Unfortunately, the world they’d been targeting wasn’t in the orbit they’d been expecting. It was just slightly too close to its star. They’d been fooled by the fact that they’d seen O2 absorption spectra in its atmosphere. There was some oxygen there, but there was no liquid water, because the surface temperature was too high to permit it. Theory said that shouldn’t have been possible, but the universe is a funny place, and it was what it was. Their best guess was that the planet may have been habitable—may in fact have been inhabited by something or other that was able to split carbon from CO2 and produce free oxygen—but that a runaway greenhouse effect, something like the one that was pushing the limits of habitability of some parts of old Earth in the years before the Diaspora, had fairly recently sterilized the place. If they were right, the residual oxygen they’d detected just hadn’t had time to bind itself out of the atmosphere yet.
With a hundred years to terraform, they might have been able to make it work. They didn’t have a hundred years, though. With the condition of their ship, they probably didn’t have ten. So, they beamed their findings back home, then put their ship into a stable orbit, doped everyone who wanted to be doped, and popped their air locks. As Two could tell you, explosive decompression isn’t a fun time, but at least it’s quick.
Reading that got me thinking about Two. That sent me into a spiral that lasted the better part of a month.
The thing that pulled me back out of that spiral was Nasha.
I’d seen Nasha around, obviously, going all the way back to Himmel Station. When you’re living in a giant canister with fewer than two hundred other people, you see everybody around at some point. I’d never spoken to her, though—mostly for the same reason I’d never spoken to most of the other people on the Drakkar. Lots of them didn’t want anything to do with me, and I compensated by not wanting anything to do with them.
We met for real about a year after the collision that wound up killing One and Two. We were well into the coast phase of the journey by then, humming along through the vacuum at just a hair under point-nine c, weightless and on short rations and bored out of our minds. Command had ordered all personnel to spend at least two hours of every duty cycle in the carousel—nominally so that we’d still have bones and whatnot when we finally made landfall, but actually I think so that we’d be less likely to start murdering one another just to break up the monotony.
The carousel was exactly what it sounds like: a spinning ring around the waist of the ship a hundred and twenty meters across, with a flat, rubberized inner surface about six meters wide. They had it going at three revs per minute, which was fast enough to get us about half a standard g, but also slow enough that you could stand upright without having the Coriolis effect bring up your lunch.
We were supposed to spend our time in the carousel working out, but as long as we were in there for the designated time, nobody who mattered really seemed to care what we did. There were a few prigs who’d shoot you a look as they ran past if you weren’t doing squat thrusts or yoga or practicing Krav Maga, but as far as I know none of them ever actually went to the trouble of filing a delinquency report on anyone.
I’d been pretty good about jogging around the ring at least a few times every day, right up until One and Two went down. After that, though, my motivation dropped off pretty radically. Not much point in worrying about bone mineral density and muscle tone when your bones and muscles have the shelf life of an open package of yogurt, right? I started bringing a tablet to the carousel, finding a place as far away from the squat thrusters as I could to plant myself against a wall, and reading through the records of other beachhead colonies. That’s when I learned all about Asher’s World, and Roanoke, and a bunch of other recent disasters.
Needless to say, reading that kind of stuff didn’t increase my motivation to exercise.
So one day I was there in the carousel, squatting against the wall and reading through a first-person account of a near-failure that had occurred almost a thousand years prior, on what’s now one of the most heavily populated worlds in the Union. The issue there was persistent agricultural failure, which they eventually traced to a virus that was endemic in the soil. They didn’t have bio-cyclers then, and the narrator made it sound like things got pretty hungry before they cracked the problem.
I was just getting to the part where the head of the colony’s Biology Section, who also happens to be the narrator, heroically saves the day with a tailored phage that clears the way for human-friendly plants to grow—while coincidentally wiping out the microorganism that had made it possible for local plants to grow, and thereby completely destroying the native ecosystem—when a boot nudged my shoulder, hard enough to knock me half over. I looked up to see a woman in black Security togs standing over me, arms folded across her chest.
“Hey,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be doing push-ups right now?”
I glared up at her. She broke into a grin and squatted down beside me.
“I’m just messing with you. You’re the Expendable, right?”
“I’m Mickey Barnes,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Mickey Barnes, huh? Don’t you mean Mickey3 now?”
Ouch.
“Yeah,” I said. “That.”
She settled back against the wall. I sighed, straightened up, and tucked my tablet into my chest pocket.
“I’m Nasha Adjaya,” she said. “Combat pilot.”
I glanced over at her. Her braids had fallen across her face, but I could still see the grin.
“Combat pilot, huh? You must be pals with Berto.”
“Gomez? Yeah, he’s okay. Better pog-ball player than a pilot, but we get along.”
I smiled. “You’re not wrong. I wonder which we’ll need more of when we get where we’re going.”
She leaned toward me. “You’re not questioning the importance of combat pilots to the mission, are you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of. Do they need a lot of those on beachhead colonies? I mean, do we expect to make landfall on a planet that’s already got an air force?”
Her grin widened. “Guess you never know, right? Just ’cause it’s never happened before doesn’t mean it never will.”
“There’s only two of you,” I said. “Better hope it’s a small air force, right?”
She laughed. “Doesn’t matter, friend. I’m a hell of a pilot.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure that’s true.”
We sat in silence then. I was starting to wonder whether I should pull my tablet back out, or maybe just get up and leave, when she turned to look at me. I looked back. The grin was gone and her eyes had narrowed. Her irises were so dark they were almost black.
“So,” she said. “What’s dying like?”
I shrugged. “Like being born, only backward.”
“Ha! I like that.” She smiled. “You know, you’re pretty cute for a zombie.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I use a lot of moisturizer.”
She touched my hand, then ran one finger up along my forearm. “I bet you do,” she said.
Her smile morphed into a leer.
“I just bet … you … do.”
* * *
IT WAS LATER, and we were back in my rack, halfway to naked and tangled around one another in the darkness, when she said, “I’m not a ghost chaser, you know.”
That was the first time I’d heard that term. It definitely wasn’t the last.
“Ghost chaser?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “You know.”
I waited for a while for her to go on. Instead, she ran her hand up my back and nipped at my ear hard enough to make me wince.
“No,” I said. “I do not.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, you know there’s a bunch of Natalists on this boat, right?”
I scowled. “Yeah, I’m aware. That’s one of the reasons I keep to myself so much.”
“Well,” she said. “Not all of them want you to keep to yourself.”