A sample from
The Warmest Room
I had worked beside the Kethri for years at a distance of about four meters, the width of a loading lane, and I had never once touched one. The freighter came through the Meridian on the second bell of the morning window, the way she did every week, and by late morning Bay One had settled into its usual argument. Clamp hydraulics groaned up in the gantry, radio static spat down from Traffic Control, and the cargo drones bickered in beeps with the handlers about whose pallet went where. My breath was fogging before I'd crossed the yellow line. Bay One runs at twelve degrees on a good day, and freighter day is never a good day, because every hatch on the cold side of the bay stands open to feed the holds.
I had a tablet of manifests riding my left forearm and forty pallets of Kethri medical cargo to sign off before the window closed, which is the part of this job I like best. People think cargo inspection is counting boxes. It's counting boxes, sure, but it's also knowing that a Kethri medical pallet is strapped with the labels facing the hold's inner wall, because their cold chain runs warmer than ours and their pharmacists want the labels readable through frost. It's knowing what a seal tolerance sounds like when you rap it with a knuckle. Eleven years on the Lock and I can tell a holding bolt from a passing one with my eyes shut, which is a skill that has never once impressed anybody at a party.
A drone cut across my path with a pallet of coolant cylinders and then thought better of it and stopped, rocking on its lift pads, its beacon doing the little apologetic blink they do when their routing brain catches up with their brakes.
"After you," I said, and stepped back out of the lane.
It blinked twice and went on, and Marsh, who was running the pallet jack behind it, shook his head at me as he passed. "You're the only inspector on this dock who says please to a forklift."
"Everybody says please to forklifts."
"Nobody says please to forklifts, Quiroga. That's how we know you're management material. You'd file a grievance on behalf of a machine."
I told him I'd put him in my report too, spelled right and everything, and he laughed and went on after the cylinders. That's the docks. I know every handler by their shoulders, because half of them you only ever see from behind, bent over a strap.
The hull crew was up on the freighter's spine, walking her with lights, and I knew their shoulders the same way. Durran's people. Six of them this week, Kethri all, enormous even by their own standard, wrapped in those orange felt-lined wraps the hull crews wear on our side of the station because the docks run cold for them the same way they run cold for us. I'd nodded to those men across Bay One for years. We had a whole relationship built out of nods — the nod when the clamps bit, the nod when the manifest cleared, the nod that meant window's closing, gentlemen. Nobody I knew had ever touched one.
Durran himself was down at the collar, one hand spread flat on the freighter's hull like a man resting a palm on a fence post, saying something to his second in Kethri, short and easy. Crew chief of the hull engineers, eighteen years on the Lock, and I'd long since had him down as seven feet and change and left it at that, because I'd measured things for a living long enough to know when a number was none of my business. He had his hair tied high for shift and his wrap open over a sleeveless vest, bare forearms the dull gray of a hull plate under work lights, and his throat-light sat at its usual workday glow, steady and unbothered. He saw me looking and gave me the nod.
I gave him the nod back. Then I took my tablet and my gauges and went to do the part of the job that was actually mine, which was the cold store off the east wall, where the medical cargo was waiting at twenty below for a human being with a stamp.
The cold store was a hold in the older sense, a steel room the size of a freight container welded into the bay's skin back when the station was young and optimistic, with an inner pressure seal the thickness of my wrist and a light over the hatch that burned green when the seal was happy. The light was green. The light was always green. I rapped the frame with a knuckle out of habit, and it answered solid, and I went in.
Cold like that doesn't feel like weather. It feels like a decision somebody else made. The air went straight up my nose and stripped the wet off everything on the way, and my coveralls, which were doing a fine job at twelve degrees, admitted defeat inside of a minute. I unzipped my cuff and got the gauge out and started down the rows, breath rolling, tablet waking up pallet by pallet as I passed. Forty pallets. Insulin analogs, burn foam, shelf-stable plasma, a crate of something sealed and diplomatic that the manifest described as miscellaneous, per the Envoy, which I'd long since learned to count without asking about. Everything strapped, everything labeled inward, everything where the bill said it should be. I signed them off one column at a time and let the work warm me up, because work is the only heater that fits in a cold hold.
Then I got to the back wall, where the inner seal seats against the hold's pressure skin, and I looked at the gasket.
It had crept again. There's a witness line painted along the flange, white on gray, and the gasket's lip had walked maybe four millimeters past it since I'd logged the same thing in my last report. I crouched down, knees popping, and put the gauge on it out of professional pride even though my eyes had already made the measurement and made it right. Four millimeters of creep. Within tolerance. The tolerance is six. I knew that number the way I knew my own shoe size, and I stood there in the deepening cold with my gauge in my hand and had the same conversation with myself I'd had twice before.
It was within tolerance. It was also worse than last time, and the time before that it had been less, and before that nothing at all, and seals don't heal. I'd noted it in the free-text of my report in week forty-two, in the most courteous words I knew how to arrange, and again in week forty-eight, and both times it had gone off into the record with everything else, and nothing had come back. I could have raised a defect ticket. I knew that then standing there the same as I know it now, and I want to be clear that I knew it, and that I looked at that gasket and did the math on a Friday report instead, because the freighter window was closing at midday and a ticket would hold the bay, and the Kethri medical chain had people at the far end of it waiting on burn foam.
I decided it could go in the next report. I even composed the sentence in my head, my third-best version of it.
I was two rows from the hatch, ticking off the plasma, when the seal blew.
There wasn't any warning worth the name. There was a sound like a rivet gun going off inside my own skull, and the white witness line disappeared under a flower of frost that came off the flange all at once, and the air in the hold went sideways. That's the only way I have to say it. The air went sideways, and it took me with it.
I went down hard on the deck plates, left hand out to catch myself, which is the thing your body does for you before your professional opinions get a vote. The deck was frosted steel and my wrist hit it flat with all of me on top, and the pain came up my arm like somebody had run a live wire from my knuckles to my elbow. I made a sound I wouldn't want transcribed. The hold's alarm started up, a flat yellow whoop, and the emergency lighting came on the color of weak tea, and over all of it the safety system did exactly what it was built to do, in the order it was built to do it, because a breached inner seal means a compromised compartment and a compromised compartment gets isolated.
The outer hatch slammed on its emergency cycle with a bang I felt through the deck in my knees, and then it was very quiet, except for the alarm, and the sound of my own breath going ragged in air that was twenty below and falling.
I lay there for one second, maybe two, cheek an inch off the frost, wrist screaming, and then my training got up off the deck and took over, because that is what training is for.
First: report it. I got my cuff up and hit the comm with my right thumb, and my voice came out steady, which surprised me then and doesn't anymore. "Bay One cold store, this is Quiroga. Inner seal failure. Hatch has cycled, I'm inside, one man, injured, left wrist. Ambient is falling. Somebody come and get me, please." Even with a cracked wrist I said please. You can't retrain a whole personality in an emergency.
Static, and then the duty officer, a woman named Preeti whose voice I'd heard five days a week for three years, saying my name back to me in the tone people use when they're already moving. "Copy, Quiroga. We have your alarm. Engineering's en route. Talk to me."
"Talk later," I said. "Work first."
Second: get off the deck. Steel at that temperature takes the heat out of you through whatever's touching it, and I'd done the course, same as everybody. I got my knees under me and stood up with my left arm held against my chest like a broken wing, and the wrist throbbed in time with my pulse, and I looked at it in the yellow light and decided not to look at it again. Swelling already. Fine. Swelling is a problem for a warm room.
Third: keep the blood moving. I walked the rows. Up one aisle and down the next, past forty pallets of somebody else's medicine, swinging my good arm, stamping my feet hard enough to jar the wrist and swear about it and stamp anyway. The alarm gave up after a while, which was almost worse, because then it was just me and the falling temperature and the little tick and groan of steel deciding how small it wanted to be. My breath stopped rolling and started shuddering. There's a difference, and the difference is the cold getting past your coveralls' feelings about the situation.
I counted things, because counting is what I do when the world stops making sense in units I can stamp. I counted the pallet rows. Eleven. I counted my own steps, one aisle at a time, and when I lost the count I started it over, and the third time I lost it I noticed I'd been walking with my teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached. The shivering started somewhere in there, way down deep, the kind that isn't in your arms and legs but in your back, up against the spine, like your body's trying to shake itself loose from the inside. I checked my cuff for the time and had to read it twice, because the numbers wouldn't hold still, and twelve minutes had gone by since the seal let go.
Twelve minutes. Preeti had said engineering was en route, and engineering meant the hull crew, because the hull crew were the people on this station who cut through things for a living.
I kept walking. The rows got shorter, or my steps did. The shivering got worse and then, in a way I knew from the same course that taught me to get off the deck, it got a little better, and that was the part that frightened me, because the course says when the shivering eases off it isn't because you're winning. I stamped harder. I talked to Preeti when she asked, in short answers, and didn't tell her about the shivering, because there wasn't a stamp for that either. I leaned my shoulder against the diplomatic crate and thought, with perfect clarity and no drama at all, that I had stood in this hold not half an hour ago and composed a courteous sentence about the gasket, and the gasket had not found it courteous.
Then I heard it.
Out beyond the hatch, muffled by a handspan of steel and my own thumping pulse: the whine of a cutting tool spinning up, high and mean and getting higher, and then the bite of it touching metal. A bright point of orange flowered in the hatch skin at about the height of a Kethri's chest, and began, very slowly, to crawl.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.