The Burn

The drive cut at ninety minutes and the weight vanished.

Five g to nothing, no taper, no gradient. One second he was pressed into the padding at four hundred kilos and the next he was lifting off the chair, the harness catching him, his stomach doing the thing his vestibular mods were supposed to suppress. They mostly did. Except for that first half-second where the world didn’t have a floor and his body had to be told there wasn’t going to be one for a while.

Then it passed and zero-g was just zero-g.

He unstrapped. The ship sounded different without the drive: the vibration gone, the low hum that had been in his teeth and his joints for ninety minutes, and what was left was the recycler and the electronics and the small thermal ticks of hull panels cooling as the drive heat bled off. Sounds you didn’t hear when the drive was running. Sounds that would be the ship for the next eleven hours.

Caro unstrapped and pushed aft toward the head. He moved the way he always moved in zero-g, hands and contact points, no corrections, no wasted momentum. Lev was good in zero-g. His proprioception mods made him good. Caro was good because he’d been doing it since before his mods knew what they were for.

Lev pulled up Mara’s Prospect on the main display and spread everything the network had across both screens.

The eight-year-old profile. The wrong population count. Thirty modification records, mostly founder generation. The network’s secondary database added trade records: processed organics and volatiles sold to passing ships, small quantities, irregular intervals. A supply manifest from four years ago listed materials purchased from a hauler called the Devi Anand: hull sealant, atmosphere filters, medical basics, a crate of raw biostock for modification maintenance. The kind of list a functioning homestead would produce. People who knew what they needed and got it when they could and didn’t tell anyone about it because nobody asked and nobody had the right to ask.

The asteroid was designated 1997 QR-4, about 800 meters on its long axis, carbonaceous, claimed by the Koss family. The structural diagram on file was from the original claim: the founder’s blueprint, what she’d planned to build when she was twenty-three and carving the first corridor with a rebuilt boring laser. Two and a half generations of expansion would have made this diagram a guide to the station’s core, maybe. Everything built since would be whatever they’d needed, in whatever order, from whatever was available.

He sent a message toward Mara’s Prospect. Network rescue, two aboard, ETA approximately fourteen hours, advise on current status and docking approach.

“Forty seconds,” Caro said, without looking up from the structural diagram. Light-speed delay at this range. Maybe forty-five.

Forty seconds came and went. Then a minute. Then five. Lev checked the signal path, checked the relay, checked the frequency. The message had gone out clean, direct transmission, no relay bounce. Mara’s Prospect was receiving. They just weren’t answering.

Caro came back and pulled himself into the second chair. Read the display without touching anything. The profile, the records, the diagram.

“Forward ring,” he said.

“What about it.”

“That’s where they expand. New construction, added on. It’s always the newest section.” He looked at the structural diagram, traced the founder’s layout with his eyes. “This is the core. Maybe the first two sections. Everything forward of that is whatever they built after.”

“So we won’t know the layout.”

“We won’t know the layout.”

Caro looked at the display for a while. Then: “They waited before the call. Two, three days.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s what you do.”

Lev had been thinking the same thing. Koss had said we are managing. You didn’t say you were managing unless you’d been managing long enough for the managing to be the problem. The atmospheric processing was going, not gone. The pressure problem was in the forward ring, not everywhere. Those were words from someone who’d watched something develop and hoped it would stop and it didn’t.

Caro looked at the display a while longer after that.

The modification records were the practical problem. Thirty profiles, founder generation, describing the modification suites those people had carried when they came out here. Cardiovascular reinforcement levels. Skeletal density targets. Radiation hardening. Cryo tolerance. Each profile a blueprint for a body, and each blueprint two and a half generations out of date.

The bodies on Mara’s Prospect would not match these blueprints. Modifications passed to children, but not cleanly. Every generation drifted from the specs. What the founders carried and what the third generation carried were related the way a copy of a copy is related to the original: the broad strokes intact, the details shifting. Two and a half generations of inheritance and drift and gray-market adjustment by whatever bio tech they’d had, using whatever materials and protocols were available, meant every person on that station was a revision of a revision of a document nobody had the original of anymore.

For a rescue operator, this meant guessing. The protocols said verify the modification profile before treatment. Stimulants safe for one cardiovascular type could overload another. Pain management depended on which generation’s nerve clusters you were working with, because modified nervous systems metabolized pharmaceuticals at rates that varied by lineage, and the distance between a therapeutic dose and a dangerous one was sometimes a question of parentage. Without profiles, you read the body in front of you. Pulse, skin color, reflexes, the densities you could feel through the tissue. You built a rough profile from what the body told you and you treated off that and you hoped you were right. Every rescue operator in the mid-belt did this. The protocols said otherwise. The protocols had been written by people with complete files.

A response came from Koss forty minutes later. Forty minutes, for a signal that should have taken less than one. Audio, brief, the same controlled voice he’d heard in the distress call.

“Paran, we copy. Dock 2, ventral approach, standard orientation. Forward ring is sealed, we’ve pulled everyone aft. Atmospheric processing is on bypass. Situation is holding. We’ll have someone meet you at the lock. Please use the approach we’ve provided. Thank you for responding.”

Situation is holding. She was still managing. But the response had taken forty minutes and it sounded like it had taken thirty seconds. Every word placed. The docking instructions, the sealed sections, the approach, all of it laid out like terms, not a request. It sounded like the end of a conversation he hadn’t been part of.

He prepped the med bay. In zero-g, everything that would need to be reachable under variable gravity had to be secured: trauma kit, pharmaceutical rack, splints, sealant, the portable diagnostic that could give him a rough cardiovascular read in thirty seconds. He checked the diagnostic’s calibration. Checked it again, because the people he’d be pointing it at didn’t have profiles and the diagnostic’s best guess was going to be the only guess he had.

Caro prepped the approach kit. EVA suits, patch materials, portable atmosphere, cutting tools. He moved through the storage compartments with the efficiency of someone who’d packed for a hundred calls and unpacked after ninety-seven of them without using half of what he’d brought.

When the prep was done, Caro heated two ration packs and handed one to Lev without asking what he wanted. The ration pack was rice in a sauce that tasted like garlic and nothing else. They ate in the cockpit, tethered loosely to their chairs, Mara’s Prospect’s file still on the display and neither of them looking at it. Caro ate his pack methodically, squeeze bottle in one hand, angled to keep the sauce from drifting. They’d done this a hundred times. The pre-call quiet. The hours where the prep was finished and the work hadn’t started and you were just two people in a ship with nothing left to do about it. Lev ate his rice.

The hours passed. Lev slept for two of them, or floated in the bunk restraint net and let his body go still and hoped his brain would follow. It didn’t. Zero-g sleep was its own problem: arms drifting up in front of his face, orientation gone, the brain solving problems twelve hours away with data from two and a half generations ago. He lay there until lying there stopped being any kind of rest and then he got up.

He was awake when the nav alarm chimed for the flip. Already strapped in. His neurological mods would keep him sharp regardless, clearing the cortisol, managing the fatigue, keeping his reaction time where it needed to be. This wasn’t free. The mods borrowed against something to do it, ran processes that would eventually show up on the biomarker panel he hadn’t checked in four weeks. But nobody had ever scrubbed a rescue call because their biomarkers were trending in a direction they’d rather not look at. You didn’t check, because checking might tell you something, and knowing might mean not going, and not going wasn’t a thing you did.

The ship rotated. Thrusters fired, the Paran swung 180 degrees on its lateral axis, and the stars tracked slowly across the fogged viewport and stopped. Drive pointed toward where they were going. Nose toward where they’d been.

The drive fired. Five g settled over him again. His shoulder seized under the harness strap. Ninety minutes.

Forty minutes into the deceleration burn, the sensors started resolving Mara’s Prospect. The asteroid first: a dark, irregular shape against the star field, growing on the approach display. Then the station, visible as lights on the surface and clustered at one end. Habitation modules. Docking structures. The glint of sealed viewports. The optical feed sharpened as the distance closed.

Some of the lights were steady. Some were not. A section on the port side, forward of the main cluster, was dark. No lights, no transponder, nothing. The forward ring, if that was the forward ring, wasn’t having pressure problems. It was off.

And adjacent to the dock, toward the dark section, a habitation module that wasn’t sitting right. A few degrees off its mounting against the rock. The kind of displacement that meant something structural had shifted underneath it.

“Caro.”

“I see it.”

The optical sharpened as they closed. The viewports in the dark section were frosted from the inside, ice on the glass. Decompressed. That section wasn’t powered down. It was open.

Koss had said the situation was holding. Maybe it had been, when she’d said it. That was hours ago. A long time for a situation that was already past the point where someone who had never called for help before picked up the comms and asked.

The station grew on the approach display. Lev started the docking checklist.