Sixty-Three Percent

The pod was four meters by two. Eli had run the arithmetic on that, too, because running arithmetic on uncomfortable facts was the only way his brain knew to make them tolerable. Four meters by two meant you could not stand. You could not stretch. You could not turn around without your elbow grazing the hull or your knee knocking against the acceleration couch or your prosthetic hand clicking against the control console in a rhythm that had started as diagnostic protocol and had become, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, a metronome for the silence between them.

Click. The life support readout refreshed. Click. The oxygen recycler status cycled from amber to green and back to amber. Click. The hull integrity overlay painted the port quarter in warning yellow, a spiderweb of microfractures radiating from a single point near the hatch seal, and the computer could not localise it beyond a general region because the sensors in that quadrant had been among the first things to fail during the detonation. Click. The thermal regulation subsystem reported a three-degree drift toward cold that the computer was compensating for but could not explain, which meant something was bleeding heat into the outer dark at a rate the system had not been designed to track.

Click.

'That sound.' Kael's voice came from across the pod, low and rough, the first words he had spoken since the explosion. He had not moved from his couch. His head was tilted back against the hull, eyes half-closed, the gash on his temple now sealed with a strip of medical tape that Eli had watched him apply with the same steady hands that had once handled a flight stick with something approaching art. 'The prosthetic. Is it a calibration issue, or are you doing that on purpose.'

It was not a question. Kael did not ask questions. He made observations and waited to see what you would do with them. This was the thing Eli had forgotten about Kael Morrow in the decade between the courtroom and this pod—the way he watched, the way he filed every detail away into some internal catalogue that he never referenced aloud but never failed to consult. Kael had noticed the prosthetic's click within the first ten minutes. He had tracked the rhythm. He had identified the pattern. And he had waited—how long, Eli could not know—for the moment when bringing it up would produce the maximum effect.

Eli did not turn around. The click came again, deliberate this time, and he let it hang in the air for a full two seconds before answering. 'Diagnostic cycle. The interface needs to recalibrate every forty minutes in microgravity or the feedback loop degrades.' A pause. A click. 'The sound is a byproduct.'

'Understood.'

That was all. Understood. One word, delivered in the same flat register Kael had used during the court-martial when the judge asked if he had anything to say in his own defense and Kael had said No, sir and sat back down and had not spoken again for the remainder of the proceedings. Eli remembered that word. He remembered the exact weight of it, the way it had landed in the courtroom silence like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward in concentric circles of implication that everyone in the room had felt but no one had acknowledged. The judge. The panel. The spectators in the gallery. Everyone waiting for Kael Morrow to fight for himself, to offer some explanation, some mitigation, some scrap of human feeling that might soften the verdict. And Kael had given them nothing. Just that word. Understood. As if the sentence had been a weather report. As if the stripping of his flight status and the end of his operational career and the decade of exile in logistics had been conditions he had anticipated and accepted long before the gavel came down.

The computer recalculated. Seventy-one hours of breathable atmosphere remaining, assuming the microfracture did not propagate, assuming the recycler held, assuming the pod's life support performed to specification in conditions it had never been tested against and for which no test protocol existed.

The assumptions were stacking up. Eli did not trust stacks.

He turned away from the console and faced Kael for the first time since the pod had jettisoned. The amber emergency lighting carved shadows under Kael's cheekbones, deepened the hollows beneath his eyes, made him look older than thirty-five. The same square jaw. The same close-cropped dark hair, grey now at the temples where it had been black ten years ago. The same quality of stillness that Eli remembered from the cargo bay, the fraction of a second before the loader malfunctioned—a complete absence of wasted motion, every muscle held in a state of suspended readiness that was not tension and not relaxation but something in between, something harder to name. The moment that had divided his life into before and after and left him on the wrong side of the division.

The hatred sat between them. A third passenger. Undiminished. Patient.

'I can reduce my consumption,' Kael said. He did not move. His hands remained folded in his lap, the fingers interlaced, the knuckles pale where the skin stretched over bone. 'Slow my breathing. Drop my metabolic rate by maybe eight percent. It would buy us'—a pause, a calculation running behind the half-closed eyes—'six hours. Approximately.'

The words were practical. Operational. The kind of thing a commander offered in a crisis when resources were finite and every hour mattered. But Eli did not hear practicality. He heard surrender. He heard a man who had accepted a verdict ten years ago and had spent every day since confirming it, a man who volunteered to breathe less because breathing less was what he had been doing since the court-martial, since the cargo bay, since the moment he had stood at the loader's control panel and looked Eli in the eye and done nothing as two cargo containers closed around Eli's arm and the world turned to white.

'Six hours.' Eli's voice came out flat. Clipped. The command cadence worn into it like a groove in metal. 'Generous of you.'

Kael's eyes opened fully. The amber light caught them, turned them dark and unreadable, but something shifted behind them. A flicker. There and gone.

'It is a practical suggestion.'

'Is that what you called it ten years ago.' The words left Eli's mouth before the circuit in his brain responsible for deciding whether Kael Morrow deserved the accusation could complete its assessment. 'A practical decision. The loader was already malfunctioning, you had flagged it for maintenance, the exercise was running behind schedule, and the most practical thing to do was to let it run. Practical. You stood there at the controls and you looked at me and you did nothing. Was that practical too.'

The word hung in the thinning air. Eli's prosthetic clicked against the armrest. Once. Twice. The sound was louder than it had been a minute ago, or the silence had grown deeper, or the distinction had stopped mattering. Somewhere in the neural feed, a phantom signal was beginning to fire—the ghost of a hand that no longer existed, reporting pressure and heat and the specific ache of crushed bone. The cold always triggered it. The pod was bleeding heat and the prosthetic was registering the loss and his brain was interpreting the signal the only way it knew how, which was to generate the memory of the moment the arm had been destroyed and to replay it, faithfully, in excruciating detail, every twenty seconds.

Kael absorbed it. That was the thing about Kael Morrow. He absorbed. Accusations, verdicts, ten years of professional exile, the gash on his temple, the blood drying on his face—he absorbed all of it without deflection, without defense, without so much as a shift in his breathing. The stillness was absolute. It was the thing Eli hated most. Not the arm. Not the cargo bay. Not even the decade of silence that had followed. The stillness. The way Kael refused to fight back, as if fighting back would have been an admission that there was something worth fighting for, something worth saving, something in the wreckage of their shared history that had not already been destroyed beyond recovery.

The hull groaned. Metal stressed beyond tolerance, a low resonant note that vibrated up through the deck plates and into the bones of Eli's legs, and for a half-second the pod felt less like a spacecraft and more like a submarine descending past its crush depth, the walls closing in by microns, the air growing heavy with the pressure of the void outside pressing in. Then another sound. Thinner. Higher. A hiss. Not the oxygen recycler—that was a steady, cyclic sound, a mechanical breath, a thing you could measure and predict and compensate for. This was intermittent. Irregular. A pressure seal somewhere near the hatch, bleeding atmosphere into vacuum through a crack too small to see, and the hiss had a quality that Eli's training identified before his conscious mind caught up: it was getting louder.

Eli was at the console before the thought completed. His prosthetic hit the interface harder than necessary, the click of the actuators sharp and percussive, and he pulled up the hull integrity overlay with the kind of speed that came from thousands of hours of simulator training and the specific urgency of a captain who had already lost one ship and was not prepared to lose another. The spiderweb of fractures centered on the port hatch seal. The hiss was coming from a single point—a microfracture, hairline, propagating outward at a rate the computer had not been programmed to model because the pod had not been designed to withstand a detonation of this magnitude and the engineers who had written the specifications had assumed, reasonably, that an escape pod would launch before the mother vessel exploded rather than during.

Eli's fingers moved across the interface. His right hand, his real hand, traced the fracture path while his prosthetic held the display steady. The computer threw up a series of numbers—propagation rate, atmospheric loss velocity, projected failure interval—and Eli absorbed them all in the space of a single breath because this was what he did, this was the thing his brain had been built for, the cold processing of catastrophic data into actionable conclusions.

'Microfracture,' he said. The word came out clinical, a shield of data that was also a weapon and also the only thing keeping his voice steady. 'Port hatch seal. Atmosphere is escaping at approximately point-oh-three percent of total volume per hour and accelerating. At current propagation rate, we will lose atmospheric integrity before the oxygen recycler reaches depletion threshold. The fracture needs to be patched.'

'Externally,' Kael said.

'Yes.'

The word was a door closing. External patching required someone to go outside the pod—to enter the debris field that surrounded them, the frozen shrapnel of the Isidore's engine array still spinning through the outer dark where the sun was nothing but a bright star among bright stars. Going outside the pod required an EVA suit. Eli turned to the emergency locker. The faded blue cross on its door was a standard fleet marking, the kind of thing you walked past a thousand times during drills and inspections and never really saw until the moment you needed it, and that moment was now.

The locker contained three things.

Emergency rations—vacuum-sealed blocks of processed nutrient paste, enough for two adults for six days at reduced consumption. Eli registered this data point and filed it. Adequate supply. Not a constraint.

Thermal blankets—two of them, thin silver sheets that crinkled when he touched them, designed to reflect body heat in environments where body heat was the only heat available and the ambient temperature was a handful of degrees above absolute zero. He registered this too. The pod was losing heat and the blankets would help but they could not stop the loss and eventually the cold would become as lethal as the vacuum.

And one EVA suit.

Eli stared at the suit. It hung from its rack the way all EVA suits hung from their racks—collapsed, faintly humanoid, a deflated version of a person waiting to be filled. Standard fleet issue. Grey thermal lining. Blue exterior shell with the faded insignia of the Isidore still visible on the left shoulder, a stylised compass rose that had once meant home port and now meant a debris field. The helmet rested on a shelf above it, visor dark, reflecting the amber emergency lights in twin curves that looked back at Eli like eyes that had already seen what came next and were not going to warn him.

One suit.

He checked the locker again. The upper compartment contained nothing but a spare oxygen canister that the suit did not need because the suit had its own supply and the canister was for a different model anyway. The lower drawer held a repair kit—patches, sealant, a hand welder smaller than Eli's palm. Useful for the microfracture. Useless without a way to reach it. He checked the space behind the rations, the gap between the thermal blankets, the floor of the locker where a second suit rack should have been mounted. The standard pod configuration for a four-person crew included two EVA suits. Two suits for four crew. One for the primary responder, one for backup. This pod had been reconfigured, or the second suit had been removed before launch, or it had never been stocked. The reason did not matter. The fact remained, irreducible and absolute, like the arithmetic that had brought them here.

One suit.

The arithmetic ran itself. Eli did not need the computer. The microfracture required external patching. External patching required someone to spend—he pulled up the schematics, cross-referenced the debris field density, calculated the radiation exposure using a formula he had memorised during his first deep-space qualification and had never expected to apply—approximately eleven minutes outside the pod. Eleven minutes in the debris field, surrounded by irradiated fragments from whatever had torn through the Isidore's engine array, fragments still hot with the residue of a detonation whose source and mechanism neither of them had had time to analyse. Eleven minutes of exposure at that density would deliver a dose high enough to destroy the neural interface in his prosthetic—the delicate lattice of synthetic nerves that translated intention into motion—and, in the case of an unshielded human body, a dose high enough to be fatal within hours, the kind of death that started with nausea and ended with organ failure and left you conscious for most of the interval between.

The suit would shield against most of it. Not all of it. The outer shell was rated for standard deep-space radiation, solar wind, cosmic background, the ambient wash of particles that filled the void between planets. It was not rated for a debris field this dense, this irradiated, this close to the blast point. But it would buy eleven minutes. It would buy the time required to weld a plate over the crack and seal the hull and give the surviving passenger whatever hours of oxygen remained.

One suit. One person. One chance to patch the fracture.

The computer recalculated. Sixty-eight hours. The microfracture was propagating faster than the initial estimate, the hiss from the hatch seal had deepened from a whisper into a steady murmur that no longer sounded intermittent at all, and the oxygen counter was ticking down at a rate that made the arithmetic unnecessary and the arithmetic was the only anchor Eli had.

He looked at Kael.

Kael had not moved from his couch, but his eyes were open now, fully open, tracking Eli's movements from the console to the locker and back to the console with the same clinical attention he had once applied to flight telemetry and threat assessments and the thousand small calculations that kept a deep-space vessel alive. The quality of his stillness had changed. It was no longer the stillness of a man absorbing. It was the stillness of a man who had already done the arithmetic, who had reached the same conclusion Eli had reached, who was waiting—as he had always waited—for Eli to say it first.

The resemblance to the cargo bay was so precise and so total that Eli's prosthetic hand closed around the edge of the console with enough force to register a pressure warning in his neural feed, a sharp spike of data that his brain interpreted as pain.

He overrode it.

'One suit,' Kael said. It was not a question because Kael did not ask questions. It was an observation, and he was waiting to see what Eli would do with it, and the waiting itself was a kind of pressure, a third gravity pressing down on both of them in a space that had none.

'One suit,' Eli repeated.

The words filled the pod. There was no room for anything else. Four meters by two. Two men. One EVA suit. The hiss of escaping atmosphere, no longer whispering now, a steady exhale that had become the dominant sound in the cabin. The click of a prosthetic against a console, slower now, the metronome winding down because Eli had stopped running diagnostics on systems he could not fix. The hatred, undiminished and patient, breathing the same diminishing air, waiting to see which of the two passengers would claim the suit and which would stay behind and which version of the story the survivor would tell when the rescue that was not coming finally arrived.

The oxygen counter ticked.

Sixty-three percent.