Chapter 1The Count Is Wrong

Mika Sorel found the error the way she found everything: by not trusting a number somebody else had written down.

The posted figure was ninety days. It was on the bulkhead outside every galley on every ring, printed on good stock in a typeface chosen by someone who had wanted it to look calm. NINETY (90) DAYS OF ATMOSPHERE REMAINING. RESUPPLY SCHEDULED. PLEASE CONTINUE NORMAL DUTIES.

She had read it four hundred times in six weeks and never once done the arithmetic, because she was a welder and the arithmetic was not hers. Then on a Tuesday she was running a seam on the E-ring scrubber housing, and she saw the plate.

Every scrubber had a plate. Manufacturer, serial, rated throughput. Mika had welded on enough of them to know what the numbers meant, and she knew what eleven thousand people breathing looked like as a load, and she stood there with her torch cooling in her hand and worked it through twice.

Then a third time, because the answer was thirty-one.

“Thirty-one days,” she said.

Deck Chief Awuni did not look up from his slate. He had a way of receiving bad news that suggested it was being delivered to a slightly different man, one standing just behind him.

“Ninety,” he said.

“Ninety is the tank figure. Ninety is what’s in the tanks.” Mika put her own slate down on his desk, turned so he could read it. “Six of the eleven scrubbers on E-ring are past service life. Three on D. The rated throughput on the plates isn’t what they’re doing — I pulled the flow logs. We’re not losing air. We’re losing the ability to clean it. Thirty-one days until CO₂ crosses hazard on the occupied rings.”

Awuni looked at the slate for eleven seconds. Mika counted.

“Who else have you shown this to?”

And there it was — the question that told her everything, arriving in the first ninety seconds, before he had asked a single thing about the scrubbers.

“Nobody,” she said.

“Keep it that way until I’ve had it verified.”

“By whom?”

“By people qualified to verify it.”

Mika picked her slate back up. Through the office port behind him, the Kestrel Mercy curved away in both directions, eight kilometres of decommissioned shipyard turning slowly against the dark, every window lit, eleven thousand people inside going about a Tuesday.

“Chief,” she said. “The number on the bulkhead is a promise. If it’s wrong, people are making thirty-one-day decisions on ninety-day information. That’s not a technical problem. That’s every plan anyone on this station is making right now.”

“It’s a technical problem,” Awuni said, “until it’s verified. Then it’s mine.”

She went back to E-ring and welded the seam she had been welding, because it needed welding, and because she had not yet decided what she was going to do.

By shift’s end she had decided.