The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“They preferred yeast,” Maris said curtly. She was tired. She had been working for twelve hours straight. She was looking forward to a shower and a long sleep. She didn’t have time for Ty’s spooky shit. He wanted her to contradict him, she realized, so that he could keep his silly notions alive in a pointless argument. She said, “We’ve got just one week left before we’re all rotated rockside. Let it go, Ty, unless you want to write up a report for Barrett.”

Ty didn’t write it up, of course. The supervisor, James Lo Barrett, was considered a joke amongst the wrecking gangs: an inflexible bureaucrat who was working off some kind of demerit at this obscure posting, an incomer who hardly ever left his ship, who had no idea of the practical difficulties of the work. But Ty didn’t let it go, either. The next day, midshift, he swam up to Maris and pulled a patch cord from his p-suit’s utility belt. Maris sighed, but took the free end of the cord and plugged it in.

“Something’s screwy,” Ty said. “I was outside, checking the service compartment? Turns out all the fuel cells in the back-up power system are gone.”

“The crew moved them inside after their ship was crippled,” Maris said. “We found one cell right by their bodies.”

“Yeah, but where are the other three?”

“They’ll turn up,” Maris said. “Forget it, and get back to work.”

They were floating head-to-head in the narrow shaft that ran through the middle of the shuttle’s tiny lifesystem, where Maris was feeding circuitry into the squat cube of a portable refinery that boiled off metals and separated and collected them by laser chromatography. Ty’s gaze was grabby and nervous behind his gold-filmed visor. He really was spooked. He said, “You don’t feel it? It’s not just that something weird happened here. It’s as if something’s still here. A presence, a ghost.”

“That would be Barrett. You know he’s always on my tail to keep you guys on schedule. We have fifteen days to strip this hulk. If we fall behind, he’ll dock our pay. Can you afford that, Ty? I can’t. I have people who depend on me. Forget about the fuel cells. It’s one of those mysteries that really isn’t worth thinking about. It’s nothing. Let me hear you say that.”

“It’s something,” Ty said, with a flicker of insolence. He pulled the patch cord, spun head-over-heels, and shot away down the long corridor.

“And another thing,” Maris said over the common radio channel, as Ty did a tuck-and-turn and pulled himself through a hatchway, “don’t fuck around with any more drones. Barrett called me up a couple of hours ago, said he thought you’d done something to one of them.”

“I don’t like being watched while I work,” Ty said.

“What did you do, Ty?”

“Glued it to a bulkhead. If Barrett wants to spy on me, he can come out and unglue it himself.”

Ty wouldn’t give up his idea that something was haunting the shuttle. Later, Maris caught him plugged into a private conversation with Bruno Peterfreund, the fourth member of the wrecking gang. They had just spent a couple of hours combing through the shuttle’s lifesystem, and presented her with an inventory: the com module gone; pumps and filters from the air conditioning dismounted; sleeping bags and tools missing.

“Something took all this stuff,” Ty said, “and made itself a nice cozy nest.”

“I think he’s right, boss,” Bruno said. “The stuff, it is not floating around somewhere. It’s gone.”

“The shuttle was zapped right at the beginning of the war,” Maris said. “Nothing could have survived out here for three hundred days.”

“Nothing human,” Ty said. “It’s a spook of some kind for sure. Hiding in the shadows, waiting to jump our asses.”

Maris told the two men to get back to work, but she knew this wouldn’t be the end of it. Ty and Bruno had wasted precious time chasing a ghost that couldn’t possibly exist. They had fallen behind on the job.

Sure enough, Barrett called her that evening. He’d checked her day log, and wanted to know why her gang were still refining rare metals when they should have started to dismount the fusion plant. Maris wasn’t prepared to expose her crew to Barrett’s acid ridicule, so she flat-out lied. She told him that the calibration of the refinery had drifted, that there had been cross-contamination in the collection chambers, that she had had to run everything through the refinery all over again.

“I don’t want to fine you,” Barrett said, “but I’m going to have to do it all the same. You’ve gotten behind, Maris, and I can’t be seen to favor one gang over another. It’s nothing, just 30 percent of the day’s pay, but if your gang don’t have the fusion plant dismounted by the end of tomorrow, I’m afraid that I’ll be forced to invoke another penalty.”