Local Star by Aimee Ogden (ebook reader online free txt) 📕

a string of increasingly creative and breathless curses. He didn’t drop dead, so she let him work without further comment.

Finally, the doors opened wide enough to hit their safety catches with a series of soft clicks, and Kalo let the broken railing clatter to the floor. “Well, there’s air out here, so that’s a good sign. Do you think you can get the lift moving again from out there?”

“If the biolights are on, the Hab is running on emergency power.” She ticked off the list on her fingers. “Artigrav, water, gas exchange, the umbilicus band, and the bay in the ‘works.”

He oofed as she elbowed past him and stuck her head out of the lift. “How are people supposed to get around to fix a busted Hab without functional lifts?”

“There’s zero-gee access tunnels on the outside of the Hab,” she said, feeling around outside the lift doors. “About as accessible as you can hope for with a dark Hab.”

“Great. How do we get to one of those?”

“Well . . . we don’t.” They were between floors, and in the dark, she couldn’t tell which ones. But the lack of a standard door within the limited sight afforded by the blue emergency light suggested they were in the guts of the Hab, the busy organs of life support and gravity generation that lay between the Terraria and the very bottom of the Hab where the wrenchworks lay. All right. She could work with that. This was going to be . . . interesting. “They’re built into the skin of the Hab. We’re pretty much right in the middle of the thing.”

“So we wait here hoping, till someone turns the lights on?”

“Not exactly.” She pointed at the lift. “You wait here in the lift. I’m going to see how far I can get.” And she squeezed out between the lift doors and the lift chute.

Behind her, Kalo sputtered in pointless alarm, but the rungs of a narrow maintenance ladder gave her handholds and footholds. Once she cleared the top of the lift car, she reached out in the darkness of the chute and groped against the cold walls. There: another ladder. She stretched her leg and moved sideways. Two more lateral movements brought her to the cold, hard opening of a hatch, slightly recessed into the wall. “Here we go,” she muttered, just as a grunt signaled Kalo’s arrival on the chute ladder. She aimed a lancet-sharp glare into the blackness where the sound had come from. “I told you to wait in the lift!”

“Well, if we’re going to be technical, I’m still in the lift. Just not the lift car. What are we doing out here, and how long are we going to be doing it? I’m not keen on being up here when the lift comes back into service.”

“If it comes back,” she said, and they both hung onto the side in silence for a moment. Then she reached for the hatch handle. “You’re not going to like this.” The handle resisted her one-handed efforts to turn it. She squeezed one arm through the nearest rung of the ladder so she could reach the handle with both hands. It groaned and then grudgingly gave way. The hatch wasn’t open far before a pungent odor hit Triz squarely in the face.

Kalo gagged. “I’m afraid to ask what it is we’re smelling and even more afraid to ask why we can smell it.”

Triz pushed the hatch open and took one last almost-bearable breath in the lift chute. “The hero of Hedgehome is about to become the hero of Recycling Engine 2b.” Her hands found purchase inside the slightly slick opening behind the hatch, and she pulled herself forward to get both knees inside. Crawling on her hands and knees in the wet darkness, she turned back to call over her shoulder. The rising mucus in her throat made her voice thick. “Or you can go back to the lift and wait for either the Hab to come back online or your own death. Whichever comes first.”

“Both appealing compared to what’s in there.” A dull metallic thud and a shadow in the tunnel blotted out what remained of the emergency lights in the lift chute. “Well, this is your turf. Where to?”

Triz’s fingers found an opening in the floor ahead of her, a space where the impenetrable blackness grew even blacker. She grimaced. At least she knew what to expect down there. “Follow me,” she said, and Kalo’s exclamation of dismay echoed after her as she pulled herself feet-first into the tube and began to shimmy downward.

The smell grew stronger and viler by the time they reached the bottom of the shaft and dropped down with a splatter into a chamber full of soft, slick organic foodwaste. When Triz struggled to her feet, the sludge reached past her ankles. “Could be worse,” Triz said, and suppressed a gag. It really could be; there were big piles of organic waste stacked up beneath some of the disposal chutes. She might just have easily landed in the middle of one of those.

A strange pride rose up in her, along with her gorge, at the ability she’d retained being able to manage in this kind of place. On its heels, a disturbing thought: all these years later and she was still a guttergirl at heart. She peeled a flat, sticky piece of ex-spicefruit off her backside, a bit pointlessly, and let it drop back into the muck. “Can you keep moving?”

“Whatever gets us out of here faster.” He coughed. “The smell notwithstanding, the faster we can find out what’s wrong with the Hab, the better.”

Triz stopped so fast he walked into her back. “The faster we can spring Casne, you mean. This might be our best shot to get her out of Justice.”

“Are you serious?” He grabbed for her sleeve, but she wriggled out of his grip and scrambled down to a low point in the heap of food scraps. Her feet found the