The Lattice of Small Hands

Erin tightened the ratchet until the last stubborn bolt sighed free and the hull seam closed like a healed scar. Cold vacuum light washed over the bay through the torn viewport, not the comforting blue of a planet but a slow, bruised amber of the brown dwarf beyond. The salvage work smelled of burned insulation and seaweed oil—old metaphor, the elders liked to joke—and of something sweeter: the warm copper tang of coffee shared in the tin can of a mess hall. Erin kept her tools in a chipped milk crate, each socket nicked with its own history. She liked the rough map the crate made when she slid it along the floor: the way it always stopped against the same dent in the bulkhead, like an old friend who refused to be left behind.

The skiff hummed under her hands, an old sound that knew the exact rhythm of her breathing. She had learned to listen to machines the way other people listened to music; they told you where to push and where to wait. Around her, the Sable Mouth bay lived in small, efficient chaos: tether lines looped like sleepy snakes, a child’s plastic toy half-melted under a bench, a string of polymer lights that winked unreliably. Beyond the bay, modules patched together like a collage of different times: a hydroponic ring with its lattice of roots, a maintenance tower with rust like fleur-de-lis, a funeral plaque nailed to a beam for someone who had floated away and been found by drift.

Miri was at the hatch with a crowbar and a grin that suggested the world was only slightly off its axis and entirely fixable. 'You always make the hull look better than you are,' she said, her voice dry with the wind that slipped through a thousand cracks.

'You teach me how to stop it leaking and I'll stop pretending my hands are made of poetry,' Erin answered. She wiped a smear of grease across her cheek and left the mark there like a sign.

They had a moment of quiet, the kind that belonged to people who shared too many late watches. Then a panel by the bay's comm relay flickered and a high, thin tone threaded the room: an emergency ping, one Erin had heard only twice before. The display filled with a voice message, raw and trembling, not from the usual corporate channels but from an old habitat whose beacon had long been dimmed.

'Please,' the voice said. 'If anyone hears us—Aurelia's core is gone. If it isn't back, the lattice will fail. We don't have—' The message staggered and then rasped into an empty hiss.

Erin felt the tools in her hands go heavier, as if gravity had leaned in for a closer look.