Store and Forward

by Necromancy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The Pentland had been silent for eleven years and four months when the Mattock found her, and she did not look dead so much as unattended: a long ore hauler turning end over end once every nine minutes, her radiators intact, her running lights dark, one of her two high-gain dishes gone at the root as if something had bitten it off.

Ruth Abernethy watched her come round in the forward port for the third time and said, "That's the dish."

"That's the dish," said Pell. He had a strip of liquorice root in the corner of his mouth and was working it slowly, the way he worked everything. "Manifold lets go, takes the dish with it. Or the dish goes and takes the manifold. The Mutual says one, the union says the other. That's thirty-one thousand you and I get for finding out which."

"I know what it's worth."

"I'm saying it so it's said." He matched the tumble with three short burns, and the hauler slowed in the port until she hung there, enormous and still, her name in white letters a metre high along the cargo spine. PENTLAND. CERES BULK CARRIERS. Under it someone had painted, in smaller letters and a different hand, a fish.

Pell had told her the rules once, at Ceres, over noodles in the transit hall, and had not repeated them since, which was how she knew he meant them. They took the navigation core and nothing else. They did not go aft of the galley. The crew were the Registry's business: the Registry would send its own boat, with its own people and its own bags, and the families would hear it from someone who had been trained to say it. Anything personal in the comms stack would go to the Registry sealed. "And it will try to give it to you," he had said, pointing his chopsticks at her. "When the bus comes up, the stack wakes before anything else. It'll have been holding everything they recorded, all those months, waiting for a receiver. You'll be the first receiver in eleven years. It will try to give you all of it at once. The old hands call that the crowd. You don't take it."

She had said she understood. He had looked at her for a while and then gone back to his noodles.

---

The airlock on the Pentland's service side took power from her suit pack and opened in four stages, grudging at each one. Inside, the hauler was at a hundred and eight below. Her visor display gave the figure without comment. Everything aboard that had ever been wet had long since frozen out onto the coldest surfaces, so the handholds wore a pale fur and the bulkhead placards read through a skin of frost: FIRE SUPPRESSION, AVIONICS BAY 2, NO UNSECURED ITEMS BEYOND THIS POINT.

There were unsecured items beyond that point. A sock. A drink bulb, empty, its straw clipped shut. A laminated card of the Ceres transit timetable for a year that no longer meant anything. They drifted in her lamp beam and turned slowly away from her, as if they had somewhere to be.

The way to the avionics bays ran past the galley. She had meant to go by it without looking, and she looked. It was a small square room with a fold-down table, six clipped seats and a heating plate, and on the bulkhead by the door a magnetic board with the cooking rota for a week that had started on a Monday eleven years ago. Five rows of initials in coloured marker. T.F. on Tuesday, with a drawn fish beside it, which explained something about the hull. B.O. on Wednesday and Saturday, having swapped with someone. J.A. on Thursday, and next to it, in her mother's square capitals, NOT CURRY AGAIN.

Beyond the galley the passage went on aft to a pressure hatch, shut and dogged, and on the hatch someone had taped a sheet of paper. She put her lamp on it from where she was. It was a printout from a ship's terminal, five names in a column, and under them, in pen, Please knock. T.F.

She did not go aft of the galley.

"Talk to me," Pell said in her helmet.

"Avionics two. I've passed the galley. I'm at the service panel."

"Bus first. Slow. Nothing over twenty-four until I tell you."

She drew the bleed line in after her, hand over hand, a fat orange umbilical that ran back through the lock and across the gap to the Mattock's auxiliary bay. Pell had made the coupling himself years ago, from two incompatible standards and a good deal of patience; it seated into the hauler's service port with a click she felt through her glove and did not hear. She opened the regulator a quarter turn.

The panel's indicators came up from the bottom of the column, one row at a time, amber, then green.

"Twelve volts," she said.

"Hold there."

She held. The bay remained dark except for her lamp and the little ladder of lights. The hauler had been built in a yard that expected her to spend her life in sunlight, close to Ceres, and her systems had been designed to wake in a certain order. Ruth knew the order from the manuals. Thermal control first, to keep the electronics from cracking as they warmed. Then the flight computers. Then life support, which here would find nothing to support and say so, in red, on every screen it could reach.

"Eighteen."

"Hold."

What the manuals did not say, because nobody writes a manual for a ship that has been dead for eleven years, was what Pell had said over noodles: that the communications stack drew its standby power from a separate low line, and woke before anything else.

"Twenty-two," she said, and somewhere behind the panel a relay closed with a small, decided sound, and Pell said, "There it is."

---

On the Mattock's comms board the requests were coming in faster than the board could list them. Pell read them out to her, flatly, because he knew she would want to know and because he thought it was better she heard it from him than imagined it.

"Store-and-forward queue. She's found a receiver in range on the low-gain and she's offering up everything she's got. Header, header, header. Two hundred and thirteen packets. Each one wants a handshake."

"What's in them?"

"Telemetry. Engineering dumps. Cargo manifest updates. Personal traffic." A pause. "A lot of personal traffic."

On the hauler's own panel a small status screen, which had its own heater because it belonged to the stack, had woken and was showing her the same thing in its own way: a queue display, white letters on black, scrolling. Each line was a crew identifier and a timestamp and a status. Every status read the same. PENDING. PENDING. PENDING. Then, as Pell's filter refused them, REFUSED, and a second later, as the stack tried again, PENDING. It did not stop. It had been designed to be patient, and eleven years of patience had not used it up.

KOWAL M. PENDING. FERREIRA T. PENDING. OYELARAN B. PENDING. HUSSEY D. PENDING. ABERNETHY J. PENDING.

She looked away from the screen and put her lamp on the bay's bulkhead, where someone had stuck a children's drawing of a ship with a fish on it, in crayon, its corners lifting with frost.

"I'm letting the nav core through," Pell said. "Just the core. Everything else stays outside."

"Do it."

The line for FERREIRA T. NAVCORE changed from PENDING to TRANSFERRING, and the rest of the queue went on asking around it.

---

The navigator of the Pentland had been a man called Tomás Ferreira, and his log was the plainest document Ruth had ever read. He did not use adjectives. He gave times in ship's hours, positions in the Ceres frame, and the rest in the abbreviations of his trade, and he did not explain any of it, because it had been written for whoever came next in his chair, and that person would know.

Pell put it on the Mattock's main screen and read it aloud to her a section at a time. She stood in the frozen bay with the bleed line looped round her arm and listened.

D1 0614. Coolant manifold B failure, stbd. Main drive SCRAM per proc. Debris strike HGA-1, total loss. HGA-2 stowed, motor seized, cannot deploy. LGA nominal, range insuff. beyond 0.2 AU.

D1 0930. All crew accounted. Hussey minor burn L hand.

D3 1700. Burn plan rev. 4 using RCS only. Ceres xfer window: missed by 41 days at best.

"That's the Mutual's answer," Pell said. "B manifold, starboard. Not the crew. They did it by the book. Hussey gets burnt doing it by the book."

"Go on."

D9 1402. Ceres xfer not achievable on any RCS plan. Nearest possible assist by any registered vessel on current ephemeris, 380+ days. O2 on current consumption, 71 days. Crew informed 1402.

Pell stopped reading. The liquorice root had gone still in his mouth.

"Go on," she said again.

He went on. Ferreira went on. The entries after day nine were no different in form from the entries before it. He recorded the rationing of oxygen and of heat, both to the gram and the degree. He recorded that the cargo master had rigged a second CO₂ scrubber from parts of the ore-assay lab, and that it had added eleven days to the estimate, and he gave the new figure. He recorded that Kowal was unwell. He recorded the cabin temperature every morning, and it went down by a degree every few days, according to the plan, which he also recorded.

D61 0700. Cabin 4 C. Heater ration per plan rev. 7. Kowal unwell, confined to bunk. Abernethy and Oyelaran on watch.

D86 0700. Cabin minus 2 C. All crew in suits for warmth, helmets off. Ferreira on watch.

D88 0700. Ferreira on watch.

There was nothing after that.

"That's the whole core," Pell said, after a while. "Mutual gets it, union gets it, families get the settlement. We're done. Bring the bus down and come home."

She did not move. On the panel in front of her, ABERNETHY J. went from REFUSED to PENDING, and then, as the filter caught it, back to REFUSED.

"Three," she said.

"Ruth."

"She's got three in the queue. Let me have them. I know the rule. I know what the Registry does and why. I'm asking."

The comms circuit carried nothing for so long that she checked it.

"The Registry will give them to you," Pell said. "In a room. With someone who's done it before."

"And I'll sit in the room, and the someone will hold a cup of tea and look at me, and it'll be the same three things. I'm here now. I'm the receiver. She was asking me."

She heard him breathe out. She heard the liquorice root go into the bin by his seat, which he only did when he had finished thinking.

"Three," Pell said. "Then I close it."

---

The first was from day ten, two minutes and eleven seconds long, and it was her mother as she had always been: in a hurry, practical, a little hoarse. Joan Abernethy had been cargo master on bulk haulers for twenty-two years and spoke to everyone, including her daughter, as if they were a docking crew who were about to make a mistake.

"Right. If this gets to you, someone's come, and I'm glad. The drive's gone and the dish has gone with it, and Tomás has done the sums, and they don't come out. I'm not going to go on about it. Listen. The deeds to the flat are in the blue tin on top of the wardrobe, not the green one, the green one's buttons. Your father won't remember the pension number; it's written inside the back cover of the atlas. Make him eat. Not soup. He'll live on soup if you let him." A pause, and something that might have been a laugh, or might have been her clearing her throat. "That's it for now. I'll do another."

Ruth stood very still in the cold bay. The blue tin had been on top of the wardrobe for eleven years. In the first month her father had gone to the green one, and found buttons. He had died two winters ago. He had lived, at the end, mostly on soup.

The second was from day sixty-one, forty-eight seconds.

"It isn't bad here," her mother said. "I want you to know that. We've got the films, and Bola's been teaching us a card game I can't follow, and we're all together. It's warm enough. Don't picture it bad, Ruthie. It isn't bad."

Pell had read her that day not ten minutes before.

D61 0700. Cabin 4 C.

She closed her eyes and the figure was still there, small and exact, in the navigator's abbreviations. Her mother had stood in a cabin at four degrees, with Kowal confined to his bunk a few metres off, and had looked into the recorder and lied to her, kindly, for the future. And the log, which did not lie, had recorded the morning's temperature.

"Ruth," Pell said.

"Play the last one."

The third was from day eighty-seven. One minute and thirty seconds.

"Ruthie," her mother said.

And then nothing. Not silence: the recorder had been running, and it had taken in everything there was to take. A breath, close to the microphone, slow, then another. The faint creak of a suit seal as someone shifted. A sound a long way off, metal, the hull taking up the cold. Another breath. Her mother had sat in front of the recorder with her helmet off, below freezing, and had said her daughter's name, and then had not said anything else, for a minute and twenty-eight seconds, and then had stopped it.

Ruth played it again.

"Ruthie," her mother said, and breathed, and shifted, and the hull ticked, and the file ran out.

She had Pell send her the raw file to her suit, and she put it through the suit's own audio and turned the gain up until the breath was a roar, and she played it a third time, listening under the breath for a word, a shape of a word, anything formed by a mouth and meant for her. At that gain there was only the recorder's own hiss, the floor beneath all sound, steady and grey and without end, the noise a machine makes when it is listening to a room in which nobody is speaking.

She stopped it.

---

"I'm closing the filter," Pell said.

"Yes."

"I'm marking the personal queue for the Registry. All of it. Sealed."

"Yes."

On the hauler's screen the queue went on with its work. FERREIRA T. PENDING. KOWAL M. PENDING. OYELARAN B. PENDING. Two hundred and nine of them, each with its own patience, each built to keep asking until something answered, and something would answer: in a few months the Registry boat would come and lay its own line to this panel, and somebody would sit with the families of Bola Oyelaran and Marek Kowal and Dee Hussey and Tomás Ferreira, in a room, with tea, and play them what was waiting. It would be the same for them.

ABERNETHY J. 3 of 3 DELIVERED.

She turned the regulator back a quarter turn. The ladder of lights went down the panel the way it had come up, green to amber to dark, and the queue display flickered and went out in the middle of a line, so that the last thing on the Pentland's screen was half a name, and then not that.

The relay behind the panel opened with the same small, decided sound it had made when it closed.

She uncoupled the bleed line and began to draw it back towards the lock, hand over hand, past the sock and the drink bulb and the timetable for a year nobody would travel in, past the children's drawing of the ship with a fish on it. The cold came back into the bay at once, as if it had only stepped aside. Her visor gave her the figure. She did not read it.

At the lock she stopped and looked down at the coupling in her glove. The current had run through it for forty minutes, and it was the only warm thing on the ship.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ā Necromantīā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Necromancy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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