Spreading Shadows

"Ten minutes on the scope," Nigel said. "It's that time."

"Take eight," Rylee said.

"Eight. You spoil me."

He unfolded himself from his bunk nook and worked his way aft, hand over hand in the cold, to the patch job he still called a sensor suite. It was a docking scanner once. He'd rebuilt it out of the pod's dead autopilot and a salvaged relay board, and there was a crack across the corner of the housing he stopped meaning to fix. Every cycle he begged eight minutes of power for it, and every cycle it showed him nothing. He ran the sweep anyway. Rylee gave him the power without being asked twice, eight minutes off the reserve, and logged the eight minutes in the book.

She made her walk while he worked. Forward first, past the recycler, where Lucas slept sitting up with one hand resting on the intake housing. He'd fed that machine by hand for so long he did it in his sleep now, and the machine ran better for him than it ever had for the manual. Somebody had taped a strip of ration foil over the warning label on the intake housing a long time ago, and it was still there. The old burn scarring caught the worklight along his jaw and neck, and the marks beneath it — the ones no fire made — sat quiet under his skin. She didn't look at those long. The intake gauge was reading a quarter down again and she made a note to raise it with him when he woke. She marked him and moved on.

Chelsea and Kate shared the wide bunk by the port, the child folded into the woman, both still. Chelsea's hands lay outside the blanket. The green tracery on them had climbed no higher in a long while. Marcus had wedged himself into the equipment bay with his drive case held against his chest, both arms crossed over it in his sleep.

Five sleepers and a watchman. Rylee counted them without meaning to. She'd been counting them the whole drift — two years of it, or near two, by a clock none of them trusted anymore. The pod's chrono said one thing and their sleep said another, and the ration math didn't agree with either of them. The child hadn't aged a year through any of it. Rylee still put a date at the top of the log every cycle and initialed under it. They'd stopped arguing about the date around the time they'd stopped transmitting, and both of those were her call. Sending burned power they couldn't spare, and the sphere never answered once. She had quit sending after the first year. The transmitter stayed racked under the console with a cover over it, and the cover stayed on.

Nobody was coming. They'd settled that between themselves a long way back, without ever saying it in front of Kate.

Out the little port there was nothing to mark where the Void had been. No scar, no glow. Just stars, ordinary and cold, in a piece of sky that had eaten a colony ship and a moon base, and then died — collapsed in on itself behind their fleeing pod for no reason any of them could name. They floated in the empty place it left. Some cycles Rylee thought the emptiness was the worst thing she'd ever looked at. It didn't even have the decency to look like a grave. The port glass was cold against the back of her hand.

"Rylee."

Nigel's voice was wrong. Too careful.

She was at his shoulder before he said anything else. The display was the small square one out of the dead autopilot, and it sat crooked in the housing where the bracket had never been right. It held a single hard return, and while she watched it refreshed and put the same mark up again.

"Debris?"

"Debris doesn't correct course, not over three sweeps." He tapped the track history. Three sweeps, a position for each, a clean line. "That's something under power, and that means it's a ship."