Re-Coil E-Book

J.T. Nicholas

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 479

Beschreibung

The Expanse meets Altered Carbon in this breakneck science fiction thriller where immortality is theoretically achievable, yet identity, gender and selfhood are very much in jeopardy...Carter Langston is murdered whilst salvaging a derelict vessel - a major inconvenience as he's downloaded into a brand-new body on the space station where he backed up, several weeks' journey away. But events quickly slip out of control when an assassin breaks into the medbay and tries to finish the job.Death no longer holds sway over a humanity that has spread across the solar system: consciousness can be placed in a new body, or coil, straight after death, giving people the potential for immortality. Yet Carter's backups - supposedly secure - have been damaged, his crew are missing, and everything points back to the derelict that should have been a simple salvage mission.With enemies in hot pursuit, Carter tracks down his last crewmate - re-coiled after death into a body she cannot stand - to delve deeper into a mystery that threatens humanity and identity as they have come to know it

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

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28

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

TITAN BOOKS

Re-Coil

Print edition ISBN: 9781789093131

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789093148

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London, SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2020 J.T. Nicholas

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Julie, who encouraged (and still encourages) me to keep going no matter how many rejections poured in.

To die, to sleep—

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

HAMLET

The derelict vessel drifted against endless darkness.

I made no sound as I walked along the ship’s surface in the sliding shuffle forced by magnetic boots, nothing but electrical charge and the ferrous content of the hull keeping me from spinning away into the deep. My ship was out there, too, of course, a hundred meters away and matching vectors with the wreck. Not that it mattered. If something went wrong while I was EVA, they might as well be back on Earth.

I kept the slow, steady shuffle, making sure one boot latched firmly before sending the mental command through my personal Net that deactivated the electromagnet in the second and sliding it forward in turn. Rinse. Repeat. Slow and steady and, most importantly, survivable.

It took almost fifteen minutes, but I found myself before the airlock door. With a thought, the miniature spotlight mounted on the shoulder of my suit blazed to life, bathing the door in harsh white light. The beam revealed pocking along the hull, not unexpected given that the ship could have been drifting through the system for decades. But it also caught the edges of three almost perfectly circular holes, two centimeters in diameter, and arrayed in a neat triangle, near the door’s center.

Analysis, Sarah, I thought.

My agent’s voice—a contralto programmed to be calm, soothing, and always well modulated—came back at once, resonating in the depths of my mind, from the place that I always associated with my Net implant. Diameter, twenty-two millimeters. The smoothness suggests a cutting laser, though there are no signs of metal fatigue. Certain drills would also be possible, though it would be difficult to maneuver them into position outside of a shipyard. The holes are equidistant from one another and placed to form a perfect isosceles triangle measuring thirty point four-eight centimeters per side.

“Did it come from the inside, or the outside?” I asked aloud, my voice hollow and tinny in the vacc suit’s helmet.

“Say again, Langston.”

This voice didn’t sound from the depths of my own mind, but rather crackled to life over the vacc suit’s speakers. “Wait one, Miller,” I replied, staving off the issue for the moment. Sarah?

Insufficient data, the agent responded.

“Great,” I muttered. “You getting this, Persephone?”

Miller’s voice came back. “Roger that, Langston. Got three holes punched in the side. We’ve been running the data through the Persephone, but we’ve got nothing.”

“Yeah. Sarah’s coming up dry, too.”

“Your call.”

It wasn’t much of a choice, really. The Persephone was a small ship, outfitted for salvage operations, with a crew of just four souls. Miller piloted, Harper ran the heavy equipment, Chan was our techno-wiz, and I was the lucky SOB who got to play EVA specialist. When we could get close to space junk, it was normally Harper’s show—they drove the mechanical arms and cutters that could crack open any debris that didn’t need the finer touch of a direct human hand and bring it aboard the Persephone, leaving Chan and me to pull off the small bits in relative comfort. But when the junk went tumbling and spinning, it was my job to get over to it, try to stabilize it for the Persephone to approach, and if that wasn’t possible, grab whatever was worth the most creds.

We’d been working together for a few years now, going out a couple of months at a time and laying claim to what salvage we could find. Lately, we’d been finding a lot of nothing. Scrap metal that barely kept fuel in the Persephone’s tanks and flavorless synth-soy in her larders. I couldn’t speak for my crewmates—when we left the ship, we tended to go our separate ways until the next mission—but I could certainly use the creds. Coil premiums were coming due, and as things stood, I had enough in my free balance to cover them, but only just. I really didn’t want to go into arrears. A derelict vessel on a ballistic trajectory into Sol was too good a find to pass up.

“Roger that, Persephone. I’m going in.”

“Be safe. And keep the video streaming.”

“Will do.”

I turned my attention back to the airlock door. The exterior of the ship didn’t tell us much. Starship design hadn’t changed significantly over the past hundred years or so. They say that technology used to change much faster, growing and expanding at an almost logarithmic rate, but those days were long gone. Humanity may not have peaked, but it had, at the very least, stabilized. The vessel wasn’t broadcasting any transponder codes. That wasn’t unusual on older salvage—no power source could last forever. Our visual inspection hadn’t yielded any exterior registration on the hull, either. Not that all ports of call required one. Earth and the domes of Luna and Mars did, but that was mostly a hallmark of the days of ocean-borne vessels. Ships in space seldom got close enough to one another to make something as pedestrian as numbers and letters painted on the hull useful. Without any way to identify it, the ship could have been years, decades, maybe even a century old.

However old the ship might have been, airlocks hadn’t changed much. Two things on the left side of the slightly-larger-than-man-sized door caught my attention. The first was an eye bolt, and I pulled the safety line from my harness and clamped it in place, tethering me to the ship. Surviving open space was about being careful, consistent, methodical… and taking advantage of every redundant system and safety feature available. I wasn’t about to go drifting endlessly through the deep while some branching proto-me picked up my life where I left off.

The second thing was a small access panel. I depressed it slightly, and it popped open, revealing the controls for the airlock door. Unfortunately, those controls were nothing more than a blank screen. I cursed under my breath.

“Looks like we’ve got a true ghost ship, here,” I said. “No power to the airlock controls.” In most ships, the exterior airlock controls were slaved to the same power systems that handled life support. If trouble arose, you knew that the rescuers could reach you quickly for as long as you had air and heat. After that, it didn’t much matter, since cutting through hulls took time that an asphyxiating crew probably didn’t have. It happened more than most people thought; no matter how stable the tech or smart the AI, neither human error nor the uncaring hand of entropy could be completely mitigated. When you had thousands upon thousands of vessels plying the space of Sol, even a small percentage of vessels suffering catastrophic mishaps still added up to a lot of missing ships. Multiply that over all the years humans had been active in space, and you realized just how much junk was really out there. It sucked, but it kept us in business.

“Can you cut it?” The voice belonged to Chan, and even over the radio interference, she managed to sound sultry.

The harness I wore over my vacc suit bristled with tools. In anything other than microgravity, I probably wouldn’t have been able to carry it. Even with that, I had to be careful about mass and inertia, so as not to inadvertently smash myself into surfaces at speeds that my coil couldn’t take. But it did give me a few options.

“Probably,” I replied. “Wait one.” Sarah, do I have enough plasma cutters to get in?

In answer, a web of glowing dashed lines appeared on the airlock door, transfixing two of the three holes already bored through the composites and tracing a path that would result in an opening big enough—if only just—to pass me and my equipment. As if to drive the point home, an arrow pointed at the dotted line and the words, “Cut here” appeared beside it. Agents like Sarah may not have had the full personalities and cognitive abilities of Alpha AIs, but she’d certainly managed to pick up a bad sense of humor somewhere.

“Okay, Persephone,” I said. “Looks like Sarah thinks I can cut through. Estimated time is…” I paused, and, without prompting, Sarah added a digital clock display to my view. “One hour, twenty-seven minutes.”

“Roger that, Langston.” It was Miller’s voice again, a deep bass. “Be advised, we estimate eight hours—that’s zero-eight hours—until we’ll be close enough to Sol that heat and radiation are going to become problems.”

“Gotcha,” I replied. “No dawdling.”

With that, I grabbed the first metal cylinder from my belt, tightened my safety tether, and brought the nozzle close to the hull, right beside one of the holes and on top of the line Sarah had overlaid. I pressed the firing stud, and a cone of blue-hot plasma belched from the torch. The cutter functioned by sending an electric arc through a flow of argon, exciting it into the fourth state of matter. It didn’t require an oxidizer, which was just as well. Oxygen was precious enough without wasting it on cutting. My vacc-suit facescreen automatically polarized, darkening before the intense light could damage my eyes. I drew slow, even breaths, moving the torch at a barely perceptible rate as the metal of the door began to glow a brilliant cherry red.

* * *

The countdown on the digital display in my view read 1:38 and I was on my second-to-last plasma cutter when I finished slicing through the composite airlock door. I grabbed an electromagnetic grip—little more than a power source, some wire, and a handle—from my harness and pressed it against the piece of metal still seated in the door. A mental command activated the magnet, locking the handle to the door. I shifted my feet, sliding them around until they were both planted just under the hole and activated the magnetic locks in them as well. By bending at the knees and hips, I slid down into a crouch, and wrapped both hands around the handle of the magnetic grips.

I drew a deep breath and stood, keeping the motion smooth and the force constant. The door section pulled free and rather than trying to fight its inertia, I held on long enough to guide it safely past my head, and then let go. The chunk of metal drifted off into space, another bit of junk that would, eventually, be pulled into the sun.

“I’m through.”

“Roger that. Be careful.”

Maneuvering through the hole required unclipping the safety tether and deactivating the magnets in my boots. For just an instant, I hung next to the derelict vessel, only Newton and Keppler keeping me in place relative to the ship. Then I grabbed the edges of the hole I’d just cut and swam my way into the airlock.

My boots clicked back onto the deck, and I swept the beam of the flashlight around me. The unadorned gray of the bulkheads drank in the light, making the room seem somehow darker than the blackness outside. The light passed over a lump, positioned before the hatch leading deeper into the vessel.

I focused the beam on it and froze. “Damn,” I muttered. “You guys seeing this?”

There was a long moment of silence on the other end of the comm. “Yeah, Langston,” Miller’s voice came back. “We’ve got it. Is that what I think it is?”

It was a body. A body that had succumbed to a combination of asphyxiation and decompression. It had been male, once, though the features were distorted enough that it was nearly impossible to tell much beyond that. “It is,” I replied to Miller’s question while simultaneously sending mental instructions to Sarah to take several deep scans of the scene from the suit’s external sensors.

Already done, Langston.

“You know what you’ve gotta do, Langston,” Miller said. “This just turned into a retrieval.”

“Roger that, Persephone.” I steeled myself for what came next. “You guys might want to turn off the displays for a minute.” I received an affirmative click back and swallowed hard.

One of the tools on my harness was a small laser cutter. Not powerful enough to slice through bulkheads, it was the perfect tool for salvaging electronics or other equipment that was bolted rather than welded in place. It also made a fair utility knife if the need arose… and an excellent field scalpel.

The corpse sat with its back against the door as if the person had simply sat down to die. There was no expression on the face—it’s hard to have an expression when your features have been twisted by asphyxiation and decompression—in fact, it barely looked like a face at all. Which was good, considering what I was about to do.

I reached out one hand and placed it on the corpse’s shoulder. In the microgravity, it was easy enough to turn the body over. It spun, maintaining its seated stance, frozen in position by the near absolute-zero temperatures of the holed and depressurized ship. I braced the body between the deck and bulkhead, relying on my boots to keep me in place as I pressed down against the corpse. It wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t fun; it wasn’t dignified. It was, however, necessary.

I found the hollow at the back of the corpse’s skull and pressed the laser cutter close. Then, I began to cut. Flesh, blood, and bone all sublimated under the heat of the laser, creating thin trails of smoke that dissipated almost instantly. It didn’t take long. I reattached the laser cutter to my harness and pulled an old-fashioned, fixed-blade knife from its sheath at my hip. Another steadying breath, and then I fed the tip of the blade into the incision I’d made, probing until I felt the faint click of metal on metal. I traced the object with the blade, freeing it from the surrounding tissue, and then used the knife as a lever, slowly working it to the surface.

What emerged from the wound was a ceramic-metallic cube, less than two centimeters on a side. Hard to believe that something so small could contain all of a person that was the person, the ego, the id, the psyche… the soul. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was the sum total of what made you… you, and the miracle of modern medicine meant that it could all be backed up and slated into a new coil. Provided it didn’t go careening into the sun anyway.

“Got the core,” I said.

“Roger that. Are you going deeper?”

It was a good question. Retrievals always brought creds, since most people were willing to give just about everything they had to keep on living and to keep their memories intact. Better yet, payouts for retrievals were built in to even the most basic of coil insurance policies, so the creds were guaranteed. But we hadn’t even cracked the doors on the main vessel, and there was no telling what treasures might await us within. Sarah, how much time do we have left?

Radiation levels will approach detrimental limits in five hours, fifty-eight minutes, and twenty-one seconds.

“We’ve got time, Persephone. I’m going to try and go deeper.”

I got another click in acknowledgment, but I knew my fellow crewmates. A retrieval was good, but a retrieval and salvage were better. I turned my attention back to the interior airlock, playing the flashlight over it, looking for the manual overrides. I found the panel and slid it open. And then stared at the mess that had been made of the controls.

Both the standard and manual controls looked like they had been hit with a plasma torch. They were melted into slag, and I doubted the door could have been easily opened… from either side. Which raised more than a few questions.

“Persephone, your monitors back on?”

“We’re seeing it, Langston.”

“Is it me, or does it look like this guy locked himself in the airlock and then slagged the controls?”

Harper’s voice. “Did you check the interior controls to the outer door?”

“On it.” I shuffled back to the hole I’d cut in the airlock and found the panel to the outer door. Sure enough, the controls behind it had been melted, too. “Looks like our retrieval didn’t want anyone else getting to him… at least not without some cutting. From inside the ship or from the outside.”

“But why lock yourself in the airlock?” Harper asked, their voice perplexed.

I grunted. “I don’t know, but I’ve still got a couple of plasma cutters left, so maybe we can find out.” I moved back to the interior door and examined the half-melted controls. Sarah, can I cut my way in? In response, a window popped up in my vision, showing a standard airlock schematic. It scrolled and zoomed, focusing in on the manual door release. Sarah highlighted the pertinent section, and I nodded. “I don’t have to cut all the way through the door. Looks like I might be able to disengage the interior lock. Won’t work if the rest of the ship is pressurized, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Be careful.”

“Roger that, Persephone.”

It took both of my remaining plasma cutters, but, following Sarah’s silent directions, I managed to burn through to the hydraulics. The fluid that bubbled sluggishly from the lines when I cut them was a hybrid synthetic far removed from anything that had once been called “oil” and designed specifically to remain liquid at the near absolute-zero temperatures that would claim any derelict vessel. I played the last of the flame from the torch gently over the surrounding metal, heating it and encouraging the flow of the fluid. After only a moment, the cutter sputtered and died.

“Okay, Persephone. Moment of truth.” I shuffled back to the door and grabbed the wheel. Once again, I made sure to apply force as smoothly and constantly as possible, slowly increasing the amount of strength I was putting into it, until it finally began to turn. More hydraulic fluid flowed from cut lines, droplets drifting around me in the microgravity. The wheel spun, and I felt the thunk of the bolts releasing. I pulled, and though the door resisted, it finally gave, swinging open and beckoning me into the darkness beyond.

The airlock opened into a short hallway, ending at another hatch at either end. The flashlight mounted on my shoulder provided the only illumination, casting odd shadows as I swept it through the hall. The beam caught the edge of letters, where the bulkhead met the overhead, and I focused the light there. Three lines of standard text, and a pair of arrows. The top row read, “Airlock.” The second row read, “Control” and an arrow beside it pointed off to the right. The third read, “Passenger Cabin” with an arrow pointing off to the left.

Sarah, have you identified this vessel, yet?

Insufficient data. The vessel has no active Net transponder. General physical characteristics are consistent with a mid-range passenger shuttle, of the type used for moving between planetary masses and their moons. Most commonly found around Jupiter.

We’re a long way from Jupiter, Sarah.

Current estimated position puts us approximately seven hundred and fifty-four million kilometers from Jupiter.

Thanks. Super helpful.

You’re welcome, Langston.

I swear she sounded smug. “Well, I guess one way’s as good as another. How much time do we have left?”

Miller’s voice came back at once. “Four hours, Langston. You need to be on your way back here in four hours, latest.”

Passengers or crew? I thought about the bloated corpse in the airlock and shuddered. So far, I hadn’t found any evidence of the ship being holed—other than the outer door to the airlock. But something had depressurized the vessel, and the thought of a passenger cabin filled with the decompressed dead sent a shiver running down my spine. I turned to the right and made my way to the door.

The manual controls presented no problem, since no one had attempted to melt them. I opened the door and panned the light across. Another corridor stretched before me, and I followed it. It branched off twice, but I ignored the side corridors, moving steadily forward to—I hoped—the bridge. My hopes bore out when I reached another hatch, this one with the words, “Control” and “Authorized Personnel Only” stenciled across it.

The hatch was shut, but whatever had caused the person in the airlock to seal themselves in must not have bothered the command crew, since the door wasn’t sealed. The latch spun freely and the door swung inward. I braced myself, mentally gearing up for what I expected to find—the distended coils of the pilot, captain, and astrogator.

Instead, the light revealed an empty chamber. The boards and screens were dark, the chairs, empty. Nothing seemed out of place. It was as if the crew had simply got up and left, shutting the door behind them on their way out. The only problem was, every regulation of every merchant and military vessel required that the bridge be manned at all times. Sure, you could maybe get away with a Net link for a minute or two, but any spacer who lived long enough to claim the title knew better than to tempt fate too much. I’d been aboard more than one vessel that had been evacuated. No one ever took the time to close the doors behind them, all nice and tidy. And if they hadn’t had the time to evacuate… in that case, the bridge shouldn’t have been abandoned. Finding bodies was never fun, but sometimes finding nothing was worse. “I’ve got a whole lot of nothing on the bridge, Persephone.”

“We’re seeing it, Langston,” Miller said.

“And it’s creepy as hell,” Harper chimed in.

“Can you get the box?” Chan that time, stepping on top of Harper’s words almost before they got them out.

“Wait one.” I moved to the captain’s console and found the access panel. A little work with a screwdriver, and the panel came free. I pushed it away, letting it drift. There wasn’t much harm it could do at this point.

I shone the light into the cavity, revealing a mix of cubes, boards, and dark fiber optics. Amidst the various electronics, there should have been the box, the successor to the antiquated flight recorder that logged the ship’s position, astrogation data, and ship’s logs. Instead, there was an empty place in a circuit board.

“It’s gone,” I muttered.

“Say again?”

“It’s gone, Persephone. Removed.” Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

“Did they evac?” Miller asked.

“And leave a crew member or passenger sealed in the airlock?” That thought sent a little tingle of fear coursing up and down my spine. What would it be like, to remain sealed away, while you heard the evacuation pods firing, one by one from the other side of the ship? “I’ll check the passenger cabin.”

“Roger that, Langston. But hurry. Clock’s ticking.”

I made my way back through the corridor, past the airlock and toward the main cabin of the ship, ignoring the side passages that led to engineering and, presumably, the escape pods. As I approached the final hatch, my feet slowed. What would I find on the other side? Empty chairs and mystery, like on the bridge? Or distended corpses? I drew a steadying breath and spun the manual hatch release.

The door swung inward in silence, on hinges so smooth that I barely felt the faint resistance. My light swept over the chamber, illuminating row after row of what my tired mind first took to be sleeping people. They sat in the acceleration chairs, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, row upon row of perfectly still bodies. It took a moment to process—to realize that the stillness was too perfect, that the faces were not composed in sleep, but slack in death. It took a moment to remember that the ship was airless, depressurized, drifting through space. In that moment, I felt suddenly, completely, and utterly alone.

“You still there, Persephone?” I asked the empty space, forcing the words to calm despite the panic I felt crawling up my esophagus.

“We’re here, Langston,” Chan said. Her voice was soft, perhaps overwhelmed by the images coming back to the ship over the Net, but it was somehow soothing.

“I…” I cleared my throat. “I’m not sure we have enough time to do the retrievals.” That was a lie—or at least, not the whole truth. Maybe there was time, maybe there wasn’t. I’d been working salvage long enough that retrievals were an inevitability. But there was something so… dehumanizing about cutting into an empty coil and prying out the little bit of storage that held most of what a person was. If they were smart, they were backed up, anyway. If not… But, damn it, they were lucrative, and all of us could use the creds.

“Understood, Langston.” Miller this time, cutting into my reverie. “We make twenty-seven, that’s two-seven, coils.” There was a long, long pause. “How many do you think you can get? Estimate time remaining at… approximately three hours.”

Shit. Miller was trying to be subtle, trying to be nice. There was plenty of time to harvest the cores from the coils. And there was plenty of reason, too. I had a job to do. Best to be about it.

“Message received, Persephone. You may want to blank the vids again.”

“We’ll keep them running. It’s the least we can do.”

I didn’t respond to that, instead stepping into the passenger cabin. I moved to the first row of acceleration chairs and turned my attention to the first corpse. The coil was bio-female, young, and, at least when imagined with the full flush of life, attractive. It showed no signs of decompression or trauma, and the eyes remained, thankfully, closed. I tried to stop thinking of the coil as a person—what made it a person was safely locked away in the core, anyway. It was just a shell, and one that had outlived its usefulness.

The rational part of my mind knew that to be true. It didn’t stop the twisting in my guts as I pulled the frozen body forward, and moved the auburn hair out of the way, baring the hollow in the base of the skull. The laser cutter and the knife did their work, and in a few minutes, I was sliding another core into the bag on my harness.

The work was grisly, but not particularly difficult. The entire coil and core were engineered so that it took only a passing familiarity with anatomy to affect the retrieval. It wasn’t the sort of task that required my full attention—in fact, it was the sort of task that begged for that attention to be turned elsewhere. Sarah, why are the coils not showing signs of decompression?

Insufficient data at this time.

I ground my teeth together. Guess.

As you wish, Langston. The first and most likely cause is sufficient time during decompression for the fluids and gasses in the body to adapt to the changing pressures. Other possible causes decrease greatly in probability and include flash freezing, absence of fluids or gasses in the system to begin with, or administration of outside agents to prevent decompression.

I knew Sarah was right—no one spent long in space without garnering a basic understanding of how decompression sickness and sudden decompression worked. Yet, at the same time, none of her answers made any sense. Who would sit idly in their acceleration chairs while the pressure in the cabin slowly went from one atmosphere down to vacuum, presumably taking with it all the breathable air? The coils showed no signs of flash freezing or desiccation, and the only outside agent I knew of that could prevent decompression was a vacc suit. What had happened to these people?

I moved down the line of chairs, the laser cutter doing its gruesome work, and the little pouch of cores at my hip slowly filled. I was down to three rows when I felt a slight shiver course through the derelict’s hull.

I paused in my work and waited for a moment. The shiver came again, and then grew into a steady vibration. I felt the faintest tug pulling me toward the back of the cabin. The ship was accelerating.

“Persephone?” I asked aloud. At the same time directing a mental, Status? at Sarah.

“What the hell’s going on over there, Langston?” Miller demanded. “Our sensors show that the derelict’s engines just came online.”

The vessel is powering up and accelerating toward Sol, Sarah confirmed.

“Shit,” I swore. “I don’t know, Persephone. The damn engines just fired. By themselves. Are you sure no one’s aboard?”

“Sensors aren’t showing anything living over there except you, Langston.” There was a momentary pause. “Time to get off that boat.”

“Yeah, that’s a big roger. Heading to the airlock, now.” I panned my light across the last three rows. Nine souls lost, at least for a few months. I turned to go, but something stopped me in my tracks. Something had been different on those last bodies. I swept the flashlight back, panning it over the coils, looking for whatever had caught my attention.

One of the corpses, its pale, lifeless eyes wide open, stared back at me.

I jerked back from the sight, my entire body lurching away, which in microgravity was a stupid idea. The motion, sudden and sharp, tore my magnetic boots free of the deck, and sent me drifting, tumbling toward the front of the cabin. The beam of the light spun with me, panning across the bulkhead and overhead, losing focus on the open-eyed coil.

My heart raced as I reached out, using my arms like shock absorbers against the bulkheads, pulling my knees to my stomach and working to reorient myself so that down was, once again, the deck beneath my feet. I’d spent enough time in freefall that the move was instinctual. The boots touched down on the deck, electromagnets engaging, and I swept the flashlight back toward the far end of the cabin.

The rational part of my mind insisted on telling me that residual electrical energy in the brain could stimulate the ocular muscles and make the eyes of the corpse snap open. It had less explanation for the fact that the same coil, which had until that moment been firmly strapped into its acceleration couch, had pulled itself up and was floating in the microgravity. It moved gracelessly toward me, limbs that should have been long frozen reaching out to pull it past the seated heads of its fellow corpses, still locked into their own acceleration chairs. Its hands closed on the back of one of those chairs, and it pulled, launching itself forward, arms stretched out before it, fingers reaching.

The coil flew at me like a missile, the steadily increasing tug of the engines hardly slowing it. My conscious mind was still trying to catch up, to process what was happening. That didn’t stop instinct from kicking in, and my hands came up, even as I twisted my body at the hips and shoulders and knees, presenting as thin a profile as possible while my feet remained locked to the deck. The outstretched hands missed me by inches, and the rest of the coil continued to float past.

I dropped my hands down, slamming my suited forearms into the coil’s back as it passed, imparting a new vector that sent it careening first to the deck, and then bouncing off toward the overhead. The force jarred me, not just my arms, but put a terrible pulling strain on my ankles as the boot magnets competed with the action/reaction force of the strike. I once again pulled free from the deck, but only just, floating a few inches off the ground.

“Persephone,” I gasped. “Are you seeing this?”

I received no response.

“Persephone, do you copy?”

Silence.

Sarah, where the hell is Persephone?

My agent’s voice echoed in my mind. The Persephone’s Net has gone offline. Insufficient signal strength to ascertain any additional information.

What?

The Persephone’s Net has…

I interrupted the agent with a quick Cancel query. I managed to reorient myself back toward the front of the cabin, using the chairs to pull myself back down to the floor. The... coil… was still flailing up near the overhead, its movements too jerky and spasmodic for microgravity. Which was alarming in and of itself—the blow to the back would have incapacitated a normal person. Of course, so would being suitless in vacuum. Normal had gone right out the airlock.

To further complicate things, the force of our acceleration was now a noticeable pull toward the aft of the cabin, like being on an incline in normal G. The struggling corpse began to slide along the overhead, drifting toward me. Whatever was driving it, it seemed to have at least some degree of rudimentary intelligence, because it stopped its flailing and curled into a gently spinning ball. It rotated with enough speed that it would have made me motion sick, but it also all but guaranteed another opportunity to grab at me as it drifted past, unless I took action.

I was cut off from my ship, alone in a derelict vessel, accelerating into the sun, with what should have been a corpse trying to grab hold of me for what, I could only assume, were nefarious purposes. Taking action sounded like a damn fine idea.

I’d been holding the knife and laser cutter, but I let them drop. Scavenging could be a dangerous business, and the smart play was to be prepared for the certain unpleasantness that came up from time to time. Which was why, in addition to the various tools and equipment, a small Gauss pistol hung from my harness.

I tore the weapon from its holster, pulling it up along the center of my body and pushing out from there to minimize the reactive force. My heart thudded against my ribs, and my breathing came in short, staccato bursts as I brought the sights to bear on the tumbling corpse. As they intersected the drifting shape, I squeezed the trigger.

The pistol made no noise, though I felt the vibration as it fired, and the force of the heavy ferrous bearings leaving the barrel drove my arms up with recoil. Only my suit boots, still struggling against the pull of acceleration, kept the additional force imparted by the weapon discharge from moving me backward.

The projectiles that flew from the barrel moved more slowly than pulsors or other military-grade weapons and were much more massive, more in line with an ancient bullet, though without all the smoke of a chemical propellant. The relative slow speed and high mass kept the Gauss pistol safe to use in the confines of a ship, with a very small chance of the burst breaching the hull. It wouldn’t have mattered much aboard the already derelict vessel, but not all our salvage operations took place on airless hulks.

The three rounds that belched from the barrel may not have been able to penetrate a ship hull, but against an unarmored, unsuited coil, they worked just fine. The first round only grazed the monstrosity tumbling toward me, opening a narrow line along its shoulder. The second struck more solidly, tracing a deep furrow down the back of the tightly curled body. The third punched through the torso, eliciting a sudden series of spasmodic jerks that disrupted the graceful roll and turned it into a macabre puppet dance. The corpse—once more behaving as expected for a corpse—flashed past me, hitting the rear bulkhead and staying there, pinned by the thrust of the engines.

That thrust was rapidly becoming a problem for me. Sarah, estimate current acceleration.

Passing 0.4 G, Langston.

The boots wouldn’t hold past half a G or so. In fact, if I uncoupled one to take a step, they would probably fail. “Persephone?”

Still no answer.

Shit.

I shoved the pistol back into its holster and turned to the nearest acceleration chair. The coil in it was middle-aged, graying, but fit, distinguished-looking. An “elder statesman” kind of look. Or had been, before I’d used the cutter to pull out his core. I braced one arm on the couch and, making sure my boots were secure, used the other arm to pull the body from the chair. We were nearing half gravity, and the coil probably weighed close to eighty kilograms. I grunted, and heaved, keeping my feet firmly planted. The coil drifted upward, clearing the top of the acceleration couch, and then gravity—or rather acceleration, did its part.

I pulled myself into the chair, using my arms more than my legs, releasing the magnets and, for just a moment, dangling precariously. But I managed to seat myself firmly, the thrust pushing me back against the gel seat. “Persephone? ”

The Persephone’s Net is still offline, Langston.

What the hell had happened? Why was the ship’s Net down? We were too far from any habitat or station for me to connect to any other network. The derelict’s bridge might have enough power with the engines up and running to broadcast farther, but the only ship that could get me off this wreck before it fell into the sun was the Persephone.

How much time, Sarah?

Please be more specific.

How much time until this ship falls into the fucking sun? Or until the heat and radiation get so intense that they microwave me?

Sarah’s voice, calm as always, responded, At current rate of acceleration, the edge of survivability will be reached in approximately seventeen minutes. Total destruction of the ship will occur approximately twelve minutes after that.

Fifteen minutes to live. I’d backed up, of course. I did before every run. But that was weeks ago. Time that would be lost, gone never to return. I had questions, so many questions. How had all these people died? Why had the engines suddenly fired? What had caused the coil to animate and attack me?

Most importantly, where the hell was the Persephone?

“Dammit,” I swore aloud. I didn’t have any answers, but it was worse than that. When it was over, when they re-coiled me, I wouldn’t even remember the fucking questions.

I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my forehead. It wasn’t the stress, or adrenaline, or anything else. I had started to sweat because of the temperature. I brought up the suit diagnostics, splashing them across my vision. External temperature was rising. The suit’s enviro-suite was trying to compensate, engaging cooling units, but it was a losing battle. In about—I queried Sarah—sixteen more minutes, the sun was going to cook me. And things would likely get very unpleasant before that.

So, what? Give up? My fingers twitched toward the Gauss gun at my hip. It would penetrate the suit’s helmet easily enough, and end things before they got too bad. But even knowing that the branch from a few weeks ago would be shoved into another coil, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So, what? Wait for the end?

Fuck that.

Sarah? Estimate current acceleration.

Approximately one point oh-one G and climbing.

Just slightly heavier than normal. I flexed my fingers. I could deal with that.

I maneuvered on the acceleration chair, getting my feet beneath me. I forced my mind to reorient itself, to think of the direction of the chairs, the bulkhead behind me as “down.” It took some concentration, but when I opened my eyes, I was no longer being pressed back into an acceleration chair. Instead, I was standing on that chair. Above me was the back of another chair. More chairs descended below me, more above, forming a ladder. I reached out, and began to climb, moving over the discarded coils, pulling my body weight up against the increasing force of acceleration as I climbed “higher” into the ship. With the engines live and power coursing back into the derelict vessel, there was a chance the communications systems would be working. I doubted I could call for help—the Persephone wouldn’t be ignoring my calls if there wasn’t something interfering with the broader signals. But it was damn hard to stop comm laser from pinging a relay. I wasn’t getting out of this in one piece, but if I could make it as far as the bridge, maybe I could send some kind of message.

The odds sucked, but that was the life of a scavenger.

I hated waking up in the body shop.

Consciousness and acclimation were slow processes, and the first thing I became aware of was that I was aware. Which felt odd, and somehow wrong. Next came the sensation of lying on something hard and cool. But the sense was muted, faint, more of a memory of what it felt like to rest upon something hard and cool than doing so. That was the extent of sensation, and I knew that, for a while at least, it was all I was going to feel.

An ancient poet from Earth’s past had once written of shuffling off the mortal coil as an analogy for death. Humanity had taken it a step further, though. Technological advances theorized that the mind, the essence, some said the soul, of a person could be digitized and preserved, given that a large enough reservoir of storage space was available. The advent of quantum computing provided the raw storage and processing needed to turn that theory into a reality, taking humanity one giant leap closer to immortality. The rest was easy.

Cloned tissue produced new shells, new coils, in which the mind could be inserted. Genetic engineering ensured that those coils were as perfect and purpose-built as any machine. They had to be slow-grown, as something in the chemistry of the brain required a certain degree of aged stability before accepting a core and by law, no one could be re-coiled into a body younger than sixteen years of age. That created any number of issues, particularly in those tragic instances when children died, but the ramifications of stuffing people with multiple decades of life into, say, a five-year-old body were too much for society to accept. And so, humanity, still unable to break the boundaries of our own solar system, effectively obtained immortality. Of course, it was never that easy, not with people being people. In the early years, with every aspiring biotech company trying to pump out home-grown coils as fast as possible to make a quick credit, the quality control had been nothing short of abysmal. And the issues went beyond the simple cosmetics and capabilities of a given coil. Improperly grown coils suffered from… call them wiring problems. The wetware of the brain, if not grown slowly over years to very specific and demanding standards, caused compatibility issues with the cores. The results weren’t that different from any number of violent psychoses.

That’s when the various polities stepped in. Most of the megacorps had a certain degree of extraterritoriality, but they were at least nominally subject to the will of the governments of Earth, Mars, Luna, and the various habitats and stations scattered throughout the system. When those governments acted in concert, even the corporations had to bow to their will. A set of standards was established and a new corporate entity, a new monopoly, was formed. BioStar was given the sole rights to create coils and held to the exacting standards. There were still errors of course, coils that didn’t quite meet spec, but most were built as solid as the human form could be. Of course, limiting the supply to a single company, coupled with the growth time required for stable coils, meant that there was always a queue for getting put into a new coil and that, unless you had the top-of-the-line insurance policies, you pretty much had to take whatever body they stuffed you into.

Which brought its fair share of problems, but they weren’t really the ones I was concerned about at the moment. Getting a backup of your mind shoved into new flesh had its own drawbacks. It took a while to acclimate, to really feel like the new coil was yours. But, more importantly, you accepted a certain data loss, as some termed it, between the time you had last backed up and the time you were re-coiled. For the ultra-rich who changed coils like the rest of us changed clothes, that might only be a few minutes. Pop into your local coil center, pick a new body, do a quick backup, and be inserted on the spot. For those of us who could only afford the most basic backup insurance, which provided for new coils only in the event of advanced age or death, that lost time normally measured in weeks, and in rare cases, sometimes as long as years.

How long, Sarah?

Agents were backed up in almost the exact same way as people, storing a copy of the AI at the point in time when the person was having their backup done. But AIs didn’t have the shock of adaptation to a new coil, or the emotional baggage of realizing that, somewhere, some-when, a version of them had just been wiped out of existence. The question was vague, but since it was the question asked by most people when waking up in the body shop, AIs were programmed to handle it.

It has been sixty-three days since this instantiation was created.

I was still too new to my coil to register the physiological responses to surprise. My stomach didn’t drop. My heart didn’t race. My mouth didn’t go dry and no sweat broke out on my body. Nonetheless, a cold, numbing sense of surprise flooded my mind, and for a moment all I could do was try to mutter, “Sixty-three days?”

The words were unintelligible, barely sounds at all, since I still had little control over my new vocal cords or lips. But they were, apparently, loud enough to catch someone’s attention.

“Awake, then, are we?” The words were cheerful, almost chipper, and full of a brisk professionalism that just screamed medtech. They had a crisp, vaguely British edge to them. “Well, you’ve no doubt already queried your agent and learned that your re-coiling was just a bit, how should I put this… unusual? We’ll give you all the details once you’re a bit more, well… you. In the meantime, I need you to open your eyes. Do you think you could do that for me?”

I’d been through this a half-dozen times before—salvage was a dangerous business, after all, and it wasn’t the most dangerous business I’d ever been involved in. The question should have been perfunctory, but there was a note of actual concern behind those words. What had happened to me?

I drew a deep breath—at which point, I suddenly became aggressively aware of the fact that I was breathing. That resulted in a brief, panicked moment where my conscious mind struggled with the autonomic responses of its new coil. It was a lot like I imagined suitless exposure to vacuum would be—wanting to breathe, struggling to take in precious, life-giving oxygen, but at the same time, being somehow unable to make your lungs work, despite seeing and feeling nothing that should prevent it. It passed quickly, leaving me momentarily panting.

I concentrated on my eyes, on opening the lids. They felt heavy, not from lack of sleep, but physically challenging, requiring an effort of muscle and will to manipulate. Slowly, ever so slowly, they parted, revealing a blurry and bleary world about me.

“Well, that’s good, then,” the British voice said. A slightly darker oval appeared in the generally bleary light that was my current field of view. A brighter light swept past my eyes, once, twice, a third time. “This may sting just a bit.”

Something warm and wet poured into my eyes, and I blinked rapidly in response to the mild irritation that came with the fluid. It had the desired effect—with each blink, the blurriness eased, and my new eyes finally came into focus. The man leaning over me was fine-boned, dark-skinned, and, as was the case with almost every coil, physically attractive. He held a plastic squeeze bottle in one long-fingered hand and was dabbing at my face with a cloth held in the other.

“Are you back with us, then? Can you talk?”

Again, there was that edge of worry in his words.

“Where?” I forced the single word out in a strangled croak. It was deeper than it should have been, or at least, deeper than my old coil would have produced. It was definitely a bio-male voice though. Re-coiling facilities tried to put people back in the gender with which they identified, unless they specifically requested otherwise, but coils were in short supply. It wasn’t unheard of to be re-coiled into whatever was available. If you did end up in the wrong body, your options were somewhat limited. You couldn’t simply ask for a new one—the demand for coils always outstripped the supply and only the very, very wealthy could get a new coil at whim. The rest of us were stuck with whatever meat our cores got pushed into. If you ended up with the wrong plumbing, you could still try for reassignment surgery, but most people had to put all their spare cash into paying their re-coiling insurance premiums, with not enough left to buy the kind of medical policy that would cover reassignment surgery.

After three hundred plus years and several coils due to the perils of my profession, I fell into what had come to be called the gender-pragmatic portion of the spectrum. All things being equal, I felt most at home as a bio-male but the one time I’d been re-coiled into a bio-female shell, I hadn’t felt any particular distress. Sure, I missed some of the muscle mass, but the smaller frame had been helpful for some of my salvage ops. And I’d still been me—thought the same way, liked the same things, been attracted to the same types of people. That wasn’t how it went for everyone, of course. Some people were gender-adaptive. Their behaviors changed fluidly along with their biology, and they could find happiness regardless of the plumbing. Others were more gender-adamant. They had a firm mental image of who and what they were, and when they ended up in the wrong bio-shell, they suffered from mental and physical distress. Many of those folks had clauses in their policies requesting to stay archived until a bio-sex appropriate coil became available. The thought of volunteering to be archived made me shiver.

“Where are you?”

I tried to focus my mind back on the present, remembering the medtech trying to make sure that all my mental faculties were functioning. I nodded.

“Prospect station, in the medical facility. Do you know where that is?”

Stupid question. And still that edge. Not much to do but answer though, since my limbs still weren’t responding. “Near Venus.”

“And do you know who you are?”

Of course I knew who I was. What kind of question was that? “What… is… going… on?” I forced the words out, a low breath on each.

“Please answer the question. I’ll explain everything once I’m sure you are undamaged.”

Undamaged? I was in a brand-new coil, my old body, my old mind, dead and gone in a way that was, quite literally, unfathomable to the new me. What kind of damage could I possibly have suffered? Had something gone wrong during the re-coiling? I wanted to sit up, to pace, to express the frustration I was feeling with action. But my body still refused to respond to the signals from my brain, so instead, I grated, “Carter Langston.”

“Good, Mr. Langston. That’s very, very good.” His voice nearly sang with relief. “One final question, Mr. Langston, I promise, and then we’ll answer some of yours. Do you remember coming in here for backup?”

“Yeah.” I coughed, and it seemed to loosen something in my throat, since words began to flow easier. “More than twomonths ago, according to my agent. We were going out on a salvage run, so I made sure to back up. Now, what the hell happened? I should have been back in action after thirty days, max. It was in my policy, after all. And why all the questions? And where is my crew?” I tried to shout the last few words, but the muscle control failed me, and instead they came out as a strangled gasp.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any information on your shipmates, Mr. Langston. I’m sure if they are here for re-coiling, your agent will be able to assist you in that.” Too right, she could. I sent Sarah a mental command to track down Chan, Miller, and Harper if they were on station. “My name is Dr. Johnathan Parsons. I was assigned your case only a week or so ago, when the technicians had repaired as much of the damage as possible.”

“Damage to what?” I spat out. “I died, right? Isn’t that why I’m here?” Prospect had been the last station I’d backed up on, before venturing out with the Persephone. It was theoretically possible for a person to be re-coiled anywhere, regardless of where their last backup had taken place, but no one wanted to risk any kind of data loss in blasting petabytes of information across the cosmos.

“Forgive me, Mr. Langston,” Parsons said, and he actually sounded contrite. “I work in biology and genetics, but I do not do software well. Perhaps I chose my words poorly. When I say damage, I mean corruption.”

That word sent a spike of fear straight into the pit of my belly, and icy tendrils of it coursed up my spine. “Corruption? Are you telling me my fucking backup was corrupted?” A jolt of adrenaline dumped into my system and I sat bolt upright, throwing my legs over the edge of the table and bracing my arms against it, getting ready to push myself to my feet.

“Slowly, Mr. Langston, slowly,” Parsons said. He placed one long-fingered hand against my chest. There was barely any resistance, but it was enough to stop me from standing. “You haven’t yet adapted to your new coil. If you insist on throwing yourself about, you might cause yourself injury.”

“I don’t care about the damned coil. What went wrong with my backup?” Saying the words, even thinking them, twisted the insides of my new body, and I had to choke back the urge to vomit. People were supposed to be immortal. Even the poorest, uninsured saps were guaranteed backup and re-coiling. Sure, if you couldn’t pay your premiums, the process might take years, but all of the polities of Sol agreed that it was a basic human right to eventually have your core shoved back into a coil. But that only worked when the backups stayed clean, pristine. Which, given all the effort and credits put into perfecting and protecting the storage methods, was supposed to be guaranteed.

“We don’t know. It must have been a systems glitch. The techs said they had never seen anything like it before.” He paused, long enough for me to briefly consider murdering him—or his coil anyway—for dismissing my near-permanent demise as a systems glitch. “But you’re okay. Your cognitive functions appear normal. Your adaptation to your new coil is… well, given that you’ve already started regaining control of primary motor functions, I would say it’s astonishing. And you don’t seem to be experiencing memory loss… other than the normal lag, of course.”

The normal lag. Two months gone. Who knew how close it had come to being permanently gone? “Get out,” I muttered. “Get the hell out and leave me alone.”