Passenger

Her name was Anneke Sol, and she was the survivor, and she was the fourth wrong thing — wrong because she was alive, and unhurt, and not nearly afraid enough. She met them in the habitat ring, in a long curved room that had been a garden once and was a garden still, after a fashion: rows of grow-troughs under failing lights, the plants in them pale and stretched and stubbornly green. She was a small woman with grey in her hair and dirt worked permanently into the creases of her hands, and when the beam of Wren's helmet light found her she did not flinch or weep or run. She said, "You came on the salvage band." "We came on every band," Wren said. "Yours was the only one transmitting." "I know." Anneke set down the trowel she had been holding. "I recorded it. A long time ago now. I've kept the structural power balanced all these years so the beacon would keep running. I always knew that when someone finally came, they'd come for the hull and not for us. That's all right. I made my peace with that. A salvage ship is still a ship." Wren's air tasted of her own breath and the inside of a helmet. "How many," she said. "The beacon says forty-one." "The beacon says forty-one because that is how many we were when I recorded it." Anneke's face did something complicated and quiet. "Captain. How long do you think this ship has been adrift?" "Pell says the reactor's been cold a long time. Weeks. Maybe more." "Forty years," Anneke said. "Forty years and four months. The reactor failed in our second year out. We were a slow ship; we had decades of journey left and no way to make them. We had supplies for the crossing and not for a lifetime of drifting." She picked up the trowel again, turned it over, set it down. "Forty-one souls, Captain. I am the last of them. I have been the last of them for nine years." The garden's failing lights hummed. Marrow had gone very still beside Wren, and on the open channel she could hear Ditta's breath catch, all the way back on the Adelaide. "The message," Wren said. "It said forty-one. It said *we*." "It said *we* because when I recorded it, we were *we*. I never changed it." Anneke looked up, and now there was something in her face after all, something Wren would spend the rest of the crossing trying to name. "I couldn't. Changing it to *one* would have meant saying it out loud. So I let it run. Forty-one souls asking for help on a dead band. I let it run for nine years, and you came forty years too late, and you came anyway, and that is more than I let myself hope for. So." She wiped her hands on her trousers. "You'll want to survey the hull. I'll show you. It's a good hull. It deserves to be worth something." Wren stood in the dying garden of a ship that had been begging for forty years, and she found that the salvage claim, the fuel, the sums she had done and not liked — all of it had become very small and very far away. "Anneke," she said. "We didn't come for the hull." It was not, strictly, true. They had come partly for the hull. But it became true the moment she said it, the way the bright line on Ditta's table had become true when she put her hand on the helm, and Anneke Sol heard the truth in it. Her face broke, at last — not into fear, which she had spent long ago, but into something rawer and older, the grief of a person who has carried a thing alone for nine years and has just, without warning, been allowed to set it down. "Then I'll show you the rest of them," she said, when she could speak. "They're in the long hold. I kept them. I kept all of them. I want you to know their names before you decide what this ship is worth." And Wren, who had bunks for nine and a hold full of nothing and a debt the size of a moon already settling onto her shoulders, said, "Tell me their names."