Distress

The distress call came in on a dead band, which was the first wrong thing about it. Wren Calloway had been a captain for nineteen years and a crewman for eleven before that, and in all of it she had never heard a beacon transmit on the salvage frequency. Nobody used the salvage band for distress. The salvage band was where you went to be found by people who would charge you for the finding. "Play it again," she said. Ditta, who ran the Adelaide's comms and most of its arguments, tapped the console without looking up. The signal filled the bridge a second time: a tone, then a voice, then a tone. The voice was a woman's, calm in the way that frightened Wren more than panic would have. "This is the colony transport Hesper. We have lost main power. We have lost the reactor. We are forty-one souls and we are asking for assistance on any band that will carry us. We are not able to pay. We understand what that means. Please." Then the tone again, and the loop began once more. "Forty-one souls," Ditta said. "And no money. You know what that means too." Wren did. It meant the call had been refused already, probably more than once, by ships better equipped than hers and closer than hers. It meant the Hesper had given up on charity and started broadcasting to the only people who might come for a ship full of nothing: the people who came for ships, not for people. The Adelaide was a freighter. She hauled ore and water and, twice, a cargo of frozen seed stock that had paid better than either. She was old and she was honest and she had a hold full of nothing on this particular run, deadheading back from a contract that had ended badly. Wren had spent the last six days doing sums and not liking any of them. "How far," she said. Ditta finally looked up. "Don't." "How far, Ditta." "Eleven hours if we burn hard. And we'd burn fuel we can't replace until Tannhauser, and Tannhauser doesn't pay sympathy rates." Ditta spread her hands. "Forty-one souls. We've got bunks for nine. Even if we reach them, even if they're alive, where do we put them? What do we feed them? You'd be carrying a debt the size of a moon and no port will take it off your hands." "I know what it costs." "You don't, or you wouldn't be looking at the helm like that." Wren was looking at the helm like that. She made herself stop. She thought about the woman's voice. *We understand what that means.* The Hesper knew exactly who answered calls like hers. She had not been asking for rescue. She had been asking for the kind of mercy that arrived with an invoice, and she had decided that being saved by salvagers was better than not being saved at all. "Get me Pell," Wren said. "And Marrow. Bridge, ten minutes." Ditta held her eyes for a long moment. Then she keyed the intercom, because that was the other thing about Ditta: she argued until the decision was made, and then she made the decision work. Pell came up from the engine deck wiping his hands, and Marrow came up from wherever Marrow went when nobody needed him, and Wren laid it out plainly because they had all signed on with a plain captain. Eleven hours of hard burn. Fuel they could not afford. A ship of forty-one people who could not pay and a hold that could not hold them. "And the upside?" Pell said. "There isn't one," Wren said. "Not a clean one. If the Hesper's intact we can claim salvage on the hull. A colony transport's frame is worth something even gutted. It might cover the fuel. It might cover a third of it." "And the forty-one souls?" "We don't leave them." Pell nodded slowly, like a man checking that the floor would hold his weight. Marrow said nothing, which was Marrow's way of agreeing. Ditta had already plotted the burn; the course sat glowing on the table between them, a thin bright line bending the Adelaide off her safe road and out toward the dark. "I want it on the record," Ditta said, "that I think this is a mistake." "It's on the record." "And I want it on the record that I'd be ashamed of us if we didn't." Wren looked at her. "That's on the record too." She put her hand on the helm. The Adelaide was old, but she answered, the way old things answer when you ask them honestly. The bright line on the table began, very slowly, to become the truth. Eleven hours. Forty-one souls. A dead band, and a calm voice, and the salt-cold dark between the stars where the Hesper was waiting to be found.