Cold metal pressed into Callum Vasek's cheek, and the world arrived all at once: a shriek slicing through the fog of cryo, a hiss of venting atmosphere, and the taste of copper flooding his mouth where he had bitten the inside of his lip sometime during the long dreaming. His eyes snapped open to a ceiling he did not recognize, ribbed with cable runs and stained by years of coolant mist, and the observation deck of the Kotrom Kazarov tilted around him as the ship groaned through a pressure loss he had not authorized.
The cryo pod's canopy had unlatched improperly, halfway through its cycle, and the emergency seal had failed. Black fluid, thick as tar and twice as cold, sprayed in a fine arc across the glass above his head and spattered against the far wall where the deck plating buckled under atmospheric stress. Callum braced one palm against the slicked interior of the canister and pushed himself upright, every muscle in his shoulders screaming protest as the cryo-stiffness fought him for ownership of his own limbs. The alarms kept shrieking, a three-tone wail that bounced off the steel walls and came back sharper, closer, as if the ship itself were screaming for someone to answer.
"Son of a disgraced house," he muttered, and the words tasted wrong in a throat raw from recycled air and three weeks of chemical sleep. He swung his legs over the lip of the pod and his boots found the deck plating slick with the black spray, his weight settling with a hollow clang that told him the gravitic compensators were running on partial power. The deck shuddered. Somewhere aft of the observation bay, a seal popped with a sound like a fist striking wet leather, and a gust of frigid air rolled down the corridor past the open hatch.
Callum moved before the thought finished forming, the way the navy had taught him years ago and the years since had not managed to erase. He pulled the emergency respirator from the pod's side mount, a slim mask with a filter the color of old bone, and clamped it over his nose and mouth in a single practiced motion. The first breath through the filter came in thin and chemical, a taste between burnt plastic and something rusted, but the air inside held and his chest unlocked enough to draw a deeper one. He unclipped the maintenance torch from the bulkhead rack, its housing scarred from a dozen prior uses, and palmed the ignition. A pale flame sputtered, then caught, throwing his shadow long across the observation deck's curved viewport.
Through the viewport the stars burned steady and indifferent, pinpricks of white fire scattered across a black so absolute it seemed to press inward against the glass. The Kotrom Kazarov hung in the drift between two unnamed rocks, her running lights dimmed to conserve power, her hull a dark smudge against the deeper dark. Somewhere on her underside a section of plating had been peeled back by whatever had struck them in the dark, and the vent stream behind him spoke of precious atmosphere bleeding out into the vacuum by the cubic meter.
"Computer," he said, his voice muffled by the mask. "Report."
The console at the observation deck's center flickered to life, its screen cracked across one corner where the shock had thrown a loose cable. Text crawled across the display in the amber of emergency lighting: HULL INTEGRITY 71 . SECTIONS 7 THROUGH 12 DEPRESSURIZED. LIFE SUPPORT COMPROMISED. ESTIMATED ATMOSPHERIC LOSS 4 PER MINUTE.
"Course heading," he said, though he already suspected the answer.
NO NAVIGATIONAL LOCK. AUTOPILOT OFFLINE. MANUAL CONTROL RESTORED to bridge.
The bridge. Three decks up, past the cargo holds, through the mess hall where Deckhand Pell Onarra would be sleeping off the last watch, if the boy was sleeping at all, which Callum doubted. The boy had taken to prowling the ship at odd hours since they had taken on their unusual passenger, as if some new anxiety had curled up behind his ribs and refused to settle. Callum did not blame him. The passenger had that effect on people.
A second shudder rolled through the deck plating, harder than the first, and Callum caught himself against the console's edge as the ship lurched starboard. The cracked screen flickered and steadied. A new line of text appeared: EXTERNAL IMPACT DETECTED. PROXIMITY ALERT. UNKNOWN VESSEL.
"Unknown vessel," he repeated, and the words came out flatter than he intended, the mask turning his voice into something closer to a rasp. He stared at the readout, his thumb hovering over the comm toggle, and then a new sound cut through the wail of the alarms: a rapid staccato knock on the observation deck's hatch, the particular rhythm Pell used when he was trying not to panic.
"Captain!" the boy's voice came through, muffled by the metal door. "Captain Vasek, the ship's bleeding air and there's a light out the port side that wasn't there a minute ago!"
Callum crossed the deck in four strides, his boots sucking at the black-coated floor, and slapped the manual release for the hatch. The door ground open on its tracks, half a centimeter at a time, and the frigid air from the corridor beyond rolled in and pressed against his exposed skin with the weight of a held breath. Pell Onarra stood in the corridor beyond, his young face pale in the emergency lighting, his hair sticking up on one side where he had clearly been dragged from a narrow bunk. He wore the ship's deck coveralls half-zipped and unlaced at the boots, and his eyes, wide and bright with the kind of fear that had not yet learned how to quiet itself, searched Callum's face for an answer that he suspected he would not like.
"How long," Callum said.
"I don't know, sir, I woke to the alarm maybe a minute before I came down, the seal on seven failed clean and I heard it pop and then the lights went amber and I came straight to the observation bay because that's where your pod is and I thought, that is, I figured if you were awake you'd want to know." Pell took a breath, the words tumbling out in a single breathless rush that Callum recognized from the boy's first weeks aboard the Black Kestrel, before the navy discipline had rubbed off and the soft coastal brogue had learned to slow itself. "There's a ship out there, Captain. I saw it on the way down. It's big, and it's dark, and it hasn't answered our hail."
The second part of that sentence caught in Callum's chest like a fishhook. He had been expecting impact debris, a chunk of asteroid that had not been on the charts, the kind of careless accident that befell haulers plying the back routes of the Ashen Strait. A ship that did not answer a hail was something else. A ship that did not answer was a choice.
"Stay behind me," he said, and stepped out into the corridor.
The passage stretched fore and aft, its deck plating buckled in a long shallow wave that followed the line of the hull breach somewhere below them, and the emergency lighting threw everything into shades of rust and dried blood. Callum moved toward the port observation port set into the corridor wall, his torch held low, his other hand resting on the butt of the slug-thrower he had begun to carry again since the trouble with the Iron Concord had started to find them in their berths at port. Pell fell in two paces behind him, close enough to touch, the boy's breath coming fast and shallow through the mask he had clearly grabbed from the same emergency rack as Callum, though his hung loose around his neck because his hands were busy gripping the corridor stanchions as the ship lurched through another slow roll.
The port viewport showed him nothing but stars until the ship steadied, and then it rotated into view: a silhouette against the deeper black, long and angular, its running lights extinguished, drifting in a parallel course close enough that Callum could make out the ragged edges of hull plating where the paint had burned away under atmospheric reentry or, more likely, where someone had sanded it down to remove a registry marking. The ship's prow bore a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt, and beneath the scar a single running light flickered on and off in a rhythm Callum did not recognize.
"That's not a freighter," Pell said, his voice very small. "That's a warship class, Captain. That's a Black Kestrel size and worse."
"I see it," Callum said. The words came out steady enough. He had been in tighter spots before, though he could not, at that precise moment, recall the names of them. He turned from the viewport and started forward toward the bridge access, and the black spray on the deck made his boot slide, and he went down on one knee with a force that jarred his teeth.
Pell made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a word and reached for his arm, and Callum waved him off with a gesture that came out sharper than he meant it.
"I'm fine. Save it for the bridge." He got his feet under him and started forward again. The next junction showed him what he had not wanted to see: a panel had blown free from the wall, and behind it a fistful of wiring sparked in short blue arcs that threw shadows across the deck in stuttering patterns. The air here tasted of burnt insulation and something sweet and acrid, the chemical signature of a refrigerant line that had cracked somewhere behind the panel and was venting into the corridor. Callum pulled the panel closed with a clang and held it there while Pell found a clamp from the emergency locker and wrestled it into place.
"Breathe shallow through the mask until we hit the bridge," Callum said. "And if you feel your eyes sting more than that, tell me."
Pell nodded, his jaw set, and followed him up the corridor at a pace that tried very hard to be a run and settled for a fast walk. The ship lurched again, and this time the sound that followed it was closer, more personal, like a hand slapping the hull somewhere just past the next bulkhead. Pell flinched. Callum did not. The ship groaned in a long descending tone that he recognized from a hundred prior berths and a dozen prior bad nights, the sound of stressed metal deciding, moment by moment, whether it would hold together or come apart.
"Captain," Pell said, his voice cracking on the second syllable. "The passenger. Soraya. She's in the forward hold. If the seals went there, she's got maybe minutes."
Callum stopped. He had been moving without thinking, the way the navy had taught him and the years since had only sharpened, and the boy's words caught him mid-stride and forced the moving to stop. The passenger. Soraya Ainsworth, daughter of disgraced archivists, courier for the Iron Concord until six months ago when the Concord had decided her usefulness had run its course, and she had come to him with a satchel of forbidden ledgers and the particular kind of stubborn courage that got people killed in places the navy did not officially patrol. He had taken her on because the money was good and because his brother, wherever his brother was, would have called it the right thing, and Callum had spent most of his life doing the opposite of what his brother would have done, and that particular rebellion had begun to feel less like a principle and more like a bad habit.
"Forward hold is sealed," he said, more to himself than to the boy. "We reinforced the bulkhead at Ashenmouth. She's got air."
"If the seven seal failed, Captain, the forward seal is the next one down the line." Pell's voice had found a steadiness that Callum had not heard in him before, the brogue gone flat and quick. "You told me yourself. The whole starboard side's compromised."
Callum turned to look at him, and the boy's face in the amber light was older than his years by a margin that surprised him. He nodded once, the gesture small, and the choice made itself without ceremony: forward hold first, then the bridge. The ship groaned again, longer this time, and a new light flickered across the ceiling: the secondary alarm, the one that meant a pressure boundary had given way somewhere on the level below them.
"Stay on my hip," Callum said. "If I go down, you seal the door behind you and you get to the bridge. You do not come back for me. You do not come back for her. You get to the comm and you broadcast on the distress channel, and you do not stop broadcasting until someone answers. Do you understand?"
Pell opened his mouth, and whatever he had been about to say died on his tongue. He closed his mouth and nodded once, the gesture small and tight.
They turned forward together, into the deeper dark, and behind them through the viewport the unknown ship kept its slow parallel course, its single running light flickering in that unrecognizable rhythm, and the Kotrom Kazarov bled air by the cubic meter into a silence so vast it made no sound at all.
The forward hold stretched ahead of them like the ribcage of something long dead. Callum moved along the starboard catwalk with one hand trailing the rail, his boots finding each step by instinct and memory, his breath shallow in his chest. The air smelled of scorched wiring and the sharp, copper-bright tang of vented coolant, and beneath that, faintly, the iron-rot smell that meant a seal had failed somewhere in the lower decks. Pell stayed close at his shoulder, the boy's hand on Callum's belt loop, their shadows thrown long by the failing amber of the emergency strips.
He counted doors as he passed them. Three. Four. The fifth was the access hatch to the cargo deck, and when he reached it the pressure sensor above the frame was pulsing a color he had only ever seen twice in his life: a deep, arterial red that meant the atmosphere on the other side was thinner than the atmosphere on this side. He put his palm flat against the hatch and felt the metal bow inward, a centimeter, then settle back.
"Hold here," he said to Pell, and the boy dropped to a crouch against the bulkhead without a word.
Callum reached for the manual override, the old iron wheel set into the hatch frame, and turned it with the slow, deliberate pressure of a man who understood what a pressure differential could do to a body. The wheel resisted, then gave. The hatch unseated with a hiss that was louder than it should have been, the sound of atmosphere equalizing in a space that had been sealed for too long. Cold air rolled out across his knuckles, across his face, carrying the smell of vacuum-packs and spilled grain and, beneath it, the unmistakable chemical sweetness of blood.
He stepped through.
The forward hold had been breached on the port side, a rent in the hull nearly three meters long, the torn plating curled back like the petals of some grotesque flower. Through the gap he could see stars, and they were steady and uncaring. The cargo nets that should have held the vacuum-sealed containers had given way, and the containers themselves lay tumbled across the deck in a landscape of shattered plastic and spilled contents. A barrel of grain had split, and the grain lay across the deck in pale drifts that moved, almost imperceptibly, toward the breach, drawn by the minute differential in pressure that still existed between the hold and the void.
There was no one here. There had been no one here for at least an hour, judging by the stillness of the spilled grain.
Callum swept the hold with his light, the beam cutting across the wreckage, and found what he had come to find: the forward seal, the heavy composite ring set into the deck where the cargo deck met the crew ladder, was intact. The pressure warning on the sensor beside it glowed a steady amber, which meant the seal held, which meant the rest of the ship still had air, which meant they could get to the bridge.
He turned back toward the hatch, and Pell was there, framed in the doorway, the boy's face white in the reflected amber.
"Clear," Callum said. "Seal's good. Let's move."
They moved. The corridor ahead of them narrowed, the walls pressing inward as the ship's spine curved up toward the bridge deck, and the amber lighting here was dimmer, more intermittent, the strips flickering in patterns that made the shadows jump. Callum felt the vibration of the hull through the soles of his boots, the deep and arrhythmic shudder that meant the Kotrom Kazarov was still bleeding air somewhere behind them, and he did not let himself calculate how long they had. He had been a naval officer long enough to know that the math of survival changed the moment you started counting minutes.
The ladder to the upper corridor was half-collapsed, the rungs twisted, but Callum tested the first one with his weight and it held. He climbed. Pell followed. The metal rang under their boots, the sound flat and dead in the thin air.
At the top of the ladder, the corridor opened onto a junction, and Callum stopped.
The junction had been a fight.
He could read the story of it in the damage as clearly as if it had been written: the scuff marks on the deck plates, the shattered light fixture overhead, the dark and arterial spray across the bulkhead to starboard that was already drying to the color of old rust. Someone had stood here, back against the junction door, and someone else had come at them from the direction of the bridge. There had been close-range fire. There had been a body, and the body had been dragged, the smear of it leading away from the junction and down the corridor toward the bridge hatch.
Callum's mouth went dry. He did not say anything. He checked his sidearm, the old naval pistol that he kept in a holster beneath his coat, and found it still there, still loaded, still functional. He set his shoulders and moved forward, and Pell fell in behind him without being told.
The bridge hatch was open.
Callum approached it with the pistol held low against his thigh, the way he had been taught to approach a closed door in a boarding action, and he paused at the frame, listening. The bridge was quiet. The ambient hum of the command systems, the steady thrum of the helm, the soft whisper of the environmental systems: all of it had failed. The only sound was the deep and irregular groan of the hull itself, the sound of a ship that was losing its argument with the void.
He stepped through the hatch.
The bridge was a ruin.
The helm console had been shot out at close range, the screens shattered, the controls hanging in loose and sparking tangles. Two of the overhead lights had failed entirely, and the third flickered in a slow, arrhythmic pulse that made the shadows breathe. The command chair had been thrown from its mount and now lay against the far bulkhead, and beside it, half-propped against the base of the helm itself, was a figure in a naval coat, the dark wool matted with blood across the left shoulder and chest.
"Soraya," Callum said, and the word came out of him before he had time to soften it.
She turned her head at the sound of his voice, and the movement cost her. He could see that in the way her jaw set, in the way her breath caught, in the small and involuntary flinch of her eyelids. But her eyes, when they found him, were clear and bright and entirely her own.
"Captain," she said, and the southern lilt was still there, even now, even with the blood on her teeth. "You took your time."
Callum crossed the deck in three strides and went to his knees beside her. The wound was worse than he had hoped. The entry was high on the left shoulder, a burn-puncture from a sidearm at close range, and the exit had torn out through her back. She had lost a great deal of blood. She had lost more than she could afford. He knew, with the calm and practiced eye of a man who had seen too many wounds, that she did not have long.
"Pell," he said, without turning. "Get the med kit from the locker behind the comm station. Now."
The boy was gone and back in a moment, the kit in his hands, and Callum took it from him without looking up. He had the sealants out, the synthetic skin, the coagulant patches, and he worked with the efficient and unsentimental hands of a man who had dressed wounds in worse conditions than this. Soraya watched him work, and her breathing was shallow and irregular, but her eyes never left his face.
"Stop," she said, and the word had a force in it that made his hands pause. "Listen to me. There's no time for that."
"There's always time," Callum said, and he resumed his work, and the coagulant hissed as it met the air.
"There isn't." She lifted a hand, and the hand shook, and she set it on his wrist and gripped. "Listen. The ship. The one out there. I ran it before they hit us. I had a few seconds on the long-range before they cut the comms."
Callum stopped working. He looked at her, and her face was the color of old candle wax, but her eyes were still bright, still sharp, still entirely Soraya Ainsworth.
"It's a derelict," she said. "Cargo hauler, old registry, flagged out of Ashenmouth. The name on the transponder is the Meriv Threshold. I know that name. My father's ledgers have a whole chapter on the Meriv Threshold."
"Where?" Callum said.
She told him.
The coordinates came out of her in a rush, a string of numbers and references that he committed to memory as she spoke, because he had no way to write them down and no time to retrieve anything that could record them. The coordinates pointed to a place in the Ashen Strait, in a sector that he knew by reputation, a sector that the Concord patrol did not watch because there was nothing in it worth watching. It was the kind of place a man could disappear into, if he had reason to disappear.
"Callum." Her grip on his wrist tightened, and the shake in her hand was worse now. "The ledgers. My satchel. They took me for the satchel. They didn't find it. It's in the courier lock beneath the helm. You have to get it off this ship."
"I will," he said.
"You have to get it to the Threshold," she said. "There's someone on that ship who can read what my father wrote. There's someone who can finish what he started."
Callum's hands had stilled on the wound. He looked at her, and for the first time in the long minutes since he had entered the bridge, he let her see what was on his face. She looked back at him, and the brightness in her eyes had not changed.
"Finish it, Callum," she said, and the southern lilt was very soft now, almost a whisper. "Don't let it end here."
Her grip slackened on his wrist. Her head turned, just slightly, and her eyes found Pell onARR, who stood at the edge of the light with the empty med kit in his hands and tears on his face that he was not bothering to hide. She looked at him for a long moment, and then she looked back at Callum.
"Take care of the boy," she said.
The words were quiet, and they were the last words she said. Her eyes did not close, but the brightness in them went out, slowly, the way a lamp goes out when the fuel is spent. Her hand slipped from his wrist and came to rest on the deck beside her, palm up, the fingers curled just slightly.
Callum knelt beside her for a long time. He did not count the seconds. He did not move.
Pell made a sound, a small and broken sound, and then the boy went quiet, and the only sound on the bridge was the deep groan of the hull and the soft tick of cooling metal.
Callum reached out and closed her eyes. He did it with his thumb and forefinger, and the gesture was practiced and gentle, and it was not the first time he had done it.
He stood. The motion was stiff, and the bones in his knees popped, and he did not look down at her again. He crossed the bridge to the courier lock set into the base of the helm and keyed it open with the captain's override that he had not yet surrendered. The lock held a single item, a satchel of dark leather, the kind that the Concord couriers had carried in his father's day. He took it out. It was heavier than he had expected.
He slung the satchel over his shoulder, and the weight of it settled against his back, and he did not let himself think about what was inside.
"Pell," he said, and the boy's head came up, and the tears were still on his face but his jaw was set. "We're leaving. There is a shuttle on the upper port deck. We are going to get to it, and we are going to get off this ship, and we are going to find the Meriv Threshold. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, Captain," the boy said, and his voice was steady, and his brogue was very flat.
Callum crossed to the helm, and the dead screens reflected his face back at him, pale and grimed. He did not look at them. He looked at the viewport, where the stars, and beyond the stars, the long and patient dark.
He did not say goodbye to the body on the deck. There was no time, and there were no words that would have been equal to it.
He turned and walked out of the bridge, and the boy followed him, and behind them the Kotrom Kazarov kept its slow and final argument with the void.
The corridor outside the bridge was dark, and the deck plating rang under their boots as they moved toward the upper port lift. Pell Onarra stayed a half step behind Callum, and the boy's breath came in short, hitching pulls that he was trying to hide. He was not hiding them well. The satchel swung against Callum's hip with each stride, and the weight of it pulled at his shoulder in a way that felt almost like an accusation.
"Captain," Pell said, and his voice cracked on the word, and he tried again. "Captain, the shuttle's on a cold cycle. It won't have atmosphere in the tubes. We'll have to cycle it manually from inside the lock."
"I know," Callum said.
"And the power coupling on the port lock has been sputtering since Drumbreath."
"I know."
"And Soraya's lock is still on the bridge."
"I know."
The boy fell silent, and they moved through the dark.
The lift well was a vertical throat of shadow, and the manual release for the cage sat behind a hinged panel of brushed steel. Callum reached it, and the metal was cold enough to sting his fingers, and he cranked the release with three hard turns that set his forearm burning. The cage descended, and the sound of its arrival filled the corridor with a long, scraping complaint that echoed back from somewhere far below. They stepped in. He pulled the gate shut. The cage lurched, and began to climb.
At the second deck, the cage shuddered and stopped, and the cable somewhere above them gave a long, tired creak that sounded, in the quiet of the dying ship, very like a sigh.
"Captain," Pell whispered.
"Hold on."
Callum reached up and braced his palm against the underside of the upper deck's grating, and he hauled, and his shoulders screamed, and the cage inched upward, and the grating scraped aside. He pulled himself through first, and then reached down and hauled the boy up after him, and the boy's arms were shaking, and his face was very white, and he did not make a sound.
The upper port deck was the widest open space aboard the Kotrom Kazarov, and in better days it had been used for the loading of cargo and the exercising of crew who had been too long in the deep dark. Now it was a field of shadows and cold starlight, and the rail that bordered the vacuum of open space was a thin black thread against the silver sweep of the distant nebulae. The shuttle sat on its cradle at the deck's far edge, a stubby craft of the kind that the navy had once called a Pinnace, and its hull was the same tarnished grey as the Kazarov's.
They crossed the open deck, and the cold bit at Callum's fingers, and the deck plating rang under their boots. Behind them, somewhere in the guts of the ship, a pipe gave way, and the sound of escaping atmosphere was a thin, high whistle that faded, and then stopped. The silence that followed was the silence of a ship that was running out of reasons to keep arguing with the void.
At the shuttle's lock, Pell was right. The tubes were dark, and the manual crank for the inner seal sat beside the hatch, and its handle was rimed with the same grey frost that covered the rest of the lock assembly. Callum gripped it, and the metal burned his palm, and he turned it, and the mechanism resisted, and he turned it harder, and his shoulders cracked, and the crank gave, and the inner seal began to cycle.
"Get in," Callum said.
Pell climbed into the lock, and Callum followed, and the crank's resistance had left a blistering stripe across his palm that he did not look at. The outer seal was already cracked, and the air inside the shuttle was thin and tasted of cold metal and old sweat, and the instrument panel along the forward bulkhead was a scatter of dead gauges and one faintly glowing telltale that pulsed a slow amber. The shuttle's own battery had held a flicker of charge. That was something. That was, perhaps, enough.
Callum dropped into the pilot's chair, and the leather of it was stiff with cold, and the cushions creaked under him. He keyed the panel, and a handful of the gauges came back to life, and the amber telltale pulsed faster, and the shuttle's core began to cycle with a low, uncertain hum that sounded, in the stillness of the lock, like a heart that was not entirely sure it wanted to keep beating.
"Strap in," he said.
Pell strapped in. The boy's hands were shaking, and the buckle of his harness took him three tries, and Callum did not help him, because the boy needed to do it himself, and because Callum's own hands were not in any condition to help with anything that required fine motor control.
Callum keyed the release for the shuttle cradle, and the clamps that held the craft to the Kotrom Kazarov's deck gave way with a series of sharp metallic reports, and the shuttle lifted a fraction of an inch off the cradle, and settled, and waited. He keyed the outer lock. The cycle was slow, and the lock's motor whined with a sound that climbed and climbed and did not break, and then, at last, the seal opened, and the void of open space yawned at them through the open mouth of the lock.
He advanced the throttle, and the shuttle slid off the cradle, and out into the dark.
Behind them, the Kotrom Kazarov fell away, and it was a long, dark shape against the silver and black of the nebulae, and it was still bleeding its last thin wisps of air into the void, and its running lights were dark. The shuttle's sensors painted it in faint amber ghosts that hovered against the velvet black, and Callum did not look at it. He looked at the scope.
The scope showed the fleet of the Iron Concord arrayed across the dark, and at the center of them, the unmarked carrier that had launched the cutter that had done for the Kazarov. It was a long, flat shape of the kind that the Concord used for the moving of prisoners, and its running lights were the dim red of a vessel that did not wish to be noticed, and its hull was unmarked, and its comm array was idling on a band that the Concord reserved for the moving of cargoes that no one was meant to know about.
Callum set the shuttle's heading for the carrier's shadow, and the small craft turned, and the stars slid across the canopy, and the nebulae wheeled slowly past, and the Kazarov shrank to a dark mote behind them. He could feel the satchel's weight against his back, and he could feel, in the bones of his wrist, the faint vibration of the ship that was dying behind him.
"Captain," Pell said, and his voice was small, and his eyes were fixed on the Kazarov's dwindling shape. "Captain, the Kotrom. She's going to break apart. Isn't she."
"Yes," Callum said. "In a few minutes."
The boy was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "She was a good ship."
"Yes," Callum said. "She was."
He brought the shuttle into the carrier's shadow, and the long, flat shape of the unmarked vessel slid over them, and the stars vanished behind it, and the only light was the faint amber of the carrier's idling running lights, and the dim red glow of its comm array. The shadow was deep, and the shuttle's hull cooled further in it, and Callum could feel the cold of the metal through the seat of his trousers, and through the leather of his gloves.
He keyed the comm.
The band was quiet. He set the falsifier to the Concord's emergency distress protocol, and he composed the signal in his head as he had composed a hundred of them in his father's house, and he keyed the broadcast.
"Unidentified vessel," he said, and his voice was level, and the Arcturan coast clipped the edges of the vowels in the way that the Concord's monitors were trained to recognize as authentic. "This is the freighter Kotrom Kazarov, registered out of Drumbreath, under emergency convoy to the Ashen Strait. We have sustained catastrophic damage to the primary hull and are venting atmosphere. We require immediate assistance. We have wounded. Repeat, we have wounded. Any vessel in range, please respond."
He broadcast it on a loop. The falsifier would hold the signal's origin point steady on the Kotrom Kazarov's last known coordinates, and the carrier's comms officer, if he was listening, would hear the dying voice of a freighter that had been caught in the wrong part of the void, and he would respond. He would have to. The Concord's regulations were very clear about the requirement to render assistance to a vessel in distress, and the regulations were even clearer about the penalties for ignoring one, and the comms officer was a man who liked his career, and liked his pay, and liked the quiet life that came from not making waves.
The comm crackled. A voice came back, and it was bored, and it was the voice of a man who had been roused from a watch that he had expected to be uneventful.
"Unidentified vessel, this is the Iron Concord carrier Vespera. We have you on scope. State your registry and your cargo. Over."
Callum keyed the falsifier again, and the signal held steady on the Kazarov's last coordinates, and the Kotrom Kazarov, behind them in the dark, gave one long, last groan of metal that no one could hear, and then was silent. The comms officer would see the signal holding on the Kazarov's coordinates, and would see the Vespera's own scope showing nothing at those coordinates but the cold drift of debris, and would conclude, in the slow and weary way of a man who wanted to go back to his cup of tea, that the Kazarov had already gone, and that there was nothing to be done.
"Negative response, Vespera," Callum said. "Hull is failing. Cannot maintain comms. Any vessel in range, please respond. Over."
He keyed the broadcast on a loop, and set the falsifier to decay the signal over the next ten minutes, and then he keyed the shuttle's engines to idle, and the hum of the craft's core faded to a whisper, and the shadow of the carrier settled over them like a blanket of black velvet, and the only light was the faint amber of the carrier's idling running lights, and the dim red glow of its comm array, and the slow pulse of the shuttle's own dying battery.
He set the falsifier, and then he keyed the shuttle's comms to passive, and the band went quiet, and the only sound was the low whisper of the shuttle's life support, and the soft, hitching sound of the boy's breathing.
The comm crackled again. The bored voice of the Vespera's comms officer came back, and it was even more bored than before.
"Unidentified vessel, this is the Vespera. We are detecting no signal at your last reported coordinates. We are registering your distress signal as received and logged. We are proceeding on our original heading. Good luck. Out."
The carrier's engines flared, and the long, flat shape began to move, and the shadow that had sheltered them slid away, and the stars returned, and the nebulae wheeled back into view, and the Vespera's running lights dimmed to a faint red smear against the velvet black.
Pell let out a long, shaking breath. Callum did not let out anything. He sat very still, and the falsifier was still keying the dying Kazarov's signal into the void, and the battery was still pulsing its slow amber, and the shuttle was still holding its heading, and the carrier was still moving away.
Then his hand slipped from the throttle. His fingers had gone numb, and the cold had crept up his forearms, and the blister on his palm had burst, and the pain of it was a distant, faraway thing that he could feel but could not quite reach. The scope swam. The amber telltale dimmed. The shuttle's core gave one long, low, uncertain hum, and then the hum faded, and then the amber telltale faded, and then the scope went dark, and then the stars went out.
The last thing he felt was the weight of the satchel against his back, and the weight of the boy beside him, and the weight of the dark above them all.
He did not black out so much as he was set down by the dark. It was very gentle, in the way that the void was not, and it did not hurt, and it did not ask him anything, and it did not require anything of him, and for a long and quiet moment he let it hold him, and did not fight it.
Somewhere, very far away, a boy was calling his name.