Respite Protocol

The cargo lifter had been complaining for the better part of an hour before it actually quit on them. Anna Cosgrove had learned to read machines the way she read children, by the tone of the noises rather than the words, and the tone had been going bad since the second haul. Byron, who understood machines at a deeper and more argumentative level, had insisted it had one more run in it. He was right, technically. It had exactly one more run in it, and it used that one to stop dead five meters above the yard with a lurch that Anna felt all the way up her spine.

She grabbed the crate of nutrient paste before it went over the rail, which was instinct more than sense, since the crate weighed about as much as a sleeping cat and contained forty sealed bars of the stuff that would survive reentry. Still, her arms wrapped around it and she stood there hugging it like it was a toddler, which told her something about where her head was at that evening.

Byron, meanwhile, was cursing at the console. Not swearing creatively, the way some men did, but in short flat bursts between commands, the way he always talked to equipment that had disappointed him. He had the diagnostic panel open and his hands moving over the guts of it with a confidence Anna remembered from a decade of watching those same hands fix things around their house. Their old house. The house she no longer lived in, a point she had to keep reminding herself of these days.

"Stabilizer's fried," he said, without turning around. "Fried fried. Not the kind of fried you fix with a clip and a prayer."

Anna set the crate down on the deck and lowered herself onto it, because sitting on crates was a habit from her twenties that had never left. "So we're stuck."

"We're stuck." He said it the way he delivered other bad news, which was flatly and without any softening, because Byron had never believed in sugar. "Board's scorched through the regulator circuit. I can bypass the lift call, maybe, but not the stabilizers. Without stabilizers we dangle at five meters all night and I don't trust the cables not to creep."

The five meters were the whole problem, Anna thought. Five meters was nothing. A person could jump five meters onto dirt and walk away sore but whole. But the lifter was rated for four hundred kilos of cargo and a pilot strapped into the seat, and letting two forty-somethings drop out of a bucket on a cable was the kind of decision that got maintenance techs written up. Byron was a lot of things, several of them still annoying to her, but he was not a man who cut corners on load ratings. It was one of the reasons she had married him at thirty-one, and one of the reasons the marriage had eventually felt like living inside a safety manual. Both things could be true at once. She had learned that over the last three years.

"So morning shift brings a part," she said.

"Morning shift brings a part. Regulation 4 stabilizer board, they keep two in stores at the geothermal plant. Somebody signs it out, walks it over, I swap it in, twenty minutes of work." He finally turned around, wiping his hands on a rag that had been gray since before either of them were born, or so it looked. "You're gonna be late, though. Kids."

The word landed where he knew it would land, and to his credit he did not pretend it hadn't. That was one of the strange courtesies left over from the marriage, that they both knew exactly which words to aim and never aimed them at each other on purpose.

Anna picked up the comm handset from the wall bracket and keyed the kindergarten channel. The settlement was small enough that everyone knew everyone's channels by heart, which was either community or surveillance depending on your mood that day.

"Ridgebreak tier-care, this is Anna."

The head teacher came back in her usual tone, which was the tone of a woman who had raised four children of her own and considered any number below eight to be a quiet night. "Anna, hey. You're still at the plant?"

"Stuck in the lifter. Mechanical trouble. I'll be late, maybe very late."

"Take your time. We're fine over here. Had the kids helping me shell beans, which mostly means they're eating beans, but they're happy."

"Is Tomas okay?" Anna asked, and hated how fast the question came out.

There was a pause on the line, the short pause of a woman deciding how honest to be. "He's fine. He's a little wound up tonight, kept asking when you were coming. He's got his blanket and he's camped by the window looking out at the plant lights, but he's fine. Fed, dry, no fevers."

"Tell him I'm coming," Anna said. "Tell him the lifter broke and I have to wait for the fix, like when the water pump broke."

"Will do. Drink some water up there, Anna. You always forget."

She hung up the handset and looked out through the lifter's open side at the yard below. The geothermal plant threw its steady orange glow over everything, pipes and sheds and the gravel path that led back toward the settlement proper, and at the edge of the light sat the tier-kindergarten, a squat prefab building with windows that glowed warmer than the plant ever would. She could not see the children from here, but she knew exactly where the window was where Tomas would be camped, blanket around his shoulders like a small grumpy emperor, watching the lights and waiting.

Tomas was six and had been at the tier-care for two years, and he had come to Ridgebreak on the last shuttle with a tag on his coat and no parents listed on the manifest, a story Anna held views about and never said out loud at meetings where opinions got people volunteered for committees. He attached to her the way some children did, completely and without negotiation, and on normal evenings she walked him the four hundred meters to the foster house and he held her sleeve the whole way and pretended he wasn't. Tonight he would not be walked anywhere. Tonight he would sit by the window and watch the plant lights and count to numbers he hadn't learned yet, waiting.

Byron, to his credit, was doing something with the console instead of looking at her face. She caught the reflection of him in the dark screen, jaw set, hands busy, a man building a wall out of small tasks. Forty-six years old now, hair going gray at the temples in a way that would have looked distinguished on anyone with less sawdust permanently in it. She had divorced him three years ago and the divorce had been the polite kind, the kind people congratulated you on, which was its own special insult.

"I can climb down," she said, mostly to test the sentence aloud.

"No," Byron said, not even turning. "You'll break an ankle on the gravel and then who walks Tomas home, a woman on a stretcher. We wait. Morning shift is at six, it's barely past nine now."

"Nine hours."

"Seven, if you sleep." He said it kindly, in his fashion, which was to say accurately.

Anna looked at the crate of nutrient paste, then at the pile of moving blankets Byron had thrown in the corner for padding fragile loads, and did the arithmetic of a night in a metal box with her ex-husband, five meters above the ground, above the window where a six-year-old was watching for her. She pulled a blanket over her shoulders and settled in to wait, and to be surprised later at how little she minded the waiting.

Anna was forty-four, Byron was forty-six, and the lifter was neither, and none of the three of them were going anywhere until morning.

The waiting settled into a rhythm after the first hour. Byron worked, or performed working, which was close enough that Anna could not tell the difference from across the lifter. He had the diagnostic panel open and was tracing circuits with a probe while the console blinked at him in a language of small red failures. Every so often he muttered something technical under his breath, and the machine muttered back in its own dialect, and Anna listened to the two of them argue the way she used to listen to the pipes in the house she no longer lived in, back when the house was hers and the pipes were a shared problem.

Around ten she heard a sound she recognized before she understood it. Metal scraping on metal, a latch giving up reluctantly, the particular hollow note of a locker that had not been opened in years. Byron had gone digging in the tool locker bolted to the aft wall, the one that was supposed to hold spare fuses and emergency sealant and instead held, as these lockers always did, the accumulated archaeology of every crew that had ever worked this plant.

He came out holding a squat steel flask and turned it in the light with the expression of a man reading his own name on a gravestone.

"Well," he said. "Somebody's been doing better fieldwork than the supply manifests say."

He cracked the cap and sniffed it, winced, and held it out toward her without crossing the distance between them, so that accepting it was her decision and her stretch.

"Homemade. Somebody's potato project, by the smell. It won't kill us. Probably."

Anna hesitated longer than she needed to. Then she leaned over and took the flask, because it was cold in the lifter and the geothermal plant's orange glow did not reach inside, and because there are only so many ways to fill seven hours with a man you once married. She sipped. It tasted like a chemistry accident with ambitions, and it burned in a friendly way all the way down.

"Good Lord," she said. "What is in this?"

"Potatoes, mostly. Regret, possibly."

She laughed before she could stop herself, and the laugh surprised them both, and then they pretended it had not happened, which was the customary procedure between them and had been for years.

Byron took the flask back and drank, and made a face, and drank again. He sat down on the deck across from her crate with his back against the wall and his long legs folded up, and for a while the only sounds were the tick of cooling metal and the distant hum of the plant's turbines, which Anna had always thought sounded like a large animal breathing in its sleep.

She knew the machine sounds the way Byron knew the machines themselves. She could tell a bearing going dry from a bearing going seized, could hear when a pump was happy and when it was lying about it. It was a small useless talent that had made her valuable at the kindergarten in ways no one had planned, because a woman who can hear a fan about to fail three rooms away makes a very reassuring guardian of small children in a settlement that runs on salvaged everything.

The flask traveled between them four more times before either of them said anything that mattered.

"You never told me why," Byron said eventually, turning the cap in his fingers, not looking at her. "The nanny job. You had seniority at the water office. You were good at it. Everyone said so. And then one day you were wiping noses at the tier-care for half the pay, and I never understood it."

Anna looked out the open side of the lifter at the kindergarten windows, still glowing, still holding whatever they were holding. A light was on in the corner room where the cots were. She wondered if the head teacher had let the children stay up past bedtime out of kindness or exhaustion, and decided the two were probably indistinguishable in that woman.

"You want the honest answer or the polite one?"

"It's me," Byron said. "Polite never took."

"The honest answer is that I was twenty-nine at the terraforming orientation and I met a man who talked about building futures for a living, and I believed him." She held her hand out for the flask. "And then I was forty-one and the future was built and it turned out I wasn't in it, and I sat in that office doing compliance forms for a water system I'd helped fight for, and one morning I walked past the kindergarten and heard forty children being loud, and I thought, there. That's where the future actually is. Not in the forms. In the noise."

Byron was quiet for a while. He was good at quiet, always had been, which during the marriage had sometimes felt like peace and sometimes like being left alone in a room with her own weather.

"I didn't know that," he said finally.

"There wasn't a form for it. You were busy with