The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) by Brenda Cooper Page A

and sent all around the pod with different jobs. Lya spent her days cleaning out habs and bagging stuff to be sent to families.
    Onor had been assigned back to the reclamation plant on B, under Conroy, who trained in from F-pod. Just like the old days, except not at all. During the first few chaotic days after the pod-wreck, as people now referred to the failure of the joining bolts and joists that kept the interior of the ship together, they had been surveying damage: cataloging angles that were wrong, blowing pipes for leaks, checking valves, and testing the cleanliness of the liquids at every inflow point. They hadn’t found anything totally gobbed up, just stressed metal and a few joins between pipe and tank pulled apart by force.
    Everything appeared fixable or replaceable.
    In spite of that, the blues had ordered the system closed up and the water partly redistributed. The first few days, there hadn’t been enough containers. More had been made and sent in. Water was heavy. Water sustained, grew food, and served as ballast and shield.
    While his team and the plant’s bots moved water, other people moved cargo around, some of it nonsensical on the surface except that it followed Ix’s particular math of balance and weight. It felt all wrong to Onor. Too fast. Since he first started school, it had been burned into his head to do things slow and right, not to rush and take risks.
    He’d asked Conroy about it. The big man had said, “Ix seems to know what it’s doing,” but Onor had a sinking feeling from Conroy’s slitted eyes and slight hesitation in answering that Conroy didn’t really think so. He just wasn’t going to tell Onor anything.
    This morning, Conroy looked like he wanted to kick something. Onor couldn’t see Conroy’s face well through the helmet, so Onor read the older man’s mood in the stiffness in his limbs. And his voice, of course. “We’re dismantling today. Begin with the offices, remove anything that could be useful.”
    Conroy called Onor’s name.
    “Yes?” he answered.
    “Start with my old office. The bots will have already wheeled in some boxes for you. Rex can take the crew room beside you. The rest of us will head into the tanks and get the extra parts.”
    Great. He’d rather be working in among the big tanks. Instead, Conroy treated him like a green baby and stuck him with Rex the Lazy. Onor knew not to argue. His old boss sounded as foul and edgy as Onor himself felt. Maybe Conroy didn’t want to be stuck in this new life either. In fact, maybe it was worse for Conroy—he’d been important as shift boss. Now what would he be?
    Rex the Lazy was already ahead of him down the hallway, so Onor caught up and then passed him. There were two crew rooms: the office that Conroy had shared with the other shift bosses and a communal room for anybody assigned office work. The rest of the space included a small galley, showers, and a restroom.
    Boxes sat in the middle of each room, placed just inconveniently enough to need stepping around. Dumb robots.
    Onor checked that Rex had started working and then stood in the doorway to Conroy’s office. He’d been in the room before, but never alone. It looked bigger and emptier without Conroy’s bulk filling the center of it.
    Piled boxes surrounded sparse furniture. Just a desk and three chairs, and walls full of monitors that used to show activity throughout the plant. All dark now, the power off. He sighed—a half a day’s work, at least. Maybe more. He unscrewed lamps from the walls and took apart chairs, packing away the pieces in boxes that were the wrong size. After two hours he stank even more, and sweat dribbled down his back.
    When he needed a break, he found Rex slumped in one of the chairs in the crew room, only one box filled in the time it’d taken Onor to finish two. Onor started toward him to make sure he was okay. Rex looked up and waved him away.
    Well, whatever. Rex was senior, and bigger. Onor went back and started