Between A Rock And A Hard Place

by Andrew Burdon

Huw’s afternoon with Julia had started well enough. True to their pattern father and daughter had chatted, saying nothing. She’d seen reports about the disaster and asked if he’d known any of the victims or their families. He’d said no; it was simpler. She in turn gave stock answers to his usual questions. Yes, she was working. Yes, she was still attending meetings with her sponsor. No, she wasn’t involved with anyone special.

He already knew she had an apartment up in Magnuson Park for which he sometimes paid the rent but had never seen. Julia’s greasy hair, crumpled blouse, and the smell of her when she arrived were enough to put him off ever wanting to. In that moment Huw was almost glad she never visited her mother. These days it would likely do more damage than good.

The pleasantness evaporated with the waitress’s arrival. Julia pretended with what Huw suspected was great practise not to notice the girl’s overt repugnance, but catching sight of his flushed ears and burning cheeks, his daughter quietly shrank in on herself. They’d avoided eye contact after that.

The bus peeled down the interchange and along 37th Street. Now Huw’s seat was in full sun, the unadjustable air conditioning became agreeable. He closed his eyes. The faint breeze and the sunlight—real sunlight—evoked memories of happier times.

Just past Montlake Boulevard, the bus came to a stop outside a large halls of residence. A dozen or so students boarded, filling up the bus and livening the atmosphere with their air of youthful invincibility. Huw watched them take the few remaining seats, chatting animatedly amongst themselves.

They were the apotheosis of modern style, and, even now, when every sane man and woman was willing to sell their souls for a space on those damn arcships, projected self-assurance in their futures. Such was the power of their life-long indoctrination: study hard and get qualified; climb the ladder; success will be yours!

All you need is to want it bad enough, right kids? Huw shook his head.

“…Like hell it is!”

Huw looked up. The outburst had come from a man half-way up the bus’s entrance wearing the familiar day-glow red-and-yellow overalls of a city workman.

“I’m sorry sir, but we’re at capacity.” The driver’s voice was clear in the hush that had fallen. “The next bus is in twenty minutes.”

The workman ignored the driver and continued up the steps and into the bus, a similarly dressed man following on his heels. They stopped half-way up the aisle in front a pair of students.

“You’re in our seats.”

Huw could see his own shock mirrored on the girls’s faces. He turned to share the disbelief with the other passengers, but most people on the bus were ignoring the display. The few who did watch looked far from appalled.

The workman leaned forward, his hand resting on the girl’s headrest. “You deaf, thicklips?” The question evoked a titter from somewhere in the bus. “I said…you’re in our seats.”

Silence fell as the setting sun burned through the smog, pouring honey-coloured light through the tinted windshield. The girl in the aisle seat glanced at her friend, then about the bus. The sunlight made an amber halo of her loose afro curls.

The urge to intervene stirred within Huw. He was still tall and tolerably broad, and hadn’t yet given in to middle-age spread…Not quite. He looked as fit as any man of what his young boss politely called ‘advanced middle years.’ But beneath his picture of health was painted a different portrait. Even sat at rest on the bus, Huw’s heart strained to keep his blood pumping. The crackle in his lungs was sometimes cause enough for him to pass out, but his honeycomb bones would snap like cinder toffee if it came to blows.

The workman struck the headrest and loomed close over the cowering girl. “Get off the fucking bus!”

Huw stood up. “Excuse me.”

The workman straightened, looking Huw up and down. “You got a problem, old man?”

There was no ignoring the ugly mood on the bus, and every pair of eyes was glued to the unfolding drama.

“No, son,” said Huw. “I just thought I’d point out that a police report of a state-workman committing a crime—racial assault, or ABH, or whatever—must be investigated by the city.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. Unemployment rates and zero-hour contracts remained at an unprecedented high across the entire developed world. Fear of lay-offs were part of most working folks’ daily reality.

“And remind you of the surveillance camera.” Huw pointed to the small dome camera housed above the driver’s seat.

A flush mottled the man’s face and cords of muscle stood out on his thick neck. Huw’s guts turned cold. The thought flashed through his mind; he was going to end up in hospital, earning statutory sick pay—less than minimum wage—for months. Gail would have to be transferred…ten wretched years wasted.

But the second man showed some sense. He patted the other’s arm and retreated down the aisle. The aggressor spat on the floor and followed his colleague off the bus.

Huw eased back down to his seat and let out a long quiet exhale. His body relaxed into trembles as the bus resumed its journey, unsure if his quivering muscles and heart palpitations were due to his medical condition or a flight-or-fight response.

On the lower I5 the bus plunged into shadow beneath the fast lane. The narrow letter-box view of colossal tower buildings, glimpsed above the immense crash barriers, slid by with customary speed. Fitful flashes of late-evening sunlight strobed through gaps in the dense cityscape onto Huw’s face, forcing him to squint.

The girl kept watching him. Finally he met her eyes and she mouthed a thank you. Huw nodded, but felt like a fraud. If he had it to do-over, he doubted he’d be so foolish a second time.

#

The airlock door remained shut. Huw’s helmet translated an exasperated sigh into a susurration of white noise. The indicator light had turned from red to green, but the door hadn’t budged.

He punched the large button again and the big green light blinked twice, helpfully reminding him that, yes, the door was open.

There were overlapping boot prints in the film of dust on the door. Spinning lightly into a half-crouch, Huw gripped the hand-holds on either side of the airlock’s narrow walls and slowly pushed the door open with his feet.

Huw floated into the locker room, the airlock door deciding to now co-operate by automatically closing once he was clear.

Max and Paulette were geared up and checking over each other’s seals while Hesus, his replacement as shift foreman, waited patiently for Huw’s suit. Of the twelve vacuum suits once in continual use only five remained usable, and these were now more duct tape and sealant than fabric.

“How was Earth?” Hesus asked. 

“Still there,” said Huw, removing his helmet. “And still hot.” And still paranoid, racist, and polluted to hell. He set his datapad in free-fall and unclipped his tool belt, mindful of the pistol grip tool’s sharp screwdriver tip. “You know harvester-four is down?”

Hesus nodded as he began toggling the suit’s release catches. “Blew last Monday.”

With Hesus’s help, Huw was quickly divested of the vacuum suit. The Mexican’s thick black moustache bristled with distaste at the sweaty smell.

Huw grimaced. “I know. You can thank Blair, not me.”

Max laughed. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you say, Huw.”

“Just for that, I’m adding a recalibration to your schedule,” Huw said. The work was needed anyway; harvester-two had hit a heavy patch of silicates near end of shift, meaning harvester-one’s pending fix would have to be rescheduled.

This and other details Huw explained during hand-over. He kept it short; only one vacuum suit had a functioning urinary system, and today that suit hadn’t been his. Six hours with no toilet break didn’t phase most of his colleagues, but at his age Huw felt he was pushing his bladder’s limits.

After his pit-stop, Huw glided through the rig’s labyrinthine prefab tunnels and open hatches, headed for the canteen. He found the cool quiet passages infinitely preferable to the noisy streets of Seattle.

His path lead through Observation Point One, which Huw had always regarded far too grandiose a label for a section of tunnel with a window in it. The half-meter glass hemisphere allowed visual assessment of the long scaffolded comms antenna and of tethers one and two, mitigating the need for costly EVA. 

The window, however, was one of only two windows on the entire rig, and one reason why Observation Point One was the most frequented out-of-the-way spots on the rig, despite the view less than inspiring view.

Folks on Earth imagine the main asteroid belt a swirling sea of rocks churning and colliding in a spectacular cosmic maelstrom. The truth was there really wasn’t a lot to see, the distance between asteroids being literally astronomical. With orbital eccentricities at 0.33 and inclinations below 20°, most asteroids orbited the sun at the same speed, meaning collisions between main-belt bodies were extremely rare. Dust soaked up all but the suggestion of sunlight this far inside the belt. Sometimes the dim speck of a family asteroid drew the eye, and if you stuck your head right into the bubble-window and craned your neck for a view whichever way out of the ecliptic, the dust became a dull ochre fog with a few bright stars shining through. 

Rounding a corned Huw found the section occupied, as he’d half-expected, but checked his momentum on the bulkhead.

Though his hasty round trip to Earth had taken the best part of a year, Huw and his colleagues were on five-year contracts, completing two years hence, as were most people on the rig. The figure floating in free-fall was a man he’d never seen before. Huw assumed the man was part of the cleaning or cargo crew—theirs were unskilled jobs filled by Belt wash-ups taken on at Jupiter.

But there was something else; something amiss, to which Huw’s sense of decency objected. The man had his back to the window and was looking at the bulkhead. Though seen in profile, his pale face held a mirthless smile.

“I fail to see what’s so amusing,” said Huw.

The man’s smile vanished. He turned round—too fast for free-fall—and instead of facing Huw, pitched into a graceless spin. Even as he  flailed for purchase on the bulkhead, the man’s dark eyes, black against an anaemic face, assayed Huw with animal ferocity, tracking him like those of a hawk.

Another crewman might have been intimidated, but Huw wielded a certain amount of authority on the rig. He asked the man directly, “Who are you?”

The stranger’s calculating stare lasted a moment, then the ghost of his previous smirk returned. Without a word the man turned his back on Huw.

“I asked you a question, son,” Huw said, but the man retreated in silence.

Huw drifted forward, intending to follow him, but stopped instead in the space the stranger had vacated.

Opposite the window, affixed to the wall amongst others of its kind, was a new home-made plaque, the largest yet. Bodged together from thin scraps of aluminium and what looked like a storage crate cut-off, etched into the metal with laser precision was a list of names; the victims of the Io orbital disaster. It, and the handful of surrounding plaques, memorialised the lives lost in various extraplanetary accidents over recent years.

Despite what he’d told his daughter, many of the names on the new memorial belonged to people Huw had known. Some were old colleagues, and others good friends with whom he’d kept in touch for years. This would have been bad enough, but the accident had occurred in the orbital’s habitation ring, and listed too were names of entire families.

No longer hungry, and too weary to chase after some reprobate, Huw returned to his quarters.

A palatial three cubic metres of private space, Huw’s room was his sanctuary. Everything was squared away neatly; every drawer and door panel closed flush to the walls; hammock-seat secured to the underside of the workbench, also folded flat; even his sleeping bag was a tightly rolled cylinder beneath the padded bed-panel’s webbing. But his usual quietude eluded him as the door-hatch clunked shut behind him.

A gentle push propelled him to the c-station in the far corner. The thirty centimetre-wide convenience station ran, according to the orientation of its various devices, from floor to ceiling, and Huw logged on to the computer terminal. The daily message he expected from the clinic was still missing from his inbox. They’d known the date his twenty-two week journey back to the Main Belt would be completed, and he’d confirmed it with a message nearly two days ago.

He resisted sending another query. Tapping at the screen, Huw called up the crew roster, checking the names and mug-shots of all the new crew, but failed to find the man from Obs-One.

He closed the files and navigated through icons and menus to ‘Safety Report; Other; Security;’ then ‘Priority-High’ and waited for a response.

The humourless face of the rig’s captain blinked onto the screen. Somewhere in his mid-forties, with thick stubble showing signs of grey around his chin, Captain James Macilray exuded a permanent air of displeasure. He gave one the impression that now was inconvenient, whenever now happened to be. This secretly amused Huw, who by way of a close friendship with the previous captain knew that Macilray was perhaps the least busy person onboard.

“Report,” said Macilray.

Hello Huw. Welcome back. Nice to see you.

“Captain, earlier today I made sighting of someone I don’t think was part of the crew. He refused to identify himself and turned-tail. There may be a possible intruder onboard.”

“We’ve had three recruitment drives and personnel changes in your absence, Howell. You’re bound to see some new faces. Was that all?”

“I’ve checked the personnel files. He’s not in there.”

Macilray’s bushy brows knotted together. “Hmm. I’ll grant you permissions to review the security footage. Will that suit you?” His tone was irritating in its magnanimity.

“No, actually,” said Huw. “I’ve reported a possible high priority risk, which is job done for me.” The system logged all high priority reports, including them in the encrypted weekly summary report sent back to Jupiter. The process was automated and tamper-proof.

“I see. We will of course investigate your concerns. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.” Macilray said, and cut off the call.

With duty fully discharged as far as he was concerned, Huw readied himself for bed. He was releasing his sleeping bag from the loose elasticated webbing when the computer terminal chimed a notification. 

A message from the clinic waited in his mailbox. His own message—back safe, hope you’re doing well, lots of love, etcetera—had gone out nearly thirty-six hours ago.

Huw opened the reply. The image of his wife came up on-screen, and a wordless exclamation of protest escaped his throat.

Though always a slender woman, Gail looked gaunt. The apple-white dress, her favourite from amongst those he’d brought her, hung from her frame, exposing the proud edges of her sternum and collar bones. Her dark brown hair, though immaculately arranged—testament to the standards of care at the facility—had lost its previous glossy lustre. Her skin too, looked dry and dull, and paper-thin. But she was smiling.

“Go on, say hello,” said a recognisable voice off-screen, and Gail laughed. It was a happy laugh, but hearing it chilled Huw’s blood. It sounded gormless. Imbecilic.

One of the care assistants, Lailani, came into view and sat down next to his wife, in front of the camera. “Budge up, Gail.” She nudged Gail with her hip.

“Yes, yes,” Gail laughed and moved over, and kept moving over until she was standing, visible only from the chest down, the rest of her out of shot.

Lailani took hold of Gail’s hand and with her free hand patted the seat they were sharing. “Come on, Gail, sit down. Come and tell Huw about yesterday. About the musicians.”

Gail laughed again. She withdrew her hand from Lailani’s and folded her arms—so thin!—across her abdomen, and wandered off-camera.

“Just a minute, Huw,” Lailani said, and followed her.

Lailani’s coaxing and Gail’s laughing ‘yeses’ faded as the pair presumably wandered out of the bedroom.

Huw was left looking at the empty room, its high-end monitoring equipment styled to blend in unobtrusively with the modern decor. The room had a small balcony overlooking the landscaped gardens, and a large rectangle of sunlight fell across his wife’s single bed, where the old patchwork throw Gail had made on the birth of their daughter blazed with a vibrancy impossible under the daylight-spectrum panels lighting Huw’s quarters.

Lailani returned alone.

“Sorry Huw,” she said, “Today’s a good day, but she’s off now. She was really happy to get your message, though. We’ve been replaying some of your old ones the last couple of months—she joins in now with ones where you sing, just like when you’re here together.” Lailani beamed her trademark positivity.

“Anyway, we’ll try again tomorrow. Glad you had a safe trip. Take care!” The message ended.

#

With the exception of the gym, the canteen was the largest lifestyle module on the rig. Ten tables provided dining space for up to forty crew at a time, but years of steady cutbacks now saw the dining hall never more than half full.

A dozen or so diners were dotted about the room in predictable cliques; departmental grudges ran high, and people tended to stick with their own. Huw openly scorned this numb-scullery, and managed to cultivate relationships across the invisible divides. Most of the crew he liked, the remainders he tolerated, but his opinions were founded on personal interactions, not job specs.

He spotted Zoë immediately. She faced away from him and her choppy blonde hairstyle had become a short ponytail, but he knew it was her. She sat at a corner table talking with Danny Jhadav, both rota’d on his upcoming shift.

Etiquette forbade sailing over diners’s heads, so, juggling his food packets, Huw manoeuvred down the central aisle.

Since his report yesterday, Captain Macilray had put out a bulletin containing a few video stills of a possible intruder onboard, and the canteen was abuzz with speculation. As he passed by, people paused their conversations to extended him warm or enthusiastic greetings, which, whilst gratifying, felt to Huw embarrassingly disproportionate having spent ten months of his time away in stasis.

Huw’s smile broadened as he arrived at his friends’ table. “Is this seat taken?”

Drifting up from her chair, Zoë leaned forward and squeezed Huw in a smiling embrace. “Nice to have you back, Guv’ner,” she said.

“It’s good to be back,” Huw disengaged from Zoë and bent to shake Danny’s hand. “Danny. How are you, my boy?”

“Very well, thank you, Mister Howell. How was your holiday?”

Huw let his food packets drift and sat down, fastening the chair’s velcro strap around his waist; the illusion of being seated for a meal really did help with space sickness.

He was about to answer when Zoë said, “‘How was your interview,’ you mean.”

Zoë had spun this rumour before he left, leaving a trail of disappointed co-workers in her wake. It was her way of showing him he was appreciated. The rumour was certainly plausible; he'd been headhunted for cushy desk–jobs within and without the company for years, but even high-profile desk-jokey pay didn't come close to the money he was earning as a digger. But he’d let the speculation circulate, indulging in a hope that management might be likewise loath to lose him—maybe he’d be offered a raise. Maybe he’d be crowned king of the solar system, too.

Huw pinched his food packets into the table’s crocodile clips and broke the self-heating seal of a packet claiming to contain beef bourguignon. “A wise man keeps his options open,” he said.

Nobody, not even Zoë, knew the severity of his wife’s condition, or how broke he was. He couldn’t risk the smallest chance of their boss finding out he essentially had Huw over a barrel: the little fuck would work him to death.

“Are you okay Mister Howell?” asked Danny.

“Yes, sorry,” said Huw. “I was just thinking about our stowaway. You know I was the one who saw him? In Obs-One.”

He could tell Zoë wasn’t fooled by this misdirection, but Danny took the bait.

“Oh?”

Huw filled them in on the encounter. “The guy definitely wasn’t used to zero-G. He flapped like landed fish when he saw me.”

“Maybe he was stoned,” said Danny. His voice dropped, “It’s gotten pretty bad while you were gone, Mister Howell… Even some of the diggers…”

Danny’s avoidance of Zoë’s light gaze was circumspect, and Huw’s heart sank despite the micro gravity.

Drugs were a fact of life on the rig. It was a high-pressure, tedious, lonely job. Diagnoses of depression ran high in biannual psyche evals. Huw and the other foremen worked hard to minimise use amongst the miners. But, apart from Command, the rest of the crew were—no offence to them—mostly ten a penny, so when the company made cut-backs it was inevitably the diggers who got the shaft.

His team was currently half what it should be, and to maintain productivity management had mandated double shifts for the remaining miners at no extra pay. Huw was sure this wasn’t even legal, but the company’s entire workforce was well aware of how long whistle-blowers lasted.

The unspoken rule he had lived by and passed on for three decades, the rule held sacrosanct by common offworlders; that above everything else, you look after your own, stung Huw’s conscience, but there was nothing he could do. Sacrificing his own job would solve nothing.

The mood at the table plummeted and the conversation became very polite. The moment Huw finished eating, Zoë took her leave, saying she’d see them in hand-over.

“Don’t beat yourself up, son,” Huw said at Danny’s guilty look. “Come on. Let’s see what joys the next six hours have in store.”

#

It took two hours of winching along the chute, which should have been vibrating from the movement of dust and rubble inside, and was not, for the three of them to reach harvester-one.

When they reached the scaffolding grid, the field beneath the lattice of girders was half completed. Swept by narrow shafts of glittering light from three pairs of helmet-mounted torches, the surface stripped of regolith looked like a calm ocean petrified in mid-swell. Juts of rock too high for the harvester to traverse looked like little islands, some retaining undisturbed shores of gravel and dust.

“It’s not moving,” Danny’s voice crackled over the open channel.

At the back of the convoy, Huw leaned out to look past his team. Danny was right; held to the surface by the tracking, the roughly cylindrical machine, part sweeper, part cone crusher, was at a dead stop almost abutting a vertical brace. Three meters wide and twice as high, the harvester stood upright and appeared at a glance undamaged.

“Alright boys and girls,” said Huw, “Let’s get to work. I’ll check the undercarriage. Zoë, see if you can get a connection and run a diagnostic. Danny, be a good boy and take a look at the track. One of the wheels might just be stuck.”

They each unwound extra length from the safety cables clipped to the chute. The asteroid generated such nominal gravity that anything more than a mild push off the surface would launch a person into space, and none of them had an EMU. 

“I can’t establish a connection,” said Zoë.

Huw was lying on the surface, trying not to kick up too much dust with his heels, when the harvester casing trembled. He heard a grunt over the comm.

“Umm…” It was Danny’s voice, sounding breathless. “A little help here, please?”

“Is this thing moving?” asked Zoë.

“Ah! Shit! Yes…now come and help me,” said Danny.

Huw heard Zoë’s snort as she drifted past him, using the harvester’s hand-holds. “What did you do, you pillock?”

“Danny?” Huw followed behind Zoë, and saw Danny wedged between a protrusion from the harvester and the vertical brace. “What on earth are you doing, lad?”

Zoë snorted again. “His hip’s pinned.”

“I…Ooooo…needed a good visual up the track. Ooooo…bloody hell! This is getting really tight, guys.”

“And you couldn’t just look round the other side?” Zoë bumped her helmet against Danny’s, inspecting the railing herself in the combined torchlight. “It is moving…just very slowly. A wheel must be misaligned.”

“They looked aligned,” Danny said. There was note of panic behind his defensive tone. “I thought the track was the problem. Are…are you sure? I only gave it a nudge.”

Huw swung hand-over-hand round to a recessed panel housing the big red kill-switch. He punched it with his fist and laid both gloved hands flat on the machine; the vibrations running through the casing continued. He tried again, then glanced up at Zoë. “Get that terminal open. Shut down all processes—quickly.”

Zoë was already moving and was soon atop the harvester with the panel flipped open.

Huw made his way back to Danny. “We’ll have you out in a jiffy, son. Don’t you worry. Zoë?”

“It’s frozen,” she said.

“It can’t be,” said Huw, “There’s still—“

“I’m telling you it’s locked up!” She pushed herself round to examine the harvester’s tracking gears. “If we can wedge something in the slewing unit, it might burn out the motor. We can push it back.”

Danny made a suppressed hiss of pain. “Ooooo… Guys?”

Huw shook his head. “That’ll kill the whole unit dead, and you know it.” He was trying to establish a connection with own his datapad, which kept repeating a ‘cannot connect’ error. “That’s a six thousand dollar replacement we don’t have, plus the cost of downtime.” …due to human error and wilful destruction of company property.

He secured away the pad and used his hand to measure the gap spanning Danny’s chest and the harvester’s main casing. Swinging to the top of the machine beside Zoë, again using his hand, Huw measured between the harvester’s near-side wheel truck and where the track circled around the brace.

“What are you doing?” Zoë asked. “Oh no. Fuck that.” Zoë drew an allen wrench from her tool belt. “We can get it off him. There’s still time.”

Huw leaned back.

“Guys?” Danny said, teeth unmistakably clenched.

“Danny…” Huw didn’t know how to continue. “I’m sorry my boy, but we can’t. Zoë, put away the wrench.” He listened to what he said as if hearing it spoken by someone else. He looked at Zoë. “We’ll have to get a hack-box and try a hardwire. Find the short.”

“Jesus Huw, that’ll take hours.” She extended the tool along the track.

“His life isn’t in danger,” Huw said, “So stand down.”

“It’s crushing him!”

“I said stand down!”

She paused uncertainly, then slowly withdrew the wrench. Danny’s breathing was a ragged pant heard over the comm.

“I’ll call this in, and stay with Danny,” said Huw. Though he couldn’t see past the reflections in her visor, Zoë’s silence conveyed the condemnation he imagined on her face. Huw felt his eyes sting. “Get back to the rig. They’ll need the suit.”

#

As soon as Huw was through the airlock he was plied with questions from more than a dozen crewmates. Zoë had apparently refused to detail the accident, and everybody wanted to know what had happened. Zoë herself was nowhere to be found.

Huw ignored everyone and after stripping off the vacuum suit made directly for his quarters, too ashamed to go check on Danny in the infirmary, going over everything again and again in his mind.

Danny had endured ten minutes of agony, dipping in and out of consciousness before the harvester had powered past its obstruction. Huw had towed the semi-conscious boy halfway back to the rig when they rendezvoused with Hesus and Paulette. As a trained medic, Paulette had administered Danny an analgesic on the spot, and taken charge of the boy. Huw had insisted on carrying out the hack/repair on the harvester immediately, and with Hesus’s assistance identified a previous shoddy repair to the slewing unit as the likely cause of the clamp-wheel misalignment. The burnt-out logic boards were identified and circumvented, and the two foremen had the harvester’s electronics and mechanics back in working order within an hour.

Propelling round a corner Huw was not surprised to find the captain, arms folded across his barrel chest, waiting outside his quarters.

"I thought I'd save you the trouble of ignoring my messages," said Macilray.

In reporting the accident Huw had made it clear that Macilray would have to wait for details; keeping Danny calm and conserving his oxygen were more important. When Macilray ran out of patience and contacted him again, he’d fobbed him off with the excuse of needing to concentrate on the repairs.

"Captain, I'm tired," said Huw.

Macilray glared at him. “You seem to be forgetting that I’m Commander here, Howell. And one of my crew is seriously injured. Now what the hell went wrong out there?”

"I'm sure whatever Zoë told you was the truth." Huw advanced on his captain, who moved aside enough for him to access the keypad. He keyed in his ID and the door-hatch swung inward.

Macilray followed him into his quarters. "Zoë won't tell me a goddamn thing."

"Really?"

"Yes. Really. I've confined her to quarters."

Huw took an empty squeeze-bottle from a drawer and plugged it into his c-station's water dispenser. "Well then you can do the same for me."

"Not a chance. Not until I know exactly—"

"Please James," Huw interrupted, "I'm tired, I'm thirsty, and I think I'm experiencing a bit of shock." This was true. Huw held up his hands which, now he was beginning to relax, were visibly trembling.

Macilray sighed hard through flared nostrils. His stubbled jaw flexed as he grit his teeth. "Oh-five hundred. My office."

"Yes, Captain." Huw suffered one last glare as the captain left.

More out of habit than expectation, he checked his messages. One was waiting from the clinic, early by a measure of hours. Though no longer the balm they had been, Huw welcomed the distraction and opened the message. He was squeezing a drink when Doctor Corneille, half obscured by the collapsible bottle, appeared on the screen.

“Hello Huw, I hope this message finds you well.”

Huw swallowed the water past the lump rising in his throat.

“First, let me ease your mind,” the doctor said, “Gail is okay, relatively speaking; no accidents or emergencies—none of that.”

Huw blew out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding.

“However, I’m contacting you because I believe it’s time to revisit our discussion of your wife’s treatment.”

Oh God…

“I’m sure you’ve noticed…changes since your visit. I’m speaking of course about her diminishing mental capacity. This decline, along with results from periodic brain scans, prove that the current immunosuppression and gene therapy no longer hold any long-term benefits for Gail. And unfortunately, Gail’s cognitive deterioration is already outpacing the growth period for new organs. We will—“

Huw paused the recording, and drifted away from the console. He couldn't hear this. Not today. Not now. But the genie was out of the bottle.

Feeling like he'd been punched hard in the chest, he returned to the screen and resumed playback.

“—Of course continue with the current lung and kidney production, since they’re almost ready for transplant. And we can proceed with the planned intestinal tract, if you wish. We’ve also put her on our donor list, but… Well. She’s not a priority candidate.

“The point here, Huw, is that Gail’s disease has reached the stage where we need to look at balancing the benefits of appropriate treatments with their impact on the quality of Gail’s daily life.

“Also, your wife’s increasing dependencies have put her care plan under review. It’s likely she’ll require permenant one-to-one care, which means a personal carer.”

Here it comes, thought Huw.

“Now, Gail’s treatment here is self-funded.” The doctor fidgeted with a pen on his desk. “The cost of… Well. Basically, if you want to continue with her treatments as they stand, it will add another eighteen hundred dollars a month to the charge.”

“I don’t have any more money, Dave.” Huw told the recording. He’d long since claimed and spent what he could from his personal & company pensions, and his state pension had collapsed along with every one else’s in the wake of the arcship projects.

“Your wife’s living will forbids the use of cryostasis.” Doctor Corneille was saying. “You’ve petitioned this many times, but her wishes, and the law, are very clear.

“I know you’re reluctant to discuss end of life care, and I understand. But it’s a conversation long overdue, Huw. We’ve done all we can. You’ve got all our literature, but I’ll forward the details again…”

Huw stared at the screen, watching the doctor’s mouth forming words, but no longer listening.

#

Ironically, the pistol grip tool he’d collected in preparation for EV repairs needed repairing. The partially deconstructed tool lay flat on Huw’s magnetised workbench, surrounded by tiny screws and neatly arranged spare parts.

His debrief with Macilray went exactly as he’d expected. Zoë had been bullied into telling the captain her version of what had happened, which, Huw discerned from Macilray’s questions, aligned more or less with his own memory of the event.

Afterwards, Huw had spoken with Hesus. Foreseeing the company eventually demanding training records, risk assessments, as well as the full repair logs to cross-check against the weekly summaries, he removed himself from the week's rota in order to review all the files and plug any gaps in the data. He also expected to uncover further repairs bodged by his overworked team. Given a good head-start he could rectify these himself with the bosses back at Jupiter none the wiser.

Using needle pliers, Huw removed the pistol grip tool’s broken commutator.

He didn’t want to think about Danny. The boy was in cryo awaiting their return to Jupiter, which wasn’t scheduled for another eight weeks. Because the injuries were avoidable, or at least due in part to Danny’s own error, whether the company would continue paying his salary for time off the job, or even meet his medical expenses, was unclear. And it was Huw’s fault. He’d chosen to save the equipment rather than the man for the sole reason of being personally unable to afford the fine resulting from the latter. Or so he’d thought at the time.

He turned the motor brush round in his hands, checking for any missed defects. 

Corneille gave Gail three months. Four at the most. That information has been included at the end of the Doctor’s message. Even if he could leave now, he couldn’t get back to Earth before… He’d messaged Corneille with instructions to do whatever would make his wife most comfortable.

Huw sniffed and blinked away the moisture blurring his vision, then frowned at the droplets flicked from his eyelashes. He caught the tears on the back of a shaky hand, which he wiped across his trousers. 

With the brush assembly clipped back in, Huw screwed the piece securely into place, and reassembled the rest of the pistol grip. He dialled a high torque into the tool’s small menu screen and pulled the trigger. The screwdriver bit whirred into a blur.

#

Huw wasn’t far from the airlock changing room when he heard a cry for help, thereupon hastening his progress down the corridor.

“…We’re not monsters. They don’t understand. You don’t understand,” Huw didn’t recognise the voice speaking. “It’s coming. Io was just the start. They call us paranoid. Dangerous. But we’re survivors. Look at me…I was supposed to die in that explosion, but by the grace of God I survived…”

Huw slowed to a stop outside the changing room. Whomever it was, was talking about the Io orbital disaster, and the implications were staggering.

“Look…please…” This voice Huw did recognise. It belonged to Grigori, one of the cleaners. “I never seen you before in my life…“

“Oh, you’ve seen. You’ve definitely seen. If not me, then one of us. Which for you is…unfortunate.”

That was enough. Huw tightened his fingers round the pistol grip and swung through the open hatch. “Alright—“

“No! Please!” Grigori’s eyes bulged as a knife slit his throat. The man clutching Grigori’s head back with a fistful of short hair looked at Huw past the stream of blood making its sudden escape, his hungry, beatific expression changing to a snarl.

Huw’s momentum carried him into a room at once populated with myriad vacillating red globes the size of golf balls to ball bearings and every size in between, wobbling into stability.

Huw squeezed his eyes shut as the blood splashed across his face. He had time to register its warmth and blink his eyes open, then the stranger was upon him, bowling them both into a row storage racks.

The knife pushed against Huw’s belly as he and his assailant banged between the racks. A film of dust was released into the air. Huw knocked the man’s arm aside before the weapon was driven home, but the space between the racks was tight, and Huw realised his advantage—movement in free-fall—meant nothing in the enclosed space. The intruder, now smiling, must have realised this too.

Huw swung the pistol grip tool at the man’s waxen face. The grin thereupon vanished as the man’s head jerked back, hitting the metal locker with a clang. Huw braced his shoulder against the locker behind him and quickly pinned the intruder’s knife-hand on the rack opposite with his foot. The man immediately used his free hand to grasp Huw’s throat, at first squeezing—by god he was strong!—then likewise pushing Huw back against the locker, the smirk Huw had first seen in Obs-One revisiting his spittled lips.

“I remember you…” Malevolence twinkled in the man’s eyes.

Pricks of light danced in Huw’s vision, and drops of Grigori’s blood sailed lazily past his eyes as he struggled for breath. Blinking to regain focus, Huw brought the pistol grip to bear on the man’s ribs and pulled the trigger.

The intruder snarled and let go of his throat. Huw gasped down a breath which, thanks to the dust, turned into a cough. Then a crushing hand covered his own, pushing the tool away with incredible strength.

Huw felt his own strength failing. Using both hands, Huw struggled the tool inch by inch upwards until whirring screwdriver point was level with the man’s face. With grim determination, Huw pressed the point against his attacker’s turned head. The skin tore from the man’s temple and the bit squeaked as it drilled against living bone. The man’s bellowing shrilled into a scream. Huw gritted his teeth and applied all his force.

The bit punched through the man’s skull, lurching the tool forward in Huw’s grip with surprising suddenness, and his adversary became limp and silent.

Huw released the trigger and let go of the tool. The drag of his hand loosened the pistol grip into free-fall, which yielded from its tip fresh blood to join that of the poor cleaner.

Huw closed his eyes. With trembling limbs he backed his way to the furthest end of the aisle, and vomited.

#

The Minnesota countryside rolled by outside. Acres of corn ripened beneath the demi-shade of endless photovoltaic canopies stretching in every direction, as far as the eye could see. The smog-hazed Rochester skyline with its supertall skyscrapers was an unmoving tableau far away on the horizon.

The bus’s second story was stuffy despite the open windows. Huw was already sweating profusely in the early morning heat. The thin overall, likely a linen-bamboo blend, did a wonderful job of wicking away moisture, and he was looking forward to getting off the bus, where even the warm breeze would be cooling.

He’d keep covered up today, even under the canopies’ shade. Yesterday’s rolled-up sleeves had cost him a liberal amount of after-sun, and required his sleeping on his back, the tops of his forearms being too painful to touch.

It was a safe bet Huw was the only man on the bus looking forward to getting started on his day’s work. His special skill-set had him working all over the 1000-acre farm, on tasks which varied from repairing the old 20,000kg combines—real grease under your nails stuff—to troubleshooting the high-tech irrigation system. For the first time in years, Huw felt challenged in his work.

The only thing which cast a cloud over his mood was the thought that tomorrow would be Wednesday; visitation hours 4pm-5pm.

Julia was still in Eyota, conspiring with a lawyer to appeal his sentence on grounds of grief. She’d been upset on Sunday, angry even, demanding answers as to why he’d pleaded guilty. He could have explained, but it wouldn’t change anything; she deplored the loss of her safety net more than his loss of liberty, and would pursue an appeal anyway. But maybe if he wasn’t there to fall back on, Julia might finally take charge of her life. He hoped so.

What he hadn’t told Julia was life in prison wasn’t much different to what he was used to, and in some ways it was better. The cost of providing air, food, water, healthcare, and so on, to people in space, means convicts are cheapest kept on Earth. Here he could enjoy such simple things as sunsets and birdsong; the prison library was good; and some casual research during his daily hour of limited web browsing revealed the Bureau of Prisons’s food budget as significantly bigger per meal than his former employer’s (and that included the latter’s processing and shipping costs).

But more than anything, he couldn’t describe to his daughter the feeling of righteousness he’d felt in the moment of ending that man’s life. The man who was somehow responsible for Io. Given a second chance, Huw doubted he’d attempt any different outcome.

The air on bus was close, and in trying to take a deep breath Huw lapsed into a fit of hard coughs. The other convicts glanced at him with disinterest, reading clearly the signs of industrial illness. He fished an inhaler—the only possession allowed on his person—from his overalls’ single breast pocket, and drew two successive doses.

The bus pulled into the plant’s parking yard. He followed his fellow inmates down the stairs, one of many sweat-soaked red overalls passing the armed guards, and stepped down onto the hot plascrete. Blinking up at the clear blue sky, Huw donned the hat the last guard handed him. He thought of the photograph in his cell; one of those tacky tourist snaps taken on their honeymoon. The sky had been gloriously blue that day too. He preferred to remember Gail as she was then.

Huw was still conflicted that mixed with the weight of grief that he knew he would carry always, was a feeling of immense relief. He loved his wife, and had never given up on her. But she was gone now. The long struggle was finally over.

He loved his daughter, but felt he needed to let go there too—for her sake.

It seemed absurd, but his confinement had divested him of all lingering obligations, expectations and responsibilities. However he came to this place, whether his being here was right or wrong, and whether or not it was an ignoble feeling; for the first time in over ten years, Huw felt free.