Chapter 3 - Below the Smooth

The grating was not smooth.

This was the first thing, and it mattered in a way that nothing on Deck 2 had mattered in years: the grating under his boots was ridged and uneven, slightly warm from the pipes below it, and it moved fractionally when he stepped on it, a flex that traveled up through the sole of his boot and registered as a small live thing. Everything on the upper decks was anchored. Nothing vibrated unless you asked it to. Down here the floor itself had an opinion.

He was grinning. He did not decide to grin. He had not consulted himself on the matter.

Eric dropped from the bottom rung beside him and looked around. His face was doing something it did not usually do, which was announce itself without editing. Under the maintenance lighting, orange-amber and inconstant, Eric's expression was entirely open for approximately three seconds before it closed back to its working default. Three seconds was a long time for Eric. Nathaniel filed it.

"Okay," Eric said quietly.

"Okay," Nathaniel agreed.

They both stood there grinning like idiots in the dark.

---

The tunnel was not a tunnel, exactly. It was a corridor in the way that a city street is a corridor: full of things that had business there, none of which was them. Pipes ran along the upper third of the walls, bundled and strapped and labeled in a notation system Nathaniel could not read, sweating faintly in the heat. The heat was the most immediate thing. It touched him in a way the upper decks never had: damp and certain, settling on the backs of his hands and in the groove of his collarbone. His shirt felt different here. Real, somehow, in a way it had not felt upstairs.

The hum was different too. On Deck 2, the ventilation hum was smooth and constant, a single tone that had been going long enough that he had stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat. Down here there were several hums and they did not agree. A low throb from something in the pipes. A clicking from above that was either a cooling system cycling or something mechanical with a loose housing. The faint sub-bass of the ship's actual engine, the deepest sound, the one that was always there if you went low enough to feel it.

"This is amazing," Nathaniel said quietly.

"You're not supposed to be here," Eric said, which was his version of agreement.

"Neither are you."

"I'm aware."

Nathaniel put one hand on the nearest pipe. It was warm and faintly rough with age, the surface slightly oxidized, covered in a notation he could not read but which clearly meant something to someone, because it was marked with care. He had spent twenty years on a ship and had never touched the ship before. This was, he realized, the actual ship. Everything above was a ship-themed habitat. This was the infrastructure that held the habitat up.

His hand on the pipe felt like the first honest thing he had done all week.

He opened his mouth to narrate this observation aloud.

"Don't," Eric said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to say something in that voice."

"What voice."

"The voice you use when you're going to say something you've decided is profound." Eric moved past him, scanning the junction ahead. He had the schematic pulled on his comm, the screen dim to minimize light. "Save it."

Nathaniel did not save it. He kept one hand on the pipe and continued in a low murmur because the acoustics were interesting down here, the sound trapped by the walls and the pipes in a way that made his own voice feel close and private: "We are standing inside the working part of the ship. Nobody we know has ever stood here. We have successfully accessed a restricted corridor using a code that has not been updated in eleven years, which suggests that nobody on the governance council is paying attention to infrastructure access logs, which is frankly alarming if you think about it from a ship-systems security standpoint and sort of galvanizing if you think about it from a personal-freedom standpoint."

"You're whispering your own documentary narration."

"The acoustics warrant it."

"Shut up," Eric said, in the fond way that was his preferred mechanism for letting Nathaniel continue.

Nathaniel continued. "The air is different. Have you noticed the air? It's like someone turned off the —"

The floor grating shifted under his foot.

Not much. Two centimeters, maybe, a flex at the join between two panels where the fastening had worked slightly loose, something that was probably on a maintenance schedule somewhere under a heading equally boring as JUNCTION MAINTENANCE ACCESS: CORR-7 SUPPLEMENTAL FILING. He lurched sideways, purely reflexive, and Eric's hand was on his sleeve before the lurch had finished.

Eric did not let go.

They stood there a second. Eric's grip was on the fabric at Nathaniel's forearm, firm and warm through the cloth. Nathaniel looked at the hand. Then he looked at the grating, which had settled back and appeared entirely unimpressed with the drama it had caused.

"I have it," Nathaniel said.

"I know." Eric let go.

They kept moving. The sleeve of Nathaniel's shirt was slightly warm where the grip had been, which was not a fact he needed, but it arrived anyway.

---

The pipe released a hiss of steam twenty meters further along.

A pressurized burst from a fitting that was either releasing controlled or had developed an opinion of its own, white vapor punching out from the lower bundle at knee height and dissipating in the already-warm air. Nathaniel did not make a decision. He grabbed Eric's arm and shoved him sideways into the wall and stepped in after him, both of them pressing against the pipe housing while the steam went where they had been.

It dissipated in about four seconds.

They were shoulder to shoulder against the wall. Eric's elbow was at Nathaniel's ribs. They were, objectively, nowhere near the steam anymore. The steam had ended. The corridor was quiet except for the hums and the clicking from above.

They did not move for another three seconds.

"Okay," Eric said.

"Steam fitting," Nathaniel said.

"Yes."

"Automatic release. Probably scheduled."

"Probably."

They peeled off the wall. Eric straightened his terrible shirt. Nathaniel was aware that his heart was doing the thing it did when he went too fast in zero-gravity athletics and the room tipped and the body went electric and said yes please more of this. He cataloged this without doing anything about it, because the tunnel was more interesting than the cataloging.

"I know where we are," he said, consulting his memory of the schematic. "We bear left at the next junction, which should bring us to the C-service spine, and then we go south until the pressure drop puts us near the sub-seven access."

"Right," Eric said.

"Left, actually."

"I meant right, go ahead."

They went left. The tunnel branched. Nathaniel went left again because the schematic in his head said left and the schematic was always right because his spatial memory was the one ability he had that functioned independently of anyone named Rowan on a governance council. Eric fell in behind him, his footsteps slightly faster than Nathaniel's, adapting to the uneven grating with less theater.

They walked for four minutes. The junction Nathaniel was looking for did not appear.

A different junction appeared. It was not marked in the schematic, or it was marked in a notation system he couldn't read, or he had turned at the wrong branch. He stopped.

Eric stopped behind him.

They looked at the unmarked junction.

"We're not where I thought we were," Nathaniel said.

"No."

"But I know where we are. We're — close. To the thing. I know where the thing is."

"Mm."

"I just need to reorient." He looked left. He looked right. He consulted the schematic in his head, which was perfect and accurate and was currently pointing very firmly at the location where they should have been, which was not this location. "We took the second left instead of the first right."

"We took three lefts."

"There were only two."

"Nathaniel." Eric's voice was composed to the point of insolence. "We took three lefts and one right and you announced the third left as a right at the time, and I did not correct you because I wanted to see what would happen."

There was a pause.

"That's a terrible quality," Nathaniel said.

Eric's face did the thing where a laugh was happening somewhere behind his eyes and he was refusing to deploy it. "Yes."

"You could have said something."

"I did say something. I said 'are you sure' twice."

"That doesn't count."

The laugh broke through. Not loud, barely audible, the smallest possible version of a laugh that could still technically qualify as one. Eric pressed his mouth shut. His shoulders shook once, briefly, in the orange-amber light. He was navigating his own amusement with the same efficient economy he applied to everything, trying not to let it take up too much space, which meant it was clearly taking up a great deal.

Nathaniel watched him. Something ran through him, brief and without a name he was prepared to give it. Then he turned back to the junction and began counting pipe bundles.

---

"Did you hear that?"

"No."

They kept walking.

"Did you hear that?"

Eric stopped. They both listened. The hums hummed. The clicking clicked. A pipe somewhere further ahead made a sound that was probably just thermal contraction and nothing else.

"No," Eric said.

Twenty seconds later something moved in the dark.

They grabbed each other. This was simultaneous, bilateral, and involved no decision-making whatsoever. Nathaniel's hand closed on Eric's arm and Eric's hand closed on Nathaniel's shoulder and they stood very still facing the dark with their hearts running at a speed the upper decks had never once requested of them.

Something moved again. Small. Close to the floor.

The cat emerged from behind a junction housing, crossed directly through the pool of light beneath an amber fixture, regarded them both with the flat authority of a creature that had made its assessments long ago and found nothing since to revise them, and sat down.

It was grey. It was calm in the way of something that had never needed to be otherwise. One of its ears was slightly torn, an old injury healed over. It looked at them in the way cats look at things they have already assessed and found unremarkable.

"There are cats," Eric said.

"Ships apparently have cats," Nathaniel said. "Nobody told us."

"Nobody told us a lot of things."

The cat, having made its assessment, reconsidered whether to stay. It looked left at the tunnel, then right, then at Eric.

Eric crouched.

He crouched unhurriedly, his center of gravity dropping, and held out one hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled. He did not make a sound. He just waited.

Nathaniel watched Eric waiting.

The cat watched Eric waiting.

After a long moment, the cat walked over. It sniffed the offered hand with the deliberateness of a customs inspection. Then it bumped its head against Eric's knuckles once, declared the matter settled, and began walking away again with an air of complete self-sufficiency, as if it had given a gift and did not require acknowledgment.

Eric watched it go. His expression was entirely open again, the unedited one, the three-second window that had appeared twice tonight and which Nathaniel was accumulating without knowing what to do with the inventory.

Then the smell hit them.

Nathaniel had eaten well his entire life: calibrated nutrition plans, variety rotations, everything fresh and precise. What came from the tunnel ahead was something else entirely. It was oil and spice and something fermented and something baked and possibly protein cooked on a direct surface and none of it was optimized for anything except for tasting like whatever it tasted like, which was, in some immediate way he could not articulate, real.

Voices, too. Faint, multiple, overlapping. A laugh somewhere, someone's actual laugh with no management protocol applied to it.

Light at the end of the tunnel: warmer than the amber maintenance light, directed, stationary, the light of something chosen rather than installed.

Eric stood up from his crouch and looked at Nathaniel.

Nathaniel looked back.

Neither of them was grinning now. They knew it might cost them something.

They went.