Free Lightless by C.A. Higgins Page B

fingers spread over the surfaces separated only by the slightest space of air. “It’s okay,” even though the ship could not hear her and no one could have heard her over the rattling in the walls.
    The banging was not coming from everywhere, she heard, and hardly noticed the tremble in her fingertips as they glided over the surface of the walls. She moved up the hall a few feet and stopped—the banging was coming from behind her. She moved back and walked the other way until the banging grew distant again. The noise was not throughout the
Ananke,
she realized. It was localized. The error, despite the apparent omnipresence of the sound and the terror it had produced in her, was not throughout the ship. It was coming from only one particular place.
    Althea walked back, toward the center of the hall, toward the center of the sound, and stood and listened to the cacophony of the ship’s malfunction. The banging was coming from just beside where she had been looking before, above her head, reverberating through the walls like a drum, obscuring its source, making it seem greater and more confusing than it was. Althea took a shaken breath and called up the plans to her ship in her head.
    The ventilation system. It was the ventilation system that was situated there, in the walls and the ceiling over her head; it was the ventilation system that was making such a sound.
    If the ventilation system failed, Althea thought as she stood and looked up to that invisible spot on the ceiling whence the sound came, they would all suffocate. As big as the
Ananke
was, the crew would have some time before they felt it, the slow poisoning of the air as oxygen turned to carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide was heavier than oxygen; it would sink to the very bottom of the
Ananke,
as near to her dark heart as it could get. Anyone down at her base would faint and die surrounded by air but air that was unbreathable. The crew that survived would be driven up and up and farther up until they had their backs against the doors to space, the very highest point on the
Ananke,
facing before them an invisible toxin, behind them no air at all, fates equally bad. They were fragile, the crew—small and fragile and human—and they relied wholly on the ship that contained them.
    That would be
if
the ventilation system failed. The ventilation system was not failing. The sound was too specific, too particular for that. It came from only one place. For the ventilation to fail, for them all to suffocate, the error would have to be throughout the entire system. Matthew Gale’s seconds of sabotage had been too few to destroy something as great as the
Ananke
.
    The lights reflecting off the ceiling seemed to move slightly, reflections distorted; the ceiling itself was being shaken and bent by some real and mechanical force. Something physical was striking it from the other side and causing that violent sound.
    The robotic arm.
    There were mechanical limbs throughout the
Ananke,
autonomous mobile robotics designed to perform simple, repetitive tasks so that Althea did not have to. They were necessary to run a ship as large as the
Ananke
with a crew so small. They maintained the engine, adjusting the radiation reflectors to propel the ship one way or another. They checked for expired food in the pantry. They opened and closed ventilation shafts automatically on the basis of sensor readings, the ship itself deciding what parts of itself needed heat or fresh air.
    And one of them, above Althea’s head, was malfunctioning.
    The realization came with a sense of purpose, and the purpose with a sense of relief. This was something she could fix.
    Althea went to the nearest computer terminal while the robotic arm banged frantically, arrhythmically overhead, and located the program for the robotic arms in the ventilation, then the designation indicating the particular arm by its location in the ship, and killed the program.
    The banging stopped, the hall falling into a silence so