Chapter 40
Forty
Holly set the pad on the console. Her voice came out flat. Emptied. “Any of the festival guests could have filed this. Someone who saw the water failure. Someone who felt the pressure shift. Someone who noticed the force field flickering when they left.”
“Could have,” Sam said.
Their eyes met. “It wasn’t Rasker.” Everyone knew where he’d been the night everything went wrong.
“Didn’t say it was.” Sam sighed. “Damn strange, if you ask me.”
“I’m going to double-check something.” Holly pulled out her wrist comm and called Mr. Binn. The lawyer answered on the fourth chime, his voice carrying its usual crisp professionalism.
“Ms. Greene-Moone. How may I assist you?”
“I’m sending you a message I just received from the Way Station Registry. You should have it now. It’s a snap inspection notice prompted by an anonymous complainant. Can you take a look and tell me if this is legitimate?”
A brief pause. “I’m afraid so, yes. Regulation 4.7(c) permits any party to file a complaint alleging operational deficiencies. The identity of the complainant is protected under the registry’s whistleblower provisions. An anonymous filing is a valid trigger for early inspection.”
“Can I challenge it? Delay it?”
“You may file a formal objection if you believe the complaint was filed in error or foul play was involved.” A pause. “Is foul play involved, Ms. Greene-Moone?”
“I…don’t know,” Holly said. “We had a lot of sudden system failures. Too many to be a coincidence.”
Mr. Binn’s voice softened, just slightly. “I’m sorry, Ms. Greene-Moone. I wish I had better news, but the inspection can’t be halted without proof of deliberate sabotage.”
Holly briefly closed her eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Binn.”
She ended the call and stood in the control tower, looking out the observation window at the landing pads below. The force field shimmered unsteadily, its rainbow ripple a visible reminder of everything that was wrong.
“Sam.” She turned to him. “What can we realistically fix in three days?”
Sam didn’t answer immediately. He pulled up a list on his console, the master log of every active failure on the station, and scrolled through it with the deliberation of a man reading a will.
“The force field; I can keep it stable with the bypass. It’s ugly, but it works.
” He scrolled further. “I’ve got a workaround in progress for the air pressure.
Should have that stabilized by tomorrow.
” He paused. “Water system is a problem. The caverns are still flooded. Without draining them, I can’t access the ruptured conduit, and without the conduit, there’s no running water. Inspectors will flag that immediately.”
“The lighting?”
“Replacement relay is a week out, since I had to purchase it with credit. Nothing I can do.”
“The bots?”
Sam shook his head and gave a quick, mournful glance to one of his precious bots, sitting still and lifeless against the wall. “Can’t fix what isn’t broken. They just won’t start. Seems like a software problem, but combing through all that is going to take more time than I’ve got.”
Holly sat down at the console and closed her eyes.
Three days. Even if she drained her personal savings, every nit she had left, it wouldn’t cover the parts and materials needed to bring the station up to code.
And even if she could, the timeline was impossible.
Some of these repairs took weeks, not days.
“If we fail the inspection,” she said, her eyes still closed, “we’re off the registry.”
“Yes.”
“And if we’re off the registry, no travelers find us. No income. No way to fund repairs.” She opened her eyes. “The station dies.”
Sam said nothing. He didn’t need to.
The elevator doors opened behind them, and Holly turned to see Rasker step into the control tower.
He wore his travel clothes, slightly rumpled, and there was a weariness about him that she recognized.
He had been gone since yesterday morning, departed without telling anyone where he was going, and Holly had not had the energy to wonder about it until now.
He’d been disappearing for a day here, half a day there, always returning with the same unreadable expression and his d-pad tucked tightly under an arm.
He helped when he was present. He carried water, he ran diagnostics she asked him to run, he swam the flooded caverns twice more to check conditions.
But something about him had shifted since the festival.
He had not touched her since that night, aside from quick brushes on the arm or pats on the shoulder.
He watched things with an intensity that unsettled her, and she couldn’t tell if he was calculating or concerned.
Both, maybe. He was still a consultant, after all.
And the station he’d been sent to acquire was collapsing in front of him.
“Where were you?” Holly asked. She hadn’t meant it to come out sharp, but it did.
“Following up with something.” He crossed the room, his eyes narrowed at Holly’s and Sam’s exceptionally dark expressions. “What’s happened?”
“See for yourself.” She handed him the d-pad that still displayed the inspection notice.
His jaw tightened as he read. “Not much time,” he murmured.
“Not enough time.” Holly ran her hands through her dirty hair. “We’re in trouble.”
Rasker was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Holly and Sam, and his voice was careful.
Measured. “When I was down in the caverns, I saw debris near the main conduit junction. Twisted metal. Shattered composite. I stand by what I said—it didn’t look like a pipe that failed from age.
It looked like it was blown apart from the inside. ”
Holly stared at him. “An explosion.”
“I’m not an engineer. But that’s what it looked like to me.”
She turned to Sam, even though they’d been over this before. “Could pressure buildup have caused that much damage, or are we looking at a different cause?”
Sam spread his hands. “As I told you before, an old conduit under extreme pressure can rupture violently. It can look like an explosion.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “But the pressure reading I flagged at the festival wasn’t high enough for that kind of eruption. Not on its own.”
“So something else caused it?” Holly asked.
“Maybe,” Sam replied. “Or maybe the conduit was weaker than the specs suggest. There’s no way to know until the caverns are drained and I can examine it.”
“If it was sabotage,” Rasker said, “you can appeal the inspection. File for a delay while an investigation is conducted. It could buy time.”
“My lawyer said the same thing, but we’d need to offer some proof that it was sabotage,” Holly said. “We have none.”
Rasker’s silence was answer enough. The recordings he’d taken in the caverns showed a ruptured conduit in a flooded system. Old pipes. Old station. It looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like: neglect.
“Holly.” Rasker stepped closer, lowering his voice. “I have a lead on Complete Respite’s operations in this sector. If I can establish a connection between their tactics and what’s happening here, it changes the game. It gives you leverage.”
She heard the words, but they arrived muffled, as if traveling through water.
A lead. Leverage. The game. She was so tired.
Her body ached and her eyes burned and the inspection notice sat on the console like a death sentence, and the man she had slept with six days ago was talking about leverage while her station fell apart around her.
“Stop. I can’t, Rasker.” She briefly pressed her fingers to her aching eyes. “I just…can’t.”
“Can’t what?” Rasker shifted. “Holly—”
“I’m sorry. I know you think someone is doing all this, and maybe that’s true, but I’m already down one rabbit hole trying to repair virtually everything, and I—I can’t go down another one. Your conspiracy theories are—”
“Conspiracy theories?” he cut in. “You think I’m making wild speculations?” Dark blue color rose in his cheeks as he flushed.
“No. I don’t know.” Heat, a flash of anger, misdirected for sure, put an edge in her voice.
“I am spread too thin, Rasker. I need to…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
She didn’t know how to finish it in a way that would appease him.
What she needed to do was fix the water system, and the lights, and run a diagnostic on the bots, and restore force field.
And it needed to be done in three days with no nits and no repair parts, and the growing certainty that none of it would be enough was starting to fray her mind. “I need to go.”
She left the control tower. The elevator took her down, and she walked across the dim, cold square to the hotel, through the empty lobby, down the hallway, and into her living unit.
Luv was in standby mode as she charged at her station, but Bean was awake. He lifted his head off the couch when Holly came through the door, and he tracked her with those steady brown eyes.
Holly sat down beside him and he climbed into her lap, turned in a circle, and settled his weight across her thighs.
Holly put her arms around him and held on.
Her thoughts pinged between all the incredible events that had shaped her life over the weeks she’d spent there.
The good, the bad, the absolutely amazing.
She thought about Rasker carrying her through his doorway and how he’d said, only if you want to.
But the last thought that surfaced, the one she had been pushing down for days and made her chest collapse inward like a structure that had finally lost a battle with gravity, was this: I may have to sell this place.
The tears came without warning in a raw, ugly rush that bent her over the dog in her lap. She pressed her face into Bean’s fur and sobbed, and the sound of it filled the small room. Bean held very still beneath her, as he always did when she needed him most.
She cried for a long time. For the station and the people and the future she had been building, piece by piece. For the woman she had been becoming here, braver and freer and more herself than she had been in twelve years, and for the possibility that it wasn’t going to be enough.
When the tears finally slowed, she sat up and wiped her face with the back of her hand. Bean looked up at her, his brown fur wet from her tears, his ears soft and warm.
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
He licked her chin.
Holly sat there with her dog in her lap, the cold pressing in from every side and the clock ticking down to an inspection she couldn’t pass, and she let herself feel the full weight of it. All of it. Without pushing it away or packing it into a quiet pocket of her mind.
Then she took a breath, and another, and another.
Three days.