That was where the video ended.
Green leaves. Twenty-three handprints. Darae’s intake number.
Her reflection in the dark screen looked unfamiliar. Instead of playing the video again, she noted its duration. Listen to a few words too often and you started adding meanings their speaker wasn’t there to supply.
“I’ll preserve the original file. We still need to check whether its date matches the camera’s clock.”
Registrar Oh Jingyeong nodded.
For a while, nothing came from Yu Seo’s end of the call.
“Seo?”
“The corrugated pipe behind those leaves. It’s an exhaust duct.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“I can’t tell from that. But someone was breathing in that room.”
Darae turned the standalone terminal toward Jingyeong. Beneath the video was another small attachment. She had mistaken it for a readme and left it unopened.
LOW-POWER EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS.
Three scheduled transmission times, a frequency, and a short note.
If the antenna gets blocked, you’ll lose my voice. I’ll call again three times.
“Twelve minutes until the next time,” Darae said.
Jingyeong checked the frequency.
“That’s in the facility emergency band. We have to go through the Safety Office.”
“Then connect us. I haven’t got time to build my own radio.”
The corner of Jingyeong’s mouth moved a fraction.
“You haven’t got authorization either.”
“No time and no authorization. Let’s ask someone who has both.”
Darae left the box open, marked it SAFETY INSPECTION IN PROGRESS, and locked the isolation rail so no one could touch it before Seo arrived. She secured the terminal and the original-file storage device to herself, then followed Jingyeong toward the north tow port.
In the axial passage, she pulled herself from handhold to handhold. Push too hard and you hit the wall when you tried to stop. It had taken her first month on the station to lose the habit of hurrying on foot.
As they passed through the hatch toward the rotating ring, her sense of direction briefly turned over.
A little weight returned to her toes. The arm holding the rail sank slowly. Folds appeared at the knees of her work clothes. She set her soles on the floor and walked.
Here people ate soup from bowls.
Only a few hatches separated this place from the axial cargo section.
Beside the dining hall, she caught the warm smell of seaweed. What had the air smelled like, passing through that pipe in the video? She stopped herself. Feelings weren’t a way to assess danger.
A man blocked the passage outside the north port. Not deliberately: he was moving a toolbox that took up most of it. First he rescued the plum sitting on its lid.
“Go ahead. Just don’t step on that. It’s the rest of my lunch.”
As Darae edged past the plum, Jingyeong addressed him.
“Pilot Han Mujin. Is the Safety Office connected?”
“Connected, and setting up low-power reception. Who took delivery?”
Darae raised a hand.
“Yeon Darae. Lost and found.”
“First time I’ve seen someone need a spacecraft to return a lost item.”
“I haven’t found its owner yet.”
Mujin pocketed the plum and shut the toolbox. His old flight suit had a repaired sleeve. Darae thought of the padding around her box.
“Communications room, not the cabin. We don’t have anywhere to fly yet.”
He led the way.
The port communications room had a wider window than her office. Outside, the rescue vessel Narae lay docked. It was a small craft without wings or a pointed nose, with folded cargo brackets along its hull and sunshades over the cockpit windows.
“Smaller than I expected,” Darae said.
Mujin secured a chair.
“Smaller still on the inside.”
A Safety Office officer appeared on-screen. He checked the file’s transmission instructions and set the station receiver for the scheduled time. They already had the equipment and the authority to receive a call. What they lacked was a destination.
“We won’t rely on the caller’s location report alone,” he said. “We’ll observe while we talk.”
Darae nodded and made a blank field for the reception time. She didn’t need a nicely formatted address. One small mark would do, if it kept them from losing the place where someone could answer.
The appointed time came.
At first there was nothing. The signal indicator flickered. A thin shadow from the station antenna crossed Narae’s hull.
A brief crackle.
Then a voice.
“Raon receiving station, this is Sai. If you can answer, please keep it short.”
The voice from the video.
Darae looked at Jingyeong. Jingyeong looked at the safety officer. He gave Darae the transmission channel.
“This is Yeon Darae at Raon Lost-and-Found Office. We received box 7-B. We’ve seen your video.”
The static stopped.
No reply.
She was adjusting her grip on the microphone when the voice returned.
“Are you really the lost-and-found office?”
“Yes. We handled L-204.”
“Do you remember the plant?”
“Cloth tied over the top of the pot.”
A sharp intake of breath.
“Mr. Noh told us about you. He said someone wrote down that it was a person’s house move, not a load of soil.”
She remembered. The automatic category had been SCRAP FROM RETIRED MODULES. Seeing the bedding and dishes, she had changed it to HOUSEHOLD BELONGINGS. Changing a category meant writing an explanation, so she had left work a little late that day.
That was all it had been.
Someone else had used that sentence to choose where to turn.
“What’s your name?”
“Maru. Communications apprentice.”
“Is the person in charge with you?”
“Mr. Noh’s here. One moment.”
Rustling. From farther away, someone told Maru to clip the tether back on. Then a low male voice filled the speaker.
“Noh Haeseong. I remember you, Darae.”
Her grip tightened.
“We need information we can check. The Safety Office is listening.”
Haeseong didn’t begin with a long speech of thanks. He gave them the number of residents, the equipment, and when the trouble had started.
Twenty-three people.
Main carbon-dioxide removal system failed. Backup sorbent canisters in use.
Oxygen supply currently normal. Reduced heat-rejection capacity.
Seo came through the communications-room hatch, a little breathless. He sat beside Darae and immediately began writing down the readings.
“What about the cartridge?” she asked.
“Handed it over to your office’s safety attendant. I didn’t leave a hot object on its own.”
He turned to the microphone.
“Did you estimate remaining sorbent capacity from head count alone? I need humidity and flow rate as well.”
A metal latch opened at the other end. Haeseong read out the numbers. Seo didn’t immediately announce how much time they had. He checked the instrument units and the last calibration first.
“Maru, how old are you?” Darae asked.
“Seventeen. I’m allowed to use the radio. I’ve learned the whole checklist.”
The quick addition suggested experience of being worried about.
“You’re doing well. Who goes outside?”
“The adults. I want to go, but they won’t let me.”
“Let’s keep it that way today. Are your feet or your body secured where you are?”
“Yes. Clipped to the table.”
Haeseong confirmed it. Maru was in the safe indoor area, and adults were checking the others in assigned groups. It helped a little to know that someone over there was counting people too.
A still image arrived on Darae’s terminal. Inside the habitat, walls and ceiling looked much the same, but she could tell where people ate. Spoons were bundled with elastic at the center of a round table. People sat with their feet hooked in different directions. Small lidded containers were fixed at twenty-three places instead of plates.
One photograph had turned a place she couldn’t find on a map into something she recognized as a home.
She looked at the timer beside her monitor.
7-B DECISION DEADLINE: 35 HOURS, 31 MINUTES.
The number suddenly seemed beside the point. That clock measured when they had to decide what to do with a box. It didn’t say how long the people at the other end would be all right.
“I’m requesting emergency preservation on the basis of this record,” Jingyeong told the safety officer. “Ownership can be decided later. We need to verify the connection between this equipment and the people requiring rescue.”
He authorized preservation of the emergency cargo. Darae changed the status beneath the timer.
NO DISPOSAL WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION.
The deadline remained. But throwing the equipment away because of it was no longer an option.
Haeseong’s voice turned away from the microphone.
“Maru, close your pocket before you move. You’ll lose the seeds.”
“It’s closed,” Maru said softly.
Darae remembered the green leaves.
“Do you grow plants?”
“A few,” Haeseong said. “Nowhere near enough to feed us.”
“Why, then?”
“To see new leaves come out. Dates are hard to see up here.”
Darae looked through the window. Darkness was coming over Earth, though the city lights hadn’t appeared yet. She had never thought that in a place where day and night changed so often, a leaf could become a calendar.
The communications room held a steady temperature. Behind its walls, coolant quietly carried heat away. Until now, she had never distinguished that sound from ventilation. She had even once assumed that with all that cold outside, they could simply let the hot air out. But in vacuum there was no breeze to carry their heat. The wide radiators had to do their work.
Seo pressed his lips together over the heat-rejection readings.
“We can’t make it as cool as Raon. First we need to bring it within the equipment’s operating range.”
He explained what he could offer and what he still didn’t know. The absence of a promise in his voice made it easier for Darae to loosen her hold on the microphone.
Mujin quietly raised two fingers. Little time remained in the window.
The safety officer requested location data. Haeseong sent the last received orbital elements and the pattern of their observation beacon. He called them new coordinates, but their measurement time was old. They couldn’t be used as a flight target unchanged.
“Can you maneuver at present?” Mujin asked.
“No. The thrusters have no power.”
“Attitude control?”
“Small corrections only. We can’t stop a large rotation.”
Mujin’s expression changed. Not fear. The look of someone choosing shorter sentences.
“Can we approach the old north port?”
Static answered him.
The officer adjusted the antenna. Haeseong’s last words broke through in pieces.
“Not north. The connecting section—”
His voice vanished.
Darae kept the microphone. Maru had written that there would be three repeat calls. Two were still to come.
The first brought only noise.
On the second, Maru’s voice briefly returned.
“He’s holding it by hand. The door won’t line up.”
A dull impact sounded in the background.
Maru spoke faster.
“Don’t come to the north side.”
The voice shook on the last words.
“There’s no floor there anymore.”