The Weight of Paste

The air inside the pressure suit was fifty-two degrees Celsius, smelled of scalded sweat, and had three minutes before it caused permanent neurological damage. Levmir hauled his boots through the airlock hatch of Sub-deck 9, sealed the manual dogging wheel with a sharp clank, and slammed his palm against the equalization valve.

Air hissed into the chamber with the screech of an overdriven turbine. The pressure gauge needle climbed from hard vacuum to zero point eight atmospheres.

The moment the green light flickered, Levmir tore off his helmet.

The cool, stale draft of the lower habitation vents hit his face like wet canvas. He gulped the recycled air, coughing as the acidic yeast vapors trapped inside his collar dispersed into the corridor. His undergarments were soaked, his ribs burned where the saturated paraffin heat pack had rested against his chest, and his personal dosimeter emitted a dull, sporadic click every four seconds. Forty-one millisieverts per hour in the upper plenum chamber had left a metallic copper tang across the back of his tongue.

He had barely seventy minutes before Kordov’s next patrol logged the abnormal thermal balance on the main trunk. To go back up and finish clearing the vent, he needed two meters of fluoropolymer tubing, two high-pressure stainless unions, and someone who would not ask why a master brewer smelled of dissolved bulkhead steel.

Levmir unstrapped his kit bag, wiped his stinging eyes with a greasy sleeve, and ducked into the low-ceilinged crawlway of Vent Junction 12.

Steam lines thrummed behind perforated bulkheads. Condensation dripped into collection gutters along the floor plates, feeding the station’s gray-water scrubbers. At the intersection of two sixty-centimeter secondary exhaust ducts, a makeshift steel grating served as a workbench.

Olenka sat cross-legged on a suspended cable bundle, stripping the rubber insulation from a coil of copper wiring with a ground-down file. A pair of magnification loupes was pushed up onto her forehead, holding back dark, oily bangs. She kept her eyes fixed on the wire when Levmir’s boots scuffed the deck.

"You smell like someone boiled a battery in a kettle of cabbage," she said. Her voice was flat, carrying the gravelly cadence of someone who spent twelve hours a day breathing dry nitrogen.

"I need three-eighths fluoropolymer hose," Levmir said, leaning his shoulder against the conduit frame. His voice cracked with dry heat. "Double-braided. Rated for ten bar at minus fifty. And two compression unions. Stainless or Monel."

Olenka dropped her file onto the grating. It clattered against the iron. She pulled down her loupes and squinted at him through the twin lenses.

"Good shift to you too, Levmir. Always a pleasure when the calorie masters grace the gutter." She leaned forward, sniffing once with exaggerated disgust. "Did you climb inside Vat Seven and let the mash ferment you? The whole deck is going to reek of sulfur for a week."

"Are the fittings in your locker or not?"

"Everything is in my locker if the scrip is heavy enough," she said, kicking a dented metal footlocker beneath the bench. She unlocked the dual latches with a magnetic key on a string around her neck. "Cooperative scrip, though? Worthless. Central logistics cut the ration token value by twenty percent this morning. The miners in Sector 2 are eating pulverized cellulose with their soup."

She rummaged through the grease-coated bins and pulled out a coil of yellowed plastic line and a fistful of dull gray brass couplings, dropping them on the bench.

Levmir stepped forward and picked up the line. He pressed his thumbnail into the outer sheath. The polymer yielded too easily, leaving a chalky white crease.

"This is unreinforced PVC," Levmir said, tossing it back into the pile. "Glycol at eighty degrees will turn it into butter, and sub-zero backpressure will shatter it in ten seconds. I asked for braided fluoropolymer."

He picked up one of the couplings, rolling the thread between his scarred fingers.

"Leaded brass. The zinc will leach out in twenty hours of exposure to reactor-side slurry, and the threads are cut at forty-five degrees instead of sixty. It will strip the moment torque hits twelve newton-meters. Do not insult me with scrap from the scrap-sorting chute, Olenka."

Olenka raised her eyebrows behind the loupes, a crooked grin twitching at the corner of her mouth. "A brewer who knows thread pitch. Truly, the cooperative is full of surprises."

"I calculate pressures for four thousand tons of boiling mash every day," Levmir said. "Give me the real hardware."

She watched him for two seconds, measuring the tightness in his jaw and the gray exhaustion around his eyes. Without another word, she reached deep into the back of the locker, past the false bottom, and pulled out a heavy coil of steel-braided black hose and two sealed plastic envelopes containing precision-milled 316-stainless compression unions. The fittings carried the stamped serial numbers of the high-pressure reactor loops.

"Sixteen hundred calories of pure protein paste," Olenka said, her voice dropping. "Not the sawdust sludge they hand out at the mess window. Dense, unadulterated Spirka yield. Four bricks."

"Three," Levmir countered. He reached into his kit bag and produced three silver-foil packages, each vacuum-sealed and heavy as lead ingots. "Each brick is seven hundred kilocalories of pure lipid-protein matrix, stabilized with cold-ferment enzymes. It will keep in your locker for two years without spoiling. Twenty-one hundred calories total. You are making a thirty percent profit on standard exchange."

Olenka picked up one brick, weighed it in her palm, and tapped the corner with her thumb. The seal was rock-hard and flawless.

"Done," she murmured, shoving the bricks into her jacket lining. She pushed the hose and unions toward him. "Take them before the shift supervisor notices the inventory drift on Loop 2."

Levmir pulled his utility snips from his belt to measure the length against his suit's severed umbilical stub. As he leaned over the bench, his torn outer sleeve brushed against the bright LED inspection lamp mounted above the grating.

The white light caught the shoulder flange of his pressure suit.

A streak of pale, emerald-green corrosion coated the seam where the bio-slurry had splashed during the hatch breach thirty minutes ago.

Olenka went completely still.

She reached out with her bare fingers, catching the edge of his sleeve before he could pull back. Her thumbnail scraped a tiny flake of the green crust off the metal. She brought it close to her loupes, then reached for a magnetic scribe on her table and touched the tip to the metal under the residue.

The magnet clung with a faint, sluggish pull.

"That isn't station-grade 304 steel," Olenka whispered, looking up from the sleeve directly into his eyes. Her voice had lost all its dry humor. "Monel-400 with a high-nickel cold-weld bead. And the corrosion is carboxylic acid etching. They haven't used this alloy anywhere on Zhelezkova since the founding vents were sealed fifty years ago."

She held his gaze, her fingers tightening on the fabric of his sleeve.

"Where were you, Levmir?"