On and on, again and again, I ran through the steps as I climbed down farther and farther, and after a few repetitions I started numbering them. I was on repetition 217 when the connection hatch for the Research module came into view at the bottom of the ladder. A flashing red warning brought me to a sudden halt.
Breach.
“No no no no no no,” I whispered as I swung into the module, activated my grav boots, then sprinted down the hall, hurdling toppled furniture and ducking dislodged paneling. “Please be just the hallway, please be just the hallway, please—”
A bright-red light blinked on and off above the door to my lab, and I swallowed the sudden lump of fear. The outer doors were partially ajar. I keyed the entry code, but nothing happened. I entered it again. Still nothing.
“Let me in,” I shouted at the door, but that didn’t work, nor did slamming my fist into it. My chest heaved in the tight harness, and I glanced about wildly, looking for anything that could help. I ran back to where some ceiling panels had come loose and wrenched off a rectangular piece the length of my arm. I shoved it into the cracked door, threw my shoulder against it over and over, and finally somehow managed to slide it open far enough that I could squeeze inside if I crawled.
Inside my office I stood up and surveyed the damage. My books and papers were everywhere. The inner door to the lab was closed, and the wall light faded in and out, so there was still power of some sort. I connected to the console and took a deep breath.
“Authorize.”
The console remained quiet.
“Liberia, authorize.”
My breathing echoed in my helmet, and it sounded shallow and panicky, which annoyed me, and why wasn’t the damn ship responding? It had power!
“Authorize?”
“Auth-o-rize.”
“Authorize! Please!”
My office chair lay overturned beneath a bookshelf and the desk. I pulled it free and was preparing to hurl it at the inner door when a gleam caught my attention. Partially buried beneath the debris of my office lay the twisted metal bangle Tomas had given me.
“Papi’s Last Resort,” I mumbled. I set the chair down, picked up the lockpick, and slid it into the door release in the top right corner. My shoulders sagged with relief when a loud click sounded and the seals disengaged. Papi was going to get a case of his favorite bourbon after this was all over. I chuckled at the thought of his face when he opened it, then headed into the lab.
The smile froze on my face, then melted into horror at the sight of mangled plants strewn about.
“No.”
Snarls of kudzu lay everywhere, as if the curtain of creeping vine had been snatched aside by some angry hand.
“No no no,” I said.
The hover-pots lay in piles—in corners, half buried in mounds of soil—cracked and broken shards sprinkling the floor. Tufts of herbs could be seen here and there, but very little was salvageable.
“Sweet God, no.”
Broken cassava stems poked out everywhere I looked, like small groups of bristling stakes warning me away from what I needed to collect. What we needed to survive. Fresh green stems sported white gashes that were rapidly browning.
The air, I realized. There was a leak somewhere, and soon the harvest would be worthless.
“Nana?” I don’t know why I called out to the large cultivar as if she could answer me. Darkness shrouded her corner, though I could make out bits of her form, and I shook my head, the corners of my eyes burning.
“Nana, don’t play with me. Don’t play!”
Something hissed and popped, causing me to jump a yard in the air and come down clutching at my heart. My suit’s audio system had activated. I was about to turn it off, but the thought of scrabbling around in the dark by myself with only the dying plants and my breathing to keep me company—no, I decided to let it play.
“So, look,” Nana Gbemi’s voice said into the darkness. “Just ’cause it feel like you been workin’ all your life, and it keep pilin’ up and don’t look like there’s an end in sight—don’t think you alone now. Hear me? You ain’t alone. Ha! You ain’t never been alone, you ain’t never gon’ be alone.”
I got on my hands and knees and started working. The cassavas were the most important—everything else could be started from seed if we landed. When we landed. For now, I just had to bag and seal the tubers off from the atmosphere.
“You gon’ face a whole heap of mess.” Nana Gbemi laughed. “If you only knew. Every time you climb one heap, you gon’ stumble into another one. Probably bigger too.”
Somebody paged me, and I answered automatically. I didn’t know who it was, but somehow I communicated the emergency. All thought, all concern and sorrow and fear, had been shoved into my own personal lockbox. The only thing that mattered was saving the harvest.
A flashing icon interrupted the recording, and INCOMING blinked on my display in bright-red letters.
“Kweku here,” I answered.
“Kweku, it’s Harry. Status?”
“Uh, it’s bad down here, Harry—there’s a breach in the lab. I’m trying to save what I can now. Any help you can send would be a blessing.”
Silence stretched on the line. I continued to sift through dirt, snagging cassava tubers—two, sometimes three, at a time—and stuffing them into the protective transport bags.
“Jen says we’ve got an hour before we need to force the separation. I really need you to come back so we can go over the emergency landing proto—”
“I know the protocol, Harry. We all do. What I need is time and help.”
“Jesus, Kweku, this is no time to pull stunts.” Harry sounded tired, and part of me felt sorry for him. But the other part of me continued to rescue as many plants as possible, knowing it might mean the difference between a successful harvest and slow starvation.
“Harry, just give me time, and make sure Tomas has that pod ready to go. In fact, send him with it—I’m going to need it soon.”
“No.”
The word echoed softly in my ears, so softly I thought I misheard it.
“What?”
“I can’t jeopardize the safety of the crew for the garden you’ve got down there.”
“Harry,” I said through gritted teeth. “We’re jeopardizing the survival of the colony if we don’t grab as many—”
“You don’t know that. I’m—”
“I ran the numbers, Harry. I do know that.”