“We’re the third ship to take this job.” Jace, head diver, backup pilot, and self-decreed doomsayer, asked, “What do you think happened to the other two?”

“Slagged.” Kai took a sip of her barley mint tea. “Nebulas are tricky.”

“You’re handling it.”

“I’m good.”

Jace laughed. He was a large man with a gravity-well build: wide shoulders, narrow waist with the hint of a gut he was always getting quick-toned on leave. His hair was buzzed this mission at five millimeters and dyed in swirls of neon yellow, orange, and blue. “Fair enough, Kai. But the others had experience too.”

“Not enough, I guess.”

“Maybe.” Jace took out his handheld, looking over the Pinter’s schematics. Jace was a checker. Double. Triple. Cautious. “There’s a point where confidence becomes recklessness.”

The Wayward Rhapsody, snub-nosed with bloated, tick-round hold, advanced towards the mining transport, Gerald Pinter, a boring box stuffed with boring minerals worth large, fascinating stacks of Consortium indexed cred sticks.

At twenty-eight-years lived, thirty-three corrected, Nakoma Kai, the Wayward Rhapsody’s Executive Officer and Lady of Odd Jobs, knew Jace resented her because of her relation to the captain. A distant niece given a position on the ship not from ability but because of a colossal screw-up. A screw up that would have, without her family’s connections, landed Kai on a prison asteroid and not a second chance on a well-regarded salvage ship.

At the same time, nebulas were tricky. Too many suns, too close-packed. They got stupid pilots killed.

Kai turned up the sound in her earbuds, listening to the hum of gravity’s pull and push on local spacetime. Allergic to internal cyber, she couldn’t support a chip to run real-time calculations. She depended on the shipboard system and a certainty in her gut the morphing of sight and sound gave her. Kai didn’t talk about that part, any more than she talked about the ghosts.

No ghosts here. Odd debris field though, approaching, the particles more refined and diverse in size and shape than the usual clumps of conglomerating dust making up the young stellar grouping where the Pinter had lost its way.

“Kai?”

Kai lowered the background audio and nodded.

“How long?”

“Eighteen minutes,” Kai said, adding. “Approximately.”

“Right.”

Everything on the Rhapsody was approximately.

Debris like downside hail pattered on the ship’s reflective skin. A squall, the particles too tiny to affect their course. As they flew, the tap-tip-tap grew louder.

“Thought we were out of the dust?”

Kai said, “It’s something else.”

A wreck? If so, it had happened quickly. No whispers, cold patches, or phantom fingers tickling over Kai’s skin. The pieces, if they were pieces, seemed too fine and dispersed for anything other than an attack or self-destruct.

“Should we ping the captain?” Jace suggested.

“I’m sure she’s on her way.” No matter it was a third shift and they wouldn’t be attempting to tow or board the Gerald Pinter until Jace finished his site assessment, the debris would give Captain Lee an excuse to look in on the crew and their progress without appearing to meddle.

Unless, by some miracle, she had fallen asleep.

“Right.” Jace sighed.

Before they’d taken on Jace and Kendra, Captain Lee’s habit had been to pace the bridge, offering suggestions. After three days of this, Jace had threatened to resign, and Kendra, who played to win, had started drugging the captain’s first-shift caffeine mix.

Now Captain Lee left the crew to their work. Mostly.

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Cutting through the nebula’s song, a com signal crackled in Kai’s ear. At first, Kai ignored it, thinking it was feedback from the gravitational monitors.

“What’s that?” Jace asked, looking up from his handheld at the blinking light on the main screen. “Is that from the Pinter?”

“Dunno.” Kai localized the direction. “Yeah, it is. A distress signal.”

The bulkhead door slid open with the usual chik-clunk.

Captain Siobhan Lee strode in. “What’s this we’re hitting? Not the Pinter, I hope?”

“No. Our prize is intact.”

The captain was a compact, amber-eyed woman, skin light brown and webbing at the corners of her eyes and lips, her once deep auburn curls threaded with white.

Despite her gravity-well birth, Captain Lee had a spacer’s build, long-limbed, lean, and grizzled. She and Kai shared little by way of looks. Kai was tall and dark, her coily hair cropped to five millimeters, her eyes larger than the captain’s and upturned beneath strong instead of wispy brows, her lips full, set in a strong jaw with blunted chin.

The thing that bound them, besides the Rhapsody and beyond blood, was ghosts.

Kai slid her fingers over the touchscreen, and a projection of the Pinter sputtered to life between herself and Jace. A white line fluttered through the image, a massive gray box with a clear, plastisteel half sphere clinging to the top. Crew quarters. Kai said, “We’ve got a distress call.”

“Still running?” Captain Lee crossed the room, squinting down at Kai’s screen where a yellow, blinking circle in the upper right showed an incoming communication. “It’s been five standard months, seven accounting for travel. And the company said the ship shuts down seventy-two hours after life signs cease.”

Kai shrugged. “Power’s back, I guess. Good news for you, Jace.”

“Maybe.”

Kai called up the message, running it through the main speaker.

“This is First Officer Marion Barker a’ Obundinjo of the Queen’s Luck, now marooned on the Giles Pinter, requesting urgent assistance.”

“Queen’s Luck?” Nakoma asked, suspecting she already knew the answer, and it would involve Jace being snotty and correct.

“Ship number two. Cracking over our hull now in bits, I bet. Told you this was a bad idea.”

“A bad idea that paid.”

“Half.”

“And half plus twenty percent on delivery.” Every stick already spent. Kai had an intimate relationship with the Wandering Rhapsody’s finances. Or Beggar’s Rhapsody, as their engineer, Captain Lee’s husband, often muttered when he knew others were listening.

“Children.” Captain Lee leaned over Jace’s shoulder. “Answer it.”

“It’s a recording. You think they’re still alive?” Kai asked.

“Establish a channel and find out.”

“On it.”

Fifteen seconds later, a response.

“Hello? Are you real? Tell me you’re real!” The vidscreen flickered to life, displaying the grainy image of an emaciated woman, narrow face framed in a halo of frizzed, black curls, wide, dark brown eyes, small, upturned nose, and blunt chin.

“We’re real, CO. I’m Captain Lee of the Wayward Rhapsody,” Lee said. “What happened? How many of you are over there?”

“Just me.” The connection crackled, her image pixelating as she continued, “Queen’s—disintegrate—. I was—weapon, m-variant—? I don’t—”

“You were attacked? Kai, scan for other ships. And... consult with engineering.”

Coward.

Not that Kai blamed the captain for having her run interference between her and his husband. Boka Moso had a temper.

Nakoma pinged Engineering.

Moso, a young man when their antique vessel had been merely middle-aged, snapped in Nakoma’s earbud. “Busy.”

“Turn on your con.” Nakoma subvocalized. “There’s a survivor on the Pinter, from the last ship sent to retrieve them, the Queen’s Luck.”

“Last ship. Siobhan said nothing of a previous ship.” Moso sounded hurt. “She promised me boring. An anniversary gift, she said. Better than the waterfalls of Clete, she said.”

“I’m sure that’s what she thought,” Kai cut in before the hurt melted into fury and Moso left engineering to give his wife (and everyone else) a piece of his mind, punctuated by smacks of wrench against bulkhead. Moso knew the ship well enough to spare it while giving their eardrums a ringing that would last minutes after he’d stalked back out.

“The Queen’s CO and only survivor mentioned something about an m-variant in the area and maybe a weapon. Disintegrate. She’s breaking up.”

“Easy work, Siobhan said. Then we rest our old bones in Maran hot-springs, she said. Wine in bed, she said.”

“Can you scan for m-variant activity?”

Moso sighed. “Scan for m-variant hostiles, Kai says. Find out who’s trying to kill us today, she says.” He left the connection up, and his breathing, and the faraway thump of his footsteps on the deck set a reassuring backdrop in her left ear as Captain Lee and Jace reestablished their connection with the Giles Pinter.

“—water enough, but I’ve been stretching the remaining rations.” Barker a’ Obundinjo’s image flickered in and out.

“What attacked you?”

“I don’t know. We had issues with the tow line, and I came here with our engineer, Elise—” The CO swallowed, wiping a hand under her eye. No tears, but her lips shook. She breathed in through her nose, exhaled. “Elise was pulled out when the airlock blew. She died quick, I beg the darkness.”

Some spacers prayed, others cursed, and others begged the darkness.

“And coms went out,” Obundinjo continued. “This ship is a hot mess. Malfunctions of every kind. There was a flare. Sun flare, took out our sensors for fourteen minutes. After, I scanned for the Queen’s Luck and hailed. They didn’t make it back, did they?”

“I’m sorry.”

The CO bowed her head.

Over the earbud, Moso said, “Nebula’s overwhelming the m-variant sensor. Tell my wife she said nothing of rogue magical entities.”

Kai passed this along to the captain, adding, “Engineering isn’t happy.”

“I’m aware.” Captain Lee flicked a finger at her earbud. “Well aware.”

Jace choked a laugh into a cough.

“How long until we can dock?” Captain Lee asked.

“Ten minutes,” Moso said over her earbud. “And tell my wife she’d best be thinking how to make this up to me. Again.”