Page 2 of Life-Debt

I grabbed her leash, clipped one end to my belt and the other to her suit. Once on board, I’d activate her magnets, which would allow her to move around on her own, assuming the ship had no gravity. I hoped for gravity. Gravity made my life a great deal easier when plundering a derelict.

“Time to hit the airlock.” I waited for the fox to bound forward, the metal pads on her suit clanging against the floor, before following in her wake. As I’d taught her, she stopped in the middle of the square room and sat, waiting for me to close the inner door, flush the oxygen back into the ship, and then open the exterior hatch. The process took less than five minutes, and Pandora waited with admirable patience.

“There’s your first treat.” I grabbed the ship’s main tether, clipped it to my suit, and opened the hatch leading into space. The vast emptiness of the void never failed to amaze me, but rather than gawk at the endless stars, I ran to the edge of the gravity boundary, which ended at my ship’s hull, and leapt out, angling towards the derelict.

Yipping her excitement, Pandora followed me.

Upon exiting my ship, I drifted in the direction of the derelict, used a voice command to activate my boot thrusters at their lowest setting, and angled towards the freighter’s airlock hatch. I deactivated the thrusters once on the correct trajectory, gave Pandora’s leash a gentle tug so she’d alter her direction and join me, and activated my boot magnets, preparing for impact. I collided with the ship, feeling the clang that the vacuum of space otherwise devoured.

Had anyone been alive within the ship, they would’ve heard me coming long before I could break into their airlock. I twisted, watched for Pandora, and caught the fox. She made two short yips and a bark, activating her magnets, special made to release and activate in set intervals so she could patter around as she wanted. Sometimes, the fox forgot how to use her magnets in her excitement, requiring me to do the work for her. Once I had her secured to the hull, I pressed my glove to the hatch and tested it.

It spun in my hand.

Under normal circumstances, captains locked the hatches. In an emergency, the wise ones made certain help could get to them without having to break through the airlock. Within a minute, I had the hatch opened, and I clucked my tongue at Pandora. “Bark if there are bodies,” I requested.

The fox waited for her magnets to release before beginning her journey to the opening into the ship, careful to pull herself along. After a lengthy stop-and-go journey, she disappeared inside. Moments later, she yipped, her method of communicating there was nothing of interest. I released my magnets and followed her inside, nodding my approval over the pristine state of the airlock. Closing the hatch, I worked to determine if the airlock system remained online.

The lights over the interior hatch activated, and once I pressed the button to gain access to the ship, gravity took hold.

While we’d remain suited for the entirety of our exploration of the derelict, gravity made my job much simpler until it was time to move cargo to my ship—unless I claimed the entire ship as my cargo.

Pandora repeated her double yips and a bark to disable her magnets, went to the interior hatch, and sat to wait for me to give us access. Smiling, I said, “And that’s two treats for my best little girl.”

Pandora stayed put, although she thumped her tail in general excitement.

Like the exterior hatch, the interior one opened with ease, and some form of gas hissed as it entered the airlock. “Scan atmospheric conditions,” I ordered my suit. A moment later, I heard a beep, and the HUD informed me it ran the requested analysis. After a few moments, the report came back with lethal levels of carbon dioxide and other gasses with oxygen levels below the minimum required for life, implying the ship had lost its main oxygenation system somehow.

I wished asphyxiation on nobody, and I murmured another prayer for the dead I’d locate somewhere within the derelict. With luck, they’d be either suited or had already decayed to bone.

The close calls, the ones where if only I’d been a few days earlier, tended to haunt me.

I waited for the hissing to stop before stepping through the hatch and gesturing for Pandora to follow. As I’d taught her, she heeled, and she would continue to do so until I unclipped her leash. Until I got a better feel for the ship, I’d keep her close. After I checked for dangers, I’d turn her loose and give her a chance to shine.

Pandora couldn’t use her nose in a derelict environment, but she had an uncanny knack for finding interesting things in odd places.

Once inside the ship, I closed the interior hatch and checked the panel near the airlock, which included a screen display and a full keyboard. Many ships required link access, and while I had the implants installed behind each of my ears, keyboard access implied the designer of the ship had gone the redundant route. Links could fail. Links and keyboards were unlikely to both fail except during a catastrophic system shutdown, giving those on board the highest chance of survival.

It amused me that the more expensive systems included older, reliable tech.

I tapped the system access key, and the screen turned on, informing me that the ship’s manual override had been activated by the captain. The timestamp indicated the ship had died six weeks ago, and that all members of the crew had gone into their suits to allow for potential recovery of the ship and cargo. Then, in what I counted as a plea I couldn’t ignore, he’d left the ship’s destination.

Had the ship lasted a few more days, they would have passed through the gate and arrived alive.

In what I viewed as admirable bravery, the captain had given a play-by-play of the ship’s final moments, beginning with the breakdown of the main oxygen circulation systems. They had been unable to bring the system back online with no mention of why it refused to work.

To worsen their situation, the communication systems had gone dead during the same event, preventing them from sending word via their crystals, which connected to their destination planet, Cremora Delta 005-26. I recognized the naming convention as something from early human explorers who’d gotten lucky and escaped Earth on faster ships, leaving the generational humans to fend for themselves.

The Cremorans had taken roughly five hundred thousand humans away from Earth, establishing them on a variety of planets named after the Greek alphabet. The relevance of the numbers remained a mystery to me.

I could fix the communication problem readily enough through taking the crystals to my ship and plugging them into my system, reading the origin etchings to retrieve the needed comm code.

“It looks like we’re a proper salvage crew today, Pandora. Whatever cargo they have is important enough the captain bothered with setting the ship up to be easy to take. Now, why would he do that?”

Pandora regarded me with her bright eyes and waited with admirable patience, likely hoping for another treat. Ah, hell. Those eyes got me every time. “And yes, you get a third treat for being so damned cute.”

She squeaked at me.

I read through the message from the captain again, tapped on the keyboard to check if their short-distance relay system was online and discovered it worked. I accessed my ship’s system and began getting a full dump of the logs to review everything from the comfort of my chair without having to wear a suit.