“What is happening? What are you doing?” Lourdes asks Voller, the anxious pitch in her voice increasing.
“The Law of Finding, baby,” Voller crows.
I grimace. He’s correct, but that doesn’t mean he needs to be quite so ghoulish about it.
“What does that mean?” Lourdes looks to me and Kane.
But Kane steps back, raising his hands in surrender or frustration, before stalking off the bridge.
“It means we found theAurora,and it’s abandoned,” I say. Or, at least unoccupied by anyone still breathing and therefore able to claim it. “Which means—”
Voller cuts in. “It’s ours.”
4
TheAurorais 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 istoogreen. And a cheerful red flag still stands atthe 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 familiartoo 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’twantto 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 anothermonitor, probably in his quarters. So he’s angry with me, but notthatangry. “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.
