Amina heaves against the tie down strap, pulling with all of her might. Across the hallway, Tessa does the same, pressing her back to the wall and applying every foot pound of force available to her.

The pipe creeps back into place, short inches at a time. With each inch gained, Amina worries that the door frame in use as a leverage point will give out. Amina worries that they will not be able to secure the pipe in place once its made whole again. Amina has many concerns.

Tsim, however, has a different set of concerns. Chief among them is whether or not he will even be able to make it to the pipe on time. With the employee elevator still nonoperational, he is stuck taking the service ladder, which was not designed for use in spin. The ladder is a holdover from the elderly ring gate’s construction days. It was put there while the gate was not yet running on its own power grid and there was no spin to generate gravity.

As such, the emergency ladder’s handholds are less designed for climbing and more designed for a quick tug to scoot along a weightless individual coasting through the construction site. It was not designed with actual climbing in mind at all. The ladder’s rungs are far enough apart that Tsim has to scramble to reach each next one. His kit full of tools dangles precariously from its strap. It jostles a sharp metal corner against his back with every climbed step.

After significant difficulty, Tsim makes it to the next floor and sprints the length of the hallway. His station shoes slip with little traction against the cheaply tiled floor, but he manages to slide to a stop before falling down through the hole in the floor ripped by the collapsing pipeline.

Unfortunately for Tsim, down the hole is exactly where he needs to be.

Tessa secures her strap to the floor with several auto rivets from Amina’s fastening gun. Designed for hull or bulkhead damage repairs, the rivets expand once driven through their target and create a pressure-tight seal. It would be overkill if not for the dire consequences of what may happen if the pipe should fail again.

Amina has the strap wrapped around her forearm. She’s not grasping it with her bare hands, as the thousands of tiny puncture wounds weep tiny drops of blood, staining the parts of the strap she has already handled and rendering it too slick to hold. With no free hands to use tools, she is unable to secure the strap herself. She leans hard against the weight of the pipe applied to her arms and braces herself against the door frame.

Tsim slips into the gap between the two levels. The damaged barrier’s sharp edges catch on his clothes as he hurries past. He absentmindedly sweeps aside the collected muddy puddle that has pooled on the bottom of the gap, and shakes the clinging ants from his fingers.

With his working space as cleared as it can be, Tsim watches his patient pipe slip into place, still pouring highly pressurized water from the bulging crack across its spin-ward side. He reaches across the top of the wide pipe and secures the high-strength adhesive polymer sealant strip opposite from the damaged portion. Normally he would wait to apply a patch when the line was no longer active, but he does not have access to its controls at this time. And with the risk of people actually drowning on a space station being an unforeseen obstacle he does not have the time to wait for the computerized controls to be made available again.

Tsim has to lean on the pipe to apply some pressure to be sure the sealant patch sticks properly. Overhead, Amina loses her footing and the pipe slips spin-ward again.

Flying out of his electronic lair, Markos grabs the carpenter around her waist and adds his weight to hers against their makeshift pulley. The added force against the lever pulls the pipe back into position. Markos clings to Amina, holding his coworker in a desperate grapple, with no improper context at all.

Amina presses her head against his shoulder. She accepts the assistance gratefully, her hand turning slowly purple below the taught strap on her arm. The unintentional tourniquet chews painfully into her flesh.

Tsim meticulously wraps the sealant patch round and around and around and around and around the pipe. He deliberately crosses back over it many multiple times, putting extra layers on either side of the break before slowly building the two sides of the patch inward toward each other. As the patch is placed, the rushing torrent slows. The high tech polymers of the sealant adhere rapidly and their layered strength resolves the leakage.

Tessa climbs around to Amina’s side of the broken hallway, using a door that has become a bridge to cross the great divide between them. Markos holds the strap in place for Amina to unwind it from her arm. Tessa secures the strap to the structural supports of the doorway with the fastening gun.

It isn’t a permanent fix, but it is a fix.

With the danger somewhat resolved for the moment, Amina sits heavily on a different chair in the still overly warm computer control room. She flexes her fingers, biting back a complaint about their tingling pain as blood and sensation return to them slowly. She rolls up the sleeves over her coveralls to inspect the damage. A dark bruise spreads across her forearm, perfectly describing the shape and texture of the tie down strap used in the temporary repair.

Emesis is not the solution to this problem.

But the horrible sensation of metal fibers still trapped in the palms of her hands certainly does make that a highly tempting prospect.

Tessa and Markos assist Tsim in climbing back up onto the floor and away from the dangerous hole. They do not worry about their coworkers below at the moment. Surely that is the safer place to be than at the edge of a long drop from a high ceiling.

With the danger past, all four sit in silence, not sure if there is anything that can be said between them.

A progress bar crawls a little further across a screen on the other side of the room. Markos flops down onto one of the chairs, its ancient upholstery cracking and flaking away every time he moves. He scoots back into place in front of the many screens, checking their statuses and making notes on his clipboard.

With hesitant steps, Tessa approaches Amina with the heavy bag she’d so carefully kept track of through the crisis. The squatter opens the bag and reveals a field medicine case the envy of any surgeon outside a dedicated operating room. The bag’s weight makes much more sense now.

Tessa takes a seat in one of the rolling chairs and adjusts a lamp to point the light directly at the carpenter’s damaged hands. From the kit she selects magnetic tweezers and a sterilizing mist solution. Her lowered eyes beg apology, but she says nothing at all.

Amina again accepts assistance gracefully, but she cannot watch. She squeezes her eyes shut and turns her head to avoid any accidental glimpse of the process of removing each splinter. Her nurse is gentle, but there is nothing available to dull the pain as each little piece is removed one by one. Each bit removed bites as viciously as when it entered.