “People like us would rather die than back down.”
“I guess you’re not alone in that,” said Jane. “Every hab has plenty of stubborn people.”
“But unlike them, we built everything we have,” I said. “That makes it much harder to give up.”
“Looks like someone finally made a decision, though.” Ricci maximized the main feed. Jane wheeled around to join us at the netting.
Glowing dots tracked tiny specks across the wide mesa, pursued by flashing trails of locational data. Vula’s media drones zoomed in, showing a succession of brightly colored, hard-shell bodybags shunting though the main valves. Sleet built up along their edges, quickly hardening to a solid coating of ice.
“Quitters,” Treasure murmured under her breath.
Jane looked shocked.
“If you think you know what you’d do in their place, you’re wrong,” I said. “Nobody knows.”
“I’d stay,” Treasure said. “I’ll never leave Mama.”
Chara grinned. “Me too. We’ll die together if we had to.”
Bouche pointed at the two of them. “If we ever have to evac, you two are going last.”
Jane expression of shock widened, then she gathered herself into a detached and professional calm.
Ricci squeezed my hand. “The supply ships want to shuttle some of the evacuees to us instead of taking them all the way to the beanstalk. How many can we carry?”
I checked the mass budget and made a few quick calculations. “About twenty. More if we dump mass.” I raised my voice. “Let’s pitch and ditch everything we can. If it’s not enough we can think about culling a little water and feedstock. Is everyone okay with that?”
To my surprise, nobody argued. I’d rarely seen the crew move so fast, but with Jane around everyone wanted to look like a hero.
Life has rarely felt as sunny as it did that day.
Watching the others abandon their whales was deeply satisfying. It’s not often in life you can count your victories, but each of those candy-colored, human-sized pods was a score for me and a big, glaring zero for my old, unlamented colleagues. I’d outlasted them.
Not only that, but I had a new lover, a mostly-harmonious crew of friends, and the freedom to go anywhere and do anything I liked, as long as it could be done from within the creature I called home.
But mostly, I loved having an important job to do.
I checked our location to make sure we were far enough away that if the other whales began to drift, they wouldn’t wander into the debris stream. Then we paired into work teams, pulled redundant equipment, ferried it to the main valve, and jettisoned it.
I kept a tight eye on the mass budget, watched for tissue stress around the valve, and made strict calls on what to chuck and what to keep.
Hygiene and maintenance bots were sacrosanct. Toilets and hygiene stations, too. Safety equipment, netting, hammocks—all essential. But each of us had fifty kilos of personal effects. I ditched mine first. Clothes, jewelry, mementos, a few pieces of art—some of it real artisan work but not worth a human life. Vula tossed a dozen little sculptures, all gifts from friends and admirers. Eddy was glad to have an excuse to throw out the guitar she’d never learned to play. Treasure had a box of ancient hand-painted dinnerware inherited from her crèche; absolutely irreplaceable, but they went too. Chara threw out her devotional shrine. It was gold and took up most of her mass allowance, but we could fab another.
We even tossed the orang bot. We all liked the furry thing, but it was heavy. Bouche stripped out its proprietary motor modules and tossed the shell. We’d fab another, eventually.
If we’d had time for second thoughts, maybe the decisions would have been more difficult. Or maybe not. People were watching, and we knew it. Having an audience helped us cooperate.
It wasn’t just Jane we were trying to impress. Bouche’s media output was gathering a lot of followers. We weren’t just trapping the drama anymore, we were part of the story.
Bouche monitored our followship, both the raw access stats and the digested analysis from the PR firm she’d engaged to boost the feed’s profile. When the first supply ship backed up to our valve and we began pulling bodybags inside, Bouche whooped. Our numbers had just gone atmospheric.
We were a clown show, though. Eight of us crowded in the isthmus sinus, shuttling bodybags, everyone bouncing around madly and getting in each other’s way. Jane helped sort us out by monitoring the overhead cameras and doing crowd control. Me, I tried not to be an obstruction while making load-balancing decisions. Though we’d never taken on so much weight at once, I didn’t anticipate any problems. But I only looked at strict mathematical tolerances. I’m not an engineer; I didn’t consider the knock-on effects of the sudden mass shift.