The Aurora is discomfortingly large, once we’re right up on it. In the LINA, it feels like we’re a tick crawling on a sleek silver beast that hasn’t yet noticed our presence or been annoyed enough by it to shake us loose.
Our working lights skate over the smooth surface as we fly over. Occasionally they catch the glass behind one of the portholes just right, sending a flash back toward the cameras and making my heart jump.
But no one is signaling us from inside. There have been no signs of life whatsoever. And a few signs of something far worse.
At the stern, a dozen escape pods are gone, their external docks empty and dark like rotten fruit in a cluster of healthy, shiny berries still clinging to the stem.
A few others look like failed launches. They dangle, slightly crooked but still attached, their sides blackened. It looks as though someone started to evacuate and then simply didn’t release the pod once they were inside. The engines, designed to be automatic, flared but couldn’t pull away without the clamps released.
Panic, maybe. And inexperience. That tells me it was probably passengers trying to get away without a crew member to guide them.
Above the escape pods at the stern, in one of the two large glass enclosures, a swathe of shocking green greets us.
My breath catches. Grass? If they managed to grow grass, then they’re probably growing food, too, and …
But almost as soon as the thought occurs, other details register and reality checks in hard.
The grass is too green. And a cheerful red flag still stands at the opposite end, stuck in the simulated ground. Café tables and chairs bolted down around the perimeter give it a country club look.
“A putting green,” Nysus says over the intercom. “For golf. Specs say the enclosure on the other side is a pool.”
As we move around the outer edge of the glass enclosure, I catch glints of light reflecting back at us. Tiny, twisted golf clubs sail lazily through the space, bumping into each other and the walls. An emergency fire extinguisher, the bottom deformed and bashed in, spins in an endless arc.
“Grav generator is off,” I say.
The green itself is shredded and furrowed near the entrance to the interior corridor, as though something has been dragged away. Or someone. And the metal door to the corridor is dented and bowed out, torn partially from its hinges. What happened here?
Lourdes, standing next to me and watching the monitors, edges closer. Her cold fingers find mine and squeeze tight.
I allow it for a moment, before that familiar too close, too much! panic starts to rise, and I yank away.
She gives me a wounded look that I have to pretend I don’t see.
I don’t want to hurt her feelings. Being a team lead is, at times, a combination of parent, camp counselor, and stern but well-meaning principal. But with some things, I just … can’t. People can only need me so much before that button inside me is pushed and I have to walk away. And I’m not allowed to need anyone at all. Except in the strictest sense—I cannot physically run LINA by myself. I would, if I could.
“I’m not seeing any damage here either,” Voller says, as we come around the stern to the port side. “Definitely nothing that looks like an explosion. Or catastrophic engine failure.” He tosses that out, though that’s not really his area of expertise. Just Voller being a provocative asshole again.
Silence holds for a long moment. Then the intercom clicks. “Engine failure doesn’t always result in explosion,” Kane says with obvious reluctance. And yet, he’s clearly watching from another monitor, probably in his quarters. So he’s angry with me, but not that angry. “It might not even be visible from the outside.”
“Right, right.” Voller makes a jerking-off motion without looking up from the screens.
The port side is as smooth and undamaged as the starboard. No curling flaps of metal hull that would indicate a forcible depressurization, no hole blasted through from an unexpected collision with a meteoroid. Micrometeoroids are still a possibility, I guess, but the hull shielding should have protected the ship from everything but a mass storm of them, and we’d see signs of that.
But mainly, it looks like a perfectly whole … abandoned ship.
“Fuck,” Voller says. “Look at that.”
As we come up on the bow, the glass enclosure at the front of the ship glows brighter beneath our lights, the normally clear surface frosted white.
Voller angles us closer to the top of the enclosure, where we can see down and inside.
The large rectangular-shaped pool has an infinity edge, likely to create the impression that passengers were swimming in the stars. But the water has floated out and away from the pool, probably when the gravity generator went down, and then it froze in the air and against the glass. Wooden deck chairs, which were apparently not bolted down, stick out of the ice at odd angles like toothpicks.
So environmentals are down, too. No heat, no air, no life support.
“If something went wrong with the environmental systems, then maybe that’s the first domino,” I say, trying to play the scenario through in my mind. It’s never just one factor, one element in play. There are too many fail-safes and planned redundancies. For this many people to be at risk, for a system this complex to falter, it has to be a combination of unexpected events.
Like, a previously unknown virus lying dormant in a soil sample until it’s revived by exposure to oxygen, thanks to rushed decontamination procedures. And then that virus spreads, in part, due to a delayed upgrade in the air filtration system—budget cuts. Add to that a lonely eleven-year-old who understands quarantine procedures but—
“TL.” Lourdes grabs at my wrist, pulling my thoughts away from Ferris Outpost and the past. “What is that?” She points to a mix of odd shapes beneath the surface of the ice, like shadows in it, with a few swatches of brightly colored fabric.
I squint at the screen until my reluctant brain finally produces a match. That long, slender silhouette with a starfish-looking element at the one end … is an arm with an outstretched hand, seemingly in supplication. The arm cuts off abruptly, however, with no shoulder or associated body.
Those are people. There are people trapped in the ice. Maybe a dozen of them. Or … pieces of them.
“What the fuck?” Voller whispers.
Involuntarily, I take a step back, and Lourdes frowns at me, then back at the images on the monitor. And this time, she sees it.
Lourdes sucks in a squeaky breath. “Oh my God. Oh my God. They’re dead!”
“It’s fine,” I tell Lourdes. “We’re fine. Some fatalities were expected, remember?”
“But not like this!” she protests.
Oddly enough, several of the bodies—the intact ones, anyway—aren’t even dressed for swimming. There’s a woman in a tight, copper-colored ball gown with ruffles near her bare feet. Mermaid, I think the style is called, ironically enough. One man is in a tux, bow tie still in place, and another wears what looks like a set of pajamas, matching top and bottom in a shiny dark blue fabric. Which means they weren’t in the pool when this happened, or they weren’t expecting to be in the pool but died close enough to it to be absorbed in the water when the gravity generator gave way. It’s hard to say exactly what sequence of events is the right one.
Red encircles the head of Pajama Guy, a bloody halo in the water, now encased permanently in ice.
These people did not die from starvation. Or an environmental systems failure. Whatever happened here was violent and seemingly unexpected.
The little black spots creep across Mama’s cheek, like mold spreading over bread. And I try to wash them off, but her skin is so cold …
I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment and shake my head to clear the image.
“Mutiny?” Nysus asks.
Voller scoffs. “On a luxury ship? These assholes rebelled because, what, their sheets weren’t soft enough? They paid to be here.”
“It could have been crew,” Nysus points out.
“Right,” Voller says. “Sure. ‘We don’t have equal access to the swimming pool in space, so let’s grab a fire ax and chop this guy’s arm off.’” He shakes his head in disgust. “No, no way, man. It was a cush job. I’ve seen the videos. Crew quarters were double, triple what we got here. Plus real food.”
“If something went wrong in the environmentals, it’s possible they were suffering from hypoxia or—” Nysus continues.
“Since when does hypoxia turn you into a fucking homicidal maniac?” Voller demands.
“No one knows what happened,” Nysus says, sounding a little frosty at being questioned. “CitiFutura called off the search after a year, and they never announced any kind of official explanation. Here, look.”
One of the monitors flashes away from the view of the Aurora to a screen of text, a piece from the Forum’s treasure trove, undoubtedly:
Aurora Search and Rescue Ends
May 3, 2130: The Swedish flag is flying at half-mast at the Royal Palace of Stockholm and the royal family’s residence of Drottningholm Palace after CitiFutura officials announced today that the yearlong joint search and rescue for its missing vessel, Aurora, has been called off. Princess Margaretha Sofia of Sweden—a popular figure worldwide for her philanthropic efforts and her viral pop hit “Just Enough”—is among the 657 persons on board, now presumed dead.
CitiFutura lost contact with its ship, a new luxury spaceliner model on its maiden voyage, six months into its yearlong cruise. No sign of the vessel has been found, and no official cause for the disappearance has been identified.
The Aurora represented a new way of space travel, luxury instead of survival, at an exorbitant price. Amenities on board included premium suites, a spa, casino, shopping, and gourmet meals from a private chef.
The complete passenger manifest for her maiden voyage, still unreleased at this point, is widely rumored to consist of luminaries from all aspects of society.
Houston Seahawks fans have redoubled their petition efforts for Theo Graves, former star quarterback in the Zero Grav League (ZGL), to be inducted into the hall of fame. Graves and his wife, Lilah, are believed to be on board, though the Graves family and ZGL have refused to confirm.
CitiFutura, with their primary competitor, Verux Inc., and supplemental support from the diminished National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) and Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA), launched the largest-to-date search and rescue operation shortly after CitiFutura was unable to raise the vessel on comm and emergency channels. No distress or emergency signals have been detected.
“It’s a terrible tragedy, of course,” a Verux spokesperson said today. “We are a community, not competitors, when it comes to working together to pave the way for humanity to live among the stars. There is no reward without risk, but it is unfortunate to consider those who may have sacrificed their lives for the advancement. We offer our deepest condolences to the families of the Aurora passengers and crew.”
Approximately 150 crew members were aboard the Aurora at the time of its disappearance, including the command crew: Captain Linden Gerard, First Officer Cage Wallace, and Pilot James Nguyen.
The comments below the article, archived from the publication date, are about what I would expect: mourning for the loss of a pair of celebrity sisters on board, wild conspiracy theories involving aliens, and commenters fighting among themselves over the validity of said conspiracy theories.
“Those poor families,” Lourdes murmurs as she sinks into her seat. She grips the edge of the board in front of her, as though she needs it to keep herself steady. “But can we go now? Set a flag or send a message or whatever we have to do to claim it and then get out of here? Please?”
Silence holds for a long moment. Lourdes doesn’t know how the Law of Finding works, but no one is volunteering to give her the information she lacks.
Voller spins around to face me. “Are we leaving?” he asks, challenge biting in every syllable.
The food printer is almost out. Just three packets of protein left. And the water is starting to taste weird. Like metal. Mama says that means the filter is going bad. She says I need to get out of here or I’ll be trapped forever, dead like the rest of them, like her …
I shove the memories down, hard. This is not the same. Not at all the same. I’m not alone, not this time. And I’m not a scared little kid on a remote outpost. I’m a team lead and the LINA is under my control. I can leave anytime I want.
Including right now, claim or no claim.
But that would mean walking away from the only chance I have left to build a life I want to live—on my own, without Verux. Verux sent my mother—and me—to Ferris Outpost. After everything that happened there, Verux brought me back and kept me in one of their group homes. Until I was old enough to work. And then guess who was the only one willing to hire me with my history?
And now, Verux is done with me, except in a formal, administrative, pat-on-the-head capacity. Whether I agree or not.
Fury and frustration ignite anew within me.
My portion of this find would mean freedom, no more Verux pulling the strings and no more depending on their generosity to keep me up here, doing what I’m good at.
“No,” I say finally. “We’re not leaving.” There’s too much at stake.
Voller lets out a whoop of triumph.
“Nysus, I need a way in,” I say.
“On it,” Nysus says immediately.
“In?” Lourdes asks. “Why would you want to go in?”
“Kovalik, we need to talk. Now,” Kane says, and his end of the intercom clicks off abruptly. He’ll be on the bridge any second. That’ll be fun.
“Voller, head back portside,” Nysus says. “I’ve got limited data without access to the commweb, but there should be a cargo bay door for loading passenger luggage and supplies. I’ve got something that will get us in, assuming there weren’t any last-minute upgrades to the published specs. Bay should be big enough for you to guide us right in.”
“Claire?” Lourdes asks. “What’s happening?”
I hesitate. She’s so young and … unjaded. It would be nice if she could stay that way. On any normal day as a commweb maintenance team member, this wouldn’t be an issue. Yes, accidents still happen. Space is dangerous. Lourdes isn’t stupid; she knows that. And the daily and occasionally grim reality of working out here will eventually take its toll, but I feel like we’re inflicting a dozen years’ worth of damage all at once.
“Seriously doubt they’ve had time to do any upgrading with being dead and all,” Voller says to Nysus with a snicker.
Lourdes flinches and turns her attention to the communication boards in front of her. Her hands shake as she runs through a comms system test, even though we’re not connected to anything out here. At this point, we can send a message and hope it has enough strength to reach the commweb, just as the Aurora’s distress signal reached us. But that’s about it. And if it did work, all that would result in is Verux Dispatch telling us to return to known space and wait for further instruction. Which … I’m not going to do.
That being said, there is comfort in routine and I’m not one to deny anyone that. She’s right to be terrified. That’s the normal reaction. Whatever normal means out here.
“Lourdes,” I say, and wait for her to look over at me.
Eventually she does, her fingers locked around the scroll at her neck, her eyes shiny with unshed tears.
“It’s part of the Law of Finding,” I say. “You have to bring a documented artifact back and make a public claim.” But I’m not taking any chances. One artifact might be ignored. It might even “disappear,” depending on how determined the remains of CitiFutura, now owned by Verux, is to hide whatever happened here and their potential culpability.
“But the people…” she begins.
“We’re not going to disturb them or their things,” I say.
“TL, no one else is going to be that particular,” Voller protests, spinning around in his chair.
I glare at him.
“All due respect,” he amends quickly—and less than sincerely. “But this is our one shot. We should be grabbing everything we can get our hands on, no matter who it belongs to. It’s all ours technically anyway. That’s what everyone else would do.”
Unfortunately, he’s right. We’ll make the claim but other ships—salvagers, scrappers, traders, just plain old mercenaries—will, as soon as they hear of our find, get out here and take what they can to sell it. Back to the families of the victims or just to interested parties wanting to own a piece of history. A Law of Finding claim is only as good as your protection of it, and since Verux will have to first send out a team to verify our claim, that leaves plenty of time for other interested parties to go nosing around.
“We’re not everyone else,” I say.
His face flushes with anger. But then he clamps his mouth shut, seemingly with effort, and turns his attention back to piloting.
“It’ll be quick,” I promise Lourdes. “I just need to grab a few things—one of those faucets maybe—to prove we were here and what we found. Not dangerous at all.”
Kane, who’s reached the bridge just in time for that last bit, shakes his head, jaw tight.
I ignore him. “And think of it this way. The families of those people on the Aurora?” I gesture toward the image of the ship on our monitors. “They’ve been waiting for answers about their loved ones for twenty years. We’ll be helping with that. Helping them find peace.”
Lourdes takes a deep breath. “Right. Okay.” She straightens her shoulders.
What I don’t say is that while the families might want answers, in my experience, they probably won’t want the kind of answers that we’ll have.
“You have no idea what you’re walking into,” Kane says, arms folded across his chest, watching as I struggle into my enviro suit outside the airlock. The biohazard plastic bags I nabbed out of the bench that serves as our “med bay” lay in a slippery pile at my feet. Anything I take out will have to be quarantined. Just to be safe.
“I know that if it was environmental failure, I’m protected by the suit,” I say. “If it was a hull breach, same thing. And if it’s some kind of virus or plague…” The thought makes my palms sweaty and the ringing in my ear louder. “The filters on my—”
“That’s not what I mean,” Kane says, and his gaze is too serious. I have to look away, focusing on flexing my fingers to situate my gloves.
“The conditions over there won’t be good,” he continues. “Decomp would have stopped when the environmentals went down, but it won’t be pretty. Not based on what we’ve seen so far.” His voice is calm, practical even, but warm with concern. For me.
I work to ignore it.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says, edging closer. “No one would expect you to, after everything you’ve been through.”
As a minor, my name was never released to the public, but Kane, as the primary medic on board, has access to relevant details. Details that couldn’t possibly be more relevant than in this moment.
But the point is, no one else knows what to expect from me, because no one knows what happened, no one knows that I was once Child #1. The sole Ferris Outpost survivor.
Sometimes I wonder if that, too, is part of why I continue to feel that pull toward Kane. He knows too much and somehow doesn’t blame me when he should.
I take a step back, despite the small but clamoring part of me arguing for the opposite. “If you’re going to help me, help,” I say to Kane. “If not, then get out. Wait it out in your quarters.”
He rocks back, stunned. “Claire, I am trying to help.”
“No. You’re trying to talk me out of it.” I tug the cap up from inside the collar of my suit and tuck my hair inside.
Kane pauses, and then gives a bark of laughter.
The noise catches me so off guard, I glance up at him directly for the first time. He’s watching me, frustration and admiration warring in his expression. “Has anyone ever managed to talk you out of anything?” he demands.
A reluctant smile pulls at the corners of my mouth. “No.”
He steps closer and reaches up to tuck a strand of hair that I missed inside my cap. The edge of his thumb is rough from work and repeated scrubbing with the harsh soap in the engine room, but his touch is gentle and warm. Against the warning voice in my head, I tip my head toward his touch, like a cat seeking the sun.
“You are a good leader, a strong person. You don’t have anything to prove,” he says, tracing the line of my cheek.
Alarms are ringing in my head. This is dangerous. Letting myself feel. I can’t take it back, and it will hurt when it’s over. The kind of hurt I’ve worked hard to avoid for most of my life. “Who says I’m trying to prove anything?” I whisper.
“You. Every damn day. Like you have to show you deserved to survive.” He pauses, searching my face with his gaze. “Or like you have to give fate a second chance to take you because it screwed up the first time.”
It is a shockingly accurate summary of several ugly interior monologues that I’ve pushed down so deep that I barely hear the whispering in the background anymore.
The heat of embarrassment scorches my skin. How does he know me so well? What, exactly, does it say in those files? I feel exposed, like I’m standing naked in front of him but not in the mutual, private way that I’ve barely let myself imagine. No, this is the harsh, evaluative light of a clinical visit.
Stung, I step back from him. “Thanks for the assessment, doc.” My heart is beating too hard beneath my suit. I make myself take a deep breath so the alarms on my vitals don’t go off before I even leave the ship.
I expect Kane to push, to keep after me about my supposed death wish—why does everyone think that?—but instead he folds his arms across his chest, giving me a knowing look. “It’s too risky to go alone. You’d never let anyone else do that.”
I shrug, as best as I can in the tight fabric. “Because I’m responsible for the safety of my team.”
“Which includes you,” he argues. “You’ll have to go off tether. We won’t be able to pull you back if you get into trouble.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “And the inside of that ship is probably one big hazard. You could get caught in debris or tear your suit…” He pauses, his expression darkening. “Or worse.”
“Worse? Like what?” Suffocating from a microscopic rip in my suit before I could get back out to the LINA sounds bad enough. Not that that’s going to happen. I have multiple patches on me at all times when I’m out in a suit—we all do. Kane’s just being paranoid.
Or overprotective. I can’t decide how I feel about that. The needle seems to be caught between irritation and nostalgic appreciation. No one has cared that much about me in a long time.
Kane starts to speak, but Voller appears in the corridor, clomping toward us.
“TL’s not going alone,” Voller announces.
Kane hesitates, but then clearly decides any ally is better than none. “See?” he says to me. “Even Voller thinks it’s too—”
But then Voller pushes past us, dropping a couple more biohazard bags on the floor next to mine, and grabs his suit. “Buddy system, right?”
It takes me an extra second to process what he means, just because I can’t believe it, even with the evidence right in front of me. “No,” I say flatly. “No way. You’re not going.”
Kane steps in front of him. “If anyone is going with, it should be someone who’s got med training. You’re a pilot. What the hell are you going to do over there if there’s trouble?”
The needle tips toward irritation. “I can handle myself just fine,” I say to Kane. “Trouble or no.”
Kane glances back at me in disgust. “You’re the TL. You’re supposed to be smarter than this. No one goes into a potentially dangerous situation without backup.”
“You do remember that I’m in charge, right?” I ask.
“Exactly,” Voller says at the same time.
“Hell no,” Kane says. “Not you.”
But instead of throwing a punch, as I’m half expecting, Voller smiles pleasantly. Which raises my hackles. He’s up to something.
“She’s team lead and you’re second-in-command. You can’t both go,” Voller points out, far too reasonably. Never mind that any time the issue of command structure has come up in the past, he’s always pointed out that the pilot is “technically” also a second. Even though there can’t be two seconds, even “technically.” Otherwise, it’s not a chain of command so much as a circle. “Lourdes is freaking out, and Nysus gets all cranky when he has to leave his tech cave.”
He’s not wrong.
“That leaves me,” Voller says. He sits down on a nearby storage crate to begin stuffing himself into the suit.
“I don’t need anyone to go with me,” I say sharply over Kane’s sigh.
“Do you know how to pull the black box?” Voller asks, eyebrows raised with a knowing smirk.
“Black box” is an outdated term, one we’ve held on to from the early days of aviation. It’s an independent recording system, a backup of the navigational computer, the captain’s log, the bridge recordings, environmental readings, etc.
In other words, it’s the one thing that will tell Verux what actually happened on the Aurora.
Like I promised Lourdes.
Fuck. I rub my forehead, forgetting that my cap is already in place, knocking the whole thing askew. “All right. Fine,” I say, shoving my hair back under the cap. The black box would, if nothing else, help prove our Law of Finding claim. “Kane, you’re in charge while I’m gone. Voller—”
“Hey, TL?” Nysus speaks up over the intercom. “I think we should pull the distress beacon in and deactivate it before you go on board. It’s about three kilometers off the bow.”
“I can do it,” Voller says immediately, and once more, I’m struck by the sense that he’s being a little too helpful. Not a comfortable feeling.
“Why?” I ask. “Nysus, that’s one hell of a souvenir.”
But it’s Kane who answers. “Because once you’re inside the ship, you’re vulnerable if someone else picks up on the signal and checks it out.” He holds up his hand to ward off my protest. “However unlikely that might be. There may not be other sniffers out here, but there are salvagers everywhere.”
Salvagers who are usually heavily armed and significantly less preoccupied with the right thing to do versus whatever they can get away with. Like gutting the Aurora of everything they can carry, taking the LINA so we can’t report them, and leaving us for dead. Or, just straight up murdering us to begin with.
Kane’s not … wrong, much as I would prefer him to be. Because if he’s wrong on this, then he could be wrong on everything. Including thinking that this whole expedition is a bad idea.
“Fine,” I say with a sigh. “We’ll pull the beacon first.”
I expect an explosion of further protests or grumblings, but I get silence followed by a variety of affirmatives. Then Kane is rummaging in one of the storage lockers lining the wall for something, while Voller, for the first time in his existence (probably), gets up without complaint and heads back toward the bridge, his suit halfway up at his waist. The quiet compliance should feel like victory in that at least no one is arguing with me, but it’s bitter compromise on my end at best.
“Here,” Kane says, holding out a black plastic hard-case toward me.
I frown at it and then him. “The plasma drill?” We use it on rare occasions if we need new holes in a commweb beacon’s external framework. “Why?”
“Because it’s the closest thing to a weapon we have,” he says, his mouth a grim line.
I gape at him. “You think Voller is—”
“No, no.” He shakes his head. “Not Voller.”
“Well, there’s nobody else alive over there.” I push the case away, but he refuses to give in.
“You don’t know that,” he says, popping the lid and tugging loose the strap that’s attached to the base of the drill handle so it can be attached to a suit. “Environmentals are down in the areas we can see. Doesn’t mean they’re down for the whole ship.”
“For twenty years?” I give a disbelieving laugh. “The food and water stores wouldn’t—”
“For one or two people, careful with rationing?” He hesitates. “And with a sizeable store of protein available, if they’re desperate enough?”
Protein. The image of the detached arm, frozen in the former pool, resurfaces in my memory, carrying with it new and horrific implications.
“It’s not unheard of,” Kane reminds me.
But I know Mars history as well as he does, perhaps even better. Ferris Outpost was hardly its first tragedy. “Daedalus,” I say.
Eighty years ago or so, some of the first colonists on Mars, a scientific expedition called Daedalus, were trapped when the early skirmishes of the first Corporate War prevented the production and/or distribution for shuttle parts the already ailing NASA needed to send additional supplies. A series of crop failures in Daedalus’s rudimentary greenhouse led to starvation conditions, and then NASA lost contact. By the time CitiFutura and Verux, the two victors in the aerospace industry of that round of price-gouging and corruption, finally arrived on-scene in their own vessels a year later … it was bad. Old-school Jonestown bad. Most of the colonists had starved to death. The few who survived had resorted to desperate measures to survive, eating whatever they could to stay alive.
Including their former colleagues.
“I doubt that’s what’s happened here,” I say.
But I take the drill, attaching it to my suit. Just in case.