The Ghost Line

by Andrew Neil Gray

  “Of course I fucking saved them. What sort of amateur do you think I am?”

  “What sort of people do you think we are to go back and change things? Why would we do that?”

  Wei banged her gloved hand on the console in front of her. “Don’t pretend you didn’t want more time here.”

  That was the last straw. Saga stormed over to Wei. She stood over her, glaring down at the other woman’s pinched, suspicious face. “My mother is dead, in case you’ve forgotten. I don’t want to explore; I just want to go home.” As she said it she realized it was true. She was going back to Earth, even if it was just to visit her mother’s grave and have a cry with her relatives. “Every hour here is an hour I’ve lost. So don’t accuse us of wasting your time. It’s insulting.”

  Wei glared back, then her expression changed. A brief moment of guilt or sorrow. She shut her eyes. “Okay,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry about your mother. If there’s anything you need to do before we leave, you should go do it now.”

  Saga closed down her displays. She looked at Michel. “You coming?”

  He hesitated, spoke to Wei. “You want me to run you through the steps in sequence?”

  Wei didn’t look up. “Go. Be with your wife. I know what I’m doing. I’m going to warm up the reactor and make the course corrections and then I’m going to sit here until it actually happens.”

  * * *

  Michel led Saga by the hand down the corridors. She pulled him to a stop. “I can’t do the interactive,” Saga said. “I’ve seen enough of this ship. My fans like stories set in ruins, places haunted by history.” She thought of Gregor’s ice rink. “The Martian Queen is lovely . . . in its own way, but in the end it’s just an empty hotel.”

  “I know,” Michel said.

  “Then where are you leading me?”

  “To the Sigurd.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You want to make arrangements to go home, right? We’re going to need the ship’s comms, and access to our bank account. I’m not waiting for Wei’s so-called help.”

  Saga felt a pulse of gratitude. She embraced him. “Thank you,” she said. “But how will we get in? Wei’s locked us out.”

  Michel smiled. “We broke into this ship. You really think she can keep us out of the Sigurd?”

  It took twice as long to defeat Wei’s overrides as it had to hack into the Queen. But in terms of jobs they’d done, it was barely in the middle of the pack in difficulty. Wei was no expert, and they possessed state-of-the-art intrusion gear.

  Inside, supplies floated everywhere, most of them only loosely tethered to the walls. They pushed themselves carefully through the air lock and past the galley onto the bridge. Michel collided with a box of dehydrated algal protein packets and swore. The box tumbled away, bumping into a box of filters for the CO2 scrubbers.

  “C’est le bordel—what a mess. What has she been up to?” he said.

  Saga pulled herself into one of the chairs and turned on the communication interface. “I don’t care,” she said. “As long as she drops us off somewhere on the way back, I’m happy to be done with her forever.” She connected to the networks that spanned the solar system, requesting the status of ships bound for Earth: locations, ports of call, who was taking passengers.

  The ship maintained the usual system almanac: a local copy of detailed information on ports, habitats, transport schedules, and ships in flight. But there was always drift if the almanac wasn’t kept in sync with the network. From the logs, she could see that Wei hadn’t updated in weeks. It was poor practice for a ship’s captain. What else had she neglected?

  Not for the first time, Saga cursed the speed of light. It had seemed fast enough when she lived on Earth, but out here in the rest of the solar system it was a frustrating reminder of just how far apart everything was.

  Finally, data started trickling in. She closed her eyes, willing the time to pass more quickly.

  “Saga, you have to see this.”

  She opened her eyes. Michel floated upside down above her. “I’m waiting for the schedules,” she grumbled.

  “Then you have time,” he said. “Come on.”

  She sighed and unbuckled from her chair, pushing up to follow him aft to the crew quarters. He led her to Wei’s cabin.

  “You didn’t actually break into her room?”

  Michel nodded. “Don’t you think we need to know what she’s up to?”

  “Actually we shouldn’t—” Saga stopped at the cabin’s entrance. “Oh my . . .”

  The space was the complete opposite of the rest of the ship. They’d waded through clutter to get there, but Wei’s room was like the calm center of a hurricane. Every surface gleamed, everything was packed and labeled and aligned crisply. She caught a slight smell of bleach. The room looked as if nobody had set foot in it since the ship had been launched.

  The only human touch was a photograph in a hammered iron frame, hanging on the wall beside the bed. Wei with her arm around a man.

  Michel was floating by the far wall. There was a high-resolution viewscreen beside him, beneath it a set of manipulator gloves.

  “What is that?” Saga said, moving closer.

  “There’s a level-five biocontainment box attached to the outside of the hull.”

  Saga had seen biocontainment boxes before on medical ships. They provided crewmembers protection from the most dangerous of biological hazards. The box itself would be sealed, surrounded by vacuum outside the ship, every manipulator controlled remotely. No chance of contamination.

  Michel pointed to the screen. “Can you make any sense of it?”

  Saga shook her head. The screen showed the inside of the box, which held an array of everyday objects: a bar of soap with the logo of the shipping line stamped on it. A piece of wood from one of the carved doors. One of Gregor’s bottles of whiskey. A loaf of bread.

  “She’s been testing things from the Queen,” Michel said.

  He tapped the display panel, swiping through images. Saga recognized mass spectroscopy panels, the sort of tools miners used to evaluate the content of asteroids.

  “The ship was mothballed,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s weird that she found some bread?”

  “That’s not the only thing that’s strange.” Michel paused at one image. “Look at that wood. It’s hollow inside. There are traces of radioactive elements. And the fine scale structure, it’s laminated like an oyster shell. I thought the doors were supposed to be hand-carved by artisans.”

  “Maybe it came from some sort of printer.”

  Michel rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “Not any printer I’ve ever heard of. What is she looking for?”

  Saga pushed back. Wei was a mystery that refused to be solved. She drifted past the bed, staring blankly at the framed photo across from her. There was something about the picture, something familiar.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve seen him before,” Saga said, pointing. “On the Queen.”

  Beside a grinning Wei, his arm around her shoulder, was the sad man who’d appeared before her in the dining room. He was smiling here too.

  It didn’t make any sense. The last dinner on the Queen would have taken place more than twenty years ago, and the recorded party she’d witnessed was probably even older than that. But the image in front of her was recent; Wei looked the same, other than her expression. Saga realized she’d never seen Wei smile.

  Michel peered at the photograph. “How the hell did you see—” He stopped and touched his earbud, answering a call. “We’re exploring, Wei. Like you said.” He made a face. “Fine, we’ll look for him.” He ended the call and grimaced. “She wants us to dig up Gregor. She thinks he can help with the nav, but he’s not responding to messages.”

  “Tell her to wait,” Saga said. “Tell her we’re here and she’s not locking us out again.”

  Michel shook his head. “I don’t want her to know we came aboard, okay? Not yet. Whatever she’s got going o
n, it’s more than just adjusting the Queen’s orbit. This biocontainment gear costs more than she’s paying us for this whole trip.”

  Saga looked back toward the bridge. “Fine. But I can’t leave now. I’m in the middle of something.”

  Michel was already heading to the doorway. “Why don’t you just set up a remote gateway to the Sigurd now that you have access to comms?”

  She folded her arms, put on a stubborn expression. “You can handle Gregor,” she said. “I’m staying here.”

  * * *

  Saga reviewed the data. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she’d found a way they could get back to Earth in fewer than fifty days. Wei would have to agree to a burn that would take them away from the Sigurd’s home port of Ceres. It wasn’t going to be cheap, either. Wei would have to be compensated, and the ship that would take them the rest of the way would surely charge a premium.

  But she would be home.

  The cold wind off the ocean. The smell of the sea. She remembered taking a trip on the ring road with her mother when she was young. They’d tramped through drizzle, been briefly stranded by a snowstorm in a cozy café with a fire and a mellow dog she’d wanted to take home. A blessed week away from her father and their fighting. Only later did she realize that her mother had been trying to leave him. There had been far more than a week’s worth of luggage in the car they’d rented. But her mother had failed. She’d never forget that sinking feeling when the car dropped them off in front of their little house in Breiðholt and drove itself away.

  What would their lives have been like if they’d kept on going?

  An alarm sounded, startlingly loud. Michel’s personal emergency beacon, set to the highest level of urgency they’d ever used on an exploration. The sort of thing you’d trigger if your suit was holed or you’d discovered a leaking reactor.

  She was heading for the lock before she was aware she’d unbuckled and pushed off from the chair.

  Saga flew through the zero-gravity sections of the Queen, making tiny course corrections with her hands. She’d played games like this when she’d first arrived in the belt. Fastest through a space, smoothest trajectory. Try to get from one end of a habitat to another without touching anything. Now, she would have lost all of them but the speed contest; she slapped bulkheads, hit the edge of a door with her shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise, flapped awkwardly through the air in her rush to reach her husband.

  When she entered the spin module she hit the ground running, shrugging off the dizzy transition to gravity. In her lenses she could see the blinking dot of Michel’s location. The dot hadn’t moved since the alarm had sounded, and he hadn’t responded to any messages.

  The system showed Michel in a medical station near the casino. Past the game tables and the curtains, the machinery of theater, there was a row of doors; the one nearest to her was open a crack, light spilling out. She entered and stopped short, confused. A naked woman, facedown on an examination table, a tumble of long brown hair. Beneath her, a naked man.

  Neither of them was moving.

  She felt weak for a moment, then Michel came into the room and she almost cried out in relief.

  “You didn’t answer. I thought . . .”

  He looked down, a flicker of guilt on his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to use the comms. I wanted to talk to you first—before we told Wei.”

  Saga stepped forward. The man on the table was Gregor. His eyes were fixed and staring, his face caught in a surprised expression.

  They were surrounded by stainless-steel cabinets and drawers, some of them open. There was a portable health monitor on one of the cabinets. Michel touched the diagnosis screen, which was blank. “Battery’s dead,” he said. “But I figure it was a heart attack. You know, right in the middle . . .” He looked over at Gregor.

  The pilot’s damp hair was stuck in tendrils to his forehead. Saga remembered how he’d huffed and puffed and nearly collapsed on the ice. He’d been in terrible shape. Why hadn’t she told him to get himself checked?

  “Did you try calling the Queen? Maybe it has emergency medical. Maybe it’s not too late . . .”

  Michel shook his head. “Medical is offline. They removed most of the equipment when they mothballed it. There’s hardly anything in here. But I would have told you to bring supplies from the Sigurd if there was any hope. This happened hours ago; it’s too late for him.”

  “Oh Gregor,” she said sadly. “You foolish man.”

  Saga looked at the woman. She’d never seen her before. Her skin had none of Gregor’s pallor or slackness. Who was she? Saga reached out and touched her leg. It was smooth. No hairs, no imperfections, not even any visible pores. Then she understood. “The dancers from the brochure.”

  Michel nodded. “Gregor was right, they’re synthetic. He took this one out of storage and activated her. Apparently he knew how to turn on some hidden features.”

  “I’m sure he did,” Saga said. “Was she on when you arrived?”

  Michel grimaced. “She was activated, but she was just lying there moaning. I turned her off.”

  Saga put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “We should clean him up before we call Wei.”

  Michel looked unsure. “We don’t want it to look like we’re hiding anything. Wei’s paranoid enough as it is.”

  “I don’t care. Gregor was part of our crew. He deserves a little dignity at the end.”

  * * *

  Wei stood in the med station and looked at their dead pilot. Before she arrived, Saga and Michel had put Gregor’s underwear back on him and carried the synth out, depositing her back in storage, where she joined a line of her companions, laid out in racks like in a morgue.

  Wei’s expression was guarded, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “We have to eject him,” she said finally.

  “What?” Michel looked startled.

  “It’s the only way to be sure.”

  Saga frowned at her. “Be sure of what?”

  “That we’re safe.”

  “From his heart attack?” Saga said. “No. We’re taking his body back to his family. We can put him in the cargo hold. It’s cold enough.”

  “Not on my ship,” Wei said. “No way he’s coming with us. No way.”

  “That’s it.” Saga stood in front of Wei. “Enough of this bullshit. We saw your biocontainment box. Now you’re going to tell us what the fuck is going on.”

  Wei was startled. She looked at the two of them, comprehension slowly dawning on her. Then anger. “You got back on the Sigurd,” she said. “You broke into my fucking ship. You invaded my room.”

  Saga shook her head. “We have a right to be there just as much as you do. You can’t hide anything any longer. We deserve to know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m doing my job,” Wei said. “Moving this liner out of the way. That’s all.” She looked at Gregor and sighed. “If you don’t want to space him, you can store him on the Queen. In a locked room. We’re not going anywhere soon, in any case.”

  Michel was covering Gregor’s body with a blanket. He looked up, surprised. “I thought you said you’d have everything done in a few hours.”

  “So did I,” Wei said.

  * * *

  They put Gregor in a cold storage locker in the main galley, after carrying him awkwardly through the corridors wrapped in the blanket. Wei secured the locker door and then the galley doors, ignoring their questions. She wouldn’t say what she’d been doing in her room, or with the biocontainment box. But she did tell them about the problems she had been having with the Queen. Twice she’d tried to change course. The reactor would warm up, she would input the course corrections, hydrogen would flow, and then everything would reset, all her changes wiped out.

  “It’s obvious,” Michel said. “There’s a fail-safe in there somewhere. It’s detecting your changes and rebooting to an earlier configuration.”

  They were back on the Queen’s bridge. Mind-state diagrams filled the holographic display betwe
en them. “If it’s so goddamn obvious then why did you miss it?” Wei said. “Show me this fail-safe.”

  Saga watched Michel lose himself in the challenge. He had a remarkable ability to ignore the outside world when he was coding. But she couldn’t concentrate—not after what had just happened.

  Two deaths: first her mother, then Gregor. Bad fortune came in threes. Something her mother had firmly believed and she half believed herself. Saga couldn’t shake the feeling that there would have to be another death. That it was coming due.

  She’d lost crew before. It had been nine years ago, shortly after she arrived in the belt and before she met Michel. She’d been an intern on a salvage crew, most junior of them all. They were stripping the Entangled Photon, a research ship that had been holed by a chunk of ice out past Jupiter. It was a hell of a start—still the most challenging wreck she’d ever explored: tumbling and spinning rapidly, it was treacherous inside. Jagged metal punctured the suit of one of the other explorers in their group, a woman named Nadira, and she panicked and got entangled in a mess of wiring. A water line ruptured above her suit’s pressure cuff and the ship’s wild spin filled her helmet with liquid. She’d drowned before anyone could get to her, dead beyond all hope of recovery.

  Saga stayed with Nadira’s body until they could move it safely. Afterward she’d created a virtual memorial, an interactive model of the wreck, with Nadira hanging in the center like a lost angel, surrounded by the voices of her friends and family talking about her life. It had been the beginning of Saga’s artistic career; it had given her a reputation, though she’d never felt entirely comfortable with the thought that someone else’s sacrifice had put her on the road to her success.

  Maybe Nadira had been the first death. Maybe Gregor was the third, and the fates were now satisfied. It would be nice to believe that, but she knew the universe rarely operated the way you wanted it to.

  “There,” Michel said.

  Saga pulled herself away from the memory of the young woman’s face, distorted by the water in her helmet.

  Wei squinted. “There what?”

  Michel adjusted the display. Mind-system maps faded to reveal what looked like the skeleton of a leaf: an organic tracery of silvery lines shimmering in the space in the center of the room.