Eyas held his eyes for a moment. She squeezed his hand, and poured them both another drink.
Sawyer
‘Boss, we got a problem.’
Everybody in the airlock paused their suiting up. ‘Do tell,’ Muriel said, continuing to wake the four empty autocarts that would be joining them.
Nyx cleared her throat over the vox. ‘We’ve got company. The Neptune.’
Muriel paused. ‘How long?’
‘Three hours, maybe four.’
Sawyer stood awkwardly, helmet in hands, not sure what that meant or why the mood in the airlock had changed. ‘Ah, shit,’ Oates said. He frowned at everyone present. ‘Who got drunk and told someone where we were going today, hmm?’ His eyes lingered on Sawyer.
Sawyer swallowed. He was pretty sure he hadn’t said anything to anybody other than that he had a salvage job. He hadn’t known he wasn’t supposed to talk about it, but who would he even have talked to?
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Muriel said. She fastened her suit latches in sequence, one, two, three. Methodical. Matter-of-fact. ‘Is what it is.’ She looked around at her crew. ‘This just became a rush job. Grab and carry first. Tear-downs if you can.’
Sawyer cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t— what’s going on?’
Muriel clicked her helmet into place, and the vox below the seam switched on. ‘We’ve got competition. Another salvage crew. Think of it like a race.’
A competition. Sawyer hadn’t planned on that. ‘Do you guys – do the salvage crews not keep a schedule?’
Dory laughed and shook her head, walking toward the hatch.
‘Salvage is a more . . . independent line of work,’ Oates said. ‘First come, first serve.’
The airlock remained tense, so Sawyer decided to save the rest of his questions for later. Still, his list was growing. If retrieving salvage was competitive, there must be some kind of special compensation given by the Fleet to salvage crews, but that didn’t mesh with . . . well, with how everything else worked. Maybe it was dangerous, or messy? You could say the same about asteroid mining, though, or zero-g mech work, or sanitation. Sanitation. Maybe he should have stuck with that, started there. He didn’t understand enough about anything else yet. Maybe . . . maybe the race Muriel mentioned was purely a matter of pride. A race to see who could bring the best stuff back home. Yeah, that made sense. He put on his helmet and got ready to follow.
That is, he thought he was ready. He’d been outside before, tethered and on a guided walk, but that was different; he wasn’t floating now. He could feel the sudden lightness of everything in and around him, but his cling boots held his feet firmly to the ruined shuttledock they walked out onto. He’d never worn cling boots before, and he found them . . . not uncomfortable, exactly, but more challenging than the others made them look. A little like walking through wet sand. It’d take practice, he assured himself. After all, this crew had probably been wearing them since they were kids. One step at a time.
Sawyer looked up from his feet and met the Oxomoco. He shuddered. He swallowed. Around them were the same features he’d seen in the Silver Lining’s dock four days prior – walkways, railings, directional signs – but this was a fever dream, a rent and twisted mirror image. The vacuum occupying the space around them glittered with dust and dreck. It would’ve been almost pretty, were it not for the violently wrenched metal everywhere else. Sawyer turned to look around, and even in the regulated warmth of his exosuit, the sight made him go cold.
There was no wall on the other side of the dock. Just a gaping hole into empty space, the edges surrounding it bent outward. He knew the decompression had been quick, but stars, he hoped it had felt that way, too.
‘All right, three hours,’ Muriel said. ‘We should split up. Oates, head to the hexes. Dory and Len, let’s go to cargo. It’s bound to be even more picked over than the last time we were here, but we gotta give it a shot. Sawyer, you’re with Oates. More code that’ll need tweaking where he’s headed. Nyx, you’ll keep us posted?’
‘You know it,’ Nyx’s voice said inside their helmets.
Muriel nodded at the group. ‘Let’s move.’
They split as directed, autocarts trailing after. Sawyer followed Oates, and tried his best to look nonchalant.
He failed at that, apparently. ‘Don’t worry,’ Oates said, pushing his big bag of tools along. ‘Fucks everybody up the first time.’
Sawyer felt embarrassed at that, but relieved, too. ‘I’ve seen pictures, but—’
‘Yeah, pictures don’t cut it. I always need a good, stiff drink to get me to sleep after we make a run here. Speaking of – you holding up okay?’
The slightest echo of a headache was all that remained of Len’s Whitedune. ‘Yeah,’ Sawyer said. ‘I’m good.’
Oates gave him a solid pat on the back, his thick glove landing dully against an even thicker oxygen canister. ‘See, you’ll be great. We got about an hour’s walk there, and if we’ve gotta be back in three, we need to keep a good pace if we’re gonna have any time to actually work. If you gotta piss, well – you’ve worn a suit before, right?’
Sawyer hadn’t ever used that particular exosuit feature, but he nodded.
Oates grinned. ‘It’s a fancy job, what can I say.’
The walk was tiring, thanks to the boots, but Oates made for good chatter. After an hour and change, as had been predicted, they arrived in a residential corridor. ‘Okay, a lot of these will be empty already,’ Oates said. ‘I’ll know a good one when I see it, though.’
Oates’ quarry was found a few minutes later, though Sawyer couldn’t see what had drawn him to this particular spot. The centre of the hex was empty. No toys or tools littered the floor. No dishes lined the table. No plants remained in the hollowed planters. Everything that wasn’t bolted down had been sucked away through a gash in the floor that split the hex in two. Sawyer could see the remaining edges of the sewage deck below and the stars beyond.
‘Hmm,’ Oates said, as if he were picking apart a pixel puzzle. He eyed the front doors. ‘That one. We’ll start there.’ He pointed to a door that was open about a hand’s width, on the other side of the gash.
Sawyer hesitated. ‘How do we . . .’
‘Ah,’ Oates said. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He reached down and hit the cling boot controls on his ankles. With a low buzz, Oates was unanchored. ‘Okay? And then—’ His suit thrusters activated, and he flew forward at a cautious speed, drifting over the tear in the floor, then reactivated his boots once he reached the other side. ‘See? Nothin’ to it.’
Sawyer repeated each step. Detach, thrusters, forward, anchor. There wasn’t anything to it, now that he’d done it, but he felt pleased anyway.
The autocarts flew themselves across the gap as well, and the small party stood at the cracked-open door. Oates reached into his tool bag and retrieved a power pack and a pair of cables. He popped open a service panel by the doorframe, connected the pack, and gestured at the door. Nothing happened. He ran his hand inside the open space between door and frame. ‘Nothing blocking it,’ he said. He rattled the door itself. ‘And it’s not off-track. It’s just locked itself in a weird spot.’ He nodded at Sawyer. ‘This is where you come in.’
On cue, Sawyer hooked up his scrib to the control panel and dove into the code. It was a different setup than the lockbox code, naturally, but the territory was more familiar now. He tweaked and teased, coaxing the commands to do what he wanted. Sure enough, five minutes in, the door slid open.