2025-08-24
Five metallic clunks ring like a clapper, and another spheroid ball of ice and silicate wanders away.
This is the worst part of a run. The fragile moments after detachment, when you became entirely reliant on your own air and engines. When you leave the lights and crowds of harbour, and the relative comfort that they bring. When, if something found you…
“How are we looking, Mauve?”
There are four of us cocooned in the centre of the Freighter. The room around us is harsh and unyielding, mainly thick metal cabinets loaded with switches, gauges, and heavy buttons, sprinkled with a few banks of thick monitors for real-time data, all blanketed in air that feels thin and cold. Our acceleration is increasing, and becoming more uncomfortable.
“Mauve?”
I blink my eyes into focus and consider the monitors in front of me. One has a crude lump centred in green phosphor. To the left, and rapidly retreating, is a larger one. To the right, made invisible by distance, is our destination: a third form. A line of data runs on the far left side: final guidance, delivered by laser and invisible to all but us. I compare the numbers, and with a few movements, release some spurts of gas to add more spin, before withdrawing my hands. The Harbour’s data slows to a stop, ending with a colon and a closing bracket.
“That’s it. Just another rock,” I say.
“Good. Ceru, how—”
“Pickaxe is running smooth, Chief. Just another rock,” Ceru interrupts, her accent punctuating the words strangely.
She is small in her couch and pale all over, except for her eyes. Her pupils are large, hungrily scavenging light, pushing her irises in a desperate war with her sclera. This is her first run, and she has left everything she knew. I smile at her and she smiles back, mouth projecting the ease her eyes can’t.
“Cargo, Cardinal?”
“No complaints, Moss,” Cardinal says. The white caterpillars above his eyes shift as he looks up from his own monitor. “Internal temps are nice and low. Harbour did us well. If their guidance is wrong, we’ll make do.”
“Good,” Moss says, from his own couch behind and slightly above ours. “Then it’s time to die, folks.”
I feel the needle pierce my skin, and I relax into the couch. Gel, thick and cold swims over me as I sink, and the dim light gets dimmer.
Just another rock.
Space is harsh.
Now that I’ve said that, you’re probably making a well duh expression, and now you’re glaring at these words because I’ve called you on it. Or maybe you’re not. In which case, our score is 0-1.
The problem isn’t really that space is harsh. Much worse is the fact that space is always harsh, and most of what we’ve ever made isn’t fit for always harsh. In space, it doesn’t matter if you have something from the cleverest engineer that ever lived, eventually it will fail. And over our timeline, eventually means soon. And that soon means death: there’s no safe failure. So instead we look for simplicity. Well, scavenge for it. Because simple means fixable, and fixable means alive.
And there’s security. It’s nice to be notified when the washer is finished, dinner is cooked, or your room is on fire. But as soon as you have two devices connected to each other, you have a vulnerability, a way to rob you. Someone pushes the buttons on your washer in the right sequence, and like a cup under a stream, data overflows and they’ve tunnelled into your fire alarm.
Now you’re in your sleepwear in the hallway, and the air is gone.
“No-where is safe. Don’t you get that?”
“…a sprinkle of sunshine, a dash of iodin…”
“Why won’t you wake up?”
Before I wake, the past taunts me in a smear of colours and gripping bites. It’s not welcoming, even though it’s good news.
“I’m alive,” I manage, through a throat scorched and chill.
And alone.
It’s time to decelerate. I engage my station and run my eyes over the map. Angle is good, velocity is manageable, and equipment is fine. I pull myself from the couch and float over to Ceru’s station. I reach over her form and flip a series of switches. Her displays flicker on, and I can barely read their dim phosphors – these ones are amber and sharp, but older, and in need of repair. Otherwise everything is rosy with the key systems: pickaxe, generator, and air have all restarted in time for me.
I turn her equipment off, and pull myself to Cardinal’s station. His equipment was refurbished recently and once active, the text and lines are bright green. With everything stable, I power his station down.
I look at Moss’s station, and drum my fingers on a surface. His is central, and redundant for all others. The only thing that’s truely Moss’s, is death. I don’t covet a lot; but the knowledge…
I return to my station and double check my sums, then make some adjustments. I’m a little disappointed that no-one else is awake to appreciate them. Then, death embraces me.
For some, the hardest part of this life is leaving everything behind. Our ancestors felt they pain when they fled the home-rock. I had it comparatively easy. My folks were Freighters and they couldn’t take me with them when they left Harbour: Freighters are not a place for kids. Growing up, I was always a second priority at Harbour. I made few friends, never found love, and never found purpose.
Becoming a Freighter was a blessing. Everything felt right from the moment I came aboard and banged my head on a cabinet. The steel room felt like home. The people, like family.
On my first run we made port, and I found company, I made love, and I was given respect. I found a purpose. And it was the same on the second run, and the next, with moments of peace and diligence shared with the other Freighters. The Freighter made me something, and it gave me the dichotomy we all share: the floating, cold quiet of a run, and the weighty hot pumping thrill of harbour. On and off, on repeat, for forever. But it’s not without risk.
“Patch that damned hole bef—”
“Vacuum isn’t kind to living things.”
“I don’t care! Two newt or they’ll catch—”
My life is up and down, and my memories reflect that. The peaks are great and the troughs hurt.
“I’m alive,” I manage, through a throat burnt and iced.
“A loss for—” Cardinal replies, before stopping to wheeze, “—the rest of us.”
“Ceru, report,” Moss orders from his chair.
Maybe I also covet his youth. My bones never used to ache like this.
“Not happy, Chief,” she says, her voice thin.
Oh no.
“But alive. Good. How’s the equipment?” he asks.
I pull myself over to her station and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, it’s OK. It’ll fade. Tell Moss how we’re doing.”
I flick on the displays, and the dim amber reflects from her eyes into mine. I squeeze her shoulder and it seems to help.
“Pickaxe is singing, and we’re at seventeen percent remaining on the generator.”
“Sounds like we’re on target. That was a long one, nicely done.”
Moss nods at me as I head back to my station.
“How are we looking, Mauve?”
I glance over my displays. We’re a fraction off, and spinning too quickly. So I fix it.
“Fixing the bad bits, now. Distance to target is point one el-ess. All going well, they’ll catch us in a dozen kiloseconds.”
“Roger that. Hailing harbour now.”
“Eighty tons of O-two, fifteen vacuum pumps, and a few dozen various panes of vacuum rated glass panels with some preformed shutters to fit,” Cardinal concludes, before taking a sip from a bulb.
“What about the O-rings?” asks the man opposite.
He is young, new to the role, and with a novice understanding of Freighter tongue that has slowed our meeting down to a crawl in its fourth hour.
Cardinal rubs his face, and Moss jumps in to speak.
“We have enough to replace your critical spares, but that’s it. Our last few harbours needed them too.”
“You can’t give us more?” the man asked, his face paling. “We’re losing one a month. With criticals only, we’ll run short.”
I look over at Ceru and give her a little kick. Her eyes open a little wider, and follow my gaze to Cardinal and the Quartermaster.
Cardinal leans back in the chair as he speaks.
“Nothing doing. We can’t know how short the next harbour is. We must keep enough for them.”
“And us,” I mutter to Ceru.
“So what happens to my docks and emergency exits?” the Quartermaster replies, chewing his vowels and leaning forward. “What if one fails and we can’t fix it?”
“If it fails, it fails. It’ll probably be a slow leak, so you’ll have time to get people out, and to reclaim the air before it gets sucked out. Re-pressurise it when the next Freighter drops by.”
The Quartermaster blanches.
“We have five hundred people a wing, and that’s already tight. If we have to move them—”
“Quartermaster, there is another solution,” I interrupt, to cut this short.
Negotiation is all about holding back. But this is torture.
“We can’t spare more. But if you’ve kept the old ones, we can show you how to keep them going for a little longer. We have a recipe for an adhesive that will give them each five to ten megaseconds more, depending on environment.”
The man processes this, then straightens in his chair.
“All right,” he says with a nod. Then, on the same breath, “Do you have any new genotype cerevisiae? Our H-type have caught something and…”
After the meeting, we copy over a map for the dockworkers to follow. The most common items are closer to the central chamber, and won’t be hard for them to find, but one or two things are deeper in the labyrinth. Cardinal gives them a final warning not to break any of his sensors, and we retire for the evening.
The walls around me seem to laugh as I inch my way to our chambers. They’re a private nook near the docks, and small but well fitted. Some Freighters like to sleep where they work, but unless something is seriously wrong with the harbour, the others and I like to accept their hospitality.
And because of that hospitality, I can’t walk in a straight line and my stomach is threatening mutiny.
I make it to the door, enter, move through the doorway on the immediate left, and collapse onto a chair. Sure enough, Moss and Cardinal are sitting on a sofa with steaming mugs of herbal in hand.
“Feeling a little stressed, have we Mauve my boy?” Cardinal says, his face measured.
“What gives you that impression?” I ask.
“I counted your drinks, and everything else besides. It’s a miracle you’re not passed out in a corner,” he says, before looking to Moss.
Moss rolls his eyes, and throws a chip towards Cardinal, who catches it with two hands.
“Thought for sure you’d sleep somewhere else. We all saw those blue eyes looking at you,” Moss grumbles.
“I did,” I say, after a moment, when the rooms straightens up. “But youth is wasted on the young. Clueless.”
I look to the other chairs, conspicuously empty.
“At least someone else is having a go, while you old farts just sit here.”
At this, the two eye each other and laugh.
“We decided to call it early when we heard from the quartermaster again.”
The words punch me sideways.
“Oh no, don’t tell me—”
“Another meeting. First thing tomorrow.”
Ceru doesn’t even have the decency to look rough the next day, but another five hours of quibbling with the Quartermaster wear her down.
“We can’t spare that much water,” the Quartermaster says. “We haven’t caught any for fifteen megaseconds, and—”
As he continues, I take myself and Ceru out for a break. Moss and Cardinal flick me a look, but still have mercy. We walk down the corridor, and aim for the Freighter.
“How was your first night in a foreign harbour?” I ask.
She looks at me, sighs, and shakes her head.
“Good, but—” she falters.
“But what?”
“Weird,” she says, after a moment.
“How do you mean?”
She chews, then speaks.
“I felt like a prize. Or a toy. Or something? I don’t know. They spoke Freighter fine, and I caught bits of their other language, but at the end they left and it was over. Like they were finished with me.”
I feel her words in my chest, then take her hand and give it a squeeze. We wait as a pair of unloaders pass, carrying dripping goods, then step over a thick hose, into the Freighter. I steer towards and her station and lean nearby as she sits down.
“We all get that, I think,” I say, “Sometimes a Freighter starts out close enough, culturally, that the locals forget. But everything changes too much, eventually.”
I shrug.
“You start to become other. A way for harbourers to taste something exotic. It’s fun, but makes it hard to form a real connection. Even when they realise that you’re just a person.”
She looks to her monitors.
“But you have? Formed a connection?”
A memory ambushes me.
“Ye—yes. But—”
She studies me.
“It was a fairytale rescue job,” I say, the words funny in my mouth. “One harbour was in severe drought, and another was expanding inside their rock, and had water to spare. They became a regular back and forth.”
I stop and clear my throat.
“I met someone, and we had a friendship. But time is different for Freighters. It moves slower.”
We listen to the sounds of the parked freighter for a few moments. Someone is chipping at ice, and the impacts resonate
“Do you regret it?” Ceru asks.
“No. Cardy had to pick me up after that one, but the answer is still no,” I manage, “But I wish it didn’t have to end.”
I shake my head.
“Don’t be afraid of trying. But even if you don’t, you’re part of our crew. Even if your Freighter is a little funny.”
I reach into a cabinet, pull out a book, and throw it at her.
“Let’s clean it up a little, sharpen some of those sounds.”
She eyes the thick book with caution.
Space is big.
Again, you’re making the well duh, and yada yada yada.
The problem isn’t that space is big, or that it’s empty. The problem is that space is so big and empty, relative to us and the wet rock we evolved on. That same wet rock could be circled in two hundred kiloseconds without leaving atmosphere. With the rock gone, and seeking the safety of isolation, we scattered so much that now it can take a gigaseconds to get from one place to another. At that scale, things change. Standardised Freighter speech has helped, but we still get left behind. Harbour folk move on.
My Harbour didn’t mean a lot to me, it never felt like home. I felt a little empty when I learned my adopted folks were dead, but that’s it. I think about the place only as often as I visit, and I dream of everywhere else.
And the Freighter.
“Whoa there, that’s a big one—”
“…the ice creak? That’s the spirit of the Frieghter tal—”
“Damned air leak. Still can’t find the hole—”
I cough, and feel the ice creep back from my lungs and the gel harden and push me up and out.
“I’m alive,” I say.
“It doesn’t get better, does it?” Ceru asks from her console. “Fifteen times and it still sucks.”
Her Freighter is a lot better. She learns quickly.
“Oh I don’t know, by five hundred you start to appreciate it a little,” Moss says from above.
“Really?”
Moss and I share a grin.
“Of course. But not a cycle sooner.”
I look at my monitor and feel some pride. This is looking like a smooth landing: they almost won’t need to catch us. A line in the data catches my eye at the same time as Moss speaks.
“Huh, would you look at that— Cardinal, this is your home port.”
The old man coughs.
Five metallic clunks ring like a clapper, and we’re attached. On the other side of the hull, I know that an accordion will be snuggling up for a tight kiss. Moss gets the all clear, and opens our exit hatch. He’s out first, then Ceru, then me. Cardinal doesn’t follow.
Moss and I look at each other.
“He can’t stay inside,” Moss whispers.
“He’ll deny that,” I whisper back.
“Uh, what’s the problem?” Ceru asks, looking at both of us.
“He’s afraid—”
Moss’s eyes flash, and I change my approach mid-sentence.
“—I mean, he. Well, uh. It’s been a long time,” I finish.
Ceru raises an eyebrow, before yelling back into the Freighter.
“Hey, Cardinal. I showed you mine, you gotta show me yours.”
Moss and I hold our breath.
And Cardinal snorts.
“Fine. Stinks in here anyway.”
“This is Cloud Hall,” Cardinal says, as we turn the corner and encounter a dead end. The hatch in front is sealed and dated. The warning is old enough to have faded and the air is stale. My heart freezes.
Cardinal frowns and moves to the hatch, tracing the letters with his finger.
“That can’t be right,” he says to the metal.
“What’s cloud hall?” Ceru asks, moving towards Cardinal.
“It’s, oh, it’s nothing,” he replies, “Let’s just drink.”
Cardinal takes the lead and we follow. Moss hangs back and I mutter the story to him.
Last time it was me, Cardinal, Lime, and Olive. The greens were twins filling in by leaving retirement, and both older than the sun. So as soon as we landed, they were off to soak the cold from their marrow. Cardinal shrugged at their loss and took me to cloud hall.
We turned the corner and it stole my breath away. Searing blue shone on three sides, as dazzling green glittered below. Cardinal lead me to the middle of the hall and spoke.
“Storm.”
Everything changed. Roiling banks of grey sprinted towards us and with a hiss, mist trickled from somewhere, covering my feet and the green below. I went to move, seeing the end of the corridor a dozen strides ahead. But Cardinal put his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s alright, just screens and carb dioxide. You’re fine.”
When we finally left, I felt changed. The flashes were stained on my lids and the thumping crackle was hidden in my bones. And my smile ached.
“Should have let him stay on the Freighter,” Moss mutters.
***
The rest of the trip is just as difficult. With each hour and passing corridor, Cardinal sags more. His favourite eatery is long gone, as is the attached bar. Our lodgings annoy him, the colours and shapes being all wrong. On a few occasions he stares at people, looking at them up and down, squinting, before shaking his head. When Cardinal tries speaking the local language, all he receives in return are blank looks and strange replies. The sounds have all shifted, and the words have changed. By the end, he gives up and just speaks Freighter. Standardised by necessity.
In private, Moss proposes that we finish the trade so that we can leave. I can’t agree fast enough, and he draws up a schedule with three hundred kiloseconds of unrelenting dock-work. The old man doesn’t seem to notice, but when Ceru sees the plan she turns a little pale.
After a final rest, we’re all couched, fuelled, and ready to leave. I look over at Cardinal. He is slouched at his station and flicking a switch idly.
I make eye contact with Moss and nod my head at Cardinal, but he shakes his head before nodding at me instead. So I pull myself over to the old man.
“Hey,” I start, not expecting a response nor receiving one.
I flick his ear.
I settle beside him. He keeps flicking the switch, and doesn’t look at me.
“Cloud hall was the first time I saw Earth,” I say, feeling the words in my mouth. “And it’s still the best time.”
I aim over my shoulder.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it, Ceru. And I hate that you couldn’t show it to her,” I finish.
Cardinal stops flicking the switch, but still doesn’t look at me.
“If you can’t say it, it won’t get out of you,” I try.
“I don’t wanna hear it,” he replies, after a moment.
“Come on, Cardy, we’re crew. I’ve known you for—”
“I don’t mean your therapy talk,” he says, and I stop. “I mean my thoughts. Saying them makes them real, it lets them spread.”
I say nothing. I don’t know how to continue.
“They’re real anyway,” Moss says, now on the other side of the station. “You can’t cure it, but speaking may help you treat it.”
The old man doesn’t say anything for awhile, and just taps his finger. He sighs.
“I don’t like how it changed. And I don’t like that, now, my memories of how is are clearer than than my memories of how it was.”
I see him feel the words in his mouth, and I see the folds of his face work and resolve.
“I won’t go back again. I want to keep the past as clear as I can.”
Moss claps him on the shoulder.
“Aye on that.”
The freighter runs on water. It makes up most of our structure, we split it for our three fuel options, it keeps our cargo safe, and, importantly, it protects us from debris. When the local neighbourhood fell apart, the rocks spread apart into the swarf field we call home. It’s sparse, given that space is so large, but we still see impacts. Ice is solid liquid life.
Liquid death, death juice, isn’t really that. Your heart stops and you go cold, but nothing breaks inside. You still seem to age, but it’s almost too slow to measure. I’ve spent about four hundred megaseconds of the last ten gigaseconds awake, and I’m only about a gigasecond and a quarter, bio-time. The worst thing is when you have to wake up quickly—
“They’re onto us.”
“See that shadow?”
“They’re waiting.”
“I’m ali—” I start, only for the chill to steal my words.
I shake away and see my curses in the air . It’s blistering cold, and the generator is taking its time to change that. I pull on my emergency layer, and I crank my couch to maximum temp. Now I can think, I can hear, and it’s loud. My console is flashing, Moss’s is flashing, and Ceru’s is smoking. Oh funt.
Cardinal is still asleep — his station is on standby, lights all green — but Moss is awake and half a second ahead of me, pawing his way to Ceru. When I get there, we pull her out, and Moss drags her away while I go for the station.
First thing, I cut the power. Second, I blast carb foam into the smoking bits. It gets everywhere, splashing back and floating away. Third, I check and confirm that the smoke has stopped. Our filters will need a good clean after this. I turn to Moss.
“How is she?”
“A little cold. What went wrong?”
“Gimme a minute.”
I find the root cause after a kilosecond of hunting, and it chills me right back down. Our sensors were hit by some sort of data pulse, which tricked the filter into opening for a moment. A second surge snuck through the opening and went into Ceru’s station.
“Why her station?” Moss asks.
“And why didn’t the fuses catch it?” Ceru follows, quietly.
I follow the conduit to Ceru’s fusebox and inside find a thick, spot-welded strip of metal bridging. When Moss sees it, his faces goes even paler than mine.
“Check yours. I’ll do mine and wake Cardinal.”
I pull myself over to my station, pop the box, and find nothing. The tension in my shoulders doesn’t relax.
“How’s yours, Moss?”
“Clear,” he says, now at Cardinal’s couch.
He turns to the box, and finds that it doesn’t open. As he tries, I pull myself over, and I lend a hand. After a few moments, Ceru comes over with a pry tool. I laugh and Moss takes the tool, bending the cabinet door and darting to snatch the loose metal now drifting away.
“What…” is all Cardinal can manage at this stage, his eyes open a fraction.
Moss holds the bridge and swears.
“Sabotage. Why was that one not connected?” I mutter. Then, I realise. “Oh funt, we need to get ready.”
Moss’s eyes widen as he catches on, and he straps Cardinal in before pushing Ceru towards his couch.
“What? How?—” she asks
“Someone sabotaged your station, and were halfway through doing Cardinal’s.” I say, strapping myself in.
“Anything on Nav scope?” Moss booms.
“Not yet. Do you want a ping?” I yell back.
“No. Let’s stay looking deaf and crippled.”
“Cardy, are you going to die on me?” I ask.
“I was doing this before your father overcommitted,” the old man fires back. “Moss, cargo is stable and I’m ready.”
“They meant to do all of us,” Ceru says, mostly caught up. “And leave us blind, dumb, and unable to run. Why didn’t they finish—”
“We left early!” Cardinal roars from his couch, then he laughs. “You’re welcome that I’m a miserable old—”
“Nav, anything on our eyes?”
Moss’s words come just as I see something in the black.
“We have a search light!” I say, feeling a laugh bubble up.
“Thank funt for that,” Moss yells back. “Mauve, let’s do ass-to-ass. Cardinal, you’re on damage control in case they try something. We know they’re idiots, so we have a chance to do some good here.”
“How do we know they’re idiots? What are we doing?” Ceru asks.
I watch the stars around the light as it winks out, and get a silhouette for the hull. They’re coming in slower now, matching our velocity, and I only have a moment to work this. A figure looms by the Freighter on my monitor: a ghoul in the black.
“Because,” Moss says, “Either they don’t know the sabotage was incomplete, or they’re going ahead anyway. Mauve?”
“Ready and moving!” I yell, flicking my controls. I feel four quick punches: one to push us aside, one to push us behind, one another to spin us around, and another to bring us closer,
“Fire!” Moss yells back.
A kick that pushes me into my couch.
After a moment I blink and curse: our heading is now wrong, and there’s an awful spin to counter. As I work, Moss engages our floodlights and sends out a ping. He captures the return data and laughs from his seat. The raiders are barely visible now, their engine outlets covered by a thick layer of water ice.
We spend the next few hours plotting and changing course while Moss writes a report to share with the next harbour and, from there, other Freighters.
“We want to be as far away as possible,” Moss says to Ceru. “They don’t seem to see our exhaust, when it’s just h-two. Even hot gas isn’t too bad. But when we combust like that…”
Ceru nods, then asks a follow-up.
“If They saw us, would They work out where our next harbour is?”
Moss pauses and raises his voice.
“They could, but Mauve isn’t usually that lazy.”
“Fifteen redirects in that course,” I say to his raised eyebrow. “Only five in the one I’m charting now. But needs must…”
I trail off as I look at Ceru’s ruined couch.
“How long will we be awake?!” Ceru asks, before swallowing, and asking another question: “I, uh, what will we do?”
Freighters are traders. We go from harbour to harbour, taking the surplus from one place to another. Every harbour typically has a different surplus, so things work out even. They refresh our generator, spray their spare water in our pickaxe chamber, help fix anything broken, and give us a week or so of hospitality. It’s not perfect, but it keeps most people alive.
Sometimes, a harbour doesn’t want us. It’s rare, but it happens. But once we’ve arrived, it’s megaseconds too late. Last time, we were especially depleted, and it was a hard barter just for water. We crossed that one out from the record.
Sometimes, a harbour wants us too much. It’s less rare, but equally bad. We give them all we can spare, and they give us just enough to survive. Last time, Moss, Cardinal, and I left early to take our mouths from their rationing, and we could only secure enough water for half-speed, with two redirects. We kept that one in the record, but put a note on it to be careful, next time.
Sometimes, a harbour just doesn’t exist. We have records, but things are constantly changing out here. We usually rely on comms between harbours, but they don’t talk a lot. When we go for a new Harbour, at best we run on old information. At worst? Rumours. When they’re wrong, we find nothing but a dead rock. We have tools to scrape ice ourselves. But that’s not an option if it’s the wrong kind of rock, or if our generator is near dead, or…
Or if it’s a trap.
“Well. Fat out of it, fellas.”
“Work quickly, we only have—”
“That is not good. Any ideas?”
“I’m alive,” I manage.
“And on duty. Mauve, you have command,” Moss says, helping me out of my couch. “One more shift. Good luck.”
Cardinal gives me a little nod as he sinks into his own couch, and within a few moments it’s just me and Ceru. Unfortunately for the both of us, we can’t risk two death-juiced people in a single couch, and unfortunately for her, we can’t risk only one of us awake for this long. She makes it about a kilosecond before coming over.
“Mauve?”
I bring my eyes into focus and look at her.
“Ya?”
“What do you do? When it’s like this?” she asks, tapping a finger.
“When we’re in rear-end of nowhere with nothing to do?”
She nods.
“We have a stash of media, but I usually just fix stuff. Chances are that something needs tightening, or vacuuming, or lubricating.”
Her expression crushes and I laugh.
“I’m just yanking you. Follow me,” I say.
I lead her to our one internal door, and pass her layers from a cupboard. Once we’re rugged up, I apply a breather and pass one to Ceru, along with a light and a small pickaxe. I pull something else out, but keep to myself. I don’t want Ceru to see it. My ghosts are my own.
“We run low pressure outside the centre. It’s breathable out there, but not for long.”
She nods as I open the door.
“And stick close,” I say, my voice echoing in the lock.
I hesitate, and kick myself for it. The girl doesn’t need my ghosts.
“It’s straightforward but you don’t want to wander off.”
We equalise and step out into the dark.
The Freighter is older than Cardinal. I know, crazy making. But it isn’t even close. He’s about two and two thirds of a gigasecond, bio-time, and has been freighting for oh, I can’t even remember. But when he was leader, he was the third one aboard. The rock has been flying for at least 50 gigaseconds. That lines up with—
When you have a rock that old, it accumulates layers. Lots of tunnels are good for freight. We could have a hanger, but then we’d have to secure items, and we’d have a big empty space to pressurise, or we’d have to work in vacuum. Plenty to go wrong, either way. It’s easier just to cut a tunnel, keeping a constriction for emergency seals, and carve out as we need. Spray a bit of water over the top to freeze it in place, and it’ll stay snug. Lots of tunnels are also good for an emergency. Harbours are discovered, and if a Freighter is there to take the dispossessed (and their supplies) before the enemy arrives, folks might have a chance.
Sometimes, though, I think the rock makes its own tunnels. And that scares me no end. That’s why we have the something else.
“Here we are!” I say, pointing to a spot on the ceiling. “Get picking, and don’t let it fall.”
Ceru frowns and looks at the ice, colours behind smeared beyond recognition.
“Why is it up there?” She asks, hefting the tool.
I shrug.
“Cardinal is short, and I’m mean.”
She laughs and strikes the ice.
After a while, I reach up and help catch it. Even though we’ve only part of a newton in deceleration, it’s large and the bulk burdens both of us the whole way. We make it back, cycle the lock, and unload our gear. I stash the something else while Ceru manages the layers.
I guide her to a hatch under Moss’s raised station, push the box inside, and push Ceru in afterwards with a squawk. I follow a moment later, with a few tools.
Underneath Moss’s station is mostly empty space. Some emergency supplies, a working light, and all of his cables are here too, sure. But I’ve tucked all that away. Giving us the only place in the centre with flat, empty floor space.
I pull a smaller tin from the larger box, unload it, and spread the contents out.
“What are these?” Ceru asks, holding the shape. The sides are wavy and uneven, with slots and protrusions. Scraps of colour are splatted in blues on one side and yellows on the other.
I smile at her.
“Figure it out.”
I watch as Ceru takes the shapes and begins to work. She spreads them out into a single layer, then flips all onto the yellow side. She discovers that not all of them have protrusions on all sides, and places four down at the extremities. Ceru lines up other pieces, finding many with a flat side, and arranging them in lines. Then she works her way from the edges to the centre. As she gets close her face unwrinkles, and soon she sits back to admire it with me.
“They’re pieces,” she finally says. “Pieces of a picture. What is that?”
“It’s a desert. The old home-rock had a few of them,” I say.
“Oh,” she says.
After a moment of silence, she looks in the large box and counts the contents.
“Where did you get them from? Where are they going?”
I wince.
“Well, uh. All different harbours, originally. I can’t remember them all.”
She nods, then looks straight at me.
“So where are they going?”
She doesn’t let me dither.
“You will give them on, won’t you? When someone is in need?”
“Of course. When someone is in need,” I say, dipping my head.
“So if the next harbour we visit has some bored kids playing around?” she asks.
I don’t say anything, and when she speaks again her tone is different.
“Mauve,” she says. “Mauve, look at me.”
I don’t look at her, so she flicks my ear. I look at her, but I can’t seem to meet her dark eyes.
“Mauve, why do you think I joined your crew?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling the words in my mouth. “I figured if you stayed, you’d tell us one day.”
She gestures at the picture.
“I joined for that.”
I glance at the picture, then back to her.
“Ceru, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s—”
“Gone. I know. Blasted to a thousand million pieces. A thousand million little corpses scattered around. That we still live in, fifty gigaseconds later.”
I feel my heart twist and my face heat up.
“Corpses?!”
“Yes, Mauve. We’ve spent lifetimes helping to keep them going, but they’re still corpses. They’ve lasted for fifty gigs, but eventually they’ll rot.”
“What do you mean? Where is this coming from.”
“I asked every Freighter who visited my home harbour. They all talked about bad ones.”
I don’t move. I don’t even blink.
“And if you ask the really old ones, like Cardinal—”
I shake my head.
“No, no, no. Not this again—”
“So he says it too?” she asks, eyes glinting under the work light.
“Next time, you can stay awake with him and ask yourself,” I reply, making for the puzzle. But she catches my wrist.
“What if it’s true?” she asks, and I feel my heart twist again. “What if harbours are dying? Who will know? Who can know?”
The feeling strikes my chest, and threatens to blur my eyes. But I resist. I breathe, and act the age I feel.
“That’s why you joined? To find out?”
She half-nods, replies: “I want to help,”
Then, it’s her turn to drop her eyes.
“But I also did it for me. If I’m going to live long enough to see what comes after—” she gestures at the desert, “—the only way to do that is as a Freighter.”
I look at her and eventually she gives me eye contact. I study her face, and I see something almost familiar.
“You know, it took me a long time to tell Cardinal,” I confess.
She crooks an eyebrow.
“Tell him what?”
“That I wanted to live longer too. It’s a red flag, when you’re recruiting for a Freighter. We’re not a ticket to the future. But I wasn’t thinking about after.”
I look at the picture.
“The back is fantastic, but this side is pretty dead. If anyone lives to see what’s after, I hope it’s more than this.
I work my jaw, feeling an idea come alive.
“I’ll give this one up at the next Harbour, but not like this.”
When I’ve finished, Ceru’s face is priceless.
“How did—”
“You watched me the whole time,” I say, rinsing the sponge and returning it to a compartment in the box alongside the paints. “No secrets here.”
She looks from me to the picture and back.
“Was it really like that?”
I nod, and admire my work. The swirling greys and blues are a little abstract, but they carry the feeling and the life, and that’s what matters.
“I’m sad I missed it,” she says after a moment.
“We all are,” I agree.
Cardinal opens his eyes. After a few moments, he pulls himself from the couch, looks at Moss’s station, then his station clock, then Ceru, then me.
“What are you planning?” he asks, low and careful.
I say nothing and look at Ceru.
“When was the first time you found a dead harbour?” she asks.
The blood seems to drain from his face, dragging his skin down with it. In this moment, Cardinal looks decades older. Then, the moment passes.
“My tenth run,” he says. “I was half a gigasecond old, bio-time. The prior harbour was on the cusp of failing, so we gave them everything. Even cut out two of the stations and depressurised the rest of the Freighter. So when we arrived, and they failed to catch us…”
He shakes his head.
“We didn’t have the fuel to move on, so we landed. I got in a suit, hit the surface with Silver, and we manually wrestled the clamps and strung out the accordion.”
His eyes seem far away. I haven’t heard him tell it sober before. Or heard it sober, either.
“When we got in, it was messy. Total pressure failure, throughout.”
After a moment, when he hesitates, Ceru speaks.
“But vent seals, and pressure doors—”
“Don’t work a thing when there’s a tunnel in nearly every room!” Cardinal says, now back in the present.
He takes a few breaths, as my brain seems to stop.
“So we stripped it best we could. Fuelled up, refreshed the generator, and took the bottled air. Piled half of it all under a cloth on the surface, in case there was another unlucky Freighter about. We took the rest aboard, along with…”
He coughs, and drops his eyes.
“The remains. Then we went back to the failing harbour, and helped them again.”
His words give way to quiet, but it only holds a moment.
“What tunnels?” Cerus asks, and I follow with: “You never mentioned that before.”
Cardinal looks at us, confused.
“Tunnels? I never said anything about tunnels.”
He scrunches his face.
“It must have been the vents…”
Ceru goes to speak, but I put a hand on her forearm, and she halts.
“Cardinal. If we pulled out the records, would you help us find every dead harbour on the books?”
He looks at me, expression clearing.
“Why?”
I nod at Ceru, and she motions the old man into the den under Moss’s station. He moves through the hatch with a grumble. Soon I hear a noise from inside, and after a moment he calls out.
“All right. I’ll help you look.”
Ceru is right. We’re a sample of one, but we have logs copies from by five other Freighters, acquired over the last three dozen gigaseconds. After searching, we find nineteen dead harbours. Our three entries are the oldest, and two are from before Cardinal. All three describe a complete loss of atmosphere, but don’t speculate on cause. Some of the others probably died from impact, others from ecological collapse, and maybe one or two from some sort of societal collapse. But we can’t actually tell, as the records from the other freighters are sparse.
Less than twenty in the last fifty gigaseconds isn’t many.
But the rate is trending up.
As we finish the search, Ceru looks to Moss’s couch, then Cardinal and I.
“Why didn’t you wake Moss?” she asks.
“Probably because this kind of thinking got his whole family killed,” Cardinal says, pre-empting me, before looking to us both and leaning back.
“Look, have you thought about what you’d do with this? People don’t take kindly to this sort of thing. A vague threat is no help.”
Ceru and I look to each other.
“I didn’t have evidence until now,” she says. “I haven’t planned any further yet.”
Then, she frowns.
“We did this in a few hours. Why hasn’t anyone else worked it out? Any other Freighters?”
Cardinal and I look at each other, then to Ceru.
“They probably already have,” I say.
Cardinal nods.
“And they can’t do anything about it. So they keep quiet. You should do the same: don’t tell Moss, and don’t tell any harbour folk. Nothing to gain by stirring panic.”
He nods at the clock on his station.
“I have one-sixy kilo seconds of death to get back to. If I don’t come out of the couch after Moss he’ll suspect something.”
After the home rock fell apart, everywhere else died. Red rock, small rock, and all the other nascent outcrops went out like a power cut through the neighbourhood; each bulb darkening so soon after the last that it seemed instant. There wasn’t enough time, or enough berths for everyone to escape. So most didn’t.
But it wasn’t over. A ship is a fragile thing: fast and light, but thin-skinned and obvious. The enemy started to find them and, one-by-one, the fairy-lights started dying too. So those who escaped had a choice to make: abandon ship, or run. It was a half-and-half split. Those who stayed made the Harbours, parting out their old ships and sinking into the rocks. The smallest ones became Freighters.
Those who left? Well, they don’t write.
Every once in awhile, someone stumbles across something they shouldn’t: the skeletons or corpses of ships, drifting alone in the dark. If they’re considerate, the graves are left alone. If they’re smart, the graves are parted out. If they’re stupid, desperate, or dreaming, they try to fix them up. They make arks, dreaming of a life outside the neighbourhood, and the greener grass of our departed kin. But arks are just as thin-skinned as ships always were.
And They, the enemy, never left.
“Mauve, wake up.”
“What did Cardinal mean?
“What about the tunnels?”
I open my eyes, check the clock, and sigh. After Cardinal took the juice, I insisted on a 25 kilosecond sleep. It’s not twenty seconds over that.
I consider blowing her off. I don’t want to discuss the T-word.
“Cardinal told me that story three or four times,” I say, scratching my face. “But he never mentioned tunnels or holes. I think his wipe is fading.”
Ceru looks at me pointedly and I nod in acknowledgement.
“Three megaseconds ago, he picked up something nasty from a harbour, and just couldn’t seem to shake it. Their doctors couldn’t do anything, so we made the call to juice him and go for the next harbour. Luckily for us, there was another Freighter just about to leave. Their leader was able to bring him up before the doctor tried treatment, but the second he was awake, he kicked them all out and called for a moot. We decided that Moss would take the job and learn the secrets.”
She digests this for a moment, then remembers.
“What was that about a wipe?”
I tap on my arm.
“I don’t know what death juice is. I don’t know how it works, I don’t know how to dose it, I don’t know where it comes from. The only people who do are Freighter leaders.”
She nods, following and not needing to ask the next question.
“I don’t know why.”
Her expression collapses, and Ceru opens her mouth to object, but my raised palms stop her.
“I have ideas, but I don’t know. It could be an anti-mutiny device. If you can’t work with death juice, you can’t Freight.”
Ceru frowns, unconvinced.
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t think it’s likely either.”
“What is likely?” she asks.
I blink, and my mouth seems to dry up.
“I told you that wanting to Freight for the juice is a red flag, right?”
She nods.
“What if harbours had juice as well? Maybe we’d run out, trade would stop, and everyone would die. Maybe you’d have folks dig their head in the sand and wait for better times that never come. Maybe everyone goes under, and we all sleep through the death of the sun.”
I stop, aware that I’m now out of breath. Ceru fills in the silence.
“So, Cardinal stepped down because he was going to die. And he passed on the secret of the death juice. But then he recovered.”
“So he and Moss went out back,” I thumb at the door, “Afterwards, Moss dragged him back in. When he came to it was all wiped.”
Ceru pauses, considering the texture on a panel while she thinks.
“And you think, wha— oh, you think it’s wearing off? That the tunnels are related?”
I nod, then knead my brow.
“Enough for now,” I say. “Let’s do something proactive. How is your soldering?”
Her blank expression tells me all I need to know.
“What about route planning?”
Somehow, her face is even blanker.
Redundancy is second to generosity on a Freighter. That means we carry all the parts we need to fix us up, except for those we’ve given away. And unfortunately, a needy harbour a few runs back means that don’t have the spares to fix Ceru’s station.
Redundancy also applies for the crew. I’m our primary navigator because I like it and I’m good at it. But Cardinal and Moss can do the job fine. Cardy did it before I did, in fact. The old man now monitors our cargo, keeping an eye on the thousands of sensors throughout the Freighter and in or around the cargo. But Moss or I could do it. Ceru’s station is for monitoring the on-board systems: air, power, thrust. She can do a little of the job already, and the three of us have been taking turns showing her how to do the rest.
As leader, Moss is in the hot seat. His station can fill in for any of the other three, and from there, he can dole out doses of death juice. He keeps each couch topped up with a few doses so that, if we lost him, we could still reach Harbour without using so much of our food.
I open my eyes, and for a moment I’m confused by the quiet and the warmth. Then I remember: I am on shift. We were working under in deceleration force, and some of my muscles ached, so I took a nap.
“I hope you feel half as bad as I do,” I say, channelling Cardinal.
She’s not there.
I frown and look at the clock. It’s two kiloseconds until Cardinal and Moss are awake, and four until we reach harbour.
She’s not in the space under Moss’s station, either.
I look to our one internal door. Some of the gear is missing, and the lock has been cycled. I don my layers, mask, and light in record time. I don’t even bother to hide the something else. The weapon. Two cycles later, I’m in the dark and my breath stutters as I see a glint. It’s a spot of red—
“—Paint. It’s paint. She marked her way,” I say to myself.
I follow the paint and quickly I’m off the beaten path, wandering through narrow alleys in the ice. I recognise the way, mostly. We store goods in the Freighter radially, with the most common items in the middle near us, and the rarer items further out. So as we go further my memories stop telling a recount and start telling a story.
My light catches on something behind the wall, and I remember a sad child giving up their toy. Cobbled together from spares, someone noticed that it contained five immaculate vacuum tubes and a rare type of filter, and they passed it onto us, I don’t know how long ago.
Deeper in, I see the bold strokes of an old man’s pride and joy. An immaculate scale-model of the neighbourhood, pre-enemy, embedded in a block of clear resin. On one edge is a silver arrow, pointing outwards. I don’t remember when we picked this up, either, but it must have been pre-Moss. I don’t think we’d have accepted ark-memorabilia otherwise.
Further again and I see a steel box, and know that the inside is full of seeds. None are of practical value, but one day they might be sown for pleasure. The woman who gave them to us is a shadow in my eye, but I remember her smile. It meant a lot that someone took them on, that someone understood what they meant.
A few more turns, and I know that the others would wake soon. They’d know where Ceru and I were: there’s no other place we could be. But they would be concerned. It’s important to be around when someone is coming of death juice. The risks are low, but present.
Then my light finds a hand.
My heart flexes in my chest, and I almost turn to leave. This is the worst place aboard, a literal nightmare. I’m among ghosts.
Harbours, Freighters, and ships face the same issue. Filters will clear air and water, generators will keep things warm and powered, and the pickaxe works with the generator to use ice as fuel for thrust. On most harbours, they have cultivated plants to share the load. But no system is perfectly closed, and there’s always the need for new input.
And we’re Freighters. When see the chance input, we take it with us. Even if it’s the bodies from a dead Harbour.
***
I dip my light from the wall and try not to look at anything. I’m looking for Ceru’s marks, which makes it hard. I find it just around the next bend, a red mark set near the floor. Beside a tunnel in the wall.
My mouth goes dry just as a sound emerges from the hole. I draw the weapon and lock up, pointing it as steadily as I can.
When an object rolls out from the hole, I nearly kill it.
“Ceru!?” I yell instead. It comes out as more of a question than it should.
Of course it’s her, there’s nothing else out here. This hole must have been made by Freighters doing the graveyard shift, wanting to link adjacent tunnels without going through the effort of digging a full height path.
“Mauve!” Ceru yells back from the hole. “I found stuff in here. You need to see this.”
I look at the tunnel and find I can’t move.
“Ceru, we’ll make harbour soon. We need to go back to the centre.”
“Not until you’ve seen this,” she replies. “It looks important. That thing I just threw out— what is it?”
A tickle rolls down my spine as I turn the object over with my foot. It’s a finger-sized metal cylinder, with an inset pane of smoky glass.
“Funt,” I say.
“What?”
I look at the tunnel.
“Make room,” I say, my stomach tensing up. “I’m coming in.”
I crouch down and look in the hole. The tunnel angles slightly upwards, and Ceru’s light is around a bend so it’s dim. The tunnel branches off in a few other directions, including up and down. The Freigher’s crew and storage areas are, more or less, all in one plane — it keeps everything simple, and ensures the pickaxe and fuel zones are far away from the pressurised parts — so if these tunnels go up and down…
I look from my light to my weapon to the hole. I only have two hands, and I want at least one to crawl.
“Should have brought the funting head-light,” I mutter to myself, putting the weapon in my waistband.
As I crawl down the tunnel, colours and shapes shine through the ice at me. I try not to think about them, but the side passages are worse. As I approach each one I pause, pull out the weapon, and point both it and my light. Each route one twists, curves, and curls off into darkness. Our tunnels are straight with square corners.
I pass the last side-tunnel and stop. Something has changed. The air has moved behind me. I panic, drop my light, and crawl as quickly as I can around the last bend. I fly into a wider chamber and turn, fumbling for the weapon.
When nothing comes out of the hole I glance at Ceru, who looks from me to the weapon with concern and horror.
“Uh?” she seems to ask.
“Your light,” I ask, reaching for it, keeping the tunnel in my view.
She hands it over, and I creep towards the tunnel. It’s empty, quiet, and still. And my dropped light is gone.
“What’s happening? Are you…?” Ceru asks.
“I, uh,” I say, looking from her to the empty tunnel.
My light must have rolled backwards, and fallen down a hole. I panicked over nothing, and lost a light. She looks down the tunnel.
“It’s fine, Mauve. I thought it was spooky too. Think. I think it is spooky.”
She smiles, and I feel my cheeks redden.
“That object you found,” I say. “It’s—”
“From here,” she cuts in, pointing at the wall.
Here it’s not ice, but silica. Part of the rock that runs in veins throughout the Freighter. They can make it more annoying to navigate: if I don’t apply thrust carefully, the Freighter will start to spin around its centre of mass. Since the rock isn’t evenly spread, and the pickaxe uses fuel differently each time, that centre is never somewhere intuitive. I want a little spin when we’re in transit — otherwise we wouldn’t look like just another rock — but it takes work to know what’s realistic, pleasant, and efficient. The good news is that I—
“Mauve?” Ceru asks.
I blink, and force my eyes to run from the floor and up the wall. There’s an alcove cut from the rock, set above a bowl with a hole in its centre. Set underneath is a row of angled cylinders, their dark fluid visible inside though smoky glass. When I move the light, the surface of the alcove and bowl glimmer.
“Watch this,” Ceru says.
She takes a few fistfuls of ice shavings from the floor, and presses them into the surface of the alcove and bowl. The ice contrasts with the surface, showing a geometric pattern of thin fissures set into the surface. Soon the ice melts into water and follows the fissures down into the sink, leaking out from below the cylinders.
I press my hand to the rock and find that it’s cool but not cold: far too warm for this place.
“So what is this?” Ceru asks, pointing at the rack of cylinders.
I look at her.
“Death juice.”
She looks back at me and nods.
“That’s what I thought. So, where does it come from?”
I look at the alcove, then back to the tunnel, and can’t shake the thought.
“Something dug these tunnels, and it comes here to make the juice.”
“And Moss comes here to collect it, like Cardinal used to. And that dead harbour—”
“Were trying to make their own, but they couldn’t control it, and it vented their air. The tunnels are related to the juice, so Cardinal forgot them when he wiped.”
I look at the hole, and the death juice collector.
Ceru follows my gaze.
“Why couldn’t they control it?”
“Good question, why—” I start, when my thought comes loose, “—wait. So where is the something now?”
I glance from Ceru to the tunnel, and her gaze follows mine. The tunnel is empty.
On our way back, my light catches the last snatch of clothing in the ice, and then we’re back in the regular storage tunnels. I swear I feel the hairs on my neck lower.
“Why did you go back there?” I ask. My voice is quiet.
“A couple of reasons,” Ceru says after a moment, matching my tone. “I figured we kept remains, and I wanted to see if there was anything unusual about them. But—”
“But you’d have to chip them from the ice, and then be a pathologist on a decades-frozen corpse,” I interrupt.
She rolls her hands in concession.
“I wasn’t looking for anything subtle, just, uh, bite marks, that sort of thing. But I couldn’t see any. So I looked for anything that could have done the wipe. And then I…”
“Found the tunnel.”
“Yeah.”
Then we’re at the lock, through it, and I’m pulling off my gear.
“Mauve! Cerulean! What on—?!” Moss barks from his station. Then, his voice softens a fraction. “Hey, you don’t look so good.”
“Sorry Moss,” I say on my way to my station. “I was helping Ceru get a feel for our inventory, and we went further than I meant. After the organics we, uh, took a moment.”
“Oh—” he cuts off, then looks to Ceru, who is now sharing Cardinal’s couch.
At harbour, everything settles to normality. I bring the Freighter to a relative stop, we attach, and disembark.
“Mauve,” Cardinal says, as we walk. “We should get her station fixed, pronto. I have directions to their parts, and I want your eye for lemons. They can handle the quartermaster.”
I nod, and Moss waves his assent.
“Let’s practise your negotiating,” Moss mutters as he and Ceru sidle over to the quartermaster.
A few turns later, Cardinal sidles closer.
“The organics? What were you playing at?” he asks.
“She wanted to see them,” I say. “She wanted to see if there were any tell-tales. Any hint about why harbours die.”
After a moment he hums in thought.
“Tell-tales on a gigaseconds-old frozen corpse.”
“I didn’t say it was smart.”
His hum trails off as we pass through a door into an office with a few desks and attendant clerks. Beyond, behind a thick window, a large hanger of shelved parts wink under cool, sparse bulbs.
Fixing the couch took longer than we thought and by the time we’re finished, the Quartermaster’s offices are empty. When we make it to the bar, Cardinal and I see Moss sitting with Ceru, both surrounded by small, empty glasses. Snatches of Moss’s Freighter cut across the busy room, the tide of his tone rising above the sand of the local hubbub. Ceru’s back is turned to us, so we only see Moss’s face.
Cardinal and I look at each other.
“She didn’t,” he mutters, staring.
“She did,” I sigh.
I slide onto the beside Moss, and Cardinal takes the one by Ceru.
“…but—” she says, in Freighter.
“Arks—” he says, nearly hissing. “They. Are. Death. Traps. Always have been. You want to know why we’ve never heard from the runners?”
“Moss,” I say, putting my hand on his arm.
“Because they’re dead,” he finishes, downing his drink. Then, he rounds on me.
“What on Earth have you been telling her?” he says, eyeing me, “Why didn’t you quash this?”
I find my hands are up.
“Quash what? I just got here, Moss.”
He looks from me to Cardinal. The gaze of the old man gives him pause and after a moment, he pauses to pull a breath. Before he releases it, Cardinal knocks on the bar and waves at the attendant.
“Water for these two drunkards and liquor for us. And four bowls of whatever you have that’s hot.”
Cardinal grabs Ceru’s last drink and downs it himself, before making a face.
“The—” he says, “Moss, this is the crap you drink. You’d better not be ruining her!”
For the rest of the night, we talk about other things. When Ceru and Cardinal almost fall asleep at the bar, they help each other down from the stools and leave for our quarters: a comfortable nook a few turns from the Freighter and docks. The room is almost empty, and the lights have all dimmed. The bartender is several strides away and ignoring us studiously.
Moss pulls himself up straight and looks at me.
“What have you and Ceru been up to?” he asks, voice low. “Why is she asking me about using ships?”
I glance at the bartender and then Moss. He is looking at me carefully, less drunk than he seemed a few moments earlier. I find myself picking over my words.
“What exactly did Ceru say?”
“That harbours should have evacuation boats, in case the enemy finds them.”
We’re Freighters, of the same crew. There’s only one thing I can do.
“Let’s get some caffeine, and I’ll show you why.”
Moss studies our summary, deadpan. He seems to read it a hundred times before leaning back.
“So she’s not just trying to piss me off,” he says.
I shake my head.
He sits there for a moment, just looking at the data, before making a face.
“Eighteen isn’t a lot to go on,” he says, tapping his fingers. “There have to be thousands of harbours. Eighteen isn’t fishy at all. I’d say it’s actually pretty good.”
“But we only have five sets of records, and they’re not up to date,” I reply.
“You’re right,” he nods, “And that trend isn’t good.”
After a moment, Moss looks to me.
“Mauve, why didn’t you tell me earlier? You should have woken all of us, so we could talk it out. We’re crew, you shouldn’t hide stuff like this from me and Cardinal.”
I dip my head.
“Ah,” he sighs.
“We didn’t wake you because—”
“You know how I’d feel about this. You’re right. When people panic and they run, they die.”
He blows his cheeks out, and something catches in his eye.
“Mauve,” he says. “Do you think that I would bury this?”
“I—”
He rises in the chair, and clasps my shoulder.
“I’m ashamed you would think that,” he says, “It means I made a mistake.”
He looks down for a moment.
“And I did. I got angry, at the bar. When she asked me about ships, all I could think of was—”
His voice cuts out, so he clears his throat and tries again.
“Let’s go to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow, and figure something out as a crew.”
People were worried about Freighters in the beginning, back when they were called something else, and flew ships. We didn’t evolve to live in these conditions: It isn’t swinging through trees, it isn’t striding through grasses, it isn’t a farm or a city. The air is the same. The view is the same. The people are the same, and you’re stuck with them for an indefinite period. But we figured it out. We did it well enough that people were starting to lodge in new nooks, further down the neighbourhood.
And then it all ended. Mass attracts mass, except this time it didn’t. And, floating among the pieces, Them.
“Mauve! Mauve! Get up. Get up!” a voice hisses at me.
And then I’m up. A red light is strobing, an alarm is blaring, and a horrific deep groan bellows through the floor while the urgent tones of a foreign tongue surges behind the door.
Moss pulls me up, I fall into my boots, and I catch something before my brain catches up and realises that it’s an emergency mask. Something is terribly wrong.
“What’s going on?!” Ceru asks, her voice coming through her mask quiet and thin.
Moss looks at us, and his eyes widen when Cardinal speaks first.
“The Enemy.”
My gut cries out as it twists inside me.
“What—”
“Into the Freighter,” Moss says. “We need to be ready to run. If it is happening, the quartermaster will be loading us up.”
We fight into the corridor rush, first Moss, then me and Ceru, with Cardinal in the rear. The emergency lights are steady here, but dim, and the hallway is packed with a surging mass. A breeze is moving past us, not yet a gale.
“Ho there!” Moss yells through the throng, gesturing. He curses, and plays with his mask.
Moss’s words come clear through my mask. He’s broadcasting on all frequencies, using his Freighter leader override. Within moments, the emergency announcement cuts out from the speakers immediately above us, and is replaced by a new message. Whatever is said has some effect, and people frantically push and pull us along with them.
We make it around the few corners, and are plucked into the ship by the dockworkers. They are loading frantically, pushing and pulling people and goods through the centre and past the internal door, into our corridors. A clutch of thick hoses are slung through the doorway, pumping air and water in. A brightly clad dockworker barges through, carrying a case marked with yellow warning symbols, heading for our generator.
We each fall into our couches, boot our monitors, and watch as data loads. I apply a headset and yell at Ceru to do the same. Moss’s voice comes growling through, fighting the harbour for airtime.
“Threat nature? Over.”
“Category one intrusion, full evacuation ordered and underway. Over.”
“Funt! How long? Over.”
“A kilosecond at most—”
The numbers distract me now. My monitors are covered in objects, clear even on passive radar.
“Ceru?! Systems check— what are our numbers?” Moss yells.
“Generator good. Air at 70% in near corridors and temperature coming up. Pickaxe and fuel are good!”
“Cardinal! How many are inside?”
“Eighteen hundred trips of the sensor. Rate one-ninety a decasecond!” Cardinal growls back. “Far tunnels are sealed for now and near tunnels will be full in fifteen!”
“Mauve—”
I look at the numbers and find myself adding to zero.
“No clear course!” I say, the words burning my tongue.
The objects are too numerous. They cover every direction. They’re a swarm.
“Damn it all! Find something! Be ready— oh he—”
The air violently dashes away, sucking our hatch shut with a slam. I see bodies thrown around and severed hoses writhing as I jerk into my belts.
“Punch it!” Moss orders.
I throw everything into the vapour chambers, burning hot as we push away from the harbour, bathing whatever’s left in a thick mat of steam that settles as ice.
My station screams at me as I push everything. I hear Ceru’s station scream too, as the reactor surges above its safeties. I hear Cardinal’s station bellow as the cargo sensors detect movement all over. And then I hear Moss’s station cry a sound I’ve never heard before. A single dot of phosphor, visible for a moment, flies away on my rear view monitor, towards the melee. As it disappears, the objects too fall away from my monitor.
Moss yells out: “Mauve! Run cold and change heading! While they’re distact—”
And then his words are ripped away, along with my breath.
When I was a boy, I had a toy ship. It was carved from pale wood and it was stained black in parts. One end of the tube was a noise of five engine cones and four stubby fins. The other was a sharp point. Once, another boy took it from me and dashed it on the ground, before running away. I took the pieces, and I sat on my bed looking at them through blurry eyes. That was when I discovered that the ship was meant to come apart. Each section of the craft slotted back into the ones either side. I repaired my ship.
But Freighters aren’t toys, or ships. Neither are people.
I’m cold when I stir. Cold enough that I just want to go back to sleep. Cold enough that I try to turn over and snuggle deeper, but find there’s no blanket, only gel. Dimly at first, a feeling of foreboding settles, and as it starts to crush my chest, clarity comes with it. Along with a pounding headache.
I’m cold, it’s dark, and the ceiling is close. I am in my station and it has shut to protect me. We must have lost atmosphere. I need to get my layers on, to use my vacuum suit, to seal the breach. I need to—
The people. What about the people?!
First, I find the emergency light. It only gives me a few pitiful lumen, the battery must be worn. Then, I wrestle in the gel, pulling out layers from side cavities, wiggling into them. Last comes a thin suit which work over my body. Once I have the suit sealed, I work a manual pump to extract as much air from my couch as I can. The suit has a layer to absorb carbon dioxide, but it won’t hold much. Without more air, I won’t have long.
I work at the couch and release the mechanism but the lid is stuck fast. I grimace and try to pull the lid aside, then try again, and again. The last tug shifts it a few millimetres and the remaining air in my couch wooshes out into the dark cavity beyond.
The effort exhausts and nauseates me, so I fall back into the cold gel.
Is this it?
The thought comes unbidden, stabbing me in between pulses of my headache.
I blink, and slow my breathing. I can put myself back together. I will get through this.
I push my helmet — little more than a crude transparent section in the fabric — against the gap. Some of my station lights are on, warnings flickering on emergency power in the dark. The monitors are dead.
Why haven’t the others helped me?
Thankfully, I have a reply for this dirty little thought. It’s obvious: they’re in enough trouble on their own. Or maybe they think I’m dead, or that I did the sensible thing and stayed secure in my couch… But no, they know I wouldn’t. I don’t have any way to—
I feel around my shoulders, then reach for my feet. I find it wedged in a fold. I fumble for the on button, and then press the headset against the suit fabric.
“Moss, Cardinal, Cerulean. Freighter crew, status?! Over!” I say.
Nothing.
Then, as I go to repeat, I hear a reply.
“Sweet mercy! You’re alive in there!” Moss whispers.
“Moss!” I say. “My lid is stuck.”
“And you’ve no more air,” he finishes for me, “Roger that.”
After a few moments of silence, I push.
“What’s the situation? Are the others OK? What about the peop—”
“They’re fine. Mauve, can you reach the top of your couch? There’s a small gap in between the gel and the shell. Dig in and you should find a tab.”
I frown and reach up behind my head. Sure enough, I find a small gap and work my finger into it, find a tab, and pull until something falls into my hands.
I feel the cylinder, it’s finger-sized and hard.
“I have it Moss. What—”
“It’s your emergency supply. Mauve, if you take that and seal your couch you’ll have months with suit air. And yes, the needle is small enough for your suit to patch.”
“But?” I ask.
“But we could use your help now.”
I swallow and feel the cylinder, cold even though the suit.
“With what?”
“We’ve been hit hard. The rock needs a lot of work before it’ll move again,” he says.
“So, how does not using this get me out of here sooner?”
Moss hesitates, curses, and speaks.
“Hell. Mauve, They are in the Freighter,” he says, letting the words hang for a moment. “If you squirt your juice out, they will come. They will tunnel a route to you.”
My headache surges and I have to fight my breathing. They. The enemy. The ones who broke the home rock, Earth, then dashed the neighbourhood. And now, puncturing harbours. Death juice lures them. Death juice that we make—
“Moss,” I say, feeling my fear cool to match my air, “Are we making death juice on the Freighter?”
Moss doesn’t reply, but leaves his mic on. I hear his breaths, faint and heavy. I give him time.
“Yes, Mauve, we are.”
“And?”
He sighs.
“We have a captive enemy on the Freighter to make it. All Freighters do.”
My headache abates and leaves a yawning hole in its wake.
“They make it,” the words numb my tongue.
Then, after a moment:
“What happens when we use it? What happens if They know we use it?” Ceru asks, over the line.
Moss sighs again, as I process her words.
“Ceru?! You’re OK!” I say.
“I’m alive,” she says, then: “Hey Mauve, he’s right. We have no chance getting all that rock off your cabinet. It’s die or see if They will tunnel to you. And we do need your help.”
I hold the cylinder up to the gap. The dim warning lights tickle its sides with orange.
“What about her questions, Mauve?”
“Ceru might as well answer them, we’ve had time to talk,” he says.
“They sense it, Mauve. It diffuses quickly. If it’s not perfectly sealed, they know, and they’ll tunnel to it. Through anything—,” Ceru says, words catching in her throat at the end.
“The Freighter,” I say, not making it any further..
“The Freighter. Ships, probably arks. That harbour, and the others you found on the books,” Moss says, “and Earth.”
I lie there, saying nothing, thinking less. After a few moments, Moss speaks again:
“It kills us, but without it we can’t Freight. And without Freighters, we’ll die. So we keep using it. It’s the job of the Freighter leaders to keep it contained, to keep it away from Harbours. Because when it gets out…” he says, then coughs and pauses.
“My home Harbour figured it out,” Moss continues, “So they fixed ships and tried to leave, tried to follow the old arks. But someone made a mistake. There was a leak.”
“They found you?” Ceru asks, voice still strange.
“My parents pushed me into a suit and gave me an emergency dose first. But it was wrong. It slowed my breathing, and paralysed me, but I could still see fine. So I watched. I watched as They tunnelled into our cabin. I watched as the air rushed out. And I watched our cabin, my parents, for weeks before a Freighter picked me up.”
He stops, and we stay in silence until the dull beeping of my suit tells me that my filters are almost exhausted.
“Moss. If I spray this inside my cabinet, will They attack me?”
After a moment, he replies.
“Not if you’re fast. As soon as you can, throw the cylinder and They should follow.”
So remove the cylinder cap, twisting the top and release it.
“Done. How long—”
My cabinet judders and tosses me against the gel. The couch thrums through my suit, and the lid disappears. It’s not ripped away, it’s not scrunched into a ball, and it’s not forced inwards to crush my body like an insect. It’s just gone.
And, backed by the intermittent stars, a black shape looms in its place.
The shape moves closer, and my arm jerks to throw the cylinder. It gets close enough for my emergency light to show some detail: a smooth surface, marked by a geometric pattern of thin fissures that glint as black liquid flows through them.
When the vial strikes, the enemy pauses. A hole appears through the centre of the cylinder, and I watch as the globules of death juice, floating in space, stream through through the gap. The fluid meets the surface of the enemy, where it settles in the crevices. The enemy hangs for a moment, and I feel it regarding me. Then it leaves, retreating out of the tunnel it made and disappearing from view.
“Mauve?! Mauve?!”
The sound causes me to start.
“Yeah,” I say, “I’m fine. It made a tunnel to me. But I’m fine.”
I pull myself from the couch, moving through the lid and along the tunnel in the rock, a few metres long. I pass through the thin shell of the centre, and continue along, to the surface. At the end, I brace myself against the walls and look outward into the sea of stars. We have spin going, and the lights are moving quickly. This might explain my nausea.
“I’m on our surface,” I say. “What’s the plan?”
My suit alerts me again. The filters are full, so my carbon dioxide will be rising. I don’t have long.
“I’m heading your way. ETA ten hectoseconds.”
When I look back across the rock, I see dozens of holes, spread erratically across the surface. I think of the damage that must be inside, and I feel some of that inside myself.
“My filters are full, Moss. I need a quick fix.”
“I read you, Mauve.”
I see a suit emerge from a nearby tunnel. Unlike mine, this is a full vacuum suit with an air supply, battery bank, and an orange anchor line trailing behind and into the hole. They move slowly across the surface, attaching to the rock with each step, all while our spin gently encourages them to oblivion.
I focus on my breathing, staying still and thinking nothing. I need to conserve all I have. The old man took my under his wing when I first joined the freighter, teaching me the ropes. The trick Cardinal taught me with breathing—
Cardinal.
“Moss, where’s Cardinal?” I ask.
The suit stops.
My head aches, my muscles are stiff, and the light hurts my eyes. When my vision sharpens, I realise the three of us are in the lock between the centre and the freighter’s bowels. Moss passes me a drinking bauble, and thankfully it’s warm. I recognise the tell-tale bitterness of painkiller in with broth, and relax against the wall. The air is thick enough that I taste sweat, and heavy enough that I feel it on my heart. There’s one light and it’s positioned awkwardly, casting shadows against the walls and ceiling.
“That was a close thing,” Moss says after a moment.
“Yep,” is all I can manage back.
We sit in silence for awhile, before Moss speaks again.
“I found him two corners down. He was first out of the centre, running to help. But They went right through him.”
Moss opens a supply cabinet and pulls out a small flask.
“He died like he lived. Protecting cargo, and fighting the enemy. I don’t think he ever stopped complaining. A Freighter through,” Moss says, before taking a swig and passing the bottle to Ceru.
She looks at flask and nods.
“Stubborn silverback. The only one of you three who could work out when I was slacking off or actually tired,” Ceru says, flashing a small smile. “A Freighter through.”
She grimaces at the bitter liquid before handing me the flask.
I hold the metal, and feel the cold in my fingers. My mouth moves before I can stop it.
“A Freighter through. I’ll miss you, Dad,” I say.
The liquid is thick and utterly bitter. It’s mostly alcohol, which burns, but that remaining percent fights the heat, and wins, cooling my core right down. In this way, we all feel a bit of death.
Ceru’s eyes are wide: she’s surprised.
Moss’s eyes aren’t: he isn’t.
The sun shines over an azure curve.
Cotton rolls from near to far, and far to near.
Blue gives way to green, gives way to brown, gives way to blue.
A crack appears: a line of white, fading to red at its edges.
Then, another.
The cracks spread, creeping at first.
They divide, conquer, and divide again, moving faster.
The geometric pattern spreads, and spreads, and spreads.
And then the paper snowflake unfolds.
A kirigami world, just for a moment, before the lacework dances away into the black.
I wake in a suit, tucked in the corner, with my head on my chest and a sore neck. A knock on the seal kicks me from my doze, prompting a stretch and blink. I stand, knock back twice, and wait. An alarm tries to call through the air, but only manages a whimper. The air evacuates from around me. This is the only airtight place in the ship. Earlier, I almost joked that our airlock needs an airlock, but the jape died before it reached my lips. My suit creaks as the pressure outside drops.
Ceru enters first. She’s carrying a crate of supplies and tools, which she places in front of a cabinet. Turning, she faces the door as Moss walks in with tools in one hand and a vacuum box in the other. He places both down, seals the door, and indicates the controls, which gets a nod from Ceru and a thumbs up from me.
As soon as the air is thick enough, I take off my helmet to escape my own smell. The room’s air, scrubbed fresh, won’t stay that way for long.
“How does it look?” I ask, as soon as Moss follows, moments after me.
He pauses, gently kicks the wall with his foot, and shares a glance with Ceru.
My breath pushes past my lips.
“But we have a bigger problem,” Moss says after a moment. “With Them loose, this—”, he taps the vacuum box, “—is a liability.”
Moss nods at Ceru’s supply box.
“And that’s all the food we know that we have. The main supply was gutted, and the hoard in the tunnels…”
“Is buried,” I finish for him, receiving a nod and gesture.
“So we need an evacuation ship,” Ceru says, something in her tone.
Moss makes a different gesture, but it falls apart half way. He takes a breath.
“It’s moot. We don’t have one. No-one does.”
Ceru looks at me, and I see myself in her eyes, a puppet dancing in ink. I feel her idea pull my strings, but Moss beats both of us to the punch.
“But we did, once.”
Moss looks at me, then Ceru, as his words fade. His eyes are wide, and his mouth is a sallow crescent, reacting to the words it birthed. His personal heresy. Moss looks at the box.
“Well, we’ll do it without this, then.”
He tucks it in the locker opposite.
They punched at least thirty holes in the centre, ripping through all our essential systems, and packing debris into the area above and around my station.
They holed the back corridors at least two hundred times, ruining the pickaxe, most vapour chambers, and the routes that connected them. Where the routes ruptured, fuel erupted and refroze, filling some corridors entirely.
They triggered the generator’s emergency shutdown, and when we brought it back, we couldn’t get the output back above ten percent of normal.
We write list of things to fix. Each wake period we apply suits, compress the lock’s air, and go out. We harvest, cut, ripped, and tear. We stitch, weave, glue, weld and rivet. We hack materials from the ice, using up our cargo like rations on a desert island, surrounded by black instead of blue. Fixing the generator takes a megasecond. Clearing most of the centre takes another five. Scavenging supplies from the near corridors demands every second in between.
I see Them rarely, but their work all too often. Without death juice, they ignore us, but dig ceaselessly, worming through the freighter rock and ice like parasites in fruit. I spend a few kiloseconds digging a corridor to find parts, only to find a new intersection a perpendicular tunnel spiralling away into the dark. I see bodies too Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and children all died in the same way, and lie cold in our corridors. Each day, we move them aside, and secure them when we can. A Freighter doesn’t waste, and habits die harder than people.
“Mauve?” Ceru asks.
It’s off hours. We spent all day in the patched, limping remains of the centre. We’re almost ready to pressurise, but almost isn’t enough, so we still live the airlock. Moss is asleep. And so was I.
“Yeah?” I ask back.
I hear her breath, close in the near dark.
“What do we do next?”
“If you’re asking questions like that, we’re not working you hard enough.”
She holds the silence for a moment.
“Are you doing OK?” she asks.
“We all miss him,” I say.
Then, after a few moments of silence: “I can work.”
“Can’t sleep, though,” Moss calls, before flicking on the light. “So, either we’re not working you hard enough, or…”
He comes over, settles beside me and motions Ceru closer.
“You’re not doing OK,” he finishes, before looking me in the eye. “Next shift we repressurise the centre. The shift after that we fix the breaks. The shifts after that, we free as much as we can, and then we leave. And we do something about that.”
Moss nods at the locker opposite.
“And we do something about the rest of this,”
Moss points his finger downwards.
“And we do something about the cargo.”
Moss returns his gaze to me.
“And, Mauve, we do something for Cardinal.”
I feel the words ice my chest. We shouldn’t leave him here. No-one will come to use these supplies. Not with Them here.
“We do something for Cardinal,” I echo.
The last three shifts bleed into each other. There’s just so much to do. We lose a tenth of our air to leaks that take five kiloseconds to seal. We chase electrical faults from our lighting, monitors, stations, and heating. Ceru and I purge the air ducts and water supply, while Moss does the same to the death juice supplies, locking the last drops in his box. We all go out to cut, hack, chip, and melt ice and rock, freeing the centre from the rest of the Freighter. It takes longer than we hoped, at least five shifts to clear everything, then place charges. They have been busy. By now, the tunnels are everywhere.
In the end, the area around my station is too far gone, the wound simply sealed with a new diagonal bulkhead. Similar plates are fixed in many places around the core, over the other parts too holed or otherwise mangled to save. We barely have three couches. The gel in one is too stiff to absorb much more than a gentle push, and the heater in another manages only tens of watts. Our redundancy is now all but gone, each station controlling one aspect only. Mine, on the left, has flight controls. Ceru’s, on the right, handles our systems. Moss’s, in the centre, has everything else. Without cargo, a fourth is no longer necessary. Without Cardinal, a fourth would just be empty. A clutch of monitors pulls through the limited information we have.
And we’re ready.
Five charges detonate in series as I hold my breath. But none rupture the centre. I push forward gently on the controls, and our centre moves forward. Debris clutters the monitors, and dull thuds impact our centre constantly. Then, we’re free, a seed from fruit. The Freighter is behind us, a small debris field, split in half like a nut.
Three Freighters die, and three Shippers are born.
I know that our the small ship is misshapen, slow, and half-blind. It’s a sad parody of the craft it was, gigaseconds ago. But I find that it still accelerates, eagerly dashing away from the rock and the ice. Away from the bodies and away from Them.
The first harbour we find is not happy to receive us. We’re dirty, cold, half-starved, and almost delirious from our poor air. We travelled direct, dangerously so, and they learn this when they receive our records. But they listen to our story, and they send us away in a better state than we started.
The second harbour is much the same.
And the third.
The fourth, learning we are a ship, threatens to attack, and so we give a wide berth.
At the fifth, a Freighter is docked. When we land, we tie-down with thick cables, and make for a secondary lock. The air cycles, and when the door opens we’re confronted with four people. Two men and two women, all old, or middle-aged.
The silver-haired woman at the front reaches out her hand and introduces herself as Slate.
When we finish our story, the Freighter crew look at each other and communicate with their eyes. We’re in the Freighter quarters, near the docks, and are all crammed around a table built for five at most. Slate visibly angered, when Moss openly described the problem with death juice. How a reliance on Them was our downfall before, and would be again. But she calmed at the end, eyes harder and cooler than her name.
“Well,” Slate says, “We need to talk about this. As a crew. And you need rest, supplies.”
Ceru, Moss, and I stand, and leave them to talk.
We find the harbour quartermaster, and negotiate a trade. We’re not carrying much, but the little we did save was valuable. At the end, we stand, and I ask the quartermaster if she has children. After a few moments, time to remember the word, she nods. I ask Ceru to pass our bag, and I pull out a small box, which I hand to the quartermaster. Warily, she opens the box and pulls out a shape. It’s square, with two flat sides and two with a cut-out. On one side there’s a bright splash of green.
“Keep a hold of that part,” Ceru smiles, “It’s easier when you start with the corners.”
A knock rings through the door, and Slate enters. She makes eye contact with Moss as he stands, and nods in the affirmative. She then looks at the quartermaster.
“Our friends here come with bad news. We need to speak with your leadership.”
Freighters don’t usually run into one another. There are too few of them, too many harbours, and too many megaseconds of travel in the black. But we do leave messages to one another. Our story will spread, given time. Knowing us, people, there will be panic. There will be fighting. There will be death, chaos, collapse. But there will also be change, there will be growth, there will be hope.
At our fifteenth harbour, I take a hot shower, towel myself off, and when I turn around, I start. I see Cardinal looking at me. He blinks, surprised. His hand follows mine, explores his face, like mine, and his mouth curls with my lips. I’m getting old.
At our twenty-seventh harbour, we trade everything we can for fuel and food. The last part of our journey will be long. Moss and I agree to offer Ceru another choice, so I pull her aside while Moss works out the logistics.
“You told me that you joined our crew to help. You’ve done that,” I say.
She nods, and lets a small smile pass over her face.
“And you wanted to see what comes after.”
She nods again.
I let out a breath.
“We might not make it, Ceru. The next part of the journey is longer than anything we’ve ever done. Even if we do, we might not make it back. You can’t see what comes next, if you’re dead.”
She looks at me, realises what I’m asking, and her resolve visibly surfaces.
“No chance, old man. We’ll make it back. And if we don’t, a half wish is more than most get.”
So we set our course, and our crew of three set off into the black. After two megaseconds we clear the invisible boundary: the edge of our old neighbourhood. There will be no more harbours beyond this point. We have a decision to make. The sums are clear: even with our supplies, we won’t make it. So, for the first time in a long time, we take shifts.
In a mostly closed system, nothing can be wasted. All resources must be reclaimed, reused. Harbours have chemical refineries, massive enzymatic tumblers, and great biomass reactors, which break down everything, ready for another go-around. Harbour burials inevitably end in the same way: the remains are in a white bag, placed on a plinth. The plinth retracts into the wall, and a door slides to cover the hole with a snick. Or a clunk.
Freighters die hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. But when it happens for real, they go the same way. Resources are resources, and Freighters give everything back.
But we’re not Freighters any more.
“You’re my boy, you know.”
“I can’t ever tell you.”
“Leaders can’t have favourites.”
“But you’re mine.”
“I’m alive,” I say, before lapsing into a cough.
When it clears, Ceru hands me a bulb of thin broth. I nod at Moss as he goes under, taking the final shift.
We fill the next few kiloseconds with lessons, and maintenance. One of the monitors is worse for wear, and I must show Ceru how to discharge the tube and hunt down the faulty capacitor. Afterwards, we inspect the generator, and curse. Its energy output is down, and we don’t have the tools to diagnose the fault, or the safety equipment to fix it. Finally, we check the fungal and yeast vats we gained from the twelfth harbour. They’re alive, but the yield is down.
After a mediocre meal of broth and mushrooms, we rest. Or rather, I try to.
“Mauve,” Ceru says, after a few hundred seconds of silence.
She gestures at the monitor, where a wireframe is imperceptibly increasing, taking up more and more of the frame.
“I want to see it, when we do it. This isn’t enough.”
I try the thought in my head and it fits.
“You’re right,” I nod.
When it’s time, we wake Moss. After he recovers and warms, Ceru pitches her idea. He looks at me, and I nod. He nods in turn.
“Let’s do it.”
I perform a final burn, double check all the sums, and run them past the other two. They confirm, and we move to the cold storage.
Moss did me a service, moving Cardinal into the bag. I wouldn’t have been able to look at him, at the time. I find touching him is enough to wet my eyes and stab my heart, even now. We carry Cardinal into the lock, and I’m struck by how easy it is. He was so large in life, it’s strange how small his body is in death. But then again, he’s still large enough in my mind.
We suit up, anchor everything down and depressurise. When the lock opens, it’s not tunnels that await, but a fountain of lights in a sea of black.
It’s slow going, moving across the skin of the centre, our ship. None of us are used to magnetic boots, and these ones are older than anything else. A relic, left behind and forgotten about, always redundant but never traded. Mine are too tight, Moss’s too lose, and Ceru’s a garish shade of blue that she couldn’t pawn onto either of us.
Finally, we stop and look above us to our destination.
When They razed the neighbourhood, they stopped at its natural boundary: Jupiter. Its storms aren’t our home rock’s, aren’t Earth’s. But they’re all we can manage.
We spent a long time on the surface, watching Cardinal drift away. We feel the correction burn, programmed earlier, fire, and know that we’re leaving him now. We will pass around the planet, using its gravity to send us back.
Long after he disappears from view, we go back inside.
I settle into the pilot’s chair as Moss sits in the leader’s and Ceru lands in hers.
“I’ll take the first shift,” I say. “You guys should both sleep. The mushrooms are looking poor, they won’t sustain two for long enough.”
Moss sighs and shakes his head. He pulls out the box, and shows its contents to Ceru and I. It’s empty, all vials exhausted.
“Oh,” I say, as Ceru does the same.
Moss nods.
“Yep.”
He holds the silence.
“But there’s a reason I didn’t save more.”
He points to a set of numbers on the screen.
“Can you give us an orbit around there? There’s something I remember hearing from my childhood…”
Ganymede is Jupiter’s largest moon. It is a mix of silica and ice, like our Freighter was.
There’s a dome on the surface, with lights and a landing pad.
And ships.
So many ships.
TCDH 
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