Rosalyn smirked, glancing over at him. “Then maybe you should redact some of those details for her, don’t you think?”
“You kidding me? That’s the best part of being an uncle . . .” The spacecraft shook, hard, both of them jostling in their seats as the ship reached maximum velocity. Rosalyn felt her teeth rattle, the chattering almost loud enough to block out her pilot’s voice. “’Sides, not my problem if she’s a fuckup. Everyone will blame her parents, not me.”
“Charming.” She bit out the word and closed her eyes. It was always disconcerting to see the ship’s instruments shaking around as they flew. It lasted another ten minutes or so, and both of them were silent, gripping their seats hard until the craft came to an abrupt stop and Rosalyn lurched forward, nearly propelled out of her harness.
“Hate that part,” Walters muttered, sighing and glancing over the flight monitor. “Always makes my guts churn.”
“Pilot, report.” The mission control Servitor’s voice filled the cockpit again.
“Green as you please,” he chirped back. “FTL systems operable, ninety-nine percent functionality. Doesn’t get much better than that.”
It gets exactly one percent better, she thought with a grimace.
A quiet hiss chased through the underbelly of the ship. The FTL engines were locked until the pilot gave verbal confirmation that the jump could be made safely. Once they jumped systems, the Salvager 6 would be far out of range of MSC mission control and they would need to function autonomously. Contact was possible, but beyond that, Salvager 6 was at the mercy of Walters and Rosalyn.
Most pilots and crew members preferred the independence of deeper space, but not her. There was something comforting in knowing mission control could still pick them up if anything went unexpectedly wrong.
“You may engage FTL systems when ready, Salvager 6. Return in good health.”
It was the usual line, and it never failed to sound a bit hollow coming from an AI unit.
“Next stop . . .” Walters said, selecting the FTL engines on his monitor, “three days out from Proxima Centauri b.”
The ship shook again, this time more subtly. Rosalyn fancied she could feel the air charging with the energy it took to pull the craft through space with such unbelievable speed. This was the part she hated most. She might never conquer the feeling that humankind in outer space was unnatural, but outrunning light itself? If it was possible, then it obeyed the laws of nature, she conceded, but it still seemed like the result of terrible hubris.
She clamped down on the seat handles and held her breath—this was the truly gut-churning part, whatever Walters thought. A sensation of weightlessness came first, then full-body pressure, as if the atmosphere itself were trying to put a hand on your forehead and hold you back. When the FTL jump stopped, they would be rocked again, slammed back to normal speeds with an almost painful jarring.
The engines flared, and she could feel the sudden jolt as the FTL drive kicked in fully, rumbling power surging through the ship, making the soles of her feet buzz. Everything blurred, the stars, the outline of the windscreen; the instruments and everything surrounding her took on that same nauseating formlessness. The blur of her vision resolved into a single, huge spot of light in the distance. Rosalyn blinked through it, eyes nearly closed, her stomach and throat constricting as if they were in free fall.
It lasted longer than their quick shot away from the campus. She had been through this many times before, but never grew accustomed to it. It was more bearable on huge passenger ships, and the sheer size of those transports dispersed the shock of the phenomenon. The first time, in training, in a ship the same size as Salvager 6, she had vomited inside her helmet the instant they dropped out of FTL speeds.
Ever since, she forced herself to close in, to go numb and contained, squeezing every muscle in her body and gritting her teeth until impact came and the urge to vomit passed.
Her pulse pounded in her ears, and then a high ringing started, growing louder by the second, bringing with it the kind of migraine-inducing pressure that made her want to drop her jaw and pop her eardrums before they exploded. It was worse this time, much worse, with her head throbbing for a drink.
“Woo!” she heard Walters scream through his helmet. He whooped and laughed, banging his fist on the seat rest. “Nothing like it, right?”
The FTL cut out as scheduled, and the Salvager 6 seemed to scream to a stop, though they drifted on and on, having been squeezed through that painful tube of light and sound and forced out the end, gliding into the neighboring star system, Proxima Centauri.
It was breathtakingly desolate. But there, not all that far away, hung a blob of silvery gray. The Brigantine. It was different from the field of stars around it. It drifted out there alone like a solitary mote of dust in a dusky sky.
I hate this shit.
Dead bodies. Five of them. She didn’t want to think about what state they would be in, and could only hope for the mundanity of a malfunctioning air lock. A shiver traveled from the base of her neck to her toes.
You chose this life, she reminded herself, sitting taller in her chair. Now do your job and bring them home.
6
Rosalyn didn’t fancy herself a music expert, but the Unpronounceable Sound barely qualified as music. So naturally, Dave Walters loved them and insisted that they be played on a loop.
“Do you have anything else loaded on your VIT? Please, this is fucking killing me, Walters.” The oxygen and temperature levels on the Salvager 6 had been stabilized, and while they finished their interception of the Brigantine and Rosalyn prepped for transfer, she liked to get some time out of the helmet. It also gave her the chance to lightly smack her forehead against the wall, a mean headache brewing at the base of her skull. Vodka would fix it, if she had any.
No. We’re done with all that.
There were five bodies to recover and a company (potentially) to exonerate; vodka certainly would not help with that.
“If I have to hear one more hour of this noise, I’m going to fucking kill someone, and just a gentle reminder that there’s only one other person on this ship.”
From the cockpit, where Walters was attempting to sync their systems with the Brigantine’s, she heard him give a childish moan. “You have no taste, Devar. Or maybe you just can’t appreciate TUS until you hear them live.”
“That’s possible?” she muttered. She couldn’t see how anyone would willingly choose to listen, in public, to a wall of synthesizers screeching at random intervals. The “song” had opened with five minutes of nonsense poetry, followed by the lead singer making an odd groaning sound, which was allegedly the real name of the group. Insufferable stuff.
Rosalyn turned away from the stack of equipment crates she had been unpacking in the main bay of the ship. A red, curly head stuck out from the arched door leading to the cockpit, and Walters smiled at her. Or sneered. Then he winked.
“How do you feel about Station Bangers?” he said, and beamed, citing yet another improvisational techno-synth experiment.
“Fucking. Kill. Someone.” She shook her head, then mouthed, “You.”
“Geez,” Walters said, clucking his tongue and appearing fully in the doorway. He tapped the VIT monitor on his wrist with his forefinger. “Your heart rate is elevated, Devar. You should really relax. Not good to get riled up before a mission.”
“Can we call a truce?” she asked, popping the lid off of a tester crate. She would need to use the individually wrapped testing nodes for taking samples of any biological material on the Brigantine. It was easier to load up with a few before boarding instead of making multiple trips back and forth between ships. “You must like the Late Nodes?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah! Maybe I like your style after all.”
“What a relief,” she muttered. “Can that be our truce? Just please change it before I turn homicidal.”
>
Walters picked their latest cover album and Rosalyn’s teeth unclenched. Working in close quarters like this was difficult and often tense—a good partnership could make an otherwise deeply unpleasant job tolerable, and on lucky days, half-enjoyable. She and Alexia had gotten on like a house on fire right from the jump. Alexia was calm and professional, with just enough of a sarcastic streak to keep the missions amusing. As much as Rosalyn disliked Walters, he was right about one thing—it did take a kind of dark humor to survive salvaging. Alexia had that macabre side; it just didn’t come with an unhealthy devotion to synth improv.
It will all be over soon.
Could be worse, of course; she could be stuck with Walters for a lot longer than their projected mission time of a week. Sometimes ships went dark in deep, deep space, and just getting to the wreck took weeks. Those missions required larger salvaging vessels, ones equipped with exercise facilities and more-comfortable sleeping quarters. Little hops like the one to the Brigantine were undertaken on smaller craft with less homey accommodations. A week of roughing it was deemed acceptable, but an already stressful task coupled with cramped quarters for weeks? Even more employees would lose their minds.
So that was a positive. Only a week. Rosalyn continued to sort out her kit, reminding herself that Walters was just about to rotate out for family time, and that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t hurt to try to be amiable for this last trip.
Rosalyn packed her kit with extra testing nodes. Unlike Walters, she had done her homework. The Brigantine accommodated up to ten researchers. The only craft that ended up with messier salvage situations were exploration ships. Crews testing the edge of known space often ran into danger, and the missions had a tendency to end in bloodshed—even if Merchantia personality checked for resilience and stability in exploration crews, they couldn’t always avoid space blindness.
It was a new thing, space blindness, the kind of sudden, previously rare condition that took over news hours and podcasts and medical roundtable discussions on Earth. You couldn’t turn on the latest talk show without hearing things like, “Are we pushing crews too far?” or “The cost of the new horizon . . .”
Humans just weren’t meant to be cooped up in little metal boxes in the middle of nowhere for years on end without relief. It did something to you. It chipped away at your humanity. MSC rotations were meant to counteract the side effects, but exploration was still important, and the human cost was, apparently, acceptable. Cryotechnology was still young and there were limits. Even her father’s company, Belrose Industries, had been poking at the possibility of using drugs to alter brain chemistry and make humans more fit for long-term space travel.
Rosalyn cringed away from the thought. She had been on that project when Glen happened. God, but there was a time when she had loved that job. The research. The sense of urgency. The feeling that she was doing something important. If they could find a way to keep human bodies from negatively reacting to the length of space travel, then there was no telling how far people could go, or what companies like Merchantia would find with their probing missions. And of course there had been friends, like Angela, and like Lin, a new intern that collected vintage lunch boxes, and Saruti, who had walked Rosalyn through her first autopsy . . . She hadn’t expected to miss them, or her fish, so much.
The work was easy to miss, too. Satisfying. Challenging. She had felt a breakthrough coming. Angela felt it, too, and had left to head up a new deep space research branch, keen to procure more samples, more data . . . The new position for Angela started just before everything imploded with Glen, and sometimes it was hard not to blame her for not being there. If Rosalyn had friends to tell, friends that would listen, maybe everything would’ve been different.
Maybe Glen would have lost his job. Gone to prison. Paid.
“You’re gonna feel the bump any minute now.”
She cleared her throat and nodded, finding that she had packed her kit from pure muscle memory. Testing nodes, atmospheric readers, blood and tissue containers, hover cuffs . . . Everything was exactly where it should be in the rectangular metal case engraved with DEVAR on the lid.
As promised, Rosalyn swayed on her heels a little as the Salvager 6 made physical contact with the Brigantine. Walters had piloted them carefully, and it was so soft that she barely heard the impact of the two ships gently touching. It would take gradual, manual adjustments from Walters to position the crafts air lock to air lock. She listened to the soft hiss of the external jets as he used the piloting joysticks to find alignment.
“Just bring them home,” she whispered, closing her kit and latching it. She stood and tucked it under her right arm, bringing it across the main chamber to the far wall and the long, waist-high metal shelf there. The main chamber of the Salvager 6 was used for storage and general prep. All of the crates of salvaging equipment, food, and first aid and emergency supplies were strapped carefully to the walls. She tidied up the mess she had made preparing her field kit, returning the crates to their designated slots on the wall and securing them.
The chamber to the right was sealed, but it would serve as living quarters during their mission. Rosalyn looked at the closed door to that room for a moment, tightness gathering in her chest. She would be alone with Walters every night. The same panic had washed over her on the first missions with Owen and Griz. They hadn’t seemed to even notice her, and gradually she stopped worrying that they were a threat. But Walters? If only Alexia were there with them, it would make it so much easier. Did she at all trust him? Did she know him? She had known Glen, or thought she did, and that hadn’t meant anything in the end.
When he had slammed her against the wall, hurt her, it was like looking into a stranger’s eyes.
Rosalyn shook her head and stumbled to the door, jamming it open. She could hardly breathe. Leaning against the wall, she forced air in through her nose and down, blowing it out slowly, repeating the exercise until her panic ebbed.
Pushing away from the wall, she walked into the kitchenette. Just beyond were two separate rooms, hardly bigger than shower stalls, which would serve as their bunks. Separate bunks. Her eye went at once to the heavy-duty locking mechanism on each and the attached keypads. She could lock herself inside and, no doubt, only a number code synced between her VIT monitor and the security panel would open the door.
It would have to do. It was enough.
She turned around to find Walters standing in the doorway to the cockpit, staring at her. That was a funny look. He lifted both brows, tilting his head to the side.
“I mean, it ain’t the Ritz . . .”
“Just haven’t been on a ship this small in a while,” Rosalyn covered smoothly. She even gave a chummy little laugh. “Sardines come to mind.”
“It’s real peaceful,” he said. “I get my deepest sleep in those things.”
“Good to know,” Rosalyn replied, closing the door to the living area and crossing back to the table. Her helmet rested there and she lifted it, lowering it over her head before giving a practiced twist to lock it into place on her flight suit.
“We’re all cozied up,” Walters told her with a thumbs-up. “You want to do the honors?”
“If you insist,” she said, cringing at his choice of words. Soon she would be immersed in her work, totally lost to the dark ghosts that threatened from the back of her mind. On a salvage, she gave herself over to the details. She took refuge in the minutiae. Find, collect, record. Find, collect, record . . .
Rosalyn took up her kit again and walked with Walters to the air lock door. He had retrieved his helmet as well, since there was no telling what might go wrong during a sync up, or what the atmosphere would be like aboard the Brigantine. She tapped out the float sequence on her VIT monitor and waited.
She had always liked that term—float. It was like floating an idea, like giving the other ship a little wave to see if they were interested in saying hello. The f
loat signal would hail every system on the Brigantine until something responded. It was as if they could coax one last word out of a lifeless body.
It only took about fifteen seconds before a green light flashed above the air lock door. Then came the familiar metal shift and thunk of the air locks recognizing each other and locking into place. Afterward, a quiet hiss beyond the door indicated the equalization of pressure and the presence of gravity stabilization. That was good. She didn’t feel like bouncing around in zero g while she did her collection.
A series of quick, sharp beeps came from the pilot’s VIT, and Rosalyn glanced over at Walters to see him frowning in confusion. He squinted at the tiny screen on his wrist and tapped it a few times.
“That’s weird,” he muttered.
“What is?” she asked. This was not a good time. She needed to keep a clear head.
“Have you ever seen this?” Walters asked. He held up his wrist, showing her a flashing alert. Red text began filtering across, and she hurried to read it aloud for both of them.
“‘Crew redirect, stand by for instructions,’” Rosalyn read. “‘Brigantine reclassified as non–mission critical.’ Crew redirect? What the hell does that mean?”
“Give me a minute.” Walters jogged back toward the cockpit, leaning over his display and sighing. She watched him key into the comm system, calling up MSC headquarters. The Servitor responded to their hail immediately.
“This is Salvager 6, yeah we’re out here and we’ve made contact with the Brigantine. We just received some kind of alert about a crew redirect. Could we get confirmation and further orders?”
“Crew redirect,” was the Servitor’s response, as if it were the most obvious command in the world. She heard Walters snort. “Stand by. Stand by. Stand by . . .”
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