Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  Once, she had wandered into the garden to see that some jerk-off named Krant had left an animated crying emoji near one of the memorial stones. As a habit she turned off her AR’s functionality in the garden after that. Vit Tech’s slogan was Life, vitally. She hated that it was partially true—everyone needed their stupid implants now. Dating. Weather. Taxes. Shuttle times. Could the average person find their own ass without an AR sticker pointing it out to them?

  Rosalyn chewed the sandwich she had gotten for lunch, and idly spun the silver canister of cola in her hand. It would be better if it had a shot of rum in it, but that was out of the question. More than twenty-four hours since her last drink. The jungle drums were starting, the throbbing in the back of her head that said it was time to find a beer or something. The ache, the sound, grew so loud it drowned out the rhythm of her own chewing. She closed her eyes, willing it away. Stronger than that, she told herself, but not by much. Chew, chew, chew, just get through the rough bit. Just ride this out.

  That made her think of her friend Angela reading aloud to her kids, the simple little stories that lulled her children to sleep while she parented remotely from work. Chew, chew, chew . . . Choo, choo, choo goes the train. Rosalyn smirked, and for a moment the jungle drums faded and eased. Rosalyn had offered to cover for Angela numerous times, even just for an hour or two so she could run home to be with her kids more. But Angela was too focused on the work. On the data. “These samples,” Angela would say, holding up a capped test tube, “are my children, too.”

  Rosalyn’s AR display chimed softly, trying to coax her into a different kind of soda. The indicator blinked in the corner of her vision, a bright, vibrating cola can sprouting arms and legs as it danced to get her attention. She chewed loudly, to the point where she could only just hear the babbling of the artificial brook wending its way through the memorial markers and under the glass at her feet. If any other salvagers wandered through the garden during her lunch, she would quiet down the chewing, but only a little. With Owen and Griz stabbing her in the back, it was becoming clear that she didn’t have many friends around. Rosalyn would chew as loud as she damn well wanted.

  “Did you know trees can talk to each other?”

  At the entrance to the garden, framed by a yawning arch, stood her onetime crewmate Alexia Courtney. Rosalyn’s AR placed a blinking arrow over Alexia’s head with a streamer showing her public profile. Petite and athletic, Alexia managed to look glamorous even in the shapeless sack of a jumpsuit they were all given to wear. Her dark eyes were wide now, and she smiled, dimples denting her cheeks.

  “Hey, Alexia,” Rosalyn said, rewinding the moment a few seconds and remembering the actual question. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. “Trees, mm? Is that a real thing, or is this some inside joke I’m not getting?”

  Lunch was over. Shuffling boots and laughter filled the corridor behind Alexia. She came a few steps into the garden and lifted her fingers, wiggling them at Rosalyn. “Little roots talking to each other. Little wagging tongues.”

  “I . . . see,” Rosalyn replied slowly. Well, Alexia’s pupils weren’t dilated unnaturally, so nobody had smuggled narcotics onto the campus. There were a few synthetic drugs coming up through the market, but Merchantia piss tested for those regularly. Maybe Alexia’s AR was screwy. Sometimes the wireless patches failed to load properly and it gave Rosalyn a monster headache. So did the booze withdrawal, of course, a one-two punch that kept her lazing in bed long after she should’ve gotten up. But that was all over. New leaf, and all.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Rosalyn asked. “We launch so soon, maybe you should get a quick med check before we load up . . .”

  She consulted the clunky VIT monitor on her left wrist. Hard-coded information that was sensitive or classified went to the physical monitor. Vit Tech was too jumpy about body jacking to let companies send encrypted information that way, so old-school hardware it was. Four hours to launch. Alexia was one of the best pilots Roz had worked with at MSC, but she didn’t exactly seem in fighting trim at the moment. Having her on the three-man crew would be the only thing making the presence of Dave Walters tolerable.

  “See you, Roz,” Alexia said, still smiling, and drifted out the door.

  “Yeah.” Rosalyn gave a short wave. “See you.” And then when she was gone: “Jesus.”

  As if summoned by the ending of that strange interlude, a wiry, redheaded man bounced into the garden, hands in pockets, whistled tune on his lips. Dave Walters. Great. Rosalyn picked up her turkey and cheddar and began eating it, smacking her lips hard with every bite. Even subjecting herself to a painfully awkward launch with Griz and Owen again was preferable to working with Walters. Every woman on the station knew he was a pig, and Rosalyn had already strategically used one of her allotted absences to avoid an assignment with him.

  But this was a test. Her second chance. Tests weren’t meant to be easy.

  Walters was of course the kind of person to advertise his relationship status in his AR profile. Single! What a surprise. And a Pisces not looking for anything serious. Fascinating.

  “You see Courtney?” His song dropped and he let out a low whistle this time, rolling his eyes. “She’s fuckin’ blasted, man. Fruit loops. That last cleanup was a real shit show. Generator malfunctioned, raised the temps, practically cooked the bodies for weeks. Rotisserie research crew. Courtney said they were vacuuming up people paste for days.”

  “Fuck, that’s awful.” Rosalyn blinked hard. And weird. She had just seen almost exactly the same thing. What was going on? Apparently it wasn’t the latest VIT patch messing with Alexia. Maybe Rosalyn was lucky to survive that horrendous cleanup without going mad and talking about whispering trees. Modern ships were equipped to drop temperatures the second no life readings were detected, keeping any dead bodies from decomposing too quickly, but things occasionally went wrong, sometimes the temps didn’t drop and, well, people paste. She wondered at the likelihood of there being two similar cleanups back-to-back, though she hadn’t heard anything about Alexia’s being caused by an actual murderer.

  “Poor thing,” she added. “I finished something similar this week. It’s hard to scrub those images out of your mind.”

  “She’ll be out of rotation for at least a week. But who knows? Reconfig goes fast sometimes.” Walters ambled over to her and swiped a potato chip out of her lunch. She grunted. Reconfig. That didn’t sound so bad. Rosalyn could think of a few things she’d like to reconfigure in her head. “Happens to the best of us.”

  “We’re scheduled to launch with her today,” Rosalyn said, glaring. “The Brigantine salvage, they went blue two months ago. Who’s replacing her?”

  “Going blue” meant all souls aboard were deceased. The ship would beam red for a crisis, an SOS message, but blue if there was no hope of recovering living crew members. It was a little cold and tragic, she thought, but it allowed for proper allocation of resources. Triage. Living crew in danger had to take precedence.

  Walters hovered. She groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Please don’t tell me . . .”

  “Yup.” So smug.

  “That you’re my pilot . . .”

  “Mm-hmm.” Even smugger.

  “On the Brigantine job, and we’re not getting a replacement for Alexia. Of course.”

  “You betcha,” he smirked, and swiped another potato chip, munching with obvious relish. Not a second later, a message arrived on her VIT monitor catching her up on the new crew assignments. “You’re in good hands, Devar, I can fly circles around Courtney. She’s decent but she’s got no style. And anyway, this sounds like a breeze. The two of us can handle it.”

  Rosalyn snatched up the remainder of her lunch before he could pilfer more of it. Then she pushed past her coworker, flinching away from actually shoulder-checking him out of the way. “I don’t need you to have style, I just need you to do your job.”

 
; “Oh, I will,” he assured her with a cocky chuckle. Dick. He breezed past her, as if ending the conversation was entirely his idea. Rosalyn froze and watched him swagger out of the garden and into the flow of salvagers leaving the cantina. “I’ll do my job,” he said over his shoulder. “With style. Four hours, Devar, don’t be late! Hey, you should jazz up your AR profile, you know? An inspirational quote or something. Keeping it blank makes you look like a psycho.”

  Don’t throw your bread crust at him. Only a child would do that.

  Rosalyn crushed the last bit of her sandwich in her fist and imagined the bread sailing across the garden to land in his tangle of red hair. Childish, she thought with a weak smile, but satisfying. She crammed the crust and empty soda canister into the bag and drifted toward the exit, wondering if Alexia would be all right. Hoping she would be all right. The job got to everyone eventually. Two years was the max anyone stayed, then came a mandatory rest period. Outer space was terrifying. Salvaging was one prolonged exercise in confronting your own mortality. And it was dangerous. It was a job one only survived and never enjoyed.

  Someone she didn’t recognize cut off her approach to the door. A woman, short, old, with deep lines carved into her brown cheeks, drooped into the garden. Her arms were laden with a sleek tray, and on the tray was a pile of stones. Rosalyn silently made room for her to pass and then observed her going to the same bench and the stream where Roz ate her lunch every day. The woman knelt and carefully began to pile the rocks next to the bench. She stood and left without acknowledging Rosalyn, but her tread seemed lighter as she went.

  Rosalyn couldn’t help it—she waited until she was alone again to approach the piled stones. Just like the older woman, she knelt, squinting to find names and dates and messages carved into the rocks. It was like a little pagan outcropping, an ancient marker, so out of place there among the cold silver and glass fixtures of the base. She reached out and brushed her fingers over one of the stones—it was still warm from the other woman’s touch.

  She shivered, reading the inscriptions with her blood chilling by degrees, growing colder as she began to recognize the names.

  MISATO IWASA, 2158–2269

  PIERO ENDRIZZI, 2231–2269

  TUVA SVERDAL, 2231–2269

  RAYAN YASIN, 2241–2269

  CAPTAIN EDISON ARIES, 2229–2269

  “The Brigantine,” she whispered, shutting her eyes tightly. In four hours she would be hurtling through space toward these people, not just their memorial markers, but their dead bodies. Flesh turning as hard as those stones. She could only hope they had gone peacefully, and that they would be found in a deep freeze, looking as quiet and whole as if they were only sleeping. This job had to be an easy one. Simple. She just needed to prove to HQ and Josh Girdy that she wasn’t headed for a total meltdown.

  It struck her as deeply morbid that Merchantia hadn’t even waited for confirmation from a salvage crew before having the stones commissioned. Well, the Brigantine had gone blue months ago, so it was a safe bet, if a sad one. Efficiency you can trust. That was the Merchantia slogan. They tended to live up to that promise.

  “See you soon,” Rosalyn added, standing and leaving the garden at a near run. She had never bothered to read the other memorial stones, and this was why. Nobody wanted to know whom they were shoving into a body bag. Nobody wanted to know whom the people paste had really been.

  Four hours. It would have to be enough time to get her head on straight.

  4

  As a child Rosalyn always climbed the same tree in the backyard.

  There was only one tree to climb—an ancient, officially protected silver maple that anchored the house on Aberdeen more than any concrete or stone foundation. Decades before, the boughs grew heavy with snow in the wintertime, or so claimed her parents. Not anymore. The leaves now soaked up the heat like tiny, brittle solar panels.

  It was a tall, tall tree, and she had learned to climb it early. Her father would stand underneath and watch, and no matter how high she climbed, no matter how little he became there on the ground, she felt his nearness. He was there to catch her, close even when far.

  He didn’t feel near anymore. The Salvager 6 hummed softly as the atmosphere inside it grew warmer and the engines cycled, machine and man preparing for the journey away from the campus and into space. One last chance. Her head pounded. She wasn’t just coping with no booze anymore, but Dave Walters and no booze, as if this assignment had been set up as the ultimate, brutal test of her will.

  It didn’t matter. Rosalyn was determined to prove herself, and this time there wouldn’t be any hidden flasks in her suit.

  She stood in the small, empty bay that connected to the ship’s air lock through a rounded, retractable corridor. Walters was already inside Salvager 6. New Classic 2210s rock drifted down the boarding walkway toward her. Alexia Courtney preferred classical, and so did Rosalyn. At least, she thought, it wasn’t the awful synth-pop remakes Owens played. She had no idea if Griz even liked music; he never talked about much of anything.

  Her pulse and temperature had started elevating since the moment she left the memorial garden. It felt safe there, but here, poised in front of the long metal tube and the ship at its end, she panicked. This was nothing new. Most salvagers got pre-mission jitters, even old pros. But this was different, her last shot, and it had to go off perfectly. Rosalyn didn’t know if she was the only one who had gotten anxious tremors even during training, when they ran through scenarios in mock ships on base. Feet on solid ground, she was still shaken to the core like a complete chickenshit. The rooms were perfect re-creations of the innards of a salvage ship, and that was enough to make her heart race out of control.

  So she did what she always did. She shut her eyes, took in several deep, deep breaths, pushed down the bad memories that resurfaced behind her closed eyes, and tried to immerse herself in the pleasure of breathing without a helmet.

  “Any strong feelings about space travel?”

  “Not really.” Rosalyn had lied her way through her evals at the Merchantia Solutions headquarters back on Earth. Even hooked up to a lie detector apparatus, she had managed to get through the questions without raising any eyebrows.

  “Paranoia? Claustrophobia?”

  “Nope, nope . . .” More lies. Harmless, she decided; she was only mildly claustrophobic.

  It came naturally, lying. She had gotten plenty of practice at her first job. It was a high-stress environment; drug tests and harsh evaluations were frequent. They were designing and engineering the future of memory medicine, of longevity, for God’s sake, and you didn’t get to perform a job like that if you couldn’t handle a little stress.

  Or a shitload of it.

  Paranoia. Claustrophobia. She wasn’t hooked up to an eval machine now, so she let the sweat bead on her forehead and her jaw grind back and forth. Rosalyn kept her eyes shut, forcing herself not to think about the tiny ship and its tiny confines and the tiny helmet that would lock over her head any second. Then her eyes snapped open, and she went rigid, the early, ugly rigor of an anxiety attack. A familiar tug in her guts, a familiar icy numbness in the tips of her fingers . . .

  She was so engrossed in trying not to break down and dissolve into her panic that she didn’t hear the footsteps approaching. An old AR advertisement had bugged out on her display and wouldn’t refresh, blinking in the upper right corner above her eye. It was for Red Mars Mud Masques. Wear it, remove it, reveal your inner goddess, read the ad’s text, scrolling by in a tiny window. You’re just five minutes away from the new you! She stared at it, trying to pull herself back from a precipice that emptied onto a fall with no bottom. It was just the withdrawal, some nausea, nothing to be worried about.

  “Jesus, eat something bad at lunch? You look terrible, Devar.”

  Walters. Her eyes snapped open and she let out a stale breath.

  “Maybe the c
heese was off,” she said with a shrug. “Just a stomachache. It’ll pass in a minute.”

  “Not that time of the month, is it? I’m sure they can find a replacement.” Walters chuckled and leaned against the wall across from her. He had a lean, freckled, punchable face, a constellation of old acne scars and a narrow chin.

  “Is this the kind of sparkling humor I can look forward to for the next week?” she asked. Her momentary panic vanished. Maybe she ought to be thanking Walters for sobering her up so fast. “You know, I’m senior on this trip, mm? And it would be my pleasure to pull rank.” Rosalyn allowed herself a cool smile. “Because I’m sure they can find a replacement.”

  Walters put his hands up in surrender, cackling. “All right, all right. Fuck. If you’re over your cheddar sweats, everything is green on board.”

  It was good that he was there. She couldn’t panic now, not in front of him. Rosalyn nodded and pushed away from the wall. Serene. Calm. Totally in control. She didn’t want Walters to find out this was her last chance at keeping her job, or he would just find a way to sabotage her. Hasty footsteps came from the other direction now, from outside the bay doors attached to the campus launch wing. The sliding doors hissed open and a young woman rushed up to them. She wore the crisp, simple blue uniform of the courier service that pinged between bases, delivering messages from as far away as Earth itself if signals were iffy.

  “What’s this? Nobody is allowed in here this close to launch,” Walters said, crossing his arms.

  The courier was out of breath. She nodded her head a few times, then shoved a small, silver package toward Rosalyn. “Just following orders. Control gave me the go-ahead to find Devar.”

  “It’s fine,” Rosalyn replied gently, taking the package. Her urge to stay friendly wilted when she read the sticker in the upper left corner. “Shit.” And then under her breath, “Great timing, Dad.”