The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“Nothing I can’t put off, boss.” Bruno was a stolid, taciturn man of thirty-five, exactly the same age as Maris, a ship’s engineer from Europa who had been stranded in the Saturn system by the war. He had spent more than a hundred days in a forced labor camp, helping to rebuild wrecked agricultural domes. Now that the Three Powers Occupation Force had declared “normalization” throughout the Outer System, and the embargo on civilian travel had been lifted, he hoped to earn enough from salvage work to pay for his ticket home. He had a round, impassive face and dark watchful eyes that didn’t miss much; lately, Maris had caught him checking out her trim whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. He was lonesome, she thought, missing the family he hadn’t seen for almost a year. If he hadn’t been married, and if they hadn’t been working together, she might have responded; as it was, by unspoken agreement, they kept it at the level of mutually respectful banter.

“We’ll make up the time,” Maris told the two men. “I know you guys can work hard when you have to. Where’s Somerset? Gardening?”

“As usual,” Ty said.

Somerset was cocooned in a sleeping bag in a curtained niche at the far end of the chamber, eyes masked by spex, ringed fingers flexing like pale sea plants.

“Hey,” Maris said.

Somerset pushed up the spex and turned its calm, untroubled gaze toward her. Like all neuters, its age was difficult to estimate; although it was thirty years older than Maris, and its spiky crest of hair was as white as nitrogen snow, its coffee-and-cream skin had the smooth, unlined complexion of a child. It was a member of some kind of Buddhist sect, and all of its wages went to the refugee center run by its temple. It owned nothing but a couple of changes of clothes, its p-suit, and its garden-a virtual microhabitat whose health and harmony were, according to the precepts of its faith, a reflection of its spiritual state.

Maris said, “How’s everything growing?”

Somerset shrugged and said dryly, “You don’t have to attempt pleasantries, Maris. I will do my part.”

“You heard what I told Ty and Bruno.”

“I thought you were quite restrained, considering the trouble they have caused.”

“I want to know just one thing,” Maris said. “I want to know if this is some kind of joke on me. If you’re all winding me up because I helped build the ship, and I’ve bored you to death about why I don’t believe in ghosts. If that’s what it is, ha-ha, you’ve all made your point, and I’m wiser for it. But we have to get back on schedule.”

“I don’t play games,” Somerset said disdainfully.

Maris said, “But you know what’s going on, don’t you? It’s Ty. Ty for sure, and maybe Bruno. Bruno’s quiet, but he’s sly.”

“To begin with,” Somerset said, “I thought Ty’s stories were as silly as you did, but now I’m not so sure. We still haven’t found that missing passenger, after all.”

“She died in some obscure little spot,” Maris said, “or she took a walk out of the airlock. One or the other. The ship was shut down, Somerset. It was killed stone dead. The emp blast fritzed every circuit. No lights, no air conditioning, no heat, no communications, no hope of rescue. Remember that other shuttle we did, last shift? All the crew were gone. They took the big step rather than die a long lingering death by freezing or asphyxiation.”

“I did an infrared scan,” Somerset said. “Just in case.”

Maris nodded. Somerset was smart; Somerset was methodical. Anything warmer than the vacuum, such as a hidey-hole with a warm body living in it, would show up stark white in infrared. She said, “I should have thought of that.”

Somerset smiled. “But I didn’t find anything.”

“There you are.”

“Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“Meaning?”

“Its hiding place could be well-insulated. It could be buried deep in the shuttle’s structure.”

“Bullshit,” Maris said. “We’ll finish stripping out the circuitry tomorrow. We’ll find her body in some corner, and that will be an end to it.”

Maris and Somerset didn’t find the missing passenger. Ty and Bruno did.

The two men came into the lifesystem a couple of hours before the end of the shift, ricocheting down the central shaft like a couple of freefall neophytes. Ty was so shaken that he couldn’t string together a coherent sentence; even the normally imperturbable Bruno was spooked.

“You have to see it for yourself, boss,” Bruno told Maris, after they had all used patch cords to link themselves together, so that Barrett couldn’t overhear them.

“If you guys are setting me up for something, I’ll personally drag your asses rockside.”

“No joke,” Ty said. “Clan’s honor this is no joke.”

“Tell us again what you found,” Somerset said calmly. “Think carefully. Describe everything you saw.”

Ty and Bruno talked: ten minutes.

When they were finished, Maris said, “If she’s in there, she can’t be alive.”