cooled to minus two hundred degrees centigrade. One by one, they had succumbed to hypothermia’s deep sleep, and their corpses had frozen solid.
Watched by one of the half-dozen drones that for some reason were floating about the lifesystem, Maris and Somerset identified each of the bodies, collected and documented their personal effects, and sealed them into coffins that Symbiosis would with impersonal charity deliver to surviving relatives. They were one body short-the passenger. Maris assumed that the woman had wandered off to die on her own in some obscure spot not discovered by the Symbiosis workers; the wrecking gang would find her frozen corpse by and by, when they stripped out the lifesystem.
Once the coffins had been sent on their way, the other two members of the wrecking gang came aboard. They rigged lights and a power supply, collected drifting trash, vented the lifesystem, and generally made the hulk safe, so that they could begin the second stage of the salvage operation, stripping out gold and silver, indium and germanium, and all the other rare metals from the shuttle’s control systems.
It was Ty Siriwardene who noticed that the shuttle’s foodmaker had been dismantled, and that its yeast base block was missing. He told Maris about it at the end of the shift, back in the hab-module; she suggested that it couldn’t be due to one of his famous ghosts, because it was well known that ghosts didn’t eat.
“ Something took the stuff,” Ty said stubbornly. “I’m not making this up.”
He was a raggedy young man, scrawny and slight in his grubby blue suitliner, thick black tattoos squirming over his shaven scalp. He chewed gum incessantly; he was chewing it now, a tendon jumping on his neck, as he locked eyes with Maris.
“Maybe the crew ate the yeast because the maker couldn’t synthesize food without power,” Maris said.
Ty popped gum. “If they just wanted the yeast, why did they dismantle the maker? And why would they have eaten the yeast when they hardly touched the reserves of food paste in their suits?”
“They preferred yeast,” Maris said curtly. She was tired. She had been working for twelve hours straight. She was looking forward to a shower and a long sleep. She didn’t have time for Ty’s spooky shit. He wanted her to contradict him, she realized, so that he could keep his silly notions alive in a pointless argument. She said, “We’ve got just one week left before we’re all rotated rockside. Let it go, Ty, unless you want to write up a report for Barrett.”
Ty didn’t write it up, of course. The supervisor, James Lo Barrett, was considered a joke amongst the wrecking gangs: an inflexible bureaucrat who was working off some kind of demerit at this obscure posting, an incomer who hardly ever left his ship, who had no idea of the practical difficulties of the work. But Ty didn’t let it go, either. The next day, midshift, he swam up to Maris and pulled a patch cord from his p-suit’s utility belt. Maris sighed, but took the free end of the cord and plugged it in.
“Something’s screwy,” Ty said. “I was outside, checking the service compartment? Turns out all the fuel cells in the back-up power system are gone.”
“The crew moved them inside after their ship was crippled,” Maris said. “We found one cell right by their bodies.”
“Yeah, but where are the other three?”
“They’ll turn up,” Maris said. “Forget it, and get back to work.”
They were floating head-to-head in the narrow shaft that ran through the middle of the shuttle’s tiny lifesystem, where Maris was feeding circuitry into the squat cube of a portable refinery that boiled off metals and separated and collected them by laser chromatography. Ty’s gaze was grabby and nervous behind his gold-filmed visor. He really was spooked. He said, “You don’t feel it? It’s not just that something weird happened here. It’s as if something’s still here. A presence, a ghost.”
“That would be Barrett. You know he’s always on my tail to keep you guys on schedule. We have fifteen days to strip this hulk. If we fall behind, he’ll dock our pay. Can you afford that, Ty? I can’t. I have people who depend on me. Forget about the fuel cells. It’s one of those mysteries that really isn’t worth thinking about. It’s nothing. Let me hear you say that.”
“It’s something,” Ty said, with a flicker of insolence. He pulled the patch cord, spun head-over-heels, and shot away down the long corridor.
“And another thing,” Maris said over the common radio channel, as Ty did a tuck-and-turn and pulled himself through a hatchway, “don’t fuck around with any more drones. Barrett called me up a couple of hours ago, said he thought you’d done something to one of them.”
“I don’t like being watched while I work,” Ty said.
“What did you do, Ty?”
“Glued it to a bulkhead. If Barrett wants to spy on me, he can come out and unglue it himself.”
Ty wouldn’t give up his idea that something was haunting the shuttle. Later, Maris caught him plugged into a private conversation with Bruno Peterfreund, the fourth member of the wrecking gang. They had just spent a couple of hours combing through the shuttle’s lifesystem, and presented her with an inventory: the com module gone; pumps and filters from the air conditioning dismounted; sleeping bags and tools missing.
“Something took all this stuff,” Ty said, “and made itself a nice cozy nest.”
“I think he’s right, boss,” Bruno said. “The stuff, it is not floating around somewhere. It’s gone.”
“The shuttle was zapped right at the beginning of the war,” Maris said. “Nothing could have survived out here for three hundred days.”
“Nothing human,” Ty said. “It’s a spook of some kind for sure. Hiding in the shadows, waiting to jump our asses.”
Maris told the two men to get back to work, but she knew this wouldn’t be the end of it. Ty and Bruno had wasted precious time chasing a ghost that couldn’t possibly exist. They had fallen behind on the job.
Sure enough, Barrett called her that evening. He’d checked her day log, and wanted to know why her gang were still refining rare metals when they should have started to dismount the fusion plant. Maris wasn’t prepared to expose her crew to Barrett’s acid ridicule, so she flat-out lied. She told him that the calibration of the refinery had drifted, that there had been cross-contamination in the collection chambers, that she had had to run everything through the refinery all over again.
“I don’t want to fine you,” Barrett said, “but I’m going to have to do it all the same. You’ve gotten behind, Maris, and I can’t be seen to favor one gang over another. It’s nothing, just 30 percent of the day’s pay, but if your gang don’t have the fusion plant dismounted by the end of tomorrow, I’m afraid that I’ll be forced to invoke another penalty.”
James Lo Barrett, the smug bastard, giving her a synthetic look of soapy sympathy. He had a fleshy, pouched face, a shaven head (even his eyebrows were shaved), and a pussy little beard that was no more than a single long braid hung off his chin and wrapped in black silk thread. He looked, Maris thought, like a fetus blimped up by some kind of accelerated growth program. He was sitting at his desk, at ease in the centrifugal gravity of his ship in a clean, brightly lit room, with real plants growing on a shelf behind him and a mug of something smothered in his podgy hands. Coffee, probably-Maris thought she could see steam rising from it. She hadn’t had a proper hot drink or meal in twenty days; the hab-module’s atmosphere was a nitrox mix at less than half an atmosphere, and water boiled at seventy degrees centigrade. It stank too, because its air scrubbers didn’t work properly; its joints needed careful monitoring because they were prone to spring leaks; its underpowered electrical system was liable to unpredictable brownouts and cut-offs; it had a low grade but intractable black mold infection; the motors and fans of its air conditioning thrummed and clanked and groaned in a continual dismal chorus. But it was infinitely better than sitting rockside, subsiding on the meager charity of the Three Powers Occupation Force and enduring the random sweeps of its police. It was work, and work was what Maris lived for, even if she had to deal with people like Barrett.
She’d met him just once, at the start of her contract. He’d made a big deal about coming out to the hab-module to meet the new wrecking gang, had a clammy handshake, grabby eyes, and smelled of eucalyptus oil. He’d tried to convince her then that he was on her side, that he thought outers were getting a tough break. “The war is over,” he’d told her. “We should draw a line under it and move on. There are tremendous possibilities out here, vast resources. Everyone can benefit. So don’t think of me as the enemy, that’s all in the past. Deal with me like you would anyone else, and we’ll get along just fine.”
Maris decided then that although she had to work for him, he couldn’t make her pretend to like him. She said now, direct and matter-of-fact, “We’ll get back on schedule. No problem.”
“Work with me, Delgado. Don’t let me down.”
