A Voice on the Band

The ship was called the Caedmon Reach, and Ines found her in the company's loss registry, in the long grey list of vessels marked with the small black cross that meant gone. Caedmon Reach. Colony hauler, Brae-class, lost forty-one years prior on the Outer Khelin run. Forty crew, two hundred sleepers. Cause of loss: unknown. Last contact: a routine position report, and then nothing, and then four decades of silence and a black cross. "Two hundred sleepers," Petrov said. He had come to stand at her shoulder, and he said it the way you say a number you cannot hold. "They never found her." "They never looked very hard." Ines pulled the old charts. "Forty years ago this route wasn't mapped the way it is now. A ship goes quiet out here, you don't send a search, you send a black cross. It's cheaper." "And now she's talking." That was the thing none of them could put down. A dead ship's transponder ran on the ship's own power. Forty years of drift should have drained the Caedmon Reach to a cold dark husk a very long time ago. A husk did not broadcast. A husk did not sing a registry number into the dark on a steady carrier. Something on that ship was still making power. Rahn called it in the galley, the second night, with the same plainness as before. "Here is what we have," he said. "We have a tug that cannot move itself and a derelict that cannot move at all, four days off our drift. We have maneuvering thrusters — not a drive, but enough to nudge our vector. Ines has run it. If we spend a third of our thruster fuel, we can intercept the Caedmon Reach. If we don't, we drift past her in nine days and never come closer to anything again." "And what do we get for a third of our fuel," Bouchard said. It was not a challenge. It was the right question, asked plainly, and Rahn nodded at her for asking it. "Maybe nothing," he said. "Maybe a forty-year-old husk full of forty-year-old dead, and we've spent fuel we can't get back. Or." He let the or sit. "Or a Brae-class hauler has four times our consumables aboard and most of them never opened, because most of her crew died before they could eat them. Air. Water. Food. Parts. Maybe a flux-coupler in a Brae-class is close enough to ours to matter. Maybe there's a working drive on that ship and a working drive is a way home." "And maybe," said Petrov, very quietly, "there are two hundred people in those cradles, and some of them are still alive." Nobody had said it out loud yet. Petrov said it, because Petrov minded cradles, because to Petrov a sleeper was never an abstraction. The galley went very still around the thought of it. Two hundred souls, forty years cold, and a ship that still somehow made the power to keep them so. "That's a lot of maybes for a third of our fuel," Bouchard said. "It is," Rahn agreed. "But the alternative is one certainty, and the certainty is that we drift, and we ration, and we hope a hauler with a conscience finds us before the air runs thin. I've spent thirty years trusting other people's consciences to find me. I'd rather spend the fuel." He looked around the galley, at the five faces that were all the crew he had left. "But I won't spend it alone. We go to the Caedmon Reach, or we don't, together. Say it." One by one, in the warm and dwindling air of the galley, they said it. Even Bouchard, last, with her arms folded and her jaw set, said it. "All right," Rahn said. "Ines. Plot the burn." She was already plotting it. She had been plotting it since the registry first gave her that small black cross, because a navigator's hands moved toward a course the way a tongue moved toward a missing tooth. She fed the thruster sequence to the helm and watched the dead ship's faint transponder steady in the plot like a single distant lamp. Four days. Four days across the salt-dark between stars, toward a voice that had been calling for forty years, and had only now, at last, been heard.