The image had gone dark, but the recording had not ended.
Mara stood in front of the console with her hands flat on the cold steel of the alcove’s edge. The glass was black. The speaker was silent. And then, after a moment, the glass lit again with a second file this time, queued behind the first, that the console played on its own when the first one stopped. A shorter one. Recorded later, the stamp said. The light in the alcove was the same, but the frame was different: closer, lower, as though the camera had been moved, or the person in front of it could no longer sit up straight.
Iona’s face came back. Thinner. Greyer. Her voice, when it came, was quieter.
She talked about the cooling this time. Her hands, at the bottom of the frame, were shaking. Mara could see them: the fine fast tremor, the smallest finger first. Her mother held the paper with both hands to keep it still.
She held something up to the camera: a sheet of paper, covered in figures, her slanted hand. A schedule. The station’s cooling system, she said, was failing; the pumps that kept the cold room cold and the alcove’s storage frozen were running down, because their supply had stopped when the station was sealed. She had worked out a way to keep them alive longer: a schedule, cycling the pumps on and off, rationing their coolant. If she kept to it, the cooling would last…
