Two – 2838 words
“Okay, let’s be something good,” she muttered, magnifying the junction of coordinates to something her eyes could actually see. Magnified umpteen times, on the screen was a ship of sleek design slowly tumbling end over end. It would be a bitch to link to, even if everything went perfect. Not for the first time she wished she had hired a crewmember. Then again, in this business it paid to be paranoid, which was why she flew alone.
It took ten hours to reach the ship, and two more to match speed and rotation. Micah did some loose calculations by eye, but ultimately let the Sugar do the finer stuff. The ship was big, bigger than the Sugar at least twice over, and mateable hatches were few and far between. There was a docking bay but the doors were closed.
Micah had completely lost track of time when she found a suitable hatch to enter the ship by, the smallest hatch, probably maintenance if the array of antennae and other, unfathomable spikes and disks were any indication. Nonetheless, she made sure the mating was successful before heading down to put on her suit.
Once again, it was the best money could buy. Gone was the bulk and the huge rebreather. This suit was skintight, the rebreather a slim envelope on her back, part of the entire waste reclamation and recycling system. There was even an additional power pack, good for an hour’s worth of flight should one lose the strap on pack. Of course, if one lost the strap on, one was screwed anyway. But the wee pack was somewhat of a reassurance. Sort of.
The Sugar was equipped with an umbilical which could be pressurized, yet Micah was too leery of letting the unknown onto her ship, regardless of much safer the umbilical would be. She decided a single tether would be good enough, especially since she didn’t recognize the ship’s design. Wasn’t saying much, of course, there were hundreds of designs out there. Even so, there was something just a little bit ‘off’, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
With a deep breath, she keyed open the airlock door, clipped herself onto the tether and toed into the black.
An eternity later she was at the desolate ship’s hatch. She’d brought tools to force open the hatch, but as it turned out nothing was required beyond her pressing the green button. Sometimes assumptions paid off.
Lights came on when she opened the hatch, a narrow tube on the other side with a ladder running down to another closed hatch at the end. She half expected to hear the whoosh of air systems coming to life, but like any sensibly designed ship, the airlock remained free of air entirely. Upon dogging the hatch, she pulled herself hand over hand to the end of the tube, opened the next hatch to flashing yellow lights and the whoop-whoop of a siren.
Snagging the bar above the hatch with both hands she flipped out into the corridor, glancing both ways as overhead lights continued to blink on. Gravity settled her firmly onto her feet, something close to Earth normal, maybe a little less. With the hatch closed, she headed towards the left, where it looked like Ops might be.
The inside was the same as the outside, sleek walls, painted a gray so light it might be mistaken for white. What doors could be opened showed rooms empty of crew, yet not empty of cargo, not empty of everything save the furniture attached to floor and walls. There were desks, fold down bunks, chairs. There was clothing, bipedal in nature, sheets of paper which crumbled at the touch. There were dormitory-style sanitary facilities with no clue as to gender, galleys leading into mess halls which could easily hold a hundred people. The scale of everything was close to human-sized, perhaps a smidgeon bigger. Or maybe they were just really big people, on the tall side of the human norm.
It took another month to fully explore the ship. Micah found a few odds and ends that might be worth a penny, but nothing short of an archeological expedition would bring forth the really valuable goods, and even then, museums would be the primary buyers. So when she found the coffin, she was excited at the prospect of being able to bring an item unsellable at Paradise back to the Institute. Not only would the price be better, she could resupply at home, buy at least twice the amount of tea she had before and maybe see if she could find a better job with the Institute, maybe do the mail run from Cerys to Shabbadoo.
She called the box the coffin for the simple reason that there was a body in it. A woman’s body, as fresh as the day it was taken. She hadn’t opened the box, of course, merely scanned it. She wasn’t sure how the body had been preserved for it certainly wasn’t in any kind of stasis field, just a wooden box inside a larger box of kind of made material, perhaps some kind of plastic. With a bit of manouvering, she brought the box back to the Sugar’s airlock, but then had to drive the box to the docking bay with a worker bee than the one she was using for herself. Thank goodness she’d brought the bee along this trip.
Coffin strapped down in the cargo hold, she returned one more time to the foreign ship and locked down the hatches most likely to be used by other miners. Detaching the Sugar took but a moment, and then all that remained to do was attach ID beacons to and around the hull. Marking the coordinates and probable rate of drift, Micah muttered “Adios,” plotted the Sugar’s course out of the Shoals, then wandered down to the galley to get some vegetable soup and a beef paste sandwich.
THREE:
Like most ship owners who actually ran their own ships, Micah was a light sleeper. She did, on the occasion, use the control room as a bedroom, eating and sleeping in the chair she’d had specially outfitted to move into a lounger. When alarms did go off, it was simply more convenient to snap to a sitting position than race down the hallway from her cabin, half-asleep and struggling into something more presentable than a stained and ratty tee shirt. Without a bra, of course.
The proximity alarm was shrill, and she jerked upright, slamming one hand down on the requisite board to shut the damned thing up. The main screen showed three ships racing in from the left, already too close for her to try and make a break for it. She queried for ID but only the Jolly Roger popped up. Well, there was nothing for it, then – she was about to raided.
The best that could be said about the raid was that it was quick. A group of five boarded, took what they wanted, mostly any fresh food and much of her dry goods, what little she had collected from the foreign ship. Happily for her they left the coffin behind. She didn’t even have to beg for it, either.
