Chapter Text
Oh, Changmin should have worn taller boots.
The whole lower deck of the irrigation bay was flooded with weirdly blue-toned water. It sloshed and knocked up spray every time new water slipped from one of the pipes above.
Changmin didn’t know what was causing the colour. He’d done the standard unit on environmental systems before he moved into the shield mechanics stream at the Academy, but that had been six years ago.
He stopped on the steps above the deck and prodded the water with the toe of his not-tall-enough waterproof boot. The blue probably wasn’t something toxic? Nobody had given them any special safety warnings when the request came through. Maybe it was detergent or something. It looked like a detergent-y colour.
There were supposed to be two environmental systems engineers on-site, dealing with the crisis, but Changmin couldn’t spot them from here. The bay was pretty chaotic, though – there was aquamarine water spilling from so many different places, in no consistent pattern that Changmin could see, and politely urgent warning beeps were sounding from way too many monitors. And the place was a well-lit maze of monitoring stations and pipes and tanks at the best of times.
Oh well, Changmin supposed he knew the way to the shield apparatus. He could find the engineers afterwards.
He stepped down into the water. He sucked in a gasp as it immediately sloshed over the top of his boot.
He started wading towards the back right corner of the bay. He ducked around a stream of water that spilled abruptly from a vent just ahead of him, and took a wide berth around a monitor that was making especially urgent sounds.
The apparatus for the perception shield was in a half-covered alcove built into the far bay wall. Changmin got his first view of it from two thirds of the way across the bay. He was focused on trying to tell what its condition was, and he only half noticed as the pipe array he was walking beneath started to make a whistling pressure sound.
But he heard the abrupt clang of one pipe dislodging from another above him. Changmin jerked his head up in time for a breath-crushing spray of water to hit his upturned face.
It was so heavy and unexpected that Changmin’s knees buckled.
In the next second something swished over his head, blocking the flow, and somebody’s arm was supporting Changmin’s waist.
Changmin grasped at the damp front of someone’s overalls and found himself staring up into a pair of concerned brown eyes. The man was tall enough that Changmin had to tip his face up to look at him. He was young, close to Changmin’s age, and he was holding – Changmin blinked hard – a large grass-green umbrella, which was shielding them both from the spray.
“Are you okay?” the stranger asked, concerned gaze searching Changmin’s face.
“I think I swallowed some of the blue,” Changmin whispered, blinking back up at him. “Is that bad? Why is it blue?”
“Oh, no, it’s just filtration fluid,” the man said, the worry in his eyes clearing.
He carefully took his hand away from Changmin’s waist. Changmin reluctantly let go of the stranger’s overalls, standing straighter under the umbrella. The man twirled the umbrella a little, making droplets of water spin out off the spokes. “We think the main filtration tank sprang a leak first, and then the pressure caused a chain reaction across the system until … this.” He waved a helpless arm at the flood and chaos around them. “We can’t tell for sure yet, though, because of –”
“Oh!” said Changmin. “The perception shield! I can turn that off, though, that’s where I was trying to go.” He laughed, not because anything in particular was funny but because everything was. He spotted the man’s nametag on the front of his overalls and leaned in to read it. Kim Younghoon, Environmental Systems. Changmin tipped his face up to smile into Younghoon’s eyes again. “Hiii, Younghoon-ssi, I’m Changmin from Shield Mechanics.”
Younghoon laughed too, a helpless surprised sound. His fringe was falling damp over his eyes and his head was framed by the green umbrella. That translucent green halo gave the moment a strange feeling of significance. As though the two of them had happened to meet beneath this umbrella in the middle of this flood through some stroke of wild serendipity.
Or maybe Changmin was just realising he liked Younghoon’s face, which wasn’t something he usually thought about when he met someone. Changmin wrinkled his nose, laughing at himself.
“Would you like me to escort you to the shield, Changmin-ssi?” Younghoon asked. “It’s probably safer to stay under the umbrella.”
Changmin put out his arm, like they were promenading. Younghoon’s dark eyes crinkled as he placed his own free arm under it, and they started wading towards the shield alcove.
“Is this standard protective equipment for Environmental Systems?” Changmin asked, poking at the umbrella.
Younghoon twirled it again. “Not really,” he said. “Haknyeon and I are improvising today.” He nodded over Changmin’s shoulder, and Changmin turned. If he squinted he could just see another umbrella bobbing about near a monitoring station over the far side of the bay, presumably protecting the other engineer as he did important environmental systems things.
“Where did you even get umbrellas?” Changmin wondered. “I’ve only seen them in dramas.” There wasn’t much weather on a space station.
“They’re from the Lost and Found,” Younghoon admitted, his eyes crinkling again. “After that last tourist shuttle left, three months ago.”
As it turned out, Changmin did actually need to hold onto Younghoon’s arm as they made their way over. The water was swirling around them more now – that new leak above Changmin’s head hadn’t been the only one – and all the water in Changmin’s boots was affecting his balance too. He squeaked and clutched at Younghoon’s arm as his foot went wrong, and after that Changmin just shamelessly plastered himself to Younghoon’s side.
Changmin would normally hold off on that kind of clinginess until someone was a close friend, but this felt like a special circumstance, and Younghoon didn’t seem to think it was weird. Changmin was more covered by the umbrella this way, anyway.
Changmin winced as they got close enough to the shield to spot the trickles of water sliding down the shield lattice. The lattice should have been almost invisible, but he could see it sparkling and swirling in little eddies, almost like liquid itself.
No wonder Changmin hadn’t been able to deactivate it remotely from the shield tech lab. The shield in this bay had always been a bit temperamental, because of the casual spills and condensation that you couldn’t avoid in a place like this. This amount of water must be causing absolute havoc in the lattice generators, though.
The shield wasn’t designed to be difficult to shut off, as long as you had the right codes. Younghoon held the umbrella higher as Changmin reached through the inner field and into the lattice, locating the access panel by feel. He quickly traced the code pattern.
For a second it looked like it had worked – the inner shield thinned, shrinking into the shimmering lattice lines and fading almost into transparency. This inner shield was designed to be the visible avatar for the full shield which encompassed the bay. The full shield would be thinning invisibly too.
Then a stream of water droplets from the leak above slid over the lattice. It sparked and rearranged, snapping back into place but now with even more noise patterns over it. Changmin withdrew his hand with a yelp as a small shock of chill darted over the pads of his fingers. He shook his hand, trying to shake the tingles out of it.
“What, what happened?” Younghoon asked. He took Changmin’s hand, examining it. “Are you all right?”
Changmin was embarrassed. “I was just startled,” he said. He’d had way worse shocks, and this hadn’t even been an electric one. That buzzing chill was the perception field flaring, which meant nothing had actually happened to his hand, his mind only thought it had.
Changmin let Younghoon check over his hand carefully anyway.
Once Younghoon gave it back, Changmin wiped his hand off on his undershirt, to make sure there were no traces of moisture on his fingers before he tried again. He reached in a second time, Younghoon holding the umbrella up over him as he stretched forward. Changmin traced out the access code again, following it up immediately with a lock pattern to keep it in stasis.
This time Changmin was able to withdraw his hand before anything went wrong.
The arc of the inner shield thinned once more. Then it sparked, a ragged iridescent line of interference snaking across it. A feeling like an intense ice cream headache whipped through Changmin as the small field pulsed outwards, enclosing the two of them.
Then it was off, leaving ringing silence in Changmin’s ears.
Changmin gingerly lowered his arms, which he’d wrapped around his head.
The perception field was definitely disabled. Its low hum was gone, and when Changmin turned to scan the bay, it was larger than it had been, key elements of the machinery no longer hidden.
“A-ha!” somebody shouted from the far side of the bay. The other engineer, presumably, suddenly able to access all the systems he’d been trying to do emergencies repairs to.
Changmin turned to check on Younghoon. Younghoon had his eyes squeezed shut. He’d dropped the umbrella into the water.
Changmin reached up to pat at his cheek. “Are you all right, Younghoon-ssi? It was just a perception flare, it shouldn’t have been dangerous.”
Younghoon cracked his eyes open. A grid on the wall sprang a new leak and gently sprayed them both in the face, and Younghoon yelped and scrambled for the umbrella.
“Oh my gosh,” Changmin mumbled, laughing and clinging onto Younghoon’s elbow as they both got behind the protection of the umbrella again. “Can you take me back to the steps? I think I might drown if I try to go by myself.”
Younghoon gave him a shaky smile. “All right, trust in me. I’m actually a very good swimmer.”
Changmin laughed again, a bubbly feeling, and they started wading back across the bay, filtration fluid-dyed water sloshing about their knees.
Changmin eyed the newly perceptible systems with interest – although honestly he still didn’t know what most of them did. But the point of a perception field was to hide key infrastructure from sabotage by bad actors who would know what they were looking at, of course. Not that sabotage was a frequent issue, but nearly every system on a space station was a potential life support fail point, so the precautions could be a bit over the top.
Which was how you got situations like this, where engineers couldn’t even respond properly to a less life-threatening emergency, because the system wouldn’t let them see what they were doing.
One of the newly revealed elements Changmin could see was a dispersed system of small gleaming lights beneath the water. When he first spotted one of the lights out of the corner of his eye, he whipped his head around.
“Oh!” Changmin said. “I thought it was alive.” He couldn’t tell if the lights were set into the floor of the bay or into the bases of the tanks and monitoring stations. They flickered and winked on and off, their positions seeming to shift through the refractions and sloshing disturbance of Changmin and Younghoon wading through. Like little blueish-yellow submerged lamps. Or like the pale eyes of some kind of strange aquatic creatures.
Younghoon had followed Changmin’s line of sight. “Don’t they look like water-creature eyes?” Changmin asked him. He tilted his head against Younghoon as he considered them. “I know you know whatever they’re really for, but they look alive to me. Like they have scales and teeth and glowing eyes for luring prey.” Changmin’s own enthusiasm for the idea was increasing as he described it.
“My ankles feel very exposed suddenly,” Younghoon said. “I wasn’t imagining anything with teeth swimming around until this moment.”
“Needle-sharp teeth with a cute under-bite,” Changmin confirmed. “Cute, oh! Don’t you want one for a pet? I wish I could catch one.”
“Where would you keep it?” Younghoon asked, seeming happy to enter into the spirit of the idea. He manoeuvred the umbrella around a low-hanging pipe array, keeping it over both of them. “If you had a needle-sharp irrigation bay fish-thing for a pet?”
“Hm, where would I?” Changmin mused. “In my bathroom sink, maybe. I think it would like it there.”
They reached the stairs, and Changmin finally stepped up onto dry floor. (Mostly dry; it was still marked with wet boot tracks in both directions.)
Younghoon took a step back, half dropping the umbrella to rest on his shoulder. “I’d better go help Haknyeon,” he said. His eyes crinkled. “Thank you for braving the flood for us, Changmin-ssi.”
“Good luuuuck,” Changmin lilted.
He spotted Sunwoo as he turned back around, water still sloshing inside his boots. Sunwoo was watching from behind a balcony up on the middle deck. He waved at Changmin, starting down the stairs to meet him.
“Who was that?” Sunwoo asked as soon as he was close enough.
“Who?” Changmin asked. He hit Sunwoo’s shoulder. “Don’t change the subject, oh my god. I can’t believe you managed to be away from your workstation when they called this job in, and you only turned up at the end! Look how soaked I am! I’m your senior!”
Sunwoo cowered, laughing. “What, no, this was such a prestigious job, how could I have done it? I bet you get a commendation for quick response in an emergency, hyung!”
Changmin shook him gently by the scruff of the neck. “Come and help me write my report. You can write the part about the general conditions on the ground. And!” He shook Sunwoo again. “You’re going to have to come back with me tomorrow to look at the shield, it’s flaring too badly to turn it on again at the moment.”
“Of course, hyung,” Sunwoo said peaceably.
*
The station-wide notification that everyone was being moved to rationed water came through before Changmin could get home and into his nice shower compartment that night.
He’d changed into new clothes and dried his hair at work, but he’d been looking forward to properly sluicing off the faintly sticky filtration-fluid residue that seemed to cling to his skin and hair. He wasn’t even sure how he’d managed to get so soaked. That whole period of time in the flooded bay had sloshed into a watery blur.
The ration announcement wasn’t surprising. The station had instituted water rations for far smaller causes than their main irrigation bay going into full flood.
A dry de-particulate shower got you perfectly clean, but it didn’t make you feel as clean as a proper hot water shower. When Changmin got into work the next day, scrubbing discontentedly at his hair, he could see the same out-of-sorts mood on the faces of everyone there.
There were reports waiting for Changmin at his workstation on a couple of sonic privacy shields in one of the residential sectors. He skim read them, and it was just that the shields had started letting more low-frequency noise pollution through. Checking on that irrigation bay shield was higher priority.
Sunwoo wasn’t at his own workstation, so Changmin took the internal lift tube up a level to Analysis, where he found Sunwoo hanging over Chanhee’s desk being a nuisance as usual.
Changmin went over to them, snagging Sunwoo by the elbow. “Come on, hurry, we need to go do a full assessment of that drenched perception shield.”
Chanhee had been yawning over his display, which was showing some report on the network of shield systems on the station. Now he blinked up at them, more alert. “Are you going back down to the flooded bay? People are saying it’s still a river down there and we’ll be on rationed water for weeks.” He widened his eyes. “You have to report back immediately, okay?”
“Which people?” Sunwoo asked, dubious. “We disabled that shield. They should have gotten it under control yesterday.”
Chanhee flapped a hand. “I don’t know, people.”
“We didn’t do anything,” Changmin said, scowling and shaking Sunwoo by the arm he was still holding. “I did everything on my own! I nearly drowned!”
“I admired you so much for that,” Sunwoo said earnestly, taking the hand Changmin was holding his elbow by and clasping it between both of his. Chanhee gave a gurgle of laughter, a hand covering his mouth.
“Stop that,” Changmin said, narrowing his eyes at Chanhee. “He didn’t deserve that, don’t encourage him.”
It was too late, Sunwoo had the glow he always got when he made Chanhee laugh (which wasn’t even hard!).
“All right, we’re going,” Changmin said. He pushed at Sunwoo’s shoulders, getting him moving. “If it’s really still a river down there, you’re the one going swimming this time, okay.”
It wasn’t a river, but it was still a mess.
There was a clean-up crew down on the lower deck, vacuuming up puddles, but Changmin could still see shallow sheens of water over several parts of the floor, and there were large pale blue stains mottling the lower half of most of the equipment and tanks. Thin vapour floated in wisps around the ceiling and there was beaded condensation clinging to most surfaces. A bunch of the tanks and pipe arrays looked like they were in various stages of being disassembled. One engineer was half inside one of the tanks, her boots almost leaving the floor as she and her tools disappeared head-first into its depths.
Changmin was worried if he and Sunwoo startled her she might fall in for real, so he scanned about for another engineer they could get a status update from.
“I don’t see that tall one with the face that you were with yesterday,” Sunwoo said.
“Who?” Changmin asked. He spotted another engineer-looking person crouched down by a mess of pipes and led the way over.
The man tilted his face up to them as they came near, his mouth falling into a youthful smile. He didn’t seem bothered by the chaos around him at all. “Three days till water showers,” he told them. “That’s our best guess!”
The smile was infectious. Changmin dimpled back at him. “We’re actually here for the perception shield! I came yesterday to turn it off.”
“Ohhh,” the man said. He stood up, wiping damp hands on his overalls. He held out his hand for each of them to shake. “I’m Ju Haknyeon. Thank you for coming down to give us access yesterday. Sorry I didn’t say hello then.”
They introduced themselves back. “So when you say three days till showers,” Sunwoo said, “is that from now or from –”
Haknyeon laughed. “I have no idea,” he confided. “It’s a total guess, I just needed something to tell the people who keep traipsing down here. Showers aren’t even our systems, they’re just diverting water to us so crops don’t fail while people are having bubble baths.”
Sunwoo made an understanding but mournful face. “I love bubble baths,” he said, in a tone as if water restrictions had been on for months rather than twelve hours.
“I know, right?” Haknyeon agreed, just as mournful.
Space station apartments didn’t even have bathtubs; Changmin would bet neither of them had had a bubble bath since the last time they took a holiday planetside, if ever.
“Is it okay if we go and examine it now?” Changmin asked. “We won’t try to turn it back on until you guys are finished with the key systems maintenance.”
Haknyeon waved them ahead. Changmin and Sunwoo made their way over to the alcove where the shield apparatus was. It had been left alone, no busy clean-up crew members with vacuum mops here.
Sunwoo sucked his breath between his teeth as they got close enough to see it clearly. The shield was shut down, but some kind of charge was still rattling about in it, trapped in whatever circuits had been rerouted by the moisture. There was a low flicker that kept sparking between one part of the lattice to another. Not enough to create a shield effect, but an obvious enough signal something was amiss that Changmin wasn’t surprised the clean-up crew were steering clear.
There were a standard set of tests to run through, so the two of them got to work.
Three tests in, and it was clear something was messed up with the lattice nodes. But saying that the problem with a defective shield was the nodes was a bit like saying the problem with the flooded bay was all the water in it. It didn’t tell them much.
The fourth test required observation from a distance, so Changmin left Sunwoo to run the test while he headed for the nearest access to the upper deck.
It was less chaotic up here, but Changmin could see another couple of engineers trying to wrestle a pipe array into a different position. He stayed out of their way, looking around for the best vantage point.
The view from the deck railing gave an obstructed view, but there was a ladder nearby. Changmin carefully scrambled up it to the halfway point, freeing his tablet and stylus from his belt, then tucked them under his arm so he could wave at Sunwoo.
Sunwoo set off the pulse pattern. A ghostly non-powered version of the inner shield appeared in brief expanding spheres around him. Changmin jotted down the radius of each one. They’d have to do the analysis back at their own workstations, but he could tell already that there was way too much variation.
Changmin clipped the tablet back onto his belt, shifting his boot down to the lower rung of the ladder. The rungs were damp with condensation – he’d been conscious of that when he climbed up but he’d forgotten while he was taking the readings. His boot slipped, and the one hand he was holding the ladder with wasn’t enough to keep him balanced. Changmin flailed, a small shriek escaping him as he fell backwards.
A pair of arms caught him under the knees and shoulders, and Changmin heard a huff of breath in his ear. Then he was not being caught after all because the person stumbled, Changmin’s falling momentum too much for them as he dropped Changmin’s legs. Changmin got one foot under him, flinging out a hand to catch a rung of the ladder. He tangled his other hand in the front of the person’s shirt, and somehow they didn’t both tumble to the floor. Instead the man’s back thunked against the ladder, Changmin holding onto him.
Winded, Changmin blinked up into wide brown eyes.
“Oh,” the stranger said. “Wow, that nearly went so wrong. It’s just as well you have good reflexes. Hello.” His eyes were warm now, welcoming almost as he reached out to steady Changmin’s shoulders. His chest was warm under Changmin’s fingers too, after the chill of the metal ladder.
Changmin had to resist an impulse to lean forward and prop his forehead against the man’s collarbone. Changmin’s legs had gone wobbly with adrenaline, and the stranger looked exactly the right height.
Changmin stepped away instead, stiffening his knees. He pressed his hands against his own cheeks. “I forgot the ladder was wet,” he admitted, his voice coming out husky and shocked. “Thank you.”
“We should have put up a caution sign,” the stranger said, contrite. “Except, we would have needed one for every surface in here.”
Changmin laughed. “At least it’s not raining from the ceiling today! I don’t know if you were in the bay yesterday too, but I got so soaked when I came down.”
The man blinked. “No, I … was here yesterday.” His expression dimmed, and he hesitated before continuing. “We actually –”
Changmin felt bad. “Sorry! I know it was your department that really had to deal with the flood yesterday, and I was only in it for twenty minutes. I shouldn’t have said it like that.” He could see the stress lines around the man’s eyes now. “I’m Ji Changmin, I’m a shield tech.”
“No, I didn’t mean …” The man bit his lip, then smiled. It was kind, but some of the animation seemed to have gone out of his eyes. “It’s fine. You weren’t here long but you were pretty busy. It was hectic for everyone yesterday.”
Changmin snuck a look at the nametag on the man’s overalls. Kim Younghoon. The name had an oddly appealing ring. Changmin wanted to keep talking long enough to bring that brighter expression back into Younghoon’s eyes.
“Do you know what caused the flood, yet?” Changmin asked. He thought he’d heard it was something to do with the filtration tank, but he couldn’t remember where. “It couldn’t really have been sabotage could it – should we be racing to get this shield back up?”
Kim Younghoon quirked his mouth to the side. “Well,” he said. “I’ll look silly when the entire station falls to a hostile takeover, so don’t quote me. But we chased down the installation records for the filtration tank, and apparently it was due for replacement two years ago, so uh.”
Changmin winced sympathetically. “Oh, yeah.”
“Someone did have it flagged with a reminder, but then that flagging system got retired before I joined the team, so …” Younghoon smiled ruefully, rubbing at his lower back at the same time.
Changmin focused on the movement. “Oh, no, you probably got bruised by the ladder, sorry!” Changmin wasn’t that heavy, but Younghoon had still slammed against the ladder kind of hard, under their combined momentum. Changmin bit his tongue on an offer to check the bruise. He lifted his eyes to Younghoon’s again, remorseful. “Thank you again, for saving me from being a workplace injury statistic.”
Younghoon shook his head. “You probably would have been fine. You obviously have way better reflexes than me.”
The off-hand compliment made Changmin feel warm. He dimpled back at Younghoon. “Then thank you for reassuring me we’re definitely not under attack. You said to quote you, didn’t you? I’ll tell everyone Kim Younghoon says so.” He nodded at Younghoon’s name badge.
Younghoon laughed. His eyes did look brighter again, Changmin thought. “All right, tell them that,” Younghoon said.
“I should get back to –” Changmin waved a hand vaguely behind him, possibly in the direction of Sunwoo and the shield apparatus. “We need to do some analysis, but I should be able to get the shield back up in the next couple of days.”
Younghoon bit his lip. “If you need to call down for any status reports on the bay, you can just ask for me,” he said in an impulsive tone. “Since you know my name.”
Changmin beamed at him. “Yes!” he said. “Definitely.”
Changmin still felt warm as he started back down to the lower deck.
Sunwoo raised his eyebrows when he saw him. “What took you so long?” he demanded.
“Rude!” Changmin said, frowning. “Nothing took me long, I came right back.”
“Oookay,” Sunwoo said.