Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dora Amelia Marquez stretched up on her tiptoes to tap the lighted panel beside the door. Nothing happened. She tried once more, just in case her small fingers hadn't quite managed to trigger the mechanism the first time, then ran clattering back down the corridor. Her mother sat at her workstation in a spare metal chair , tapping a stylus against her lips and staring out the large viewport.

"Mami, juega conmigo." Play with me.

"I can't play right now, mija, I'm very busy. Betelgeuse is acting fussy this morning and I have to write a report.”

Dora opened her mouth to whine, but something in her mother's tone stopped her. "Fussy how?" The giant blood orange star outside the viewport, wrapped in pastel colored gauze, didn't look different to her eyes. She plopped down to idly poke her fingers through the holes in the floor. There was no real bottom to the station, just crossing bridges and mesh floors, lighted by occasional bluish spotlights, as far down as the eye could see. The lack of a solid floor had frightened her when she was littler; now, she had grown to like the faint, swooping vertigo that came over her when she looked down into the dark.

Mami answered absently, "We might be going back to the Starbase soon. That's all."

Baloney. Dora chewed thoughtfully on Boots’ foot, felt her mother's eyes on her, and sheepishly removed the soggy appendage. Papi had wrapped the sock monkey’s battered feet with red electrical tape to keep the stuffing from coming out of all the holes she'd chewed. The tape wrapped feet made the monkey look a little like it was wearing bright red boots. "The holosuite's not opening," she complained.

"Your Papi is working on it, Dora. Go play and let me work," her mother said. "But keep your comlink on."

Dora felt reflexively for the comlink pinned to her shirt. "Yes, Mami."

Deep in the core of Betelgeuse, a final turning point was reached. Gravity trumped radiation pressure, and a portion of the star's mass began to collapse, finally, in toward the center. The data Valeria Marquez was analyzing vanished from her console to be replaced by a single, flashing warning. A notation appeared at the bottom of the screen, noting that the final data upload into subspace had been initiated.

*

Dora crept along a dimly lit corridor. The dark girders had become a jungle all around. She pushed imaginary vines away from her face. A snake hissed in the darkness, low and menacing. She ducked away from it. It didn't stop hissing. A funny smell, sweet, but not candy sweet, tingled in her nose. She leaned down, toward the hissing noise, sniffed, then backed away so abruptly she tripped over her own feet and landed hard on her bottom. She rubbed her stinging eyes and nose, held her breath, and crawled forward again to get a look at the source of the noise. A fine spray of dark, oily looking liquid was shooting out of the seam between two lengths of pipe.

The jungle forgotten, Dora crawled back a couple of meters to lean against a girder, then tapped her comlink. "Papi," she said, pausing a moment to give the comlink time to connect to her father's. "There's yucky stuff leaking out of a pipe here." The comlink knew where she was at all times, so there was no point trying to describe the place. Papi would just look her up on his map. There was no answer.

"Papi. Answer me. I'm not playing."

Well, okay then. "Mami."

Did they both have their comlinks off? She gave the link three fast taps, the emergency code. Any leak that smelled like that and--she took a good look at the rapidly corroding surfaces near the leak--did that to metal, was an emergency. Still nothing. She would have to go back to the hub and tell them herself.

*

Valeria tapped her own comlink. "Raul, she’s gone hot.”

Nothing. “Raul?” She walked around the corner to his workstation. “Raul. We have the neutrino signal. She’s in the final implosion sequence.”

”Right. Where’s Dora?”

Valeria bit her lip. “Playing. Somewhere. The comlinks aren’t handling the neutrino influx. Would you go look for her while I load the shuttle?"

Raul wasted no time. He pushed his feet back into his loafers and jogged off down the corridor, calling her name.

*

Dora rummaged through her battered purple backpack for her locator and keyed it on. Nothing but gray static. No way. The locator had to work. How would she find her way back without it? Her chest tightened and burned. She could feel tears starting to prickle behind her eyes. Stupid. Dora forced herself to breathe, to unclench her fists, to sit, quietly against the girder. Stop and think, she told herself. She bit down on Boots’ taped up foot.

She needed a map. The backpack had paper and crayons in it. She pulled out an irregular piece of yellow paper and a green crayon and drew a line. At one end she drew herself and Boots. At the other, Mami and Papi. Between them there was a huge arch, one of the main support structures for the station. She could just see it in the gloom, lit by several spotlights and the faint glow of the dying star. She drew a rainbow shape for the arch. Beyond the arch, there was a long zigzagging bridge. She drew a zigzag shape along the line, between the arch and her parents, for the bridge.

"Arch. Bridge. Mami and Papi." She scooped up her backpack and started on the path home, keeping her eye on the lighted arch far ahead. "Arch. Bridge. Mami and Papi." The arch looked different from the way it had on the way out. It was more brightly lit from the outside, the orange and gold contrasting with the cool white of the spotlights.

Dora’s feet went clang, clang on the metal flooring. Echoes bounced around the hollow structure and returned to her ears, becoming spooky on their journey. "Arch. Bridge. Mami and Papi."

Clang, clang, clang, BEEEP BEEEP! Dora jumped backwards, out of the eerie glow of the dying star filtering in through the transparent aluminum panel. The beeping stopped. She stepped forward again. BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP! The tiny flower on her bracelet had turned from blue to red and was beeping at her. She backed up again, out of the light. The noise stopped again. That meant something.

Blue means safe. Red means dead. If the bracelet started to beep she was supposed to get away from wherever it was beeping, fast, and tell Mami or Papi right away. The light from the dying star was making her bracelet beep. But she had to go through a long stretch of corridor bathed in that deadly orange light, under the the arch, to get back to Mami and Papi.

She looked around the stretch of corridor for anything that might help. There was a panel on the outer wall, just above her head, with buttons on it she wasn't quite tall enough to see. She tried stretching up onto her tiptoes, but all she could see was that a piece of paper was taped next to the panel, not what was on the buttons or what, if anything, was written on the paper.

Stupid adults put everything too high. Dora was not going to cry. Crying never solved problems. Mami said so. She was wrong of course, crying was a great way to solve the no cookies before dinner problem, but that wasn't a real problem. Dora sank down against the outer wall and pulled Boots out of her backpack to tuck into her lap.

She looked around for a moment. The corridor was empty. No boxes or stools to stand on and make herself taller. She took an extra minute to run back down the corridor the way she came, to see if there was any movable object she could drag over to use as a stool. Nothing. She craned her head back as far as it would go to see if she could make out anything on the panel. Nothing but the sides of the buttons. She was about to start pushing buttons randomly, just to see what would happen, when she had an idea.

She stepped away from the wall until the railing on the other side of the corridor bumped into her back. Then she looked up again. There were numbers on the buttons, and words and numbers handwritten on the paper next to the panel. Dora could only read a little bit, but she recognized one of the two words: OPEN. After the word OPEN were the numbers 1234. Below open, letters spelled out C, L, O, S, E. Clossie? Claw see? Next to it were the numbers 5678. The panel must be for opening and closing the blast shutters on the viewport. She thought about the clossie word a moment more, took her monkey's foot out of her mouth, and decided that CLOSE must be a crazy English way of spelling close. Spanish words were easier. All the letters always made the same sound.

She'd have to remember which buttons were 5, 6, 7, 8 and find them by feel. After studying the panel for a minute or two she stepped forward, felt for the panel, and with her eyes squeezed shut, felt down to the second row, middle button and pushed it, then the button next to it, felt down a row and pressed the first and second buttons in that row. Machinery clunked inside the wall, and a huge section of dark metal slid down, cutting off the orange starlight, leaving only the fainter glow of the spotlights affixed to the surface of the arch.

Holding her breath, she stepped forward again. No beeping. She ran the full length of corridor up to and under the arch, slowing only when the corridor rounded a corner and was no longer following the curve of the outer wall. She had almost reached the bridge. "Arch, Bridge, Mami and Papi," she repeated to herself as she ran. She dashed across the first part of the bridge, which swayed slightly under her pounding feet. Something tumbled out of her arms. She stopped and turned to look. A smudge of pale gray was caught on a girder a meter or so below the floor of the bridge. Boots! She ripped off her backpack and sat to rummage frantically through it, but the monkey wasn't there. She leaned over the side of the bridge. Definitely Boots. The sock monkey's stitched eyes peered helplessly out of the gloom.

Raul passed Valeria by at a run. "I've tried the starboard corridors. She's not there. I'm heading down the port side now."

"We're cutting it close. Move."

He didn't tell her he was moving as fast as he could. She didn't tell him how little time they had.

*

There was no way Dora could reach Boots on her own. It was too far. But she really didn't want to leave him behind, even just long enough to tell Papi about the leaky pipe. She searched her backpack again, this time a little more slowly. She needed something to drop to him that he could catch hold of.

The string was easy. Dora always had an ample supply of string rolled up in the bottom of the backpack. Finding something to put on the end of the string was harder. She'd played fishing games off the side of the bridge enough times to know that the string would need a weight on the end of it to help it swing. There were several little bits of technological debris adrift in the bottom of her backpack that might do. She hefted them in her hands, selected one she liked, and taped it to one end of her string. Now for a hook, a sharp one that would catch the fine fuzz covering the sock puppet's body. Mami did not like her to pick up sharp things, but that had never stopped her. She just stored them in a separate pocket on the outside of the backpack where she wouldn't accidentally cut herself on one...again.

A length of thick wire with an angled point at one end would do the trick. She bent it to shape, using the floor grate for leverage, then taped it to the weight and wrapped a few extra loops of tape around the entire apparatus. Next came the really hard part. She'd have to be careful or Boots would fall all the way down into those dark depths, never to be seen again, except perhaps by Big Giant Baby, Rolly Dog, or another of the toys that had met its end here.

Dora lowered her improvised fishing line toward the sock monkey and gave it a swing. Once, twice, three times, then she jerked it upward. It caught, just, under Boots' chin. Slowly she pulled in the string, while Boots rocked back and forth on the point of the hook, threatening to slip off at any moment. Dora snatched out a hand at last and pulled Boots to her chest, heart pounding.

*

Raul pelted up the portside corridor. "No sign of her."

Valeria thought. "Try that bridge down by the main support beam. She likes to throw things off it."

"When you have to go, if we're not back, go," he said.

*

Boots got an extra kiss before being shoved way down into the bottom of the backpack. Dora dumped the rest of her stuff in on top of him and carefully zipped the bag closed this time, then shrugged back into it and jogged the rest of the way across the bridge.

Arch, Bridge, Mami and Papi. Clang, clang, clang. She was almost back to the hub. Funny, the shuttle bay door was open. "Mami, Papi, there's a leak down in the pipe place!" She ran a few more steps. "Mami, Papi!"

"Dora, come here! Run!" Dora was pelting as fast as her short legs could carry her even before she recognized Papi's harsh voice. He ran toward her, slung her onto his hip, and turned to run back to the hub so fast her head banged painfully into his shoulder.

Then they were inside the shuttle, and the door banged shut, and Mami shot the shuttle out of its bay before Dora could say anything or even get to her seat. "What's happening?" Dora said, rubbing her head.

Papi scooped her up and sat her on his lap. "Betelgeuse is exploding. We have to go fast so it doesn’t catch us." He squeezed her tight and kept on squeezing the breath right out of her.

"What about my toys?"

"Going to warp," Mami interrupted. There was a funny little swoop in the pit of Dora's stomach, and then they were very, very far away from the little station, so far she couldn’t see it at all. The star was blowing up. Big Giant Baby and Rolly Dog and all those cut paper fish lost under the bridge were all burning up.

Mami sighed once, loud. "We're OK. We beat it."

"Are my toys all burned up?"

Papi gave her one more tight squeeze and turned her to face him. "You know how I told you it's important to keep your toys put away?"

Dora nodded.

"All the toys that were in the toy box are here." He pointed to the corner where the toy box sat next to a pile of computer stuff.

Her yellow bedspread puffed out of its open top. She darted over to the toy box and dragged the blanket out, leaving a trail of stuffed animals in her wake. Wrapping herself up in the blanket, she squirmed back onto her Papi's lap. "Fluff my hair," she whispered, then turned her face to the window to watch the smeary stars.