Up Against It - M. J. Locke [15]
“I’ll contact them as well, then.” She’d have to do it after her emergency meeting with the PM. She shot the files off to Marty, with a note to fit the notifications into her schedule.
Aaron Nabors was still young, around forty, with blond hair, freckles, and pale skin. His brown eyes were shadowed with fatigue and worry. You would think he had spent the night in half a gee, the way his shoulders slumped and his face muscles sagged.
“What are we down?” Jane asked him.
“Let’s see.” Squinting, tumbling slowly, he ran his finger across invisible icons. Graphics and figures sprang up in their shared waveface, in response to his words. “The city infrastructure assemblers took a hit during the initial disaster, when nutrient flow was disrupted, but we’ve got that back online now, and the bugs are regaining their base numbers, feeding on enriched bug juice as well as their own dead. We’ll be fine there.
“Materials and parts. We’re OK as long as the assemblers don’t hit their reproductive limit for another few days. We have an emergency shipment of parts and equipment scheduled to arrive a couple months from now. We can probably limp along till the bugs are back up to full capacity.
“Food. The food assemblers weren’t touched and we still have plenty of raw stock. So starvation isn’t an immediate threat, praise God.”
He paused to wipe at the sweat beaded on his upper lip. Jane raised her eyebrows. “Air, water, and power?”
He gestured. Images played in the small group’s center, showing the impending collapse of Phocaea’s resources. He played it through, tweaking the inputs to show them three or four simulations in succession, and froze them in a patterned layout. He pressed his lips together and let Jane and the others study the readouts.
“This one can’t be right,” Sean said, pointing at the temperature display. “The temperature levels off at minus ten C or so, and only drifts down a little after that. I thought the big risk was freezing.”
Aaron replied, “No, not at all. We’ve dumped too much heat into this rock over the decades. It insulates us. It would take a year or more for the city to cool down to a truly dangerous level. It’ll get cold in here, but not deadly cold.”
“Not deadly to humans at least,” Jane said, thinking of the arboretum. “The real risk is the toxins. Contamination in air, water, and food supplies, as our assemblers and disassemblers die off.”
“Slow suffocation, poisoning, and famine,” Tania said, with a gallows grin. “We’ll steep in a stew of our own excretions. Mmmm!”
Jane gave Tania a sharp look. Tania had the decency to look sheepish. Jane pulled the calculations and graphs over, reorganized them, and examined the parameters Aaron had put in. “Your simulations are saying that if we preserve hydrogen fuel for the power plant we can’t begin to rebuild the disassembler base.”
“Correct. If we don’t leave enough for Sean to build up his disassembler population fast, even if we do get an ice shipment in time, we won’t be able to convert enough oxygen to support our people.”
“Give me a date. How long do we have?”
“With strict rationing of fuel, water, and air, and optimal balancing: twenty-six days. That’s the best I can do.”
Jane heard Sean or Tania inhale. She had known, though. “Several dozen families will be falling off the ends of the treeway before then,” Aaron said, “and will either need to be restocked or brought in. That will have to be your call.”
“Bring them in. Standard protocol.” Standard protocol: they were welcome to refuse the official invitation to camp out in Zekeston or one of the other two towns till the supply crisis eased, but did so at their own peril.
Stroiders were a frontier-minded lot. If some fool fell off the treeway insufficiently stocked, and many years later on the other side of the sun ran out of supplies or had no way back, well, too bad, so sad.
Of course, the reality wasn’t quite that harsh. If Phocaea could do something for its citizens beyond the edges of the treeways, it did. Especially if there were