Page 32 of Full Speed to a Crash Landing

But that’s the thing about tragedy.

It’s hard to lie about.

12

Two Years Ago

Most ships don’t crash like theRoundaboutdid. They don’t hit planets. Most ships that are lost are lost at either takeoff or landing. That’s the dangerous bit. Leaving a world or coming home to one. The stuff in the middle? That’s the easy part. Coasting through the black. Little to hit, few reasons to break out the highly volatile fuel.

But I wouldn’t have a job if things never went wrong.

If a ship malfunctions in flight, typically there’s a warning. Escape pods go out, the crew’s picked up, and if it’s not worth hauling back anywhere, they let the dead ship float, empty. Perfect for looting.

The other kind of ghost ship is the kind where the escape pods don’t go out.

I’ve seen it more than once. Sometimes sabotage, particularly if it’s a competing company. Sometimes attack. There are pirates. Some tiny worlds with cult-like colonies that fiercely protect their sector. No one ever said space was safe, and then humans go in and make it even less so.

I once came across a ghost ship that broadcast a perpetualbiohazard warning on loop. I broughtGloryclose, using the front flood lamp to illuminate the dark windows. There weren’tmany portholes that could show me anything, but I’ll never forget the way the bridge looked. A beam of light cutting across the grotesquely twisted faces. Some sort of sickness; I don’t know what. Killed them all. Half a dozen people, at least, all piled up in the nose of the ship, fingers splayed on the carbonglass as if they’d been trying to scratch their way to the void.Glory’slight made their open eyes reflect strangely.It felt like they were watching me. I didn’t board that ship.

TheRosewas something else.

I did all the scans. Checked everything. I could tell before I boarded that the ship had had a major malfunction, theescape pods hadn’t been evacuated, and there was no one left alive on board. Floating in space with a full cargo meant itwas an easy job. I opened upGlory’sbay door, flew out to theRose.This was before I had a jaxon jet, just a regular unit.

To get in, I had to activate the emergency latch on the depressurization chamber, but the ship was completely dead—no power at all, let alone gravity generators, oxygen flow, or any other type of life support. There was nothing to stop me from cranking open the door; it was designed to be accessed in case of a breach or failure like this.

I can never explain the full eeriness of a ghost ship. Even the ones where I know what’s happened, boarding a ghost islike a violation. You’re going into someone’s home. You should be stopped.

Because every ship is a home. People like Captain Ursula, who treats theHalifaxlike a tool, don’t always know that. But I bet Nandina sees the med bay as her home, even if this is a temporary job for her, even if she claims otherwise. Humans do that. They turn the place where they feel safe into a home, and even when they know that home won’t last, they fall in love with it. A little, anyway.

Ghost ships are dark. Fuck,spaceis dark. People forget that because we use external floodlights and internal electronics, and when a ship is lived in, it’s never fully dark. But ghost ships are.

When I boarded theRose,I had my helmet’s headlamp on, and I had two handhelds in my belt. I always carry extra lights on ghost-ship salvages; I learned the hard way how difficult it is to get off a ship that’s not yours when your light goes dark.

But the glow from headlamps and handhelds is dim, sporadic. They illuminate a circle at a time, and they cast shadows, long shadows that shouldn’t exist in space.

Not everything wants to be seen.

It wasn’t the bodies that bothered me on theRose.To be honest, I expected the bodies. No pods evacuated, no shuttle...a ship doesn’t fly without a crew. So, a dead shipwould have dead humans on board. That was always going to be the case.

What got me was that it had been a family. Eight people total. One elderly man, three middle-aged adults, four children. I found them in various parts of the ship. The older man and one adult were on the bridge. I found another adult in themess hall. The third adult, a female with long black hair that hid her face, floating around her like a halo, was in a room with all the children. There were little toys—building blocksand a stuffed animal and those posable dolls that can interact with augmented reality games but are still fun on their own.

None of them were strapped down, not even the people on the bridge. They were all floating. Which meant that they didn’t actively crash—they were just living their lives. Until something went wrong. Something sudden. Something catastrophic.

I had to find out. I located the record box in the bridge, the thing every ship is required to have, took it back toGlory,and hooked it up to power.Somethingevacuated all the oxygen on the ship. There was a record of a slow leak for a long time—at least two cycles—but the life-support unit compensated, so there was no noticeable decrease in available air. Then something broke, and all the O2was discharged at once.

None of this felt like sabotage, but it also didn’t make sense.

I dug deeper.

Some repairs—to fix the leak, I assume—had been made to the O2filter. I went back aboard theRose, careful this time to avoid seeing the bodies. Took the main panel down, removed the unit. I didn’t notice it at first. I had to use my visor’s visual enhancements to see the tiny crack in the O-ring. A little circle used to seal the outtake tube. It was small enough to slide over my gloved finger, although that made the hairline break in the plexi-steel more visible.

I spent hours in the dark, trying to see if there was anything else.

But in the end, it came down to one O-ring. One individual part. Those damn things cost almost nothing on land. You can pick them up at any dock.

They’re so tiny.

But when the seal broke, the tube popped off.

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