Dark Station

"Dark Sky Stations"

By the time Lee Hriniak arrived back at Apogee from the L2 Outstation, she was feeling the dread of cycling down again. She hadn’t spoken to anyone about the heavy anxiety she had on returning to Earth, as it wasn’t a smart way forward on her career track to admit such a strong psychological barrier directly related to her chosen profession. To jeopardize what little hope she had of digging out of the deep hole she and her family were in by admitting weakness wasn’t a winning play. So few people ever had a chance to win at all that to let her phobia become an issue seemed to Lee like she’d be tapping out before the weight was even on her.

She’d been out at L2 for nearly three months, which put her weightless time almost two weeks over limit for the year, and if her bone density check came up short, she’d be on-world for the foreseeable future, which meant back to cranes and cargo planes for at least the next six months, which meant treading water on bills, as long as interest rates didn’t rise.

It wasn’t that Lee hated gravity, as much as she didn’t like the feeling of weight on top of her, literally or metaphorically. And if she could open up and speak to a psychologist about it, she knew exactly where she’d begin, because whenever Lee came back to Apogee, every time she got on the elevator down to Clearwater the same incident popped into her mind.

Combat training.

Sheila Dunfee had outweighed Lee by forty pounds, and in Lee’s mind, they never should have been paired together, but you can’t opt out of combat training if you want to stay in the military. Sheila had body slammed Lee hard enough to knock the wind out of her lungs, and at that point, Sheila Dunfee could have done anything to Lee—a blood choke, an armbar—anything. Sheila had Lee clinched around the shoulder and neck, and she arched up with her body weight pressing down on Lee’s chest. Lee was too weak to even move her arms to tap out. She was limp and breathless with nearly two hundred pounds of Sheila Dunfee keeping her lungs from inflating, and Dunfee kept driving Lee’s body across the mat so that even though Lee had gone limp, it seemed like she was still resisting. It went on for nearly a minute before the sergeant called time. That weight on her, the heavy sensation, the breathlessness, it kept coming. Gravity. Debt. Cycling back to Earth. It usually took Lee a drink or two at Star Gallery to work up the nerve to get on the elevator and go down. If it hadn’t been for the Space Force’s strict regulations on time in low-G, Lee would’ve been tempted to stay off world indefinitely, even if intellectually she knew it would eat her bones outside in and her kidneys inside out.

The Star Gallery was oddly empty for the time—mid-afternoon Eastern Standard. There would usually be officers or commercial pilots or private captains in the lounge, but it was almost empty, so Lee took up a coveted spot at the outward glass wall with a perfect view of the rounding sapphire globe curving into the pitch-black backdrop of space. There was a small team of walkers clipped into a table behind her, but other than that and the waiter and the bartender, no one. The weather was clear below, so the Gulf Coast beneath her looked a pristine, bejeweled blue all the way to the Texas Coast. A good scene for the cold margarita Lee was nursing. Her first drink in three months, since deploying to the L2 Outstation.

Lee was scrolling through the JABR app on her glasses, which had quite a few more options here on Apogee than she could view out at the L2. There were the usual commercial crane shifts in the dockyards, and all the commercial cargo flights were off-limits for at least two weeks while she acclimated, which meant that at best she might be able to inch ahead in the four weeks before redeploying if her bone density scans came out okay.

Then, more out of curiosity than intent, she cleared out the zero-G filter to see what she’d be missing out on. And there it was, the jackpot.

Lee’s first impulse was to look deeper into the specifics to see why the cap was so high on the contract. Mercury was part of the answer, sure, and, the diverse array of necessary skills was pretty specialized. But she wasn’t the only space jockey who checked all those boxes, and two million for a twenty-day turnaround was insanely high. There had to be a complication. Did that matter though? Two million was enough to erase her dad’s medical debt and get her brother Damon back on level ground. And if the Space Force grounded her on the zero-G violation? It wouldn’t matter if she could pull three years’ salary in three weeks. It wasn’t just tempting, it was stupid not to look into it.

“Who’s it through?” Lee asked the assistant.

“J. Heller through Fallon Galaxie.”

“Who are they, Frenchies?”

“Industrial metallurgy and mining, ground-based in Antigua.”

“Antigua? Tax haven?”

The app bonked in her ear, as though she’d gotten the wrong answer on a quiz show.

“Okay then, who are the principals?”

The app ran down a list of finance firms and board members, and it was a pretty diverse group of multinational individuals and financial backers. What it looked like to Lee after a little investigation was that they’d poached a division of Hatton Solaris as a way to get a foothold in the mining game without staking the capital out front to build from scratch, a bit like a budget airline buying older planes from the big boys and trying to squeeze as many operating years out of them as they could. It didn’t explain the two million cap, but the job seemed legit.

“Put a line in for me,” Lee told the app. “I’ll talk to them from Clearwater if they’re interested.”

Lee finished up the margarita and began to think about getting on the next lift down. She felt better about heading down planetside with a drink in her system and a major score to daydream about on the ride down.

By the time Lee got back on base outside Clearwater it was early evening. Her mother had cooked, and Damon was in. He looked heavier but decent, all things considered. He’d shattered his tibial plateau so severely on a jump that the Army doctors had nearly opted to amputate his leg. It led to a knee replacement that had gone terribly wrong. Between his back and knee, he’d been at Walter Reed for nearly four months, and if that wasn’t tough enough luck, the drone fleet pilot qualification Lee had taken out a loan to put Damon through had become all but obsolete when the Squadfire AI took over all but the most specialized commercial opportunities.

These days, just seeing Damon off the sofa was a welcome sight, even if he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.

“You look frail, Lee,” Damon said about halfway through dinner.

“First day’s tough, D,” she said.

“I mean in general. Not that we need to see any more of you around here, but you should take some more ground shifts.”

Lee smiled. “You’d get sick of me in a week.”

Lee was so tired she was nodding in and out for much of the meal. As much as she hated the transition back to gravity, it was always worth it to see her family.

By the time she’d finished eating, Lee didn’t have much strength to move. She needed help from Damon to get up the stairs to her bed.

“You’ve lost twenty pounds,” he said, all but carrying her up the stairwell.

“You’re just getting stronger,” Lee said.

“Both can be true,” Damon said. “Earthside.”

That word was the last thing she remembered on her first night back. That, and the subtle heat of the headaches setting in.

Jean-D’Arte Heller called at 7:30 the following morning. Lee’s head was pounding, and her bones were aching. She put on her buzzing glasses and hit the audio switch.

“Who is this?” Lee said, and as she said it, she could hear that her voice sounded like hell.

“J.D. Heller with Fallon Galaxie.”

“Oh,” Lee said. “The Mercury thing.”

“I beg your pardon but I cannot pronounce your name.”

“It’s Hriniak,” Lee said. “But call me Lee. I’m off duty.”

“Okay, Lee. I’m Jean, and we were very interested in your CV. You seem to have all the qualifications, which is somewhat rare.”

“Two million dollars rare? Not that I’m arguing, but it’s more than I usually get paid on a single contract.”

“It is a complicated job, and we’ve had some trouble filling it.”

“At that cap? I’m sure you could have your pick or hire a team for that matter.”

“We did, and that was the problem—getting a team to coordinate, and then when they failed, we decided to look for one person who could do everything.”

Lee was beginning to wake up. She sat up in bed.

“I don’t even know what it is,” Lee said. “I know it’s Mercury, which is tight on time, but doable if we get things in motion.”

“I’d need you to sign an NDA before getting into the details.”

“That’s not exactly standard,” Lee said.

“Nor is the cap, nor the work,” Jean said. “But you can evaluate that for yourself, when you get the details.”

“I’ll take a look at it as soon as I have a cup of coffee. It’s my first day down.”

“We’d like to get you out again as soon as tonight if that’s possible.”

“Really? No interviews or anything?”

“We looked into your commercial record yesterday, Lee. My superiors only had one concern, or I guess it’s a logistical question.”

“Shoot.”

“You were three months on L2, so I presume it’s better the Air Force doesn’t find out about an unsanctioned contract like this?”

“That’s correct.”

“So, logistically, we want to be clearing through Osaka then?”

Lee sighed. “I don’t exactly want to sit on a plane for fourteen hours, but yeah.”

“Okay. We understand each other,” Jean said. “I will forward the paperwork.”

“I have a med check this afternoon,” Lee said. “I can move it up if it’s a problem.”

“My job is to make the problems go away, Lee. I’ll check in with you later today. Once we get your commitment, then we’ll talk about all that.”

“Really,” Lee said. “I mean, great. I’ll get back to you shortly.”

Lee switched off her glasses and rolled out of bed. She’d have to put on a brave face for the docs at the base, but again, the prospect of a job that could make five years’ worth of financial problems evaporate? That was worth rolling out of bed and suffering a headache for.

It was almost like there wasn’t a decision in it at all, at least one that Lee seemed to make consciously. Her checkup didn’t go well. In addition to being underweight and weak, she had an untimely nosebleed that the doctor made a big deal of and demanded to see Lee again in four weeks. She wasn’t grounded yet, but Lee could feel it coming.

Jean booked her out of Miami that evening on a hypersonic to Osaka. Lee mixed a painkiller and a couple glasses of prosecco before takeoff, slept the whole way to Japan, and when she regained her senses again, she was already halfway up the Space Lift. Had she even looked at the file? She couldn’t remember for sure but probably, yes. She figured she could get deep enough into the details on the way. There was a last call on forty minutes to Uchukaigan, and Lee called for some warm sake to hopefully calm her nerves. She realized it wasn’t just the drawdown and the stress catching up with her, she was still on L2 time, which was Greenwich, and she’d been trying to transition to Florida time, and now she was in Osaka, heading to the Moon, then to Mercury. Sake couldn’t possibly confuse the issue any further, especially with four more dry weeks awaiting.

Lee slept for the first sixteen hours of the transit. Then, after two cups of coffee she felt good enough to dive into the Fallon files. Near as she could tell, Fallon’s crawlers—really their entire mining operation—had been reliant on Hatton Solaris’s and A & A’s arrays to supply them with power. That arrangement had been sufficient to keep Fallon operating, but it had always come at a premium cost and was a limiting factor on the size of their fleet. So Fallon’s first major investment in capital on Mercury was on their own array so they’d no longer have to pay for power or rely on others for it. Four months into operating, though, Fallon’s Amity Array had gone down. Now they were not only reliant on Hatton Solaris again, but Solaris was no longer contractually obligated to service Fallon under the original agreement, so Fallon was getting bled dry on energy costs by their competitors. They’d save the two million they were paying Lee in a week if she could get their array up again.

According to the files, the original shielding on the array’s control unit had a manufacturing flaw, which caused its hardware to gradually fail—processors, transceivers, memory. Mama needed a whole new brain.

Lee could see why the job had been such a challenge to coordinate. The array was in a stable orbit for the time being, but it basically sat in a stream of solar wind at the outer edge of the sun’s corona—more or less. The more Lee read about the problem, the more she likened it to trying to change clothes in a downpour while staying dry.

After looking at the problem for a couple days en route, Lee was confident she could fix it. She kept her nose in the files, kept to herself and her quarters, read, studied the systems, and developed five distinct operations, ranging from lower likelihood of success and lower risk, to higher likelihood of success and higher risk. She only had a six-day window aboard Mercury Horizon once she got there, so Lee was going to make every last minute of the transit count.

By the time the Striker arrived at the common station at Mercera, Lee was feeling downright sanguine about life. Apart from the minor nagging feeling that she might get caught off-world and grounded, she was hopeful. One of her five fixes would work, and in the meantime, there was nothing she enjoyed more than floating in space, working on a challenging problem, and operating specialized gear in ways no one else could. As a kid, she’d raced drones as a hobby, and this work was like an extension of that with the difficulty level hyped-up by a factor of ten and a coolness factor of fifty.

The airlock disembarking at Mercera was cramped, but out this far everyone knew how to handle themselves in zero-G, so there wasn’t nearly the long wait in the bunch-up that there usually was at Luna, Apogee, or Uchukaigan. The second her head protruded into the causeway proper, a man with an eastern European accent began talking to her.

“You’re military, yes? Here for Fallon, yes?”

“Yes,” Lee said. “You’re with them?”

“Let me show you down to short shuttle. I am Dodek. I tell you some things.”

“I’m Lee,” she said.

As anxious as she was to get started, Lee was grateful to have the guide, even on a station as small as Mercera.

“I have wait for you here, Lee.”

“I appreciate it.”

Dodek pulled his way down the hallway to an area that seemed to be away from the main causeway. Lee hadn’t been to Mercury before, but she had a good enough sense of stations that she felt like Dodek was leading her the wrong way. He kept looking around and then finally back over his shoulder.

He began to talk softly. “The sound carries in the causeway, you see. If you sign same papers I sign before coming, you cannot talk much and I cannot talk much, Lee, no?”

“I think I’m understanding you.”

“You must understand this. Two things. First is nothing here works as rated. Range is hundred thousand kilometers, you can count on ten thousand, no more. Solar wind is bitch out there. Screw all work. Second is that you have right,” and he pulled Lee by the shoulder closer to him and looked her dead in the eyes and pointed to her chest; “you have obligation and right to return to your family. That is most important. I cannot say specific,” he said now looking over his shoulder both ways, “but they do not respect that. Be safe. Be so safe, Lee. Go home to your family. Is first thing. Is only thing.”

“Okay,” she said. “I don’t have any intention of doing otherwise.”

“You are military,” he said. “So you know safety. Is no different in private work. Do not let them say otherwise.”

“I won’t,” she said.

“I wish you best of luck, Lee and safety. Safety. Short shuttle is this way. And you have never seen me, yes?”

“Seen who?” Lee said.

“Very good,” Dodek said. “I never see you too.”

Lee found the encounter more than a little unsettling. She’d never had an experience even approaching it. Something had rattled Dodek, but she hadn’t talked to him for long enough to take a measure of him. All she knew was that he had seemed sincere.

Javier, the pilot for the short shuttle was much friendlier. He jokingly asked Lee if she wanted to fly, assuming she wasn’t a pilot herself.

“You can take a nap if you like,” she joked back, gesturing toward the controls. “I wouldn’t mind taking us on a little detour to the array. Never hurts to have a closer look.”

“Oh, mama. You want to cook us alive? I’d like to have kids someday, you know. Shielding’s not so good on this bucket.”

“No?”

“No, no, no. I’m going to take the controls.”

Javier flew the hop out to the dark little deadstation the Fallon Galaxie files had referred to as Mercury Horizon. The tiny station amounted to a small cluster of pre-fab space pods with an airlock on either side and a bundle of antennae on both top and bottom, a modest worksite that reminded Lee of the replica of the old ISS at the Museum of Space Flight on Apogee.

Javier docked the short shuttle like he’d flown the route a thousand times.

“You get to know Pierce real fast,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you, but I got a few supply runs down to the surface from all what the Striker brung with it. Good luck with the work.”

Lee thanked him and hopped into the airlock. Before long, she was aboard Mercury Horizon with no way off and a difficult task ahead.

Once inside, she tried to introduce herself to Pierce, who wore an indifferent gaze on his face and a Canadian patch on his jumpsuit. It was a first for Lee to meet a Canadian who was both impolite and seemingly completely devoid of a personality. When she said, “I’m Lee,” he just said, “I’ve read your CV.” And when she asked if there were quarters, he told her that Fallon didn’t bring her to Mercury to sleep. She shrugged and got to work inspecting the gear.

There were twelve decent IE drones, and there was a diverse collection of transceivers and repeaters. The inventory looked pretty similar to what she’d seen in the files, so she told Pierce that she was going to test the gear, unless he had more accurate range data he wanted to report to her.

“Do you have reason to doubt the specs?” he asked.

She was tempted to say she’d bumped into Dodek at Mercera.

“Just my instincts,” she said, “And the solar wind.”

“The sooner you get that out of the way, the sooner you can get to work,” he said.

So, within the first hour of arriving, Lee was testing the drones in teams of three with a repeater in trail position in case she lost the signals, and true almost exactly to Dodek’s warning, the signals got wonky at about a tenth their rated range. It wasn’t that they didn’t respond, it was just that the interference corrupted the signal, delaying the controls.

Scenario One collapsed before Lee even had a chance to attempt it. Lee had drawn up the first attempt for how the repair should unfold in a perfect world. The drones would attach magnetically to the shield, and Lee would run the swarm downstream behind the shield, carrying the quarter arm and the new hardware. Then she would open the array and replace the hardware using the shielded quarter arm.

None of that turned out to be realistic. As the drones periodically lost signal, they fell out of sync, which meant Lee risked the shield getting ahead of the hardware and the quarter arm, frying both the new parts and the only tool she could use to install them. Lee spent her whole first day just mapping out where in the process equipment became unreliable or failed altogether.

Scenario Two involved an innovation Lee had picked up from a clever engineer on Allegis, who liked to have all his tools at hand. He used to use an assortment of conventional magnets and a loose sheet of hull plating to lay out everything. Lee figured she could do something similar to shield the two repeaters and generate a steadier signal, even in the heavy solar wind. That didn’t fail so much in principle as in practice. The signals got through, but again, when she began to test the quarter arm, the signal was patchy. It would cut in and out, and replacing hardware required a smooth, delicate touch on the arm.

By the end of day two, Lee decided she’d need to skip Scenario Three altogether. And whenever Pierce came to get updates on her progress, she got the sense that he was just waiting for her to wind up at a place further down the road that he already knew and she had yet to discover. Like she was retreading the work of the previous teams and possibly Dodek, and things would be so much easier if she were just told what the hell she was dealing with.

“I’m going to need the short shuttle,” she told Pierce. “I can’t run these instruments from here.”

“It’s not rated,” he said.

“I’m not taking it all the way out there. I don’t particularly have a death wish, but I would actually like to fix the array.”

Pierce shrugged. “Can you fly it?”

“I can fly just about anything.”

“Javier won’t be back for another six hours. So be prepared for the moment he arrives. You’re down to three days, Hriniak.”

“I’m well aware,” Lee said.

The ugliness of the scenario was beginning to set in for Lee. She could only see one real scenario that would end with a functioning array, and that involved moving the Amity Array into the penumbra behind Mercury, repairing it, and then repositioning it afterward. Given the delicate nature of the solar panels and the catchment structure, that would take weeks if not months and would cost millions in lost operating revenue and contracting flight specialists to execute a rescue at that scale.

Lee insisted to Pierce that she needed Javier to fly the short shuttle while she operated the quarter arm. She guessed that Pierce allowed it because it was an aggressive step forward.

Lee flew the hop out to the edge of the penumbra, stopping the shuttle just outside the leading edge of the solar wind.

“Ever been out there yourself?” she asked Javier, “to the array?”

“I shouldn’t say.”

“With Dodek? Or with the team before him?”

“You trying to get me fired?”

“I’m trying to fix the array. How far did Dodek get? He went out there with the shuttle, didn’t he? You don’t have to say anything,” Lee said. “You can blink once for yes and twice for no.”

Javier laughed. “What are we doing out here if it seems like you know?”

“I need to know a few more things about this situation,” Lee said.

“I can’t tell you anything. I’ve been told.”

“I know, but you can speculate, like if I was to ask you, Javier, what do you think my odds are of getting the quarter arm to be functional from this distance?”

“I see, I see. You mean functional or useful?”

“I need it useful.”

“Then I speculate you’d need to get closer. A lot closer.”

“And what would you speculate my chances would be, say, situating the shuttle in front of the array?”

Javier shrugged.

“That good, huh?”

Lee examined Javier’s eyes.

“Dodek was a capable operator?” Lee said. “As good or better than me?”

“I don’t really know you, ma’am, and I don’t know nobody named Dodek.”

“Please, don’t call me ma’am, Javier. It’s Lee. And the only thing I can’t figure out is why the secrecy. If Fallon is losing money every day, why waste two days letting me spin my wheels instead of telling me what the situation really is?”

“I really couldn’t say, Lee,” Javier said.

“You’re really uncomfortable with this,” Lee said. “I can tell you don’t much like what’s going on here. What the hell am I missing?” she said to herself more than Javier.

“He got it open, didn’t he? That’s the only thing I can figure. I’ll bet that quarter arm couldn’t get the old hardware out without torquing the array out of position.”

“I can’t say nothing. Didn’t say nothing.”

Lee sighed. “I know it’s not you, but Jesus, this is some cold-blooded shit right here.”

“I don’t want nothing to do with this. I just fly supplies, fly people. That’s all I wanna do.”

“I understand,” Lee said. “It’s okay. We’re going to stay out here for a while, make a show of it.”

From then on, Lee went through the motions, executing the scenario she’d laid out for Pierce, getting to know Javier, and expecting the failure that ultimately came several hours later. She’d pieced it together, thought it all through. Poor Javier had been told to keep his mouth shut while Pierce had been running what amounted to a psy-op on Lee. There was one way to fix the array, and she could see it plain as day now—a spacewalk, out there in the solar wind, using the additional shielding as an umbrella. She could do it too, she thought. That’s what Dodek had been talking about, and if he’d never waited around for her, she’d likely have come to the same conclusion in another day or so. Then, with the clock ticking and the pressure on, she would have considered it organically.

Everything made sense now. The absurdly high cap, the NDA, the secrecy. Fallon Galaxie couldn’t advertise that job, but financially, this move versus the hundreds of millions they were losing by having a dead array lying derelict in the solar wind? So, what did they think she’d gamble her life on? Two million dollars. It was a good number. Some actuary somewhere had chosen it well. Two million was just small enough to be plausible and just large enough to gamble a life on, and Fallon had doubtless looked as much into Lee’s family’s debt profile as her CV and knew not only that Lee could do the walk, that she probably would do the walk. And if she died, they could say it was her crazy idea anyway. Fallon would report that Pierce advised her against such a risky proposition. Lee couldn’t imagine a human being had thought up the scenario, but as much as she wanted to believe that some diabolical AI was at the bottom of it, there were enough humans down the line who’d set it in motion that absolution went barely as far as Javier by her reckoning.

When they got back to the station, Pierce wanted a report, the next step, Lee’s plan of action. She told him she had to think.

She did think. Two million dollars was still two million dollars. Business was still business, even if it was an evil bastard of a corporation shelling out the money. Lee figured she owed it to herself to spend the rest of the day planning out the walk as meticulously as though she’d already opted to do it, and then she could weigh the pros and cons and sleep on it.

After several hours of consideration, Lee was convinced she could pull it off. In her mind, it was a go. But still, she told Pierce she’d update him after a few hours’ sleep, and after sleeping on it, she’d changed her mind.

She couldn’t get the thought of Damon, half-crippled and in constant pain, pulling her up the stairs to her bedroom. What would he do if it went wrong? He and mom would get thrown off base. There’d be no benefits paid out on a death that happened on some unsanctioned contract off-world against regulations. Then her thoughts spiraled downward. Ninety percent, Lee kept telling herself, but what about the ten? What happens then?

“I’m not doing it,” she told Pierce. “I’ve figured this whole thing out, and I don’t appreciate it.”

He played dumb. “Figured out what?”

“You want me to do a spacewalk and fix it. I’m not doing it. It’s too damn risky.”

“You are contracted to fix the array, Sergeant Hriniak. No one said anything about a spacewalk, though, except you.”

“Look. I told you, I know what you’re up to, and I don’t appreciate it. We’re done here.”

“We could be done. Fine. That’s your decision. But Fallon Galaxie has incurred considerable expense bringing you out here, and you’ve failed to deliver on your end of the contract. If you fail to make a good-faith effort, we may be left with little choice but to try to recover those expenses. That’s not to speak of the added cost in delays to a return to full operating capacity.”

“Are you threatening to sue me?”

“That’s not a decision for me to make,” Pierce said. “But our legal division has been known to be aggressive in circumstances like this.”

“You people are evil, my God!”

“Let’s not be overly contentious about this. This is a business contract, and we expect you to fulfill it. Far be it from me to offer advice to an intelligent person such as yourself, but at this point there are simply two pathways forward for you, sergeant: the first, where you fulfill the contract and get paid in full for your services; the second, where you risk litigation, legal expenses, and tarnishing a promising military career in the process. I know what I would choose if I were in your position.”

Lee took a deep breath. “You need to get me off this station right now, Pierce. Call Javier and get me out of here now.”

Lee shut the hatch to the third pod, and she focused on controlling the building anger that was boiling inside her.

The shuttle ride over to Mercera was quiet. Javier kept shaking his head. He told her he was sorry.

“It’s not you,” Lee said. “I know it’s not you. I wish you better than this, Javier. I really do.”

On Mercera, Lee didn’t have any idea what to do with herself. Striker wasn’t due back till the following day. She paid for treadmill time, put on some music and walked as much as she could tolerate. She’d need to get as strong as possible for when she got back. She found a quiet corner at the far end of the causeway and did her best to remain inconspicuous through the night. She had the sense that everyone must know what a sucker she’d been to get dragged out here by those evil hucksters.

In the evening, Lee received a text from Aeris letting her know that her return ticket aboard Striker had been canceled. It was the first salvo meant to rattle her cage. She still had twenty-four hours to go down the other path. She could fix the array in six. Or, she could put another thirty thousand dollars on credit to get back to Uchukaigan and figure out how to get back to Florida on her own from there. A lump in her throat began to build and the thought of the cost of her ticket had her angry and terrified, stuck, hungry, powerless, and waiting. She spent a long, cold, sleepless night of doubt in the causeway aboard Mercera.

In the morning, she pulled together enough credit to get back home and spent the rest of the morning on the treadmill until Striker arrived.

Lee did her best on the way back to Earth to exercise as much as she could tolerate. She got in as much treadmill time as she was allowed and did band work and stretching. But all that, she knew, was a poor substitute for four weeks on the ground. Even if she got back in time, she knew she was going to fail her physical. That was out of her control, though. All Lee could do was put her head down and work.

As bad as everything had gone on Mercury, on the way back Lee did everything she could think to get her head right. She knew a reckoning was coming, and she’d prepared herself to take her lumps like an adult and own it. She still had skills, and she still had her life to live. Yes, she still had all that debt to deal with, but there’s a way back from debt. There’s no way back from dead. It had been too risky, and damn them for putting her in that position.

It was a long eleven days getting right with herself.

When the shuttle from Luna finally docked at Uchukaigan, Lee should have been expecting something. She was so focused on figuring out how to get home, though, and once again dreading cycling down to gravity, that Fallon Galaxie was the last thing on her mind. A young Japanese woman with a perfect American accent was waiting for her at the gate, saying simply, “Technical Sargent Lee Hriniak?”

And Lee said yes.

“You’ve been served.”

And the filings came through to her glasses. It was a blow, yes, but Lee told herself that she’d known it was coming. Get home. Get home, Lee, she told herself. One thing at a time. She resolved not to even open the files until after she reported for duty, but the ride down got the better of her. She could feel the weight again. The debt, the gravity, the sense of loss for the terrible Mercury fiasco. Lee’s anxiety overcame her resolve. She had to look.

She figured she was looking at about double her ticket price. She’d fight it, but that would cost legal fees too. When she opened the files, she couldn’t believe her eyes. It wasn’t just the thirty thousand one-way trip to Mercury or the hypersonic to Osaka and the trip up to Uchukaigan. Those costs were in there, of course, but they were the sugar on top. Fallon Galaxie was suing her for thirteen-point-five million dollars for “failing to provide contracted services, resulting in the delay of business operations,” and “over-representing her ability to complete necessary contracted technical deep-space operations.”

Thirteen million dollars.

Lee’s first reaction was to laugh. It was a laughable amount of money for a military brat. That was tycoon money. Socialite money. Tech mogul money. Lee would have to live to two hundred to ever be able to pay that back, and she’d be damned if she paid Fallon Galaxie a dollar. She was angry, tired, and more than anything, she felt heavy. She needed a helping hand from the porter getting to her feet once the space lift had settled at ground level.

Lee walked out of the Grand Concourse at the OSL and was overcome by gravity. Lee felt her chest get heavy and her legs beginning to fail her. She happened to be just outside a private lounge, and she made a line for the nearest chair. She didn’t care who the chairs belonged to. It felt again like she had a big bully on her chest pressing the life out of her, and there was no tapping out, no referee to save her, no drill sergeant to call time.

A moment after Lee sat, several people approached her and began to speak to her in Japanese. She didn’t understand, but she knew what they were saying. She knew that wherever she was, she wasn’t supposed to be sitting there. One woman asking nicely turned into three women pointing and telling her she had to get up. One of them even tried to take her by the wrist and pull her out of the big leather chair. Then two Japanese men in suitcoats came over.

“Just leave me alone,” Lee said, and it was the sound of her own voice that set her off, the weakness of it. She sounded utterly defeated. She had this bizarre, rather meta moment of clarity in which she realized that this was truly the lowest point in her life, and she had the sense that it didn’t really matter what they did to her, she couldn’t possibly feel any worse even if the Japanese police dragged her out of that lounge kicking and screaming.

Lee Hriniak decided she wasn’t moving.

The five people surrounding her began to try to pull her up.

“Don’t touch me!” Lee stated. “Do not touch me. Get your hands off me.”

She didn’t have the strength to fight them, but she decided to fight nonetheless. The alternative was to turn into a blubbering mess, and she’d be damned if she let Fallon Galaxie do that to her. Lee was preparing to kick the man closest to her in the kneecap.

“Kanojo o hanatte oite!” she heard a voice shout. “Stand back from her.”

The five people surrounding her froze.

“Ima!” the woman speaking said, and the lounge attendants and the security guards scattered.

“You’re American,” the woman stated as though she knew it as fact. “Military, right?”

“How could you tell?”

“Backed into a corner and you’re still fighting.”

“Lost battle,” Lee said. “Better to go down with the ship.”

“Where you coming back from, let me guess, Lieutenant?”

Lee took a deep breath. “Tech Sergeant, on my way back to Florida by way of Mercury.”

“You came down the wrong lift?”

Lee shrugged.

The woman, who looked about fifteen years Lee’s senior, was dressed like an executive and carried herself like she owned the place. The moment Lee said Mercury, she shook her head.

“Tell me about Mercury, sergeant,” she said. “And don’t skimp on the details.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Lee said. “I signed an NDA, I’m getting sued, and I don’t have a lawyer.”

“You happen to be looking at a damn good lawyer,” the executive said. “I want the details.”

Lee took a deep breath, looked the woman in the eyes, and nodded. She started from the beginning and told the executive the whole story, from her service to her family’s debt to the jackpot contract, the situation on Mercury, the psy-op they’d run on her—everything. At some point while she was talking, Lee began to take in her surroundings and realized that she was seated in the front-facing executive lounge of A & A’s Astronautics division, and she was sharing trade secrets with one of Fallon Galaxie’s direct competitors in a way that probably constituted industrial espionage. At that point, Lee didn’t care, though. Fallon could go to hell.

The executive sat there, shaking her head at points in Lee’s story, seemingly holding back anger. Lee punctuated the narrative with the magnitude of the lawsuit and the fact that she had less than six hours to report for her medical in Clearwater and that she barely had the strength to stand.

“Well, I’ll say this for you, sergeant, you can take one on the chin,” the woman said. “If I were in your shoes, I’m not sure I’d be handling it as well as you are.”

“I don’t feel like I’m handling it all that well.”

“I’m glad you stopped by,” the woman said. “I’m sure you’re aware of where you are, and I know you’re experienced enough up there to realize it’s a real small world out there right now. I know exactly who put you in that position—apart from you, of course—and I know why they did it. Fallon is actually in litigation because one of the sub-contractors for the Amity Array screwed up on manufacturing the shielding, and it wasn’t Fallon’s mistake. That doesn’t give them license to treat you like disposable inventory, but it explains the motivation anyway.

“I can’t make most of your problems go away, Lee. Your family debt, your physical condition—I mean, you’re going to fail your physical. That’s why I came over in the first place. I saw you walking up and I didn’t think you’d even make it to the chair.

“I can however make a couple of your bigger problems go away. Fallon will continue to be dependent on our array until they pony-up the money to fix that power supply properly, and quite frankly, we’re under no obligation to sell energy to our competitors—you get my meaning?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’ll kill the lawsuit, Lee, and I’ll get you back to Clearwater.”

“Really?” Lee said. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Because it’s a small world up there still, at least for the time being, and you strike me as a better friend to have than not.”

Lee couldn’t help it and began to cover her eyes with her hands.

“Stop that,” the executive said. “This isn’t the time or the place. Keep that private, sergeant.”

Lee took a deep breath and composed herself. “What can I do to repay you?”

“I’m going to call you someday, Lee. Someday soon. I want you to take the call.”

The woman sent her credentials through to Lee’s glasses.

“Oh, and I want you to have a drink with me on the day I cut Vivienne Heitmeier’s throat, in the business sense, of course. Hell, I’ll fly you out.”

 Lee was about to ask who Vivienne Heitmeier was, but then she realized. She’d been the mastermind at Fallon Galaxie—the one who’d set Lee’s life’s worth at two million dollars.

“Thank you, Florence,” Lee said.

“It’s Flor,” the executive said. “Thank you for your service, sergeant. I’m a military brat myself, and I’ll be damned if I let some German Frenchie get away scot-free after treating an American servicewoman like she treated you.

“It’s coming.”

Lee shook Flor’s hand gratefully.

A few minutes after Flor left Lee sitting in that big leather chair, a cart pulled up and a very polite porter helped Lee aboard his cart. She rode first class back up to Uchukaigan, was ferried in a private shuttle over to Apogee, and rode down to Clearwater, where, at the base of the Florida Space Ladder, there was a limousine waiting to take Lee to her doctor’s appointment on the base.

Per doctor’s orders, Sergeant Lee Hriniak would be grounded for the next six months. Nearly simultaneous to the issuance of the orders, Lee received notice of payment for twenty-two days contract work, a reimbursement for her return leg of the Mercury voyage, and notice that the lawsuit against her had been dropped. Shortly after that she received a carefully worded apology that admitted no fault, categorizing the Mercury affair as a “dreadful misunderstanding” in the legal department. The note was signed Vivienne Heitmeier, Fallon Galaxie.

A small, small world up there, Lee thought, with some good people still in it, and she went home to her mother and brother grateful, exhausted, and for the moment ever so slightly lighter.