Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,1

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