Re-Coil

The derelict vessel drifted against endless darkness.

I made no sound as I walked along the ship’s surface in the sliding shuffle forced by magnetic boots, nothing but electrical charge and the ferrous content of the hull keeping me from spinning away into the deep. My ship was out there, too, of course, a hundred meters away and matching vectors with the wreck. Not that it mattered. If something went wrong while I was EVA, they might as well be back on Earth.

I kept the slow, steady shuffle, making sure one boot latched firmly before sending the mental command through my personal Net that deactivated the electromagnet in the second and sliding it forward in turn. Rinse. Repeat. Slow and steady and, most importantly, survivable.

It took almost fifteen minutes, but I found myself before the airlock door. With a thought, the miniature spotlight mounted on the shoulder of my suit blazed to life, bathing the door in harsh white light. The beam revealed pocking along the hull, not unexpected given that the ship could have been drifting through the system for decades. But it also caught the edges of three almost perfectly circular holes, two centimeters in diameter, and arrayed in a neat triangle, near the door’s center.

Analysis, Sarah, I thought.

My agent’s voice—a contralto programmed to be calm, soothing, and always well modulated—came back at once, resonating in the depths of my mind, from the place that I always associated with my Net implant. Diameter, twenty-two millimeters. The smoothness suggests a cutting laser, though there are no signs of metal fatigue. Certain drills would also be possible, though it would be difficult to maneuver them into position outside of a shipyard. The holes are equidistant from one another and placed to form a perfect isosceles triangle measuring thirty point four-eight centimeters per side.

Did it come from the inside, or the outside? I asked aloud, my voice hollow and tinny in the vacc suit’s helmet.

Say again, Langston.

This voice didn’t sound from the depths of my own mind, but rather crackled to life over the vacc suit’s speakers. Wait one, Miller, I replied, staving off the issue for the moment. Sarah?

Insufficient data, the agent responded.

Great, I muttered. "You getting this, Persephone?"

Miller’s voice came back. "Roger that, Langston. Got three holes punched in the side. We’ve been running the data through the Persephone, but we’ve got nothing."

Yeah. Sarah’s coming up dry, too.

Your call.

It wasn’t much of a choice, really. The Persephone was a small ship, outfitted for salvage operations, with a crew of just four souls. Miller piloted, Harper ran the heavy equipment, Chan was our techno-wiz, and I was the lucky SOB who got to play EVA specialist. When we could get close to space junk, it was normally Harper’s show—they drove the mechanical arms and cutters that could crack open any debris that didn’t need the finer touch of a direct human hand and bring it aboard the Persephone, leaving Chan and me to pull off the small bits in relative comfort. But when the junk went tumbling and spinning, it was my job to get over to it, try to stabilize it for the Persephone to approach, and if that wasn’t possible, grab whatever was worth the most creds.

We’d been working together for a few years now, going out a couple of months at a time and laying claim to what salvage we could find. Lately, we’d been finding a lot of nothing. Scrap metal that barely kept fuel in the Persephone’s tanks and flavorless synth-soy in her larders. I couldn’t speak for my crewmates—when we left the ship, we tended to go our separate ways until the next mission—but I could certainly use the creds. Coil premiums were coming due, and as things stood, I had enough in my free balance to cover them, but only just. I really didn’t want to go into arrears. A derelict vessel on a ballistic trajectory into Sol was too good a find to pass up.

"Roger that, Persephone. I’m going in."

Be safe. And keep the video streaming.

Will do.

I turned my attention back to the airlock door. The exterior of the ship didn’t tell us much. Starship design hadn’t changed significantly over the past hundred years or so. They say that technology used to change much faster, growing and expanding at an almost logarithmic rate, but those days were long gone. Humanity may not have peaked, but it had, at the very least, stabilized. The vessel wasn’t broadcasting any transponder codes. That wasn’t unusual on older salvage—no power source could last forever. Our visual inspection hadn’t yielded any exterior registration on the hull, either. Not that all ports of call required one. Earth and the domes of Luna and Mars did, but that was mostly a hallmark of the days of ocean-borne vessels. Ships in space seldom got close enough to one another to make something as pedestrian as numbers and letters painted on the hull useful. Without any way to identify it, the ship could have been years, decades, maybe even a century old.

However old the ship might have been, airlocks hadn’t changed much. Two things on the left side of the slightly-larger-than-man-sized door caught my attention. The first was an eye bolt, and I pulled the safety line from my harness and clamped it in place, tethering me to the ship. Surviving open space was about being careful, consistent, methodical… and taking advantage of every redundant system and safety feature available. I wasn’t about to go drifting endlessly through the deep while some branching proto-me picked up my life where I left off.

The second thing was a small access panel. I depressed it slightly, and it popped open, revealing the controls for the airlock door. Unfortunately, those controls were nothing more than a blank screen. I cursed under my breath.

Looks like we’ve got a true ghost ship, here, I said. No power to the airlock controls. In most ships, the exterior airlock controls were slaved to the same power systems that handled life support. If trouble arose, you knew that the rescuers could reach you quickly for as long as you had air and heat. After that, it didn’t much matter, since cutting through hulls took time that an asphyxiating crew probably didn’t have. It happened more than most people thought; no matter how stable the tech or smart the AI, neither human error nor the uncaring hand of entropy could be completely mitigated. When you had thousands upon thousands of vessels plying the space of Sol, even a small percentage of vessels suffering catastrophic mishaps still added up to a lot of missing ships. Multiply that over all the years humans had been active in space, and you realized just how much junk was really out there. It sucked, but it kept us in business.

Can you cut it? The voice belonged to Chan, and even over the radio interference, she managed to sound sultry.

The harness I wore over my vacc suit bristled with tools. In anything other than microgravity, I probably wouldn’t have been able to carry it. Even with that, I had to be careful about mass and inertia, so as not to inadvertently smash myself into surfaces at speeds that my coil couldn’t take. But it did give me a few options.

Probably, I replied. Wait one. Sarah, do I have enough plasma cutters to get in?

In answer, a web of glowing dashed lines appeared on the airlock door, transfixing two of the three holes already bored through the composites and tracing a path that would result in an opening big enough—if only just—to pass me and my equipment. As if to drive the point home, an arrow pointed at the dotted line and the words, Cut here appeared beside it. Agents like Sarah may not have had the full personalities and cognitive abilities of Alpha AIs, but she’d certainly managed to pick up a bad sense of humor somewhere.

"Okay, Persephone, I said. Looks like Sarah thinks I can cut through. Estimated time is… I paused, and, without prompting, Sarah added a digital clock display to my view. One hour, twenty-seven minutes."

Roger that, Langston. It was Miller’s voice again, a deep bass. Be advised, we estimate eight hours—that’s zero-eight hours—until we’ll be close enough to Sol that heat and radiation are going to become problems.

Gotcha, I replied. No dawdling.

With that, I grabbed the first metal cylinder from my belt, tightened my safety tether, and brought the nozzle close to the hull, right beside one of the holes and on top of the line Sarah had overlaid. I pressed the firing stud, and a cone of blue-hot plasma belched from the torch. The cutter functioned by sending an electric arc through a flow of argon, exciting it into the fourth state of matter. It didn’t require an oxidizer, which was just as well. Oxygen was precious enough without wasting it on cutting. My vacc-suit facescreen automatically polarized, darkening before the intense light could damage my eyes. I drew slow, even breaths, moving the torch at a barely perceptible rate as the metal of the door began to glow a brilliant cherry red.

* * *

The countdown on the digital display in my view read 1:38 and I was on my second-to-last plasma cutter when I finished slicing through the composite airlock door. I grabbed an electromagnetic grip—little more than a power source, some wire, and a handle—from my harness and pressed it against the piece of metal still seated in the door. A mental command activated the magnet, locking the handle to the door. I shifted my feet, sliding them around until they were both planted just under the hole and activated the magnetic locks in them as well. By bending at the knees and hips, I slid down into a crouch, and wrapped both hands around the handle of the magnetic grips.

I drew a deep breath and stood, keeping the motion smooth and the force constant. The door section pulled free and rather than trying to fight its inertia, I held on long enough to guide it safely past my head, and then let go. The chunk of metal drifted off into space, another bit of junk that would, eventually, be pulled into the sun.

I’m through.

Roger that. Be careful.

Maneuvering through the hole required unclipping the safety tether and deactivating the magnets in my boots. For just an instant, I hung next to the derelict vessel, only Newton and Keppler keeping me in place relative to the ship. Then I grabbed the edges of the hole I’d just cut and swam my way into the airlock.

My boots clicked back onto the deck, and I swept the beam of the flashlight around me. The unadorned gray of the bulkheads drank in the light, making the room seem somehow darker than the blackness outside. The light passed over a lump, positioned before the hatch leading deeper into the vessel.

I focused the beam on it and froze. Damn, I muttered. You guys seeing this?

There was a long moment of silence on the other end of the comm. Yeah, Langston, Miller’s voice came back. We’ve got it. Is that what I think it is?

It was a body. A body that had succumbed to a combination of asphyxiation and decompression. It had been male, once, though the features were distorted enough that it was nearly impossible to tell much beyond that. It is, I replied to Miller’s question while simultaneously sending mental instructions to Sarah to take several deep scans of the scene from the suit’s external sensors.

Already done, Langston.

You know what you’ve gotta do, Langston, Miller said. This just turned into a retrieval.

"Roger that, Persephone. I steeled myself for what came next. You guys might want to turn off the displays for a minute." I received an affirmative click back and swallowed hard.

One of the tools on my harness was a small laser cutter. Not powerful enough to slice through bulkheads, it was the perfect tool for salvaging electronics or other equipment that was bolted rather than welded in place. It also made a fair utility knife if the need arose… and an excellent field scalpel.

The corpse sat with its back against the door as if the person had simply sat down to die. There was no expression on the face—it’s hard to have an expression when your features have been twisted by asphyxiation and decompression—in fact, it barely looked like a face at all. Which was good, considering what I was about to do.

I reached out one hand and placed it on the corpse’s shoulder. In the microgravity, it was easy enough to turn the body over. It spun, maintaining its seated stance, frozen in position by the near absolute-zero temperatures of the holed and depressurized ship. I braced the body between the deck and bulkhead, relying on my boots to keep me in place as I pressed down against the corpse. It wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t fun; it wasn’t dignified. It was, however, necessary.

I found the hollow at the back of the corpse’s skull and pressed the laser cutter close. Then, I began to cut. Flesh, blood, and bone all sublimated under the heat of the laser, creating thin trails of smoke that dissipated almost instantly. It didn’t take long. I reattached the laser cutter to my harness and pulled an old-fashioned, fixed-blade knife from its sheath at my hip. Another steadying breath, and then I fed the tip of the blade into the incision I’d made, probing until I felt the faint click of metal on metal. I traced the object with the blade, freeing it from the surrounding tissue, and then used the knife as a lever, slowly working it to the surface.

What emerged from the wound was a ceramic-metallic cube, less than two centimeters on a side. Hard to believe that something so small could contain all of a person that was the person, the ego, the id, the psyche… the soul. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was the sum total of what made you… you, and the miracle of modern medicine meant that it could all be backed up and slated into a new coil. Provided it didn’t go careening into the sun anyway.

Got the core, I said.

Roger that. Are you going deeper?

It was a good question. Retrievals always brought creds, since most people were willing to give just about everything they had to keep on living and to keep their memories intact. Better yet, payouts for retrievals were built in to even the most basic of coil insurance policies, so the creds were guaranteed. But we hadn’t even cracked the doors on the main vessel, and there was no telling what treasures might await us within. Sarah, how much time do we have left?

Radiation levels will approach detrimental limits in five hours, fifty-eight minutes, and twenty-one seconds.

"We’ve got time, Persephone. I’m going to try and go deeper."

I got another click in acknowledgment, but I knew my fellow crewmates. A retrieval was good, but a retrieval and salvage were better. I turned my attention back to the interior airlock, playing the flashlight over it, looking for the manual overrides. I found the panel and slid it open. And then stared at the mess that had been made of the controls.

Both the standard and manual controls looked like they had been hit with a plasma torch. They were melted into slag, and I doubted the door could have been easily opened… from either side. Which raised more than a few questions.

"Persephone, your monitors back on?"

We’re seeing it, Langston.

Is it me, or does it look like this guy locked himself in the airlock and then slagged the controls?

Harper’s voice. Did you check the interior controls to the outer door?

On it. I shuffled back to the hole I’d cut in the airlock and found the panel to the outer door. Sure enough, the controls behind it had been melted, too. Looks like our retrieval didn’t want anyone else getting to him… at least not without some cutting. From inside the ship or from the outside.

But why lock yourself in the airlock? Harper asked, their voice perplexed.

I grunted. I don’t know, but I’ve still got a couple of plasma cutters left, so maybe we can find out. I moved back to the interior door and examined the half-melted controls. Sarah, can I cut my way in? In response, a window popped up in my vision, showing a standard airlock schematic. It scrolled and zoomed, focusing in on the manual door release. Sarah highlighted the pertinent section, and I nodded. I don’t have to cut all the way through the door. Looks like I might be able to disengage the interior lock. Won’t work if the rest of the ship is pressurized, but it’s worth a shot.

Be careful.

"Roger that, Persephone."

It took both of my remaining plasma cutters, but, following Sarah’s silent directions, I managed to burn through to the hydraulics. The fluid that bubbled sluggishly from the lines when I cut them was a hybrid synthetic far removed from anything that had once been called oil and designed specifically to remain liquid at the near absolute-zero temperatures that would claim any derelict vessel. I played the last of the flame from the torch gently over the surrounding metal, heating it and encouraging the flow of the fluid. After only a moment, the cutter sputtered and died.

"Okay, Persephone. Moment of truth." I shuffled back to the door and grabbed the wheel. Once again, I made sure to apply force as smoothly and constantly as possible, slowly increasing the amount of strength I was putting into it, until it finally began to turn. More hydraulic fluid flowed from cut lines, droplets drifting around me in the microgravity. The wheel spun, and I felt the thunk of the bolts releasing. I pulled, and though the door resisted, it finally gave, swinging open and beckoning me into the darkness beyond.

The airlock opened into a short hallway, ending at another hatch at either end. The flashlight mounted on my shoulder provided the only illumination, casting odd shadows as I swept it through the hall. The beam caught the edge of letters, where the bulkhead met the overhead, and I focused the light there. Three lines of standard text, and a pair of arrows. The top row read, Airlock. The second row read, Control and an arrow beside it pointed off to the right. The third read, Passenger Cabin with an arrow pointing off to the left.

Sarah, have you identified this vessel, yet?

Insufficient data. The vessel has no active Net transponder. General physical characteristics are consistent with a mid-range passenger shuttle, of the type used for moving between planetary masses and their moons. Most commonly found around Jupiter.

We’re a long way from Jupiter, Sarah.

Current estimated position puts us approximately seven hundred and fifty-four million kilometers from Jupiter.

Thanks. Super helpful.

You’re welcome, Langston.

I swear she sounded smug. Well, I guess one way’s as good as another. How much time do we have left?

Miller’s voice came back at once. Four hours, Langston. You need to be on your way back here in four hours, latest.

Passengers or crew? I thought about the bloated corpse in the airlock and shuddered. So far, I hadn’t found any evidence of the ship being holed—other than the outer door to the airlock. But something had depressurized the vessel, and the thought of a passenger cabin filled with the decompressed dead sent a shiver running down my spine. I turned to the right and made my way to the door.

The manual controls presented no problem, since no one had attempted to melt them. I opened the door and panned the light across. Another corridor stretched before me, and I followed it. It branched off twice, but I ignored the side corridors, moving steadily forward to—I hoped—the bridge. My hopes bore out when I reached another hatch, this one with the words, Control and Authorized Personnel Only stenciled across it.

The hatch was shut, but whatever had caused the person in the airlock to seal themselves in must not have bothered the command crew, since the door wasn’t sealed. The latch spun freely and the door swung inward. I braced myself, mentally gearing up for what I expected to find—the distended coils of the pilot, captain, and astrogator.

Instead, the light revealed an empty chamber. The boards and screens were dark, the chairs, empty. Nothing seemed out of place. It was as if the crew had simply got up and left, shutting the door behind them on their way out. The only problem was, every regulation of every merchant and military vessel required that the bridge be manned at all times. Sure, you could maybe get away with a Net link for a minute or two, but any spacer who lived long enough to claim the title knew better than to tempt fate too much. I’d been aboard more than one vessel that had been evacuated. No one ever took the time to close the doors behind them, all nice and tidy. And if they hadn’t had the time to evacuate… in that case, the bridge shouldn’t have been abandoned. Finding bodies was never fun, but sometimes finding nothing was worse. "I’ve got a whole lot of nothing on the bridge, Persephone."

We’re seeing it, Langston, Miller said.

And it’s creepy as hell, Harper chimed in.

Can you get the box? Chan that time, stepping on top of Harper’s words almost before they got them out.

Wait one. I moved to the captain’s console and found the access panel. A little work with a screwdriver, and the panel came free. I pushed it away, letting it drift. There wasn’t much harm it could do at this point.

I shone the light into the cavity, revealing a mix of cubes, boards, and dark fiber optics. Amidst the various electronics, there should have been the box, the successor to the antiquated flight recorder that logged the ship’s position, astrogation data, and ship’s logs. Instead, there was an empty place in a circuit board.

It’s gone, I muttered.

Say again?

"It’s gone, Persephone. Removed." Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Did they evac? Miller asked.

And leave a crew member or passenger sealed in the airlock? That thought sent a little tingle of fear coursing up and down my spine. What would it be like, to remain sealed away, while you heard the evacuation pods firing, one by one from the other side of the ship? I’ll check the passenger cabin.

Roger that, Langston. But hurry. Clock’s ticking.

I made my way back through the corridor, past the airlock and toward the main cabin of the ship, ignoring the side passages that led to engineering and, presumably, the escape pods. As I approached the final hatch, my feet slowed. What would I find on the other side? Empty chairs and mystery, like on the bridge? Or distended corpses? I drew a steadying breath and spun the manual hatch release.

The door swung inward in silence, on hinges so smooth that I barely felt the faint resistance. My light swept over the chamber, illuminating row after row of what my tired mind first took to be sleeping people. They sat in the acceleration chairs, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, row upon row of perfectly still bodies. It took a moment to process—to realize that the stillness was too perfect, that the faces were not composed in sleep, but slack in death. It took a moment to remember that the ship was airless, depressurized, drifting through space. In that moment, I felt suddenly, completely, and utterly alone.

"You still there, Persephone?" I asked the empty space, forcing the words to calm despite the panic I felt crawling up my esophagus.

We’re here, Langston, Chan said. Her voice was soft, perhaps overwhelmed by the images coming back to the ship over the Net, but it was somehow soothing.

I… I cleared my throat. I’m not sure we have enough time to do the retrievals. That was a lie—or at least, not the whole truth. Maybe there was time, maybe there wasn’t. I’d been working salvage long enough that retrievals were an inevitability. But there was something so… dehumanizing about cutting into an empty coil and prying out the little bit of storage that held most of what a person was. If they were smart, they were backed up, anyway. If not… But, damn it, they were lucrative, and all of us could use the creds.

Understood, Langston. Miller this time, cutting into my reverie. We make twenty-seven, that’s two-seven, coils. There was a long, long pause. How many do you think you can get? Estimate time remaining at… approximately three hours.

Shit. Miller was trying to be subtle, trying to be nice. There was plenty of time to harvest the cores from the coils. And there was plenty of reason, too. I had a job to do. Best to be about it.

"Message received, Persephone. You may want to blank the vids again."

We’ll keep them running. It’s the least we can do.

I didn’t respond to that, instead stepping into the passenger cabin. I moved to the first row of acceleration chairs and turned my attention to the first corpse. The coil was bio-female, young, and, at least when imagined with the full flush of life, attractive. It showed no signs of decompression or trauma, and the eyes remained, thankfully, closed. I tried to stop thinking of the coil as a person—what made it a person was safely locked away in the core, anyway. It was just a shell, and one that had outlived its usefulness.

The rational part of my mind knew that to be true. It didn’t stop the twisting in my guts as I pulled the frozen body forward, and moved the auburn hair out of the way, baring the hollow in the base of the skull. The laser cutter and the knife did their work, and in a few minutes, I was sliding another core into the bag on my harness.

The work was grisly, but not particularly difficult. The entire coil and core were engineered so that it took only a passing familiarity with anatomy to affect the retrieval. It wasn’t the sort of task that required my full attention—in fact, it was the sort of task that begged for that attention to be turned elsewhere. Sarah, why are the coils not showing signs of decompression?

Insufficient data at this time.

I ground my teeth together. Guess.

As you wish, Langston. The first and most likely cause is sufficient time during decompression for the fluids and gasses in the body to adapt to the changing pressures. Other possible causes decrease greatly in probability and include flash freezing, absence of fluids or gasses in the system to begin with, or administration of outside agents to prevent decompression.

I knew Sarah was right—no one spent long in space without garnering a basic understanding of how decompression sickness and sudden decompression worked. Yet, at the same time, none of her answers made any sense. Who would sit idly in their acceleration chairs while the pressure in the cabin slowly went from one atmosphere down to vacuum, presumably taking with it all the breathable air? The coils showed no signs of flash freezing or desiccation, and the only outside agent I knew of that could prevent decompression was a vacc suit. What had happened to these people?

I moved down the line of chairs, the laser cutter doing its gruesome work, and the little pouch of cores at my hip slowly filled. I was down to three rows when I felt a slight shiver course through the derelict’s hull.

I paused in my work and waited for a moment. The shiver came again, and then grew into a steady vibration. I felt the faintest tug pulling me toward the back of the cabin. The ship was accelerating.

Persephone? I asked aloud. At the same time directing a mental, Status? at Sarah.

What the hell’s going on over there, Langston? Miller demanded. Our sensors show that the derelict’s engines just came online.

The vessel is powering up and accelerating toward Sol, Sarah