Moso knelt, pulled a panel free from the bulkhead, and peered inside.

“Hmm,” Moso murmured, looking over the internal connector. Or Kai thought it was the internal connector. He reached into his case and pulled out a palm-sized calibrator and tapped a finger at the screen. “Looks normal, but...” He sighed and reached out, fingers extended, stopping a centimeter from a long, metal tube. “Warped,” he said.

Kai knew better than to ask how he knew better than the calibrator’s diagnostic sensor. Moso had a way with machines. Especially those which, in his words, had ‘lived long enough to have character.’

Instead, Kai asked, “How long to fix it?”

“Depends. An hour, a half shift, at most.” Moso leaned over his bag and began sorting through tools, mumbling, “Pleasure cruise, she promises. Tie a line, tow a ship, she says.”

Kai stepped back, giving Moso his space. He’d fiddle and mumble until finished. She turned, only to find Obundinjo centimeters from her. Kai jumped, almost stumbling into Moso, who was too occupied with his work to notice.

“Excuse me,” Kai said. Slag, the woman was quiet.

Obundinjo stared, blinked once, twice, smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said and coughed.

“Are you ill?”

“Dust,” Obundinjo said. “And droning on and on. It grates.”

Was the therapy node still installed on the ship’s drive, or had Moso removed it for processing speed again? If Moso had deleted it, Kendra would have to whip up a sedative from her herbs. Three-and-a-half-months-corrected, less lived, in the aftermath of her crewmates’ deaths hadn’t been good for the Queen’s Luck’s CO.

The lights flickered again.

Moso looked up. “Is this a ship-wide problem? How long? How often?”

“Clete first,” Kai reminded him.

“Yes. Yes. ‘Work conditions don’t matter,’ she says. ‘This ship is scrap anyhow.’ ‘What respect does it deserve?’ she asks.”

“Waterfalls, remember? Long nights. Wine,” Kai said. “Help the captain keep her promise.”

“You are as bad as my wife.” Moso turned back to his tools.

“Moso’ll be at this for a while,” Kai said. “Can you show me to main navigation? If we can sync our drives, we’ll be able to skate out of here relatively faster. Is someone... waiting for you?”

“No.”

Kai nodded. Deep spacers, including crews of salvage ships like the Queen’s Luck and Wayward Rhapsody, tended to be loners. Or to find love with each other, like the captain and Moso. Kai hoped to find someone for herself, though it was unlikely.

Kai forced a smile. “That’s good then,” she said. “Nobody to worry.”

“Yes.”

Touchy subjects, it seemed. Months spent stewing with the possibility of your own death probably made a woman reassess all aspects of her life, Kai figured.

“I’d like to go to the nav section,” Kai suggested. “Can you show me?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Kai could follow the ship’s schematics on her own, and Moso could handle himself. Except when he got wrapped up in his work, he lost track of everything around him. Maybe Jace’s paranoia had rubbed off on Kai, at least regarding the Queen’s Luck CO, because Kai didn’t want to leave them alone. Besides, Obundinjo would get bored watching Moso mutter and fiddle around.

Obundinjo looked at Moso, ran her tongue between her lips, nodded.

“We’ll be back in a half-hour, Moso,” Kai called out. “Ping me or Jace if you need anything.”

“Twisty strippers, why are you not in your slot. ‘I’ll return it, I promise,’ Siobhan says. And she does, but where does she put you?”

“Moso!”

“Yes! Yes! Go, please. Give me thirty minutes of silence. Silence is platinum, they say. Stacks of it.”

“Come on,” Kai said. “He’ll get grumpier the longer we hang around.”

Obundinjo followed Kai. Someone, Obundinjo, presumably, had set the ship’s non-essential systems to manual to save power, so Kai had to turn the wheel and slide the bulkhead door halfway so they could pass. She left it that way. If there was a breach, emergency systems would seal it. But she disliked locking him inside herself. This ship was too quiet for Kai’s comfort.

What had happened to the crew? What had happened to the Queen’s Luck, and the earlier ship sent to retrieve the Pinter?

“Yes, there! Open up, little snake.” The words drifted into the corridor as they left Moso to his work.

As Kai and Obundinjo walked together in silence, an echoing silence that mingled with the slightly acrid scent of mechanically scrubbed and recycled air, she realized any conversation would have to begin with her.

But what to ask?

It was rude to ask directly if one was spacer-born or gravity-well grown, like Kai, though usually one could guess by a person’s frame. Even with artificial gravity, either generated or spun in ship and station rings, spacer kids spent some time in low or zero gravity. It made them leaner. And they thought in three dimensions, taking neither up nor down as given.

That had been the hardest part for Kai when she’d hired on with her first crew as a Ship’s Rat, nearly a lived decade ago. Her crewmates had had a leg up, or around, in zero-g pranks. At least some virtue of Kai’s biology had spared her spacesickness.

“What brought you to salvage work?” Kai finally managed.

“Money.”

“Saving up for something special?”

“Yes.”

Kai debated asking what Obundinjo was saving for but feared it would be rude. She was trying to make conversation, not interrogate the woman.

Kai really hoped the therapy node was still active.

A ping sounded in Kai’s earbud. She accepted it. “Jace?”

“Cargo’s all here. And something—. Are you alone?”

“No. Heading to the bridge with Obundinjo.”

“Ah. I have some questions for her.”

Kai glanced over at the woman.

Obundinjo’s hands were shaking. Not only her hands, though the ship was almost uncomfortably warm: shivers ran through her entire body, and her light brown skin had grown dull with grayish undertones.

“Obundinjo? Are you ill?”

“Yes.”

Slag.

The Pinter’s radiation shielding had been intact when they scanned it, and the chances of Obundinjo picking up a virus stranded alone in the middle of a nebula were shockingly low. Maybe she had an underlying illness the Pinter’s med-tube couldn’t treat?

If so, the Wayward Rhapsody’s system wouldn’t have better luck. Their tube had basic medications and advanced trauma care routines installed, but not exotic illnesses. Deep-space injuries tended more to bludgeoning than bacteria or viruses.

“What’s wrong?” If necessary, they could put Obundinjo on ice for the ride home and hope she was strong enough to survive thawing out.

Another flicker and crackle. Then a smell of burnt wires and darkness.

In the corridor, the darkness was absolute. The silence, nearly so. Kai’s breath tickled through her nose. No breach. If the ship had lost atmosphere, then the clunk-crunch-clunk of falling blast doors would have hammered through the remaining air.

A hand gripped Kai’s wrist, radiating cold. Nausea washed through Kai.

An outline of something, not a ghost, stood before her, a cloud of mist in a vaguely human shape. Its arms and legs were elongated, and its face shifted, features forming and fading around a starving, starless vacuum where eyes would rest.

“Let go!” Kai tried to pull away, but the thing held her tight, nails piercing her skin. Mist filled her vision, cold tickling her nose and lips.

“Kai!” Footsteps sounded from further down the corridor.

“Jace, help!” she yelled, but the thing swallowed her voice.

Plasma arced above in a blazing blue stream. A scream, unheard but felt, jarred Kai’s teeth and spiked pain in her ears.

The earbud crackled, spiking heat. Kai yanked it out and threw it down.

Slag! Slag! SLAG!

The lights came up as Jace reached Kai’s side.

Obundinjo had vanished.