“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 anythingAurora-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 sellingpersonalpossessions—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 themfrom 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.
