Kris gave Idris a wave from where she sat on the floor, Kittering crouching beside her. The alien wasn’t much more than a metre high but was half again as wide, lending him a crab-like gait when he moved through their human-designed corridors. High-status Hannilambra back home might lavishly ornament their armoured backs and the shield-like surfaces of their protective arms, to show their wealth and status. Kittering’s were set with cheap screens that he used to communicate or rented out as advertising space.
‘Suspension pods . . .’ said Olli. Idris glanced up to the bay’s main screen, flicking from one drone feed to another. Here was the main cargo space of the Gamin, lined with suspension beds. Their irregular layout and lack of uniformity spoke of the haste of their installation. None of the drones were picking up any power signatures.
‘Could be worse,’ Kris said, and he could only nod.
‘It will, of course, become worse.’ Medvig’s cheery tones issued from their metal torso.
‘Next cargo bay. I’m opening her up,’ Olli reported. And then, ‘It’s worse.’
Idris stared dully at the screen, noting that the conversion of the Gamin from cargo to passenger craft hadn’t been complete by the time of its evacuation. That hadn’t stopped its crew from nobly taking on as many people as they could.
There were no suspension pods in the next chamber, just bodies. They were vacuum-withered, dried-up like sticks, many with ruptured eyes and self-inflicted wounds. A few desiccated hands clutched makeshift weapons. Idris watched a gun drift past, an old-model accelerator that could certainly have put a pellet through the hull; perhaps that had lost them their atmosphere.
The Vulture’s drones pushed in through the open hatch, sending rigid bodies spinning away. It looked as though there had been a couple of hundred people packed into this hold, and they had not gone peacefully. Idris could almost hear an echo, across time, of the dreadful all-consuming panic that had swept through the hold like a flash fire; the madness gifted to each one of them alone.
It wouldn’t have just been the knowledge that they were going to die. People could be remarkably sanguine when all hope was gone. It was that they had gone through unspace, awake. It was something he himself was intimately familiar with, but then he was an Intermediary. It was what he had not only been trained for but extensively engineered for. One of the lucky ones who’d survived the process.
Unspace travel while awake wasn’t a death sentence; it wasn’t guaranteed to drive a person into a stage of permanent madness either. But both outcomes were entirely possible. Unspace was different. Things from real space – such as humans – had a tenuous existence there. It was a terrible, lonely place, until you sensed something . . . other. Then being alone became preferable to the alternative. Regular navigators retired to their suspension beds after setting a course along the Throughways, and their ships woke them when they were ready to exit unspace at their destination. It was only when you went off the beaten track that someone had to keep the lamps burning, gazing into the abyss and having it gaze right back. That was what Intermediaries did. That was the invaluable service people like Idris provided to the post-war world, for as long as their minds held together.
Things went further downhill after Olli found the Gamin’s lone power signature, the one system still working in the whole ship. She tracked it down to one corner of the hold, finding an antique mediotype projector bolted lopsidedly to the wall. It was looping through an array of entertainment, brightly coloured figures that were partway between human and extinct Earth animals. They were still capering about, having adventures, teaching vacuum-silent lessons about space safety and friendship and making do. Because someone had wanted the children to have something to take their minds off the journey when they left their homes and went into space. Because of course there had been children here. Because of course.
After enough time had passed, Rollo’s rough voice came through to them. ‘All right, my sons and daughters. Olli, Medvig, bring in anything loose that’ll fetch a price. Then let’s get this tomb back to Roshu. Soonest started, soonest finished. And Barney?’
‘What now?’ the engineer demanded from wherever he was in the ship.
‘Run some component comparisons. I know she’s old, but there’s probably something on that ship that we could reuse on this one.’
3.
Idris
Back Before, nobody came to Roshu for their health. It was a poisonous planet, the atmosphere full of sulphur, chlorine and arsenical compounds, the ground heavy with selenium and cinnabar. The external temperature could cook eggs even near the poles, which was where all the habitats were. The initial Roshu colony had been a small mining concern. After Earth, a lot of refugees ended up there. They lived out of their failing ships for a generation, while people built makeshift shelters on the ground or in orbit. Some ships failed, some shelters did too, yet people kept arriving. Roshu had been one of the few colonies that hadn’t needed to encourage refugees to leave, but it was never going back to being a little mining colony. Enough people stuck from the Polyaspora, and the same Throughways that brought the refugees also made Roshu a stopover for merchants and haulers.