Page 43 of Cloverleaf Station

Kieron wasn’t the sort of person who prayed. He hadn’t even learned about the existence of religion until he was off Hadrian’s Colony and shoved into a low-budget Alliance school. There were so many religions, and so many among them purported to be the one and true religion. At first it beggared his understanding that people could actually allow themselves to believe such things, until his mind made the natural parallel between religion and his own cult-like upbringing.

Blind faith is the problem, not religion. Blind belief. That’s all you’ve let yourself have ever since Zakari disappeared. It’s all that’s kept you going. What will you have now if your faith leads you to an empty hole in the middle of space? How will you cope, knowing that your best was never good enough, that you were always going to be too late? How will you live with your own failure?

Do you even want to?

“Ten secooonds,” Catalina said, breaking through his spiraling reverie. Kieron took a deep, slow breath.

Too late to go back now.

“All we can do is move forward,” Elenus murmured as if Kieron had spoken aloud. Kieron—for reasons he didn’t even understand—reached out and grabbed Elenus’s hand, holding it like a lifeline as Catalina crested the final set of asteroids between them and the highest-probability site for finding remnants of Zakari in the known galaxy.

“I seeeeee somethiiiing!” Catalina exclaimed, highlighting it on her viewscreen and enlarging it so that they could see it too.

Kieron held his breath. Was it … was it …

Fuck … what the hell was that?

***

Whatever they were looking at, it was manmade—or at least, sentient-life-form-made—that much was clear. The section that was visible head-on looked like part of a fuselage, but it was bigger than just that. Some of the central cabin was still attached to it. Not the part that would have held the pilot’s seat, though—this was too close to the back of the ship. So not something that was likely to have Zakari’s body in it if it was even his ship.

Kieron cut through his own useless mental meanderings with a harsh pinch to the inside of his knee. “Catie, can you identify the model of the ship based on the pieces you see here?”

“Yess, Keeeeron. This is a piece of an XP-Dart 5.3, Xera Cona Factooory, on—”

“Thank you.” That was their ship. Xera Cona Factory was the largest manufacturer of spacefaring vehicles on Trakta, and Kieron and Zakari had poured most of their personal savings into getting this one. When it was made, it had been middle of the line for mining vessels, but their custom radiation shields had elevated it to be far more expensive than it looked. It had been equipped with all sorts of scientific supplies as well as the standard mining kit, and it was big enough for two to sit in comfortably for days on end while they worked.

It had been a joy, buying this ship. The first thing Zak had done after they got it was to take his children for a ride—in atmosphere, of course, because no Traktan parent risked their child to space if they could help it. It had still been fun. Kieron had never felt more like a part of the family than he had that day.

And now here was a part of their lost ship. As much as it pained him to see it broken apart like this, he couldn’t just leave it here. The potential for learning more about what had happened to Zakari was too strong.

He cleared his throat. “How close can you get to it without risking impact?”

“Thirteeeeeen point two-one meeeters.”

“That’s still not close enough for you to risk getting into a greenie and going out there to poke around,” Elenus said quickly. His hands seemed oddly twitchy, like he was on the verge of taking hold of Catarina’s external controls and turning them around … or like he was trying to keep himself from grabbing hold of Kieron. “There’s no safe range for that as far as I’m concerned. I absolutely refuse to grow you another entire body’s worth of vital organs, do you hear me?”

“I hear you, and I’m not an idiot,” Kieron said.

“Could have fooled me.”

“Keeeeron!” Catalina interrupted before the conversation could deteriorate any further. “Penetrating density analyssiiiis shows therrrrre is a high probabiiiility of organic matter insiiide the structure.”

What? Could it even be remotely possible that something of Zakari was left on this piece of ship? Why in the back of the ship? Why wouldn’t he have been in the pilot’s seat, where he could see the pictures of his family he’d left stuck in the crevices on the dash? Had the accident that took him out happened too quickly for him to get to the front … but this wasn’t the part of the back that had held the bathroom either.

What the hell had happened here? “How big is the organic matter?” he asked, a little proud of how calm his voice was.

“Less than a meeeeeter loooong.”

Elenus spoke up. “Can you safely reorient to get us a visual confirmation?”

“Yess, Daddeeeee.” Catalina began to slowly, carefully move herself closer to the wreckage, and Kieron found himself holding his breath. He had no idea what they were about to find in there, and he was afraid to get his hopes up, but …

“Expanding bit.” Elenus pointed to a sharp, petal-like protrusion jutting through the fractured hull as their point of view changed. “Miners use them—”

“—to anchor their crafts to asteroids, I know.” He’d only been working from Cloverleaf Station for nearly half a decade now. “We always kept a full four-point set in the ship with us.”

“And what are the odds that your old partner put that one through your hull deliberately?”