PROLOGUE: 173 Days
The Raft’s internal telemetry ends at 04:12 UTC ship-time. The last of its recorders were shut down to save power for docking. To piece together the rescue, we used optical proximity data from the tug Aethelgard, footage from the automated exterior cameras, and three drives recovered from the forward access collar.
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On the tug’s approach monitors, the target no longer looked like a ship. Six hulls flew together because they could no longer fly apart. Four curved sections of passenger accommodation and a fifth module hauled back from the perimeter had been lashed around a yellow logistics container, like broken pieces of a wheel. The tug’s cameras could pick out the towlines, the cargo straps, and the lengths of framing salvaged from a cargo bay.
The white hull had gone chalky gray. Debris had pitted it, and improvised attitude burns had left streaks along the sides. Gold and silver thermal blankets covered the seams, held down with heavy tape. Two mismatched solar arrays, wired in by hand, flexed with each small correction burn.
Behind the layered glass of an observation port, the tug’s long-range lenses caught a pale figure hanging in the dark, watching the rescue beacon approach.
The assembly turned at a fraction of a degree per second, too slowly to produce measurable gravity. The Aethelgard’s salvage master entered one line in the log.
Structure does not match any registered class profile. Visually, it is a raft.
At 02:40, Captain Rourke called the Raft by name and asked about its attitude thrusters. The man who answered sounded as if he hadn’t had a drink of water in hours. He gave his name first.
“Aethelgard, this is Lindqvist, Station Logistics. We have zero maneuvering gas remaining. M-1’s forward collar is cleared for hard seal. Bring transfer harnesses. Our people cannot walk.”
He gave the docking instructions without a stumble. Before walk, he stopped for two seconds.
When the first response team opened the hatch, their helmet cameras caught no cheering, no tears, no rush for the airlock. They captured an organized dark.
The cabin lights had been switched off months earlier to save fuel. What power the habitat still had came from scavenged solar arrays. Green photoluminescent tape, held to the bulkheads with Velcro, marked the way through the corridors. The air smelled of cold sweat, dry lint, and the mineral dust of overworked scrubbers. There was a faint sting of ozone.
Men, women, and children pulled themselves along the guide ropes in the main transit tube. After half a year in weightlessness, they moved hand over hand without hurry. They were thin. They wore pieces of old uniforms, thermal layers, and even luxury hotel bathrobes, cut off at the knees so the cloth wouldn’t catch on the valve handles.
Dozens waited on the other side of the bulkhead. Beyond them, hull after hull, waited the rest of the two hundred and eighteen. For several seconds, the only sound we can make out is the dull metallic click of a tether carabiner snapping onto a handrail.
Eighteen months earlier, our production crew had boarded a very different vessel to tell a very different story.
