‘Anyway,’ Idris put in. ‘We have something else to do first.’
Spacer funerals weren’t elaborate. There was no grand ritual to it, no protected ceremony, fancy hangings or pretty caskets. Most of the human race simply hadn’t been able to pack those old-Earth traditions when the evacuation call went out.
And so the ‘spacer’s wake’ tradition came about.
‘Captain Rollo Rostand,’ Olli announced. They were in the Vulture’s drone bay, because there was more room there. It was a novelty for spacers to have a physical body present. Not knowing what else to do, Kris had printed out Rollo a fresh set of shipboard clothes and dressed him in his father’s old jacket. He had newly printed sandals on his cold, dead feet and they were slightly askew. Kris kept wanting to adjust them, as though Rollo might get blisters wherever he was going.
Olli took a deep breath. ‘Born 73 After, on Orbital Nexus Seven over Tormaline,’ she said, and looked around at the others.
‘Terrible gambler,’ Kris put in dutifully, staring down at the man’s body. He had been by far the best captain she and Idris had signed on with, despite his flaws. Because of his flaws. No slave-driver, no profit-chaser, no margin-cutter, and so never quite the successful man of business some of his peers were. But a far better captain to work under, for all that.
‘Too quick with his fists, by half,’ Idris said faintly. He looked to Kittering but the Hanni was tilted forwards, screens dark and arms motionless.
The silence stretched out until Kris elbowed Solace. Olli looked as though she would object to the Partheni getting a word in, but then scowled and subsided.
‘No sense of delegation.’ And to her credit, Solace looked as upset as any of them, despite only having known Rollo for a short time. Kris wondered what they’d taught her to expect of a Colony man with a command position. Nothing good, probably, so maybe meeting Rollo had shaken her preconceptions.
Olli sighed. ‘Our father, he was, our grandfather, our uncle, a captain of his own ship. Loyal to his crew and safe hands. Died in space where we all die, where he belonged. One of ours, he was.’
Kris mumbled the last few words along with her, adding this grief to the others stored up inside her, the way spacers did. And some time in the future there’d be somewhere to drink, some place that didn’t need clear minds and constant maintenance to keep it together, and then the grief would get a round bought for it, and more than one, and have its edges dulled.
‘This is not . . . not not correct,’ Kittering’s translator piped up. ‘Observation of set protocols is recognized and observed but . . . But no, not for him. Grand tragedy of a lost nurse demands pledges of furtherance and dedication.’
They stared at him. Kris glanced to Olli, finding the same lack of understanding there.
‘He produced zero offspring in continuation of his germ line,’ Kittering’s translator rattled, turning Hanni concepts into their nearest human equivalents. ‘He dedicated himself to the nurturing of others, of us, of we. He nursed us. He was our teacher. Our teacher.’ And there were nuances of meaning that just weren’t coming through. ‘I pledge to him that when I give up myself to continuation, he shall be added to the pool of names. I dedicate nineteen eggs to Captain Rollo Rostand.’
Later, Kris slept on this, and on what she knew of the Hannilambra, and thought she understood. Right then, none of it had made sense – save that the little alien was as upset as any of them and needed to express this in his own way, beyond the stripped-down envelope of a spacer’s funeral. Before they sent Rollo off to roam the universe on his last, eternal voyage.
*
And after that: there was the box. It was still on the Vulture’s command console, open and waiting for them, its contents shimmering within a field Olli had not been able to analyse.
‘Some kind of gravitic interaction,’ was all she could say for certain. ‘No idea how there’s any kind of generator in that little box. And you don’t feel any push or pull, even when holding the case.’
‘Open it up,’ Kris suggested. ‘See how it’s done.’ When the drone specialist looked at her, she shrugged. ‘If we find out, the information alone would be worth . . .’
‘Every Tothiat assassin in the Hegemony after us,’ Idris suggested wryly.
‘It’s Hegemony tech . . .’ Olli squinted at the box as though trying to see into its substance. ‘You ever hear of Transient Component Engines? The high-level Essiel stuff – not the toys they give to their underlings. They generate ghost fields in fluids, so that the substrate springs into the shapes they need. Infinitely reconfigurable tech . . . you need a toaster, it’s a toaster; you need a cutting torch, it’s a cutting torch.’