The Friend in the Vacuum
The suit alarm cut through the comm channel before the lance flash registered on the Underweight‘s forward optic.
Maren’s voice. Two words.
“Hit me.”
Then the alarm. Then nothing.
Anya’s hands moved before her thinking caught up. Attitude thrusters port, hard burn, bring the Underweight between the wreck and the second crew’s skiff. Pull Maren’s helmet beacon onto the forward optic. Lock the recovery tether to the bay’s outer rail.
The helmet beacon was steady. Steady was the wrong word. Steady meant the suit was still pinging position. It did not mean anything else.
“Maren.”
The channel hissed.
“Maren.”
Nothing.
The second crew’s skiff was already withdrawing, running on cold thrust, lights doused. They had come back for the wreck. They had not come back to talk. The lance pulse had been clean and angled and intended.
Anya did not chase. She did not have the geometry to chase. She did not have the crew. She did not have anything that resembled a thought beyond the steady beacon and the dead comm.
She put on her helmet.
She cycled the airlock.
She went out.
The Bonecrack Field was quiet in the way only a field with one body in it could be quiet.
The wreck still tumbled, half a kilometer of dark lattice spine catching ring-light along its broken face. Anya did not look at the wreck. She tracked the helmet beacon and let her thrusters carry her in a long shallow arc that conserved fuel she might need on the way back.
The beacon resolved into a suit. The suit resolved into Maren, oriented head-down relative to the Underweight, drifting on the slow tumble her dying motion had given her.
The puncture was at the small of her back. Lance-clean. Through-and-through. The suit’s emergency seals had clamped on entry and on exit, the way the suit was built to do. The seals had clamped on nothing the suit could save.
The suit’s interior atmosphere had vented through the breach in under four seconds. The math was on the chest panel. Anya did not look at the chest panel.
She clipped the tether to Maren’s belt ring. She rotated the body to match the Underweight‘s burn vector. She translated them both back across the long shallow arc. The tether reeled.
The airlock cycled.
Maren went into the cargo bay and not into the suit locker.
Anya cycled out of her own suit because she could not stand in it any longer.
The return burn to Mimas was nineteen hours.
She did not sleep. She did not eat. She did the burn manually because the autopilot was the part of the skiff Maren had calibrated, and Anya did not want a course held by Maren’s hand. She wanted her own hands on the stick. She wanted the muscle of the work.
The cargo bay was sealed. The atmosphere inside the bay was set to vacuum. The math said vacuum kept the body. The math said a great many things Anya did not say out loud.
She held the bridge.
The rings turned past the canopy at the long slow rate they had turned past every salvage burn she had ever flown. The rings did not care. The rings had never cared. She had known that on Day One.
The comm was quiet. Davit had pinged her three times in the first hour. She had answered the first ping with one word, coming, and not answered the next two. Davit had not pinged again. He understood what silence was for.
The Polaris fragment was in her chest pocket. She did not take it out. The fragment was the part of her the work had not taken yet, and she was not in a room she wanted to risk it in.
She held the bridge.
Davit was at the dock plate when the Underweight came in.
He was alone. He had not brought any of the cooperative’s people. He had not brought a recovery team. He had brought a stretcher and a black canvas wrap and his own two hands.
Anya cycled the bay. Davit came aboard. They did not speak.
He helped her lift Maren onto the stretcher. The body was light in the bay’s quarter-gravity. The body had always been light. Maren had been ring-belt for thirty years, and Anya had only ever known her that way.
They wrapped her. Davit fastened the seals. The seals were the kind that locked once and did not open without a coroner’s key. Davit had brought the right ones. Davit always brought the right ones.
He looked at Anya across the stretcher.
“I am here as long as you want me here.”
“Thank you.”
“What do you need.”
“Nothing.”
He waited.
“Nothing yet,” she said.
He nodded. He did not push. He did not ask the question she could read in him not asking, which was the question of whether the cooperative would survive the next forty-eight hours and what it would survive as. He carried the stretcher down the dock plate. He took Maren to the small bonded room on Mimas Station that the cooperative used for crews who came home this way. He left Anya at the Underweight‘s ramp.
He stayed at the ramp’s foot a long time. He did not come up. He did not go away.
She went into her storage bay alone.
The storage bay was the second one she had rented on Mimas, taken on a six-month lease the previous spring because Maren’s gear had needed a place to live.
The shelf along the back wall was Maren’s. The plasma-lance carbide tips in their foam tray. The custom torque wrench Maren had built from inner-belt parts and would not let anyone else use. The thermos with the dent in the side from the first Saltline burn. The spare helmet liner with Maren’s daughter’s name stitched in the inside seam in a hand Maren had taught herself when she was thirty-eight years old.
Anya took the helmet liner off the shelf.
She held it.
The seam was clean. The thread was navy. The name was four letters. Anya did not say the name out loud. The name was not hers to say.
She put the helmet liner back on the shelf.
She did not pack the shelf. She did not move any of it. The shelf was Maren’s, and the shelf would stay Maren’s for as long as the bay was leased, and after that for as long as Anya had a bay anywhere in the rings.
She stood in the middle of the room.
The room was quiet in the way only a room with no living thing in it could be quiet. The Mimas lower-ring ventilation cycled. The lighting buzzed at the second-stage harmonic the station never fixed. The bay smelled like cold metal and the suit-oil Maren had used to seal her gloves.
Anya looked at the shelf.
She said it out loud because there was no one else to say it to.
“Never again. Not like this.”
The room held the sentence. The room had nothing to add.
Anya stood another minute in the dark.
Then she left the storage bay, locked it behind her, and went to find Davit.
Author’s note: Day Sixteen of the Iron Wake Origins arc. Year 2, Month 8. Two days after the Bonecrack standoff, the second crew returns to the field. Their first shot is a deliberate lance-strike on Maren Holvaag’s suit, through-and-through at the small of her back, the seals catching too late to matter. Anya Rask recovers the body alone, runs a nineteen-hour manual burn back to Mimas, and lays Maren in a bonded coroner’s wrap on the dock plate with Davit Kade’s silent help. The final scene is the storage bay where Maren’s gear has lived for a year. The decision that turns the cooperative into the Iron Wake is made in that room, with no witnesses, in eight words said to no one. The Salvage Wars have arrived. Anya knows what she is about to build next, what it will cost her to build it, and that the line she promised herself she would not cross has already moved.
If you enjoyed this story, you can follow the main story arc in The Exodus Rush, the first book in The Vethrak Requiem series.