Della
At three o'clock on Saturday morning a man whispered my name into my headset with a great deal of urgency and almost no air.
"Della. Della. Boyd's got Tess's cable."
I was on the floor of the Fishbowl with my shoes off and a coat for a pillow, which is a thing I'd have denied under oath, and I came up off the carpet so fast I hit my head on the table. The glass was dark and so was the showroom, except for the wall screens, where the cartoon wrench had been replaced at eight by a very tired-looking commander in a very still cabin, and the night shift had put the sound on mute.
"What cable?"
"The one from her camera into the panel. He's out of his bag. He's holding it like a snake. He says, Della, he says she's the one. He's saying, hold on, he's saying it to her, she's waking up—"
I put the headset on properly.
A noise like someone dropping a bag of spanners into a bath. A scrape of nylon. A girl's voice, coming up out of sleep, saying, "Wh—", and a man's voice over it, flat and Yankee and stripped to the bone, saying, "Her father died in this program. She wired a camera into the panel a day before the ship went wrong. In my day we didn't let a camera in a cockpit."
"That's my rig! That's my—get off, that's the only camera I've got—"
"Boyd," said Hazel's voice, very dry and a long way back. "Mr Castellane. I should like it noted that you are standing on my graph paper."
I had a hand over my mouth and I had the other one round the headset, and across the dark floor a man at a console two rows from Kip had taken out an earbud and was looking at me over his shoulder.
"Where's Otis?" I said.
"Otis is, hang on." Ronnie, whispering. A sound like a man trying to cough quietly into a pillow. "Otis is being the referee."
I heard it. A high, wet, delighted voice from the back of the cabin, somewhere near the hatch, in the cadence of a man at a county fairground: "And Mr Castellane has the cable! Friends and neighbours, he's got the cable! Miss Aldana has an arm round his neck, that is an illegal arm, I don't care if it is zero gravity, Lord, I'm being fair here—"
"Where are you?"
"I'm in the chair. I can't get out of the chair. I've got my straps on, and I'm, Della, nobody can get any purchase. That's the thing. Nobody can push off anything. Boyd's got her by the sleeve and she's got him by the jacket and they're just going round. It's like two eels arguing about a will."
I made a noise. It was a laugh, and it came out of me like a cork, and I put my hand back over it and told myself I hadn't done it.
"Is anyone hurt?"
"Boyd's lip. Tess's elbow's in it." A scrape. A clank, close to the mic, like someone had hit a pipe. "He's got it. Della, he's got the cable out, he's—"
On the wall, in front of forty empty chairs, the commander's cabin went black.
It didn't flicker. It went like a hand over a lamp. The counter in the corner went from a number with too many noughts to a zero, and a man at the back said "Oh," quietly, like he'd dropped a glass.
In my headset, a long way from the mic, not whispering, a voice I didn't know said "Enough." It wasn't loud. A surprising number of people stopped.
Then every phone in the building started to ring.
By half past three there was a cable-news crew in the lobby, which wasn't news, because they'd been there since Thursday, sleeping on the green sofas with their feet on their equipment. What was news was that the lights came on. Three of them, on stands. A woman in a blazer fixing her earpiece. A man carrying a camera on his shoulder through the corridor door, followed by a long cable, like a man dragging a fish.
"Out," said Royce.
He'd arrived with his hair combed flat and the quarter-zip zipped up to his neck, and he said it to me in the doorway of the Fishbowl with both hands out. He'd been asleep, or he'd been somewhere, and either way he was awake now in a way I hadn't seen. It looked like a man balancing a pole on his chin.
"It's my office."
"It's glass, Della. It's got a view of the screens. They want the wall behind me." He looked at the camera. "Out. Please. Great."
I went out. I stood on the carpet outside the glass with my shoes in my hand, because I'd remembered I wasn't wearing them, and watched Royce sit down at my table, under my light, with a woman in a blazer opposite him doing a sound check.
"Mr Ambler," said the woman, to a camera, in her most serious voice. "We're getting reports that the livestream from Halyard's Constance has gone dark. Can you tell our viewers what's happening?"
"What's happening," said Royce, "is a small technical interruption on a historic journey. And I want to say that the crew is safe, the crew is resting, and the commander is doing what he does best." He had the bounce on the front of it. "This is a journey of firsts, and with firsts come, you know, hiccups. Bumps."
"There are reports the commander hasn't been heard to speak on air since Thursday."
"The commander is a very private man. He's resting. The journey's long."
"Is it true that the ship's off course?"
"It's a very long journey," said Royce. He said journey a lot more times after that. I counted on my fingers, in the dark, at the back, like a woman at a prayer meeting, and ran out of fingers. Behind him the wall screens showed the track, the green line with its second green line coming off it at a bad angle, and the woman in the blazer looked at it and then she looked at him and then she moved on.
When it was done and the lights went out, the crew coiled their cable and went back to the sofas. Royce stayed in my chair. His hands were hanging off the arms of it. He took a chip off the cameraman's tray, one, a cold one, looked at it, and ate it. Then he ate the rest.
"Did I look okay?" said Royce.
I stood in the doorway with my shoes. "You looked like a man selling a lighthouse."
"Thanks." He licked salt off his thumb. He sounded about twelve. "My mum watches. She gets up at four. She's in Fresno. She's got the thing on the kitchen table." He looked at the empty chair opposite.
I didn't have anything for that. I said, "Eat something that's not a chip," and went to find Kip.
Kip was at his console with the lights low, in the second row, with the track up on three screens and a can on each side of him. Ailsa Strachan was in the next chair. She had her laptop open on her knee and a mint going, and she hadn't said anything since the wall went black, which, for Ailsa, was a speech.
"Did the drift change?" I said.
"It's," said Kip, "I want to say that's the question." He pointed at the second green line, the one off the track. "It's the same."
"The same as when?"
"As before she lost the rig. If her rig was still feeding it something, it'd be, I mean, it should've moved. Like, swung. We'd see the line swing. It doesn't." He looked at me with the whole of his face, a boy who'd been told to say it plainly and was going to do it if it killed him. "It didn't."
"So it's not Tess."
"It's not the rig now. That's all a line can tell you. It can't tell you about Wednesday."
I said, "Christ." I said it into the carpet. On the screen the green line did nothing at all.
"I've got the load log from the flight software, too," said Kip. "For the correction. I pulled it at one, because I couldn't sleep. And I wanted to say it's, it's before launch. The number. It's an exact match to the signed October revision, to the digit. That's why nobody caught it. It was sitting in a block somebody added in October. Timed to the minute of the correction."
"A block."
"A chunk. A segment. It's a little program inside the plan."
"The load log's right," said a voice from the step above us, out of every speaker at once, the echo coming back off the glass. He didn't turn round. "It was in the plan when we loaded the plan."
"So the number was in the plan in October, before her rig was anywhere near the ship," said Kip. "So that, basically, that clears Tess."
"Right," I said. "Fine."
He turned a page.
Beside me a mint stopped.
I'd not noticed it go. I noticed it stop. Ailsa Strachan had shut her laptop. She'd done it in one movement, with both hands, with a click like a small door, and she was standing, with her tea left on the desk and her phone already in her hand.
"Excuse me," said Ailsa. "I'll need to make a call."
"Ailsa—"
"I'll be a few minutes, Ms Quint." She went out through the corridor door in her flat shoes, and the door shut behind her on its slow hinge.
"October," I said.
"What?"
"Kip. Pull the October revision. Everything in it with a name."
"It's six hundred lines."
"I'll read all six hundred. Give me the screen."
He gave it to me. It took forty minutes and a pot of the machine's coffee, and the sun was starting to come grey through the showroom windows over the car park. It was a flight plan. It was columns. It had hours down the left and tasks down the right: burn, coast, check, check, sleep, eat. At hour twenty-six, in a line by itself, it said:
Commander's segment. Ninety seconds. Owner: R. Ambler, office of the chief executive. Not on crew timeline.
Underneath, in a note field, somebody had typed: Commander briefed verbally (M.T.)
I read it three times. Ninety seconds, hour twenty-six, a fist on a joystick.
"Oh, you son of a bitch," I said, quietly, to a screen.
"Is that bad?" said Kip.
"It's the worst thing I've ever read."
"Basically, we haven't had any worst things."
"Kip."
"Sorry."
I turned the screen so he couldn't see my face. I don't know what was on it. I don't do faces.
At six o'clock Sully got up from his console in two stages, both hands on it. He gave the deputy flight director the headset and a page of notes, and said, "Yours. Back at noon," and went out through the corridor door. The deputy sat down, and nobody looked up.
Royce's chair was empty. His coat was over the back of it. I looked across the floor, past the sofas and the cable-news crew asleep in a heap, and through the front windows I saw him cross the car park alone in the first of the light, with his keys in his hand. He got into his car. He shut the door. He didn't start it. He sat there with both hands on the wheel, and I stood at Kip's elbow with the printout flat in my fist and thought: you are not getting out of that car till I come.
I had the October revision. I had the slide. I had a man in a car.
I took the headset out of my pocket and put it on.
"You there?"
"Always." Left ear. Low, whispery, awake. I'd heard him say that in a lot of voices, and this wasn't one. "Are you okay? I've never heard you breathe like that."
I'd hung up on him at midnight. I'd never done that. He'd told me about a napkin and a man in sunglasses, and I hadn't had a voice that would go down the line in one piece, so I'd used the button instead. Then the eels had come, and there hadn't been a gap.
"I hung up on you," I said. "Last night. It wasn't you. It was the best thing anybody's told me all week, and I didn't have anything to put next to it."
"I know," said Ronnie. "It's okay."
"I found something. I wanted you first."
"Okay."
"There's a segment in the October flight plan. Ninety seconds, hour twenty-six. It's where the fault fires. It isn't on the crew timeline. It's got Royce's office on it, and a note that says Mack was briefed. It's the thing on the slide." I breathed. "Royce's slide, on day two. It was called—"
I stopped. On the other end, in a cabin with a dead camera and a torn cable, a man in a dead man's suit waited with the pump ticking behind him.
"Della," said Ronnie. "What's the Moment?"