I don’t know what kind of job David had asked for when he first started at Parthenope, but every time I had asked for an Overseer-adjacent position they had always brushed me off. There were too few positions available. My medical needs were too great. Be patient. Work toward promotion. Engage positively in Parthenope corporate culture and you will be rewarded.
“The thing is, um . . .” David paused again. I did not remember him being so hesitant to speak, and it made me uneasy to see him stammer and stall when I didn’t even know what he wanted. “Hey, remember that time we went to Kristin’s gran’s place down on the Jurassic Coast? I keep thinking about that weekend. I went looking for photos and vids. All that stuff. I’ve been looking, and I found something I wasn’t looking for. That was a good time.”
A hollow feeling opened up inside of me. David kept speaking, but his words slipped around me, too distant and too loud all at the same time, indistinguishable through the buzzing in my head. I remembered. A few years ago. A lifetime ago. A sweeping beach on the Jurassic Coast, beneath crumbling sandstone cliffs. We were on a retreat for the Titan tech team, those of us who would be responsible for making all our stubborn machines get along. I remembered lying on the sand on a clear, cold night, the day’s work satisfying and exciting, all of us buzzing with the potential of our own brilliance. The taste of whisky, the taste of salt, the bite of the wind, the way the stars turned and turned. The wreck of the smuggling ship Excelsior offshore, dashed by waves, its massive metal hull dark and lonely, its ghosts silent for over a hundred years.
My chest ached. I rubbed at the scar tissue over my sternum. I had missed a few words of David’s message. I played it back again.
“I just realized that you never settled up that bet you lost to me, the one about Excelsior. About what happened when it crashed.” He leaned forward, his face growing large on the wallscreen. “I was right. You were wrong. They lied about it. They lied about everything.”
He shook his head and sat back in his chair. He laughed, but it was forced, empty.
“You hear me? I was right. I won that bet after all. That lake should have been mine. I’d love to catch up. Let’s do it, okay? I can set up from my end, but you need to handle your side. You know how tetchy the OSD gets about personal comms. Hey, fuckheads!” He made a face at the camera. “I know you’re listening. Fuck off. Miss you, Hester. Let’s talk. Do this one thing for me. Please?”
I sat for a long time after the message ended. I sat and stared at the comms menu on the wallscreen and did nothing at all.
Eighteen months since I had spoken to David, and now this. I couldn’t recall when he had last asked anything of me. When we had been working together, he would wheedle and whine for silly reasons, sure, for a cup of fresh coffee, programming help, introductions to somebody he had his eye on. But he had not asked for anything after Symposium, after we learned we were stranded out here in the asshole of the solar system. There was a tremor in his voice when he said please, an unsteadiness he was trying so hard to hide. That was grief, I thought. That was fear.
I remembered the weekend he was talking about, but not as he described it. That had been before Kristin Herd joined the Titan project. The cottage had belonged to Jay Knox’s grandmother, not Kristin’s. We had argued about the Excelsior that night on the beach. David had believed the cause of the crash was a fault in the navigational system; I was certain it was human error. And I remembered clearly that David had been in the wrong. We had looked it up the next morning, over a hangover breakfast of toast and eggs. It had been the captain’s fault all along: she had been smuggling weapons from Earth to an orbital station, and her attempts to evade notice had led her into the busy traffic around the Calais spaceport, where she collided with a small unmanned cargo ship. Her ship, her crew, all the illegal weapons they were carrying, they had all crashed into the sea. Over a hundred people had died when Excelsior’s impact sent a tsunami over the southwest of England, cresting seawalls from Exeter to Bournemouth. The rebelling orbital that Excelsior had been carrying weapons to had surrendered to Earth forces only a few weeks later.
We hadn’t been mourning any of them, the smugglers or soldiers or freedom fighters, or even thinking of them at all, when we argued. That had happened over a century ago, during the meaningless rebellion of a minor orbital habitat. I couldn’t even remember which one had tried to declare its independence that time around. It had nothing to do with us. It was only a curiosity. David had promised to pay up what we had bet—first dibs on exploring Kraken Mare, Titan’s largest hydrocarbon sea—and we had laughed about it, laughed and drank and dreamed of the future. We had been so certain tomorrow, all of our tomorrows, would be splendid. I could not remember anymore what that certainty had felt like, if it had tasted of salt and bitter wind, if there had been room for
