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Manda had been an asteroid miner for thirty years, and every single time she woke up on her own ship with no goddamned foreman shouting at her she thanked fuck the company had fallen apart and given her the chance to escape.
The ship was cramped, yeah, and grimy in a way that was never coming off unless she took it to one of those fancy all-in-one interior/exterior cleaning places — in both cases, not that different from the mining colony. But she was her own woman, now, flying across the galaxy, taking cargo on from time to time to make ends meet. Having to make ends meet was better than having to live off whatever slop your corporate overlords chose to give you.
And she was alone. In the mining colony you were never alone, you were cheek by jowl with the other workers in your shift, always jostling each other with elbows and catching sight of them in the mirror. You put up with the total lack of privacy — and it was total — but you never got used to it completely. Manda was now used to having space, and time, and quiet. Even when she went worldside or to a station, which she did as little as possible, she tried to meet her client and get out of there.
So when she heard the distress call, she paused. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about people, she told herself; it was just the thought of having to work with a crew, maybe help out with passengers, the babble and noise and people ignoring sensible orders in favor of panicking. Her hand hovered over the controls while her lizardy hindbrain screamed at her to ignore it. She was one person in a tiny ship! What was she even going to do?
This was the middle of nowhere, though, a shipping line that was all but defunct between Alpha Centauri and Lalande. If Manda didn’t stop, probably nobody else would. And she’d never know — but she’d always wonder if the other ship had just gone on broadcasting to the void until it lost all power and went cold and lifeless, with a crew of corpses.
Her hand stopped hovering, and went through the practiced motions to drop out of hyperspace that she could do blindfolded.
The first thing she realized was that there most likely wasn’t a crew, as such. From her scans, the ship was a Phaeton C-661, a zippy little cruiser meant for a pilot and one or maybe two passengers, if they didn’t mind crowding in. Expensive, too. Probably some rich idiot who went out for a spin in the middle of nowhere and then broke his navsys.
The beacon had been able to cross the hyperspace barrier, but Manda’s shitty old comm system wasn’t able to actually accept or receive calls when she was traveling FTL, so she flipped the switch to open a channel once she could, bracing herself for unavoidable human contact.
The sound of choking sobs suddenly filled her cockpit and she jumped, knocking over her coffee and having to grab at it frantically to keep it from flying.
“Uh,” she said when she’d caught it. “Hi. This is Individual Small Transport Ship Delta Papa Charlie Nine One Three Eight Oh. I —”
“What?” There was a mad shuffling, almost static, over the comms, and then, “Hello? Hello? Someone’s there? Oh! I can see you on the little screen!” It was a woman’s voice, a little stuffy and creaky, which wasn’t surprising given all the sobbing. It had one of those slightly childish Terran accents that Manda usually found very annoying.
“Yeah, uh, I’m here. Your ship’s transmitting a distress signal?”
The voice let out a tremulous little laugh through the tears. “It is? Oh, that’s good. I wasn’t sure I did it right, and I just thought — I thought — oh, damn, I’m going to die out here!”
You had to thicken your skin to exist in this universe, whether you were living in a corporate colony or out on the fringes of the galaxy. You had to be able to tune out the suffering happening all around you so that you wouldn’t be overwhelmed and dragged down with it. Manda knew this very well, had had it ground into her over and over and over. But the horror in the voice at the thought of drifting powerlessly in an empty corner of space reached into her heart and plucked a chord.
“Well, that’s not what’s happening, obviously,” she said with some added gruffness to cover. “What’s wrong with your ship, specifically?”
“We-ell,” said the voice. “Um. It doesn’t … go?”
The fuck. “What do you mean, it doesn’t go?”
“It just stopped! It’s drifting! I don’t know!” The voice was threatening to go back to sobbing, and Manda immediately dropped into a more soothing tone.
“Okay, okay. You’re fine now — I’m gonna get you out of here. Can you give me the passkey for your control system?”
She prepared herself to lay out a case for it, but the woman immediately chirped out, “Of course! Computer, grant access to the other ship.” There was a soft chime, and then a smooth computer-voice began a standard warning. “Shut up! Grant full access.”
“You really shouldn’t do that, in general,” said Manda, already pulling up a diagnostic for the phaeton. “At least ask for some bonafides.” Engines weren’t a problem, they were just turned off. So was the navsys, and the main medcenter, plus a number of background functions — about the only important things left running were comms (which were almost impossible to turn off) and basic life support. Weird.
“I trust you,” said the woman in the other ship, and her voice was calmer than it had been the whole conversation so far.
Hang on. The diagnostic showed that these systems hadn’t just turned off on their own — there was a forced shutdown. That was really weird, that usually only happened if … Manda did a check of the logs and yeah, a command had been sent to the phaeton about two standard hours ago, knocking it out of hyperspace and leaving it floating in the middle of nowhere, dead in the water.
Fuck.
“Um,” she said, then cleared her throat. “So. Yeah. Is there … do you think anyone wants to kill you.”
If it weren’t for the slight background noises of the woman breathing and swallowing, Manda would have thought that the comms dropped out, because she didn’t say anything for so long. But finally a faint reply came. “Yes.”
“Probably best if we get you off the ship, then.” Manda tried to keep her voice calm and even. “I’ll just talk you through docking. Okay?”
“Okay,” said the woman, still bizarrely calm, and she stayed pretty quiet while Manda rattled off orders for settings and toggles and things to engage and disengage, just going, “mm-hmm,” periodically as an acknowledgement. Poor thing.
At last both ports were ready, and Manda waited just outside her airlock with arms crossed and one heel bouncing awkwardly. It was too bad she didn’t have the capabilities to tow a full ship, even a small one; chop shops would pay through the nose for something like this. But then, if a murderer were after this woman, it might be better to totally abandon the phaeton here. Just in case. Manda was already borrowing enough trouble without adding more of a trail.
She was prepared to offer some verbal support (“Hey. Really sucks that someone marooned you in space. Want a cup of coffee?”), but when the lock opened the woman from the other ship stumbled through and tumbled into her arms. Manda froze, then slowly brought her hands in to sort of embrace her back.
“Thank you,” said the woman, her voice muffled by Manda’s shoulder but still somehow clearer than it had been on the comms on account of her being right there. Her black hair was all done up in tiny braids, each tipped with some kind of long, gold bead, and she was wearing a purple silk jumpsuit that rich Terrans probably thought was casual and practical; there was a perfume about her full of flowers Manda couldn’t name, because she hadn’t smelled them since before she went to live on a dry, airless dwarf planet.
“Well. Couldn’t leave you there.”
The woman stepped back, just a little bit, and looked up at Manda with gold-edged brown eyes. They couldn’t be as big as they seemed, could they? Fuck, what was she seeing? Manda wasn’t put together — she lived on this tiny transport and took sonic showers and wore the same ratty boiler suit every day —
“My husband could,” she said, with a slightly rueful but mostly matter-of-fact air. “Oh!” A little life came back into her face, and the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled. “My name’s Adenike.”
“Manda.” What was she supposed to do now? Her brain seemed to be wiped clean of everything she’d been thinking up to the point where she learned Adenike’s name. “Can I — can I get you something to eat?” Fuck, that was stupid. “I mean,” she went on, trying to temper expectations, “all I have are reconstituted mealpaks, but some of them aren’t bad.”
“Thank you,” said Adenike, and she slid a hand into the crook of Manda’s arm. Manda swallowed hard, and started to lead her to the galley.
It would be tight quarters, but suddenly that concept didn’t bother Manda as much anymore.