The Second Fire

The door was four metres away, and Julian Ashdown had been explaining for twenty minutes why Farah Musa could not walk through it.

“It’s carbonyl,” he said again, with the patience of a man who billed by the hour and had decided to waive the fee. “Nickel tetracarbonyl. I’m sure you know it better than I do, Doctor, but humour me. Lethal at a few parts per million. It gets in through the skin. If we open that bay without a full purge, my insurers will take the foundry, and your Office will take my licence, and someone’s mother will get a letter.”

“I’m not asking you to open it without a purge.”

“Of course not.” He smiled. Ashdown had very good teeth and used them the way other men used their hands. “You’re asking me to purge a refinery that sits outside the scope of a routine inspection, which takes seventy-two hours, during which six hundred and forty people stop making the metal that pays them. For a look at some reactors.”

The corridor was cold. Psyche Foundry kept its industrial levels at fourteen degrees, and the air smelled of machine oil and the burnt-sugar edge that carbon monoxide scrubbers left in everything. Beyond the door, behind a second door and a third, was the bay Ardent Orbital Metals had declared to the Office three years ago as a carbonyl refinery: ordinary plant, ordinary chemistry, the Mond process that had been purifying nickel since before anyone’s grandmother was born. Ordinary plant fell outside the inspection mandate. Farah had read the declaration twice on the voyage out from Earth. It was a beautiful document. Somebody had worked hard on it.

“We have seen Cascade A,” Gideon Asante said, from her left. He said it mildly, as if agreeing with Ashdown, which was how Gideon said nearly everything. “Every machine, every log. It is all in the minutes, and the minutes are in order.”

“Thank you.”

“Four hundred and eighty centrifuges,” Farah said. “Nickel-62, to be irradiated into nickel-63 for your betavoltaic line. Forty kilograms a year.” She looked at the far door. “And that is a refinery.”

“That is a refinery.”

She looked past Ashdown’s shoulder, down the corridor, to the observation window of the utilities room at the end. Through the glass, on the far wall, was a substation panel, and on the panel, in green numerals the size of her thumb, was the load on each feeder. She had been reading it for twenty minutes, while Ashdown talked about insurers and mothers. Feeder six ran into the refinery bay, and it was drawing thirty-nine point six megawatts.

The Mond process ran at about sixty degrees. You could do it with a kettle and a great deal of nerve. A foundry this size might need two megawatts to refine its nickel, three if the engineers were careless with their heat. Centrifuges were another matter. Each was a very fast, very thin rotor spinning in a vacuum, and a hall of them, running for years, drank power the way the old enrichment plants on Earth had drunk it. Forty megawatts was a hall of them. It was a big hall.

Nobody at Psyche Foundry had ever said the word Method in her hearing, and nobody would. That was the first rule of a site visit. Seven years ago the probe Prometheus had come home from the nearest star rebuilt into something its makers did not recognise, carrying a specification for doing to a ship what had been done to it, and Eleanor Hadfield had given that specification to the whole world in a little over four seconds. A ship built to it could cross to another star at nine-tenths the speed of light. The only vessel that had ever made the crossing now circled Earth four hundred kilometres up, quiet, changed beyond anyone’s understanding. So the nations had signed the Prometheus Accords: nobody flies it, nobody builds it, until somebody understands what it does to what it carries. The Office existed to make sure, which in practice meant that Farah spent her life in cold corridors looking for nickel and iron purified to a degree that nobody had any honest use for.

She kept the sum to herself. Yesterday she had said a version of it about the cooling plant, and Ashdown had thanked her for her interest and sent her a forty-page maintenance history by return.

“Mr. Ashdown,” she said instead, “I’d like the refinery’s utility logs for the last twelve months. Power, coolant, nitrogen.”

“Those are commercial records.”

“Utilities are within scope. Annex Three, paragraph eight. Any supply to a declared building.”

“The refinery isn’t a declared building.”

“It shares a substation with one.”

He considered this with every appearance of pleasure. A lawyer who enjoyed his work was the worst kind, in Farah’s experience, because you could not tire him. “That’s a fair reading,” he said. “I’ll ask our counsel in the registry for an opinion. Shall we say the next circuit?”

The next circuit was eleven months away. Ashdown knew that, because the Office published its circuit schedule to every state party under the transparency annex, and Ardent’s registry received it with everyone else’s.

“Let’s say tomorrow,” Farah said.

“Let’s say I’ll ask.” He turned to Gideon, closing the subject without closing it on her. “Coffee? The canteen on this level is terrible, but the one on two is almost Italian. Dr. Marchetti will forgive the almost.”

Lucie Marchetti, kneeling by the door seal with a swipe kit open on her knee, kept her eyes on her work. “Dr. Marchetti forgives nothing,” she said. “Dr. Marchetti is working.”

“Of course.”

Ardent provided escorts at two per inspector, which was within the rules and put six people in a corridor to watch three people do their jobs. The older escort, a woman from the safety office, had the stillness of somebody counting down the minutes to the end of a shift. Her colleague was a broad, fair lad with a Psyche Foundry patch on his coverall and REID stencilled under it. Perhaps twenty-four, he had been watching Lucie work with frank interest, and every time Ashdown said “of course,” his ears went a shade pinker.

Lucie peeled the backing from a fresh swipe and drew it along the floor where the door seal met the deck, slowly, the full width of the door, then folded it in on itself and slid it into a sample bag. She wrote the time on the bag in marker. A second swipe went over the same stretch of floor into a second bag, which she held out to Ashdown without a word.

“Our half,” Ashdown said, and took it. “Thank you.”

Split samples were the rule. Ardent kept a duplicate of everything the Office took, so that if the Office’s laboratory ever found something, Ardent’s laboratory could find something else. It was a sensible rule. Farah had helped write the annex it came from, in a room in Vienna five years ago, when the treaty was new and everyone in the room believed the hard part was over.

She looked at the floor where Lucie had swiped. The deck plates here were a grey composite with a gritted finish, and in the grooves of the grit, along the line of the door, there was dust. All industrial floors had dust. This dust was finer than the dust in the rest of the corridor, and darker, and it had been tracked out under the seal in a fan, like water spreading from under a bathroom door. People went in and out of this refinery. A lot of people.

Overhead, in the cable tray that ran along the corridor ceiling, three insulated pipes came out of the wall above the door and turned away towards the utilities room. Their lagging was furred white with frost along the first metre. Liquid nitrogen, then, or something colder, and a good deal of it, going in. Vacuum plants used cold traps. Refineries, as a rule, did not.

On the wall beside the door was a shift board, the old-fashioned kind with magnetic name tiles, because Belt foundries trusted nothing that needed power to tell you who was inside a room full of poison. The board had a column for the refinery. Thirty-eight tiles.

“Busy refinery,” Farah said.

“We refine a great deal of nickel.”

“With thirty-eight people. On a Tuesday.”

Ashdown glanced at the board. For a fraction of a second his face did nothing at all, and then it did charm again. “It’s a training rotation,” he said. “We bring the new intake through every plant on site. You’d be amazed what a graduate can break.”

“I would,” Farah said. “I’ve been a graduate.”

Gideon’s hand came to rest on her forearm. It weighed nothing, the lightest touch she had ever been given by a man telling her to stop, and it worked, as it always did. Gideon Asante had spent twenty years inspecting chemical-weapons stockpiles for the Organisation in The Hague and had stood in rooms where the wrong sentence got people shot. He had learned there how little pressure it took.

“We will take the coffee,” Gideon said. “Thank you, Julian. Level two.”

They walked back towards the lift. Farah let herself be walked. As they passed the utilities window she looked through it once more, without turning her head, and the green numerals on feeder six had moved: thirty-nine point eight. On the other side of three doors a load had come up. Something had started spinning, or been told to spin faster, while she stood in the corridor being offered coffee.

Reid fell into step beside her at the lift. He cleared his throat as if he had been rehearsing.

“The canteen on two,” he said. “It’s not almost Italian. Same machine, different cup.”

She looked at him properly for the first time. He went red to the collar.

“Thank you, Mr. Reid,” she said. “That’s very useful.”

❦

Themis was docked on the foundry’s south port, a cutter-class inspection vessel the Office leased by the year from a Scottish charter firm and painted in the treaty’s blue and white so that nobody could pretend afterwards that they hadn’t seen it coming. Inside, she was a working ship with a laboratory bolted where a cargo hold should have been. She smelled of hot electronics and the lemon disinfectant Captain Abernethy’s crew used on every surface, including, Lucie claimed, the coffee.

Abernethy herself met Farah at the airlock, a compact Scotswoman in a cardigan over her flight suit, holding a mug. “Anything for the log?”

“They offered us coffee.”

“Wreckers,” said Abernethy comfortably, and went back to the bridge.

The laboratory took up the whole midsection. Lucie’s multicollector sat at the centre of it under a dust hood, a mass spectrometer the size of a chest freezer, all cables and vacuum gauges, with a laser ablation cell bolted to its front. It was the most expensive object on the ship and, Lucie said, a temperamental old aunt who needed eight hours of calibration every time anyone so much as breathed near her.

“She’s halfway through,” Lucie said, when Farah came in after supper. “Nickel standards, iron standards, the full cycle. You want your corridor swipes tonight, you want her to lie to you.”

“I want them first thing.”

“You get them first thing. Then the dock samples. Then my breakfast.” Lucie peeled off her gloves and dropped them in the bin. She had come to the Office from Zürich three years ago with a doctorate on the isotopes of meteorite iron, and she had not yet learned to be polite to machines or to men in good suits. “That dust is wrong, by the way. You saw it.”

“I did.”

“I don’t know how it’s wrong yet. But I was on my knees at that door for ten minutes and it is not refinery dust. Refinery dust is a powder. This was grit. Somebody’s grinding metal in there, or something with bearings is wearing out.” She shrugged. “The aunt will tell us.”

Gideon was in the wardroom, which was a table, six fixed stools, and a hatch into the galley. He had a cup of rooibos and the printed crossword from a London paper that Abernethy’s comms officer downloaded for him every morning, three days stale. A third of the grid was done. He looked up when she came in and made room for her on the bench, which on Themis meant moving his elbow.

“Forty megawatts,” Farah said.

“I know.”

“Thirty-eight people on the board.”

“I counted them too.”

“And the frost on the lines, and the dust.”

“Farah.” He set down his pen. “Sit.”

She sat. Through the bulkhead she could hear the steady hum of the ship’s own plant and, beyond it, the deeper vibration of the foundry, which never stopped, which had a shift running in it at every hour of every day.

“You are right,” Gideon said. “I think you are right. I have thought so since yesterday. But we are not here to be right in the corridor. In the corridor we ask, and they say no, and we write down that they said no, and how they said it.” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, an old habit. “If you make Ashdown angry, he becomes cautious. A cautious lawyer is ten times harder than a happy one. Let him be happy. He should think we are three tired people who want to go home.”

“I am a tired person who wants to go home.”

“Then you are perfectly cast.”

She almost laughed. It came out through her nose. Gideon picked up his pen again and wrote a word into the crossword without seeming to have read the clue.

In her cabin she recorded a message for Hiba. The light delay to Vienna was thirty-one minutes and some seconds that night, so her daughter would see it at breakfast, propped against the fruit bowl in Rashid’s kitchen while she ate cereal standing up. Farah told her about the foundry, which was the size of an airport and cold as a church, and about the young man called Reid who went pink when lawyers lied. She left the door out of it. Hiba was fourteen, and since the summer every message she sent ended with a question that was really the same question, which was when are you home. Farah answered the one in last night’s message, which was about the cat, and said she loved her, and stopped recording before she could say anything she would have to explain.

Then she opened the inspection log and wrote the day’s entry. The log was the Office’s legal record. Ardent would receive a copy. So would the registry, and Ardent’s lawyers, and in time, if it ever came to that, the Council. She wrote it as Gideon had taught her, with nothing in it that a lawyer could call an opinion.