2025 Short Story & Essay Contest: Third Place, Adult Short Story Contest
By John Simpson
“If we don’t get this under control, the Old Man’s gonna replace us both with robots!”
Peters grunted by way of reply, more than the comment deserved. No robot ever made could replace human experience or be flexible enough to adapt in an emergency—which is what they were in right now. Absent a great deal of luck, the whole system would collapse. God only knew what might happen then.
A veteran spacer at 42, Jock Peters was Station Engineer, and the last thing he needed was to be told his job: not by the trillionaire whose cost-cutting layoffs and sub-spec construction methods had caused this mess, and certainly not by some snotnosed college boy pretending to be his superior.
Kid’s not completely wrong, though, he thought. Things are FUBAR. At least lives aren’t at risk. Then, reconsidering, he grimaced. I hope.
Aloud he said, “Check the pressure on number three dehumidifier.”
His downy-faced boss did so. “38 and dropping. When it gets below the dew point, atmospheric moisture will start condensing.” The kid’s voice cracked. “All the roots will get wet, mildew and rot. We’re gonna lose this whole crop!”
The least he could do is give me a hand, Peters thought unfairly. It takes skill to trace an electrical fault in even a simple device, and this orbital station, with 10 miles of solar panels, a quarter million grow lamps, a hundred times as many underground irrigators, and perhaps 10 billion individual support components all working together in an intricately balanced system, was anything but simple. The lad’s degree was in agricultural management. Damned college kid. An electrician’s ticket would at least have been useful.
Peters worked steadily, testing one circuit at a time manually until he reached the next short. Sparks showered as the whole panel tripped—again. “Fault in circuit 32,” he said laconically as he worked his way back down the resets, stopping at 31. More cross-wiring, dammit! I’m getting too old for this. For a moment he glared resentfully at the burnt-out hulk that had once been the computerized controls. Then he shook his head and got back to work.
“How long ‘till night?” he asked, marking 32 and starting again at 33. His so-called manager mumbled unintelligibly and he asked again, louder.
“How should I know?” whined the boy.
With that, the long-suffering engineer finally ran out of patience. He stood, marched to where his nominal superior sat sulking, and … gently placed his hands on the young man’s shoulders. Boy’s trembling. Terrified. Their eyes met, locked. “Listen, kid. There’s exactly two people on this whole station: you and me. Sink or swim, we’re in this mess together. You can choose to help, or else you’re part of the problem. Get me?”
He paused and waited for comprehension to dawn. When it had, he continued speaking—quietly, deliberately. “Once this mess is over, when management reviews us, you want me to say you did your best. Right? Only I won’t lie for you; I wouldn’t tell a lie for my own mother, God rest her. What you don’t want me to say is that you were part of the problem. So take a second, pull yourself together, and then figure out how long before this station will enter Earth’s shadow. All right? Good.”
Peters returned to his work, having delivered himself in thirty seconds of more words than he’d spoken in the past six months. It felt good. Then, half a minute later, the kid’s voice came, shaky but sure, which made him feel even better. “50 minutes before sunset begins. Full night 10 minutes after.”
“And it’ll last…”
“Three hours if we’re lucky. We’re still correcting, so it’s hard to calculate.”
An earlier control board fault had blasted the maneuvering jets for hours before it had been detected. Their abrupt cutoff had touched off the present cascade failure in the power system. Long-hidden glitches then started surfacing in ever-increasing waves. Emergency systems had since taken over, slowing their orbit, with the result that the station had only marginal power reserves going into a long, cold time in Earth’s shadow. Planets have insulating clouds, miles of atmosphere, and a huge thermal mass to keep from freezing every night. Stations don’t.
“50 minutes,” Peters muttered. His hands kept moving surely through their rote task as he considered the situation. 37 faulted, and then 39, each producing its own spectacular display of sparks. He taped both breakers down; he’d now found nine bad circuits and he was only 20 percent done. At this rate, he might get halfway before nightfall. There wasn’t nearly enough time.
He reached a decision. “Right, kid; you’re gonna have to take over for me. I’ll go find that cross-wiring the hard way. If I don’t, we’ll lose the harvest no matter what. When you find a fault, tape the tripped breaker in the off position, reset the rest, and move on; three faults in a row, the real short’s hiding in the circuit before those three. Start where I left off and follow the pattern. Have you got all that?”
“But there’s no time to—”
“Doesn’t matter,” said the engineer. “Your job from here on out is cover-your-ass, which means if we go down, we go down working. Got me?”
The manager blinked, processing this new mindset. Finally he nodded, sat down, and started flipping switches. Wonder if he’ll stick it out. Peters banished the thought and went out to the garage. He had a job to do.
—
The engineer grabbed a buggy and drove down the station’s one road, passing between fields of ripening wheat under the illusion of a clear blue sky. Clouds of dust rose in his wake, a constant air filtration problem in this place with no free water. Amber wheat waved gently in the breeze of his passing. It would have been beautiful if anyone had noticed.
His objective was pylon 17, the location of the first fault. Somewhere in its wiring harness was a connection that shouldn’t exist, live power pouring in from a completely different circuit hundreds of yards away. If he could figure out which, he’d have located the core electrical flaw. Assuming there’s only one.
This crop was worth more than he’d be paid in a thousand lifetimes. Every kernel raised in orbit was one that didn’t need to come from Earth, which meant saving a hundred times its mass in rocket fuel. Talk about golden waves of grain! Whatever they could warehouse would be invaluable; anything that hadn’t yet ripened would never get the chance to—not unless he got the power fixed. The harvest droids had all been sent down to the far end of the station and were working inward, getting in the ripest first. That meant nothing else was on the road. He could speed with impunity, and he did.
He reached the massive pylon’s access hatch in six minutes, then climbed down through a maze of irrigation pipes, drains, nutrient pods, air ducts, and—Ah! Finally, electrical conduits. Condensation was starting to form on them. Dear Lord, if those connections get wet! He shook his head to clear it, then opened the panel and got to work, testing each supposedly dead breaker for live current. It took him 10 precious minutes to find the fault, another two to trace it back, and then… Hmm.
Common sense, to say nothing of professional safety standards, required him to follow the live power to its origin, turn it off at the main, and only then pull the faulty breaker. Otherwise it could be 10 volts or 10 million, and there was no way to know which. Doing it the right way—the safe way—would take hours, and there simply wasn’t time. Peters sighed quietly, steeling himself. He wasn’t a religious man, but he still said a lightning prayer to any god who happened to be listening. Then he grimaced, reached in with one heavily gloved hand and, in a single fast move, manually yanked out the live breaker.
It was a lot more than ten volts.
Power arced and circuits screamed, and there was a thunderous detonation. The concussion knocked him back to the end of his safety line, stunning him momentarily and—he’d later notice—giving him flash burns all across his face. Oh, Lord; I’ve blown the whole harness! Then he heard a faint humming noise as the lights started to come back on, and, painfully, he smiled. He’d done it!
Once he could move again, he carefully covered the terminal ends and reset the rest of the board. Pylon 17 was now active. Now all he had to do was get back to the central transmission hub and cut out the miswired power bank. If he was lucky, that would be the only major system fault; if not… It didn’t bear thinking about. There wasn’t time to do all this again, and anyway he didn’t intend to risk electrocution a second time. That was too close!
He wiped his brow (removing the charred remains of his eyebrows in the process) and began the climb back to ground level. He was humming tunelessly, though he didn’t know it.
Peters surfaced, sealed the lock, and pointed his buggy back toward home base. The illusion of blue sky on the station’s curved sides was fading with the sunlight, and only about half the grow lights in this section had power. That was from one of his taped-down breakers. Probably number twenty-two, he figured idly. Through the curved dome, he could just make out the sun setting around the edge of Earth far below, a glorious vision denied forever to the mass of humanity. That he could see it at all meant even more systems were failing than he’d thought. He scowled and gunned the accelerator.
Disaster struck. A small harvester droid, far outside its programmed path, blundered beneath one of the buggy’s balloon tires. Peters flew through the air in a long arc, plowed backside first through a furlong of standing wheat, touched the ground, and tumbled painfully to a halt.
—
When he came to, night had fallen. He lay on his back, bloody and aching, breath steaming in the rapidly cooling air, and stared. Far above were vast banks of grow lights, but to his confusion he couldn’t see them. Instead, his eyes met a sight perfectly unique in outer space, a phenomenon never before seen off-planet by a living human. His scattered wits could make no sense of it whatsoever.
He became aware of an oddly familiar aroma, sharp and pungent yet somehow pleasant. Then came a soft pattering noise, followed by a low rumble off in the distance. A droplet of water splashed his face, and finally he realized: Those were clouds up there. Actual clouds. Inside a space station.
It was raining.
