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It has been years since he's seen her, so she could look different now; she should look different now. People do change, especially when they're the age that his daughters are—in their young twenties. They are the age where hairstyles can change as often as the weather. Outfits too.

  He hadn't heard from either of them in years and didn't know what they looked like or how they carried themselves. Their faces, in his mind, were still a little plump. But the reality was they'd probably thinned out by now. His girls were no longer girls. They were women now, and he tried to keep that in mind as he scanned these crowds.

  I’ll recognize her, right? A father will recognize his own daughter, even if it has been years and she’s grown to a woman. Even if she’s drastically changed her appearance. Even if … right?

  One video ends, and Lebbe starts the next without thinking.

  THREE

  The elevator deposits Caroline Grey onto the floor above Zulu's grand dome. She walks the long hall that leads to the control room, her heels clacking a staccato beat on the hard tile.

  She comes through the door and finds Keith and Rebecca each behind their terminals, and she's disappointed. Not by their presence, she likes both junior members of her team well enough. But this room was built for more than a staff of two. A wide screen at the front swallows up the place, but it wouldn’t—or wouldn’t as much—if Zulu had its full complement of staff. As it is, dozens of desks that sit just below the rail that Grey is now looking over go unused. The terminals never turned on. That part of the room is kept dark because it’s never needed.

  “Ma’am,” Rebecca says, snapping Grey out of her daydream.

  Grey spins. “Sorry.”

  “Are you ready to coordinate?”

  Grey pulls her datapad out from under her arm and swipes across its screen until she finds her daily itinerary. She looks up at Rebecca and smiles. “Ready now,” she says.

  Rebecca begins reading out the daily schedule and to which of Zulu’s four points she’s assigned each of the arrivals. Grey follows along on her own copy of the itinerary, nodding and making notes.

  Rebecca gets to the end of her list and waits for a response from Grey. “How does that sound?” she asks when none comes.

  Grey apologizes again. “I’m sorry. That works.”

  She hesitates again then asks: “Can you two do something for me?”

  Keith turns from his terminal and looks at the boss.

  “Can you listen and tell me if you hear something abnormal?”

  “Abnormal?” Keith asks. “Are we listening for anything specific?”

  Grey shakes her head. “Just if something sounds … off. Lebbe mentioned something to me this morning. He said there was something wrong with Zulu’s ‘hum.’ Said I should check it out. I can’t hear it, but if one of you can then I’d be more inclined to make something of this.”

  Neither Keith nor Rebecca respond. Both have their faces twisted in concentration. Grey concentrates too. Maybe here, in the quiet, I’ll be able to hear whatever Lebbe says is there. Or isn’t.

  The room is quiet for half a minute before Grey breaks it.

  “So?”

  Rebecca shakes no. Keith too.

  “Me either,” Grey says. “Thanks for humoring me. Back to work.”

  Both Rebecca and Keith turn back to their terminals. Grey heads out. Then she stops, hand already in the middle of the cool metal door headed to the hall. She turns back around.

  Whispered: “Damnit, Lebbe.”

  “Hang on, Rebecca.” She’s walking back to Rebecca’s terminal. “Before you get too deep into something, pull up the systems reports. I just need to see the numbers for myself.

  Rebecca closes the screen she’s been working in and punches up another. Charts and bars fill her screen. Grey leans over to study what she’s seeing.

  “How does that look to you?”

  “Things appear mostly normal to me,” Rebecca says.

  “What about that?” Grey points to the report focused on the water recycler. “Is that number right?”

  “It’s not wrong,” Rebecca says.

  “That’s not helpful. What’s that mean?”

  “Everything has a range,” Rebecca says. “That number is within the range of normal for the water recycler. It's on the low end, but it's not a bad reading.”

  “So we're in good shape?”

  “At this point, nothing's ringing any warning bells.”

  “Good. And if the bells do start going off?”

  “I'll get an alert and then I'll contact you.”

  “That's what I wanted to hear.”

  Gray turns and heads for the door. She actually leaves this time.

  +++++

  Grey gets back on the elevator to take her down to Zulu’s main floor, and she checks her watch. It's nearly time to meet Lebbe.

  The elevator doors open, and she steps off. It's just as crowded as it was earlier. The people this time, though, look a little more put together. She looks back at her itinerary. The ship of travelers heading out on some kind of private vessel to see the far away stars must have arrived early. This feels almost like real society again. The people here look like they're just out for a night on the town. At 11 o'clock in the morning, it is an early night. But time does tend to lose a little bit of its meaning this far out. When day and night is only signified by a time on a clock and that the rising and setting of some celestial body.

  Grey puts on a smile and greets some of Zulu’s new guests. She works her way across the main floor to the elevator on the opposite wall. She punches the call button and checks her watch: still a few minutes before she is supposed to meet Lebbe to look at the rogue ship.

  The elevator takes her down two floors, and she gets off at the end of the long hall that will lead her to Zulu’s military quarters. She looks at the doors at the end of what always feels like a forever walk, and she feels the butterflies kick up in her stomach. She’s like a young girl with a crush, knowing that the object of her affections is close.

  She shakes her head and pulls on the bottom of her jacket to snap it smooth and straight. She runs a stiff palm down the front of her skirt to do the same thing. Then she walks almost double time toward the double metal doors at the far end. From the end of the hall she can read the big letters painted across the doors: ISS. Stands for Independent Station Security. It’s not until she gets closer, nearly to the doors themselves, that she can read the smaller words painted there: Commander Lawrence McKibbon. And it’s seeing those words, that name. The makes her smile and gets those butterflies to doing backflips.

  She pauses outside the doors and looks at the name again. He’s a commander. I’m dating a commander.

  She hadn’t expected to find love on Zulu. She’d only seen this place as career opportunity. But here it was. And it was love, wasn’t it? She didn’t know for sure. She’d have told you it felt like love if you’d asked her. But was it too fast to be love? Or was this all thinking too much? She and McKibbon never talked about it. But, then again, they’d never had a proper date. They just sort of fell into this thing. She’d told herself then, and it wasn’t all that long ago anyway, that she wouldn’t try to put a label on it so quickly. She’d give it time to see where it went. But here she is outside of the door to Commander McKibbon’s unit and she is rubbing her fingers across his name and fighting off butterflies.

  Deep breath and then she pushes the door open. She steps through, and there he is. A smile instinctually paints itself across her face. He smiles back then looks around. They are alone.

  He hurries across the room and gives her a quick kiss hello.

  “Good morning,” she says.

  “It’s a good one now.”

  He waves her into his personal office and heads to his desk. She heads for one of the two chairs in front.

  “Busy day?” she asks.

  “Actually, for once, yes. Lots of paperwork to do today since we had an honest-to-God mission. Plus there’s clean up work to d
o on the hauler. Space is a surprisingly dirty place. I”ve got my crew inspecting and detailing the hauler. I’m handling the paperwork.” He taps the screen of the terminal in front of him for emphasis.

  “You haven’t started it yet, have you?”

  He shakes his head slightly. “How’d you know?”

  “Just a suspicion.”

  “It’s just so boring. I’m filling in blanks and answering nonsense questions.”

  “Then don’t,” Grey says. “Or at least not yet. Come with me and Lebbe and check out the woman’s ship. I assume you’ll need to supervise anyway since it’s officially your asset.”

  “Someone would. Might as well be me.”

  She smiles. “Speaking of Lebbe.”

  She checks her watch again. “Have you seen him?”

  McKibbon says no.

  “He’s late.” She looks to the door, like she can will Lebbe to appear and open it.

  “Want to wait for him?”

  “Mind if I stay here?”

  “Not if you don’t mind if I try to get started on these reports.”

  Both of them turn to their devices and get lost in obligations.

  Ten minutes pass. Then fifteen. Then twenty.

  Grey looks back to the door, concentrating harder on the handle, again willing it to open and for Lebbe to come through. But she doesn’t have that much control over what happens on Zulu.

  She closes the open application on her data pad and stands. “That’s it,” she says, “I’m calling it. He’s not showing.”

  McKibbon looks up. “Then let’s go.”

  Grey follows McKibbon through halls and into parts of Zulu she's never seen before. These are the places on her station that aren't quite complete. The people building Zulu had finished out one of the outer rings and the military had finished out portions of this second ring, but not all of this ring was complete. Parts of it were still open studs and metal bars and pieces of construction equipment that had just stopped being used, like whoever had been operating them left because their shift was up.

  It was clear even during Zulu’s construction that it was probably more station than was necessary. That we wouldn't need all of this because humanity would never make it out this far. So there are things here that gather dust and places that are never seen by anybody. And that's where McKibbon has decided to keep this ship, this rogue vessel that's now just staying quiet deep inside of Zulu.

  McKibbon fumbles down the wall for a switch then turns the lights on. They illuminate every bit of this wide open room and this rogue ship.

  “There you go,” McKibbon says.

  “Come look with me?” Gray asks.

  It’s the first time she’s seeing it up close. It’s not as big as she’d imagined, and it feels much more worn out than it looked through the cameras. On the screen, its sides looked smooth and straight. Here, in person, they just look like they’ve been beaten that way by a lifetime of flying between stations and mining camps and back to Earth. This was clearly a ship built for working.

  “What do you know about this ship?”

  “Not much,” McKibbon says. “I never really saw inside of her. That was left to my crew. Martin in grace. They can probably tell you more about what's inside her than I can.”

  Grey runs her fingers along the Mercy Bringer’s cool exterior. She digs a finger inside a pockmark left on the ship’s side, left there by space debris or some other intergalactic odditie.

  “Not very big,” Grey says.

  “I don't know. She's a pretty standard sized hauler.”

  Grey steps back a few dozen feet to look at the whole ship. “Maybe you can help with this,” she says. “Why doesn't she have any markings?”

  McKibbon steps back to join Grey. He shrugs. “Could be any number of reasons. Biggest thing is to remember that she's not required to have them. Most ships do, but if this one wasn't part of some kind of galactic government or trade organization or big corporation, no markings isn’t necessarily a flag that something’s wrong.

  “And why wasn't she showing registration when she was approaching Zulu? We couldn't get any information from her.”

  McKibbon shrugs again. “I wish I could tell you. Could be a new captain. Could be somebody who doesn't know that they have to keep certain documents stored in certain places on a ship’s servers so they can be accessed. Could be just a simple mistake. Is it weird? Sure. But it's not crazy weird. Not suspicious weird. At least that's not where I would go right away.”

  “Those are all good points,” Grey says.” And I tend to think like you do. I know there's other people on this station that want to make this out to be something more than it probably is. They want to find the mystery and the mysterious. I just think this is some captain got out here too far and got hit by pirates and wasn't ready for it.”

  “I have a feeling you're correct,” McKibbon says. “Look inside?”

  McKibbon’s team has covered the wide gap created by the pirates punching into the side of the ship with a tarp. He sweeps it to the side and the light from the room spills into the ship. Grey gets her first look, and what she sees steals her breath.

  It’s clear there was a struggle here. Everything is scattered. Containers are toppled, their contents spilled across the floor. The storage lockers on one of the walls are all broken open. Half of them have come unattached and are hanging from the from the ceiling, dangling like a broken bone.

  And there’s blood. So much blood. It’s dried to a coppery brown, but it’s everywhere. Streaked across the ground. Spattered over walls. A bloody handprint on the side of one of the toppled containers.

  “Whoa,” McKibbon says behind her.

  “Yeah,” Grey says. “I had no idea.”

  “Me either,” McKibbon says. “So this was really pirates.”

  “If there was any doubt before …” Grey doesn’t finish.

  “When my team was on the ship before, I’d tapped into their cameras, but neither of them spent much time in here. They both went opposite directions, and Grace seemed to find our pilot pretty quickly. I didn’t see this.”

  They both walk the hold in silence for a moment more when Grey announces: “You all found her in her seat, right?”

  McKibbon nods. “Basically.”

  “Then that’s where I’m going next.” Grey disappears down the hall at the far end of the hold, and McKibbon follows. The hall quickly gets dark, and McKibbon pulls as flashlight off his belt. He flips it on and a spot appears on the floor in front of both of them. It’s not much, but enough to highlight the hardened mound of melted metal that used to be the door that leads to the cockpit.

  Grey bends down to touch it. It’s cool and smooth, like a stone pulled from the bottom of a creek. McKibbon drops to a knee beside her.

  “Wow,” he says.

  Other than the melted door, the cockpit looks mostly intact. The fight wasn’t had here.

  Grey steps through the opening in the wall. “This is where they found her?”

  McKibbon points his light to a spot near the far wall. “Over there, I think. Looks like what I saw through their cams.”

  Grey moves across the room and kneels to look closer. It’s a bank of controls. None of it means anything to her.

  She stands and moves back toward McKibbon. She steps past him and heads back into the hall. “I think I’ve seen everything.”

  She quickly moves back through the hold, not pausing long enough to look at anything a second time, stepping back out into Zulu.

  “So?” McKibbon asks. “Thoughts?”

  “I don’t know,” Grey says. She’s now wondering now what she thought she’d find on the ship, what sort of insight she thought she’d suddenly have. Like answers were waiting there for her, some special story would unfold and all of this would suddenly make sense. Like she could help this woman in her medical bay make sense of what happened to her. Now she’s just more confused.

  SHe wants to look back to the ship one more time, g
et another look. See if there was something that looked different now that she’s seen the inside. But she can’t look up. Something inside here won’t let her. So, instead, she just stares at the floor in front of her.

  “You OK?” McKibbon asks.

  She looks up at him, tears beginning to gather at the corner of her eyes. “Honestly?”

  He grabs her and pulls her to him, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. She sinks into his chest and begins to sob.

  “Awww, lady…”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s just overwhelming.”