“This is ridiculous,” Rosalyn hissed. “We’re ready to go. Just tell them we can take another job after this one is finished, or have them send a probe. Can you confirm that the Brigantine is code blue?” she called out loudly enough for the comm to detect her voice.
“Affirmative,” the Servitor responded. It then returned to repeating its standby message.
“And you can confirm that there are dead bodies aboard?”
“Affirmative. Stand by, stand by . . .”
Rosalyn turned back to the air lock. This was the third crew to go dark recently, and it needed to be handled. She didn’t just need to prove herself, she needed to give the deceased and their families some closure. “I don’t like wasting time. We’re already here, Walters. Let’s just wrap it up and get on to the next assignment.”
“I don’t know,” Walters called out. He spun away from the console, taking a few slow steps toward her. Then he pivoted and pointed at the comm. “Maybe we should wait.”
The Servitor suddenly came out of standby. “Redirect assignment confirmed—please proceed to the following coordinates for a refuel request. Repeat, redirect and refuel.”
She could see Walters examining the coordinates and data streaming to his VIT. And she could also see the moment his face went white and slack. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” He glanced over at her. “It’s some senator on a feel-good see-the-stars tour. His vessel overshot their window and now he’s stuck. Idiot.”
“A refuel?” Rosalyn wouldn’t budge. “Talk about non–mission critical. His life support won’t run out for days; they can send a fuel probe instead. There are people in there, Walters. I saw their little memorial stones. The senator can wait.”
“No, Devar, come on. We’ll get in deep shit for this.” He closed the distance between them, joining her at the air lock. She fought the urge to shrink away from him. “You heard mission control.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I did. And Josh Girdy specifically asked me to look into the deaths on this ship, so this is me ignoring mission control. They can take it up with him if there’s a problem. Who signed off on this redirect?”
Walters queried headquarters about just that, then stumbled over some name Rosalyn had never heard before. If it was Girdy’s decision to send the redirect, she would take it seriously. This was his mission, he had chosen the crew, so any changes to the itinerary should be made by him and him alone. Rosalyn smelled a rat again, a rat that seemed determined to keep her away from the Brigantine.
Girdy needs to know about this, she thought. If this was all a mix-up, and Girdy really was fine with the redirect, then he ought to have been involved enough to sign off on the mission change himself. Her gut told her this wasn’t his call. Her gut said, Someone doesn’t want you poking around.
“Respond, tell them to send a fuel probe. Twelve more hours twiddling his thumbs won’t kill the esteemed senator.”
The Late Nodes still crooned through the ship, but their voices dimmed as the float signal was picked up by what was left of the Brigantine’s computer. It was like a soft, plaintive hello. Or maybe help.
“See?” she said. “It’s a sign. Can you shut the music off?” Rosalyn whispered, glancing up at Walters. “I don’t want any interference.”
“Oh,” he muttered, scrambling to bring up his VIT. “My bad. Wouldn’t want any interference while you fuck off and get us fired.”
“Girdy will bail us out; he wanted me on this job. We won’t get fired.”
Before he could kill the music, the Brigantine’s systems responded. Instead of the expected, recorded rundown from the computer, the voice of an AI Servitor crackled over the speakers. It wasn’t shocking that the Brigantine would have an AI helper on board, but it was strange that it wouldn’t have shut down as soon as the dead hail went out. Efficiency. That was the Merchantia way.
“This is Servitor J-A-X Zero November, series type N . . .”
“What the fuck?” Walters murmured.
“Shhhh.”
There was a pause, and then the AI completed its introduction, launching into a string of diagnostics regarding the state of the Brigantine’s systems. It went on and on and on, a predictable list of problems that she had already found in the dossier. Then, finally, Rosalyn sighed and pressed her finger to the VIT monitor, sending a return message.
“We’re responding to a code blue,” she interrupted. The AI fell abruptly silent. “We already have your ship diagnostics. We received a dead hail from your vessel. Can you confirm?”
“Confirmed,” the AI replied succinctly.
She nodded, giving Walters a grin. A good sign. This talkative fellow had probably just failed to power down and had been puttering around the ship, waiting for them to come along. She almost felt sorry for it. Let that stalled senator stew for a while; this poor AI had been sitting there with a dead crew, alone and in the dark.
“That’s good,” she said into her wrist monitor. “Thank you. We’re expecting five code blues on board, crewmates Aries, Endrizzi, Sverdal, Iwasa and Yasin. Can you confirm?”
“You memorized all that?” Walters whispered.
She ignored him. There was another pause, this one longer. Rosalyn frowned and leaned in closer to her VIT, which was silly, considering the response would come from the speakers embedded in the ceiling above them. Walters breathed loudly next to her, practically panting. She couldn’t blame him—there was no reason for a Servitor to take so long to respond. The dead crew ought to be obvious and his response similarly forthcoming. And logged.
“Confirmed,” the Servitor finally said. The speakers crackled softly as the AI went on, and Rosalyn felt the blood slowly and painfully drain from her face. “Crewmates Aries, Endrizzi, Iwasa and Yasin present aboard MSC research vessel 705-B, call sign MWC-70, all life readings green. Crew Member Sverdal deceased. Permission to board granted. Confirm?”
7
Walters gasp-choked so loudly it made her jump. “Life readings? Shit. Oh, shit. The crew are still alive in there? That’s not good, Devar.”
Rosalyn remained quiet, focused, staring directly at her VIT monitor and nothing else. Perspiration beaded on her forehead. Training had prepared her for this. She had run into all kinds of fuckups and glitches and misinformation on previous missions, not to mention liquefied cats and people, so there was no reason to overreact. Not yet, anyway. And if the crew were alive in there, then it would be huge news for Merchantia. Girdy would probably do a jig when they told him. Someone would get shitcanned for trying to redirect them to a bored senator. One dead woman was still awful, but four living was practically a miracle.
“Are you insane? Of course it’s good. Still want to go off course and help that stranded senator? Just . . . just please be quiet and let me handle this,” she hissed. “Servitor, give me the current location of the crew, please.”
Walters fidgeted, then broke away from her side and began to pace. Clearly he had never run into a hiccup on a mission before, or the salvagers with him had kept the problems quiet. Rosalyn wasn’t going to let this go pear-shaped because they couldn’t keep it together on their end. She reached out with her free hand and grabbed his arm, hard.
She didn’t let go until the Servitor gave its response.
“Unknown. Confirm?”
“Yes, confirmed,” Rosalyn said, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. This was either a positive sign or a very bad one. “Can you give me your location?”
“Cockpit galley, confirm?”
“Great, yes, confirmed. And while you’re there, give me a quick oxygen reading.”
Rosalyn let go of his arm and locked eyes with Walters, shaking her head almost imperceptibly. Freezing, he kept eye contact, a light sheen of sweat glistening on his pale face.
“Oxygen levels holding at six percent, pronounced dangerous for humans.”
She c
lucked her tongue softly, disappointed. No miracles here; it was just a glitch. Nobody would survive in oxygen levels like that, not for long, anyway. “Seal and secure your current location, Servitor. I’m coming aboard.”
It was the pilot’s turn to lash out and grab her by the forearm. Rosalyn shook herself free at once, glaring.
“Are you fucking crazy? You can’t go in there, Devar, we don’t know where the crew is! They could be alive.”
She closed the communication link to the Brigantine and waited, leaning against the air lock portal while the AI followed her commands. She heard the whir and clank of the opposite air lock engaging, the doors aligning and then unlocking. As always, the sound made her adrenaline spike—it was time to do her job.
“Relax, salvagers run into stuff like this all the time.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m serious, Walters, you need to calm down. That AI should have powered off ages ago; it’s probably just low on cells. My guess? It doesn’t have enough juice to sync all the new mission information and it’s repeating back old data. I’ll check the onboard databases when I get inside. Once we get that Servitor fully charged, it’ll cycle in the new logs from the ship and match up with our dossier.” She leaned against the exit briefly before glancing over the items in her case. The doors finished aligning and she punched the release lever next to theirs.
“Good to see you’re so confident, but it sounds to me like you’re writing fiction,” Walters muttered, shaking his head. He was sweating, too. “Me? I’m staying put. You let me know if I need to rescue your ass. Or don’t, you know, because I warned you, all right? You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Christ, we could be going to a cushy refuel job and probably, like, winning a medal of service or something, but instead you want to get messed up in this shit.”
“Good to know where your priorities are at.” Rosalyn shot him one last glance and then nodded toward the circular door as it gave, opening onto the tunnel passage like an aperture. “There are dead bodies on that ship, right? Our colleagues. One stupid glitch isn’t going to keep me from getting them home.”
He stared at her, unblinking, then rolled his eyes and took a step back, putting up his hands as he retreated to the cockpit. “You’re sure this is all routine? I can get mission control on the horn again.”
“Don’t bother them,” she said, scooting herself into the tunnel. She wouldn’t prove much of anything if her last chance on the job ended before it really even began. And this had happened to her before or, at least, to Griz. One of the few times he ever spoke to her and Owen was when he explained away the glitches they ran into docking with dark vessels. Power and temperature fluxes wreaked havoc on gear and crew alike. Servitors malfunctioned. Data was corrupted. Sometimes entire ships had to be completely refitted at HQ after an equipment problem. Or as Griz had so eloquently put it, “Surge and purge.”
The gravity in the tunnel had stabilized and she moved about as smoothly as she could in the flight suit. “Let me get eyes inside and some power into that Servitor, then we can make the call.”
Walters nodded slowly, and she watched him disappear into the cockpit before the circular door to their salvaging ship hissed shut. She was alone in the passage; her only communication with the pilot would come through the headset in her helmet. That was fine. She was eager to get this job over with—sure, she knew it was just some technical burnout causing the confusion, but that didn’t mean she was sweating any less over it. Recovering code blues was tough enough on a flawless run, and there was no denying the jumpy nervousness fluttering in her chest.
Girdy had implied there was a remote possibility that more was going on than just bad luck.
I cannot believe I’m hoping for bad luck.
The other option was foul play, and she had seen where that led on her run. A cargo hold flooded with human soup. Until she saw for herself what was inside the Brigantine, she wasn’t going to bother Merchantia HQ. After panicking and calling HQ too fast on her first assignment, she returned to her barracks room and found a baby bottle and a pacifier waiting on her pillow. She didn’t hail mission control much after that. And besides, they would be alerted to the fact that she was ignoring the redirect if they called in the anomaly now. Did Girdy know about the redirect? Leaving too soon wouldn’t get him or Rosalyn any closer to understanding why so many crews were going dark.
“This thing on?”
She flinched, Walters’s voice blasting through her helmet. His voice crackled on the speaker, blown out.
“Please stop yelling.” Rosalyn moved along the connective tunnel, pausing outside the door to the Brigantine. A tiny green-and-gold light flickered above the hatch, indicating it was unlocked and ready for boarding. She took a deep breath, feeling bruised on the inside from the force and speed of her heartbeat. Just a glitch, Devar, keep it together. “I’m at the door.”
“Everything looks good, and the connection is fine. This patch of space is calm, shouldn’t be in any danger of debris colliding with the tunnel,” he responded, this time in a voice that didn’t make her want to leap out of her suit. And then, in an even tinier voice: “You’re still sure about this?”
“My first mission out I opened the target door and a dead botanist fell on me,” she said flatly. “Things go wrong.”
“Yikes. You didn’t quit on the spot?”
“Our day can only get better from there, right?”
She heard Walters chuckle darkly on the other end. “That takes balls. I like it.”
“No more chitchat, thank you very much, keep the talk to a minimum. I need to concentrate.” Rosalyn hefted her work case, swinging toward the door. She pressed her palm slowly against the air lock release mechanism teamed to the Brigantine’s door and waited for it to respond.
“All right,” she said shakily. “Going in.”
Right on cue, the Brigantine opened to her, revealing a small, tidy room and another, smaller door. She sealed herself in, gravity in the antechamber stabilizing before she pressed through to the second door and into the ship itself. The temperature remained constant, regulated by her suit and the small oxygen canisters hidden in the flaps on her shoulder blades. The material was dense enough to keep her warm, dry and safe, a combination biosafety and space suit. There was no telling what smells or bacteria she would encounter on these missions, and the filtration system and heavy-duty gloves were meant to protect her from it all.
She let the security of that knowledge enfold her like a blanket as she switched comms to a general channel, allowing her to interface with both Walters and the Brigantine’s onboard AI.
The door led into a galley not unlike the one on Salvager 6, apparently used for minor storage and for traveling from one area of the ship to the next. Lights flickered overhead, nothing but emergency panels giving the ship a low, green glow. Her eyes adjusted slowly, tricked now and then by the strobing lights. To her left lay the sealed door to the cockpit, and to her right, another closed passage that would lead deeper into the Brigantine. It was a much, much larger vessel than theirs, equipped with more lodging for the crew, as well as several laboratories and sophisticated, atmosphere-controlled closets for storing research materials. She had memorized the schematic before launch, but seeing it in person was something quite different—for one, it was dark, and for another, it was bigger than she had visualized.
She paused just inside the galley, finding the floor damp and almost slick with something blackish. Not again. Only a few feet away sat a small folding table with the remnants of a card game and a few chairs, two knocked over and askew. She carefully padded to the table, making sure she didn’t slip in whatever coated the floor. The lights strobed again, unevenly, and she gazed around at the walls, marveling at a strange blue flicker she hadn’t noticed before.
Where was their Servitor? And what the hell was all over the walls . . .
“Devar? Hey.
Talk to me.”
Grimacing, she tore her gaze away from the strands of glowing blue on the walls and looked down at the card table. “Crazy eights,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“They were playing cards,” she added, noticing a distinct smear of blackish red on one of the spades. She waited a beat, spreading out one of the card hands and then walking away, slowly approaching the odd filaments of iridescent blue pulsing along the walls, as bright and spidery as human veins.
Rosalyn leaned in, squinting. “The floor is sticky. My VIT just keeps saying, ‘Unknown Substance,’ and there’s something biological growing on the walls. God. It’s everywhere. I’m actually getting a spore level alert inside a ship.”
“That doesn’t sound great.”
“Here, grab the visuals,” she said, using her VIT monitor to grant him access to the little camera affixed to her helmet. Anything in her AR display would stream directly to him. “See it?”
“Ugh. Yuck. Although . . . it’s kinda . . . I mean, if you squint, it’s sort of—”
“Beautiful,” she finished for him, gazing around. “Definitely. Reminds me of those glowing caves, you know? With all the fluorescent mushrooms. Malaysia, I think.”
“Nothing on the VIT?” he asked.
“No, nothing. Best I’m getting is ‘Unidentified Fungal Growth.’ Can you broaden the search from the Salvager? Maybe there’s something in the MSC biological database.”
Walters fell quiet while he performed the search. Through his mic, she could hear him tapping away at the console and breathing heavily. His VIT screeched again, trying to alert him to the refueling mission redirect. Rosalyn tuned it out. She moved farther along the wall, noting that the glowing blue growth became thicker as it neared the doors leading out of the galley, even disappearing into the creases along its edge, suggesting it had spread deeper into the ship.
“I’m going to take a wild guess and say this growth is our mystery killer,” she said, sidestepping the door and following along the perimeter of the room. She needed to find that Servitor, and he was somewhere in the flickering darkness, powered down and waiting.
Salvaged Page 6