But right now it’s just Seam and me. We’ll make the first breach and load up the shitbox with goods far nicer than we usually carry and knock off thirty million credits from our debt. Maybe more, if we find anything really interesting. Exotic tech. Historical artifacts. Anything made of wood.

  Sure, they grow trees for decorative lumber on stations. But there’s something about homeland wood that people will pay for. It smells different. We found a cache of lumber on one of the whalefalls we disassembled, a few years back. I took a little chip as a souvenir. I keep it in my pillow and it makes my sheets smell strange and fragrant.

  Seam swings us around to starboard midship. The heatmap proves her right: there’s a blood-red hotspot. Live electronics, probably. Some sort of core system. The last piece of the generation ship still running.

  They took the white core of Saint-Seb apart last. It was like watching a soap bubble burst, all the little specks of the center being hauled away in sections. I think they reused some of the disassembled parts for the Accord Ring Station. We visited once, a few years ago.

  “Right there,” Seam says, pointing to a blip of cool blue in the center of the hotspot. “That’s our entry point. But we need to hit it precise.”

  I pick my helmet back up and sling the ripper on my back. The shitbox isn’t good at precision. I’ll have to make the first cleave manually, and hopefully the cool spot leads into a service hallway rather than some sort of air duct. I want this to be fast. If we’re lucky, we’ll have landed near the mother lode and if we hustle, we’ll have time to make two runs before the rest of the fish get here. Twenty million credits. I’m salivating for it. But we have to do this clean.

  “Are we expecting live bogeys?”

  Generation ships die in all sorts of ways. Some of them go fast—mutant virus strains that rip through the population. Targeted, well-planned bloodbaths by some sort of anarchist cell. Cryotube failures. Catastrophic hull breaches. But other ships malinger. Sometimes there’s just not enough genetic diversity to sustain a population long term. Or just a psychological, chronic apathy toward procreation. Deaths of despair, I guess. Like the guys who put a ripper in their mouths before Saint-Seb broke apart. But some people are too stubborn to die, even when everyone around them offs it. Some people live out of spite. Or hope.

  You’re supposed to kill the stragglers on generation ships. It’s just practical. They’re usually hostile, or crazed by isolation. There’s a reason that scavengers work in teams. Sanity is an important commodity.

  And most importantly, if you leave anyone alive, if they manage to make it off the ship, and if they manage to register on the intrastation system, then they have automatic legal claim to the entire fucking whale.

  Kill the stragglers, and the ship quietly becomes free real estate.

  “Not sure,” Seam says. “I wasn’t picking up any distress signals on the broadband, and it doesn’t seem like a life support system, from the shape of the hotspot. Other than that, no idea.”

  “Black box. Very fun.”

  “Yep. I’m coming down with you.”

  I look up from where I’m rezipping my boots. Seam is calmly pulling her nullsuit on.

  “Seam.”

  “Mica,” she says. She makes a complicated facial expression at me. I make a complicated facial expression back.

  “Fine!” I say.

  She grins. Her white teeth are the last thing I see before she puts her helmet on.

  Seam and I float out the airlock. I flip the magnetization on and my boots sink me down. Seam lands heavily near me and crouches to draw a crude, person-sized box before stepping back. She gestures. I nod.

  I worked exostation construction before Saint-Seb got taken apart. Zero-grav welding. They didn’t have any of the local boys working on the deconstruction, though. I think the corpostate buyer was scared we would riot. Point being—I easily carve a neat oblong into the hull. Sparks fly. The top drops down. Interesting. Internal gravity field must still be on. Means that Seam was right about the hotspot being tech. There’s still life in this thing.

  First breach. When a whale dies, a temporary ecosystem sets up around the corpse as it sinks. I wonder how they know how to find it. Sharks can sense blood in water up to one part per million. But that’s not the sort of animal that savages a whalefall. It’s the scavengers. The opportunists.

  Early humanoids cracked marrow from bones pulled from animal carcasses killed by something larger and more dangerous. Seam told me about that. She took a class on archaic human evolution, in the crèche. The black marrow of the breach point could hold anything. We’ve never done a first breach before.

  “After you,” Seam says.

  I roll my eyes even though she can’t see me. I drop down into the black.

  We drop into the end point of a hallway that seems to be surrounded by a server farm, barely visible through dark glass walls. This was likely the source of the heat signature. I pull out my ripper and patch the breach point with the heat from my blade even though I’m not sure there’s breathable atmo.

  “What do you think caused it?” Seam says. “I’m putting my money on mass murder. Rogue agent. Nerve gas released through all the vents.”

  I turn away from my slipshod patch job. Down the hallway, there are soft chemical lighting strips on the ground that glow green-blue. But other than that, the whalefall is unlit. At least our helmets have night vision. I start walking. Seam walks next to me.

  “Or maybe a biological agent,” she continues. “Some sort of disease that got them all. Or got enough of them so that the survivors couldn’t repopulate. And their frozen genebanks all melted because of a power failure.”

  The corridors are empty. Nothing here we can haul back, although I suppose we could strip up some of the metal railing on the sides, remove the plate glass, and carefully float it back out. Or we could break the glass and remove the servers—computational parts go for fairly large sums, especially ones that are fully functioning, but neither Seam nor I have the knowledge to sell generation ship tech without getting a little grifted by the buyer. It’s alien stuff. It comes out of about seven different generations of history and three solar systems. But if it’s online, then maybe we can find some ship schematics or something useful like that, find the storage caches. See if there’s anything worth taking—an antique ox scrubber is still an ox scrubber.

  That’s the sort of practical thing we’d usually take. But today we’re the first scavengers on the scene, and so we have first pick of the exotica. I know that Seam wants to find a library or living quarters. Hopefully the rooms of someone high class, who has a lot of small, expensive objects. Books with interesting diagrams, and videos in languages familiar enough that our translators will smooth everything over. If we’re really lucky, then we might find a dead garden or shipboard greenspace that has rare biological material we can transport back. Wood would be fantastic. Seeds would be stellar.

  But all we see are racks and racks of servers sliding past and things that look a little like big generators, still humming. They look too large to just be powering the servers. Hopefully this means we’re near one of the nerve centers of the ship.

  “Or maybe they had a massive cultural schism and a civil war, this place is big enough for a civil war, right? We’re going to get to the main area and see a three hundred–year–old bloodbath. C’mon. Play with me, Mica. What do you think happened? We’ve never gotten to see the ships fresh.”

  “There’s no point in speculation. They’re dead now.”

  The corridor widens, branches out. The little luminescent tracks on the ground multiply. Arrows that lead in different directions. Labels in a language I can’t read. I mentally map out the ground we’ve covered. I take a left, on a hunch. I think we want to go nearer to the generators.

  “Am I making you sad?”

  “Seam.”

  “Sorry,” Seam says. “This place is creeping me out a little. It’s just so dark. And cramped.”

  I stop. Seam stops. It’s impossible to see her expression through her helmet. It’s also impossible to see mine. When we work with other people, we have to rely on body language and the tiny bit of tone we can glean over the radio. But I know Seam.

  “You can go back up, if you want. I can handle whatever I find down here. You know me.”

  “No,” Seam says. “But do you mind if I keep talking?”

  “Just not about what killed this place.”

  We wander through the dark corridors.

  “I think we’ve got a good chance at three or four runs if we get the schematics and smash the system before anyone else gets here. We can probably loot a bunch of the good bits first. Knock about twenty million creds off. Maybe thirty.”

  The signs on the wall multiply. Some of them are pictographic. Big Xs. And some sort of spindly spiderweb-looking thing.

  “I know I’m always on about paying down as much of our debt as possible, but how do you feel about taking maybe a million creds and blowing it on something fun? Spend a couple months on a terraformed asteroid, or something. And we’ll get a new ox scrubber. That’s practical.”

  I think maybe I’ve steered us wrong. More spiderweb signs. This place looks like it might lead toward danger. Not expensive goods.

  “Mica, you can talk back. I know you like doing the ‘stoic exowelder with the ripper’ thing on the job but there’s no one else here. And I think we’re going in the wrong direction.”

  But the faint trail of luminescent markers ends at a door. It has the same spindly spiderweb thing on it. I frown.

  “What do you think that is?”

  “Stylized snowflake,” Seam says.

  “What?”

  “You know, snowflakes. Snow. Frozen precipitation. It’s a weather thing. You’ve seen snow—remember that video I showed you? The one with the glaciers? I mean the big slabs of ice.”

  I remember now. Seam had pulled the video in a swap meet. She liked to go trade data with other scavengers, and she always came back with new media. Clips of alien shores. Home video of people long dead. Holographic family photographs where everyone is wearing outlandish clothing. Sometimes books or audio dramas produced by foreign stations. She played them while flying. I listened while doing maintenance on my ripper and our nullsuits.

  One of the video clips had been of a man dressed in bright gear that looked a lot like my nullsuit, climbing with crampons on a monstrously large column of ice and rock. There had been drifts of white all around him like scoops of shaving foam.

  “That doesn’t look like snow,” I say, gesturing at the symbol.

  “It’s pictographic. Represents the individual snowflake crystals.”

  “Sure.”

  It’s not worth arguing about linguistics with Seam, especially since she’s given me the context I need. There’s only one thing we could find inside, and it’s either going to be dead or alive. I’m not really looking forward to either. But everything about the hallways, the generators, the servers that we walked past, all of it makes sense now. And there’s sure to be a console inside, which we can use to access the ship’s schematics.

  I raise my ripper and cleave the door open, revealing the cryotube chamber and the rows and rows of tubes crowned with broken, glinting glass.

  I feel absurd relief. So I’m not going to have to kill them all, then.

  We had adequate warning when Saint-Seb Station was liquidated. Three months’ notice. That was generous for a station that was about to be stripped for parts. It had been coming for a long time. Saint-Seb was an old mining colony, back when they did mining out here. Back when there was anything to mine for. We’d stripped most of the surrounding sector. Saint-Seb was falling apart.

  The corpostate that bought Saint-Seb for scrap was relatively humane about it. They offered cryotube shuttles off the station to anywhere in the surrounding seven sectors. It would cost a few million credits or a few years of indenture post-arrival. And they weren’t guaranteeing timeframe. Still, most people agreed. But a solid few hundred refused. I didn’t understand why. There weren’t better options. I would have taken them up on it if Seam hadn’t come up to me with the jump drive and a plan to steal the shitbox.

  I imagine I could still have been happy in the universe where I took the first shuttle off Saint-Seb. I’d be asleep, and then I’d be working exostation construction for the corpostate a few sectors away. I would have left before the station was taken apart. Instead, Seam parked the shitbox three kilometers away and we watched our hometown get disassembled piece by piece.

  In that world, I wouldn’t be walking next to Seam right now. We carefully pick our way through the cryotube room, trying not to step on the broken glass as we look for the terminal that controls the cryotubes. A lot of our job is based on assumption. We assume there will be a terminal that connects to the cryotubes and that the shipbuilders would have placed it near the physical objects it controlled. We assume the terminal will be connected to the wider ship network. We assume it will be possible to access a ship-wide map from the terminal. Ordinary human logic. Probably the same sort of assumptions people were making thousands of years ago. They had glass thousands of years ago, too.

  The night vision in my helmets isn’t good enough to identify what’s inside the cryotubes, but I imagine that it’s either dust or mummified corpses so I just let my gaze slip past and concentrate on the patterns instead. The glass fell around the cryotubes in radials. The breaks in the tubes look like deliberate puncture wounds, made with something sharp. The radial glass patterns turn to smudged floors and wide sweeps of empty space with the shards shoved into drifts as we walk. There was some sort of struggle here.

  The animal part of my mind, the part that jumps at sudden noises and likes to have the light on when I piss at night, is losing its shit. I stuff that part of me in a box. Everything organic on the ship died centuries ago. Nothing is going to jump out at us. Whatever technician went berserk in here, he’s got to be dead by now. I’m still holding my ripper with the safety off, ready to unsheathe the bright blade as we walk through the dark.

  Broken glass. Smears. Tube after cracked tube. Then, the relief of seeing a terminal and two human-sized slumps tangled in front of it.

  “Oh thank God, corpses,” Seam says. She strides over to the terminal and immediately begins trying to get the thing online, jamming a skeleton key into the likeliest port. The skeleton key slithers in and I hear the whirr of the terminal starting up.

  “Hitting the lights,” she narrates for my benefit.

  Bank after bank of white light turns on. And I see it instantly, behind the two slumps of debris that used to be human. The perfect column of it. The pristine body, blue-white with cold. Seam hasn’t noticed, yet. She’s still looking at the terminal, typing intently.

  “Seam, one of them’s still online.”

  “Well shit. Go ahead and smash it,” Seam says, absently.

  I hope that the radio is smoothing my voice out for Seam, because I sound strangled to my own ears.

  “There’s a kid inside.”

  The kid isn’t exactly a kid. I’d put him at about fifteen, old enough that he’s mid growth spurt, but young enough that he still looks a little unfinished. There’s nothing archaic about his features, just a vague exoticism that could be passed off as one of his parents being from a couple of sectors out. He looks like any other stationer kid.

  “I pulled the schematics. We’re on a cryo transport ship. Total jackpot. Most of this place is storage, and I’ve pulled the inventory list. It looks like the place was manned by a skeleton crew, and they manually decanted new techs every few decades,” Seam calls from the terminal. “Ready to go? Did you crack the canister yet?”

  We can’t leave the kid alive. He has legal claim to the entire ship.

  “I’m going to check the rest of the cryotubes first,” I say. “Do you know who he was? Tube 785-B.”

  “I’m not looking him up. That’s morbid as hell. Mica, just close your eyes and break the glass. He’s basically been dead for centuries.”

  “Let me check the other tubes first.”

  I do a loop around the chamber but the original murderer did a thorough job. The kid’s cryotube is the only one intact. I return to the terminal and the kid’s glass coffin. I step over the two lumps that used to be human and inspect the shielding more carefully. It has the faintest hairline fracture that mustn’t have been deep enough to puncture the cryochamber. The kid came very close to dying. Behind the glass, he looks like he’s just asleep.

  “Mica,” Seam says.

  “Seam,” I say.

  “If we don’t kill him, someone else will,” she says, voicing what I’m already thinking. I know. Soon this place is going to be swarmed. Even if we don’t leave him alive, there’s no world where he opens his eyes and gets out of the tube. He’s too much of a liability. And in the nonexistent world where he gets onto station and claims the ship, he’s a fifteen-year-old, hundreds of years out of time. He’ll be killed as soon as it hits the headlines, before he has the chance to appoint a legal heir. And then the whalefall will be public property again. He’s been dead since the beginning.

  “Just make it clean. That’s the kindest thing you can do for him.”

  I grimace reflexively.

  “That’s what you said last time, Seam.”

  The sharp intake of her breath is loud enough to hear over the radio.

  I killed a man to get the shitbox. He was going to die anyway. It was a week before the liquidation, and the man had been a conscientious objector. There were a lot of those at the end. It was strange to be on the station with them. They were very calm, and Seam and I had been jittery with nerves. Everyone else had plans to lay down and die, politically. We had plans to steal a ship.

 

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