Page 27 of Crave
With puffs of compressed gas from his suit, Sil propelled them slowly through the floating fragments.
“There’s this ancient Earth video game called Frogger,” she muttered.
“Sounds intriguing.”
“It involves not getting smashed to bits.”
“A worthy goal.” He angled the illuminated datpad. “Almost there.”
Working through the interference, the shuttle’s scanners had identified the highest concentration of likely components. Angling between the larger bits of rubble, they came to what reminded Kinsley of the country church where her uncle had taken her once a year on Easter because that was when it counted most to apologize for sins committed during the rest of the liturgical year. Even as a kid she’d been fairly certain begging forgiveness didn’t work that way. Out here in the middle of some nowhere galaxy, it seemed as if that old church had become a space ghost: chunks of stone like broken walls interspersed with hazy clouds of dust as if muted stained glass windows floated without sashes, still refracting the delicate light.
All of it untethered in the void.
The scanner on Sil’s datpad kept cycling, clearly searching but not locking.
Because there was nothing to be found here, no forgiveness and no fortune either.
“Roxy came from here, no question,” Sil said quietly. “All the markers are present. Judging from what remains, the collision was with another interstellar object, mostly heavy metals and ice.”
Kinsley sighed. “What are the chances? So much nothing out here, but they ran into each other anyway.”
“The force of impact was so immense, almost everything was obliterated. And the electromagnetic energy wave cracked through even atomic structures.”
Through the exo-suit comm, the sorrow in his voice was just too close. She glanced away, looking into the darkness.
Yeah, she felt that: floating through a mostly empty universe—not happy, maybe, but existing—only to run smack into something else, hard enough to blow apart that little existence, exposing some sad little lump of loneliness.
Nope. Better to be the cold, hard chunk that spun off into the void, never to be seen again.
She cleared her throat. Gotta focus on what was left. “You said before that there would be at least some valuable molecules. Enough here for the Luster?”
“There are trace amounts similar to the spalling Roxy left on theDeepWander. But it’s mostly decayed from radiation exposure, and it will be hard to separate from the impact residue. And there’s just…not much left.”
Notenough, he meant.
While he adjusted his devices to set up a search grid, she drifted a little away from him, clutching the tether between them. The shuttle searchlights and the distant starlight shimmered through the chunks and dust that remained, making strange, dreamlike shapes in the waste, not even as well-defined as clouds, but whispering to that drifting part of her.
“It’s all dust,” she murmured.
Sil didn’t answer for a moment, but he stopped looking at his devices and just hung there in space beside her. “The collision was just too catastrophic, and it’s been too long. All that’s left are a few basic elements. But there’s nothing to save or even salvage.”
The biggest mistake of her life had been thinking that if she hustled enough, scammed enough she would eventually feel like she had enough. Instead, everything she’d ever grasped had just sifted through her greedy fingers, less than dust, less than starlight, less than the fleeting moments of pleasure she’d found with a romantic alien.
Though Sil took a few more samples of the shimmering dust, shattered disappointment evident even through the visor of his exo-suit, she knew they had failed. Memories couldn’t be gathered and hoarded. Remembering wasn’t enough.
When they returned to the shuttle and stripped out of their suits, he didn’t even try to subtly ogle her as she knew he’d done before. Yeah, that feeling of missing a score kinda drained all the fun out of risking their lives.
As he fed the samples into an assay test he’d brought from theDeepWander, she scrounged up the flask of Amma’s yezo he’d mentioned. How nice to have the alien analog of cheap whiskey to really underscore the pain of their failure.
She found him sitting in the cargo hold next to Roxy, his hand on one facet. No lights moved in its depths.
She angled the flask over the top of the rock, letting a few drops fall. “I don’t know if you taste things like we do, but…”
“Sad,” Roxy said through its speaker. On the darkened surface, the droplets streaked like slow tears.
“Sad,” Kinsley agreed as she hunkered down next to Sil. She took a swig—and sputtered, pressing her knuckles to her lips to keep the rest down. Knowing yezo was fermented algae should’ve been her first hint. Chalk that up in the ever-lengthening mistake column.
“Not alone,” Roxy added as Kinsley passed the flask.
