Rust on the Gums

Teodor wiped his greasy thumb against the stiff fabric of his coveralls, scraping the gray twill until the cloth took on the dark sheen of synthetic lubricant and dried sweat. It was no use. The graphite had worked its way beneath his cuticles hours ago, during the purge of the aft condensers, and now it formed a black crescent glued to the quick of his nail. In the guardroom, the recycled air tasted precisely like it always tasted when the station completed its grazing arc: ferric oxide, insulation dust chewed up by the turbines, and a lingering aftertaste of fried ozone that settled on the back of the tongue like a copper coin. Every twelve minutes, when the compensation stabilizer lost two-tenths of a revolution to keep from burning out the quartz nozzles, the gravitational tide of Kallio-B pulled the structure downward. It wasn't a visible movement; it was a liquid weight at the base of the skull, a dull pressure that sought out any gap in the skeleton and lodged itself in the gums, waking a sharp, rhythmic stitch in his left premolar that beat in sync with the fifty-hertz hum of the CRT monitor.

The green phosphorus of the screen flickered with an irregular cadence, dyeing the sleeves of his coveralls an ash color. Teodor rested his index fingers against his left temple, pressing into the bone until the luminous smudge of the cathode-ray tube doubled in his field of vision.

He blinked.

Nothing got fixed by pressing.

No one on the discard shifts asked why the receiving bay remained open in a quadrant like that. Neither did Teodor. He simply sat in front of the secondary console, rubber soles glued to the metal floor to keep from absorbing the chassis's stray currents, pretending to watch commercial drift while counting down the minutes to lukewarm coffee. When your job consisted of watching gravity grind up two-century-old orbital scrap, you learned not to look for meaning. He jotted down dispersion patterns to fill out the form and signed from memory with his elbow so he wouldn't let go of the plastic cup.

On the side table, Dr. Sofia Lem was lining up oblong pills by shade on a translucent plastic tray: pale pale blue on the left, dirty beige in the center, two maroon capsules on the right. Her fingers moved with a slow calm, untouched by the tremors of the bulkhead.

"The section four water filter clogged up with calcium salts again," Lem said without lifting her eyes from the pillbox. "Smells like an old laundry room."

"It has calcium because the heater has a leak in the jacket," Teodor replied. He dragged his sleeve across his forehead, leaving a smudged trail over his pale skin. "If you don't purge it before the second shift comes in, the coffee is going to taste like chalk again."

"It already tastes like chalk."

"Last week's tasted like sulfate."

"It was magnesium, Teodor. Not sulfate. Sulfate would have blown your guts out in twenty minutes and I didn't see you running to the head."

Sofia snapped the lid of the pillbox shut with a dry click. Her hands smelled of the iodized alcohol from the hallway dispenser, that triage stench that clung to your pores even if you scrubbed yourself with a scouring pad three times a day under the recirculated stream. She stood up, adjusting the elastic of her trousers that danced around her ankles, and walked toward the main terminal with the heaviness of someone who had spent fourteen months sleeping on a folding cot without stable gravity.

On the top line of the phosphorus tube, the low-frequency demodulator began to cough up a string of hexadecimal numbers. They weren't coming through the consortium's emergency channel or the local approach beacon. It was a dead carrier, a fossil packet trapped in Kallio-B's curvature, dragged for centuries through the well until the station's antenna snagged it sideways like someone dragging a net through a sewer and pulling up a rotting boot. An archaic packet, compressed into logical formats that half of the modern compilers didn't even know how to read without throwing overflow errors.

Teodor brought his face close to the screen. The curvature of the glass distorted the corners, stretching the characters toward the edges of black bakelite.

The packet contained no cargo telemetry or navigation manifest.

It traced a sinusoidal curve broken by a ventricular pause: a brief peak, a flattened valley, an awkward rise that lingered three-tenths of a second before collapsing into a nearly horizontal line. An identical sinus arrhythmia, millimeter by millimeter, to the irregular click Teodor felt at that very moment against his sternum, beneath the zipper of his work clothes. He brought a hand to his chest, pressing the fabric soaked in cold sweat and soot. The pulse in his wrist stumbled; on the greenish glass, the trace from three hundred years ago stumbled in the same cycle, with the same flawed notch in the repolarization.

"Don't touch the header," Sofia murmured behind him, resting a bony hand on the metal back of the chair. "Let the buffer fill the dump."

"It has a biological signature," he said, without turning around. His voice came out cracked, thick with the brine that formed in his mouth every time Kallio-B bit the hull. "There shouldn't be anything organic on that band. Nothing survives at that angle of entry."

"Everything survives if it's frozen in a vacuum and falls with enough mass," she said, though her tone had lost its clinical indifference. Her fingers closed around the backrest with unnecessary force. "Unless it's hollow."

" ◇ "

Commissary Officer Halvard Strand didn't enter the guardroom; he occupied it. He always did it the same way, as if the cubic volume of the air belonged to him by inventory. He wore his gray synthetic wool collar zipped up to his Adam's apple and his tunic buttoned without a single wrinkle. No visible tremor despite the floor plates vibrating with the tide.

He held between his thumb and index finger a silver, plunger-style metal pen, whose mechanism he clicked with regular persistence: click, clack, click, clack. The sound was more annoying than the hum of the screen.

"We have a three percent variation in axis twelve drag, Kask," Strand said, stopping two paces from the console, without looking at Teodor, eyes fixed on the distorted reflection the monitor threw back of the two of them. "Three percent. That means either the auxiliary reactor is burning slag, or someone has hooked an unauthorized tap into the cooling ring to charge personal batteries. Know anything about personal batteries?"

"I don't use batteries, Commissary. All my equipment is wired to the guardroom sockets."

"Of course. You're an exemplary technician. Everyone on the night shift is exemplary until we open the ventilation ducts and find hooch flasks or rolls of copper fiber stolen from the maneuvering thrusters."

Click. Clack.

"The well doesn't wait for you to retire to turn you into scrap, Kask," Strand said, lowering his gaze for the first time toward the screen, where the heartbeat wave continued to print in green against a black background. "What is that?"

"A drift packet," Lem intervened before Teodor could formulate an excuse. "An echo from the outer quadrant. We're decoding the header to see if it contains fuel remnants that justify a capture maneuver."

Strand tilted his head. His skin had that pasty paleness of men who hadn't set foot in a true atmosphere for ten years, fed on protein paste and reduced-spectrum fluorescent tubes. He looked at Lem, then at Teodor, lingering for one exact second on the hand the technician still kept pressed against his chest. He said nothing for ten ticks of the pen.

"I don't like old echoes," he said at last, and the mechanism stopped with the plunger jammed down. "Ancient scrap usually comes with names of shareholders who no longer exist, or with union claims that were dissolved by gunfire before you and I were born. Old names bring paperwork. And letterhead is expensive at this latitude."

"It's just static telemetry," Teodor said, holding his gaze with a dry mouth.

Strand passed the pad of his thumb over the lapel of his uniform, smoothing the cloth with a mechanical gesture.

"If that thing knocks the main receiver out of calibration, Kask, I'll have you scrubbing the ejection manifolds with a wire brush and no pneumatic harness. Don't forget it."

He spun on his heel. The soles of his military boots didn't squeak against the steel plates because they were worn down to the lining.

He left.

" ◇ "

Teodor took three full breaths to pull his hand away from his sternum. His fingers were cold, numbed by the condensation dripping from the ceiling pipes directly onto the monitor frame. A drop fell onto the curved glass, sliding like an oily tear that refracted the green phosphorus wave into three broken traces.

"You shouldn't have lied to him," Sofia whispered, dragging a three-legged stool until she was beside him. She sat down, rested her elbows on her knees, and covered her mouth with her intertwined hands. "Strand checks the automated dumps every morning at four. Everybody knows it."

"Strand doesn't know how to read a binary dump without a glossary next to him," Teodor replied. His premolar started throbbing again, this time with such violence that he had to bite the inside of his cheek to fix his attention on the console. "And even if he knew, he doesn't care as long as he doesn't have to sign the acknowledgment of receipt."

The system's decompressor let out a harsh, metallic whistle, like the friction of two dry files.

The station's bulkheads creaked with a long, cavernous groan, a burst of tension that sounded exactly like a sheet of ice cracking beneath the hull of a stranded ship. Kallio-B was reaching periapsis. Differential gravity strained every rivet, stretched the carbide welds, and made the residual water in the floor pipes whistle like a kettle about to burst. If the stabilizer failed two more cycles, the micro-oscillations would tear the decompression chamber apart before anyone could put on a helmet.

Teodor typed the forensic extraction command. His knuckles were red, veins swollen from forced dilation.

The file wasn't a message: it was a personal record of remains allocation. An escape pod from the first prospecting run, crushed to the size of an accordion by tidal friction, whose biological seals had fused with the occupant's bones three hundred and twelve years ago according to the header timestamp.

The screen vomited the final lines of the scan: mass density, residual carbon ratio, antemortem fractures in the pelvis from brutal deceleration. And, at the foot of the forensic report, the optical transcription of the military service tag recovered from the clavicle fragment.

Teodor let the air out slowly. His breath trembled on his chapped lips.

He slid his fingers beneath the dirty collar of his work coveralls, felt for the steel ball chain encircling his throat, and pulled out the small rectangular tag, worn by continuous friction against his skin, scratched by years of sweat and workshop grime. He held it up next to the monitor.

On the green phosphorus, the reading of the archaic corpse broke down the nine-character alphanumeric serial number. They matched one-to-one. Even the diagonal notch over the last digit, caused by a defective stamping die, was identical to the cut Teodor felt with the pad of his thumb every night before trying to sleep.