Ninety Days of Rust — Chapter 2: Ration Math

The thing nobody tells you about a station is that it runs on the assumption that everyone is wrong at a manageable rate.

Mika had learned this in her first year: the tolerances, the redundancies, the deliberate slack built into every system so that a bad weld or a mislabelled valve or a tired hand at 0400 would cost inconvenience instead of lives. The Kestrel Mercy had been built with beautiful slack. Forty years of decommissioning had spent almost all of it.

She spread the flow logs across her bunk and started on the ration math.

It went like this.

Eleven thousand people. Call it eleven thousand and forty, because the manifest was six weeks stale and manifests only ever ran low. Scrubber capacity, real capacity, measured rather than rated: sixty-two percent of design. Atmosphere volume across the occupied rings, minus the four sections sealed in the third year for reasons that had been posted and then quietly unposted.

Thirty-one days to hazard. Forty-four to incapacity. Fifty-one to the number she did not write down.

Then she did it again with three of the dead scrubbers rebuilt, because that was the question anyone sane would ask second.

Thirty-one became fifty-eight.

She sat back against the bulkhead and looked at that for a long time, because fifty-eight was not survival either — resupply was at ninety, if resupply was real — but fifty-eight was different. Fifty-eight was a number you could work with. Fifty-eight said the problem was not air. The problem was six months of maintenance that had to happen in four weeks, on a station where the maintenance budget had been zeroed in the same memo that promised ninety days.

She needed parts. She needed hands. She needed, specifically, eleven thousand people to know why she was asking.

Awuni had told her to keep it quiet until it was verified.

Mika thought about the typeface on the bulkhead notice, the calm one, chosen by someone who had understood exactly how much a number can be made to feel like a promise.

She got up and went to find Yara Osei, who ran the E-ring galley, who knew everyone, and who had once told Mika that the fastest way to move information on a station of eleven thousand was to tell one cook.