Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,5

remain sealed away, while you heard the evacuation pods firing, one by one from the other side of the ship? “I’ll check the passenger cabin.”

“Roger that, Langston. But hurry. Clock’s ticking.”

I made my way back through the corridor, past the airlock and toward the main cabin of the ship, ignoring the side passages that led to engineering and, presumably, the escape pods. As I approached the final hatch, my feet slowed. What would I find on the other side? Empty chairs and mystery, like on the bridge? Or distended corpses? I drew a steadying breath and spun the manual hatch release.

The door swung inward in silence, on hinges so smooth that I barely felt the faint resistance. My light swept over the chamber, illuminating row after row of what my tired mind first took to be sleeping people. They sat in the acceleration chairs, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, row upon row of perfectly still bodies. It took a moment to process—to realize that the stillness was too perfect, that the faces were not composed in sleep, but slack in death. It took a moment to remember that the ship was airless, depressurized, drifting through space. In that moment, I felt suddenly, completely, and utterly alone.

“You still there, Persephone?” I asked the empty space, forcing the words to calm despite the panic I felt crawling up my esophagus.

“We’re here, Langston,” Chan said. Her voice was soft, perhaps overwhelmed by the images coming back to the ship over the Net, but it was somehow soothing.

“I…” I cleared my throat. “I’m not sure we have enough time to do the retrievals.” That was a lie—or at least, not the whole truth. Maybe there was time, maybe there wasn’t. I’d been working salvage long enough that retrievals were an inevitability. But there was something so… dehumanizing about cutting into an empty coil and prying out the little bit of storage that held most of what a person was. If they were smart, they were backed up, anyway. If not… But, damn it, they were lucrative, and all of us could use the creds.

“Understood, Langston.” Miller this time, cutting into my reverie. “We make twenty-seven, that’s two-seven, coils.” There was a long, long pause. “How many do you think you can get? Estimate time remaining at… approximately three hours.”

Shit. Miller was trying to be subtle, trying to be nice. There was plenty of time to harvest the cores from the coils. And there was plenty of reason, too. I had a job to do. Best to be about it.

“Message received, Persephone. You may want to blank the vids again.”

“We’ll keep them running. It’s the least we can do.”

I didn’t respond to that, instead stepping into the passenger cabin. I moved to the first row of acceleration chairs and turned my attention to the first corpse. The coil was bio-female, young, and, at least when imagined with the full flush of life, attractive. It showed no signs of decompression or trauma, and the eyes remained, thankfully, closed. I tried to stop thinking of the coil as a person—what made it a person was safely locked away in the core, anyway. It was just a shell, and one that had outlived its usefulness.

The rational part of my mind knew that to be true. It didn’t stop the twisting in my guts as I pulled the frozen body forward, and moved the auburn hair out of the way, baring the hollow in the base of the skull. The laser cutter and the knife did their work, and in a few minutes, I was sliding another core into the bag on my harness.

The work was grisly, but not particularly difficult. The entire coil and core were engineered so that it took only a passing familiarity with anatomy to affect the retrieval. It wasn’t the sort of task that required my full attention—in fact, it was the sort of task that begged for that attention to be turned elsewhere. Sarah, why are the coils not showing signs of decompression?

Insufficient data at this time.

I ground my teeth together. Guess.

As you wish, Langston. The first and most likely cause is sufficient time during decompression for the fluids and gasses in the body to adapt to the changing pressures. Other possible causes decrease greatly in probability and include flash freezing, absence of fluids or gasses in the system to begin with, or administration of outside agents to prevent decompression.

I knew Sarah was right—no one spent long in space without garnering a basic