The coolant line was lying to him, and Eli Navarro could hear it.
He lay on his back under the Halfpenny's console with a torque driver clamped in his teeth. The pump ran at a steady hum. Under the hum ran a thin whine. Under the whine, every eleven seconds, something dropped half a tone and came back up again.
Not the pump. A seal on the return side, going soft.
He took the driver out of his mouth. "You're not fooling anybody, sweetheart."
The tug didn't answer. Tugs never did, and that was most of what he liked about them.
He found the seal by feel, behind a bundle of cable he'd zip-tied himself two years ago. It was warm and slightly tacky under his thumb, which meant it had a month left in it. Maybe a week. He didn't have the money for a month or a week, so he wrapped it in sealant tape and told it to hold.
The whine sank back under the hum. He counted eleven seconds, then eleven more. Nothing.
"Good," he said. "Stay that way."
An old chief on his first cruiser had told him that every machine tells you how it's going to die, if you're quiet long enough to hear it. Eli had been quiet for most of his adult life since. It had paid off with machines. With people, not so much.
He slid out and sat up, and the cabin came back around him. Six square meters of scuffed gray panels, one acceleration couch with the padding worn shiny, and a galley that was really a heating plate and a cupboard. Beyond the forward port lay the Scatter.
People on Earth pictured the asteroid belt as a crowd of rocks jostling for elbow room. It wasn't. It was mostly nothing, with a rock every few thousand kilometers if you were lucky. The Halfpenny had been out here eleven days, and in eleven days he'd found one dead communications satellite worth hauling home.
It hung behind him on the tow cable, a gold-foil box as big as a cargo container. Somebody long gone had folded its solar panels away before it died. At Mags Ferro's yard on Ceres it might fetch four thousand credits. That was a month of algae coffee, or eleven days of the real stuff if he wanted to feel something.
He did the math anyway. He always did the math.
Four thousand for the satellite. Reaction mass to get home, call it twelve hundred. Interest on the tug due on Day 12, three thousand six hundred eighty. What was left over would fit in his pocket with room for his hand.
He pulled himself along the ceiling grip to the pilot's couch and strapped in.
Taped above the console, where he'd see it every time he looked up, was a photo of Danny Ocampo.
It was an old print from one of the vending booths on Gateway Station. Danny grinned out of it in a Navy jumpsuit, grease to the elbows, holding a wrench up like he'd won it in a fight. One corner had curled from the console heat. Eli kept meaning to fix that, and kept not doing it.
Hold the light steady, Navarro. I can't fix what I can't see.
He didn't look at the picture long. You didn't, with that kind of picture. You let it hang there and got on with the work.
The fire had been three years ago. A reactor room, an order to seal the hatch, and a hatch he'd opened instead. Four people out. One not.
That was all of it. That was all he let it be.
The proximity alert chirped once. He thumbed it quiet before it could chirp again and checked the plot.
The shear lay dead ahead.
That was what the old rockhoppers called it. On the charts it was a dull carbonaceous lump designated Locker 4417, three kilometers long and logged as worthless. Around it turned a slow field of boulders, some as big as the tug and some as big as a house. Something long ago had broken a larger rock here, and the pieces had never finished falling.
The boulders didn't move at random, because nothing in space really did. They swung through a lazy, tumbling cycle around the Locker, like water circling a drain that would take ten thousand years to empty.
Most pilots went around. Going around added nine hours.
Eli watched the field and counted.
The big boulder on the left rolled past the gap. One. A pair of smaller rocks crossed behind it, two, three. He counted the way he'd once counted a pump's strokes in a dark engine room, lips moving, because a pump would tell you everything if you let it talk. Seven. Eight. Nine.
Then the gap held open, and nothing crossed it at all. He counted the quiet. Rest.
Then the left boulder swung back around, and the count started over.
Nine, rest, nine.
He grinned at nobody. "There you are."
He brought the Halfpenny in on the rest. The tug slid between two tumbling slabs of black rock, close enough that the proximity alarm rose to one long, steady note. He let it sing. The tow cable stayed straight behind him, and the satellite didn't so much as twitch.
On the far side, he finally breathed again and drank lukewarm coffee from the bulb. That was the short way home, and he'd just bought back nine hours.
The comm chimed at 07:40 ship's time.
Eli looked at the ID and considered not answering. Then he answered, because ignoring Mags only made her louder.
"You're alive," Mags said. Her voice came in with the half-second lag of Ceres, dry as grit. "I was hoping you'd been eaten. Then I could sell your tug and retire."
"My tug's worth less than your coffee machine."
"My coffee machine works." Something clattered on her end. Mags ran a parts yard on the Port Piazzi spin ring, and something there was always clattering. "You know what day it is?"
"Day eleven of being broke."
"Day one of being broke and late. Interest is due on the twelfth."
"I know, Mags."
"Interest doesn't care that you're tired, Eli."
He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. Mags was sixty-seven years old and held the note on everything he owned, which was one tug and the clothes he was wearing. She was also the only person in the belt who still said his name like it wasn't a verdict. He'd never told her that. She would have charged him for it.
"I've got a comms satellite in tow," he said. "Gold foil. Panels intact."
"Folded or broken?"
"Folded. Somebody put it to bed nice before it died."
"Then maybe four." She paused to yell at someone on her end about a crate. "Less, if you bring it in looking like you need the money."
"I do need the money."
"That's why you'll get less." Another clatter. "Are you eating?"
"I'm eating."
"What are you eating?"
He looked at the cupboard. "Puck."
"That's not eating. That's surviving with extra steps." She made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Your face looks terrible, by the way."
"You can't see my face."
"I don't need to. I can hear it."
He laughed despite himself. It came out rusty, like a hinge that hadn't been used.
"Listen," Mags said, and the grit went out of her voice for a moment. "Dagan Pruitt's been in my yard. Twice this week."
Eli stopped smiling.
Pruitt ran a claim-jumping tug called the Gristmill with a crew of four who liked him because he paid them on time. He'd been an enforcer for Hadley-Okuma Mining once, the kind they sent when a contract needed renegotiating by hand. These days he freelanced. He didn't find salvage. He found people who'd found salvage.
"What did he want?" Eli asked.
"He asked which lanes you work. Asked like it was small talk."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him you work whatever lanes have no money in them." The clatter, farther off now. "He laughed. I didn't like the laugh."
"He's got nothing to take, Mags. I've got a gold box and a bad seal."
"He doesn't know that. Men like Pruitt assume everybody's hiding something, because they always are." She went quiet a beat. "Be careful out there, all right?"
"I'm always careful."
"You opened a hatch on a burning reactor because somebody told you not to. You've never been careful a day in your life."
The line hissed with distance. He didn't have an answer for that, and she didn't wait for one.
"Twelfth," she said. "Don't make me come out there."
The comm clicked off.
Eli sat for a moment with his hand still on the switch. Then he checked the long-range plot. It took a while, because the Halfpenny's sensors were old and the Scatter was very wide. Then he found it at the edge of the screen: a transponder thirty-one thousand kilometers back, holding a course parallel to his own.
The Gristmill, matching his speed to the decimal.
As he watched, the comm chimed again. Voice this time, open channel.
He let it chime twice. Then he picked up, because not picking up told a man like Pruitt more than talking did.
"There he is." Pruitt's voice was warm and slow, a voice for selling used tugs to widows. "Navarro, right? Eli Navarro. We've never been properly introduced."
"We haven't been improperly introduced either."
Pruitt laughed like that was the best thing he'd heard all week. "See, that's what I like. A man with a sense of humor out here. Most of these rockhoppers, you say good morning and they act like you shot their dog."
"Good morning, Pruitt."
"Dagan, please." A pause, friendly. "Saw you come through that shear back there. Tight flying. Real tight. Most folks go around that thing."
"Most folks have more fuel than time."
"Ain't that the truth." Another pause, longer. Eli could picture him leaning back in his couch, feet up, smiling at his crew. "Saw you got yourself a box in tow, too. Gold foil. Pretty."
"It's a dead satellite."
"Sure, sure. I'll give you two thousand for it, right now. Save you the trip to Ceres."
"Mags'll give me four."
"Mags'll give you three and a half and a lecture." Pruitt chuckled. "But I hear you, I hear you. Man's got to make his own decisions." The warmth didn't change at all when he went on. "I read about you, you know. Navy man. Engineering. That was a hard thing, what happened on that cruiser. Real hard. I always felt the brass hung you out to dry."
Eli's hand tightened on the armrest. "That's a matter of public record."
"Everything's public record, if you know where to look." The smile was audible. "Anyway. You find anything interesting out here, partner, you give me a call. I always pay fair."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"You do that."
The channel closed. Eli stared at the plot, at the little transponder holding its patient parallel line.
Pruitt couldn't do much from that far out. But he was patient, and that was what made him dangerous. He'd shadow you for a week to learn where you went, and then he'd go there first with a lawyer and a smile.
There was nothing out here to find, which was the funny part. Eli had a gold-foil box and a seal that wouldn't last the month. Let Pruitt burn his fuel watching that.
He turned back to the forward port and finished his coffee.
The boulder came out of nowhere, which was the whole problem with boulders.
He'd cleared the shear twenty minutes earlier. The field should have been behind him. But one slab had been flung wide by some collision a thousand years back, and it came tumbling up from below on an arc he hadn't counted. It wasn't big. It didn't need to be.
It clipped the satellite.
The tow cable snapped taut, and the Halfpenny lurched sideways hard enough to slam him into his straps. The console screamed in three colors at once. Behind him, the satellite swung wide on its cable like a weight on a string, and it dragged the tug's stern around toward the slow, dark bulk of Locker 4417.
Eli hit the thrusters. It wasn't enough. The tug was turning, the rock was close, and the satellite had more mass than the tug did.
So he fired the grapple.
It was what you did in a spin. Anchor to something solid, kill the rotation, and sort out the rest afterward. The grapple shot out on its cable toward the Locker's pitted surface, and he braced for the dull jolt of a harpoon biting into rock.
It didn't jolt.
It rang.
The vibration came up through the cable, into the tug and through the deck plates and into the bones of his hands. It wasn't a thud. It was a note, long and clear and almost musical, as if someone had struck a bell the size of a building.
The spin died. The tug hung there on its tether, swinging gently, while the satellite drifted to the end of its own cable and stopped.
Eli sat very still in his couch and listened to the hull hum around him.
"That's not a rock," he said to the empty cabin. "Rocks don't ring."
The cabin had no opinion.
He pulled up the grapple camera. The feed was grainy and lit by a single floodlight. The grapple's head had punched through a crust of dirty ice and burned down into what lay beneath it. The stone around the hole looked wrong: smooth and layered and almost grown, like the inside of a seashell.
At the bottom of the hole, under the stone, was metal.
Dark metal, not the gray of station alloy or the dull green of mining steel. It was nearly black, with a faint sheen like oil on water, and it was perfectly smooth. No weld lines. No rivets. No seams he recognized, and Eli had spent fourteen years of his life reading seams.
His hands were shaking. He noticed it from a distance, the way he'd notice somebody else's hands.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. It's a ship. Somebody buried a ship. That's fine. People bury things."
Nobody buried ships inside asteroids. Nobody grew stone over a hull like a scab.
He laughed, and the sound came out wrong in the small cabin. "Mags is going to want a bigger cut."
Then the salvager in him caught up with the rest of him, and he made himself think it through like a damage report.
Belt law was simple, which was the only nice thing about it. First grapple on a derelict was a claim. But a claim was only real once you filed it at the salvage court on Ceres, with the tug's grapple log and a fee he didn't have. Until then the find was loose. Anybody who could hold it could have it.
And Pruitt was out there at the edge of the plot, watching his transponder sit still beside a worthless rock.
"Right," Eli told the photo above the console. "Options."
Danny grinned at him, unhelpful as ever.
"One. Cut the grapple, act like the satellite snagged, and go home. Pruitt sees nothing." He shook his head. "Two. Call the Navy. Hand them whatever this is." That one made him laugh again, short and sour. The Navy had been very clear about what it thought of Machinist's Mate Navarro. He doubted they'd be grateful. They'd thank him with a cell.
"Three. Call Mags. Borrow the fee. File before Pruitt figures it out." He looked at the hull on the camera feed, black and seamless and impossible. "And then what? Tow a mountain to Ceres?"
The photo didn't have an opinion either.
He keyed the comm to call her back. The relay to Ceres showed busy. He tried again and got busy again, which was strange, because the relay was never busy at this hour.
Then he noticed the uplink.
The Halfpenny's data line was still open from Mags's call. He'd never closed it, because he never did. The little green indicator for a live connection was blinking fast, and the counter beside it was climbing. The tug was moving more data than it had moved in a month.
Something was using his uplink.
Text filled the console. It wasn't English. It wasn't any script he had ever seen: angular, dense, scrolling too fast to follow. Then it stopped, and the screen went blank for one heartbeat. When the text came back, it was plain capital letters.
His own name.
NAVARRO, ELI JAVIER. MACHINIST'S MATE FIRST CLASS. UNITED EARTH NAVY.
Then his service number. Then his record.
Eli stared at the screen. He hadn't opened that file in three years. He knew every line of it anyway.
The text scrolled at a steady, unhurried pace. Fourteen years of service. Two commendations, one of them for a coolant fire he'd mostly forgotten. Then the cruiser, the date, the reactor room. The words disobeyed a direct order to seal compartment during reactor casualty. The words general court-martial. The word guilty. The words dishonorable discharge, which he could still feel in his teeth.
Below that came the testimony. The names of the witnesses scrolled past, and he made himself not read them.
Something on the other side of that black hull was reading his life through his own uplink, line by line. It read the way he read a failing pump: patiently, all the way to the end, listening for the part that told the truth.
He reached for the switch to kill the connection. His hand stopped above it.
The scrolling had stopped too. The record sat on the screen, finished, his whole worst day laid out in plain type.
He waited for an alarm, or a demand, or a warning to stand clear.
Instead, below the record, two new lines appeared.
```status BOSUN: Selection criteria satisfied. Provisional Commander, please come aboard. ```
