Sarya guessed that, which is what gave her this idea in the first place. Mer is a pushover; Roche is the one to convince. “The former owner of this ship is dead,” she says in her carefully rehearsed business voice, tapping the floor with Roche’s own finger. “I’ve had my helper intelligence do some research, and it turns out we can claim it. And everything on it.”
Ace’s icon appears in the corner of her vision, but thankfully he says nothing. If there’s one plus to lying in bed for two days, it’s that there’s plenty of time to train your helper intelligence not to constantly interrupt.
“Ah,” says Roche. “Phil wants to know if your helper intelligence is an expert in salvage law.”
“Tell them kind of,” whispers Ace in her ear, feeding her the information they’ve been poring over together. “Recently, anyway.”
“Article one hundred five,” reads Sarya. “Paragraph nineteen. In the Event of Shipowner Death.”
Roche’s lenses lose focus for a moment. “Ah, yes,” he says. “I remember being on the receiving end of this one.”
“Really?” says Mer, picking his teeth. “How did that work?”
“Not well,” says Roche. “It’s heavily weighted against the deceased. I was forced to purchase my own ship back, just because I spent a few days legally dead. And I ask you: is that fair?”
“Honestly, yeah,” says Mer, scratching himself. “It sounds pretty fair.”
“All right,” says Roche, turning back to Sarya. “Let’s assume the ship is available to us, free and clear. Given this, what business would you propose?”
Here it goes, step two. “We have a hold full of water ice,” Sarya says, barely weaving in her seat on the floor. “Heavy water ice. Seven hundred tons of frozen deuterium oxide, according to the manifest. And all that heavy water is suddenly more valuable—at least in the short term—because Watertower is ions.” The old Sarya would not have gotten through that sentence without choking up. Whether because time has passed or because she has half a Widow wedged in her brain, she barely even feels its passage now.
“Speaking of cold,” murmurs Roche.
She takes a breath: now for step three. “So we sell it,” she says. “We take that money, and we buy Network passage. We leave this solar system and we don’t look back.”
Roche tilts his head to one side. “Do you have a destination in mind?”
Another breath. “There are millions of possibilities,” she says. “Plenty of places to earn a living. But first,” she adds, almost like it’s an afterthought: “The Blackstar.”
The other two stare at her.
“The Network Station?” says Mer. “The big one?”
I’m on every Network Station in the sector, echoes a memory in her mind. “The big one,” she says. “We have to pass it anyway. Why not take a look around?”
“Normally one does not dock with a Blackstar,” says Roche. “One waves as one passes by.”
“Tourist traps,” agrees Mer. “For rich tourists.”
“We can buy a new cargo there,” Sarya says. “And we can take it anywhere we want. Our Blackstar services a hundred million cubic lightyears. That’s eight hundred Networked solar systems, all branching off that one station. Can you imagine the business, just in our sector? We were lucky enough to stumble into ship ownership, friends. Let’s not squander it.”
She halts, here at the end of her presentation, slightly out of breath. She glances from one face to the other, trying to judge their reactions.
“That was good,” whispers Ace in her ears. “I see you changed the last sentence from your rehearsals.”
Mer clinks a talon against his teeth and performs what her unit tells her is a [shrug]. “I like it,” he says.
“Roche?” Sarya prompts.
“Excellent presentation,” says Roche. “A well thought out plan.”
Sarya feels a rush of relief. “Great,” she says. “Then we’ll plan on—”
“There’s only one problem,” says Roche. “The owner of the ship is not dead.”
Sarya stares at him. She has not rehearsed anything for this particular objection. “Hood is…alive?” she says. She makes a sound that she is startled to realize is laughter. “Oh no,” she says. “Last I saw him, he was definitely dead. Even if he wasn’t when I left him, Watertower is—”
“Hood is not the owner,” says Roche, and now her Network unit has inserted a glimmering [amusement] next to his lenses.
She feels her stomach sink; what did she miss? “Who is?” she says.
And now Roche doesn’t even bother to hide his [laughter]. “Sandy is,” he says.
Sandy is in her cabin when the Human comes to see her. She’s been awaiting it for days—it takes forever for twos to get around to accomplishing anything, even when they’re not almost dead—but is still startled when the notification appears in her mind.
[Door], says her helper intelligence.
[Open], she tells it in return.
The Human stands there, rank in the stained utility suit it has insisted on wearing since it arrived on board. It’s ridiculous. Everyone on this ship knows its species; why insist on hiding its anatomy? It is also injured. It stands under its own power, but barely; Sandy can tell it’s doing everything it can to remain upright.
“Hi,” says the Human.
Sandy cannot hear the words but she can read the simple Standard in its mouth movements and feel its voice vibrate her fur. She watches the Human sway in the doorway, clutching the frame with the android’s hand. Its eyes do what Sandy expected them to; they flicker over Sandy’s own body, over her cabin, and finally come to rest on the object hanging on the wall. They widen, which surely means the same thing as it does for Sandy’s species. Sandy waits a carefully measured moment for the Human to drink it in…and there’s the sudden tightening of facial muscles she was waiting for.
[Hello], says Sandy.
The Human doesn’t reply immediately. Sandy waits, watching it stare at the thing on her wall. It’s fascinating: you can actually see its glacial thought processes lumbering up to speed. That’s one thing she misses about the academy; say what you will about her classmates, but at least they were sufficiently high-tier for a decent conversation. The Human probably barely clears a two. If this were one of her classmates darkening her doorway, the visit would have been over by now. For every Network symbol that was spoken, a dozen would have been understood. A tier two, if it saw Sandy communicating with a fellow high-tier, would think it barely a conversation at all.