Belt Three

Olzan grinned. ‘We’re just that good. Anyway, it’s five of us now we’ve found you.’

‘Still not sure I’m joining,’ she said.

Olzan ignored her. ‘Tarraso will be in the other ring. Come on.’

The second ring housed storage for grav-dependent cargo, the ship’s own stores, and Tarraso’s workshops. Olzan could hear the sound of his tinkering as soon as the transit module opened. He followed the sound, with Keldra still in tow.

Tarraso had one of the air scrubbers laid out on a workbench. The scrubber had stopped working a week ago, coughing graphite across the corridor, but Pandora’s markets didn’t have a replacement for a price they could afford. Olzan had cursed his bad luck and told Tarraso to extend its lifespan as much as he could. Despite the messy nature of the work, the room was spotlessly clean, with a dozen tools laid out on a side table and everything else tucked away in neatly hand-labelled cupboards. Tarraso didn’t look up as Olzan and Keldra entered.

‘Tarraso,’ said Olzan. ‘This is Keldra. She’s our new second engineer.’

Tarraso acknowledged Olzan with a tiny nod, but finished the adjustment he was making and carefully laid down his tool before turning around. He looked Keldra up and down, his expression just the same as if he were inspecting some flawed and dirty piece of machinery.

‘No,’ he said.

Olzan moved closer to his old friend and spoke more softly. ‘We’ve been through this. We’re half-falling apart here.’ He gestured to the other damaged ship components resting in a line against the wall. ‘You need another pair of hands.’

Tarraso wiped his hands on a cloth and walked up to Keldra. ‘You ever been assistant engineer on a Salamander before?’

‘No,’ she said. It was a simple statement, devoid of emotion.

‘Ever served on a freighter?’

‘No.’

‘Ever even flown inter-city?’

‘No.’

Tarraso turned his gaze to Olzan. ‘No,’ he said. He went back to his work.

Olzan gave Keldra a frustrated look. ‘Come on, sell yourself some more!’ To Tarraso he said, ‘Keldra’s worked in city habitat maintenance, and you saw her test scores. We’re not going to find a better assistant in the cluster.’

‘I’m engineer here. I don’t need an assistant.’

‘I’m the captain, and I’m telling you, you do.’

Tarraso fumed, but relented. He turned his critical gaze onto Keldra again.

‘You. Look at this air scrubber. What would you do to fix it?’

She peered into the dusty guts of the machine. Her hand floated above it, almost but not quite touching the components.

‘Get the whole module replaced,’ she said after a few seconds. ‘It’s well past the end of its life. You can fix individual problems but the whole thing’s going to keep failing in different ways.’

Tarraso snorted. ‘We’re not living in a perfect world, girl.’

Keldra looked as if she was about to say something, but then stopped. She seemed surprised, offended even. It was the first time she’d shown a definite emotion since she came aboard.

‘We can’t replace the module,’ Olzan prompted. ‘What do you do?’

She examined the machine again, this time bending down to peer at its innards and feeling some of them with her fingertips. When she straightened up her face and hands bore thin smears of graphite dust and oil.

‘Take out these catalyst fins,’ she said, pointing. ‘Run the module at three-fifths capacity. You’ll get a few more months out of it. You can afford to run life support below capacity since you don’t have a full crew.’

Olzan glanced at the workings of the machine – he barely understood them – and then at Tarraso. ‘Would it work?’

‘Yeah, it would work,’ Tarraso said grudgingly. He turned to Keldra, looking now as if he was assessing a broken machine’s value as a source of spare parts. ‘You do what I say, all right? You give your opinion when I ask for it, and only then. Your main job’s going to be cleaning up. There’s a lot of that, and you’re going to take the time to do it right. Understand?’

‘I’ve got some other ships interested in me,’ Keldra said. ‘I need to think about it. I’ll let you know.’

‘No, you’re coming with us,’ Olzan said. He subvocalized the command that would put his implant in touch with the bridge. ‘Brenn, release docking clamps. Get us under way.’

‘You can’t do that!’ That anger was the second emotion Olzan had seen Keldra show. ‘I haven’t signed anything. I was here for an interview.’

Tarraso laughed. ‘Hah. Girl from a perfect world.’

‘Sorry, kid. We can’t risk losing someone with your skills. You’ll get your cut, don’t worry, but you’re not getting off. You’ve just joined the noble ranks of inter-city traders.’

Keldra looked as though she was about to argue, but then seemed to think better of it. She stood sullenly, saying nothing.

‘Come on. I’ll show you to your quarters.’

‘Jonas! What are you doing?’

His head swam, as if he were being shaken awake from a dream. It took him a few seconds to become aware of his surroundings. He was still in the corridor of the first ring on the Remembrance of Clouds. Keldra was yelling at him, but he ignored her, closed his eyes again, and tried to work out what was going on.

That had been a memory playback. The implant Keldra had put into him must have been an admin implant with memory-recording functionality, belonging to this Captain Olzan. Keldra might well be the genius engineer that Olzan had believed her to be, but according to the memory her training was in habitat engineering. That would transfer easily enough to other ship systems, but less well to the arcane mix of electronics, software engineering, and neurobiology required to hack an implant. Keldra must have made a mistake when she turned the implant into a control device, causing it to push one of Olzan’s recorded memories into his head, unbidden.

‘What happened?’ Keldra demanded. ‘Talk to me!’

Jonas thought for a short while before answering. It looked as though only a few seconds had passed in the real world. Memory-playback implants didn’t play back experiences in real time; they just inserted the memory image of having just experienced the scene, adding minutes or hours of subjective time that the brain couldn’t tell from the real thing. If Keldra didn’t know that Jonas’s implant was malfunctioning, he didn’t need to tell her.

‘I blacked out for a moment. I’m tired.’

Keldra seemed to believe him. She gave him an unsympathetic sneer. ‘You can sleep when we’re done with the tour. Try to keep up.’

The tour confirmed what Jonas had suspected: the Remembrance of Clouds was the same ship as the Thousand Names, the ship from Olzan’s memory. Keldra had modified it, added the armaments he’d seen earlier, and done a decent job of repairing several years of wear, but underneath it was still the same ageing tramp freighter, held together by duct tape and bloody-mindedness.

The tour Olzan had given Keldra had been about meeting the crew. There was no free-willed crew on the ship, but Jonas suspected that, even if there had been, they would have been a side-point, at best, on Keldra’s tour. She took him through the ship section by section, from nose to tail, pointing out her modifications and explaining its technical specifications in more detail than he understood. He couldn’t see much use in giving such a detailed tour to a non-engineer, especially an untrustworthy prisoner, but he suspected that it wasn’t entirely for his benefit. Now that she’d decided to keep him around, it seemed that she was enjoying having someone to talk at. A few times, when pointing out some particularly clever modification, she forgot to be aggressive and Jonas detected some honest pride entering her voice.

The tour began in the ship’s nose, a bulbous structure consisting of the forward observation blister, the docking airlock and umbilicals, and the extendible gantry that housed the sail bud. Right now the sail was unfurled, and the kilometres-wide plane of ultra-thin nanomaterial dwarfed the rest of the ship. The sail was perfectly flat, possessing an eerie mathematical beauty, as if it were an intruder into normal space from a universe of pure geometry. From inside the observation blister Jonas could see his gold-tinted reflection looking down at him, at the nose of a vertiginous duplicate of the Remembrance of Clouds.

From a distance, a sail clipper looked like an insect, or a jewel, suspended from its sail by hundreds of gossamer nanotech threads. The sail was Earth-tech, of course; a forgotten technology, invented in the last flush of learning of the Planetary Age. The belt-dwellers could produce it in semi-automated factories, and even maintain it in a rote way, but could never have invented it.

Behind the nose were the two grav-rings, rotating in opposite directions for stability. Keldra ran them faster than Olzan had, fast enough to provide one gee of centrifugal pseudo-gravity. Jonas wondered why, before he remembered where the ancient measurement had come from: one gee had been the surface gravity of Earth.

Looking down from the blister he could see the inner surface of the first ring as it rotated around him. The repairs were more extensive than they had looked from the Coriolis Dancer; he could see a great swathe of the ring where the surface had been replaced with mismatched sheets of scrap metal.