4. Evac Instructions

At the call, Peter plowed out of his office and headed straight for the main office. The executive branch was a small pod sitting high on the crater's side, over and above the rest of the station. He jogged down the ramps and tunnels that led to the largest pod where most of the administrative offices were, passing few people.

That was the thing that still caught him off guard, even two months in. The station had always been loud — not city-loud, but the specific, layered noise of a place that ran continuously: equipment hum, boot-falls on metal decking, voices carrying around corners, the distant percussion of the mining operation that had formed the baseline of his entire life. He'd grown up inside that sound. It was as natural to him as weather.

The quiet was wrong in a way he felt in his back teeth.

He passed office clusters where people had found things to occupy their hands — filing, mostly, which was either genuinely necessary or a collective act of psychological self-defense, he couldn't tell which anymore. A few people looked up as he jogged past. He nodded, kept moving. He could feel their eyes on him after he'd gone. Captain, they were thinking. Fix it.

He finally came up to the main office, a large and long pod with no interior divisions, filled with low-walled cubicles. Like everywhere else, it was a ghost town, except for the three people standing on the far side by the ancient, back-up fax machine.

He clocked them before they saw him: Li, with that particular stillness he carried from his mining days, standing close enough to Cookie that it was either instinct or comfort, probably both. Cookie herself had gone pale under her makeup, which in four years of knowing her he had never once seen happen. And Angie, spine against the wall, arms full of fax paper, already furious.

He'd done that, he thought. Not today — before today. Whatever had driven his sister to that wall with that expression had started six months ago, and he'd spent every day since calculating how to undo it and arriving at the same answer: he couldn't.

"Evacuation?" He called out as he crossed the expanse of desks and clutter.

"Those bastards!" She held up the long sheaf of paper. Peter could see the color in her cheeks as soon as she looked up.

"I'm glad you called," he said, finally slowing his pace as he approached them.

"I'm sure as hell not going to be blamed for keeping you in the dark," Angie snapped.

"It's okay." Peter gently took the fax roll and started reading it. He scrolled up to where the evac instructions began, and looked at the time frame. "No," he said, jerking his head up to look at Li, disbelief in his voice.

"Yep. That's it."

"They know we can't do it that fast!" Cookie punched at the fax paper where Peter was holding it.

"We need to flood the mines. Vacuum out, and—"

"Angie, we can't try for the Wadi." Peter switched his gaze to his sister, who began pacing.

"We don't have a choice, Peter, and you know it."

"No. We evac according to instructions."

Li and Cookie moved back slightly from the confrontation, glancing at each other nervously, and Peter couldn't blame them. The last time he and Angie faced off, a ping pong table in the rec room got broken — which was on him, despite Angie being the one with the reputation for being hot-headed.

"Play it safe? The LQ won't clear re-entry. I thought we established that." Angie stopped and crossed her arms, daring the challenge.

He was half tempted not to try. The LQ, the living quarters pod, was the remains of two retrofitted cargo carriers, currently eighty years old and held together by maintenance schedules and optimism in roughly equal measure. In a true emergency — the kind nobody at Mizmo had ever seriously planned for, because planning for it meant admitting it was possible — the LQ could theoretically be de-retrofitted back into a single large cargo transport. Stripped of its partitions, its small apartments, its accumulated decade of personal effects, it could carry people back to Earth the way it had once carried drilling equipment up.

Peter had read the specs three times. Each time, he'd arrived at the same word: theoretically.

The economic and political collapse of Greater China had not been on anyone's radar at Mizmo HQ, and the shutdown of interplanetary launches Earthside had caught everyone flat-footed. The miners, to their credit, had unionized fast and negotiated extraction on the last two large cargo transports. The office staff had faced a different choice. Peter had campaigned hard for cooperation with Mizmo HQ, which had promised emergency transports and so far delivered none. He felt the weight of that every time someone looked at him in the corridors. They'd stayed because he told them it would be all right. He was still trying to make that true.

The Wadi was the other option. The terraforming dome complex — a hundred acres of engineered green space, carefully selected species, the Moon's single most improbable and expensive experiment — had been Angie's answer from the moment the station's situation became undeniable. Her numbers said it could support them. Peter had checked her numbers until he knew them as well as she did, and he still couldn't find the hole in them.

His gut said the hole was there. His gut had said that before, about other things, and it had been right. The last time he'd had a very bad feeling and failed to act on it, people died. Including his father.

He stood staring at the fax roll, and the thought he'd been turning over for six months moved through him again, slow and cold. Fifty years the filtration systems had run without serious failure. For the last two years they'd degraded so steadily, so comprehensively, that they were now boiling water to drink it. And three kilometers away, the Wadi ran the identical system without a hiccup. Clean water. Fresh air. Not a single reported malfunction.

He'd looked at those numbers from every angle he could think of. He kept arriving at the same place.

He pushed it back down. He had no evidence, no motive, and a crew of 114 people who needed him to be the captain rather than a man standing in the middle of the main office with a conspiracy theory and a bad feeling. There would be time for it later, or there wouldn't. Either way, it wasn't the argument to have right now.

Behind him, Cookie finished loading their last roll of thermal paper into the fax machine so it could continue printing. As it clacked to life, Angie began pacing. It was a bad sign.

"I know you don't have a lot of confidence in me, but trust me, Angie, the Wadi won't work."

"Nigeria is in the middle of negotiating with Mizmo on an emergency rescue launch. They can do it, if they get time. The Wadi only has to hold us for a couple of months."

"I read the news too, Angie. But I don't think Nigeria is as ready to help transport 100-plus people off the Moon as the news channels say they are. Once we are at the Wadi, this place will degrade fast and we won't be able to come back if—"

Angie slammed her hand on a desk. "Damnit! You can't have it both ways! It's either the LQ or the Wadi, Peter, and the numbers on the LQ don't run! You keep playing it safe and we're all going to get killed!"

Peter looked down at the fax he was still holding. He did not argue back, and in the silence, Angie's heavy breathing started to calm down. Li leaned forward.

"Peter, she's being harsh, but she's got a point." Peter looked over at him. "I know. But she's wrong." He dropped the fax and walked out before Angie got her second wind.