102: BED

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We settle into a new routine surprisingly quickly. Lina’s still processing samples from her previous braindead patients (now in the freezer) and the Friend is slowly picking through Captain Kinoshita’s notes to see if we’ve missed anything of note in there, but on the whole, the crew is more interested in the future than in digging up more unpleasant surprises from the past.

And the present. We’re very interested in staying alive in the present, too.

There’s a certain level of primitive charm in the ad-hoc monitoring systems we’ve put together without the AI. Every morning, the doctors check the feeds from the individual cameras we’ve set up to monitor the food and oxygen tanks in the chronostasis rings and compare the results with that the computer says they should be. Tal spends most of kes work time hunting disconnected computer functions left behind by the AI and forestalling any impending tech disasters ke can find, Denish does the same job on a more physical level, devising manual controls or simply removing unnecessary dangerous systems (“if you are worried about a computer locking you in, you just cut lock. Why fight computer?”), Sam learns everything they can about how to navigate and pilot a giant spaceship without the help of an AI, and the rest of us keeps the ship clean, maintained and running normally. With a crew of eight people restricted to a handful of rings, this isn’t particularly difficult.

One of my jobs is atmospheric analysis. Which is a fancy way of saying that twice a day, I ask the computer about what’s in the air in each ring in our little habitable zone. And then I go to each ring and check what’s in the air according to the handheld analysers that we’ve taped to random desks and walls, and compare those numbers to the computer’s numbers. So far, the computer and the handhelds have agreed with each other, and there’s been no more surprise poisons.

I check the analysers in the Greenhouse Ring and ensure that the oxygen is at its ideal level (21%) and the carbon monoxide at its ideal level (0%) and write the numbers down. There are small differences between the four analysers spaced around the ring, which is normal; the presence of greenery, machinery, and the normal movement of air creates local imbalances all the time. We always get a tiny drop in oxygen around heavily active electronics and an accompanying increase in ozone, for example, ozone being the natural result of applying electricity to O2. (Or ultraviolet light to O2. But if significant levels of UV light are getting inside the spaceship then we have other, extremely serious concerns.) The numbers are all within expected and safe levels, and agree broadly with the numbers the computer gave me.

I also check on the emergency space suits in the ring. They’re all exactly where they were yesterday, waiting and with full oxygen tanks. It’s not my assigned job to keep track of such things, but I’m pretty sure everyone’s doing the same thing as me, regularly checking every safety feature that happens to be within range. I know I’m not the only one who stops to look at every atmospheric analyser I pass or checks the camera feeds for the chronostasis rings. Just in case.

My personal project for the morning is to expand my sleeper nest, and the journey meandering abut the ring for appropriate wood takes me past our little graveyard. Plants have started to reclaim the graves, as they should; by the time we land they’ll be part of the ground once more, slight mounds beneath the greenery notable only for their strange regularity. Paper flowers lay scattered over some of them, recent enough to have not been destroyed by the daily scheduled rain. A Texan custom. I’d told everyone that we had plenty of real flowers, and could plant more on the graves themselves if they liked, but they’d explained that no, the point is to craft the dedication with your own hands. Cut flowers can count if they are properly and carefully arranged, but most people craft them from something. Something like paper.

It is, technically, a waste of paper. Most paper we use can be recycled, if necessary, but the grave flowers are destroyed by rain and washed into the soil. Nobody cares, of course. The colony will be fine missing the supplies that Tal uses to make kes accessories and makeup, and the dyes and tracers that Lina uses in her experiments, and the several-decades-old instant coffee that Sam has taken to drinking near-constantly despite the subtle disapproval of the doctors. It won’t miss a few sheets of paper.

Some graves get more flowers than others, but all of them accrue some flowers. Even Captain Sands, to my surprise, gets flowers, which I don’t get at all. He tried to kill these people for stupid, selfish reasons, and they still find time to be sad for him. Maybe I’m just not a very forgiving person.

Heli’s grave is generally the barest, but I’ve found flowers there before, folded in Captain Klees’ distinctive style, which… wow, the feelings there must be very, very complicated. He never mentions her in therapy. I’m not sure if that means I’m doing my job badly.

I collect my sticks and head back to my nest. Time to get to work.

Captain Klees is there, harvesting some herbs I don’t know the name of from his little herb patch. “Oh, hey, Aspen. Making a bigger bed?”

“Yep.” I sling my rope-tied bundle over my shoulders and climb the tree. “Since a certain someone who visits me in the night can’t stop worrying about falling out of the tree.”

He flushes. “It’s a narrow ledge and a high tree. And we were moving around a lot. It’s a natural concern.”

“You are so Texan. No Arborean would ever think that.”

“What, Arboreans can’t fall out of trees?”

“Out of trees, sure. But a sleeper nest is a sleeper nest. Have you ever fallen out of your bed? Why would you expect to fall out of mine?”

“I have, actually.”

“You have?”

“I was drunk, and it was an unfamiliar bed.”

“Oh. Well. Good thing I’m making this one bigger, then.” I start to lay the sticks.

“Anything I can do to help?”

“This part’s a one-person job.” Besides, Tal shares my nest occasionally, too. If he helps and Tal sees us, ke will also want to help, and I don’t need the integrity of my sleeping platform in the hands of two people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Captain Klees finishes harvesting his herbs and stands up just as Tinera wanders past. “Oh, hey, Captain,” she says with a little wave. “Chives, huh?”

“Yes,” he says with the resignation of one who knows what’s coming next.

“You know what chives are great in? Omelettes. Just saying.”

“Tinera, we can’t have chickens on a spaceship.”

“Why not? We have an apple tree on a spaceship!” She gestures towards the tree I’m building in. “Oh, hi, Aspen.”

“Hi, Tiny.”

“Aspen, back me up. You grew up in a giant garden. Chickens are good for plants, right?”

“I wouldn’t know. The ship’s agricultural terraformation files say they’re useful though, and this greenhouse ring is basically what the agri-domes will probably be like. So, yeah.”

“You didn’t have chickens in your gardens in Arborea?” Captain Klees asks, frowning.

“We were on the water. We had wading birds. The first time I ate a chicken egg was in exile.”

“And they’re great, right?” Tinera insists. “Moral-boosting food. Nutritious food. Perfect for a spaceship crew food.”

“I find them weirdly small. Which made Lunari food a disorienting experience, since you guys put them in everything, for some reason.”

“And it has been years since I’ve had one! Years! Captain, please. I am this close to breaking into medical storage and drinking their stored blood proteins as an eggwhite substitute.”

“Tiny.” Captain Klees puts a hand on her shoulder. “How will you get your chicken down to Hylara when we get there?”

“I’ll kill them and cook them! Think – fresh meat!”

That seems to almost convince him. He looks uncertain for a moment.

“Don’t you wish you could cook with real, fresh eggs, captain?”

“Even if we created one, it would be at least a year before it laid anything.”

“Actually,” I cut in, “we have accelerated chicken embryos in storage. One of those would start laying after a few months, and if we grew it now, should die of old age shortly before reaching Hylara.” (Anticipating the possibility that I might be heavily involved in establishing agriculture when we get to Hylara, I’ve been reading up a lot on what we have aboard and why.)

Captain Klees sighs deeply. “We can discuss it at the status update meeting tomorrow. If the crew agrees, then you may have one, and only one, accelerated chicken.”

“Chickens are flock animals,” Tinera points out. “They need to be in groups of at least three to feel safe and happy.”

He sighs even more deeply. “We can discuss it at the status update meeting tomorrow. If the crew agrees, then you may have three, and only three, accelerated chickens.”

“Yeah!” She pumps a fist in the air. “You’re gonna love these eggs, Captain.”

“The crew might still say no.”

“Of course they won’t! Who could say not to cute little pets that make breakfast?”

The radios on our hips crackle to life, making all three of us jump. (It’s lucky the captain isn’t helping me build. I’m far too experienced to fall out of a tree, but he might have.)

“Hey, Aspen!” Tal’s voice calls with that flattened, difficult-to-comprehend tone that people get when they lean way too close and yell into bad microphones. “You got a minute?”

It’s my turn to sigh deeply. I hold my own radio the proper distance from my face and say, “Aspen to Tal. I’m in the middle of a project right now but I’ll be done in five minutes or so. Is it urgent? Over.”

“Nah, I’ll tell everyone at the meeting tomorrow. Just thought you might to know, we’ve found the answer to your carbon monoxide question. Don’t tell the others though, I want to put it together and explain it right.”

“Lina to Tal. This is an open channel, everyone can hear you. Over.”

“Oh, right. Fuck.”

“You might as well just tell us, over,” I say, knowing I’m probably going to regret asking for a long enthusiastic Tal explanation over this specific medium. Under my tree, I hear Tinera mutter, “How is our tech savvy hacker this bad at basic radio?”

“Okay so, you know how you asked awhile back, why Amy even had access to enough carbon monoxide to kill everyone? There’s no big tank labelled ‘crew killing gas’ in the blueprints. We looked into that, and ‘Nish found the tank and disconnected it from the ventilation systems last week. Anyway. I’m code-sniping in here and I just found some code for those valves. And it’s just what I thought. You remember when we found that evidence that the aft engine was deliberately sabotaged.”

“When we found what?” Tinera asks into her radio.

“Yeah.” I frown. “When did that happen?”

“Oh, you guys know! Right before the murder thing. ‘Nish, back me up here.”

“That is right,” Denish says. “You came to me and I looked at the engine, and then we put it all together and decided not to kill the vibe of the party and to tell everyone at breakf – ah. Tal, I think we forgot to tell everyone.”

“I’m sorry, you what?” Tinera asks. “You found sabotage evidence and you fucking forgot?”

“No, we definitely told people,” Tal says. “Because I made that cool reference to the Heartbreak Screamers, remember?”

“You made that to me when you told me, Tal,” Denish says. “And I still do not understand it. Over.”

“How did this slip your mind?” Lina asks. “Over.”

“It was day that we were moving out of habitation Ring 2,” Denish says. “Everyone was drunk in our ring, other ring all busy with Movie Night. We decided to tell everyone at breakfast, but then Captain Sands came in, told us that two of our crewmates are dead, accused everyone of murder. Other things were on our minds.”

Captain Klees rubs his temples. “Of course even more things are going on,” he mutters, before lifting his radio from his belt. “Klees to all crew. Meeting in the rec ring in fifteen minutes, to go over… all of this, I guess. All acknowledge. Over.”

Tinera and I look at each other as the string of acknowledgements comes over the radio, each person verifying that they heard the order.

“This had better give us lots of answers without a bunch of new questions,” I say.

Tinera just smiles. “Aspen, when has that ever happened?”

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