The tiny galley area on the LINA was never meant as a gathering place. It’s just a slightly wider area of corridor with a sink and a food rehydrator and a suggestion of a table in a hinged flat surface that unlatches from the back wall. On poker nights, the four of them would gather and wedge themselves in around the table, even Nysus drawn out by the prospect of entertainment or, more likely, the chance to improve his card-counting skills.
The three of us—Lourdes, Kane, and I—standing at the threshold of the galley is about two too many in this space, especially with the emergency beacon on the floor taking up valuable real estate, but I’m not complaining. The door is closed, the airlock is sealed, and while we’re still technically on board the Aurora, it feels a lot safer in here than out there. And once Voller is dressed and ready, we’ll be gone.
The focus of our attention, Speed and Grace, still in their sealed biohazard bags, sit back-to-back on the table, their wings touching in what would have been a messy midair collision. Kane pulled Grace free as we hurried out.
Without the black box. On my order, over Voller’s vehement objection.
Not that the sculptures or black box will matter. Not now.
“So,” Lourdes says, her voice softer and slurred from the sedative Kane had given her. “Someone lost their nuggets”—her mouth ticks up briefly in a pleased-with-herself smile—“and started heading off course, and the passengers rebelled.”
“By killing each other?” Nysus asks, over the intercom. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Kane glances to me over Lourdes’s head, his gaze taking in my damp hair and fresh jumpsuit. His hair is still wet, too. We don’t exactly have decontamination protocols on the LINA. We aren’t that kind of ship. Our suits are stuffed in biohazard bags inside the airlock, and Kane, Voller, and I used up more than a week’s worth of water rations in extended showers. A line item I would have to justify somehow on our return. And I’m still not sure what, if anything, I’m going to say about all of this.
Okay? Kane mouths.
I don’t know how to answer that. So, I look away, returning my attention to the sculptures.
“I think it’s far more likely something like mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness,” Nysus says, continuing his conversation with Lourdes and anyone else listening. “The passengers were isolated and trapped on the ship, for months. They weren’t used to that kind of life. Emotions get heightened. It’s easy to lose perspective. Maybe there was an issue with the food or something, people panicked. This kind of thing dates back centuries.” As always, Nysus sounds happiest—and most distracted—when he’s digging into some kind of research. “The Salem witch trials. Dancing frenzies in the Middle Ages. Mass poisonings in the midtwentieth that turned out not to be poisonings at all but people collectively panicking over the idea of being poisoned.”
“That doesn’t explain the crew,” Kane points out. “There’s no way CitiFutura sent out a high-profile ship like the Aurora with inexperienced hands at the helm.”
“They didn’t,” I say. “Captain Linden Gerard. First Officer Cage Wallace. Pilot was James Nguyen.” I knew the names from all the reports at the time. I’d dreamed of reporting to the Aurora, after all. And who is more famous than the crew who disappeared with the most expensive ship ever created?
“But they were outnumbered by a bunch of spoiled civilians who had no training or preparation but a bunch of money and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement,” I continue. “And because of that they all paid with their lives—rich people, maids, dog walkers, crew. Just so CitiFutura could make a few bucks. Sending people who had no business being out here.” The words burst out of me in a bitter torrent that I couldn’t have stopped if my life depended on it. Inwardly, I cringe.
Kane cocks his head sideways, giving me that insightful look that feels like it turns me see-through, lighting up the mess of me and scars of past trauma that I work to keep hidden. I want to shout at him to shut up, even though he hasn’t said anything. Yet.
“I’m not sure it’s that simple,” he says eventually. “CitiFutura never received a distress call, or a request for help.” He hesitates. “Claire. It’s not the same as Ferris—”
“I know that,” I snap. And I do—Ferris was obvious negligence and this appears to be simply an unanticipated and terrible outcome to a new venture—but it feels similar. Careless. Reckless with human life. Arrogant.
“Someone did try,” Lourdes points out.
We both look at her.
“The automated distress beacon,” she says, enunciating each word carefully. “Remember? If the ship wasn’t in distress, someone had to trigger its release. Right?”
“She’s right,” Nysus says after a moment, sounding stunned. “If the ship was shut down deliberately, then the ship itself wouldn’t have met conditions to trigger the distress beacon. Someone must have set it off.”
“But that would have to be someone with access, and that means bridge crew,” Kane says. “The captain. First officer. Pilot. Maybe the security chief.” He frowns. “But why wouldn’t they have tried to keep the ship on course and powered up instead?” He shakes his head. “None of this makes sense.”
“And it never will,” Voller says flatly, from behind us.
Lourdes jumps, startled.
“Enough,” Kane says, turning to face Voller.
Voller gives a harsh laugh. “Of course you’re still defending her.”
“I don’t need any defending,” I say sharply, turning toward Voller. “I’m the—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re the TL. The one in charge. But have you considered that maybe you shouldn’t be? I mean, even the saint here”—he jerks his hand in a wild gesture that comes dangerously close to Kane’s face—“isn’t sure walking away is the right move.”
I stiffen, gaze shooting automatically to Kane.
He looks away, unable to meet my eyes.
Hurt sears like a fresh burn from touching a still-hot engine, but I shove the pain down, forcing myself to focus on the issue at hand.
“I’m trying to keep us safe.” I inch closer to Voller, crowding him in the already crowded galley. “Let me ask you something. Do you think that cushy job of yours is still going to be there when you bring back proof that someone on the CitiFutura crew killed everyone on board? Verux bought CitiFutura. They’re one and the same now. Do you think Verux is going to pat you on the back and give you a fat bonus for bringing back that news and all the trouble that will come with it?” Especially with Zenit, their latest competitor, breathing down Verux’s collective necks. First it was Verux on CitiFutura. Now it’s Zenit on Verux. It’s always someone, a company-eat-company-eat-company world.
“We don’t know that’s what happened. We don’t know anything,” Voller says pointedly. “Maybe shut down was the safest option. Someone set off that beacon, trying to get help. Maybe that was the only choice for whoever was in charge at the time.”
Taking a step back from him, I roll my eyes. Right.
“I mean, clearly, the captain lost her shit,” he continues. “And the first officer had to—”
“You don’t know that,” I say, oddly defensive of Linden Gerard.
Kane sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. “Claire is right,” he says finally. “As much as I’d like to turn this over to Verux so the families of the passengers and crew will have some closure, I don’t think we have that option. With something this big, even money says Verux will try to cover it up.”
Lourdes gasps. “They wouldn’t do that.”
A harsh laugh bubbles up from my throat. “They would. They have.” Never in any of the Ferris Outpost post-tragedy analysis was there a mention of the air filters and Verux’s decision to hold off on sending more. The focus of those news stories was my rescue and the valiant work “the medical team” had done to try to save everyone before the virus took over.
And as for the colony itself, all the habs were burned in a planned detonation. For “safety.” That included all of the dead. My mother never came home from Mars. She has no grave for me to visit. No place for me to see her name or leave flowers. My father, whom I barely remember, rests in a cemetery alone on Earth, with a blank headstone connected to his, where my mother is supposed to be.
Kane nods. “Verux won’t want the financial hit that this story will bring. Not to mention the bad optics. They’re not exactly CitiFutura, but with that merger, they’re close enough,” he continues. “And if we try to speak up anyway, Verux can just fire us and claim we’re disgruntled ex-employees, lying about finding the Aurora to cause trouble.” He hesitates, conflict flickering in his expression, and I know he’s thinking about his daughter. “I can’t afford that.”
“But we have proof!” Voller points to Speed and Grace. “And we would have had more if Claire hadn’t—”
“It won’t matter,” I say. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Who’s going to listen to us over the sound of a hundred Verux lawyers?” My emotions are complicated on that subject. The same web of corporate secrecy and complicated legal maneuvers that had protected Verux for decades had also protected my name and identity. People were interested in me, the survivor, but they would have been even more interested in learning the cause of the Ferris Outpost disaster. The old air filters, yes. But also the Ferris resident who broke quarantine and inadvertently caused the deaths of seventy-three men, women, and children.
So, yes, Verux kept me safe, fed me, housed me, along with any other children who had been left parentless by their various operations/decisions. But those other children were innocent, and I was not.
I am Verux’s very own dirty little secret. Perhaps not the only one.
“Wait, does this mean that we’re just going to leave these people out here?” Lourdes asks, from behind us, where she’s still staring at the sculptures. She sounds wobbly and close to tears again. “We’re not going to tell their people that they’ve been found?”
Shit.
“And if you think Verux will try to hide what happened, then they’ll never go home. They’ll just float through space forever,” Lourdes says, her voice growing louder. “Their families will never know what happened, and they’ll never find peace and—”
“I don’t know that that’s what’s going to happen,” Kane says gently, taking her by the shoulders and bringing her around to stand with the rest of us. “It was just a guess, Lourdes.”
I hesitate. “We could mention that we picked up the beacon’s signal, but didn’t have time to check into it.”
“Good idea, TL,” Voller says. “And I’m sure no one will put that together with why we’re over two hundred hours off schedule.”
The last of my patience evaporates. “And you’d rather, what, march right up to the fucking corporate office and hand over everything they need to—”
“Hell, yes! So what if they fire us? It’ll just add credence to our story. They’re dumping your ass anyway, so I’m not sure why you care,” he adds.
I struggle to keep from reacting to the deliberate barb.
“If they don’t honor our Finding claim, so what? With the sculptures and anything else we take now”—Voller gives me a reproachful look, as if my command not to steal from the dead is a ridiculously stilted and antiquated notion, like shaking hands or reading on paper—“we could sell it all to collectors. Shit, some of Nysus’s Forum buddies would probably pay big money for anything Aurora-related.”
He’s not … wrong. I’d considered it before when it was about removing a faucet or two. But the thought of taking and selling personal possessions—a favorite dress, a watch, even a diamond-studded dog leash—makes my stomach roil. Those things belonged to someone; they meant something to someone. Detaching them from the person, literally or figuratively, to sell as objects of interest for collectors obsessed with the tragedy feels … obscene.
Items from Ferris Outpost pop up every once in a while, in private auctions, in raids on collectors of other less-than-legal things. I read about them in the newsfeeds. Most of the “relics” are fakes. Or supplies created for Ferris—more jumpsuits with the colony name patch already sewn on and names embroidered just below—that didn’t reach us in time.
But some are not. My rescue team apparently stopped for souvenirs when they were supposed to be searching for me. Mostly small things, but they go for big money. A still-folded pair of worn socks with the Ferris name stitched in the cuffs. A plastic bowl from the mess hall hab with “the remains of a final meal still inside.” A pair of eyeglasses that I recognized as belonging to one of my mother’s colleagues, Dr. Thoreau, who’d always refused to risk her eyesight to corrective surgery or implants. A gold locket that haunted me for years because I have vague memories of a similar necklace around my mother’s neck. I never was able to determine whether it was hers. The only photos I have of her—and my father, before he died—show the delicate chain against her neck or the hint of a curved locket beneath the fabric of her shirt, but there’s no clear shot of the necklace itself.
Various Verux personnel in white biohazard suits had tried to take my blanket—the one my mother had stitched my name and hab number on—for decontamination once I was away from Ferris. I refused and carried it with me through my decon sessions. Sometimes I wonder if I’d let them take it, if it would have ended up on one of those newsfeeds. In someone’s collection.
“No,” I say flatly to Voller.
“You’re disgusting,” Lourdes chokes out.
“No, sweetheart, I’m a pragmatist,” Voller says with a tight smile and an obnoxious wink. “And a survivor.”
“Like a cockroach,” Kane mutters.
“And fucking proud of it,” Voller says. “Look, you want to run and hide, that’s fine, but—”
“We’re not talking about hiding,” I say through gritted teeth. “But there’s a time to be smart about—”
“Smart means scared. And in this case, poor,” Voller says.
It’s too hot in here, all of us jammed in together, and I can feel my grip on my temper slipping. “Goddamnit, Voller, if you could just use your brain for once instead of—”
“Everyone, just take a breath,” Kane says, holding up his hands.
Voller and I both glare at him.
“Actually, there might be another option,” Nysus says, his quiet voice breaking through in the moment. He pauses. “According to the Forum, there’s something called the Versailles Contingency.”
“What the fuck is that?” Voller asks, for once taking the words right out of my mouth.
“It was top secret at the time, not acknowledged in the marketing materials or the released schematics, but some of the high-profile guests were told about it before the launch, as a reassurance of their safety while on board. Like the safe room fads of the late twentieth / early twenty-first century?”
Kane and I stare at each other blankly. Voller shakes his head in annoyance.
Nysus makes an impatient noise at our ignorance. “Never mind. Not important. What’s important is that the forward section of the Platinum Level is equipped with bulkhead doors. It can be sealed off—with the bridge—from the rest of the ship. Like a self-sustaining lifeboat inside the ship itself. Its own independent air filtration, grav generator, food supply, water, all of it. It requires the main engines, of course, but—”
“Why would they want that?” I ask. It was a waste of resources to duplicate whole systems like that.
“Versailles,” Kane says suddenly. His expression goes grim. “The French Revolution. Eat the rich.”
“Exactly,” Nysus says.
“You’re going to have to give me a little more than that,” I say in exasperation. Earth history is not my strong suit.
“It’s a reference to a war, four or five centuries ago. The haves versus the have-nots,” Kane says. “This contingency Nysus is talking about was meant as extra protection for the wealthy in case something went wrong.”
I stare at him in disbelief. “So, in other words, if the main air filtration system goes bad, it’s ‘good luck, everybody who’s not a multibillionaire, we’re sealing ourselves up tight with our own air’?”
“Specifically, it was more in case the less fortunate on board decided to take advantage of the isolation and rise up,” Nysus clarifies. “A year is a long time. Social order can shift quickly in such seclusion. But yes. You’ve got it.”
“That’s repulsive,” I say.
But Voller laughs. “That’s fucking brilliant. Housekeeping gets tired of cleaning up dog shit and decides to strike, what can anyone do to them? The brig, if there even is one, isn’t big enough for everyone. Can’t kick them off the ship or send them home. Not for a whole year. They can live like kings and queens, and there’s way more of them than the Platinum Level eggs.” He sounds delighted.
“Why the hell didn’t they actually use this Versailles thing instead of taking the ship off course?” I demand.
Voller shifts his attention to me, striking a mock thoughtful pose, his fingers on his chin. “It’s interesting that you should ask that. Because we just don’t know. Hmmm. Why is that again? Why don’t we know fucking anything? Because somebody—”
I launch myself at Voller, shoving him back against the wall until his head hits with a muted thunk. “Will you shut the hell up about that black box?” I say through clenched teeth.
“Claire.” Kane intervenes, looping an arm around my waist and pulling me back. The urge to fight free rises up, but I manage to quell it in time, embarrassment taking its place.
“I’m fine,” I say after a moment, twisting away from him.
“We don’t have the codes to open it anyway,” Nysus points out. “Only CitiFutura—or Verux now—does.”
Voller rubs the back of his head with an exaggerated wince. I know it’s exaggerated but that doesn’t stop the flood of shame from pouring over me, until I feel stripped bare. I lost control. I don’t ever lose control, not like that. Then again, I also saw my dead mother today for the first time in more than twenty years. Or, thought I had.
Not command material. Those three words stamped in conclusion on my record, on me.
Maybe they were right, after all.
“Can you get to the point, Nysus, before TL kills me?” Voller asks, grinning at me, pleased to have triggered a reaction. Because he’s an asshole. Though he may be an asshole who has a point. I don’t know anymore.
I squeeze my eyes shut, rubbing at the stress headache forming in the center of my forehead.
“I think we could do it,” Nysus says, his words speeding together in his excitement. “Clear the Platinum Level and the bridge of … any former occupants. Run a diagnostic on the lifeboat systems. Check for known contaminants throughout the ship, just to be sure. Air and water. Though I didn’t see any evidence of anything like that, vomiting, illness, et cetera.” He seems to be talking to himself now as much as us. “And of course, we’ll need to make sure that the main engines still have enough charge to—”
“Nysus,” Kane says, even his tone beginning to sound strained. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh,” Nysus says, sounding startled. “I mean, we could seal ourselves in. Use the Versailles Contingency and bring the Aurora back ourselves.”