The Cold Math

They gathered in the galley because the bridge had only the one chair and the galley had warmth, the residual heat of cooking and bodies, and on a ship that was quietly going cold you learned to count warmth as a resource. Bouchard came up last, grease to the elbows, and she did not need to say anything. Her face said it. The flux-coupler was not a thing you repaired with what a colony tug carried in its lockers. It was a thing you replaced at a yard, with cranes and a clean room and a part that cost more than the ship. "So we can't fix the drive," Rahn said, to put it in the room plainly. "Say it out loud so nobody's carrying it alone. We cannot fix the drive." Nobody argued. That was the crew Ines had: people who did not waste air arguing with a closed door. "Then the problem changes shape," Rahn went on. "We're not trying to get this ship to Khelin anymore. We're trying to keep forty-five people breathing until something can reach us. So. Two questions. How long can we last, and who's coming." Ines took the first. She had the numbers ready and she laid them out the way she laid out a course, plainly, without softening, because softening a number only meant someone hit the hard edge of it later by surprise. Fourteen months of food. Eighteen of air. The sleepers cost almost nothing — that was the mercy buried in the cruelty of it. Forty people in cold cradles drew a trickle of power and a whisper of air and no food at all. It was the five of them, awake, who ate the ship alive. "We could go under," said Petrov quietly. He was the youngest, the medical tech, and he had been the one who minded the cradles. "All five of us. Cold-sleep. Cut the drain to nothing. Stretch eighteen months of air into — I don't know. Years. Decades." "And nobody awake to mind the ship," said Bouchard. "Or the cradles. Or to answer if a rescue does come and needs a hand to dock." "Cradles run themselves." "Cradles run themselves until they don't," Petrov said, and there was something raw under it, because he had been the one who found the fault in Voss's cradle too late. "I've buried one man off this ship already. I'd rather not do it asleep." Rahn let the silence sit. He was good at letting silence sit; he understood that some decisions needed room to be afraid in before they could be made. "We don't decide that tonight," he said finally. "Ines. The second question. Who is coming for us, and when." And here was the part she hated, because here the arithmetic stopped being clean. "Khelin logs us as overdue in nineteen days," she said. "Standard response is a tender out of the station — but a tender's a short-hop craft, it can't reach this far. They'd have to charter something with legs. Best case, a long-range hauler diverts off the Ceres lane. Best case, that hauler reaches us in nine months." "And worst case?" "Worst case nobody charters anything, because we are forty-five people and a chartered rescue at this range costs more than forty-five people are worth on a company ledger." She said it flat, the way she said all her numbers, and she watched it land. "I'm sorry. You asked for the real one." Rahn nodded slowly. He did not tell her she was wrong. That was another thing she loved him for, and another thing she hated. "Then we don't wait to be worth rescuing," he said. "We make noise. Bouchard, I want the long-range array singing every band we've got, our position and our situation, on a loop, starting tonight. Somebody out there has legs and a conscience. We give them a reason to point this way." It was Halvani, the comms officer, who had been quiet in the corner the whole time, who lifted her head. "Captain," she said. "Something's already pointing this way." The room went still. "I picked it up an hour ago and I thought it was an echo of our own carrier. It isn't. There's a transponder out there. Faint, drifting, maybe four days off our drift vector." Halvani wet her lips. "It's broadcasting a registry number. And the registry number belongs to a ship that was lost with all hands forty years ago."