“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“Black box” is an outdated term, one we’ve held on to fromthe early days of aviation.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 theAurora.
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 littletoohelpful. 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 theAuroraof 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, whileVoller, 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 tosend 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.
