Belt Three. John Ayliff
looked up from the pilot console blearily, as if Olzan had pulled him out of a daydream. ‘We’re fuelled up and the cargo’s stowed. Our window for the spin to Xanadu lasts another twelve hours. We can set sail as soon as the new recruit’s on board.’
‘New recruit’s here, Brenn.’
‘Oh! Hello.’ Brenn looked startled, even though Keldra had been in the doorway for several seconds. He could sense everything that happened to the ship, but a lot of the time he only seemed half-aware of his own surroundings. But he was a good kid, and Olzan had never met a pilot who was quite all there in the head.
‘That’s nearly everyone,’ said Olzan. ‘Just got to introduce you to our engineer.’
Keldra had moved into the bridge and was peering at the captain’s console, or maybe at the hash of wiring beneath it. It looked as though her interest in ship engineering had overcome her nervousness, and from the way she was looking at the wiring, Olzan could easily believe she was the genius engineer her scores showed. She looked up at him with a puzzled expression.
‘There’s just the four of you? How do you manage without a full crew?’
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