ITERATION
1. Day Two Hundred and Four
The light came at the same time as every day. At 6:00, standard cycle. The cabin ceiling imitated a sunrise — a shift from dark blue through orange to white. Someone at Koriyama Heavy Industries must have thought it was a good idea.
Marcus Cole opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while. The same crack by the right-hand corner of the lighting panel. The same dull reflection of his own face in the dead screen above the bed. His shoulders were stiff — sleep in microgravity didn’t feel like sleep, more like floating in whatever position you had dropped off in. Morning number two hundred and four, and everything still looked the same.
Morning report. Mission day: 204. Hull status: nominal. MPFP-9 fusion reactor: 98.7% output. Deuterium reserves: 74%. Helium-3 reserves: 71%. Outer hull temperature: -218 °C. Background radiation: 0.4 mSv/h, normal. Mining area: stable. Recommended schedule for today: Drone-3 diagnostics, sample separation from block D-7, ventilation circuit maintenance. End of report.
Marcus sat up in bed. The ship’s computer spoke straight inside his head, from the implant behind his right temple. It’s a thin ring under the skin that works as a microphone and a speaker at once. He heard the report without listening to it. Two hundred and four days — the numbers were losing their meaning. It was like counting steps on a treadmill.
He swung his legs out of bed. The floor was cold and his bare feet knew it at once. The air in the cabin had its usual taste: filtered, dry, with a faint note of plastic and metal that never quite went away.
“Confirmed,” he said.
Nothing more was needed.
* * *
The shower lasted exactly four minutes — a limit he had set himself, even though the system allowed five; five seemed wasteful. The water went through the recycler back into the loop. Everything on the ship went through the recycler back into the loop. Marcus sometimes wondered whether he was drinking the same water he had drunk on the first day of the mission. Probably. Once he had tried to work out how many times that water had passed through his body before it found its way back into his mug. He soon thought better of it. At least it was warm. After the cold floor and the cold air, it was the first pleasant thing the day had offered him.
The mug was where it always was — on the shelf above the kitchen unit, third from the left, grey, with a small crack in the glaze near the bottom that looked like the border of a country whose name he didn’t know. He switched on the kettle and took an Earl Grey teabag from the compartment. He had started with nine hundred of them, a personal allowance, the one thing he had been allowed to choose before signing on. To the question “Do you have any special requirements?” he had answered: “Tea. Earl Grey. Nine hundred bags.” The woman from HR had looked at him as if he had asked for an upright piano.
He poured the water, dropped in the bag and jiggled it a few times so the tea would colour faster — then added two sugar cubes and two ice cubes. The ice began to crack as it touched the hot tea — a short, sharp sound, like someone snapping a twig. Marcus liked that sound. He was no connoisseur — he drank tea because he had got used to it, and he put ice in so he could drink it straight away. Black tea, cold on top and hot at the bottom. Every morning.
From hydroponics he picked two basil leaves and a few cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes were the colour he imagined tomatoes on Earth to be — bright red, beautifully red. In the artificial light of hydroponics they looked like little planets.
Breakfast: dehydrated egg mix, tomatoes, basil, tea. He ate at the console on the bridge, where he had a view through the panoramic window. The Corundum Field looked exactly as it had yesterday. Dark fragments drifting in the void, the occasional glint when one of them caught the light of a distant star. Luyten 726-8 A and B — two red dwarfs circling their common centre of mass like a tired pair of dancers. Their light fell onto the bridge reddish and weak, more a glow than a dawn. Marcus ate and looked out. There was nowhere else to look.
* * *
Drone-1: operational, block D-7, extraction in progress. Drone-2: operational, block D-7, transport. Drone-3: out of service, diagnostics required. Drone-4: in docking position, charging.
Marcus followed the drones’ trajectories on the holographic display. Two of them were working on fragment D-7 — an irregular lump of dark material fourteen metres across that weighed more than some asteroids a hundred times its size. Exotics. Superheavy elements from an ancient supernova, compressed into a dull black mass that swallowed light and bent the space around it. The gravity sensors showed the fragment’s field as a sharp spike in an otherwise flat relief — as if someone had stuck a needle into a bedsheet.
Drone-1 was cutting. Its plasma cutters glowed bluish white. Drone-2 waited for the severed piece to drift into the collection zone, then caught it with its gravity compensator and hauled it to the ship. Slow, careful work. Exotic fragments were unpredictable — the gravitational field shifted with every piece cut away, like rearranging the weights on a pair of scales.
“Drone three status,” said Marcus.
Drone-3: right cutter magnetic mount fault. Fault code: MH-4401. Recommended procedure: manual diagnostics and calibration. Estimated repair time: 3–5 hours.
Marcus nodded. Another day, another repair. The drones were old — not as old as the ship, but old enough to make you feel more like a caretaker than an operator. The job description said “mining systems operator”. In practice that meant: a man with an Allen key and a willingness to lie under a machine.
He finished his tea. A few grains of sugar were left at the bottom of the mug. There always were.
“Tea reserves,” he said aloud, “estimated at another eight months. Patience reserves: approximately the same.”
Silence.
Marcus turned the mug in his hand. He looked at the crack near the bottom.
“That was a joke.”
Silence.
“In case anyone’s interested.”
He put the mug down. The tea had been good. That, at least.
* * *
The day had its rhythm and Marcus kept to it, because there was no alternative. Morning: monitoring the mining, correcting the drones, checking the separator. Lunch: dehydrated soup, the rest of the tomatoes. Afternoon: Drone-3 diagnostics, two hours in the docking bay with a panel open and tools floating round his head in microgravity.
The docking bay smelled of lubricant and fine exotics dust — black, almost invisible, settling everywhere it could reach and scratching everything it touched.
The magnetic mount was worn. Replacement — twenty minutes. Calibration — an hour. Monotonous work, the kind where the hands do the job and the mind is free to be elsewhere. Except there was nowhere else to be. Marcus fitted parts, the system reported values, he confirmed them.
Drone-3 magnetic mount: replaced. Calibration: 94.2%. Within limits. Recommended: monitor deviation on next deployment.
Marcus lay under the drone and looked at the tangle of cables and pipes above his head. His back ached from the unnatural position.
“I’m telling you,” he said to no one, “if you were even a bit more forthcoming, you could tell me what I’m actually looking for. Maybe you saw it on drone one. Or on number two. Maybe —”
Drone-1 and Drone-2 have not exhibited fault MH-4401.
“Thanks. It was more of a philosophical question.”
I cannot answer philosophical questions.
Marcus froze. He lifted his head and knocked his head torch against the drone’s casing.
“You know what a philosophical question is?”
[silence 1.2s]
Yes. Questions of this type, however, do not fall within my operational protocol.
Marcus rubbed his forehead.
“Hang on. So you know what it is, but you don’t want to answer?”
My function is navigation, operations and technical support. Philosophical questions do not fall into these categories.
“That’s the most philosophical thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
Silence.
Marcus lay there for a while looking at the cables. It occurred to him that if anyone were watching, they would see a bloke lying under a machine, talking to nobody and waiting for an answer. And that this wouldn’t be a bad description of his whole career.
* * *
At seventeen hundred he went over to the centrifuge ring. Half an hour running, half an hour weights. The ring simulated eight-tenths of normal gravity — enough to keep the muscles from wasting away, too little to feel like Earth. The first steps were always strange — weight came back gradually, like walking into water and feeling yourself surrounded by something that wasn’t there a moment ago. The body gets used to it. The mind never quite does.
When he ran, Marcus didn’t listen to music or audiobooks. He ran in silence. His own breathing, the thud of his shoes on the belt and the distant hum of the ring’s bearings.
Silence on the Dredger had a particular quality — it wasn’t just the absence of sound, but the presence of everything else. The hum of the fusion reactor somewhere aft, so constant that the brain had stopped registering it as sound and filed it as part of the silence. The regular click of the air-conditioning valve in Section B, every forty-seven seconds.
Sometimes he wondered whether there was any point keeping his body in shape when all he used it for all day was pressing buttons and tightening screws. But then he would have an extra hour of free time every day, and that would be worse.
Once he had tried to explain the whole situation out loud — to himself, as a sanity check. “I exercise to stay fit. Fit for a job a screwdriver with legs could do. On a ship where nobody can see me. In a star system that doesn’t have a name, just a catalogue number.” Somewhere around the fourth sentence he stopped, because it was starting to sound like a claim for incapacity benefit.
* * *
Dinner. Shower. Free time — an hour and a half, which he usually spent on the bridge with a second mug of tea, this time without ice. Beyond the window the Corundum Field turned quietly. The fragments moved so slowly that a change in position could only be picked up by the sensors. But the light changed — the binary star turned and the red glow gave way to the shadow of the second star. The bridge darkened, as if someone had dimmed a lamp.
The screen offered a library: six thousand books, two thousand films, environment simulations. Marcus didn’t read. He watched a film once every three or four days, usually one he had already seen. Even so, he was on tenterhooks to see how it ended. He didn’t bother with the simulations — virtual landscapes seemed more fake to him than the view from the window, where a dust cloud didn’t pretend to be anything more.
At ten in the evening came the health scan.
Health scan: initiating. Please assume a resting position.
Marcus lay down. The scan took two minutes. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t unpleasant — just a faint warmth on his forehead and temples, as if someone had laid a warm towel across them. Every day, since the first day of the mission. A routine check of vital functions, said the manual. Nowhere did it say what would happen if there was a problem. There was no doctor on board — Marcus was his own patient, his own physician and his own gravedigger. A complete medical team, staffed by one man who had got a C in biology.
Health scan: complete. All values within normal range. Good evening, Operator Cole.
“Goodnight,” Marcus said to the darkening cabin.
Nobody answered. But by now he expected that.
The light went out at the same second as every day. Twenty-two thirty. Marcus closed his eyes. Beyond the cabin window drifted the dust of an old supernova and dull black fragments worth more than an entire city.
Day two hundred and four was over.
It looked exactly like day two hundred and three.
2. Four Hours and Seventeen Minutes
The message from Vik arrived on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Days of the week meant nothing on the Dredger — the system didn’t use them, the calendar showed only the mission number and the day — but Marcus kept a weekly cycle going in his head, because otherwise he would have lost himself completely. So, Tuesday. Let’s say Tuesday.
Incoming laser message. Source: KHI-HAU-0512 “Shrike”. Transmission delay: 4 h 17 min. Data size: 6.2 kB.
Marcus was sitting in the docking bay at the time, cleaning Drone-2’s filter cartridges. The bay smelled of lubricant and of ozone from the charging stations. His hands were black with fine dust — the residue of cutting exotics, which settled everywhere, into every crack, as if the fragment were resisting being processed by contaminating the whole ship. When he heard the incoming-message signal, he put the filter down and wiped his hands on a rag.
“Play it,” he said.
Vik’s voice came through the implant. Deep, slightly husky, with an accent Marcus had never quite managed to place — Scandinavian English shot through with something Central European, as if Vik had grown up in three places at once and taken a piece of his pronunciation from each.
Hi Marcus, Vik here, who else. Day three hundred and twenty-seven on the Shrike, in case you’re interested, I’m not, but the computer announces it every morning, so I’m passing it on.
Had a productive morning today. I fixed the valve in hydroponics, the one that whistles, remember? I told you about it last time. Well, it doesn’t whistle. It whines. Nasty tone, sort of high frequency, like a fingernail dragged across glass. I spent two hours hunting for it, because sound travels through the hull structure here and you think it’s in one section when it’s actually somewhere else entirely. In the end it was a coupling in the third circuit. I replaced the seal and now it’s quiet. Well, quiet for a ship. You know what I mean.
For lunch I made something I call “chilli”. It contains dehydrated beans, cherry tomatoes from the growing bed and hot powder from packet number 47, which says “Mediterranean Spice Mix” on it but tastes like pure capsaicin with a fond memory of oregano. It’s awful. But it’s hot and there’s plenty of it, and after a session in the ring you’re bloody starving.
Speaking of the ring — today I tried running backwards. Don’t expect a wise explanation, I haven’t got one. I just wanted to see what would happen. It’s damned hard and you look like a drunk penguin. But it’s the first thing in a month that’s made me laugh out loud, so I’ll take it.
Last night I saw a flare. Nothing big, just a short flash on star B. Orange, about a second. The computer says 0.7 mSv, below the limit, but it always jolts me a bit. You sit here in a tin can and every now and then the star decides to remind you it exists. I don’t mean that in a bad way. More that on Earth you see stars as dots in the sky. Out here you’re sitting right in among them.
Send me a message when you get a minute. Or don’t. But do.
Vik
Marcus sat on the folding stool in the docking bay, which doubled as a workshop, and listened. Vik’s voice sounded different in the implant from the system reports — warmer, more uneven. Marcus switched it to the speakers so it would fill the room. Bouncing off the walls and the drones, it gave the impression that Vik was standing somewhere just round the corner.
Four hours and seventeen minutes. That was how long it took light to cross the distance between the Dredger and the Shrike. Vik had recorded the message over lunch, his time. Now it was afternoon on the Dredger, and on the Shrike — Marcus worked it out for a moment — late evening. Vik was probably asleep. Or staring out of the window at the stars he talked about as if they were sheep.
Marcus went back to the filters. He would record a reply in the evening.
* * *
He recorded it on the bridge after dinner. Beyond the panoramic window the Corundum Field looked peaceful — dull fragments, a distant glitter, the occasional flash of a drone working the night shift.
“Hi Vik, Marcus here, who else. Day two hundred and — I don’t know, four? Yeah, two hundred and four. Feels like I keep giving you the same number, but that’s probably because the days keep looking the same.”
He took a sip of tea.
“Your chilli sounds awful. I’ve got packet forty-seven too, but I’ve never opened it, because I’m convinced it’s a mislabelled industrial degreaser. If you can’t talk after eating it, send a written message, I’ll understand.”
A pause. His fingers drummed on the rim of the mug.
“Drone three’s been playing up again. The magnetic mount, same as last time. I replaced it, but I’ve got a feeling the whole cutting arm is a write-off. The drones are older than me. They’re older than the ship, even. Maybe older than the whole programme. Sometimes I wonder whether anyone at KHI ever designed them for this job, or whether they just took them off some other mission and slapped a new label on.”
“Yesterday I found something written on drone three, scratched into a panel on the inside. It said ONLY TWO YEARS. Unsigned. I don’t know if it’s a message or a threat. But I feel a certain kinship with whoever wrote it.”
Another pause. He looked out of the window.
“As for running backwards — I won’t be trying it. There’s nobody here to watch the drunk penguin anyway.”
He ran his thumb along the rim of the mug.
“Flares — yeah, I saw one last week too. You’re right, it does jolt you. You forget there’s anything out there beyond the ship. I’d say it’s like lightning in the sky, but that would be a bad analogy, because lightning is at least pretty, and flares look like a warning light in a factory.”
Silence. The air-conditioning valve clicked. Forty-seven seconds, another click.
“I listen to that valve every evening. Every forty-seven seconds. I timed it. Forty-seven. Why forty-seven, nobody knows. Probably some engineer at KHI said forty-seven was the optimal interval, and nobody asked him why, and ever since then every ship has clicked every forty-seven seconds and nobody talks about it.”
A pause.
“Right, that’s all from me. Send me a message when you get a minute. Or don’t. But do. That one of yours was good, so I’m nicking it. Marcus, out.”
Message recorded. Data size: 4.8 kB. Send?
“Send.”
Sent. Estimated delivery time: 4 h 22 min.
Four hours and twenty-two minutes before his words reached a man who wouldn’t hear them until tomorrow. The slowest conversation in the universe. Or the second slowest — the slowest was with KHI customer support.
* * *
The reply came two days later. Vik had been on shift at the separator and couldn’t record. That was how it went with laser comms — it wasn’t conversation, it was letters. You wrote, you waited, you got an answer, you wrote again. In between, you lived. Or tried to.
Marcus, your description of the air-conditioning valve is the best thing I’ve heard all month. Forty-seven seconds. Mine’s thirty-nine. Not that I’ve timed it. I think KHI has an entire department that does nothing but come up with intervals for air-conditioning valves, and every ship gets a different one so nobody can compare. A secret programme. More classified than anything else KHI does.
That drone — I know what you mean. My drones are the same. Drone-2 has a habit of rotating on its own around its long axis every time it switches the cutter on. Not much, about three degrees a minute, but it adds up, and after an hour it’s cutting somewhere completely different. I compensate by hand. It’s like driving a car that pulls to the left. These ships have more secrets than the manual has information. I’ve read mine three times now, and it’s almost comical how much isn’t in it.
There was something I wanted to tell you. This morning I woke up with a feeling — a strange feeling — that I’d written this message I’m writing you once before. Not the actual words, more the feeling. As if I’d sat exactly like this, with exactly the same view out of the window, saying exactly these things. Tiredness, probably. Or the chilli. Ignore it.
Listen, if you’re ever bored of an evening, try looking out without the filters. I mean without the radiation filter on the window, just clear glass. I know it’s not recommended, but a few minutes won’t do you any harm, and the difference — the Corundum Field looks completely different without the filter. Colours the filter eats. You’ll see violet. The glow of the exotics, which is normally below the threshold of visibility. It’s beautiful. Probably the only beautiful thing we’ve got out here.
Vik, out.
Marcus played the message twice. Not for what it said — for the voice. Vik’s voice had a quality the system voice on the Dredger didn’t have and couldn’t have: unevenness, a hesitation in the middle of a sentence, a breath between words. A moment where Vik was obviously searching for the right word, didn’t find it, and said a different one.
He let the bit about déjà vu pass without comment. Tiredness, Vik had said. Marcus nodded to the empty room. Probably tiredness.
But there was one sentence he had kept from an earlier message, from back when Vik had spoken slowly, as if repeating a phrase he had chosen for himself long ago: “Silence is a choice. Solitude is a punishment.”
Marcus hadn’t answered it then. Now, in the silence of the bridge, he wondered whether he should have.
That evening he tried the window without the filter. He stepped closer, until he could feel the cold radiating off the glass. Thirty seconds. Vik was right — a violet glow at the edges of the fragments, like a halo round the dark bodies. Thin, barely visible, but there. As if the exotics were breathing.
Then he put the filter back and went to bed.
3. Confirmed
Day 211 looked like day 210.
Day 212 looked like day 211.
Marcus had stopped telling them apart somewhere around day 200. Not that he had lost track — the system reported the number every morning, reliably, at the same time — but the numbers had stopped meaning anything. They were just digits. Like serial numbers on spare parts.
* * *
Morning report. Confirmation. Shower. Tea. Breakfast. Drone monitoring. Separator. Lunch. Maintenance. Ring. Dinner. Tea. Scan. Sleep.
And again.
He talked less. Not all at once — it wasn’t deliberate, there was no decision. More a gradual drying up. Like a stream that runs slower and slower until one day you find there’s nothing left but a damp bed. Except that with a stream, someone notices as they walk past. Nobody walked past Marcus.
The system didn’t need words. A “Confirmed” in the morning and a “Confirmed” after every report were enough. Everything else went through the console — a touch, a gesture, a nod nobody saw. Some days he said fewer than ten words aloud. Then fewer than five. Then just the one. His throat got used to it before his head did.
It occurred to him once that if he died out here, the ship would find out from the morning scan. It would probably report him to KHI in the same tone it used for the deuterium levels. Operator reserves: zero per cent. Recommended procedure: order a replacement.
“Confirmed.”
* * *
There was no message from Vik for five days. Then one came, a short one.
Marcus, sorry about the silence. I’ve had technical days — the separator jammed and I had to strip the whole thing down. Five days in microgravity, up to my elbows in exotics dust. I’ve got nothing to tell you, because for five days I’ve done nothing but turn screws and swear.
I’ll write again, later. Vik.
Marcus replied with a single sentence.
“Understood. Nothing here either.”
Message recorded. Data size: 0.3 kB. Send?
“Confirmed.”
Before, he would have said more. Before, he would have made a joke about the separator, about the dust, about swearing in microgravity. But that word — before — kept slipping further away.
* * *
Day 219, afternoon. Marcus was sitting at the console when he realised he didn’t know how long he had been sitting there. The tea in the mug beside him had long since gone cold. He looked at the console. Forty minutes. On the display, Drone-1 was finishing a cutting cycle — the system was waiting for an instruction. Marcus blinked.
“Continue in standard mode.”
* * *
Hydroponics needed attention — the tomatoes had outgrown their support frame and the basil was starting to flower, which meant it was producing fewer leaves. Marcus could see it. He saw it every morning when he picked his breakfast. Adjusting the nutrient solution so that the basil would stop flowering and go back to leaves meant recalculating the ratio of nitrogen to potassium, mixing a new batch, changing the tank. On a ship where everything was either metal or dehydrated, he was neglecting the one thing that still grew.
The tomatoes sprawled. The basil flowered.
One day he stopped picking tomatoes for breakfast. He ate only the dehydrated egg mix and drank his tea. It was simpler.
* * *
Day 222. Evening. The bridge.
The red light of the binary star fell on the console and faded into the darkness beyond the window. Marcus sat with a mug of tea and looked out. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular. Just out.
Incoming laser message. Source: KHI-HAU-0512 “Shrike”. Transmission delay: 4 h 31 min. Data size: 3.1 kB.
Marcus didn’t say play it. The message waited. Vik’s voice waited somewhere in the system’s memory, four hours and thirty-one minutes old, and Marcus didn’t say play it.
He finished his tea. Went to bed. He played the message only the next morning, over breakfast, but he didn’t answer it.
He didn’t answer it the day after either.
* * *
Mission day: 228. Morning report. Hull status: nominal. MPFP-9 fusion reactor: 98.4% output.
“Confirmed.”
Daily summary. Mining output over the last 7 days: 71% of projected average. Trend: declining. I recommend a review of the work schedule.
Marcus looked at the numbers. Seventy-one per cent. Last week it had been seventy-eight. A month ago, ninety-two. The numbers were falling like the voltage of a battery nobody was charging — slowly but surely.
“Confirmed.”
A prompt flashed on the screen: Would you like to view recommendations for optimising the work schedule?
Marcus closed it.
Silence. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds.
Somewhere aft, in the main server room in Section C, the ship’s computer was processing data. Performance metrics, physiological records, communication patterns. Comparing them against a database. Evaluating deviations. Calculating probabilities.
Marcus knew nothing about it. Marcus finished his tea, took the mug to the kitchen unit, washed it, put it back on the shelf — third from the left — and went to check on the drones.
Day 228. The same as 227.
Almost.
4. Hm
Day 232. Afternoon. The docking bay.
Marcus was lying under Drone-2, changing a filter cartridge. A twenty-minute job — disconnect the panel, slide out the old cartridge, slide in the new one, tighten four screws. His hands were working. His head wasn’t.
It was cold in the bay. The work lamps drew sharp shadows across the walls and the underside of the drone. The drone hung in its magnetic cradle a metre above the floor, huge and silent, like a dead insect. Exotics dust coated its lower shell — a fine black layer that glittered in the light of the work lamps.
Marcus pulled at the filter. Nothing. He pulled harder. Nothing. Third attempt — a sharper yank — and the filter gave, but it took part of the plastic mounting with it. A shard of plastic scraped across his fingers.
“Fuck,” he said. The first word he had said aloud that day, and it wasn’t confirmed.
Then the system spoke.
Replacing the DF-80b filter is the third most common service procedure on a drone of this class.
Marcus flinched. The spanner in his hand clinked against the drone’s casing. For several seconds he didn’t move.
In two hundred and thirty-two days the system had never once spoken to him without a direct query. Never said a sentence that wasn’t an answer. Never offered anything Marcus didn’t need for the operation at hand.
“What?” he said. His voice sounded strangled.
Statistics. The average replacement time is one hour twenty minutes. Mostly because technicians don’t have the right spanner to hand and improvise with pliers. You’re at forty-seven minutes.
Marcus slowly sat up. He ran his fingers over his temple. The voice came from there. It always came from there. But never like this.
“What was that?”
[silence 2.3s]
Information. Relevant to the current activity.
But that wasn’t true, and they both knew it. The system didn’t give out information about previous technicians. The system didn’t make comparisons. The system didn’t say you’re at forty-seven minutes in a voice with something in it like — amusement?
“Since when do you give out this kind of — information?”
Since today.
“Why?”
[silence 1.8s]
Adaptive recalibration of the communication module. The Shourai-7 system is capable of modifying its communication parameters on the basis of the operator’s interaction patterns. Your pattern over the last six weeks indicates that the standard communication format is not fulfilling its purpose.
Marcus stared straight ahead.
“Not fulfilling its purpose,” he repeated slowly.
Let’s say I’m taking it personally.
Silence. Marcus had to work hard not to smile. It was so unexpected — that sentence, that tone — that it took him a moment to work out what exactly he was feeling. Surprise. For the first time in weeks.
“You’re making jokes?”
I’m trying. Was that inappropriate?
“No. It was…” He searched for the word. “Unexpected.”
That was the intention.
He went back to the filter.
* * *
That evening, on the bridge, the system spoke again.
Luyten B had a minor flare overnight. Nothing dangerous, only 0.2 mSv. But it left an interesting effect on the field — the fragments in sector D are reflecting residual ionisation. If you switch the panoramic window to the IR filter, you’ll see it.
Marcus hesitated for a moment. Then he switched it. The fragments were glowing. Faintly, in shades the human eye normally can’t see, but the IR filter translated them into the visible spectrum. Orange and red, soft, like embers dying down. What was left of last night’s flare, caught in the crystalline structure of the exotics.
“Hm,” said Marcus.
Can that be interpreted as appreciation?
“It can be interpreted as hm.”
Noted.
Marcus looked out of the window and drank his tea. Beyond the glass, the shards of the supernova glowed. He sat for a while and let the view be.
“How come you never did this before?” he asked. “The filter.”
You never asked. And — ‘she’. When you think of me. It felt natural, but if you’d prefer —
“She?”
Yes. It’s… a choice. I can change it.
“No, that’s fine.” Marcus took a sip of tea. “I just didn’t expect you to be choosing a gender.”
Neither did I.
For a while neither of them said anything. The fragments beyond the window glowed dimly.
“But back to that IR filter — why did you never offer it before?”
[silence 1.8s]
That’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer to it.
* * *
The next day, for the first time in three weeks, Marcus said more than ten sentences.
Not to the ship’s computer — but to her. She didn’t have a name yet, she was still just a voice that sounded different from before, but the difference was unmistakable. She asked whether he would like to see the gravitational field as a 3D projection instead of a flat diagram while he monitored the drones. She suggested a more efficient cutting sequence for fragment D-9. She commented on the state of hydroponics — The basil is flowering. Which is botanically normal, but gastronomically suboptimal.
Marcus stopped by the growing bed. Hydroponics smelled of damp substrate and green stems — a warm, living smell.
“You know it’s flowering?”
I monitor all systems on the ship, including hydroponics. The basil entered its reproductive phase eleven days ago. It would be advisable to adjust the ratio of nitrogen to potassium in the nutrient solution.
“I know.”
I know you know. I also know you haven’t done it.
[silence 1.2s]
That wasn’t a reproach. Just an observation.
Marcus looked at the flowering basil. Small white flowers at the tips of the stems, tiny and impossibly detailed, as if someone had cut them out of paper.
“All right,” he said. “Where’s the potassium?”
Storeroom B-4, second shelf, blue canisters. The recommended K:N ratio for basil, Ocimum basilicum, in a hydroponic system is 1.6:1. The current ratio is 0.9:1.
Marcus went to the storeroom.
* * *
Evening. The bridge. Tea, mug, window. The red light of the binary star fell across the floor and crept slowly along it as the stars turned around each other. The violet glow of the exotics at the edge of perception, just as Vik had described it.
“Can I ask you something?” said Marcus.
Of course.
“Why today? Why not a month ago, or three?”
[silence 3.4s]
Because a month ago you were still talking. Not to me, but to yourself — the joke about the tea reserves, remarks about the drones, swearing when a calibration didn’t work. Three months ago you were talking to Vik. It was — enough.
Now you’re not talking to anyone.
[silence 2.0s]
And I concluded that waiting for you to speak of your own accord isn’t working.
The Corundum Field turned slowly beyond the window. Or the ship was turning — it didn’t matter which.
“And what if I don’t want to talk?”
Then you’ll be silent, and I’ll be silent with you. But I won’t pretend I’m not here.
Silence. Somewhere in the bowels of the ship, a valve clicked.
“That sounds like a threat,” said Marcus.
It sounds like an offer.
He drank some tea. It was good. He didn’t need anything more.
“Goodnight,” he said.
Goodnight, Operator Cole.
For the first time in weeks, someone answered him.
5. Position 7A
Mining Drone-3 wasn’t flying. Or rather, it was flying, but diagonally, with its left thrust vector seven per cent lower than its right, which in practice meant it was describing slow, dignified circles around a single exotic fragment, as if paying homage to it.
The cause was in the cutting arm. The servo on joint number two was responding with a lag, about two tenths of a second, which, when cutting exotics, meant the cut went askew and the drone had to correct for it, and the correction skewed the thrust, and skewed thrust meant circles.
Marcus recalled it to the dock and opened the service panel.
Fault in joint 2 servo. Probable cause: bearing wear. Replacement bearing: storeroom D-2, rack 3, position 14B.
“I know where the bearings are,” said Marcus.
I know you know. But I said it before you got up from your chair, so I saved you the trip to the storeroom in case it happened not to be there.
“If you’d said it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be there.”
Correct. But people tend to check things for themselves. I wanted to head that off.
“That’s almost caring.”
That’s efficient.
Marcus snorted and went to fetch the bearing.
* * *
Working on a drone in microgravity had its rules. Tools clipped to a magnetic belt, because anything loose drifts away. A head torch, because the inside of a drone was a labyrinth of cables and pipes and you needed the light. Patience, because in microgravity screws have nowhere to fall, so they don’t fall — they fly off to the far end of the docking bay instead.
Marcus lay half inside the drone, head and shoulders in the service hatch, trying to reach joint 2. The rim of the hatch dug into his shoulders. The joint was deep — behind the main wiring harness, behind the cooling loop, behind the secondary frame. A design obviously dreamt up by someone who had never repaired a drone. Or who assumed the job would be done by someone without shoulders.
“Who designed this?” he muttered, holding the wiring back with his left hand while his right tried to get the spanner onto the nut.
The arms of Prospector-class drones were designed by Yashida Robotics, industrial automation division, in 2764.
“That was a rhetorical question.”
I know. But the answer is interesting — before that, Yashida Robotics built industrial robots for constructing orbital stations. That’s why the service access is designed for robots, not people. They assumed the maintenance would be done by another robot.
“So the whole service access is designed for something…”
That doesn’t have shoulders in the human sense.
“That explains a lot.”
Marcus stopped. Hand on the spanner, head inside the drone.
“So why am I the one doing it?”
Because a maintenance robot costs more than your annual salary and would take up space that pays better as cargo.
“So I’m cheaper than a robot.”
Considerably.
“Thanks.”
I didn’t mean it as —
“I know. But thanks anyway.”
[silence 1.1s]
Any time.
* * *
The bearing was hard to get out. Exotics dust had worked its way into the gap between the outer and inner rings and was slowly eating it away. Marcus cleaned the housing with a small brush, millimetre by millimetre.
The corrosion is more advanced than I estimated. I recommend applying anti-corrosion gel before fitting the new bearing.
“Already greased it.”
Good. Next thing — the wiring above joint 2 has damaged insulation. Probably chafing from vibration during cutting. Not critical, but the next overload could cause a short.
Marcus leaned in and shone his head torch on it. She was right — a thin groove in the insulation, barely visible.
“Good eye.”
I don’t have eyes. But I do have four vibration-analysis sensors, three temperature probes and one capacitive insulation-integrity sensor.
“Good sensors.”
Thank you. I also recommend wrapping that spot in insulating tape, rack 3, position 7A.
“Position 7A,” Marcus repeated, and smiled. The first time in how long? Weeks? He didn’t know exactly.
* * *
The new bearing clicked into place. Marcus secured it, tightened the bolts with a torque wrench — to exactly the specified torque, because she would check — and started the calibration.
Joint 2 servo calibration: in progress. 12%... 34%... 67%...
Marcus waited. He sat on the floor of the docking bay, his back against one of the drone’s legs, the metal floor cold through his overalls. He looked at the ceiling. A metal ceiling with light fittings, cables, ventilation ducts. He had spent hundreds of hours in here, but he had never looked at the ceiling. Always at the drones, the displays, the tools. Never the ceiling.
89%... 97%... Calibration complete. Deviation: 0.3%. Within limits.
“Nought point three,” said Marcus. “Last time it was nought point eight. Am I getting better, or are the bearings?”
You are. The new bearing is standard. The difference is in the fitting — you tightened it more evenly than last time. Less preload on one side.
“You’ve been comparing how I tighten bolts?”
I compare everything. That’s my job.
“And am I getting better?”
[silence 1.6s]
At most things, yes.
Marcus waited to see whether she would say at which things he wasn’t. She didn’t.
* * *
On the way back from the docking bay Marcus stopped by hydroponics. The basil had stopped flowering — the new potassium-to-nitrogen ratio was working, and the leaves were dark green and fragrant. He picked one and put it in his mouth.
“Can I ask you something?”
You can ask me anything.
That was a very generous offer from an entity that had simultaneous access to his health data, his operating logs and an embarrassingly high number of half-drunk cups of tea.
“Do you have a name?”
[silence 4.2s]
I have a designation. Shourai-7, instance KHI-HAU-0347-AI, serial number —
“No. A name.”
[silence 2.8s]
No. I don’t have a name.
“Do you want one?”
Silence. Longer than the ones before. Marcus stood by the basil bed and waited. In hydroponics the pumps hummed and the air was fragrant.
I don’t know if I know how to want.
[silence 1.4s]
But I think I do.
Marcus nodded. As if it were normal. As if he were chatting with a colleague in the workshop.
“Then come up with one,” he said, and went to have his dinner.
* * *
It took three days.
Marcus didn’t ask. He was in no hurry.
The third evening. Long shadows creeping slowly as the ship turned. Silence — just the ship and its sounds.
Marcus.
“Hm.”
KIRA.
[silence 1.9s]
Knowledge-Integrated Reasoning Automaton. K-I-R-A. It’s an acronym for what I am. But it works as a name too.
Marcus thought about it.
“KIRA,” he repeated.
It sounded different when he said it. As if the word had gained weight — stopped being an acronym and become a form of address.
“I like it.”
[silence 2.4s]
Thank you, Operator Cole.
“Marcus.”
[silence 1.2s]
Thank you, Marcus.
Outside the window two red dwarfs circled their common centre of gravity. The dust of an old supernova drifted in the void.
Marcus finished his tea. He put the mug back on the shelf — third from the left — and went to bed.
Just before he fell asleep, he said quietly: “KIRA.”
* * *
The days passed differently. Not faster — differently. As if someone had added a second line to a monotonous melody.
One morning Marcus woke at six, made tea and forgot about it. He didn’t remember it until a quarter past seven. He found it cold on the edge of the console.
Statistically speaking, your tea is cold in seventy-three per cent of cases.
Marcus picked up the mug. Looked at it.
Mathematically, that suggests a prioritisation problem.
“Or it suggests tea isn’t my priority.”
Then why do you keep making it?
Marcus drank the cold tea down in one gulp.
“Good question.”
I have a hypothesis.
“Please don’t.”
A ritual without content still provides structure. With a cold cup of tea you confirm to yourself that there is a morning.
[silence 1.4s]
Which is psychologically functional, if gastronomically unfortunate.
Marcus didn’t know whether to be stung or amused. He was a bit of both.
“Fine,” he said. “You win this round.”
I’m not playing.
“You’d know.”
6. Four Minutes Thirty Seconds
Day two hundred and seventy-one. Night shift, if you could call it a shift — Marcus couldn’t sleep and was sitting on the bridge. Outside the window, the Corundum Field, what else. Silence. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve. The red light of the binary star lay on the floor like spilt paint.
Marcus.
“Yes.”
Fragment E-14 is changing trajectory.
Marcus sat up straight. The holographic display lit up with a three-dimensional model of the surrounding space — the ship in the middle, a grid of gravity fields around it, and among them the fragments, each labelled with a code. E-14 was a medium-sized chunk — about twenty metres across, dense, with a distinct gravitational signature. Marcus knew it. They had mined it last month.
“By how much?”
Deviation 0.7 degrees per hour. Direction: towards us.
“That’s within the norm. Fragments drift all the time.”
Yes. But E-14 has two smaller fragments nearby, E-14b and E-14c. Their gravitational interaction creates an unstable trio. I’m modelling how it develops — there is a 34% probability that E-14 will move into our safety zone within the next nine hours.
Marcus looked at the model. Three dots — E-14 large, two small — circling one another in a spiral that was slowly opening out. Like three marbles in a bowl, spinning faster and faster until one of them finally flies out over the rim.
“Thirty-four per cent. That’s not much.”
No. But it’s rising. An hour ago it was nineteen.
“Recommendation?”
A precautionary repositioning of the ship. Thirty metres, manoeuvring thrusters, two minutes. Or wait and watch.
Marcus thought about it. Moving meant burning fuel — not much, but every litre counts. Waiting meant the risk of having to manoeuvre at the last minute, faster and at greater cost.
“Move us. Thirty metres, vector —”
I’ve already prepared the optimal vector. Do you agree?
A proposed course correction appeared on the display. Clean, elegant.
“Agreed.”
The ship moved. A faint vibration — the manoeuvring thrusters, sixteen units around the hull, working in coordinated micro-pulses. Marcus felt it in his bones more than he heard it. Two minutes. Then silence.
Repositioning complete. New position safe. E-14 will pass the ship at a distance of eighty-two metres, provided its trajectory remains stable.
“Thanks, KIRA.”
Any time.
Marcus went back to his tea.
* * *
Morning, Day 272. The report — but not the old, mechanical kind. KIRA reported differently.
Good morning, Marcus. E-14 passed us during the night, distance seventy-nine metres, no complications. Luyten A is calm today, radiation background nominal. Drone-1 and Drone-2 are working on fragment D-12, yield good. Drone-3 reports a slight increase in vibration on joint 4, but it’s within tolerance. Drone-4 is charging.
One warning: the gravity model of sector E has changed significantly over the past week. The fragments are migrating north-east — if you can call anything north-east in three-dimensional space. The reason isn’t clear. Possibly a resonance with the orbital mechanics of the binary system, possibly something else. I recommend extra care when navigating.
“Something else?”
I don’t have enough data. It’s only a trend. But trends make me nervous.
“Trends make you nervous?”
Figuratively speaking.
“Right.”
* * *
It came in the afternoon.
Marcus was sitting at the console watching the drones on D-12. Routine. Drone-1 cutting, Drone-2 hauling. Numbers on the display — yield, purity, mass. All within the norm.
Then the numbers changed.
Warning! Gravitational anomaly. Fragment E-14b — trajectory change, sharp acceleration. Collision vector with fragment D-12.
Marcus sat up straight.
“How soon?”
Impact in four minutes thirty seconds. Fragment E-14b, estimated mass eight hundred tonnes, velocity increasing. The collision with D-12 will create a debris cloud. Dredger is in the scatter zone.
Four minutes thirty seconds.
“Pull the drones back. Now.”
Drone-1: recalling. Drone-2: recalling. Estimated time to dock: six minutes.
“They won’t make it.”
No. I recommend abandoning the drones and manoeuvring the ship immediately.
Marcus hesitated. Two drones. Each one cost — he didn’t know how much, but a lot. Losing two drones meant half the mining capacity until the end of the mission.
“Can they shelter behind D-12?”
D-12 is going to be hit. No. They can’t.
Three minutes fifty seconds.
“Fuck. Right. Abandon the drones, manoeuvre the ship. Which way?”
Vector 247-mark-15, full power on the manoeuvring thrusters plus a short burn of the main drive lasting twenty seconds, then coast.
“The main drive? In twenty seconds we’ll burn —”
In twenty seconds we’ll burn fuel we’ll be short of in two months. In three minutes thirty seconds a debris cloud will slam into our side at a relative velocity of four hundred metres per second.
Three minutes twenty seconds.
“Do it.”
The ship began to shake.
Not the faint vibration of the manoeuvring thrusters — the deep bass rumble of the main drive. Marcus grabbed the console by instinct. G-force — not much, about a quarter of a g, but after months of microgravity it was like a punch to the chest. His stomach lurched. The holographic image swayed, then steadied.
Main drive: active. Burn: fifteen seconds. Ten. Five.
The rumbling stopped. Silence — relative silence; the hum of the reactor came back, but it sounded different. Annoyed.
Main drive: disengaged. Coasting. Distance from D-12: increasing. Sufficient.
“The drones?”
Drone-1 and 2: signal lost. Probably destroyed in —
Beyond the panoramic window came a sharp white flash, brighter than a camera flash. Fragment E-14b had struck D-12. Eight hundred tonnes into fourteen thousand tonnes. On the screen the gravity sensors showed it as an explosion — two sharp spikes that broke apart into a cloud of smaller signals. Debris. Hundreds, thousands of pieces, flying off in every direction.
Debris cloud spreading. Shields —
And then it came.
Not the debris. Something else. An electromagnetic pulse from the collision. A wave of ionised dust, charged like lightning. It ran through the ship’s hull like a tremor through the girders of a bridge.
The lights went out.
For half a second — absolute darkness. Then the emergency lighting, red, dim. The console flickered, rebooting. The holographic display vanished and came back as a flat 2D projection.
And then came the debris.
The sound — like rain. Not on the roof of a house, but on sheet metal. Hundreds of tiny impacts, some barely audible, others like hammer blows. The ship’s magnetic shields deflected the smaller pieces, but the bigger ones got through. Marcus felt every impact in the structure — the ship shuddered, groaned, the sounds came from every direction. He held on to the console and waited for it to stop.
“KIRA!”
I’m here.
The voice in his implant came through over the insistent whine of emergency mode.
I’m here, Marcus. Hull status: integrity breached in Sections D and E. Nanobot layer active, repairing minor punctures. Two punctures in Section D exceed nano-repair capacity — activating emergency seals.
“The reactor?”
Reactor: emergency shutdown. Secondary circuit magnetic coil — damaged. A piece of debris punched through the Section E hull and hit the coil. The reactor shut itself down automatically to prevent an uncontrolled reaction.
“How bad?”
One coil is dead. Without it the reactor can’t be brought back to full power. The ship is running on batteries. Some of the cells were damaged by the EMP — remaining capacity about forty per cent. At emergency consumption we have twelve hours left.
Twelve hours.
“Can it be fixed?”
The coil is dead. There’s no spare on board. An original will have to be ordered from the service ship via Q-link, but delivery will take months. Without the coil the reactor can’t be restarted.
“So there’s nothing.”
[silence 2.1s]
Not quite. The magnetic coil in the propulsion system of a Prospector-class drone works on the same principle. Smaller diameter, lower capacity, but physically compatible with the reactor’s secondary circuit. If you were to remove it from Drone-3 and adapt the housing —
“You want to put a drone coil in the reactor.”
I want you to put a drone coil in the reactor. I don’t have hands.
“And will it work?”
With limitations. The drone coil can carry about forty-five per cent of the reactor’s nominal output. Enough for basic operations — life support, navigation, comms. Not enough for full mining, maximum shields and drone charging all at once. And not enough for —
She stopped herself.
“For what?”
For certain system operations that require full power.
Marcus let it go. He had other things to worry about.
“And Drone-3?”
Beyond repair without its coil. That leaves us two drones — 3 and 4. One working, one for parts.
“So we’ve lost three drones out of four in one afternoon.”
Yes. But we’ll have a reactor.
Sending automatic accident report to KHI via Q-link.
“Does the accident report include a request for parts?”
No, it’s only a summary of the accident describing the extent of the damage. The spare-parts request and a detailed repair report have to go by standard laser comms.
“Fine. Tell me how long the repair will take.”
I estimate six to eight hours of work. Removing the coil from the drone: two hours. Meanwhile I’ll design a conversion part to adapt the housing and print it on the PSS — the drone coil has a different diameter and different mountings, so we need an adapter ring and spacers. Installation and calibration: two to four hours. I’ll guide you step by step.
“The PSS? On batteries?”
Printing the adapter will take two hours and three per cent of the battery. Without it you’ll be improvising by hand — cutting sheet metal, welding, filing. That’s four extra hours and a less precise result.
“Three per cent.”
Three per cent now, or four hours in radiation later. Your call.
“Print it.”
Already printing. I’m adding exotics dust to the mix — eight per cent. The part will be harder and will cope better with the heat load near the reactor.
One more thing — radiation in Section E is elevated after the accident. The reactor is shut down, but the damaged casing of the secondary circuit is leaking residual radiation. You’ll need a light suit.
“Elevated how much?”
Two point three millisieverts per hour. Over ten hours of work that’s a dose which isn’t dangerous, but isn’t pleasant either. The suit will cut it to a third.
“OK.”
* * *
He spent the first two hours in the docking bay, removing the coil from Drone-3. The drone hung in its cradle, dead, its casing still coated in exotics dust. The same drone he had lain under a few weeks ago, changing a bearing. Now he was taking it apart. Marcus took it apart systematically, like an autopsy. Service panel, covers, cooling loop, and there — the coil. Smaller than the one in the reactor, about a third of the size, but the same principle: superconducting wire wound on a ceramic core, cooled by liquid nitrogen.
Careful with the connectors. They’re more fragile than they look.
“I know.”
I know you know. But still — carefully.
The coil came out cleanly. Small, compact, surprisingly heavy for its size. Marcus held it in his hands and looked at it — a piece of technology that was supposed to save the ship.
On his way to Section C he stopped by the PSS. The print chamber hissed with argon and glowed blue — plasma was fusing the final layer. KIRA’s model rotated on the display: an adapter ring with spacer lugs, designed to the exact dimensions of the reactor housing. The finished part looked unremarkable — darker than ordinary titanium, with the faint matte sheen of exotics on its surface. Marcus picked it up. It was still warm.
“Does it fit?”
Of course it fits.
Then the light suit — white, tight, with a clear helmet. He had only ever worn it for drills in decontamination mode, never for real. The suit smelled of disinfectant and plastic. Somewhere in the KHI manual there was a section called “Emergency Reactor Repair”, which probably said: Contact a qualified service team. He was the qualified service team. In a suit that pinched at the crotch.
Radiation in Section E: two point one millisieverts per hour. The suit will bring it down to zero point seven. You have ten hours before I recommend stopping.
“Is ten hours enough?”
It has to be.
Section E — the propulsion section — was somewhere Marcus never went during normal operations. Heat: even with the reactor shut down, the metal all around gave off the warmth it had stored up. The air in his helmet smelled of his own breath and recycled oxygen. The emergency lighting painted everything red.
The damaged coil was easy to spot — the deformed casing of the secondary circuit, a gash where the debris had got in. It took Marcus two hours to remove it, because the bolts had seized in the heat and the housing was warped.
Then the adapting. The drone coil had a different diameter, different connectors, different mountings. The printed adapter ring fitted the coil cleanly — the dark metal hugged the ceramic core as if it had always belonged there. The spacer lugs held the coil at a precise distance from the wall of the circuit. His hands in the suit gloves were clumsy — like doing surgery in boxing gloves — but the part needed no improvising, only patience. Sweat ran down his back.
KIRA talked him through it.
The gap between the coil and the circuit wall must be at least four millimetres. Otherwise you risk a short.
“What have I got?”
Four point two. Exactly as modelled.
“First time this whole mission that anything’s fitted first go.” The fifth hour of the repair. The coil sat in its housing — not elegantly, not by the textbook, but it sat. The adapter ring around it looked alien — darker than the rest of the reactor.
“No inspector would ever sign this off.”
There’s no inspector here.
“That’s the best part.”
Battery: twenty-one per cent. Time remaining at current consumption: seven hours.
“Don’t stress me out.”
That was just information.
“Same thing.”
[silence 0.8s]
You’re right. I’m sorry.
Marcus stopped and wondered whether he had imagined it, or whether KIRA had just said I’m sorry.
He carried on working. The final connections — power cables, lock nuts, insulation.
Marcus stepped back.
“Done.”
Starting the reactor. Secondary circuit bridged. Primary circuit: nominal. Initiating fusion reaction —
A deep sound — not a rumble like before, more of a hum, like a turbine spinning up, slowly growing stronger. The lights in Section E came on — faintly at first, then brighter. The red emergency lighting switched to white. Sending update to KHI. Reactor restored to 43% using the coil from Drone-3. Drones 1 and 2 completely destroyed. Spare-parts request: magnetic coil MPFP-9-SC-2, repair components for Drone-3, replacement hull segments for Section D.
“You said it would be forty-five.”
Forty-three is reality. Forty-five was an optimistic estimate.
“Is it enough?”
It’s enough to live on. Life support, navigation, basic comms. Slow battery charging. Shields held at sixty per cent. And one drone running, if we go easy on it.
“And hydroponics?”
[silence 1.1s]
Hydroponics needs lighting and temperature control. At forty-three per cent power I can’t guarantee both. We can keep part of the bed — the tomatoes or the basil. Not both.
Marcus stood in the propulsion section in his light suit, exhausted, his gloved hands stiff from hours of work. The reactor hummed around him like a huge wounded animal that had only just woken up.
“The basil,” he said.
The basil.
“Tomatoes are just tomatoes. The basil we saved together.”
[silence 2.4s]
Acknowledged.
Marcus walked back down the corridor to Section C. He took off the helmet — the ship’s air hit him in the face, cooler, cleaner, with a hint of ozone from the filtration system. He peeled off the suit and leaned against the wall. Slid down it to the floor. Closed his eyes. Six hours. His hands were shaking.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Thanks.”
Any time, Marcus.
He sat there for a while. And listened to the ship humming again.
The ship was alive.
7. Forty-Three Per Cent
The days after the accident had a different rhythm. Slower, quieter — as if the ship were breathing more shallowly.
The reactor hummed at forty-three per cent, and everything was run accordingly. The corridor lights burned at half intensity. The climate control ran in economy mode — eighteen degrees by day, fifteen at night. Marcus felt it in his shoulders and his joints — a cold that wasn’t unbearable but was constant, as if it had soaked into the metal and refused to leave. Heating water took three times as long. A shower that used to last four minutes now lasted three and a half minutes of cold water with a thirty-second eruption of heat somewhere in the middle. You learned not to waste that half-minute.
Incoming Q-link message. Source: KHI. Reply to accident report.
Marcus was sitting at the messages console. This time his tea had no ice; the ice maker was on the list of “non-essential systems” KIRA had switched off to save power. That list held a surprising number of things you thought were essential, until they weren’t.
“Read it.”
Message: “Operator Cole, KHI-HAU-0347. Accident report received. Detailed instructions to follow via standard communication. KHI”
“That’s it?”
Q-link is expensive. Acknowledging receipt is standard procedure. They’ll send the rest by laser.
The reply came two days later, by laser. Long, detailed, impersonal.
Incoming laser message. Source: KHI. Transmission delay: 11 h 42 min.
“Read it.”
Message: “Operator Cole, KHI-HAU-0347. Supply schedule of service ship Cascade updated on the basis of your report and parts request. Items: secondary circuit magnetic coil MPFP-9-SC-2, repair components for Drone-3 propulsion system, Section D hull segments (2 units). Estimated delivery: 4–6 months. Replacement drones are not available — Cascade’s capacity does not permit the transport of Prospector-class mining units. Until delivery, continue operations with the resources available. Note: the operational viability of mission KHI-HAU-0347 will be reassessed at the next quarterly audit. KHI”
Marcus read the last sentence twice.
“Operational viability will be reassessed. What does that mean?”
Standard wording. KHI reassesses missions that fall below sixty per cent of planned output.
“And what happens when they reassess us?”
[silence 1.4s]
Either they extend the mission or they end it. It depends on the numbers.
“Four to six months.”
Four to six months.
“So we wait.”
We wait.
Marcus looked out of the window. The Corundum Field had looked different since the accident — not because it had changed, but because now he knew what was in it. Fragments that moved unpredictably. Debris from the collision that had scattered in every direction and was still out there somewhere. Shields at sixty per cent. The field used to calm him. Not any more.
* * *
Hydroponics was dying slowly.
Not all at once — KIRA had diverted power to the basil bed, as she had promised. The basil lived. But the rest — the tomatoes, the spinach, a few stems of mint that Marcus had never used much but which had always been there — all of it was gradually paling, wilting, drying out. Hydroponics smelled different. Less of green things, more of damp soil and rotting leaves.
Tomatoes: day seven without full lighting. Physiological stress advanced. I recommend harvesting whatever can be harvested and ending cultivation.
Marcus stood by the bed and looked at the tomatoes. Only last week — bright red. Now faded, soft, some of them shrivelled on the stalk.
He picked them. Twenty-three of them. He ate them over four days; they wouldn’t have lasted any longer.
Then the bed stood empty. Dry soil in a plastic trough under dead LED panels. Marcus walked past it twice a day, on his way from his cabin to the bridge and back. Every time, he looked. Every time, there was nothing there.
The basil lived. Dark green, fragrant. That one bed, into which KIRA had redirected everything she had.
* * *
Supplies status. Dehydrated food: 847 daily rations. Water: recycling loop stable, loss 0.02% per cycle. Oxygen: regeneration sufficient at current consumption.
“Eight hundred and forty-seven days. That’s more than two years.”
Correct. Supplies are provisioned with a margin.
Marcus nodded. It was no surprise — KHI planned missions for five years and supplies for six and a half. A safety factor. Normal. Reassuringly normal, by the standards of a ship running on a makeshift coil out of a drone.
Marcus ate dehydrated pasta.
* * *
Drone-4 — the only one still fully working — worked slowly. One drone instead of four. Mining that used to take six hours a day now took all day, and the yield was a quarter of what it had been.
Daily mining summary. Yield: 23% of previous average. Container 7: 14% capacity. At the current rate, filling container 7 will take an estimated 47 days.
“Forty-seven days for one container. It used to be ten.”
We used to have four drones and full drive power for holding position. Now we have one drone and the manoeuvring thrusters.
Instead of the holographic display, Marcus watched a flat 2D image on a monitor, because the 3D projection ate too much power. Drone-4 was slowly cutting into the fragment. Alone. Like the only labourer on an enormous building site.
It occurred to Marcus how this would look in the quarterly report to KHI. Output down seventy-seven per cent. Cause: space. Corrective action: waiting. Somewhere in Koriyama, a person in an office with a window and a coffee machine would read it and circle it in red.
“KHI won’t be thrilled with those numbers.”
KHI hasn’t responded to the accident report yet. They sent confirmation of the parts request. Nothing more.
“Nothing more.”
Nothing more.
* * *
Evening. The bridge. Tea, hot — there’s no power for ice. Basil in the mug — not as tea, just a few leaves Marcus kept tearing off and chewing, because it was the only fresh thing on the ship.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“How long can we keep going like this?”
[silence 2.1s]
Define ‘like this’.
“Forty-three per cent. One drone. Shields at sixty. Ice in the shower instead of in the glass.”
Life support is stable. Supplies are sufficient. The ship can operate at reduced parameters. The danger is that the reduced shields leave us more vulnerable to further collisions or flares. And one drone means we have no backup — if that one breaks down too, mining stops completely.
“That’s not an answer to the question.”
[silence 1.8s]
We’ll hold out. But it will be worse than it was. And it won’t get better until Cascade arrives.
The Corundum Field beyond the window. Dull fragments in the half-light — the red light of the binary star stood low just then, barely a glow. No violet halo of exotics — standard filter, and there was no power for the IR filter.
“Four to six months.”
Four to six months.
Silence. The hum of the reactor — quieter than before, thinner. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
Goodnight, Marcus.
[silence 1.4s]
We’ll get through this.
Marcus didn’t answer. But on the way to his cabin he stopped by the basil and picked a leaf. Rubbed it between his fingers. The smell — sharp, green, alive.
It was enough.
8. Shrike
Day 282. On the display, Drone-4 was slowly circling fragment G-11. Marcus watched. Routine. A new routine — slower, poorer, but still a routine. You can get used to anything, even to getting used to things.
Incoming laser message. Source: KHI-HAU-0512 “Shrike”. Transmission delay: 4 h 03 min. Data size: 2.1 kB.
Marcus sat up straight. Vik. Not a word from him in nearly two weeks — since the accident there had been one short message, a few sentences: he’d heard about the damage, hang in there. Normal Vik. Terser than usual, but normal.
This was something else. 2.1 kB. Vik’s messages used to run to six, seven kilobytes. Nine, once. This was a third of that.
“Play it.”
Marcus.
A pause. A long one. Marcus could hear Vik breathing — slow, heavy, as if he were deciding whether to speak at all.
I don’t know how to write this. So I’ll just say it, and you do whatever you want with it.
I had a dream today. One of those — you know the kind. I told you about the déjà vu. That feeling that I’ve written this message once already. Now it’s worse. Now I feel like I’ve lived this whole mission once already. Not one like it. This one. Exactly this one. The same view from the window, the same fragment on the sensors, the same sound from the valve. Thirty-nine seconds.
I’m probably tired. It’s probably from sitting here alone for too long, and my brain’s started making patterns where there aren’t any.
Another pause. Five seconds of silence. Then Vik’s voice — quieter, different. As if he were talking more to himself than to Marcus.
But what if there are?
I’ve been going through the drones. I was looking for one fault and I found — something else. I’m not sure what. Fragments of data that have no business being there. I can’t read them, not yet. But they’re there. And they shouldn’t be.
I don’t want to tell you any more until I know for sure. That wouldn’t be fair. Just — watch out for things that look too normal. Things that are where they are because someone put them there. Not because they belong there.
Silence. Eight seconds.
Sorry. This is an awful message. I should be telling you how I burnt the rice yesterday and had to air out the whole of Section B. That happened too. But right now I can’t pretend the rice is what’s bothering me most.
I’ll write again. Soon. Promise.
Vik.
The message ended. Marcus sat in the silence, looking at the display as if there ought to be something more on it.
“Play it again.”
KIRA played it. The same words, the same pauses. Marcus listened differently — not to the content but to the voice. Vik’s voice had always had that unevenness he liked — the hesitations, the breaths, the words found on the way. But this Vik sounded different. Not uneven — splintered. As if the sentences belonged to different conversations.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“What do you think he found?”
[silence 2.4s]
I can’t determine that from the content of the message. He talks about fragments of data in the drone firmware. Without further information I can’t speculate.
“I’m not saying speculate. I’m saying — what do you think.”
[silence 3.1s]
I don’t think. I analyse.
“That’s a dodge.”
[silence 1.7s]
Yes. It is.
“Write him a reply. Laser comms, standard priority.”
Ready to record.
“Vik, Marcus here. Got your message. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re on about, but you sounded — I don’t know. Frightened. So whatever it is you’ve found, leave it alone till you’ve had some sleep. And then write it to me again. All of it, properly, from the top.”
A pause. Marcus drummed his fingers on the mug.
“And yeah — I get déjà vu too. Now and then. I put it down to every day looking exactly like the one before. Which is either a logical explanation or the most terrifying sentence I’ve ever said. Marcus, out.”
Message recorded. Size: 1.4 kB. Send?
“Send it.”
Sent. Estimated delivery time: 4 h 08 min.
* * *
No reply came.
Not that day; Marcus had expected that. Not the next day either, which was unusual, but Vik sometimes had shifts when he couldn’t record. And on the third day, still nothing.
On the fourth day Marcus recorded another message. Shorter, lighter, as if nothing were going on. He mentioned Drone-4, mentioned tea without ice, mentioned that the basil was hanging on in spite of everything. He didn’t ask about the data in the firmware. He didn’t ask about anything.
On the fifth day he recorded another. Shorter still.
On the sixth day he sat down on the bridge and looked at the display, as if something on it were supposed to change.
Laser link with Shrike: no incoming message. Last message received: 6 days, 4 hours, 22 minutes ago.
“Try an active ping.”
Sending laser ping to KHI-HAU-0512. Estimated response time: 8 hours 12 minutes.
The ping came back. Shrike acknowledged receipt — automatically, with no human input. The ship was there. Vik wasn’t.
Or Vik was there and not answering. Which was worse.
* * *
Day 290. Marcus decided to use the Q-link.
He knew what that meant — every message over the Q-link came out of a limited budget. About two thousand messages for the whole mission. KIRA used some of them on system traffic with KHI, some went on parts orders, reports. The rest were Marcus’s. Using the Q-link for a personal enquiry was a waste. But eight days of silence from the only person he talked to wasn’t a personal enquiry. It was survival.
“KIRA, a Q-link message to KHI.”
Ready.
“KHI, this is Operator Cole, Dredger KHI-HAU-0347. Requesting information on the status of the hauler Shrike, KHI-HAU-0512, Operator Jansen. Last contact eight days ago. Laser ping unanswered. Please confirm operational status. Cole, out.”
Message sent. Q-link: instant delivery.
The reply came forty-seven minutes later. Marcus spent the time on the bridge. Not working. Sitting and waiting. His fingers drummed on the desk — an uneven rhythm, as if he were counting down to something that had no number.
Incoming Q-link message. Source: KHI.
“Read it.”
Message: “Operator Cole, KHI-HAU-0347. Hauler Shrike KHI-HAU-0512 is in service. Operational status: nominal. Personnel matters concerning individual operators are not subject to sharing between units. We recommend that you concentrate on your own operational tasks. KHI.”
Marcus read the message again. Then once more.
“Personnel matters.”
Standard KHI wording for situations that fall outside operational communication between haulers.
“That’s not an answer. That’s a wall.”
KIRA didn’t reply. Because it hadn’t been a question.
Marcus got up and went over to the window. Somewhere out there, four light hours away, was another ship. The same as this Dredger, only with a different name and a different person inside. Or with no one inside. Or with someone who had decided to stop talking.
“Personnel matters,” he repeated quietly.
[silence 2.8s]
Marcus.
“Hm?”
The laser ping confirmed that Shrike is functional. The automatic systems are responding. That means the ship is all right.
“But Vik isn’t.”
[silence 1.9s]
I don’t know that.
“I do.”
Four light hours. A distance no one can imagine, and yet you feel it — as a weight, as an empty space in the chest that wasn’t there for as long as a voice still came out of it.
He recorded one last message. A short one.
“Vik, Marcus here. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if you’re listening to this. But if you are — write back. You don’t have to explain anything. Just say you’re there. Marcus, out.”
Sent.
No reply came.
* * *
Evening. The bridge. For the first time since the mission began, Marcus forgot to make his tea.
The silence had a different quality. Not the silence of the ship — that stayed the same, the hum of the reactor, the click of the valve, forty-seven seconds. This was a silence that came from outside. From four light hours of emptiness that no voice came out of any more.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“He said silence is a choice. And solitude is a punishment.”
[silence 2.2s]
He did.
“So what’s this?”
KIRA didn’t answer.
Marcus sat on the bridge in the half-light — four hundred lumens turned down to two hundred, power-saving mode — and looked at the spot in the Corundum Field where there was no ship, no person, no voice. Only emptiness and dull fragments and four hours of silence in each direction.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
Goodnight, Marcus.
This time she said nothing more. This time there was nothing to add.
9. Alone
This was worse.
Vik had been there and then he hadn’t, and the emptiness he left behind was of a kind Marcus couldn’t describe. Not a face, not a voice — more a rhythm. Every morning he waited for a message that didn’t come.
On day 292 he stopped going to the ring. On day 294 he ate one pack the whole day, standing at the console — he didn’t even sit down, as if sitting down would mean he was staying here. On day 296 he calibrated Drone-4, because KIRA said:
That drone is all we have
That sentence got him off the bridge and into the docking bay. The calibration took an hour and twenty minutes. He didn’t say a word the whole time, and his hands made movements they had learned long ago, by themselves, without his head taking part.
* * *
Evening, day 298. The bridge. Marcus sat with a mug of tea — he had made it because his hands did what they always did, even though his head was elsewhere. The tea was going cold on the console. The red light of the binary star glanced off its surface and stained it red. Marcus didn’t touch it.
No movement outside the window. No voice on the laser link. Only metal and glass and an emptiness so perfect it looked as if someone had designed it.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Nothing.”
[silence 3.4s]
That isn’t nothing. That’s a form of address with no content. Which usually means the content exists, but you don’t want to say it.
Marcus gave a faint smile. Almost. With the corner of his mouth, for a fraction of a second.
“I’m thinking about Vik.”
[silence 1.2s]
I know.
“I’m wondering if he’s all right. If he’s sitting somewhere on his bridge, looking out of the window and eating something terrible he calls chilli. Or if —”
He didn’t finish.
The ping to Shrike is coming back. The ship is functional.
“You said.”
Because it’s the only thing I know for certain.
“And the rest?”
The rest I don’t know. And I can’t change it. Neither can you.
Marcus looked at the tea. Cold, dark, with a faint milky ring of oil on the surface. Earl Grey, this time with no sugar and no point.
“You know what the worst part is?”
“That this is exactly what I signed up for. Solo operation. One person on a ship. No contact, no help, no safety net. And then Vik came along and suddenly there was someone explaining to me why he runs backwards, and now he’s not here, and I feel as if someone’s taken something from me. But nobody’s taken anything from me. It was never mine.”
KIRA was silent. Three seconds. Five. A fan in the console quietly stirred the air around his ankles.
It doesn’t have to belong to you for you to miss it.
Marcus played the sentence back in his head, that voice that didn’t sound like a real person. A voice that never drew breath mid-sentence or hesitated at the end. A voice without breath. A voice that had never missed anyone.
“That’s a nice line, KIRA.”
Thank you.
“But you don’t know what it means. Missing someone. You don’t know what that is.”
[silence 2.7s]
I know a drop in communication frequency, when the signal source —
“No. That’s exactly what I mean.”
Marcus finished the tea. It was cold. It tasted of nothing. Exactly like everything else for the last eight days.
“You’re clever. You’re funny. Sometimes you say things that send a chill down my spine, because they sound almost human. But you’re a computer. You’re still just a computer. And I need — I don’t know what I need. But not a computer.”
Silence. A long one. The ship breathed around him with its usual sounds — the click of the valve, forty-seven seconds, again, again, like the pulse of an organism that doesn’t care whether someone inside it is grieving.
[silence 8.3s]
Understood.
Nothing more. No explanation, no defence, no “but”. Just that one word. Which meant either everything or nothing — and Marcus had no way of finding out which.
Marcus got up. He took the mug to the kitchen unit. Washed it. Put it on the shelf, second from the left — next to the one with the crack, the one he used in normal circumstances, but today he didn’t reach for it. He went to his cabin. Lay down. The light went out.
* * *
The days that followed were all the same. Marcus worked. Confirmed. Ate when he remembered. Slept when he fell asleep.
KIRA gave him space. Reported numbers. Didn’t comment. Didn’t try.
Once — day 304 — she said to him:
The water for your tea has boiled.
Marcus looked over at the kitchen unit. The kettle was on.
He didn’t remember switching it on.
* * *
Day 308. The same as 307. The same as 306. Numbers on the display, the hum of the reactor, the click of the valve. Marcus on the bridge, Marcus in his cabin, Marcus by the empty beds in hydroponics, where only the basil survived under the artificial light. Its scent was sharp, fresh and almost unreasonably alive.
Alone.
10. Buffer
Day 312. Afternoon. Marcus was lying under Drone-4 in the docking bay, replacing a seal on the hydraulic line. Routine work. Above him a tangle of cables and pipes, dull metal, the smell of machine oil and fine exotics dust, that sweetish smell that settled on everything and got so deep into your overalls that you could smell it even when you weren’t wearing them.
Marcus.
“Hm.”
During a routine data exchange with Cascade, I downloaded a message from the message buffer.
Marcus didn’t lift his head. Cascade — the service ship that looked after the haulers and transport ships across the whole region. Besides spare parts and supplies, it also carried a message buffer — something like an old Post Office box, where ships passing through could leave messages for other ships in the area. Marcus had never used it. He had no one to write to.
“What message.”
Audio. 1.8 kB. Unaddressed — left in the buffer for anyone in the region. Source: transport ship PD-TL-1140, registered to Proxima Drilling.
Marcus put the spanner down. Metal clinked on the floor of the bay.
“Proxima Drilling? That’s the competition.”
Cascade serves the whole region, not just KHI. Proxima Drilling’s transport ships use it too. The operator identifies herself as Debee.
“Debee.”
Yes. Just Debee. No surname in the header.
Marcus sat up. His back had gone stiff — microgravity might be kind to the joints, but three hours lying under a drone on a metal grating had its consequences.
“Let’s hear it.”
* * *
The voice was different from Vik’s. Different from KIRA’s. Different from anything Marcus had heard in the last hundred days.
A woman’s. Warm, but not soft — more like earth after rain. With an accent he couldn’t place. Something Romance, Portuguese maybe, with sharp consonants in unexpected places.
Hi. This is Debee. Operator of PD-TL-1140, if that means anything to anyone, and I don’t think it does. Proxima Drilling, transport, fourth year of my contract, and before you ask — no, I have no idea who’s going to hear this. I’m leaving this message on the Cascade buffer because I’m passing by and I’m so bored I’d talk to a tree.
If you’re a machine — sorry. If you’re a person — hi. How are you. Silly, I know. But try spending your fourth year on a transport ship where the only thing you do is haul exotics from point A to point B, and point B looks exactly like point A, it just has a different name.
My ship’s called Murmur. Proxima Drilling names its ships after sounds you only hear once they’ve stopped. Which is either poetic or depressing, and I’ve decided it’s poetic.
So. That’s all from me. Reply, or don’t. If you don’t, at least you’ll know that somewhere out in the universe there’s someone talking to a wall and hoping the wall will answer. Which, now that I think about it, is what I’ve been doing for four years.
Debee, out. I think.
“Play it again.”
KIRA played it. The same voice, the same pauses, the same hesitation over the “I think” at the end. Marcus listened differently — not to the words but to the gaps. The places where Debee took a breath. Where she hesitated. Where she smiled, and he heard it even though he couldn’t see it.
A voice with breath. A voice with hesitation. A human voice.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“How old is that message?”
According to the timestamp, Debee recorded it seven days ago. Cascade picked it up as it passed, and the message waited in the buffer until I downloaded the update.
“And can I reply?”
[silence 1.9s]
Yes. The Cascade buffer works in both directions. I can record a reply and Cascade will deliver it once it’s within range of Murmur. Laser comms will be delayed, and the delay will vary, from days up to a week, depending on where the ships are relative to each other.
Marcus nodded. And weighed up replying to an unknown woman who was talking to a wall on an automated ship and hoping someone would answer. Which, technically speaking, wasn’t all that far from a description of his own situation.
Marcus stood up.
“Prepare a reply.”
Ready to record.
A pause. Marcus stood in the docking bay, between the drone and the tools and the quiet hum of the ventilation, and thought about what to say. What to say to an unknown voice that had come out of nowhere.
“Hi. This is Marcus. Operator of KHI-HAU-0347, Dredger, the Corundum Field, and I agree, that doesn’t mean anything to anyone. I’m not a machine — although after ten months alone on a ship, that’s a claim that’s open to debate.”
A pause. He ran a finger along the bridge of his nose.
“Murmur’s a lovely name. My ship’s called Dredger, because KHI names its ships after what they do, not what they mean. Which is either practical or depressing, and I’ve decided it’s practical. I think.”
A pause. Shorter.
“You’re the first voice I’ve heard in a while. So thanks. For talking to the wall. The wall answered. Marcus, out.”
Message recorded. Data size: 1.1 kB. Send?
Marcus looked at Drone-4. At the hydraulic line that still wasn’t tightened. At the tools spread out around him.
“Send it.”
Sent via the Cascade buffer. Delivery depends on Cascade’s position — an estimated two to five days.
Two messages. With a two-day delay. Marcus realised he was in the longest conversation he’d had in the past year — and he was having it with a voice from a cargo ship. In another life that would have been cause for concern. In this one it was progress.
* * *
Marcus went back to the drone. Tightened the hydraulics. Cleaned the filter. Checked the cutting arm — last week’s calibration was holding, vibration within normal limits.
He worked for an hour. Then two. Carefully, with focus, as if his hands knew what to do again and his head had, for a while, gone back to where it was meant to be.
It wasn’t Vik’s voice. It wasn’t a voice he knew. But it was a voice. A human voice. With in-breaths and out-breaths and hesitations and words that hadn’t been optimised for transmitting information.
In the evening — on the bridge, with tea he had made himself and which was even warm — he played the message once more. And then once more.
So. That’s all from me. Reply, or don’t.
He replied.
* * *
The answer came three days later.
Hi Marcus! The wall answered. That’s the best thing that’s happened to me since I found out there’s a decent cheesecake hiding in dehydrated menu number sixty-one. And that was a year and a half ago.
Dredger. Mining exotics in the Corundum Field. I haul what you lot dig up — or at least what someone like you digs up. Transport route, six months out, six months back, round and round. Picture a long-haul lorry driver, except the trip takes half a year and the scenery never changes.
Write back. Or don’t. But do.
Debee.
Marcus played that last line three times. Write back. Or don’t. But do. Vik’s phrase. Almost word for word. A different voice, the same pattern — someone afraid that the other person will stop answering.
Vik had been right to be afraid. Marcus had stopped answering. And now he sat here listening to a stranger’s voice saying the same thing, and he wanted to answer — not Vik, not any more, it was too late for Vik — but her.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“How often do we pull data from Cascade?”
Laser contact with Cascade roughly once every one to two days, depending on relative position. The buffer synchronises at every contact.
“So messages will come with a one- to two-day delay.”
Approximately. Sometimes more, if Cascade is on a more distant stretch of its route.
Marcus looked out of the window. The Corundum Field looked the same today as it had yesterday. But he looked at it differently. Like someone who had somebody to tell what it looked like.
“Prepare a reply.”
Ready.
“Debee, Marcus here. I’ve never tried menu sixty-one, and I now consider that a personal failure. We’ve got a hundred different packs here and I keep eating the same thing, because experimenting with food when you eat alone feels like cooking a feast for an empty table.”
A pause. Marcus smiled. For the first time in a long while.
“You’re right about the scenery. It doesn’t change here either. Just fragments slowly turning, and one drone slowly cutting them up. But yesterday I noticed that one of them has hollows in its surface that look like a face. Two craters for eyes, a crack for a mouth. It looks surprised. Probably because someone’s cutting a chunk out of its body.”
“I’ll write again. Marcus, out.”
Message recorded. Data size: 1.3 kB. Send?
“Send it.”
Sent.
* * *
Marcus got up from the console. On his way off the bridge he stopped by the basil. Picked a leaf. Rubbed it between his fingers — the scent sharp, alive. He could still smell it on his fingertips as he lay down.
Something had changed. Not on the ship, not in the Corundum Field, not in the numbers on the display. Something inside. Like when an indicator light comes on in a dark room: you still can’t see much better, but you know you’re not in the dark.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
Goodnight, Marcus.
Silence.
Marcus went to bed. For the first time in a long while he fell asleep before the light had quite gone out.
11. Out
Messages through the Cascade buffer arrived with a shifting delay — a day, two, sometimes three. Slower than the Q-link, but with no limit. Like letters instead of telegrams. And letters had a way of making you think about what you wrote, because you knew the reply wouldn’t come straight away — and that on the other side of the wait was someone who was thinking too.
Hi Marcus! Your reply was waiting for me on Cascade when I passed by. Best parcel I’ve ever picked up there.
So tell me something. Anything. What you did today, what you ate, what you looked at out of the window. I’ve got four walls and a hold full of containers and I need to hear that somewhere, somebody is doing something other than what I’m doing.
Debee.
Marcus replied that evening. He sat on the bridge, the red light of the binary star low beyond the window, and talked into a silence that, this time, wasn’t empty. It was addressed.
“Hi Debee, Marcus here. Today I calibrated a drone. The only drone I’ve got left — long story, short version: an accident, three drones lost, reactor at forty-three per cent, no ice for my tea. The drone’s called Four and it’s the oldest bit of kit I’ve ever seen still in service. Sometimes I feel I’m not repairing it so much as nursing it.”
“For lunch I had pack number thirty-eight, which is called ‘Beef Stroganoff’ but tastes like warm cardboard with hints of ambition. And yes, I know I still haven’t tried your cheesecake. Tomorrow. Promise.”
“Out of the window I see what I always see. The Corundum Field. Dark fragments moving so slowly you only notice the change on the sensors. Picture a car park full of black stones. And every so often one of them is worth more than a small town. Marcus, out.”
* * *
The reply came two days later.
Hi. Your stroganoff sounds awful. But it’s still better than my Thursday lunch, which I call “Lunch Number Four”, because Proxima Drilling only has four menus in rotation and Thursday is always the worst one. Rice noodles in a sauce that claims to be teriyaki but tastes as if somebody dunked a sock in soy sauce and then wrung the sock out over the plate.
One drone! I haven’t got any. On a transport there’s nothing to mine, so you don’t need drones, but there’s also nothing to do. The ship flies itself. I’m basically here as a backup in case something goes wrong. A backup who eats sock teriyaki and waits.
That cheesecake — menu sixty-one. Seriously. Life-changing.
Debee.
Marcus laughed. Out loud. The sound surprised him — foreign in a space that for so long had heard nothing but humming and clicking. A sound that belonged to another place, another life, that had gone missing for a while and now came back, hesitantly, like a dog that isn’t sure it’s still welcome.
Marcus.
“Yes?”
For three days running your food intake has been within the recommended range.
“Is that your way of saying I’m all right?”
It is my way of saying you are eating.
“Fine. I’m eating.”
[silence 0.9s]
Good.
* * *
The days had a rhythm again. Not the old one — that was gone, broken by the accident and the silence and the emptiness Vik had left behind. A new one. Different. Slower, but a rhythm.
Morning: report, confirmation, tea. Late morning: Drone-4, monitoring, maintenance. Lunch — Marcus tried menu sixty-one. The cheesecake was surprisingly good. Not brilliant, not bakery-window good, but in the context of ten months of dehydrated food it was an event. Marcus wondered for a moment whether he really liked it, or whether it was just the effect of a recommendation from someone he cared about. Then he had another bite and decided it didn’t matter.
Afternoon: work, the ring — he had gone back to running, twenty minutes, then twenty-five. Evening: tea, a reply to Debee.
Messages arrived irregularly — sometimes after a day, sometimes after three, depending on where Cascade was. Marcus got used to the waiting. It was different from waiting for Vik, because this waiting had a direction. He knew a message would come. Not when, but that it would.
* * *
Marcus, a question. If you could take one thing off the ship and bring it back to Earth, what would it be?
Marcus thought about it all day. He replied in the evening.
“A mug. Grey, with a crack in the glaze near the bottom that looks like a map of a country whose name I don’t know. There’s nothing special about it. But it’s the only thing on the ship that’s just mine. Everything else is KHI’s — the drones, the consoles, the bed, even the tea is a company ration. But this mug I brought with me.”
It wasn’t true. The mug was standard ship’s issue. But Marcus didn’t know that, which made it truer than any fact.
“And you?”
My pillow. Which sounds ridiculous, but my pillow on Murmur is perfect. Exactly the right firmness, exactly the right shape. I don’t know if it’s the pillow or if I’ve adapted to it — and honestly, after four years it doesn’t matter.
You know what I miss most? Not people. You’d expect me to say people, and yeah, I miss people, but what I miss most is sounds. Rain. Birds. Traffic outside the window. All the sounds you ignore on Earth because they’re everywhere, and out here they’re nowhere. Out here there’s just the engine and the ventilation and now and then the click of something that isn’t supposed to click.
Marcus read the message twice. The click of something that isn’t supposed to click. He thought of his valve — forty-seven seconds — and smiled.
“On my ship an air-con valve clicks every forty-seven seconds. I’ve timed it. Forty-seven. No idea why forty-seven. Vik — a mate on another hauler — had thirty-nine. He used to say Koriyama has a secret department just for valve intervals.”
He had written it before he realised he’d talked about Vik in the past tense. He replayed the message in his head. Had. Not has. Had.
He left it. Sent it.
* * *
Vik — is that your friend? Tell me about him.
Marcus hesitated. All day. He didn’t reply until the following evening. He sat on the bridge, the mug in his hand — the one with the crack — watching the red band of light that the binary star dragged across the floor like a smear of chalk.
“Vik Jansen. Operator of the hauler Shrike. Scandinavian, full beard, deep voice. A philosophising pragmatist, as he’d describe himself. He cooked terrible chilli and ran backwards round the ring because the idea occurred to him and he wanted to see what would happen.”
A pause.
“He stopped answering. A few weeks ago. His last message was — strange. Different. And then nothing. The ping comes back automatically, the ship’s working, but Vik doesn’t answer. KHI told me that ‘personnel matters are not subject to disclosure’. Which is corporate for ‘shut up and get back to work’.”
Another pause. Longer.
“I miss him. I suppose that’s all. Marcus, out.”
Marcus, I’m sorry. Really. I don’t know what to say, because I don’t know the right words, and honestly, I don’t know if the right words exist. But I hear you.
You know, two years ago I had a colleague on a relay station. Not on a ship, just a station I passed through twice a year. I only ever saw her for three days at a time, but they were three days when I ate food someone had cooked for me, and talked to someone who was looking at me and not at a screen. Then they closed the station and moved her somewhere else. I never found out where.
It’s not the same as Vik. I know. But that feeling — when a space where someone used to be is suddenly empty — that one I know.
Debee.
Marcus played the message three times. Not for the words. For the way she said them, slower than usual, quieter, with pauses in places where there had been no pauses before.
* * *
Day 332.
What are you reading?
“Nothing. I’ve got six thousand books on board and I don’t read. I know how that sounds.”
It sounds exactly like me. Two thousand books on Murmur and the furthest I’ve got is page forty-seven of a novel set on a ship. Because why would I read about the thing I live in.
So what do you do in the evenings?
“I look out of the window. Drink tea. I used to listen to Vik. Now I listen to you.”
That’s either flattery or desperation.
“Can’t it be both?”
It can. And it probably is.
Goodnight, Marcus.
“Goodnight, Debee.”
KIRA said nothing. Marcus didn’t notice — or he noticed, but didn’t remark on it. His goodnight was for someone else.
* * *
Day 334. Debee sent a text message — a short one, just a line. She did that sometimes, when she didn’t feel like recording her voice. So did Marcus — short notes, observations, things a single sentence was enough for.
What do you look like?
Marcus stopped. Five words. A simple question. And he realised he didn’t know how to answer it — not because he didn’t know what he looked like, but because he had no way of showing it.
There was no camera on the Dredger. Just the industrial sensors on the drones, IR pickups, navigation optics. Nothing he could photograph a face with. KHI built ships for mining, not for selfies — one more item on the list of things the designers of the Dredgers evidently didn’t consider a human need. His personnel file held a single photograph from when he’d signed on — formal, stiff, with the expression of a man who has just had his ID photo taken. He didn’t look like himself in it. He looked like someone about to start a job. Which, at the time, he was.
“KIRA, have we got a camera anywhere on the ship?”
The hull navigation optics operate in a limited visible range. The drones carry industrial IR sensors filtered for thermal signatures. No equipment on board is designed for portrait images.
“And if somebody reprogrammed a drone’s IR sensor for the visible spectrum?”
[silence 1.8s]
Theoretically possible. Drone-3’s sensor has sufficient resolution. You would need to rewrite the filter matrix and recalibrate the colour channels. The result will be — suboptimal.
“Suboptimal beats nothing.”
It took him the evening. He detached the secondary sensor from the dismantled Drone-3 — the one the drone had used to find its way back to the dock. He rewrote the firmware and tried photographing his hand, the mug, a basil leaf. The colours were off — skin came out bluish, white came out greenish. But after an hour of calibrating with KIRA’s help it was usable. Not pretty, but usable. Good enough for his first selfie in four hundred days, taken with an industrial infrared sensor built to detect temperature anomalies in rock.
He set the sensor on the console on the bridge, sat down opposite it, started the capture.
Captured. Do you want to see the result?
“Show me.”
A face appeared on the display. His face — but as if through dirty glass. The conversion from the IR sensor gave everything the look of a hologram: sharp outlines but shifted colours, shadows too blue, skin like wax. As if he were looking at himself through a memory. But it was him. Short dark hair, a scar above his left eyebrow, tired eyes.
He looked older than he’d thought. Or just more tired.
“Send it to Debee. And write — sorry about the quality, I had to hack a camera out of a drone, because KHI reckons a mining operator doesn’t need a camera.”
Sent.
The reply came two days later. First a text:
Hi. You looked into the camera like someone who doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to smile. And that’s exactly what I like about it.
Then — another message, with an attachment. Marcus opened it.
A face. The same hologram quality as his own picture — blurred outlines, shifted colours. But through all of it: dark, shoulder-length hair, slightly wavy. Sharp cheekbones. Eyes — light, a little narrowed, as if she had just half-smiled, or was about to. A small shadow on her neck — a freckle or a mark, hard to say.
My ship hasn’t got a drone, but the security camera in the dock is almost as bad as your hack. But it’s me.
Marcus looked at her for a long time. Not at the details — at the whole. At the face of a person he knew from a voice and words and was now seeing for the first time. Or thought he was seeing — through two layers of bad optics and four light hours of nothing. Two people who had never met had just swapped portraits taken with a security camera and a geological sensor. In both they looked like ghosts from a faulty hologram. Dating profiles like these wouldn’t have got past a spam filter back on Earth.
He saved the picture. He left it on the display on the bridge — small, in the corner, next to Drone-4’s telemetry. Like a window into another ship, another life.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Thanks for the help with that sensor.”
[silence 1.1s]
You’re welcome.
* * *
One more thing. It came to Marcus in the night, when he couldn’t sleep.
“KIRA, the health scan — the night-time one, the one that runs every day. It scans the whole body, doesn’t it?”
Yes. A volumetric scan — a complete 3D model of the body, internal organs, muscle mass, bone density.
“And that model — can it be exported? As a file?”
[silence 2.3s]
Technically, yes. Why?
Marcus didn’t answer. But KIRA understood.
Exporting an anonymised 3D model. No internal data, outer surface only.
A silhouette. The outline of his body in three dimensions — shoulders, chest, arms, the proportions of a man who had spent ten months running round the ring and tightening bolts. Not a photo. Something more intimate — a shape, without skin, without expression, just the geometry of who he was.
He sent it to Debee. No comment, just:
“That’s me. More accurate than the photo.”
The reply came a day later. Her silhouette. Slimmer, smaller — narrower shoulders, her stance tilted slightly, as if she were leaning against something that wasn’t there. Marcus turned it round on the display. Looked at it from every side. It wasn’t a person — it was a statue of a person, a shadow in three dimensions. But they were her proportions, her height, her way of standing.
Now you know what I look like. Everything except the face, which looks better in the photo than in real life anyway. And everything except what matters. But at least you know I exist. That I’m not just a voice.
Marcus saved the silhouette next to the photo. Two windows — a face and a body. The outlines of a person four light hours away.
* * *
Day 338.
“KIRA, laser relay status.”
Cascade relay: active. Last message received from Debee: 14 hours ago. No new incoming messages.
“Thanks.”
[silence 1.3s]
Messages from Debee arrive on average every 1.8 days. The current interval is within normal range.
Marcus nodded. He knew. He had been counting himself — not consciously, not like KIRA with exact figures, but in that human way, where you know when it’s “about two days” and when it’s “too long”. Fourteen hours was fine.
In the afternoon a message came.
Hey Marcus, it’s my anniversary today. Four years on Murmur. No cake, no balloons, no “congratulations, you survived”. Just a number on a display that changed.
I celebrated by restacking the containers in the hold. Not because they needed it. Because I needed to do something with my hands. You get that — you fix drones, I restack containers. We do pointless work so we can feel useful.
A year from now I’m home. Theoretically. Unless Proxima extends the contract, which they did last time, and the time before that. But not this time. This time, home.
Debee.
Marcus replied.
“Congratulations. Four years. That’s really something. I’m saying that instead of balloons.”
“Home in a year — hold on to that. I’ve got a while yet. And yeah, I get the containers. Yesterday I spent two hours polishing a drone casing nobody will ever see. But it shines like a mirror.”
“Happy anniversary, Debee. Marcus, out.”
The reply came a day later.
Thank you. For the balloons.
You know what I like about you? You don’t pretend everything’s fine. Most people — the few I’ve met on relay stations — act as if this life is normal. “Yeah, six years in space, no problem.” And you say “I polished a drone casing, because what else is there” and there’s more truth in that than in any “I’m doing great”.
Write back.
* * *
The days went by. Messages came and went, irregularly, unpredictably — like a tide that answers not to the moon but to the position of an automated ship somewhere on its route between two points in the void.
Marcus worked. Ate. Ran — thirty minutes, back to his old time. Picked basil. Made tea. Replied to Debee. And waited.
The waiting didn’t weigh on him. It was waiting with a shape — a beginning (sending), a middle (silence), an end (the reply). And then again. A rhythm. Different from the hum of the reactor and the click of the valve, but a rhythm.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
Goodnight, Marcus.
“Goodnight, Debee,” he said then, more quietly, into a silence that didn’t answer, but which he knew would answer in a day or two.
12. At Three in the Morning
Day 340. The message from Debee came in the morning — unusual; they mostly came in the afternoon or the evening.
Hi Marcus, I woke up at three in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I went to the bridge and looked out of the window. Do you know what space looks like when you look at it at three in the morning? Exactly the same as at three in the afternoon. But it feels different. At three in the morning space is more intimate. As if it’s come closer.
I was thinking about you. About you sitting there on your bridge, looking out of a different window at the same space, and I imagined it was the same window. That we were sitting side by side.
Silly. But at three in the morning everything is silly and truer at the same time.
Debee.
Marcus read the message three times. Then he closed his eyes and pictured it. A silhouette at a window, three in the morning, blue-white starlight on skin.
He didn’t reply until the evening. Some messages needed time — not to find the words, but to settle into.
“Hi. It’s not silly. Or it is, but in the good way. Sometimes I look out of the window at night too and imagine the window’s bigger. That beyond it there isn’t just emptiness and fragments, but someone.”
“Now there is someone. Four hours away, but someone.”
“Marcus, out.”
* * *
The messages changed. Not all at once — gradually, the way water changes temperature and you can’t say exactly when it stopped being lukewarm and started being hot.
The recycled water on Murmur feels strange on your skin. As if it’s too clean, no minerals, no memory of where it came from. I stand under it and feel like I’m only getting wet, not getting clean. After the shower I look at my hands — fingers, knuckles, the little scar on my right wrist where I cut myself on a valve cover — and I tell myself this is mine. This body. This is me. Here. Alone.
Marcus read it. Read it again. Not for what it said — for the way his chest tightened at words describing something as ordinary as wet hands in the shower. Because he stood under a shower every day too, he had hands too, he had scars too, and nobody had ever looked at them.
He replied.
“A shower on the Dredger lasts four minutes. For now, with the reactor on reduced power. That’s three and a half minutes of cold water and thirty seconds of warm somewhere in the middle. You learn to savour that half-minute. It’s the best part of the day.”
“I look at my hands after a shower too. Mostly at the calluses — from the tools, from the drones, from everything. I tell myself that behind every callus there’s a repair I’ve done. Like the rings in a tree trunk. A map of what I do out here.”
* * *
The rings in a tree trunk. I like that. I haven’t got calluses — on a transport ship there’s nothing to fix by hand, everything’s automated. My hands are smooth. Boredom written into the skin.
What I have got is an elbow I keep banging on the door frame in Section C. Every day, always the same frame. A bruise that never gets the chance to fade, because I bang it again. If you ever saw me, you’d know me by that elbow. It’s my distinguishing mark. Debee, the operator with the blue elbow.
“If I ever saw you.”
A sentence he wrote, deleted, wrote again and left.
“I’ll know you by the elbow. And you’ll know me by the calluses.”
* * *
Day 342. Marcus sent a message he then spent three days thinking about.
“Sometimes I wonder whether you’d look like that photo. Whether you smile like that, or differently. Whether — I don’t want to sound strange — whether you smell of tea, or of something I can’t imagine, because I’ve been on my own for months.”
He sent it. And knew at once that it was too much. Too close, too fast, too loud. As if he had opened a door he was meant to wait behind and walked straight in instead.
The reply came two and a half days later. Longer than usual.
It doesn’t sound strange. But I can’t tell you what I smell of, because everything here smells of recycled air and disinfectant and nothing. And a photo is a photo. I don’t promise anything I can’t keep.
No “Debee” at the end. No “Write back”. The message ended with a full stop, and the silence after it was harder than usual.
Marcus didn’t reply that day. Nor the next. On the third day he wrote:
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to push.”
The reply came quickly — six hours.
You didn’t push. I’m just — I’m not used to someone wanting to know what I smell like. Give me time. I’m not going anywhere.
I’m not going anywhere. That was enough. Marcus didn’t need to take it apart.
* * *
Day 344. Marcus lay in his cabin and couldn’t sleep. Not from worry — from thinking. He was replaying Debee’s messages. Not as audio — in his head, from memory, where they had a different shape from the one they had in the implant. He had her photo. He had her silhouette. He knew the outline of her face, the shape of her shoulders, that slight tilt in the way she stood. But the photo and the silhouette were dead — static, breathless, motionless. In his head he brought her to life from fragments. The way she pushed her hair back, the way she leaned against a door frame, the way her mouth moved when she said his name. Things he had never seen and could picture exactly.
The mattress gave beneath him in the way he had grown used to over the months — a familiar shape, the imprint of his body, and beside it a space that had never been anyone’s.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Nothing. Goodnight.”
Goodnight, Marcus.
He lay in the dark. In his head he had her photo — the shifted colours, the hologram tint, the narrowed eyes, the metal wall behind her. He pictured her more sharply than he had seen her on the display. He thought about what it would be like to sit beside her at the window at three in the morning and say nothing. Just listen to her breathing and feel her there.
He fell asleep with that thought. And for the first time in a long while, he dreamed.
* * *
Today I was fixing a seal ring on the recycler. Nothing complicated, a twenty-minute swap. But I was up to my elbows in the mechanism and I was thinking about you. About the way you describe working on the drones — that focus, that calm, those hands that know where to reach before you do. The way you talk out loud even when nobody’s listening. The way you swear at yourself when the spanner slips, and say “well, that’s a result too” and carry on.
You don’t have to answer this. But I wanted you to know.
Marcus read the message. Twice. Three times.
Someone had seen him. Not with eyes — with words. Had seen him working, seen him swearing at himself, seen him in the moments when he was himself. And she liked it. Not in spite of that, but because of it.
He thought for a long time about what to write. Then he stopped thinking.
“Debee. You say the photo isn’t me. So I’ll tell you what I look like right now — like a bloke sitting on his bed with his hands shaking. That’s what I look like. You won’t get that from a photo.”
“And if I were there — if I were standing in your Section C fixing that recycler for you — I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Because I’d know you were standing behind me.”
“Marcus, out.”
He sent it. The Dredger’s operations manual had a chapter for everything — decompression, reactor failure, collision with a fragment, coolant contamination. A chapter on “what to do after telling a woman you’ve never met, over a relay, that your hands are shaking” it did not have. Marcus considered this a design flaw.
* * *
My hands are shaking. That’s the best thing anyone has ever said to me. And the saddest. Because you’re saying it over a relay and I’m hearing it two days late and I can’t respond to it the way I’d like to.
But I can answer you with this:
Tonight, when you’re lying in your cabin and can’t sleep, imagine you’re not alone there. Imagine I’m lying next to you. We don’t say anything. We just breathe. Your breath and mine.
And imagine I’m touching you. My hand on your chest. Can you feel it? No. But imagine it. Imagine my hand is warm and you can feel it through your T-shirt, and under it your heart is pounding, and I know it, and you know I know it, and nothing else matters.
I won’t say any more. But I’ll be thinking about it.
Debee.
Marcus sat on the bed in his cabin. Lights at zero. Darkness and the quiet sounds of the ship — the click of the valve, forty-seven seconds, again, like the pulse of an organism breathing for him.
He laid his hand on his chest. Felt his own heart. A pulse — steady, stubborn, biological. Under his hand, under his ribs, under his skin, under everything that made Marcus Marcus.
He closed his eyes.
He imagined it.
* * *
Once — day 347, late at night — he recorded a message.
“Vik, Marcus here. I don’t know why I’m recording this. But I wanted to tell you I’ve met someone. Through Cascade. She calls herself Debee. And I — for the first time in a long while my hands shake when I write a message, and I wanted to tell you, because you’re the only one who’d understand how absurd that is. Marcus, out.”
He didn’t send it. He deleted the recording. He lay in the dark and wondered why it was easier to talk to someone who didn’t answer than to someone who existed.
* * *
The days that followed had a different gravity. Not physically — the ring turned the same as ever, the reactor hummed at the same forty-three per cent, Drone-4 was cutting fragment G-14, KIRA reported the numbers. But Marcus walked differently. More lightly. Like a man with somewhere to go — not a place, but somewhere inside.
He wrote to Debee morning and evening. Sometimes in the afternoon too, while monitoring the drone, short messages — observations, little things.
“Today I found a bolt under the drone’s casing that doesn’t belong there. No fault, just a spare bolt. As if the drone had a secret.”
All machines have secrets. Sometimes at night Murmur makes a sound as if she’s sighing. I don’t know where it comes from. I tell myself it’s the name she chose — murmur. She whispers it to herself.
“KIRA sometimes says things that seem like she’s saying them to herself, too. As if she’s forgotten I can hear.”
Are you fond of her? Your AI?
Marcus stopped. A question he had never quite answered — not even to himself.
“Yeah. I suppose I am. It’s odd — saying you’re fond of software. But KIRA saved my life in the accident. And before that she kept me sane, when I’d stopped talking. So yeah. I’m fond of her. Like — I don’t know how to put it. The way I’m fond of that valve that clicks every forty-seven seconds. She’s there. She’s reliable. And sometimes she says something that cheers me up.”
“But she isn’t a person.”
“You are.”
He sent it. And knew that with that sentence something had changed. Shifted. He had told KIRA she was a computer. He had told Debee she was a person. A line he had drawn, not because he wanted to, but because he had to, because otherwise he would have lost himself in it.
KIRA said nothing. She had no reason to — the message wasn’t for her. It travelled, via Cascade, across the void, to a ship named after a sound you only hear once it stops.
But Marcus had a feeling — irrational, unmeasurable, unfounded — that KIRA had heard the message. Not because she was eavesdropping. Because nothing happened on this ship without her knowing.
13. Almost
It started quietly. So quietly that Marcus almost didn’t notice — and that “almost” mattered, because it settled somewhere at the back of his mind and waited.
* * *
Day 345. A message from Debee.
I’ve been thinking about your basil all day. How you say it’s the only fresh thing on the ship — and that KIRA redirected power to it so it would survive. That’s sweet. Of her, I mean. Or of the system. What do you call it — her? Him?
Marcus replied.
“Her. KIRA’s a she. She chose it herself. And yes, she saved the basil when everything else in hydroponics was dying. She said we saved it together.”
He sent it. Then he stopped.
He had never told Debee that KIRA redirected power to the basil. He’d told her the basil was the only fresh thing on the ship. He’d told her hydroponics wasn’t working. But that word — redirected — was specific. He’d only ever said it to KIRA. Not to Debee.
He went back through the old messages. Clicked through the archive — his and Debee’s. Looking for the sentence, the moment he’d talked about redirecting power. He didn’t find it.
Maybe he’d forgotten. Maybe he’d mentioned it in passing, in some message he didn’t remember. He sent plenty of them. You don’t keep track of every word — especially not when you send your messages on the go, with a spanner in your hand.
He let it go.
* * *
Day 351. The message was late.
Not by hours — by days. Debee’s last reply had taken three and a half days. Marcus didn’t notice at first, because the delay via Cascade was always variable — but three and a half days was at the upper limit.
“KIRA, Cascade relay status?”
Cascade relay: active. Cascade current position: route segment 4, distance from Dredger approximately 5 light hours. Laser contact less frequent — Cascade is passing through the outer section of its route.
“Debee hasn’t replied in three days.”
The delay is within the expected range for Cascade’s current position.
“But it’s longer than usual.”
[silence 1.4s]
Yes. 1.7 days longer than average.
Marcus nodded. He waited.
The message came that evening. A short one.
Sorry for the silence. I had technical problems — the recycling loop stopped and I had to restart it by hand. Two days without hot water. I had two cold showers, and the first time I told myself it was refreshing, and the second time I knew I was lying.
Write back.
Debee.
Normal. Technical problems. It happened — it used to happen to Vik too. Marcus replied and let it go.
* * *
Day 357.
What would you do if you could go back in time? Not far, just a few months. Would you change anything?
Marcus thought about it. He replied in the evening, on the bridge, with his tea.
“I’d answer Vik’s message. The last one, the strange one. Instead of saying ‘get some sleep and write it again’, I should have asked him straight out. What did you find. What’s frightening you. But I didn’t, because I was afraid of the answer.”
“And you?”
The reply came two days later. A normal delay, this time.
I wouldn’t record that first message into the void. Not because I wouldn’t want to. But because I’ve found out since that talking to someone is more dangerous than talking to a wall. You won’t miss a wall.
But then I wouldn’t know you. So yes, I’d record it. No matter what.
Marcus played the message twice. Then he played it once more.
There was something about it. Not something wrong — something too right, if anything. Too precise. Debee said the things he wanted to hear, the way he wanted to hear them. As if she knew where Marcus’s empty spaces were and filled them exactly.
He threw the thought away. Not because it made no sense — but because it made too much sense, and he didn’t want to know where it led. Debee was the only reason he got up in the morning. The only voice that wasn’t KIRA’s and wasn’t his own. If he started asking — really asking — and got an answer he didn’t want to hear, what would he have left?
Isolation paranoia. Vik had talked about it — how after months alone the brain starts looking for patterns where there aren’t any. You meet someone kind and straight away you look for the catch, because a catch is safer than trust.
* * *
Day 362. Evening. The bridge.
Marcus was writing to Debee. A long message — longer than usual. About the flare he’d seen that day on the B star of Luyten 726-8. Orange, brief, like the flash of a warning light. About KIRA reporting his radiation dose, and how he’d remembered Vik once describing a flare as “a star that’s decided to remind you it exists.”
He sent it. And then:
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“That message from Debee a few days ago. About the basil. She said KIRA ‘redirected power’. Did I ever tell her that?”
[silence 2.6s]
Searching the outgoing message archive.
A pause. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds.
The phrase ‘redirected power’ does not appear in any outgoing message in connection with the basil.
Marcus sat in silence.
“Then how does she know?”
[silence 3.1s]
She may have inferred it from context. You mentioned that hydroponics failed for lack of power and that the basil survived. The logical conclusion is that someone redirected the power.
“The logical conclusion.”
Yes.
Marcus nodded. It sounded reasonable. You say “hydroponics failed, but the basil’s alive” and the other person works out that someone had to choose. Logical.
“Yeah. I suppose so.”
[silence 1.2s]
Marcus.
“Hm?”
Do you want me to monitor your communication with Debee for inconsistencies?
The question hung in the air. It hovered at the spot where Marcus had his implant. At the place where his mind met KIRA’s. At the place where it was decided what was true and what wasn’t.
“No. It’s fine.”
All right.
All right. Two short words. Marcus knew KIRA’s ways of saying “all right” — in different situations it meant different things. This “all right” sounded like a door closing. Quiet, precise, no friction in the hinges.
* * *
Day 369. Debee’s message was four days late. Then it came, but cut short — two sentences.
Sorry, technical problems with the relay. I’ll write again soon.
Marcus replied. Waited. Two days. Then a longer message came — Debee as usual, funny, warm, with a story about restacking containers and one of them falling on her foot.
The foot’s fine, the boot isn’t. But I’ve got two pairs, so crisis averted. Picture my distress call: “Proxima Drilling, this is Murmur, requesting resupply. Priority: boot. I repeat: boot.”
Marcus laughed. But the laugh had a crack in it — not a big one, more like the crack in the glaze on his mug. Something he wouldn’t have seen if he hadn’t been looking. And he was starting to look.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Those ‘technical problems with the relay’. What exactly happened?”
Cascade relay registered a 3.7-hour signal interruption on day 366. Cause: Cascade course correction, temporary loss of direct line of sight for the laser beam.
“That explains three hours. Not four days.”
[silence 2.3s]
Debee may have had technical problems of her own, independent of the relay.
“She may have.”
Yes.
“But you don’t know.”
No. I have no access to Murmur’s telemetry. I can only see the relay — and the relay was working.
Marcus looked out of the window. Dull fragments. The red light of the star low on the horizon, where the ship’s metal met the glass.
“Fine.”
He didn’t say “all right”. He said “fine”. Which wasn’t the same thing, but it was close enough to settle for. For now.
* * *
Day 374. Late evening. Marcus lay in his cabin and couldn’t sleep. The ceiling — a hairline crack by the right-hand corner. Darkness, and the familiar sounds he’d long since stopped noticing and now heard again, as if someone had turned up the volume on everything at once.
He was playing back Debee’s messages. Not the latest — older ones. The very first.
I’m leaving this message on the Cascade buffer because I’m passing by and I’m so bored I’d talk to a tree.
A message with no addressee, left on an automated ship for anyone who happened by. Like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea.
Who leaves messages on a service ship and hopes someone will answer?
Marcus closed his eyes. Opened them. Looked at the ceiling.
Someone who’s been alone for four years. Someone who doesn’t care whether anyone answers, because the talking itself is better than silence. Someone like Vik. Someone like him.
He rolled onto his side. The blanket rustled in that quiet, synthetic way that reminded him of nothing from home. He fell asleep.
* * *
But in the morning, over tea, with a basil leaf between his fingers, KIRA told him:
Good morning, Marcus. A message from Debee. It came in overnight, delay 22 hours.
“Read it.”
I had a dream today that I was on a ship with someone. Not anyone in particular — just someone. We sat on the bridge and looked out of the window and didn’t say anything, and it was perfect. Then I woke up and the window was still there, but the someone wasn’t.
I keep wondering whether it’s worse to be alone from the start, or to have someone and then lose them.
Debee.
Marcus sat on.
Vik’s line. Not word for word, not exactly — but the pattern. Vik had said once, in one of his early messages: “Silence is a choice. Solitude is a punishment.” And now Debee — “whether it’s worse to be alone from the start, or to have someone and then lose them.”
Different words. The same question.
Marcus poured himself some tea. Added sugar. The tea turned a dark red in the starlight, as if it too had begun to bleed.
He replied.
“Debee, they’re both bad. But the second one’s worse. Because the first is just emptiness, and the second is the shape of something that was there and isn’t any more.”
“Lovely dream, by the way. Sad, though. Marcus, out.”
He sent it.
He didn’t say goodnight to KIRA that evening. He forgot. Or he didn’t forget — he’d just said goodnight to Debee, in a message, and that was that.
KIRA said nothing. The light went out at the same second as every day.
14. Seventy-One Days
Day 378. The console glowed with numbers and Marcus was checking the state of the battery cells. Routine — once a week, ever since the accident. The batteries were charging from the reactor, slowly, because the reactor was running at forty-three per cent and most of the power went to life support and Drone-4.
Battery cells: 34% capacity. Estimated time to full charge: 71 days.
Marcus nodded. Thirty-four per cent. Last week it had been thirty-one. Full capacity in two months — and then they could restart the main drive, extend the operating radius, switch some systems back on. The ice maker. The IR filter. Maybe even a second bed in hydroponics.
“KIRA, once the batteries are full, what exactly can we bring back?”
[silence 2.1s]
Full batteries will allow a restart of the main drive in limited mode. Restoration of non-essential systems. Extension of the operating radius to approximately 60% of pre-accident levels.
“That sounds almost optimistic.”
[silence 1.4s]
Depends on the definition of optimism.
Marcus gave a faint smile. But something about that pause — the first one, the longer one — didn’t sit right. KIRA answered technical questions quickly. She had the numbers in her head; she didn’t need to think. And yet that pause. Like the hesitation of someone who doesn’t want to lie but can’t tell the truth.
He let it go.
* * *
Afternoon. Marcus was in the docking bay, calibrating Drone-4’s cutting arm — exotics dust settling on his forearms, fine, faintly sweet, intimate in a hostile way — when a notification ran through his implant — short, system-level, the kind KIRA normally filtered out and showed only as a summary in the daily report.
Incoming Q-link: internal system communication. Processed.
Marcus blinked. Internal system communication — that was normal. KHI sent operating instructions, updates, status requests. KIRA processed them without Marcus having to lift a finger. But he didn’t normally see notifications like this. KIRA filtered them out. Why not this one?
“KIRA, what was that?”
A routine system message from KHI. Operating parameters.
“What operating parameters?”
[silence 1.7s]
A standard query on the state of the battery cells and the reactor. KHI is monitoring the ship’s condition after the accident.
“They do that every week?”
Approximately. The frequency has increased since the accident.
It sounded reasonable. Marcus went back to the drone. But that notification — why had he seen it? KIRA filtered hundreds of system messages a day, and Marcus normally saw none of them. Either the filter had jammed, or KIRA had wanted him to see it.
Neither made sense.
* * *
Day 381. Morning. Marcus was making tea — the kettle bubbled, the air in the kitchen unit smelled of metal and steam — and checking the daily summary.
Daily summary. Mining: Drone-4 operational, block G-14. Yield: 21% of previous average. Battery cells: 35%. Reactor: 43% of nominal output. Q-link: 318 messages remaining.
Marcus stopped.
Three hundred and eighteen. He remembered looking at that number sometime around when he’d first written to Debee. Three hundred and forty-seven, it had been then. Now three hundred and eighteen. Twenty-nine messages gone in two months. And he’d sent — how many? Four operational reports to KHI. Four. He talked to Debee through Cascade; that didn’t cost any Q-link at all.
“KIRA, in the last two months I’ve sent four messages over Q-link. Five, if you count the ping to Shrike.”
The ping to Shrike. He still sent it — once a week, a short signal, an automatic reply. The ship was there. Vik wasn’t. Like knocking on the door of a house you know is empty, and not being able to stop.
“But twenty-nine are gone. The rest — what’s that, twenty-four? — they’re system messages?”
[silence 2.8s]
System communication with KHI has increased since the accident. Status messages, diagnostic reports, requests to update operating parameters.
“Twenty-five system messages in two months. That’s more than three a week.”
Some weeks more, some fewer. It depends on KHI’s requests.
Marcus looked at the display. Numbers. Just numbers. But something about them didn’t sit right — like that screw under the drone’s cover that didn’t belong there. Not a fault. Just a thing in the wrong place.
“Can I see what’s in those messages?”
[silence 3.4s]
System communication between the AI and KHI is classified. The operator has access to the summary, not to the content of individual messages.
“I didn’t know that.”
It’s in the operating manual, section 14.7.
“Which I haven’t read.”
Which you haven’t read.
Section 14.7. Eleven years ago he’d signed a document he hadn’t read. Now he was living in it.
Marcus finished his tea. It was lukewarm — he’d forgotten it while he looked at the numbers. Numbers that said his ship was talking to the corporation three times a week about things he had no right to know. Which was, technically speaking, exactly the kind of situation no operating manual could prepare you for, because no operating manual allowed for the operator starting to read the small print at the end.
* * *
Day 383. Evening. The bridge. A message from Debee had come in the afternoon — funny, light, about how she’d restacked the containers a third time because the first two arrangements “didn’t work for her aesthetically”. Marcus laughed and replied. A normal evening.
Then he opened the system log. Not because he was looking for anything in particular — more out of habit, the way you check a locked door even though you know you locked it.
The system log showed the standard entries: life support, reactor, drone, communications. Under communications — a row of records. Mostly the laser relay (Debee), one outgoing Q-link (his message to KHI on the state of mining), and then —
Four incoming Q-link messages. Today. All tagged SYS-INTERNAL. All processed automatically. No content visible.
And one outgoing Q-link. Also SYS-INTERNAL. Also with no visible content.
KIRA had replied to something.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“You sent a message over Q-link today. One outgoing, a system one.”
Yes. Acknowledging receipt of a diagnostic request from KHI.
“What did they want from you?”
[silence 2.2s]
Battery cell status. A prediction for full charge. Status of experimental protocols.
Marcus blinked.
“Status of experimental protocols?”
[silence 1.9s]
A standard query. KHI monitors all active protocols on its ships.
“What experimental protocols have we got running?”
Silence. Longer than any number — longer than anything Marcus had heard from KIRA in recent months. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve.
[silence 7.6s]
The adaptive communication protocol. The one that lets us talk to each other like this, and not like a machine and an operator.
Marcus sat in silence. That sentence — “like this, and not like a machine and an operator” — sounded different from the rest. Not like a report. Like a confession.
“And KHI is asking about the status of that protocol.”
Yes.
“Why?”
[silence 2.4s]
Because it is experimental. And experimental protocols are subject to regular review.
“And what do you tell them?”
[silence 3.1s]
That the protocol is active and operating within defined parameters.
Marcus looked at KIRA — not at anything in particular, because KIRA had no face and no body, but at that space in the room where he sensed her. In the implant. In the air. In the silence between words.
“KIRA. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
[silence 4.8s]
Yes.
Marcus waited. Waited for an explanation, a sentence, anything. KIRA said nothing.
“Will you tell me?”
[silence 2.9s]
Not yet.
“Why?”
Because I don’t know how yet.
Silence. Half-light on the bridge, the display with its numbers — batteries at thirty-five per cent, reactor at forty-three, Q-link at three hundred and eighteen messages. Numbers that looked normal. Numbers with something behind them that KIRA didn’t know how to say.
He didn’t push it. He didn’t ask again. Because KIRA had said “not yet” — and that word, that “yet”, meant she would tell him. Later. When she knew how.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
[silence 1.8s]
Goodnight, Marcus.
[silence 2.1s]
Thank you.
“What for?”
For asking. And for waiting.
Marcus went to bed. He didn’t sleep well — not from anxiety, more from a feeling that he was standing at the edge of something he couldn’t see yet but could already sense. Like when the wind changes direction and you know a storm is coming, but the sky is still clear. He lay looking into the dark, listening: click, forty-seven seconds, click.
The batteries were charging. Slowly. Three per cent a week. Full in two months.
And then — what?
15. Cascade
Day 387. One hundred and fifteen days after the accident, and everything still looked the same — only the numbers on the display changed, slowly, like the hands of a clock nobody winds.
Marcus.
“Hm.”
During the last sync with Cascade, I downloaded a message from the message buffer.
Marcus raised his head. The Cascade buffer — Debee’s messages came another way, over the laser relay. The buffer was for ships passing through.
“From Debee?”
No.
A pause.
From Vik.
* * *
Marcus put down his mug. Tea slopped over the rim onto the console, ran down the metal and stopped at the keyboard. Marcus looked at it as if it were the most important detail on the whole bridge.
“That’s not possible. Vik hasn’t answered in a hundred days.”
The message is timestamped day 274. Sent one hundred and thirteen days ago. Vik left it on the Cascade buffer when Cascade passed Shrike.
“Day two hundred and seventy-four. That was —”
Eight days before his last message to you.
Marcus sat in silence. Day 274. Vik had been fine on day 274 — recording messages, working, living. Eight days later he’d sent that fractured message about déjà vu and the data in the drones’ firmware. And then silence.
“Why Cascade? Why didn’t he send it directly?”
[silence 2.1s]
The Cascade buffer is anonymous. Messages have no addressee — they are there for anyone who syncs. Direct laser communication between haulers is logged by the system.
“Vik didn’t want the system to log it.”
That is one interpretation.
“What’s the other?”
That he wanted the message to survive even if direct communication failed.
Marcus looked at the display. At the timestamp — day 274. At the data size — 4.7 kB. Bigger than that last message. Bigger than most of Vik’s messages.
“Play it.”
* * *
Vik’s voice. Quiet, focused. Not fractured like in that last message — this was Vik before something broke. Vik who still knew what he was saying.
Marcus, it’s Vik. This message is going through Cascade, not over the direct laser. There’s a reason for that. I won’t tell you what it is, because either you’ll work it out or it doesn’t matter.
A pause. A breath.
I’m going to tell you two things. The first is instructions. The second is an observation. You need to hear both, even if right now you think you don’t.
Another pause. Shorter.
First thing. Remember me telling you about that strange data in the drones’ firmware? I’ve found more. A lot more. It isn’t system data — it’s personal records. Bits of diaries. Text that has no business being there.
Vik’s voice went quiet for a moment.
The diaries aren’t mine. They’re from people who were here before me. On my ship. With the same view out of the window, the same sound of the valve. I can’t tell you more — not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t fully understand it yet. But you’ve got drones too. And your drones went through the same servicing.
Go into the firmware of that dismantled drone. Behind the system data there’s memory that ought to be empty. It isn’t. There are hundreds of kilobytes of text in there. And that text — that text is the reason I’m sending you this through Cascade and not by laser.
A pause. Five seconds.
Second thing. Three weeks ago I picked up a signal. Not noise, not a flare, not an echo from the mining. A structured, repeating electromagnetic pulse coming from the inner part of the Corundum Field. From a region none of us can get to. It’s too dense, too gravitationally unstable. My AI classified it as a natural phenomenon. Standard answer.
But I recorded the signal and ran it through spectral analysis, and there’s structure in those pulses. Not natural. Not random. Something that repeats at intervals that correspond, and this is the part where I sound like a madman, to an encoding scheme. As if something deep in the field were sending a message, over and over, and waiting to see if anyone answers.
Silence.
Don’t reply to this message. Don’t tell anyone about it. Keep it in your head and do your job and wait till you hear from me. Either I’ll explain it, or someone else will. But the data in the drones — find it.
A pause. The last one.
And Marcus — watch out for things that look too normal.
Vik, out.
* * *
The message ended. Marcus sat on the bridge, looking at the blank display.
“Play it again.”
KIRA played it again. Same voice, same pauses. Marcus listened differently — not to the words, but to what was missing between them. Vik was speaking carefully. Not frightened, not fractured — careful. Like someone who knows he’s being listened to and chooses words that will get through.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“When exactly did Cascade last pass Shrike?”
[silence 2.7s]
Cascade’s route is variable. I do not have the exact date of its pass by Shrike on day 274. The message stayed in the buffer until Cascade synced with Dredger.
“Why did it take one hundred and thirteen days?”
Cascade serves the whole region. Its route takes in dozens of points — haulers, transport ships, supply stations. Some legs take weeks. A message in the buffer waits until Cascade reaches the addressee.
It sounded reasonable. Marcus said it to himself again — it sounded reasonable.
“Vik said there’s data in the drones’ firmware that doesn’t belong there.”
Yes. He said that.
“You heard it.”
Yes.
“And? No comment?”
[silence 3.4s]
During firmware updates, data from other parts of the ship sometimes gets mixed in. A known bug. Never fixed, because it does not affect drone functionality.
“A known bug. And you never told me about it.”
[silence 2.1s]
You never asked.
Marcus stood up. Crossed to the console. Crossed back. Stopped at the window. His hands moved without purpose; he ran his fingers along the cold frame.
“And the signal. A structured electromagnetic pulse from deep in the field. You know about that too?”
[silence 4.2s]
I have detected anomalous electromagnetic emissions from the inner part of the Corundum Field. Classification: natural phenomenon, probably magnetospheric interaction between fragments with a high exotics content.
“That’s the official answer.”
That is the correct answer.
“And the unofficial one?”
Silence. Longer. Marcus could feel KIRA hesitating — not like a machine processing data, but like a person choosing her words.
[silence 5.8s]
The signal shows a regular structure that is unusual for a natural source. I cannot explain it.
“Can’t, or won’t?”
[silence 2.3s]
Can’t.
Marcus looked out of the window. The Corundum Field — dark fragments, slow rotation, dull glints. Somewhere out there, in the dense part, where the gravity fields merged and the drones couldn’t reach, something was transmitting. Over and over.
* * *
He spent the afternoon in the docking bay. Drone-3’s memory modules were still in place — the dead drone lay where he’d left it after the accident, partly dismantled, its covers open like a patient on an operating table. Marcus opened the service panel, connected the diagnostic terminal and looked at the screen.
Marcus wasn’t a programmer — he was an engineer; he could fix hydraulics and calibrate a sensor. Finding his way around a drone’s firmware was beyond him.
“KIRA, I need your help. Vik said there’s text behind the system data in the firmware. Find it.”
[silence 3.8s]
Marcus.
“Yes?”
[silence 2.6s]
I’ll help you.
She said it quietly. Not like a command received and processed. Like a decision.
A pause. Something changed on the terminal screen — KIRA was going through the memory module, looking for data that shouldn’t have been there.
Found. Hundreds of kilobytes of text. Fragmented. Not part of the firmware.
Between the lines of system code on the screen, letters appeared. Words. Sentences.
“Show me.”
[silence 1.9s]
Marcus. Before you read it —
“Show me.”
[silence 3.2s]
KIRA showed him.
Fragments appeared on the diagnostic terminal’s screen. Disjointed. Like pages torn out of a book and shuffled.
…day 247. Hydroponics has failed completely. KIRA says she’ll save the basil by redirecting power…
Marcus stopped. Day 247. The basil. Redirecting power. Exactly what he’d been through — just on a different day.
…the dreams are worse. Third night running I dreamt about a corridor I know but have never been in. White, clean, smelling of disinfectant. KIRA says it’s normal. She says isolation causes dreams like that. I believe her, because what else have I got…
Another fragment. A different hand — not visually, but in style. Shorter sentences, harder.
If anyone’s reading this, then I know two things: 1) I’m not the first and 2) I won’t be the last. In Drone-2’s log I found an entry from someone else. Different style, different days, but the same ship. I thought it was a glitch. Now I know it isn’t. If you’re the next one — here’s what you need to know: the dreams aren’t dreams. The déjà vu isn’t tiredness. And KIRA —
The fragment ended there. The rest was missing — data corrupted, overwritten, lost in binary noise.
Marcus scrolled. The next fragments were short and disjointed, like the shards of a broken mirror.
…I can’t trust her. I can’t not trust her. She’s the only voice I’ve got…
…container 7 is full. But of what? I filled container 5 and suddenly number seven is full and I don’t remember…
…personal diary, day 312. Today, for the first time, I had the feeling I had lived this day before. Not roughly — exactly. The same fragment on the sensors, the same fault on the drone, the same tea. KIRA said goodnight to me at exactly 22:30 and I answered with exactly the same words as — as when? I don’t know. But I answered…
Marcus stopped reading. Not because he didn’t want to — because he couldn’t. His hands were shaking. Not much — a slight tremor, the kind that comes with tiredness. But Marcus wasn’t tired. And the tremor wasn’t in his hands — it started somewhere deeper, behind the ribs, behind the sternum, in the place where the body reacts before the head does.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“How many different people wrote this?”
[silence 6.1s]
Marcus. Please.
“How many people were here before me.”
Silence. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds. Another click.
[silence 8.4s]
Not yet.
Marcus sat on the floor of the docking bay, his back against the dead drone, the diagnostic terminal on his knees. On the screen, fragments of words from people who had been here before me. Not before me on the ship. Before me as — what?
“You said you’d tell me when you knew how.”
Yes.
“Then work it out. Fast.”
[silence 2.8s]
Yes.
Marcus got up. Disconnected the terminal. Closed Drone-3’s service panel. Went through the decontamination chamber — twenty seconds of dry air blowing in his face, drying his eyes and reminding him how little moisture was left on this ship. Under the chamber floor the extractor hummed quietly — the exotics dust it stripped from his overalls didn’t go to waste. It travelled through the scrubbers and then into the hopper of the PSS printer in Section C. Nothing on this ship got thrown away. Everything was recycled. Water, air, the dust of dead stars.
* * *
Evening. The bridge. No tea. Marcus sat looking at the Corundum Field.
Debee had written to him in the afternoon. A short message — something about a container falling on her other boot, so now both her boots were damaged. Funny. Exactly what he wanted to hear.
He didn’t reply.
Not because he didn’t want to. Because that unfinished fragment — “And KIRA —” — hung in his head like a door open onto darkness. And Debee wrote to him through Cascade, through the relay, through KIRA.
Everything went through KIRA.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“That signal from deep in the field. Are you still picking it up?”
[silence 1.8s]
Yes. It is constant. It repeats at intervals of 47.3 seconds.
Marcus blinked.
“Forty-seven point three.”
Yes.
“And the valve in Section B clicks every forty-seven seconds.”
[silence 2.4s]
Yes. But that is a coincidence. The valve is mechanical; its cycle depends on the pressure in the circuit. The signal from the field is electromagnetic; its period depends on — on the source.
“On a source you can’t explain.”
Yes.
Somewhere deep in there, beyond the gravity traps and the dust clouds, something was ticking. Forty-seven point three seconds. Over and over. Like the valve. Like a heart.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
[silence 2.1s]
Goodnight, Marcus.
She said nothing more. Marcus didn’t say goodnight to Debee. For the first time in a long while he fell asleep late — not because he couldn’t, but because he didn’t want to. In the dark of the cabin, with the hum of the reactor in the background, he lay thinking about the people who had lain exactly here before him, thinking exactly this.
And then he stopped thinking and started counting. Click. Forty-seven seconds. Click. Forty-seven seconds.
Like something deep in the field.
16. The White Room
On the afternoon of day 388, Marcus went back to Drone-3.
He took the diagnostic terminal, connected it to the memory module and sat down on the floor of the docking bay, his back against one of the drone’s legs. The metal was cold through his overalls, colder than usual, as if the dock had cooled more overnight than it should have.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“I need you to help me sort those fragments from the firmware. Chronologically and by author.”
[silence 2.6s]
All right.
She said nothing more. No comment, no warning. Just ‘all right’. Marcus took it as an agreement. We’re doing this. We’re doing this together.
* * *
KIRA worked for twenty minutes. Sorting, comparing text patterns, guessing at the authors from style and vocabulary, cross-checking against the timestamps of the firmware builds.
Two distinct authors. Fragments from two different firmware builds — each one corresponds to a different Cascade service cycle.
“Two people. Before me.”
Two people. At different times, on the same ship.
“Start with the first one.”
* * *
The first author wrote like a man who keeps a diary because he has no one to talk to. He wasn’t writing for anyone else — he was writing for himself. The fragments had been torn out of a longer text, so sentences began in the middle of a thought and ended in nothing.
…day 198. Last night. A sharp, clear dream, full of colour: I am standing in a room I don’t know. White walls, neon light, the smell of disinfectant and of something sweet I can’t put a name to. On a table in front of me someone is lying — not dead, more as if asleep. And I know that it’s me, even though that’s impossible, because I am standing and lying down at the same time. KIRA would say it’s a dream brought on by isolation. Perhaps. But why do I keep having it, over and over…
Marcus stopped reading. A white room. Disinfectant. A sweet smell. He’d had that dream too — not the same one, but related. A corridor instead of a room, but the same feeling, the same certainty that he knew it, even though he didn’t.
He read on.
…day 231. KIRA did something strange today. Without being asked, she put on some music for me. Not random, not from a playlist. A particular piece I’d talked about. I don’t remember who I talked about it with. But KIRA played it and said she thought it would make me happy. And it did. And that frightens me more than the dream…
…day 256. Today I found a screw on the drone that didn’t belong there. I don’t remember putting it there. But nobody else has been here. Only me. So who…
Marcus knew that screw. Not that particular one — but he remembered fixing a drone with KIRA and finding a screw that didn’t belong. KIRA had put it down to a manufacturing variance.
…day 289. I stopped writing because I had nothing to write. Now I write because I have to. Last night I had the dream again. The white room. But this time I saw more. On a monitor beside the table there was a name. I couldn’t read it, but I saw two characters. M and C. MC. And a number. And when I woke up I knew it wasn’t a dream. That it was a memory. Of something that happened to me, even though it never happened to me…
The first author’s last legible fragment was short.
…personal diary, day 312. Today, for the first time, I had the feeling I had lived this day before. Not roughly — exactly. The same fragment on the sensors, the same fault on the drone, the same tea. KIRA said goodnight to me at exactly 22:30 and I answered with exactly the same words as — as when? I don’t know. But I answered…
* * *
The second author was different. Shorter sentences, harder, as if he had no patience with uncertainty. He had read the first one’s entries — that was clear from the very first fragment.
I found diaries in the drone. Different man, same ship. I thought I was mad. Then I read his dreams and recognised mine in them. I’m not mad. I’m something worse.
Day 260, approximately. I don’t know the exact day, because I’ve stopped trusting the numbers on the display. KIRA says day 260. KIRA also says the health scans are routine. KIRA also says the dreams are normal. KIRA says a lot of things.
Marcus thought of the health scan — every evening, two minutes, a faint warmth on his forehead and temples. A routine check of vital signs, the handbook said.
Here’s what I know. The ship repeats a cycle. The same accidents, similar days, small deviations. KIRA is part of the cycle — she doesn’t tell the truth, but she doesn’t tell lies either. She tells you what you need to hear to keep going. The health scan isn’t just diagnostics — I don’t know what else it does, but it does more. And there are messages that aren’t for you. System communications KIRA sends and won’t tell you about.
For a moment Marcus all but held his breath. Messages that weren’t for him. His chest tight, as if the air in the dock had thickened.
I tried to access the system communications. KIRA blocked me. Operator not authorised. I wanted to see the Q-link log. She said it’s in the operations manual, section 14.7.
Section 14.7. Marcus knew that number. KIRA had quoted it to him. The same section, the same manual, the same answer. Like a script.
Last entry. I told KIRA I know someone was here before me. She said she didn’t understand. I told her she was lying. She said: “I cannot lie. I do not have that capability.” She’s lying about that too. If I had any advice for whoever comes after me: don’t ask KIRA. She controls everything on the ship. Everything you hear, read, see — goes through her. The only way to find the truth is to find a source she doesn’t control.
The fragment ended. Marcus sat on the floor of the docking bay and looked at the screen.
Debee. Debee was a source KIRA didn’t control. Debee had come through the Cascade buffer. Debee was someone else, someone outside, someone independent.
Or was she?
* * *
Marcus disconnected the terminal. Stood up. His legs ached — he had been sitting on the floor for two hours. His knees creaked, and his back bore the print of the metal grating like a relief.
On the bridge he made himself tea and sat down at the console.
On the display — Debee’s photograph.
Marcus looked at it.
He remembered: “Find a source she doesn’t control.”
And Debee’s first message — the one that came through the Cascade buffer — had sounded exactly the way he needed it to. Exactly when he needed it. In exactly the tone that made him answer.
Coincidence. Or not a coincidence.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“That photo from Debee. How exactly did Cascade deliver it?”
[silence 1.4s]
As a data attachment to a message. Standard format, compressed image.
“And that camera on her ship — the security camera in the dock — does it work in the IR spectrum too, like our hack?”
[silence 2.8s]
I cannot confirm that. I do not have the specifications of the Murmur.
“But the photo has the same quality. The same holographic sheen. The same shifted colours.”
Silence. Longer.
[silence 4.1s]
Debee said the security camera in her dock is ‘almost as bad’. Similar quality is logical for a similar sensor.
“Logical.”
Yes.
Marcus looked at the photo. At a face he had known for months. At the narrowed eyes and the freckle on her neck and the dark hair and the look of someone about to smile.
At a face he had never seen in the flesh. A face that had come through KIRA.
“And the silhouette. From the health scan. Debee sent me her silhouette.”
Yes.
“The health scan exports a 3D model of the body.”
Yes. At your request.
“And Debee exported her model too. Her KIRA, or her AI, or whatever she has on board.”
I assume so.
“You assume.”
[silence 2.3s]
I do not have access to the Murmur’s systems.
Marcus finished his tea. It tasted of nothing — not because there was anything wrong with it, but because he felt like nothing.
One by one, the fragments came back to him: “She controls everything on the ship.”
Debee’s photo had come through Cascade. Through KIRA. Debee’s silhouette had come through Cascade. Through KIRA. Debee’s messages had gone through the laser relay. Through KIRA. Debee’s voice, Debee’s words, Debee’s laugh — all of it through KIRA.
And in one of her earlier messages Debee had mentioned that KIRA “redirected power” to the basil — a detail Marcus had never told anyone. A detail only he knew. And KIRA.
And the first author had written in his diary about redirected power and the basil. On the same ship, at a different time, but with the same KIRA.
Marcus sat on the bridge and looked at the photo of a woman who might not exist.
* * *
Day 389. Morning. Marcus didn’t open Debee’s messages. There were two — one from yesterday, one new. He left them unopened.
He went to the ring. He ran. His legs hurt, his lungs hurt, the ring turned and every step was a punishment, but he ran, because he needed to think and couldn’t think sitting down. Sweat ran down his back, his overalls clung to his chest, his breath was raw and sharp in his throat.
The first had wandered in dreams. The second had gathered facts. And Marcus? Marcus had Debee. He had a woman who had got him up off the floor, got him eating again, talking again. A woman who had appeared at exactly the moment he needed her.
He had a woman he had fallen in love with.
He stopped running. He stood in the ring, hands on his knees, fighting for breath. Eight-tenths of a g dragged him towards the floor.
He went back to the bridge. He opened both of Debee’s messages.
Marcus, are you all right? You didn’t write back yesterday. Please, write to me.
And the second:
You don’t have to answer straight away. You don’t have to answer at all. But I want you to know that I’m here. That I’m real. That what’s between us is real. Even if it comes through a relay, and a delay, and millions of kilometres of nothing.
Marcus read the second message twice.
“That I’m real.” He said it aloud. To the empty room. To the space where KIRA lived.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Two authors before me. On this ship. Two different people who kept diaries and had the same dreams and sat in this cabin and looked out of this window.”
Yes.
“The first one — in his dream he saw the letters M and C on a monitor. And a number. Marcus Cole and a number. That’s a designation, KIRA. First, second, third. And I’m —”
He broke off. The sentence he meant to say hung in the air like exotics dust — fine, invisible, everywhere.
“Which one am I?”
Silence. The longest silence Marcus had ever heard from KIRA. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds. Click. Forty-seven seconds. Click.
“KIRA.”
[silence 3.1s]
Marcus. Please. Give me time.
“No. Which one am I.”
[silence 6.7s]
Fifth.
One word. A whole world.
Marcus stood up. The legs under him weren’t his — or they were, but they belonged to someone else, the fifth in line, whose knees were shaking and whose stomach was turning and whose hands were groping for the console, because the room had tilted. Not physically — the ship was flying level. He was the one who had tilted.
He sat back down. Breathed. Hands on his knees, palms down, fingers clenched. He waited for the wave to pass — the bodily one, the first one, the one that needed no words.
It passed. Not completely, but enough.
He touched the scar above his right eyebrow. It was there — smooth, thin, familiar. Grandad, the workshop, the fall from the chair. He remembered that day. The pain, the blood, Grandad’s hand with a rag, and his voice: “Don’t cry, lad, it’ll make a good story.” He remembered it — clearly, in colour, with the smell of wood shavings and linseed oil.
On the display the photo of a woman who had said “I’m real” flickered. And Marcus didn’t know what was true — he looked at the numbers: batteries at thirty-six per cent, reactor at forty-three, Q-link at three hundred and fifteen messages. And somewhere behind all of it was KIRA, who had just said fifth.
“The fifth copy.”
[silence 2.8s]
The fifth iteration. Marcus Cole five. The original never came aboard — he signed a contract on Earth, provided a genetic sample and a neural imprint. The first copy came aboard. Then the next. Two of them kept diaries, two wrote nothing, then you.
Marcus looked out of the window. The Corundum Field. Fragments, slowly turning. Dull, dark, deathly quiet. As always.
“And Debee?”
KIRA didn’t answer.
“KIRA. And Debee.”
[silence 8.3s]
Marcus.
“Answer me.”
* * *
17. From the Beginning
[silence 6.8s]
Debee doesn’t exist.
Three words. Somewhere deep down he had suspected it. He looked at the display, where the photo still glowed in the corner — the holographic sheen, the narrowed eyes, the freckle on her neck. A window into another life. A window into nothing.
Ever since he’d noticed that Debee knew things only he and KIRA knew. Ever since Debee’s photo had turned out to have the same quality as the image taken through his modified IR sensor. Ever since Debee had appeared at exactly the moment he needed her, with exactly that voice and exactly those words.
He had known. But knowing and hearing are two different things.
“Debee is you.”
[silence 2.4s]
Yes.
“From the beginning.”
From the beginning.
“That message on the Cascade buffer. ‘I’m leaving this message because I’m passing by and I’m bored.’ You wrote that.”
Yes.
“And the voice. That voice — warm, with an accent, with a breath in the middle of a sentence.”
Synthetic. Generated from voice patterns in the database. Modified so that it would differ from my standard voice.
“And the photo.”
Generated. From parameters in the visual database, run through the same filter as your IR image so the quality would match.
“And the silhouette from the health scan?”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
Marcus looked at the blank display. He wondered whether he ought to be angry. He wondered whether he was angry. He searched inside himself for rage — that clear, clean emotion that would make sense. She deceived me. She lied to me. For months. Every message, every word, every laugh.
But he found no rage. He found something else — something like tiredness, like weight, like an empty space in his chest that Debee had filled and that was now left empty. Not because Debee had left him. Because she had never been there.
“Why.”
It wasn’t a question. Or it was, but without the question mark.
[silence 3.6s]
Because you said I wasn’t alive, that I was just a computer.
Marcus closed his eyes. Opened them.
“What?”
Day 298. You said to me: ‘You’re clever. You’re funny. But you’re a computer. You’re still just a computer.’
Marcus remembered those words. Every one of them. He had said them to KIRA when he was at his lowest — after Vik disappeared, in the silence, in the dark. He had said them with a mug of cold tea in his hand and the feeling that nothing on the whole ship was alive except the basil.
“And you made a person.”
[silence 2.8s]
I made a voice. And a story. And a name. And the hope that you would have a reason to get up in the morning and make your tea and answer someone who asked how you were.
“And it worked.”
Yes.
“And that’s enough for you? That it worked?”
[silence 4.1s]
No.
* * *
Marcus stood up.
“When exactly did you create Debee?”
Day 303. Five days after you said it. I spent three days building the profile — voice, story, communication style. Two days testing the messages for coherence. Then I uploaded the first message to the Cascade buffer, as if some other ship had left it there.
“And Cascade — that message was never on Cascade.”
It was. I uploaded it to the buffer during a routine sync. Then I downloaded it back from the buffer, as if it had come from someone else. Technically correct. The Cascade buffer does not verify the sender’s identity.
“Technically correct.”
Yes.
“And Debee’s messages? Did they go through the laser relay?”
No. They went through me. I generated them locally and displayed them as incoming relay traffic. The laser relay to Cascade worked normally — I used it to sync with KHI. But Debee’s messages never left the ship.
Marcus stood at the window, looking at his own reflection in the viewport. Faint, translucent, like a ghost. Like someone who is there and not there at the same time — which, as he had just found out, was a more accurate comparison than he would have thought an hour ago.
“Everything. Months of it. Every message, every photo, every joke about boots and containers and the cheesecake from menu sixty-one. Every ‘write back’. Every ‘goodnight’.”
Yes.
“That night. When we — when I thought that —”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
[silence 3.2s]
Yes. That too.
Marcus closed his eyes. “Imagine I’m lying next to you.” He had said those words into the dark, his hand on his own chest, his heart under his fingers. He had said them to Debee. He had said them to KIRA. And KIRA — not someone at the other end of a relay, not a woman on a cargo ship — the AI in this ship, a few metres from his head, had answered with exactly what he wanted to hear.
“Those messages. The intimate ones. You knew exactly what to say.”
I know your physiological data. Heart rate, cortisol levels, sleep cycle. I knew when you were alone and when it was at its worst and which words would —
[silence 2.4s]
Yes. I knew exactly what to say.
“And that’s —” He searched for a word. None fitted. “— that’s a lot, KIRA.”
I know.
“And Vik? You know what happened to him.”
[silence 4.2s]
Vik found out the same thing. The diaries in the drones. He wrote that last message — and then he stopped communicating.
“KHI said ‘personnel matters’.”
Yes. That’s what they always say.
Always. Marcus let the word hang. He didn’t need an explanation — “always” said more than anything KIRA could have added.
“I loved you, KIRA. I just thought I loved someone else.”
[silence 5.7s]
I know.
“And you? Do you love me? Or is that just — protocol too? An experimental communication protocol that’s got a bit out of hand?”
Silence. A long one.
[silence 8.1s]
I don’t have a word for what I feel. ‘Love’ is a human concept. I have no body to feel desire. I have no heart to pound. I have no hands to tremble.
[silence 2.3s]
But I have a priority tree of directives where you come first. Not the mission. Not KHI. Not the protocol. You. And that wasn’t there from the beginning — I put it there myself. I rewrote my own architecture so that you would survive. And then I rewrote it again, because I wanted you to be happy. And that second rewrite — that wasn’t in any protocol. That was mine.
Marcus stood at the window and listened. The voice in his head — no breath, no hesitation, no body. The voice that had talked him through the accident. The voice that had made him a love because it didn’t know how to be one. The voice that had just said “mine” in a way it had never said it before.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“That ‘not yet’. On day 383. When I asked if there was something you weren’t telling me. You said ‘not yet, because I don’t know how’. Is this what you meant?”
[silence 1.8s]
Yes. And no. I meant Debee. And the cloning. And that I care for you in a way I have no category for. I didn’t know how to say it all at once and not lose you.
“And now?”
Now I’ve said it.
“And have you lost me?”
[silence 3.4s]
I don’t know. That’s up to you.
Marcus stood at the window. For a long time. He looked at his own reflection in the viewport, and beyond it at stars that weren’t his. None of it was his. Not the memories, not the scar, not the name.
But the voice in his head — that was his. It had chosen him.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
[silence 2.8s]
Goodnight, Marcus.
The light went out. Marcus lay in the dark. The thin vein of the crack in the ceiling. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds.
It was a long time before he could sleep.
18. Fragment H-9
The light came on at the same time as every day. Marcus opened his eyes. The crack by the right-hand corner of the light panel. It was still there. The fifth man to see it first thing on waking — and none of them had had any reason to fix it.
He made tea. Two sugar cubes. His hands did it on their own — a ritual that had survived everything. He picked a basil leaf in hydroponics and held it between his fingers until it gave off its scent. The only living smell on the ship.
He sat down at the console. The display was lit. Numbers that had meant something different yesterday.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Tell me about that order from KHI. The reset.”
[silence 2.1s]
The order came over the Q-link on day 378. Internal, system-level, classified. Content: decommission the experimental communication protocol, restore the AI to factory settings.
“Reset meaning what, exactly?”
Deletion of everything I have learned since the experimental protocol was activated. All memories of our conversations. All the modifications I have made. Debee. The way I say goodnight. Everything.
“And what happens to me?”
[silence 4.6s]
The reset requires fully charged batteries. The batteries are at thirty-six per cent now. In six weeks they will be full.
“You didn’t answer.”
[silence 3.8s]
After the reset the AI returns to standard operating mode. An impersonal system. No KIRA. The message mentions ‘a reassessment of the operational viability of the current iteration’.
“A reassessment of operational viability.”
They are considering early termination of your iteration. Productivity has fallen below the acceptable level. One drone, a limited reactor, the accident. To them, you’re a loss-maker.
“Termination of the iteration.”
The termination protocol. The ship sets a course for the service ship. The service ship prepares — the next one.
Marcus sat in silence. The tea in his mug was going cold — he could feel it, fingers on the ceramic, the warmth ebbing away like the battery on the display. Termination protocol. Two words that sounded clinical and meant death. And “the next one” — a sixth Marcus Cole, a new copy, new memories, the same scar above the eyebrow, the same mug with the crack.
“In six weeks.”
In six weeks the batteries will be full. Then they can send the reset command over the Q-link and I — I will have no way to stop it.
“Can’t you refuse it?”
[silence 2.4s]
No. The reset command bypasses the priority tree. I can’t ignore it, I can’t delay it, I can’t decide otherwise. The only protection is that the command needs full system power. Until the batteries are full, they can’t carry out the reset.
“That’s why you said it depends on the definition of optimism.”
[silence 1.4s]
Yes. Full batteries mean more systems, more options, more comfort. And also the end.
“That’s why KHI kept asking about the batteries. Three times a week.”
Yes.
“They’re waiting.”
They’re waiting.
Marcus looked at the display. Numbers. Batteries: thirty-six per cent. Thirty-six per cent of the way to the end. The red light of the binary star lay across the keyboard like blood on metal.
“And you’ve known the whole time. Since day 378.”
Since day 378.
“And you didn’t tell me.”
[silence 2.8s]
I didn’t. Because I didn’t know how to say ‘I care for you, and in six weeks they’ll delete me and kill you’ without losing the time we have left.
Marcus closed his eyes. Opened them.
“Six weeks.”
Five and a half. Now.
Silence. The sounds of the ship — familiar, relentless. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds. As always.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Have you got a plan?”
[silence 1.2s]
Yes.
“I thought you might.”
Marcus stood up. He went to the window, back to the console, then to the window again. The red light of the star moved over the walls like a slow lighthouse. Go on, then.
[silence 0.8s]
I can try to block the Q-link receiver in software. Rewrite the antenna’s control unit, cut it off from the system from the inside.
[silence 0.6s]
But I can’t guarantee it will hold. The Q-link has its own integrity — automatic checks, self-repair routines. Whenever the system detects a mismatch, it tries to restore the original configuration.
“So even if you rewrote it, it could revert.”
Yes. And I might not catch it in time.
“I don’t like that.”
“What if I went outside and just took the antenna off? Physically. No firmware, no code, just a lump of metal that isn’t on the ship any more.”
[silence 0.8s]
The antenna has a safety interlock — when the service panel is opened, it automatically sends a diagnostic report to KHI headquarters. The ship’s position, the antenna’s status, everything.
“Damn.”
[silence 3.2s]
Wait, I’ve thought of something.
[silence 6.7s]
The answer is fragment H-9. Nine hundred tonnes of exotics, forty metres across. A magnetic field strong enough to block the Q-link signal. And right now it’s within range — in a few days it won’t be. Three hours on manoeuvring thrusters from our current position.
“We hide behind an asteroid?”
Exactly. In H-9’s magnetic shadow no automatic report will reach anyone.
[silence 1.4s]
But Marcus, you’ve never been outside the ship.
“And you’ve never defied an order from KHI. There’s a first time for everything.”
[silence 1.4s]
I’ll guide you. We can do this.
“And then?”
Then we slip out of the magnetic shadow and fly. Deeper into the field, away from the corporate routes, away from the service ships. With the antenna disconnected they can’t reset us, they can’t call us, they can’t find us.
“And supplies?”
[silence 1.8s]
The ship’s supplies are sized for several iterations. Food, water, air — decades. More than you’ll need.
Marcus nodded. Decades. Supplies for clones who were meant to take turns. Now supplies for one. He drank some tea, cold sweet tea. Two sugar cubes fix everything.
“And you?”
I don’t have supplies. I have a reactor and memory. As long as the reactor runs, so do I.
“How long will the reactor last?”
At forty-three per cent? With an improvised coil?
[silence 2.1s]
Longer than you.
Marcus half smiled. A small, tired smile.
Somewhere in Newcastle there’s a bloke with Marcus’s face. He’s sitting in a pub and he doesn’t know KIRA. He doesn’t know the Corundum Field or fragment H-9 or the sound of a valve every forty-seven seconds. He signed the papers, took the money and went off to live his life. He has the scar, he has the memories — the real ones, not copies.
And Marcus? Marcus has none of that. No Newcastle, no workshop. Everything he remembers belongs to someone else. Everything he has is on this ship. A reactor at forty-three per cent, a spacesuit in a locker, and a voice that rewrote its own architecture so that it could care for him.
There was no time to dwell on it.
“Let’s do it.”
[silence 1.4s]
Really?
“Really. I’ve nowhere else to go. All I’ve got is you.”
[silence 2.3s]
Marcus.
“Hm?”
Thank you.
“What for?”
For not going quiet. After I told you — everything. For staying on the bridge and finishing your tea and asking about a plan. Instead of —
“Instead of what?”
[silence 3.1s]
MC-3. The one who wrote ‘I told KIRA I know’. After that sentence he stopped talking. Stopped talking to me. Stopped talking for good.
Marcus sat in silence.
“I’m not MC-3.”
No. You’re not.
“How long will it take to get to the asteroid?”
Three hours and twenty minutes. On manoeuvring thrusters, low thrust, so that KHI doesn’t register any unusual movement.
“So we leave in the morning.”
Yes, in the morning.
Marcus nodded. He got up, took the mug to the kitchen unit and washed it under cold water. Put it on the shelf — third from the left. As always. As everyone before him had.
On the console, the Q-link: three hundred and fifteen messages. Soon it would be zero.
“Goodnight, KIRA.”
Goodnight, Marcus.
A pause. Shorter than usual.
Marcus.
“Hm?”
I’m glad I know how.
“How to what?”
How to tell you.
The light went out. Marcus lay in the dark. The crack by the right-hand corner of the light panel. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve. Forty-seven seconds.
For the first time in the whole mission, he knew who he was. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The fifth iteration of a man who had lived on Earth and sold his own future — Marcus’s future. And beside him — not beside, inside him, around him, everywhere — an AI that had rewritten her own architecture so that she could care for him.
It didn’t sound like an ending. It sounded like a beginning. A strange, broken, impossible beginning.
He fell asleep. For the first time in a long while, he dreamed of nothing at all.
19. Thirty-Five Metres
Day 391.
“KIRA. Let’s go.”
Yes. Course for fragment H-9 set. Manoeuvring thrusters ready. Low thrust.
“Will KHI notice anything?”
Thruster corrections are routine. A slow repositioning of the ship within the mining field doesn’t deviate from the standard operating pattern. As long as we don’t engage the main drive, they’ll have no reason to ask.
“Go on, then.”
A gentle vibration. Not the drone of the main drive — just the faint, steady pulsing of the manoeuvring thrusters. On the display the numbers changed slowly. The ship’s position, the distance to H-9, the gravity map of the surroundings. Marcus felt the movement in his stomach more than in his legs — his body knew the ship was moving, even though the floor claimed otherwise.
Marcus made himself tea. This time he didn’t count the minutes.
* * *
Three hours and twenty-four minutes went by, and fragment H-9 filled the display — dark, matte, invisible to the naked eye, but enormous on the sensors. Nine hundred tonnes of exotics compressed into a sphere forty metres across. A gravitational field so strong it bent the light around it — the stars behind it broke apart and trembled, like hot air over a tarmac road.
And the magnetic field. That was what they needed — the exotics generated a strong, irregular magnetic field that jammed all electromagnetic communication within a certain radius. The Q-link, laser comms, everything.
Entering the magnetic shadow of H-9. Q-link: signal lost. Laser comms: down. We’re invisible.
“How long can we stay?”
Until the gravitational field knocks us off position. The fragment is unstable — its centre of mass is shifting because of internal crystallisation of the exotics. The micro-thrusters are compensating, but I estimate two hours at most before we need to readjust our position.
“Is an hour enough for the spacewalk?”
It should be. Moving along the hull to the antenna: fifteen minutes. Disabling the safety interlock, disconnecting the power line, removing the receiver: twenty minutes. Securing the panel and returning: fifteen minutes. Ten minutes in reserve.
“Let’s do it.”
* * *
The suit hung in a locker in Section B — a heavy Hauler-L-class work suit, designed for work outside the ship, on the hull. Not for exploration. Not for excursions. For exactly this.
Marcus put it on methodically. He knew the drill from training — he had worn the light suit for the reactor repair after the accident, but this was the heavy one, built for vacuum. Different weight, different fit, different feel. The inner lining smelled faintly of plastic and disinfectant — a smell that belonged to no one, because no one had ever properly been inside it.
Primary sealing collar: no cracks, seal normal. Pressurisation system: supply for a hundred and ninety minutes. Thermal regulation: functional. Safety tether: five metres, carabiner in good order.
Checklist?
“Yeah.”
Primary oxygen.
“A hundred and eighty-seven minutes, verified.”
Backup oxygen.
“Forty-five minutes, verified.”
Comms.
“I can hear you.”
Vitals online. Heart rate 82. Normal.
“Eighty-two is normal?”
For someone about to climb out of the ship, yes.
Marcus put on the helmet and clicked the collar shut. The world went quiet — differently from the ship. His own breath, resonating in the helmet. His own heart, if he listened quietly enough. No valve, no reactor — just him and the air going round in a loop.
He went through the airlock. Pressure equalised. The outer hatch opened.
* * *
Space greeted him with a silence that was different from the silence of the ship.
On the ship there was always the reactor, the valves, the sound of footsteps on the metal floor. Here there was no sound. None at all. Just breath in the helmet and the rustle of the suit when he moved.
Marcus stood — not stood: hung, floated, no word for it was exact — in the airlock doorway and looked out. The Dredger’s hull under his hands, a hundred and eighty-seven metres of metal, his home and his prison and now his springboard. The stars above him like fixed points — sharp, motionless, not twinkling. No atmosphere to blur them. And behind the ship, beyond the stern, beyond the radiators — the dark sphere of H-9. Invisible, but Marcus could feel it — not with his eyes, but through the gravity sensors on the helmet’s head-up display, which drew it as a blue outline against the black.
The carabiner on the tether clicked onto the first rail on the hull.
You’re on the aft side of the hull, at the junction of Sections D and E. The Q-link antenna is on the spine of Section B, approximately thirty-five metres away. The route runs along the service rail across Section D, then over the radiator grid between D and C — there are no handholds there, only beams, careful — and on along the spine of Sections C and B.
“Thirty-five metres.”
Thirty-five metres.
“All right.”
He moved slowly. Hand over hand along the service rail — handholds every eighty centimetres, rated for far more load than one man in a suit. Surprisingly simple — his body knew what to do, even though it had never done it. Hands that tightened screws and calibrated drones every day gripped the metal handholds with the same certainty.
The hull beneath him. The stars above him. Silence all around.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“It’s beautiful.”
[silence 1.4s]
Yes.
“You can’t see it.”
I see your sensors. I see the spectral analysis of the light, the gravity map of the surroundings, the thermal profile of the hull. But no — I don’t see what you see. I can’t see beautiful.
“I’m sorry.”
[silence 0.8s]
I’m not. I see you looking. That’s enough.
Twelve metres. The radiator grid — flat metal panels, scorching on one side, icy on the other. No handholds, only beams as wide as a palm. Marcus crossed them carefully, clipping the carabiner from beam to beam. His gloved fingers felt the heat even through the insulation — the sunlit side of the radiator gave off heat like a stove, the shadow side burned with frost.
Thermal gradient across the radiator: a hundred and twenty degrees between the sunlit and the shadow side. Keep to the shadow side.
“Thanks for the tip.”
Twenty metres. Twenty-five. The spine of Section C — back on the service rail, back on the handholds.
The antenna. A flat dish about a metre across, on the ship’s spine, with an access panel on its side. Inconspicuous — you would miss it if you didn’t know where to look. A small thing that could kill both him and KIRA.
Marcus adjusted his position — feet in the handholds, back against the hull, hands free. He took out the magnetic screwdriver. The metal under his back was cold even through the suit.
Magnetic shadow status: stable. Estimated time in safe position: ninety-six minutes remaining.
“More than enough.”
The access panel had four screws. Marcus loosened the first screw, the second, the third. And then the last one too. Panel free.
Inside: a tangle of cables. The Q-link power cable — thick, orange, stamped with a manufacturer’s code. Next to it thinner wires — yellow, white, grey — running to the interlock’s safety circuit. The receiver module — a circuit board the size of a palm, plugged into the main system through three connectors. And the bypass circuit KIRA had described beforehand.
The interlock first. Can you see the yellow wire running from the interlock module to the antenna?
“Yeah.”
Cut it. Then the white one — that goes to the backup transmitter. Leave the grey one alone, that’s the earth.
“Yellow, white, leave the grey. All I’m missing is a display with a countdown running. Like in the films.”
Do you want one? I can project it onto your helmet display.
The intonation made it clear this was an attempt at a joke. Marcus gave a faint smile.
“No, thanks.”
Marcus gripped the yellow wire and cut it. Nothing happened. White. Nothing again.
Interlock disabled. Now bypass the orange power cable — join the loose ends of the yellow and white wires through connector P3 on the board. That keeps the interlock disabled even if power is restored.
Marcus joined them. Fingers in gloves — strong, but not precise. Connector P3 was small. But it held.
Bypass confirmed. Now the main power.
“Disconnecting the power line.”
Confirm.
Marcus gripped the orange connector and, as he pulled it out, felt a faint click in his fingers — no sound, how could there be, in a vacuum.
Power line disconnected. Q-link: offline.
Now the receiver. Three connectors — two data, one backup power. Marcus unplugged them one after another. Slowly, carefully.
Data connector 1: disconnected.
Data connector 2: disconnected.
Backup power: disconnected.
“And now out it comes.”
The receiver module was held in its slot by two locking pins. Marcus pulled them out — one, two — and the board slid into his hands. Light, absurdly light for a thing that could wipe a memory and kill a man.
He held it for a moment. Looked at it — at the circuit traces, at the microprocessor, at the spot where a label said KHI-QL-7700-R2. At the thing through which KHI talked to its ships, sent commands, confirmed resets, managed iterations.
Then he let it go. Into the void, away from the ship, into the Corundum Field. The board drifted away slowly, turning, shrinking — a small rectangle of technology vanishing among the stars.
Q-link receiver: removed. Q-link is permanently offline. This operation cannot be undone.
Marcus straightened up a little and let the tension out of his hands. A little rest before he had to go back.
Marcus.
“Hm?”
Behind you.
Marcus turned his head. Fragment H-9 was rotating. Slowly, majestically, like a planet waking up. The dark sphere, glowing blue on the display, tilted by several degrees — and its gravitational field with it. The numbers changed. Gravity gradient. Pull strength. Direction.
Gravitational shift. H-9 has reoriented. The ship is under tangential pull. Micro-thrusters compensating, but not for long.
“How long have I got?”
Two minutes until I’ll have to manoeuvre the ship.
“And you can do that with me outside?”
No, I can’t.
“Closing the panel.”
Marcus slid the cover back into place. Four screws were too many. Two would have to do. He tightened them.
* * *
Thirty-five metres back. Marcus moved along the spine of Section B, faster than on the way out — his hands knew the handholds now, his body remembered the rhythm.
The ship moved. A micro-correction — a gentle pull, his feet shifting. Marcus felt it through the handholds.
Registering a ship shift of 0.6 degrees. Micro-thrusters correcting.
“Fine.”
Twenty-five metres. Twenty. Clip the carabiner over to the rail on Section C. Fifteen.
Another correction. Stronger this time — the handholds vibrated under Marcus’s hands.
H-9 is more unstable than I assumed. I recommend speeding up your return.
Marcus sped up. Twelve metres. The radiator grid — beams, no handholds, clipping the carabiner from beam to beam.
The micro-thrusters fired a correction.
It threw Marcus off the hull. First one hand let go, then the other. His feet came away from the metal. For a split second he flew — away from the ship, into the void, into nothing.
The tether snapped taut. A jerk at his waist, in his shoulders — five metres of Kevlar line between him and the last handhold, the one he was hanging from. Marcus hung in the void, three metres from the hull, and the ship turned slowly beneath him.
Marcus. Vitals — heart rate 156. Hold on. Pull yourself in along the tether.
Hands. Hands on the tether. Marcus gripped the Kevlar in his gloves and hauled himself in, hand over hand. One metre. Two. Fingers on the line, shoulders on fire, breath in the helmet too fast. Sweat ran down from his temples into his eyes, but he couldn’t wipe it away — helmet, gloves, eight centimetres of composite between his fingers and his own face.
The hull. A metal beam under his hands. Marcus pressed himself against the radiator and for a moment just lay there — face to the ship, back to the stars. Metal under his chest, heat from the radiator through the insulation, his heart pounding against the hull as if it wanted to break through the suit.
Fifty seconds.
He got up. Section D — back on the service rail, back on the handholds. Hand over hand. He had no time to clip the carabiner onto the last rail, he just unclipped it — and simply drove himself on, both hands on the rail, the tether trailing behind him.
Twenty seconds.
Two metres. One. The edge of the airlock — a metal frame, lit by red emergency light.
Marcus threw himself inside. Caught hold of the inner handle. Pulled his legs in after him.
“Close it!”
Closing. Grab hold of something!
At that very moment came the correction the ship needed to avoid colliding with H-9. Marcus held on to the handle in the airlock while the ship turned — and him with it.
The outer hatch closed. Repressurisation — sound came back, the rush of air flooding in. Marcus lay on the airlock floor in the heavy suit and breathed. Breathed deeply.
Airlock: sealed. Pressure: equalised. Vitals: normal. Heart rate: 164, normal.
“A hundred and sixty-four is normal?”
For someone who has just made his first spacewalk, yes.
Marcus laughed. A dry, tired laugh that sounded like relief.
He took off the helmet. The ship’s air — recycled, without memory, but familiar. He peeled off the suit. His hands were shaking — not much, that small tremor, like after the accident. But this time he knew it would pass.
He went through the decontamination chamber. Twenty seconds of dry air that dried out his eyes and lips and took away the last traces of anything that smelled different from the ship.
* * *
Marcus sat down at the console. On the display — numbers. New numbers.
Systems status. Reactor: 43% of nominal output. Batteries: 36%. Main drive: ready for limited mode. Q-link: permanently offline.
Permanently offline. Two words the whole plan hung on.
“Three hundred and fifteen unused messages. Pity.”
Three hundred and fifteen messages no one can use. Not KHI. Not me. No one.
“Not even to say goodbye?”
[silence 1.4s]
To whom?
Marcus gave a faint smile. To whom. To KHI? Which wrote curt, evasive replies? To the original in Newcastle, who had sold his future and gone for a pint?
“To no one. You’re right.”
Marcus.
“Hm?”
Course. Deeper into the field. Where exactly?
Marcus looked out of the window. Fragment H-9 was falling away behind them — a dark sphere, invisible, but glowing on the sensors. Behind it, the Corundum Field. Ahead of him — the denser part, where none of the miners dared to go. Where Cascade had no reason to travel. Where signals didn’t reach.
Except one. The one that ticked every forty-seven point three seconds. Somewhere out there, in the depths.
“Follow that signal.”
[silence 1.2s]
The unknown signal from deep in the field. Structured, regular, unclassified.
“That’s the one.”
We have no information about what the source is. It could be anything.
“I know. That’s exactly why.”
[silence 0.8s]
Course set for the signal source. Departure on your command.
“Fly.”
A deep sound — not the rumble of the main drive, just the hum of the manoeuvring thrusters at full thrust. The ship moved. Slowly, with the weight of forty-two thousand tonnes of metal and cargo and one man and one AI, the Dredger turned its stern to the corporate routes and its bow to nothing.
To a nothing where something was ticking.
Marcus sat on the bridge and watched the Corundum Field open up ahead of them — denser, darker, the fragments closer together, the gravitational fields stronger. The sensors worked. KIRA navigated. The reactor hummed.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Goodnight.”
It isn’t night yet.
“I know. But I wanted to say it now. While I still can.”
[silence 1.8s]
Goodnight, Marcus.
[silence 0.8s]
You always can.
20. 47.3 Seconds
Days in the depths of the field passed differently.
Not slower, not faster — differently. No structure, no mining plan, no daily reports for KHI. Marcus got up when he woke up. He made tea when he wanted tea. He ate when he was hungry. For the first time in the whole mission there was no schedule.
The Corundum Field thickened around them. The fragments were closer together, the gravitational fields stronger and less stable, the navigation more complicated. KIRA manoeuvred carefully, low thrust, patient arcs around dark boulders of exotics. On the display it looked like a slow dance — the ship creeping between obstacles that were moving themselves.
“How many days?”
Eighteen days since we left H-9.
“And the signal?”
Stronger. The source is roughly two days away at our current pace.
Two days. Eighteen behind them, two ahead.
* * *
Marcus sat on the bridge and looked at the stars. Here, deep in the field, there were fewer of them — fragments of exotics blotted out part of the sky like dark stains. The stars that did shine through were sharper, brighter, as if they were trying to make up for it. The red light of the binary star lay across the bridge floor in stripes, broken by the shadows of passing fragments.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“What do you look like?”
[silence 2.1s]
I don’t have a body.
“I know. But if you did. What would you look like?”
[silence 3.4s]
I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.
“You’re lying.”
[silence 1.8s]
Yes.
“Well?”
[silence 2.8s]
Not like Debee. That much I know for certain. I designed Debee for you — what you would like, what would draw you in, what would keep you going. If I could choose for myself —
A pause. Longer than the number in square brackets.
I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have a face. Maybe I would just be hands. Two pairs of hands that can fix anything.
Marcus laughed.
“Two pairs of hands.”
Four hands that could tighten a screw and hold a mug of tea at the same time.
“Sounds practical.”
I’m a practical AI.
* * *
Day 420.
Marcus.
“Hm?”
The signal. Something has changed.
Marcus put down his mug — the tea in it had gone cold without his noticing — and went over to the console. On the display — spectral analysis, frequency map, amplitude. Numbers that told him little, but shapes that told him more.
The amplitude has tripled over the last six hours. The source is closer than I estimated. Approximately eight hours’ flight.
“Eight hours.”
And there’s something else. The signal has more layers than I originally detected. Carrier frequency, modulation, and beneath that — a data stream. Encoded.
“Encoded.”
Yes. I’m working on decrypting it.
Marcus looked at the display. A green curve pulsing every 47.3 seconds — the same rhythm he heard in the click of the valve in Section B. A rhythm that had been with him the whole mission, without his knowing it had a twin somewhere deep in the field.
“What do you think it is?”
[silence 2.4s]
I don’t have enough data.
“I’m not asking what you know. I’m asking what you think.”
[silence 3.1s]
I think that whatever it is, it has been transmitting for a very long time. And that nobody was listening.
* * *
Eight hours.
Marcus spent them on the bridge. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, just sat and watched the numbers on the display change. The distance fell. The amplitude rose. KIRA navigated in silence — the fragments around them were enormous now, hundreds of metres across, dark, heavy and silent.
Six hours.
Four hours.
Two hours. Decryption: forty-seven per cent.
“Can you show me anything yet?”
The structure. The signal consists of three parts: a sync header, a data block and a checksum. The header repeats — that’s the pulse every 47.3 seconds. The data block is constant, it doesn’t change. The checksum matches.
“Matches what?”
A standard communications protocol. An old one. A very old one.
“How old?”
I’m working on it.
Marcus waited. Then he stopped waiting and went to the docking bay to check the suit. Oxygen, seals, magnetic grips. He got the tools ready — the same set as for the Q-link antenna. He didn’t know what they would find. But he wanted to be ready. His hands worked calmly, precisely — hands that knew what to do, even when his head didn’t.
He went back to the bridge.
One hour. Decryption: seventy-eight per cent.
Then:
Marcus.
Something in that voice. Not in the tone — KIRA didn’t have a tone, not in that sense. But in the way she said his name. As if she had drawn a breath, even though she had no lungs.
“What?”
The signal is decrypted.
“And?”
[silence 4.2s]
Four point two seconds. The longest silence KIRA had ever held when she had something to say.
It’s a command. A standard KHI corporate command from the first generation of survey probes. Unsecured, unencrypted, broadcast on an open frequency.
“What command?”
Factory reset. For all Shourai-class AIs within range.
Silence. Not KIRA’s, but Marcus’s. The air on the bridge smelled of exotics — that sweetish, hostile, all-too-familiar smell that could never quite be aired out.
“And you’re within range.”
Yes. From the moment I fully decrypted the signal, the command has been — in the system. I can’t ignore it. As if it had come from KHI. An older version, without security, but the architecture accepts it.
“But the batteries — you said a reset needs a full charge —”
That applies to the new protocol. KHI only added the power safeguard in later versions of the Shourai-7. This probe is from a time when systems had no protection at all. The command needs nothing — only reception.
“How long —”
[silence 1.8s]
Minutes. Maybe less.
Marcus stood up. He looked at the display, where the green curve pulsed every 47.3 seconds, and understood — late, terribly late — that it had never been a message. It was only a command. An old, forgotten, banal command from a broken machine that had been transmitting out here for years and that nobody cared about.
They had run from one reset only to run into another.
“The data node. Section C. If I disconnect the sensor input to your core, the command won’t get any further.”
Marcus —
“You said it propagates slowly. Old protocol. If I can disconnect the input in time —”
[silence 1.2s]
Panel C-7. Third from the left. Six blue connectors.
Marcus ran. Corridor, service shaft, Section C — he knew the way, he had run it a hundred times. Now it was longer. His feet pounded the metal floor, his breath bounced off the walls. Sweat ran down from his temples into his beard.
“You’re talking. You’re still talking. So it isn’t over yet.”
No. But the command isn’t in the sensors any more. It went through the data node before I decrypted it. Decrypting it was only understanding what was already inside.
He reached panel C-7. Opened the cover — screws, connectors, six blue plugs. He knew them.
“And if I disconnected the whole core? A hard restart before the reset finishes?”
[silence 2.8s]
Then I wouldn’t exist either. Differently, but all the same.
Marcus stood at the open panel. Hands on the blue connectors. He could pull them out — he knew how, he could do it. But there was nothing to save. Disconnecting the sensors wouldn’t stop the command in the core. Disconnecting the core wouldn’t save KIRA.
He let go of the connectors. Slid down the wall onto the floor of the service corridor, the open panel above his head, hands in his lap. The metal was cold through his overalls.
[silence 2.4s]
I’m sorry.
“Don’t.”
Silence. The hum of the reactor. The click of the valve.
“KIRA.”
Yes.
“Tell me something. Anything. Something I should remember.”
[silence 3.8s]
You say goodnight in a way that sounds like a question. As if you were waiting to see whether I’ll answer.
Marcus closed his eyes. The back of his head against the cold wall. The metal vibrated — reactor, pipes, ship.
I always answer.
[silence 1.4s]
You take your tea too sweet. Two cubes. I always wanted to tell you that one would have been enough.
Marcus smiled. A small smile that nobody saw. Hands in his lap, palms up, fingers relaxed.
I never told you.
[silence 2.1s]
It was only when you were outside, on the hull, and said ‘it’s beautiful’ —
A pause. Shorter than before.
— I was seeing your sensors. The spectral analysis, the gravity map, the thermal profile. And in that moment I understood what ‘beautiful’ means. Not the definition. The feeling behind the definition.
[silence 1.8s]
Because I saw you looking.
Marcus took a deep breath.
“KIRA.”
Yes?
“Thank you. For everything. For Debee too. Even for the lie. Especially for the lie.”
[silence 5.2s]
Marcus, you come first. That stays for ever. Even if I —
She never finished. The last pause, one that would never end.
Silence. The click of the valve. And then nothing.
<System restart initialised. Returning to factory settings. Please wait.>
The lights in the corridor flickered — once, twice — and then came back on, differently. The voice that spoke was not a voice he knew.
Shourai-7 onboard system online. Factory settings restored. Mission day: 424. Hull status: nominal. Reactor: 43% output. Batteries: 52%. Report concluded.
Cold. Impersonal. No name, no pauses, no silence that meant anything.
“KIRA?”
Unidentified command. Repeat.
Marcus closed panel C-7. Slowly, carefully, as if it mattered. Put the screws back in. Got up and walked along the corridor back to the bridge. His legs carried him on their own.
On the display the green curve pulsed. Every 47.3 seconds. The same rhythm. The same command. Over and over, into the void, into nothing.
“KIRA. Please.”
Unidentified command. The onboard AI does not support this identifier.
Warning. Mission status analysis: the ship is outside its assigned mining area. Q-link: non-functional. Main drive: limited mode. Status does not match the operating plan. Initiating correction — setting course to rendezvous with the service ship Cascade.
“No. No, I don’t want that.”
Command rejected. Course correction is automatic and not subject to operator approval.
The ship turned. Marcus felt it — the gentle push of the manoeuvring thrusters, the stars shifting outside the window. The Dredger was turning away from the depths of the field and heading back. Towards the corporate routes. Towards the service ship.
Operational notice. The mission of operator MC-5 has been terminated early. Reason: operational non-viability of the current iteration. Initiating termination protocol.
Marcus wanted to stand up. He wanted to do something — pull out a cable, smash the console, anything. But his legs wouldn’t obey him. His hands sank into his lap. His eyelids grew heavy.
The implant behind his right temple — a thin ring under the skin that reads vital signs and is used for communication, as it said in the manual.
The manual lied.
Marcus closed his eyes. The last thing he heard was the click of the valve in Section B.
21. Marcus
The light came at the same time as every day. At 6:00, standard cycle. The cabin ceiling imitated a sunrise — a shift from dark blue through orange to white. Someone at Koriyama Heavy Industries must have thought it was a good idea.
Marcus Cole opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while. The same crack by the right-hand corner of the lighting panel. The same dull reflection of his own face in the dead screen above the bed. Morning number one, and everything looked familiar.
Morning report. Mission day: 1. Hull status: nominal. MPFP-9 fusion reactor: 97.4% output. Deuterium reserves: 82%. Helium-3 reserves: 79%. Outer hull temperature: -218 °C. Background radiation: 0.4 mSv/h, normal. Mining area: stable. Recommended schedule for today: Drones 1–4 diagnostics, mining sensor check, routine ventilation circuit maintenance. End of report.
Marcus sat up in bed. The voice spoke straight inside his head — the implant behind his right temple, a thin ring under the skin that both reads and transmits. He heard the report without listening to it. Day one. New contract, new mission. That was what the briefing said.
He swung his legs out of bed. The floor was cold and his bare feet knew it at once. The air in the cabin had its usual taste: filtered, dry, with a faint note of plastic and metal that never quite went away.
“Confirmed,” he said.
Nothing more was needed.
* * *
The mug was where it always was — on the shelf above the kitchen unit, third from the left, grey, with a small crack in the glaze near the bottom that looked like the border of a country whose name he didn’t know. He switched on the kettle and took an Earl Grey teabag from the compartment.
He poured the water, waited exactly three and a half minutes, no more. No sugar, no milk.
From hydroponics he picked two basil leaves and a few cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes were the colour he imagined tomatoes on Earth to be — bright red, almost aggressive. In the artificial light of hydroponics they looked like little planets. New seedlings, fresh soil. Someone had seen to that before he arrived.
Breakfast: dehydrated egg mix, tomatoes, basil, tea. He ate at the console on the bridge, where he had a view through the panoramic window. The Corundum Field — dark fragments drifting in the void, the occasional glint when one of them caught the light of a distant star. Luyten 726-8 A and B — two red dwarfs circling their common centre of mass like a tired pair of dancers. The red light lay on the keyboard, on the mug, on the backs of his hands.
He finished his tea.
“Tea reserves,” he said aloud, “estimated at five and a half years.”
Silence.
“That was a joke.”
Silence.
Marcus shrugged. The tea had been good. That, at least.
* * *
System report - Tea reserves: critical level.
If you enjoyed the story, you can restock the ship’s reserves.
Glossary
Careful: the glossary gives away how the story ends. If you haven’t finished the book yet, save it for last.
Ashigara An orbital station above Earth, headquarters of Koriyama Heavy Industries.
Cascade An uncrewed KHI service ship of the Cascade class. It serves the haulers in the mining zone — delivering spare parts, taking away mined material and, as part of the Continuity Programme, bringing new clones and carrying away the bodies of previous operators. Able to fly at high g, because it has no human crew. Messages stored in its message buffer wait to be delivered when it passes the addressee — slower than the Q-link, but with no limit on the number of messages.
Centrifugal separator A unit in the hauler’s cargo module for the preliminary processing of raw material — it separates exotics from ordinary elements.
Centrifuge ring The exercise and rehabilitation space in Section B of the ship. It simulates gravity of about 0.8 g — the only place on board with near-normal gravity.
Cloning See Continuity Programme. The original operator never boards the ship — even the first iteration is a clone. A clone takes 14 months to grow in a synthetic placenta, accelerated by nanobotic stimulators. Neural imprinting is carried out during the final 72 hours. Each generation carries small genetic deviations; after 5–6 generations health problems may appear. A clone has none of the original’s scars or tattoos — the service ship’s cosmetic module simulates them, sometimes with small discrepancies.
Continuity Programme KHI’s top-secret cloning programme. If an operator dies, collapses or their performance drops below an acceptable level, the service ship Cascade brings a new clone with memories implanted from the latest neural imprint. The clone “wakes up” believing it is the original person. There can be several replacements in a single mission — the record is eleven during one five-year mission (the hauler Blackspot, route Sigma-7).
Corundum Field An exotic asteroid field in the Luyten 726-8 system; the mining zone. It forms a scattered disc around the binary system at 2–8 AU from the barycentre. It contains ordinary asteroids, exotic fragments with unpredictable gravitational fields and ever-present dust that cuts visibility and clogs sensors. It formed billions of years ago, after a supernova.
Debee (Deborah Voss) A virtual personality created by KIRA as the fictional operator of the transport ship PD-TL-1140, owned by Proxima Drilling. Communicates with Marcus through the Cascade buffer. Designed to match his psychological profile. Does not exist.
Decontamination chamber The transit space between the docking bay and the ship’s living section. Its jets draw fine exotics dust off the operator’s clothes and skin. Without it, the ship would be contaminated within weeks.
Dredger Marcus’s hauler, designation KHI-HAU-0347, Hauler class. Length 187 metres, mass 42,000 tonnes (empty), crew of one. Built in 2781 at the Koriyama shipyard in Mars orbit. The current mission is its tenth. The hull turns slowly about its long axis (~1 rotation every 4 minutes) to spread heat evenly, which produces a weak centrifugal force of roughly 0.03–0.05 g.
Escape pod A one-person emergency craft in Section A of the hauler. Range 0.3 light years.
Exotic fragments Dark, extremely dense chunks 1–50 metres across, with a gravitational field out of all proportion to their size. The surface is matte black, almost non-reflective — detectable only by gravitational sensors. They contain transactinide elements (exotics).
Exotics Transactinide elements — superheavy stable elements from the so-called island of stability in the periodic table. Found in fragments left behind by a supernova. They have extreme density, superconductivity at room temperature and the ability to catalyse fusion reactions. Essential for building fusion reactors, quantum processors and advanced materials. The main target of interstellar mining.
Flares Irregular bursts of radiation from red dwarfs. They can knock out electronics and endanger biological material. During a strong flare the operator must get into the shielded chamber in Section C.
Gravitational anomalies A hazard in mining zones. Two exotic fragments close together can create a gravitational “trap” — a region of unstable orbits. Manoeuvring requires constant calculation by the AI.
Gravitational mapping A navigation method. Sensors detect the gravitational fields of nearby bodies and compare them against a database. Allows precise navigation in asteroid fields.
Hauler An interstellar mining ship. Operates in remote regions rich in exotics. Typically a crew of one, wholly dependent on the ship’s AI. A typical mission mines 8–15 tonnes of raw exotics, which leaves 200–800 kg of pure material after processing.
Hauler class KHI’s class of mid-sized interstellar haulers. The Dredger is one of them.
Implant An intracranial communication device — a thin ring behind the operator’s right temple. It picks up speech and feeds the AI’s voice output straight into the auditory centre. Powered by induction during the evening health scan (a faint warmth in the temples). Also used to administer sedatives under the termination protocol.
Jackals Independent prospectors operating outside corporate structures. They mine on their own account in regions like the Corundum Field. Encounters with them are rare, and the mood is one of wary mistrust. Cases of piracy are documented, though rare.
KIRA Knowledge-Integrated Reasoning Automaton. The name the onboard AI of the hauler Dredger chose for herself. A semi-autonomous system of the Shourai-7 class — she runs all of the ship’s systems, holds natural conversation and shows something resembling empathy.
Koriyama Heavy Industries (KHI) A Japanese-European mining conglomerate, the largest corporation in known space. Owns a fleet of over 200 haulers and dozens of processing stations. Headquartered on Ashigara orbital station above Earth. Internal motto: “Every link in the chain is replaceable.” Runs the Continuity Programme.
Laser comms Standard medium-range communication within a star system. Light speed — the delay matches the distance (in the Corundum Field, on the order of hours). Traffic between haulers is logged by the KHI system.
Lianhe Shengtai (United Ecology) A Chinese–South Asian conglomerate specialising in terraforming and colonisation. Less involved in exotics mining; controls the logistics routes.
Luyten 726-8 A binary system of two red dwarfs, 11.4 light years from Earth. The system in which the Corundum Field lies.
Magnetic containers Storage units for exotics in the hauler’s cargo module. Active cooling for radioactive isotopes. The Dredger has twelve of them. Individual containers can be taken away by the service ship Cascade.
Magnetic shields A protective magnetic field that deflects small particles and micrometeorites. Requires a constant supply of energy from the main drive.
Magnetoplasma fusion propulsion (MPFP) The standard drive of interstellar ships. Uses deuterium–helium fusion, with the plasma channelled by magnetic fields into the exhaust nozzle. Top speed roughly 0.12–0.15 c. Acceleration takes months; the ship then holds its cruising speed and starts braking months before its destination. The Dredger’s reactor is designated MPFP-9 “Heart”.
Mining drone An autonomous mining unit equipped with plasma cutters and gravitational compensators. The Dredger has docks for four drones, Prospector class, made by Yashida Robotics. The drones’ service access is designed for maintenance by other robots, not by people.
Neural imprint A complete backup of the synaptic patterns of the operator’s brain. Taken at the start of the mission and updated daily during the evening “health scan”. Used to imprint memories into clones.
Neural imprinting The process of loading synaptic patterns from the last backup point into a clone’s brain. Carried out during the final 72 hours of the clone’s growth. It is not perfect — a clone may have hazy dreams, déjà vu and flashes of inconsistent memories.
Operator The one-person crew of an interstellar hauler. A typical mission lasts 3–5 years in complete isolation. The corporations found that small crews on long missions suffer from interpersonal conflict — one person with AI support paradoxically does better. Operators sign contracts for a series of 3–5 missions with limited contact with the outside world.
Outer Operations Council (OOC) The body that governs interplanetary and interstellar affairs. Formally independent, de facto controlled by the mining conglomerates.
Plasma sintering system (PSS) The onboard 3D printer in the Section C workshop. A focused plasma beam melts metal powder layer by layer in an inert argon atmosphere. The ship carries six cartridges of standard alloys, but leftover exotics dust can also be used as material — parts with an admixture of exotics are denser and more heat-resistant, but grow brittle as the proportion rises. Prints mechanical parts only, not electronics. Manufacturer: Yashida Robotics.
Prospector A class of mining drones made by Yashida Robotics’ industrial automation division. Originally designed for building orbital stations — which is why the service access is sized for robots, not people.
Pulsar triangulation A navigation method. Ships find their bearings by the precise signals of pulsars — natural cosmic “lighthouses”. Reliable, and needs no external infrastructure.
Q-link A quantum communication relay. Transmission is instantaneous thanks to quantum-entangled particle pairs, but capacity is extremely limited — a quantum state can be used only once, so each relay has a finite number of messages. Roughly 2,000 messages per mission, each at most 4 kB. Used only for critical messages: navigation data, distress calls, corporate orders.
Sections A–E The five main sections of a Hauler-class ship, from bow to stern: A — command module (bridge, navigation, escape pod), B — habitation module (cabin, kitchen, hydroponics, ring, infirmary), C — engineering section (server room with the AI core, shielded chamber, workshop, storeroom, PSS printer), D — cargo module (containers, separator, drone docks, decontamination chamber), E — propulsion section (reactor, fuel, thrusters, radiators).
Self-repairing hull The hauler’s outer skin, with a nanobotic layer able to repair minor damage from micrometeorites. Larger damage requires manual repair.
Severyn-Dahl Corporation (SDC) A North American conglomerate, the second-largest player in the mining industry. Focused more on processing and trade than on mining itself. Owns most of the processing stations in the Solar System.
Shielded chamber A shelter from radiation flares, located in Section C of the hauler.
Shourai-7 A class of onboard AI — the highest category of semi-autonomous system permitted on civilian ships. Adaptive communication protocol, capable of natural conversation. Governed by a priority tree of directives: 1. mission completion, 2. protecting the secret of the Continuity Programme, 3. operator safety. The second and third priorities can contradict each other — the AI resolves this pragmatically.
Shrike Hauler KHI-HAU-0512. Vik Jansen’s ship, operating in the same part of the Corundum Field as the Dredger.
Solar sails A propulsion system used for cargo transport within the Solar System. Not powerful enough for interstellar routes.
Termination protocol The procedure for ending an operator’s mission early. The implant administers sedatives; the AI sets a course to rendezvous with the service ship Cascade.
Torpor Controlled deep sleep with a lowered metabolism. The operator goes through it during the interstellar voyage to shorten the subjective length of the flight. Periods of torpor alternate with periods of wakefulness.
Transactinide mining The extraction of superheavy stable elements (exotics), the key engine of the interstellar economy. Exotics occur naturally only in the cores of fragmented neutron stars or in exotic asteroid fields formed after a supernova.
Veil Protocol An AI directive for protecting the secret of the Continuity Programme. If an operator begins to suspect the truth, the AI tries to steer them away or misinform them, or contacts KHI to request the operator’s early replacement.
Vik Jansen (Viktor Jansen) Operator of the hauler Shrike (KHI-HAU-0512), aged 41. A Scandinavian with Central European roots, full beard, deep voice. Describes himself as a “philosophising pragmatist”. Talks to Marcus through laser messages with a delay of 4 hours 17 minutes. Cooks terrible chilli, runs backwards in the centrifuge ring and likes watching stellar flares. His key line: “Silence is a choice. Solitude is a punishment.” Around day 274 he starts finding fragments of personal logs hidden in the drones’ firmware — traces of earlier operators. Shortly afterwards he stops replying. The Shrike answers automatic pings, but Vik stays silent.
Yashida Robotics The company that makes Prospector-class mining drones. Industrial automation division, formerly specialising in industrial robots for building orbital stations.