Smith found him near the fabrication tent, where the morning’s work had left a scatter of cut stock and filing dust across the tarp.
She didn’t announce herself.
She just appeared at his shoulder the way she always did, too close, smiling.
“Ivo,” she said.
“Walk with me.”
He looked at the half-sorted pile of aluminum bar stock Maureen had marked for the frame reinforcements.
“I’m in the middle of”
“It won’t take long.” Her voice stayed warm.
Her eyes didn’t.
“And I think you’ll want to hear this somewhere the Robinson children aren’t listening.”
He set down the calipers and followed her past the main tent, toward the edge of camp where the trees started and the noise of two dozen people organizing an escape thinned to nothing.
She stopped beside a fallen log, brushed it clean with one hand, and sat.
Ivo stayed standing.
“The resource allocation meeting is this afternoon,” Smith said.
“Victor Dhar’s little council of concerned families. Deciding who gets what from the shared salvage.”
“I know.”
“Maureen will ask for machining tools. Cutting stock. A portable welder if anyone has one to spare.” Smith’s smile didn’t shift.
“All very reasonable. All very necessary for her brilliant frame-reinforcement plan.”
Ivo said nothing.
“She’ll get them,” Smith said.
“Because she’s Maureen Robinson and everyone trusts her to save them. But there are other families asking for things too. Smaller families. Families without a Voice-of-Reason and a decorated Navy father.”
“What do you want?”
Smith tilted her head, considering him the way she might consider a tool whose function she was still learning.
“Jupiter 11 has water purification tablets. Medical-grade. Enough for sixty days if rationed properly. They’re offering to share them with three other Jupiters in exchange for help with their solar array repair.”
“So help them fix the array.”
“I don’t fix solar arrays, Ivo. You do. Or you know people who do.” She folded her hands in her lap, the picture of reason.
“I want you to make sure Jupiter 11’s repair help comes from someone other than the Robinsons.”
He stared at her.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. A word in the right ear. A suggestion that Jupiter 7 has someone better suited to the work. The Robinsons stay focused on their frame reinforcements, Jupiter 11 gets their array fixed, and those water tablets end up distributed to families who’ll remember I helped coordinate the arrangement.”
“You want to build leverage.”
“I want to be useful,” Smith said.
She stood, brushing bark dust from her jacket.
“The same thing you want. The same thing that keeps us both on the lifeboat when the seats run short.”
The trees were very quiet.
Somewhere behind them a child laughed, high and bright.
“And if I don’t?” Ivo said.
Smith’s smile finally shifted.
It didn’t grow warmer.
“Then I suppose I’ll have to ask Maureen about that antenna repair,” she said.
“The one where the copper traces regrew inside a sealed housing. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit. Wondering if anyone else has noticed how much it looked like the way Will’s Robot healed itself after the waterfall fight.”
The cold came fast, wrist to elbow, with no metal anywhere near him.
“I don’t want to. Truly, I don’t.” She took a step closer, and her voice dropped to something almost kind.
“But I need you to understand that we’re the same, you and I. We both do what we have to do to stay on the lifeboat. And right now, what I have to do is make sure I’m valuable to more people than just the Robinsons.”
She turned and walked back toward camp, her steps light and unbothered.
Ivo stood beside the fallen log and felt the shape of the choice close around him.
Every version of helping Smith took something from someone.
Jupiter 7 had fewer people than the Robinsons, less weight in the survivor council, and their fabricator had been asking for work.
Steering them toward Jupiter 11’s array wouldn’t hurt them.
It might even help.
It just wouldn’t be clean.
He walked back to the fabrication tent.
The aluminum stock sat where he’d left it, waiting to be measured and cut and bent into the bones of an escape.
Maureen’s plan.
The thing that would save them all, if he could make the metallurgy work without explaining how.
Ivo picked up a length of bar stock and ran the Assay across it without meaning to.
Aluminum 6061-T6, eighty-two percent, impurities acceptable.
The numbers wrote themselves across his vision in rust-orange precision, and the molar ache started low and familiar in his jaw.
He found Marcus Webb from Jupiter 7 an hour before the allocation meeting, sitting outside his family’s tent with a field repair manual open on his knees.
“You’re the one who fixed the Yamamotos’ fuel pump,” Ivo said.
Webb looked up, squinting against the light.
“That’s me. You need something fixed?”
“Jupiter 11 needs their solar array repaired. I heard you asking around for fabrication work.”
“I was.” Webb closed the manual, interested now.
“They offering trade?”
“Water purification tablets. Medical-grade. Enough to make it worth your time.”
Webb’s eyes sharpened.
“The Robinsons were supposed to help with that.”
“The Robinsons are focused on frame reinforcements,” Ivo said.
“They don’t have the hours. But you do, and you’re good at this kind of work. I’d tell them to talk to you.”
It wasn’t a lie.
It was all true.
It just wasn’t the whole reason, and he swallowed around the gap between the two anyway, the way he swallowed everything else that didn’t go down clean.
“Yeah,” Webb said slowly.
“Yeah, I could do that. Thanks for the tip.”
Ivo nodded and walked away before the man could ask why he was playing matchmaker.
He found Judy in the med tent, inventorying supplies with the same methodical focus she brought to everything.
She looked up when he stepped inside, and her expression did something complicated.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.
“I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been working and avoiding me.” She set down the clipboard.
“What’s wrong?”
The lie came easier than it should have.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just tired. The antenna repair took more out of me than I thought.”
“Your hands are steady. Your color’s fine. You don’t look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“Ivo.”
He made himself meet her eyes.
“I’m fine, Judy. I promise.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she let it go.
“Okay. But if that changes”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, and something small and quiet gave way between them a hairline seam, the kind that never fully closes again.
He left before she could press harder.
The allocation meeting ran long, voices overlapping in the main tent as Maureen and Victor Dhar negotiated the grammar of survival.
Ivo stayed outside, listening to the shape of it through canvas.
When Jupiter 11’s array repair came up, Marcus Webb’s name carried the vote.
The Robinsons got their machining tools and their cutting stock.
Smith got her water tablets distributed to families who would remember.
Everyone got what they needed.
No one got hurt.
Ivo told himself that all the way back to Jupiter 2 as the sun tracked west and the camp settled into the rhythm of another day spent preparing to abandon a dying world.
Smith caught him at the edge of the clearing, just long enough to touch his shoulder and lean close.
“You did that beautifully,” she said quietly.
“And the terrible thing about the first time is how quickly it stops feeling like the first time.”
She walked away before he could answer.
Ivo stood in the long shadow of the Jupiter.
She hadn’t been gloating.
She’d been remembering.
He looked at his hands.
They were steady.
Clean.
The same hands that had mended the antenna and steered a decent man toward work he’d earned and lied to the one person he’d promised not to lie to.
The road was smoother than he’d feared.
He didn’t trust a road that easy.
Not one he’d built himself.
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