T minus two days—Yakutsk
Hey, Dallas! Come have a look at this.”
Dallas turned and squinted at Martine. On the nearly airless plains, the line between Lena’s brightness and the stardusted black of open space was crisp and painful, and the backlighting always fucked with Dallas’s eyes. Eye surgery might help, but that took money; and scavengers, even as experienced as Dallas, never made much money. The dealers made the money, and Dallas didn’t understand why more didn’t take their hoard and escape. After the failure of the Great Terraformer Experiment, they should have been leaving Yakutsk in droves.
Dallas wouldn’t leave. Dallas preferred Yakutsk without diffuse sunshine, orbiting Lena with nothing but its thin atmosphere and meager gravity. Dallas had spent thirty years in the domes, and had childhood memories filled with jet-black days clomping across the dusty surface of the moon in weighted boots, finding discarded shipyard parts and the occasional trash—or wreckage—from passing freighters, starships, and even Syndicate raiders, and collecting it like gold. When the terraformers had been activated a year ago, Yakutsk had become alien, and any pleasure Dallas had felt scavenging the surface had dissolved. It seemed so wasteful, forcing a perfectly reasonable moon into a role it had not been born to play. Domes were efficient. Domes took nothing they did not need. Domes made sense.
So many people had been frightened and angry the month before when the terraformers had failed, and they’d had to move back into the old covered cities. The days had grown jet-black and familiar again, and Dallas had been relieved.
The object Martine was looking at was also silhouetted by the big gas giant, and getting close enough to see would require Dallas to drop a large, ungainly fragment of cargo hull. Freighter wreckage was almost always profitable, if mundane; Jamyung, the trader who paid them most promptly, always said he wanted the unusual, but Jamyung bought more standard parts than anything else. Dallas had built an entire career off of spotting the ordinary and scavenging quickly, bringing in three times the salvage of other scavengers and making twice the money. Breaking down this chunk was going to take time, and the afternoon was wearing on. Taking a few moments to placate Martine might cut the day’s payoff by quite a bit.
Martine was new. Dallas remembered what it was like to be new, and the sting of realizing you really were in it on your own.
The fragment dropped back to the moon’s surface, sinking gently in the low gravity to hit the dusty exterior with a quiet thump. Shuffling in weighted boots, Dallas crept up next to her to look at what she held in her hands.
It was cuboid, about fourteen by fourteen by three centimeters, and entirely unadorned. In the verdant light of the gas giant it was difficult to be clear on the color, but Dallas’s unreliable eyes cast it as more or less gray. What kind of reaction was Martine expecting?
“It’s a box,” Dallas said.
Martine shook her head, disagreeing. Up close, Dallas could see the flash of excitement in her eyes. “It has no seams,” she said. “None, Dallas. It’s solid.”
“Machined.”
“Why would someone machine a random box? Besides, Dallas—feel it. It’s warm.”
“Can’t feel anything through the suit.” And if it’s warm, it’s probably radioactive, you damn fool. But Dallas ran a scan—no ionizing radiation, only thermal. And sure enough, the thing’s surface temperature was nearly 37 degrees. Body temperature. Out here in the near-vacuum of Yakutsk’s frigid, terraformless night. “Must be something inside.”
Martine was grinning. “How much do you think he’ll give me for it?”
“Jamyung?” Dallas scoffed. “Not fucking enough. He’ll tell you it’s shit, worth nothing.”
“Then I’ll keep it.”
A vague uneasiness crept up Dallas’s spine. “No, Martine. Get rid of it. Or just drop it. Leave it out here.” That seemed wrong as well, but it felt important to get Martine away from the thing. Dallas clomped back to the hull fragment and wrenched a chunk of polished alloy off of it, extending it toward her. “Take this. He’ll give you good money for this. It’ll keep you in retsina for a week.”
Of course she wasn’t listening. She was tucking the box into her