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  “Scans back yet?” Martin studies the new, clearer image of the ship. The hole in the side looks like a mouth open wide, ready to snap shut at any second.

  “Ship is cold as ice, but bio scan returned a body. Whether or not it’s alive in undetermined. Looks to be near the front of the ship, but let’s not limit our search.”

  Martin and Grace acknowledge and put on their helmets. The opening for their eyes is small, narrow slits that make the armor look like it’s scowling. More intimidating, as if the size wasn’t enough.

  “Now go to the hold. Lock and seal my door. Once you are both set I’ll open our cargo hold doors.”

  Martin and Grace leave, and McKibbon starts to bring the back end of his hauler around. It slips like it’s on ice, and the hauler is soon flying like a sideways brick. Metal groans as the bay door opens in the cargo hold behind him. McKibbon reverses the thrusters to slow their approach, and the hauler comes to an eventual stop a few feet from the stranded ship.

  “You are clear to board,” he says into a mic that pipes him into Martin’s and Grace’s helmets.

  +++++

  McKibbon watches Martin and Grace drift across the gap to the stranded ship. They each flip a switch on the side of their suit, activating the gravity generator. Each land hard, like a magnet suddenly near steel.

  “We’re onboard. Grace is going to take everything to the right. Cargo hold and cockpit. I’ve got the left. What should be crew quarters and equipment storage.”

  They take heavy, awkward steps. Fake gravity turns both of them back into toddlers for a few moments.

  “Scans say that you should have one body, Grace. It’ll be in the cockpit. Grey said they had communication with someone in here, a woman. I assume that’s who you’ll find. Martin you should be all alone. I’ve got both of your cams pulled up in here, so don’t feel like you need to narrate everything. Just call out the highlights or anything unusual.”

  Martin and Grace split, each disappearing into the black. McKibbon moves their helmet cams to his main display.

  Grace is slow. Cautious. Uncertain. The light from her helmet makes a slow scan of the cargo hold. It open space and all chaos. Storage lockers have been pulled or blasted from the walls. Blaster fire has scorched everything it’s hit. And blood. So much blood.

  She heads toward an opening at the far end. McKibbon watches a moment longer then switches to Martin’s view. He’s pulling tops off of storage bins and tossing them behind him. Most of the bins are empty. Martin stirs the contents of those that aren’t with an arm.

  He moves to the overhead storage, breaking locks only to find most of these cabinets empty too.

  “Heading to the equipment room,” Martin announces.

  McKibbon watches Martin squeeze through a narrow hall, the shoulders on his armor scraping the walls. He steps into the main equipment room. It isn’t more than a series of lockers. Door after door after door. An audible sigh comes through Martin’s mic. He’s pulling against the lock on the first door when Grace speaks up. McKibbon switches back to her view.

  “Sir,” she says. “I’ve looked over this entire room, and there’s no one here.”

  She slowly pans the floor and then under the control panels.

  “Wait.”

  Grace’s view is covered in shadows, and on McKibbon’s screen he sees mostly black.

  Grace begins speaking again, but not to McKibbon.

  “Ma’am.”

  She leans in closer, and McKibbon begins to see it, to see her. It’s a woman, their woman. She’s curled onto the floor under the control panels. She’s in a full flight suit.

  “Ma’am,” Grace says again, but the woman doesn’t respond.

  McKibbon hears Martin enter the room.

  “We have her?” Martin asks.

  McKibbon is now just an observer as the two soldiers begin to work together.

  They try to get a response from her. They shake her. They prod her. Nothing works.

  McKibbon puts himself back in their ears. “Can one of you just grab her? Carry her back over here? We’ll put her in sick bay.”

  “I’ll get her out from underneath the panels.” Grace says.

  “Gently,” McKibbon reminds her. “You’re in that big suit. Mind its power.”

  “Roger that,” she says and begins to slide the woman out into the open. Grace bends to pick up the woman, but McKibbon stops her.

  “Check for vitals,” he says through the comms in her helmet.

  Grace lays a gloved hand on the woman’s stomach and waits for her suit’s med app to take a reading. The results pop up on the overhead display. She starts giving McKibbon a rundown even though he can see the reading on her screen.

  “Pulse is very weak, but it’s there. Also needs oxygen.”

  “Yeah,” McKibbon says. “I don’t know enough to tell whether or not those numbers are good or bad. Bring her back across. We’ll get her set up in here and let the med bots take a look at her.”

  “Roger that,” McKibbon and Grace say in unison.

  FIVE

  McKibbon turns back to the monitors and watches Grace and Martin work to bring the woman out of the rogue hauler. Getting three armored bodies through the tight halls of this ship clearly isn’t easy. It looks like they are moving furniture, McKibbon thinks, then reminds himself that they aren’t carrying a sofa, but another human.

  He leaves the bridge of the ship and heads back to the medical bay to get things set there. The lights come on slow, the halogen inside taking a while to warm up. “First time in years they’ve had to do that,” McKibbon reminds no one.

  He turns his attention to the control panel to the right of the door once the lights are all the way up. He enters commander codes into the keypad next to the screen and the unit chatters to life.

  “Welcome, commander. What seems to be the problem?”

  This was always weird, talking to a machine like it’s an animate object. It shouldn’t be. McKibbon knew that. Voice instruction had been the standard for hundreds of years. So, why was it awkward? He hesitated.

  “What seems to be the problem?” The med bot unit prompted him again.

  “Sorry. I don’t know. We are bringing a woman across from another ship. We found her in bad shape. We just need her better.”

  “Female with indeterminate medical issues. I will run a scan. Do you authorize me to initiate a proper course of treatment?”

  “Initiate?”

  “Yes, sir. It means to begin.”

  “I know what it means. It just seems like an odd word choice.”

  “Would you like me to update my language database.”

  “No, no. Just seemed a formal way to say it is all.”

  “Noted, sir. I’ll make adjustments.”

  “It’s really all right, I don’t …” A noise from the front of the ship interrupts McKibbon’s sentence. Oh, thank God.

  McKibbon exits the room and finds Grace and Martin in the hold area of the hauler, the mysterious woman laid out on the ground between them.

  Martin takes off his helmet and the big mechanical gloves covering his hands. Grace follows suit.

  “Let’s get her out of this thing and into the med bay,” McKibbon says. He steps to the woman and begins to unhitch latches on the sides of her suit.

  “Hold up,” Martin says. “We sure that’s safe?”

  McKibbon hesitates before undoing another latch. “What do you mean? You found her like this.”

  “Yeah. That’s the point. In a ship wrecked in ways I’ve never seen a ship wrecked before, we found her like this. Just seems …”

  Grace: “Suspicious.”

  “OK. Fair. But why? Wouldn't she be in a suit?”

  “Are you?” Grace asked. “You were on a boat with a destination, a mission, and a hold that was going to be open to the void of space. Still…” She finished her thought by pointing at McKibbon's lack of protective gear.

  He nodded, conceding the point. “Still, we don't
know where she was taking that ship. We don't know where she was just before. This could all have an explanation. It could just be her preference.”

  McKibbon looks to Martin. “I know plenty of pilots who can’t fly without a suit on. It’s some kind of security thing for them. It makes them feel comfortable.”

  Martin nods in agreement. “Then interface with the ship.” Martin has taken off the top of his armor and set it to his side, leaving him in just a set of mechanical legs. Grace was starting to get herself out of her fighting gear too. Martin continued.

  “Pull it's history. Where it was headed. All the places it'd recently been to.”

  “We can't. Zulu tried. There's nothing there. You knew that.”

  Martin stepped out of the rest of his armor and placed the bottom next to the top he’d placed against the wall a moment earlier.

  “Let's get her out if this armor and in medbay. Once she's squared away you two can tell me more about what you saw over there and theories on what happened.”

  McKibbon leaves Martin and Grace and heads back to the front of the ship. He closes the bridge door behind him, not that this is much of a bridge. It’s two seats and room for someone to stand. He won’t be commanding any large fleets from here. Still, it’s comfortable. The most familiar place for a pilot is behind the stick, even when you’re a fast-tracked officer. Here, behind the dials and switches was home. And, now, this pilot needed to call his girl.

  He picked up his datapad from the console to his side and initiated a call to Grey. His pad beeped once. Then twice. A third time and she picked up.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  “Alone?”

  “I am. You?”

  “For now. Just wanted to give you a quick update.”

  “So this is official business.”

  He chuckled. “Sure. This part anyway. We’ve got the woman off the ship. I’m going to get a briefing from Martin and Grace on what they saw over there to figure out what might have done this. Have to get the lady hooked up in the medbay first.”

  “Sounds good,” Grey said. “You feel comfortable that this was just some kind of isolated attack?”

  “Seems like it to me.” McKibbon hesitates. He weighs telling Grey about the concerns that Martin and Grace have. “At least for now. From what I can tell. I may know more later.”

  “Thanks for the update.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You’re welcome, ma’am.”

  Grey giggled. “Knock it off.” The connection dropped. McKibbon looked at the screen on his pad for a moment then dropped the device into the pocket on the side of his thigh.

  He finds the rest of his crew carrying the woman into the medbay. He reactivates the med bot panel on the wall after Martin and Grace get their guest set onto bed. She starting to come to, and is mumbling something incoherent.

  McKibbon is punching codes into the control panel.

  “Anyone catch that?” He asks, never looking away from his task.

  “Gibberish to me,” Martin says.

  “I think I heard ‘we’ in there, but I don’t know that does us much good.”

  McKibbon hits four more keys and the equipment starts moving from the walls. Martin and Grace dip and dodge their way out of the increasingly crowded room and meet McKibbon in the hall.

  “We could mean that there was more than just her on that ship,” McKibbon said as the trio gathers up.

  Grace: “True.”

  Martin: “But wouldn’t you assume that this far out you aren’t going to have some pilot flying solo? I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, me either,” McKibbon says. “Let’s fix something to eat. You guys can tell me more about what you saw over there. If we are going to tell Zulu that they’ve got a pirate problem, I want to be really damn certain.”

  +++++

  Lebbe holds the flashlight in front of him, illuminating parts of Zulu that he’s never seen before but that all look remarkably the same.

  He’s three levels deep, seeing the empty, open spaces that show what Zulu was supposed to be. They reveal the potential of the place he calls home. He’s a tourist in his hometown, visiting all the spots he knows about but never goes. He might be the first person here besides the construction crew that put Zulu together to see this space.

  He searches the back wall with his flashlight until he finds a control panel. He opens it and turns on the lights. They slowly come to life and the size of this unit becomes clear. The places Lebbe has searched before now were smaller, better contained. This one doesn’t seem to have walls. Lebbe looks to either side and the room continues around the curves of Zulu’s outer ring.

  “Is this one big open space all the way around?” Lebbe asks no one.

  He begins to walk. The open space is broken up by massive pillars evenly spaced about every 100 yards. They are big like trees, and, for a moment, Lebbe’s mind wanders. It takes him back home and to the Piney Woods of East Texas. He’s a kid again playing on his grandparents’ property, chasing cousins through the trees, shooting at them with fake guns and pretending they are space soldiers saving the world.

  Thinking of home eventually turns Lebbe’s thoughts back to his daughters and the scenes on the screens at the Quickstop. The turmoil. The spreading chaos. The death and destruction in Dallas that was likely in other cities by now.

  He raised them, as much as he was around to raise them, to be passionate. To fight for the causes they believed in. But he also raised them smart, right? They would recognize when the fight had gotten too big, when it got to be unnecessarily dangerous. They wouldn’t put themselves in harm’s way.

  Then Lebbe remembers being their age, how easy it was to get pulled into the frenzy, to let the excitement and passion around you confuse your better judgement and confound your common sense.

  He stops walking and replays the scenes he’d seen from Dallas. How the buildings he knew were gone. How the camera scanned past bodies in the streets while the reporter’s voiceover talked about increasing violence and a growing body count.

  Lebbe leans against one of the massive pillars then slides to the ground. He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a cigarette. He smokes and stares off into nothing, his thoughts back home, his heart there too. He hasn’t been the best dad, he knows that. And even that was probably giving him too much credit. He’d been a bad dad, his worst move picking up these security jobs. They took him from the girls. They put him on this spinning top at the edge of the galaxy — a three year contract that was only half over.

  In his good moments, he sees it as cresting a hill. Up one side but now ready to head down the other. In moments like this, though, when he was beating himself a mental black and blue, time was a never-ending tunnel, and even a new week seemed a lifetime away.

  He crushes the cigarette out and flips the butt, end over end, in front of him. He lets out the last lungful of smoke in a thick cloud. One year two hundred thirty five days, he told himself. But who’s counting.

  One year two hundred thirty five days and then he’d be begging his way on board of a ship to carry him off Zulu and to some nearer-in transfer station. Then begging his way aboard another that would take him even closer. And repeating the process until he got close enough that he could call the girls and tell them that he’d be home soon and that he’d like to see them if they’d like that too.

  He tries to imagine their responses — enthusiastic yeses that would have him smiling one of those grins that’s so big it makes people suspicious. But he can’t imagine that because he doesn’t know how they’d react, although he suspects they wouldn’t be nearly as enthusiastic as he hopes.

  There is a click and the room suddenly goes black, the deep black that Lebbe often stared into when he’d sit himself in front a window and look off into nothing.

  He feels beside him for the flashlight and turns it on. Overheads must be on a timer, he thinks. He stands and turns a slow circle, the spot of light slowly sliding across gleaming metal walls and shining
off of polished metal floors. He goes back the way he came and searches the back wall for the control panel.

  The hum of Zulu is different down here. Lower? Louder? Lebbe doesn’t know. Just different. He tries to tune into it. To hear it like he does when he’s lost in it in his office, but he can’t. This isn’t his hum, but down here, in all of this new space that still has the sparkle of a new station, it isn’t his Zulu.

  Find the air handler, he says to himself. It’s the never-ending woosh, the rush of fresh breath out to the vents and into the lungs. Find the air handler.