She guided the Rocinante alongside the pod, matching its drift with a delicate touch. Through the broken viewport, she saw a shape—a body, strapped into a seat, motionless. The pressure suit was torn across the chest, and the helmet’s visor was cracked, webbed with frozen condensation. Inside, a face. A woman’s face, eyes closed, lips blue.
Mira felt a prickle at the base of her skull—the kind of instinct that had kept her alive through a pirate interdiction near Europa and a depressurization incident in the rings of Saturn. “Match it against known debris databases.” carrier p5-7 fail
“Maybe,” Mira said. “But her pod’s still transmitting. Let’s find out why.” She guided the Rocinante alongside the pod, matching
She looked toward P5-7. The twisted solar arrays were still dark, but now she saw something else—a faint, pulsing light from the station’s core, deep inside its ruined structure. A light that matched the rhythm of the pod’s data pulse. Inside, a face
“Moving how?”
But the Rocinante ’s engines were already powering up—not by their command. The ship turned, slowly, deliberately, toward the dark heart of P5-7. Toward the pulsing light. Toward the carrier that had failed, and was now, in ways they could not yet comprehend, very much alive.
Mira looked at the pod outside the viewport—at the woman’s frozen face, the cracked visor, the blinking light. And she understood.