Macao Station

Chapter Four

‘Come in,’ called Halman’s voice from behind the door. Hearing this, Nik Sudowski hit the pad to open it. It stuck, motors singing treble, near the top of its track. Ducking slightly, he entered the austere grey room, feeling sheepish.

‘How’s it going, Nik?’ asked Halman, pushing aside a datasheet that he had been studying. His stubbled face peered up at Sudowski warily. Halman indicated the chair opposite his own and Sudowski sat in it.

For a moment, his hands twisted nervously in his lap before he managed to still them. ‘Not great, Boss.’

Halman sighed resignedly. Sudowski guessed that whatever he had been looking at on the datasheet had already put him in a bad mood. ‘Spill it,’ he said.

Nik took a deep breath into his skinny chest. He caught sight of his reflection in Halman’s window. His face was deeply lined and drawn, his growing army of wrinkles more pronounced than ever. It wasn’t a great face, he knew, but he had grown to tolerate it, and he supposed everyone else had, too. ‘When is the shuttle due?’ he asked.

‘Should be in the next few days. We had the standard message through from Way Station One a few weeks ago, claiming that the shuttle passed by them on schedule. It shouldn’t be far behind the laser-message, although of course it must be slowing down by now. Why?’

‘It’s that PCB in the air scrubbers — a little thing, really, but one that’s going to be a problem any time soon. We’ve made a liquid-nitro jacket for the chip but it’s on the verge of burning out. Can’t do much else, I’m afraid.’ He suddenly caught a whiff of the distinctive workshop smell that emanated from his own dirty overalls — a bitter mixture of metal and machine-oil.

‘How soon is “any time soon”?’

‘Like any time now, really. As in, for all I know, it’ll die while I’m sat here talking to you.’

Halman looked out of the window, which showed the usual, stable image that most people preferred. Nik’s gaze followed his. The tiny planet Vagar was a cold speck in the distance, Platini an impossibly great distance beyond even that. Such a fragile lifeline. Something groaned vastly, deep in the bowels of the station — a shuddering, metallic sound that startled the two men from their reverie. They looked at each other, fearing the worst, but no alarms went off.

‘Probably just the baler jamming,’ said Sudowski after a pause.

‘I expect the refinery guys are on it. Isn’t there anything we can cannibalise to get the PCB part?’

‘It’s possible. Or maybe my guys can reverse engineer it, bodge together some sort of functional stopgap. Crude would be the best we could do, but it might work for a few days.’

‘Well let’s get everyone we can spare onto it and hope that it doesn’t become a matter of life or death before the shuttle gets here. Keep it quiet, though, okay?’

‘Sure.’

‘And apart from that?’

Sudowski wiped a hand across his face and exhaled deeply. ‘About the same as usual. Trouble with the Kays. The dead-lifter needs replacing, too. The whole control console is gone, as are two of the motors. We’ve had to patch in an auxiliary terminal just to move it out the way.’

‘Well, I’ll certainly add it to the list, but the chances of us getting a new one this side of eternity are pretty slim, I’d say. You’ll have to figure out how to drive it through the auxiliary.’

‘If we can’t, then the ground crew are gonna have a nightmare time. Lina’s old crate sprung a hydraulic leak today.’

Halman laughed, but it wasn’t a particularly humorous sound. ‘Don’t you ever have any good news, Nik?’ he asked, rocking back in his chair and spreading his hands questioningly.

‘No,’ Sudowski admitted. ‘Not often.’

‘Anyways, I have every confidence in you and your team. If anyone can keep the scrubbers going and the Kays flying, it’s you. If you need personnel to move them around by hand, let me know and I’ll find people somehow. But personally I’m expecting that you’ll patch up and make do, as always.’

Nik Sudowski sighed, flattered by the compliment, but subdued by tiredness and the burden of expectation. ‘I can’t promise anything, Boss.’

‘Sure. Well, I’d better let you get on, then, Nik,’ said Halman. Behind him, the asteroid field rotated gently, like a vast cog. The gas trail of a solitary Kay was threading its way through the minefield of rock and ice. Neither man noticed it go.

‘Guess so. See you later. Let me know as soon as the shuttle radios in, would you? Then I can stop panicking.’

‘Of course,’ said Halman.

Sudowski let himself out into the dimly-lit corridor and headed off back towards his office, which was one floor hubwards, or up. Turning a corner, he came across one of his maintenance teams, comprising Alphe Ridenhour and Fionne Sinclair, both of whom were on their backs on the corridor floor and immersed from their waists up in an open wall space. He stopped and coughed politely. Alphe jerked, banging his head on some unseen hazard, and swore. There was an agitated clanging sound and then Alphe twisted his body and his oil-smeared face appeared, complete with look of irritated inquiry, which faded when he saw Sudowski. He combed a hand through his dark, untidy hair.

‘Hi, Boss,’ he said, shuffling out and sitting up. Fionne also wriggled free of her confines, holding a well-worn spanner in one small hand. The knuckles of the hand were skinned and raw, caked with machine oil and blood.

‘What’s up?’ asked Sudowski.

‘Damn water pipes. Failed one-way in the main branch of the hot. There’s boiling water pouring from the ceiling in corridor 146.’

Fionne laughed, lighting up her grubby face. Underneath the dirt she was an unusually pretty young woman — blonde and clear-skinned, handsome bone-structure and slightly upturned nose — though she wore her good looks with complete indifference. ‘The only way we can come at it is from the floor above, of course. But we have to pinch the supply off here or we’ll be boiled alive. We taped the area off, so if you’re heading up you’ll have to detour.’

Sudowski sighed heavily. ‘It’s almost as if Farsight weren’t thinking of us at all when they paperclipped this pile of junk together, eh?’ He found that he was massaging the side of his head with one hand. It was beginning to ache, he realised — subtle, pulsing waves of pain that showed promise of intensifying later.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Alphe. ‘Almost seems that way.’

Fionne began rifling through a heavily patched canvas tool bag. She produced a gunmetal-coloured power clamp as long as her forearm and began to dial settings into it with the ease of long practise. She hefted it meaningfully. ‘We’ll get the bastard,’ she said, and slid back into the dark recess of the wall. Sudowski heard the growl of the power clamp from inside.

‘How long?’ he asked.

Alphe’s face — the face of a country bumpkin, despite the intelligence it concealed — wrinkled in distaste. ‘Ohhh. . . The dreaded question. . .’

‘Ballpark.’

‘By the end of the shift, I guess. But it is a guess.’

‘Thanks, Alphe, that’ll do for me.’ He gave Alphe a nod and turned to continue down the corridor. The voices of the two engineers faded into the distance. He reached his office without passing anybody else, and let himself in.

The room was generously furnished compared to most of the station — two-seat sofa, small meeting table, desk in one corner, pictures on the walls — but somehow the starkness of the underlying structure still showed through, like bones poking through skin. An ugly rust stain that stretched from ceiling to floor in one corner had repeatedly thwarted any attempts to paint over it, showing through again and again with impressive determination. Nobody had been able to find what was causing it, but it was presumably some splitting, slowly failing pipe in one of the hubwards floors, that would eventually show itself by creating some entertaining disaster, much like the one Alphe and Fionne were dealing with at that very moment.

Sudowski went to his desk and sat. He fired up the computer — they were all off by default to prolong the lifespan of their heat-generating components — and opened the parts files. He found the chip, and the related board, that was currently dying in the air scrubbers, and enlarged the schematic, turning it this way and that.

He was rubbing the side of his head again, where the interface chips had been removed. In his previous life, he’d driven plant equipment by neural link on Aitama, in the Platini system. The chips had been taken out when he’d left for Macao, but he still felt their legacy sometimes. More and more, lately, it seemed. It was really beginning to ache now, and the harsh light of the computer screen was making it worse. Maybe he was coming down with something, although transmissible illnesses were rare on board, brought in yearly batches by the supply shuttles.

He pulled up the attached specifications file and ran through it, biting his lip. He began to enter details into the search utility. Nothing. No match. Of course not. He got up, went to the coffee machine, and let it make him its own version of the classic drink, which was basically brown-coloured chemical sludge plus caffeine, then returned to the computer. He set the cup down and began to adjust the parameters of the search, shifting margins and tolerances to find a part — any part — that would do in a pinch. Gradually, the figures he entered grew further and further from the ideals. And then, just as he was about to give up, there it was. It wasn’t a perfect match, of course, but it would — should — do the job.

He pulled the part up and inspected it. He felt reasonably confident that it would do to replace the chip in the scrubbers, if it came to it — if, for example, the shuttle was late, as they sometimes were, and the scrubbers failed. Only problem was that it was a key component of the communications array, and they only had one — the one that was in use.

‘Okay,’ Sudowski said under his breath. ‘I guess that’s good to know.’ He felt like either laughing or crying, maybe both. Instead, he shut the computer off, poured the remaining coffee away, and headed back towards his own quarters and his bed, massaging his head as he went.