The Cold Ledger

They found the Hesper exactly where her beacon promised, and that was the second wrong thing. A ship in real distress drifts. She tumbles, she sheds, she trails debris like a wound trails blood. The Hesper did none of this. She hung in the dark with her long spine level and her running lights dark and her great ringed habitat section turning, slowly, the way a colony transport's habitat was built to turn. The turning meant the ship still had structural power somewhere. The turning meant something aboard her was alive enough to keep the rings spinning. "Reactor's cold," Pell reported from the engine deck, reading the Adelaide's instruments. "Stone cold. Has been cold a long time, Captain. That's not a fresh failure." "Define a long time." "I can't, not from here. But a reactor doesn't go that cold in days." Wren stood at the forward port and watched the Hesper grow. She was a beautiful ship, or had been; the colony transports always were, built in an age that thought beauty was a thing a ship owed the people who would spend their lives inside her. Forty-one souls. The Hesper had been built to carry two thousand. "Comms," Wren said. "Hail her." Ditta hailed her. The salvage band, the distress band, every band the Adelaide carried. The Hesper answered none of them. Her beacon kept repeating its calm loop into the dark — *we are forty-one souls, we are asking for assistance* — and the loop did not change and did not stop, and Wren understood, slowly and coldly, that the loop had perhaps not changed or stopped for a very long time. "That's a recording," Marrow said. He had come up to the bridge without anyone hearing him, which was usual. "It was always a recording. A live voice doesn't loop that clean." "A recording can be set running by living people," Ditta said. "If your comms are failing and your reactor's dead, you record the message and you let it run so it doesn't depend on anyone staying awake." "Then they set it running and they did what?" Nobody answered that. Wren took the Adelaide in close, closer than was prudent, until the Hesper filled the port from edge to edge and the slow turn of her habitat ring was a thing you could feel in the back of your teeth. The hull was intact. That was the salvage in it — the hull was genuinely intact, and an intact colony frame was worth real money, enough money that Wren let herself feel, for one shameful breath, something like relief. Then the Adelaide's lights swept across the Hesper's flank and Wren saw the airlock, and the relief went out of her like heat out of a reactor. The airlock stood open. Not breached, not torn — open, cycled, the outer door retracted into its housing the way a door retracts when someone has opened it on purpose and never closed it again. An open lock on a dead ship was an invitation and a grave marker at once. "Pell," she said. "Suit me and Marrow. We're going across." "Captain—" "The salvage claim needs a hull survey or it's worth nothing, and I'm not sending a survey team into an open lock without going first. Suit us up." It took an hour to cross. The Adelaide had no proper shuttle, only a work pod that smelled of solvent and complaint, and Marrow flew it the way he did everything, without comment and without error. The Hesper's open airlock swallowed the pod's lights and gave nothing back. Inside, the lock was clean. That was the third wrong thing, and by then Wren had stopped counting. The lock was clean and the corridor beyond it was clean and the emergency lighting still glowed a low patient amber, fed by the structural power that kept the rings turning. No bodies. No debris. No frost of decompression, no scorch of fire. A colony transport that had lost its reactor and its main power and forty years of time, and her corridors were as tidy as a ship at dock. "Wren," Marrow said. He had stopped at a junction where the corridor branched, and he was looking at the bulkhead, where someone had written, in the careful blocky hand of a person who wanted very much to be understood, four words. WE WAITED FOR YOU. The amber light hummed. The rings turned. And from somewhere deep in the spine of the dead ship, faint and unmistakable and impossible, came the sound of a door being opened.