“Don’t get distracted,” Natalie said.
Ash gulped down confusion. “It’s the painkiller.”
“I told you not to overdose,” Natalie said.
It’s all right, now that you’re with me, said Keller’s ghost.
“Shut up. You’re not helping.” The words were out of Ash’s mouth before she could stop them.
Natalie frowned, then swiped the map from Ash’s hands. “No more drugs for you. Just—give me that. How many hatches until the spine?”
“Five, I think.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
Ash pressed her lips together, trying to cultivate patience as Natalie examined the map to check her work. By its nature, battlefield salvage was methodical, perfectionist, full of checks, rechecks, and long skeins of utter boredom paired with moments of starbright terror. Behind any door could lurk live ordnance that would not tolerate careless disruption; beyond any hatch, huddled survivors that would not live through a careless rescue.
Keller had recruited her for a molasses-paced, methodical war—a war against nature, war against entropy, war against their own technology. A salvager’s weapons were rules and information, checklists and sterling technique. Coming out of the broken hell that had been Bittersweet, Ash had craved the rules, purpose, and safety that had so characterized the prewar mine. A no-bullshit life, she’d told Keller.
That’s a promise, Keller had said.
Right now, all Ash and Natalie had was guesswork based on faulty data, and the thought of it made Ash nauseous. They were fighting a war with no weapons, no fortifications, and no reinforcements, trying to bullshit their way to victory.
The apparition hovered in the uneasy space right behind Ash’s ear. Space plus bullshit equals—
“Death, I know, I know,” she muttered.
“That’s not a good joke.” Natalie handed the map back to Ash. “I bet Len would have a great joke right now.”
Ash anchored herself behind Natalie with the twist of one foot against a handhold. “Pass me the pressure gauge, will you?” she said. “And, honestly, don’t you think he tries too hard?”
“Like he’s trying to impress us?” Natalie said. “Come on, who wouldn’t?” Natalie fished around in the tool belt, then handed the pressure gauge to Ash.
Ash slapped the pressure gauge on the door, watching it measure the air pressure behind the hatch. The machine hummed away for a few seconds, then displayed a bright, safe green on the indicator. She then tested the seal of the door manually, pressing her fingers against the seams. She felt no sick, starving pull characteristic of a vacuum leak, and nodded to Natalie.
“Clear. I mean jokes are a defense mechanism for some people. Len could have been working for Ramsay, too, and—”
Natalie yanked the gauge from Ash’s hands, cutting her off. “No. Can’t think like that.”
“Can’t rule it out, though.”
“I always thought he liked me. In that way. You know? I don’t want it to be because he was working an angle.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Ash said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“On the other side,” Ash said, reaching for the manual hatch release.
Natalie snorted. “You are a stone-cold bitch.”
“Just a student of hope.” Ash pushed the release down and out, and the door loosened and yawned outward. She heard the blessed, hollow clatter that was sound on the other side—blessed sound, real atmosphere, three whole compartments of it, from what she could see in the dark. She ducked away so Natalie could poke her flashlight through the hatch first.
“Pay up,” the other woman crowed.
“I think he likes you, but he told me last week that he was worried you were too young. You’re his sister’s age.”
Natalie swung her light around in the standard four-corner search pattern, checking for structural deficiencies, exit points, and possible salvage. “That’s bullshit. I was old enough to go to war. And his sister’s a—Oh, gross.”
The stink hit Ash in a gagging, fetid wave as she followed Natalie into the next compartment. Ash could see three floating bodies in torn Auroran indenture uniforms, silhouetted against a dead, silver-black Company interface bank. Dried blood hovered in shriveled brown balls around their skeletal fingers. One man displayed the ragged, crackling black skin of a single, fatal boltgun wound on his back.
Ash choked down sour liquid, looking away. She concentrated instead on getting to the next hatch at the end of the compartment. It was open, the oval bulkhead seal framing yet more atrocities—citizens, this time, in the white coats of the science corps.
She struggled for something to say. “Rotting bodies. This is a good thing.”
“You’re just a fucking ray of sunshine today, aren’t you.” The former soldier was trying to keep it together, Ash could see, but her cheeks were pale and her hands tightened nervously on the flashlight.
“Smells pretty stale.” Ash made an attempt not to breathe. “I’m going to guess that the air’s probably stable all the way to the spine.”
Natalie pulled herself to the ceiling, kicking her legs behind her, intent on finding a vector devoid of death. “How the hell can you tell that?”
“Old trick from Bittersweet,” Ash said. “They didn’t always use all of the air pumps every day, so you learned to figure out where the fresh air was coming from, and if you got up early enough you could get on the detail that didn’t stink.”
“Sounds pleasant. Oh, wow, look at this guy.” Natalie yanked herself into the next open compartment, stopping immediately. She waved her light at one of the bodies—a man in a long, black coat, with dark, loose hair braided with red ribbons. An uncitizen, and proud of it, to leave his hair so uncontrolled, thought Ash. She looked for a boltshot wound, but found nothing. He hadn’t died from depressurization or oxygen deprivation. It looked like he’d just stopped where he was.
“He looks … off,” said Ash.
“Definitely not one of ours,” Natalie said.
“He wasn’t shot. And he didn’t suffocate.”
“Well, there’s no time to figure it out,” Natalie said, then turned her light away, kicking toward the next open hatch. “And speaking of time, I don’t think eight years is that much of a difference.”
Ash was grateful for the subject change as she skirted the half-skeletal remains of a white-coated scientist. “It was more about the power dynamic, I think. It’s tough getting involved with shipmates.”
“Yeah, well, it’s tough meeting new people when you’re out on an indenture—”
She stopped halfway through the sentence.
“Nat?”
“Shh.” The woman’s tone was short and knife-sure.
This next compartment had taken significant fire. The entire aft wall sat slagged and scored and partially melted. There were three bodies here, all citizens with birthright tattoos, but none of them had been shot. The first—younger than Ash, much younger—was still strapped to an interface, his eyes open in shock. Ash noticed a hull breach against the exterior bulkhead, treated with a piece of decking and sealant, and two birthrights spinning nearby, close to the hatch, their rotting eyes and open mouths pointed somewhere far beyond the compartment itself, off at some heaven or hell, forever clouded. Official Aurora Company flimsies floated around them like confetti.
Over the tableau, Ash heard a faint, familiar hissing sound.
That’s not a good sound, Keller said. She was behind Ash, now, whispering in her ear, her cheek close enough to touch.
“Bridge crew. They get shot, too?”
“No. Looks like they got scared to death, just like the guy in the coat,” whispered Natalie. “That noise. Is it the breach?”
Ash listened, then shook her head. “They used sealant, which means they fixed it before they were killed. I’ll check the hatch.” Natalie tossed her the pressure gauge, looking instead to the score marks on the walls. Ash applied the machine to the hatch and waited; thi
s time, it clicked and whined and calculated, and the more time it took, the more nervous Ash felt.
“Hullcracking laser,” Natalie said, tracing the arc of the weapon with her left hand. She frowned. “But not Vai. The Vai are surgical. This is messy, inexcusably so. Look at the edges of that piece of hull—how they’ve been melted back. The Vai would have thrown a corer at it, yanked out a whole bunch of hull with a razor-sharp straightedge. A human weapon was used here.”
“Were they fighting back?”
“If so, where are their guns?” Natalie’s eyebrows raised.
“Why are all these people even here?” Ash asked. “These aren’t battle stations. This is what, a ground survey compartment?”
Natalie made a face, then yanked a nearby flimsy out of the air. She read it quickly and grabbed another. “It’s all Tribulation-related. Funny, right, and wasteful of Company resources, when we were told the ship wasn’t even on course to the planet.” She picked a third from the air. “Look at all of this. Import-export logs, a recent census, maps of the colony, all on data flimsies, like they were worried about not having access to a server.”
“Well, you know corporate. So much ‘just in case.’ Redundancy plans for redundancy plans,” said Ash.
The Business Continuity Assurance Strategy, Keller chirped from behind her, causing Ash to startle. She sounded like a training holo. Aurora builds to win!
The pressure gauge finally clicked over—this time, to a nauseous yellow. Natalie stuffed the flimsies in her shirt. “That looks good enough. We can figure it out when someone shows up. Gimme that. I’ll go first.”
Ash handed her the gauge. “If we had the option, I’d recommend going back for rebreathers.”
“Well,” Natalie said, hauling in a deep breath of the stinking air. “We’ll just have to be quick, then. I’ll go ahead, open the hatch to the bridge, and you be ready to launch when it opens, okay?”
“Got it.”
Ash grabbed the hatch release lever and pushed again. The pressure differential caused the hatch to pop open, and she and Natalie tumbled out into London’s central spine. There was oxygen here, but not much, and Ash dug her useless fingers into her left side to keep herself from panicking or hyperventilating.
The spine stretched from fore to aft, and was filled with an acrid, electrical stench and the aftereffects of smoke. On Twenty-Five, the hub was little more than a dumbwaiter and a rickety ladder, but London had a cargo elevator, a walkway, and room for crew going both ways in gravity or free fall.
The utilitarian gray walls were marred by charcoal scoring and pockmarks from kinetic gunfire. Ash shuddered at the thought of using bullets on a ship, bullets that could punch through hulls, not energy bolts built for space travel—and at the crusted blood splattered against a wall.
“Vai?” managed Ash. She felt dizzy.
Natalie shook her head. “Human.”
“Mutiny?”
“Or boarding,” Natalie said. “Fucking go.”
“Going,” said Ash. She gasped again, pointed toward the bridge, and pushed off the ledge again. She collided with the bridge hatch and applied the gauge, not even waiting for Natalie to follow until she pushed it open. Ash sailed through, missing the bridge railing by a foot and hitting what used to be the weapons station with a disgraceful and slightly painful thump.
If the grav-drive had been functional, their seeming ascent would have been a descent; London’s bridge was shoved into the bowels of the vessel where nukes and hullcrackers would have a harder time reaching.
Natalie shut the hatch, and the two of them collapsed, breathing heavily. Ash let the oxygen fill her body, and for the first time since they left the ready room, she felt the prickling, acid pain of the arctic cold.
“Oh, hell,” Natalie said, rubbing her head.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “But they weren’t.”
London’s expansive bridge, made for ten operators instead of two, made Twenty-Five’s look like a high-tech janitor’s closet. The interfaces were haptic, not the direct-input, finger-to-keyboard old reliables on the ships belonging to the salvage corps. Headsets and handsets floated on black tethers in front of each station, tied to darkened holographic interfaces. Ash had heard of this kind of thing being installed in a few Auroran ships just before the war, new, game-changing tech developed in the haze of victory. Len would have drooled over all of it, except for the fact that the fight belowdecks had come here, too. The walls were scored with bloodstains and black char, and ripped holes in the upholstery of the chairs testified to kinetic gunfire.
In the center of it all was the captain’s chair, and it had an occupant.
It had once been a man—the captain, perhaps—dead, decayed, still strapped to his chair, small bits of shredded, desiccated flesh floating in the thin atmosphere like tiny funeral flags, his jaw wide, blank sockets looking up at a matching blank sky. Dried brown blood painted his blue Auroran executive’s suit and the ground around him.
“Something’s wrong,” whispered Natalie.
That, Keller whispered, is the understatement of the year.
9
Keller felt the headache before anything else—scratching, reactor-bright pain, tightening around her eyes like grapes in a juicer.
The room slammed into existence around her, fuzzy and slanted, and she became aware of cold metal against her arms and the angry chimes of familiar machines. The medbay. She was alone in the medbay. Sharma’s white coat was draped over her empty chair, while an abandoned, unlabeled syringe lay on a table near the sharps container, red blood gathered at the tip.
She knew as soon as she took a deep, ragged breath that the ship’s CO2 scrubbers were broken. The air she tasted was dizzy-thin and tinged with metal. Her chest felt tight, like someone had stuffed her lungs with too much cotton. Her head continued to wail.
Keller swung her legs over the side of the examination table. Her injuries didn’t matter. If the CO2 scrubbers were down, she needed to be in the engine room five minutes ago.
Starting for the hatch, she stumbled and caught herself. The gravity didn’t feel right. The spin rate’s off, she thought, confirming it by pressing the pads of her fingers against the deck. The comforting oscillation that usually supported her every step instead resembled a flurry of terrified butterfly wings, which was never a good sign. She counted spin cycles, taking the ship’s pulse: seventy-five a minute, when she was supposed to feel fifty-two.
A frantic calm settled on her shoulders, and Keller straightened, crossed the bay, and palmed the door.
The door stayed closed.
She palmed the door again. Locked, it said.
Weird. She jabbed the comm by the side of the door. “Ms. Ramsay. What’s going on?”
The comm was dead for a few agonizing seconds. “Good, you’re awake.”
“What’s going on with the ship?”
Keller heard clattering in the background, and a grinding cacophony that could only mean that Ramsay was already working in the engine room. The sound lanced pain through her hangover- bright brain, and she winced.
“There’s a leak in the fuel injection system,” Ramsay said. “How fast can you get down here? I could use an extra pair of hands.”
“You locked the door.”
“What? It shouldn’t be lock—Shit!” Keller heard a squeal of metal on metal. “I’m so sorry. I’m elbow-deep in the fix, so can you just hang on for a little while?”
“Do you need me to talk you through it?”
“No, I’ll be fine,” Ramsay said.
Keller took another breath. Her lungs filled; the oxygen followed, sluggish and hot and wrong. She felt like a runner at the top of a mountain. “What about the scrubbers?”
“The … CO2 scrubbers?”
Keller rolled her eyes. “I’m hoping this isn’t a cascade failure issue. Can you check?”
“I’ll check.” Ramsay sighed. “I called Dr. Sharma, and she said she
was worried about a concussion. Why don’t you get some rest, and I’ll come get you in five or ten?”
“As soon as you can,” Keller said.
“Ramsay out.”
The room went silent. Keller snorted to herself. Typical Ramsay, to advise her to rest during a possible cascade failure on her very own ship. She doesn’t know me at all, does she?
Keller walked back to Sharma’s console. Just because she hadn’t logged enough profit for haptics yet didn’t mean Twenty-Five still used the same old purpose-slaved terminals of the past. Any onboard terminal could become her personal bridge computer when fed the right codes. She called up the captain’s interface, intent on starting the diagnostics that would point her to the next system to fail, the next task to do. Entering her command codes was easy muscle memory, and she was already moving to access the core dialogue when the interface blared a polite, helpful alarm and told her that her command codes were invalid.
What the hell?
The lack of oxygen dragged her throat. She tried again.
Invalid.
She breathed deep and slow to steady herself. If the computer wasn’t recognizing her command codes, the cascade failure was already worse than she thought—and Ramsay, dealing with an engine leak, probably had no idea.
Well, there’s always the back way, she thought, and entered Aurora’s standard salvage codes instead. She was rewarded with the familiar back-end access to the system status monitors. She grabbed a stylus and a half-filled flimsy from Sharma’s desk, ready to scribble a list of tasks in the margins.
Except there was nothing wrong.
No blood-red warning indicators.
No yellow watch alarms.
One single red light flashed next to the celestium-injection system in the engine room. The report read as under maintenance, not nonfunctional.
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