After Voller’s successful retrieval of the emergency beacon, which is now taking up most of the limited floor space in our tiny galley, I watch on the monitors outside the airlock as theAurora’s outer doors open with a rush of escaping air and random bits of detritus that indicate the hold was pressurized. The dark and cavernous cargo bay swallows us whole, the cameras outside going black for a moment, and I shiver. It feels like a giant shadow has fallen over us, even though the lighting inside LINA remains steady and bright.
Then our working lights kick on outside, giving us our first look inside theAurora.
It is shockingly normal, other than the field of debris, bits of flotsam and jetsam in the air that came up from the floor when the gravity went. Screws, scrap wood, a folding chair, sheets of protective plastic, rolls of packing tape. A coffee mug, absurdly upright, floats by, as if carried by a caffeine-seeking ghost.
Hundreds of large hard-case storage bins line the walls from the floor to about eight feet up. Most of them are still securely strapped in. A half dozen or so, missing their lids, bob gently around the perimeter, where they’ve been abandoned. Someone searching for something? Food, maybe.
But then…
Above the crates, a four-legged object, glossy with black paintthat reflects our lights back at us, drifts aimlessly in the far left corner.
“Shit.” I lean closer to the screen, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. It takes a second for my brain to flip the image over into its more expected position.
It’s a baby grand piano, floating upside down.
The top is folded flat and carefully secured with a fuzzy fabric strap to keep from damaging the wood, a useless precaution now. Even from this distance I can see that the edges of the piano are dented and smashed, revealing the paler shade of wood beneath the lacquer, where the piano has crashed into walls or other objects.
It just looks wrong. I shiver.
“They were supposed to have shows on board,” Nysus offers. “Entertainment.”
In the opposite corner, yellow metal glints between the slats of a giant wooden crate. Some kind of construction equipment, maybe?MIRAis burned crosswise across the front of the crate. Three enormous flat-packs that I recognize as hab extensions lay stacked in front of it, strapped to the deck.
“Nysus, why is there Mira stuff here?” I ask. TheAurorais… was a CitiFutura ship and Mira is a Verux-sponsored site on Mars. They were competitors, of a sort. Verux, at the time, was more ground-based, habitation and colonization focused. CitiFutura had cornered the market on shipbuilding. Though theAuroramight have been seen as a bit of a dig at Verux’s specialty, offering luxury in space on a ship rather than a hard, bare-bones existence in a ground-based hab.
“Hang on.” He sounds distracted. “Um, okay. Based on some old Forum posts, it looks like CitiFutura agreed to coordinate a supply drop for Verux at Mira on their way back.”
It’s hard to believe that enough people are that interested in the minutiae of a ship that went missing so long ago to have specific chat threads about it online. But then again, Nysus apparently has the information archived and available offline—or basically memorized. So…
“Verux and CitiFutura were getting along okay back then, I guess,” he adds.
And they’d be getting along even better a short few years later once the tragedy and scandal of theAuroracaused CitiFutura to implode and Verux to swoop in and scoop up the remains.
I roll my eyes. Of course, Verux consumes without hesitation. Companies. Equipment. Lives. Families. Anything and everything to appease their board and shareholders.
Ferris Outpost was wiped out because Verux had delayed sending new air filters, trying to squeeze a few more months from the old ones. And then it took them a month to reach me because they refused to retask the closest ship—a mining vessel heading out for ore—for rescue. It would have cost too much in time and operating expenses—something I found out only after I was employed by them and able to dig a little in the old files in the company archives.
And yet, they didn’t hesitate to promote my rescue on all the media sites as a “miracle.” The miracle was that I survived that long at all. Sometimes I wonder if Verux was hoping that if they left me alone long enough the problem would solve itself.
Too bad for them.
The lights continue to sweep the area as Voller edges us toward the center of theAurora’s bay.
This time, they catch a familiar low-slung shape, the windshield bright and shiny, the cobalt blue metal curves as pristine as the day it slid off the factory line and onto the mag-lev highway. The car is firmly attached to the metal decking beneath, with no visible straps or restraint mechanism, the magnet still holding its own out here after all this time. Twenty years ago, it would have been one of the first of its kind. Mag-lev vehicles were bigger back then, resembling the fossil-fuel behemoths they were descended from, and manually guided, nothing like the autopilot personal transports of today.
“What the hell?” Kane says, his voice tinged with awe. “That’s a Mach Ten. I’ve only ever seen one in museums online.”
“Mach Ten, Special Edition,” Nysus corrects. “Yeah, one of the passengers paid extra to bring it on board.”
“Why?” Voller scoffs. “It’s not like they could drive it anywhere.”
Which says a lot about the type of people who bought passage on this first solar system cruise. Then again, it’s not like you install pointlessly lavish faucets for people whoaren’texpecting that level of treatment.
“Since when has practicality ever stopped a rich guy from doing anything?” Lourdes asks, dryly, sounding steadier, more like herself.
“How do you know it’s a guy?” Voller demands with righteous indignation.
Lourdes snickers.
