Eleven Thousand

They boarded on the twenty-fourth day, at the ventral service lock at frame nine hundred, through the temporary patch that Marchetti's crew had welded over their own cut eleven years before.

Halloran-Voss made a point of it. She had the tug's cameras running and she narrated the whole of it into the claim log, and what she said, for the record, was: "We are entering by the existing breach, which was made by the Marchetti party and closed by them. We are not cutting new hull. This vessel will be no more open when we leave than when we arrived."

Yusra went in fourth of five. She had done eleven boardings in three years and all of them had been of wrecks, and a wreck has a particular character which is that it is obviously finished: cold, dark, tumbling, full of the debris of a bad day. She had built her idea of what a boarding felt like on eleven of those, and it was of no use to her whatsoever.

The Tessellate has gravity. Not much — a tenth, from a rotation so slow you cannot feel it start — but enough that there is a floor and a ceiling and a down, and enough that a hundred and forty years of nothing happening has settled dust in the corners in a way that looks like housekeeping.

She has light. The corridors run at about a fifth of what the manual specifies and the light is a warm amber, which was a deliberate choice by somebody at Anholt Yards two hundred years ago who thought that a crew woken in an emergency should not be woken into white light.

And she is not silent. That is the thing nobody had put in the record properly and the thing Yusra has never been able to convey to anybody who has not been aboard. There is air at a hundred and eleven millibars, which is not enough to breathe and is enough to carry sound, and the Tessellate is full of it: pumps, a long way off; the tick of a structure changing temperature; and, every eleven minutes, from somewhere forward, a single soft chime that is in the manual as the sleep-bay integrity confirmation and that has been sounding every eleven minutes for two hundred and six years to an audience of nobody.

She had read eleven hundred pages of second-wave design on the crossing and had built, without meaning to, a picture of the Tessellate as a machine that had failed. What she walked into at frame nine hundred was a machine that had not failed at all. Everything aboard that ship was doing exactly what it had been built to do, on schedule, at the reduced rate its remaining power allowed, and had been doing it without supervision for longer than any polity in settled space had existed.

Kofi's voice came over the suit link about ninety seconds in and it said, "Yus. It is keeping house."

They went to the number nine sleep bay, which is the nearest to the service lock, and which is the bay Marchetti's crew counted, and Yusra had asked specifically that they go to that one and no further.

A second-wave sleep bay is a hexagonal well eleven berths deep on each of six faces, with a walkway spiralling down the middle, and it holds a hundred and forty people, and the Tessellate has eighty-one of them.

The berths have windows. Yusra had known that for eighteen days and had looked at the images once, and none of that was any preparation at all for standing on a walkway in a tenth of a gravity in a warm amber light and being able to see, from where she stood, the faces of about forty people.

They are not preserved and they are not corpses. Cold sleep of the second wave is a metabolic floor, not a freeze; the body runs at about a two-hundredth of normal and the face relaxes into something that is not quite sleep and is nothing at all like death, and there is a fluid exchange that keeps the tissue supple, and the practical consequence is that the person in berth nine-four-eleven, whose indicator was green, looked like a woman of about fifty who had dozed off in a chair.

The count on bay nine, taken properly by two people independently and logged, was a hundred and thirty-one green, six amber, three dark. Marchetti's count eleven years ago had been a hundred and thirty-one, six, and three. Nothing had changed in eleven years. Nothing, as far as anybody could tell, had changed in a hundred and sixty.

They did not open a berth. Halloran-Voss had been absolutely immovable about that in three separate briefings, on the grounds that a berth opened by a salvage crew with no medical officer is a person killed by a salvage crew, and also — she said this second and Yusra noticed her saying it second — on the grounds that it would be an assault, and that she had no interest in finding out which jurisdiction's version of that offence applied four hundred years from anywhere.

Yusra stood at berth nine-four-eleven for rather longer than the survey required and made herself write the indicator state into the claim book in her own hand, because that is what a claim book is for, and because the alternative was to go on looking at the window. The entry reads: Berth 9-4-11, indicator green, occupant present, not disturbed. It is the first line in the history of Kessel salvage in which an advocate wrote the word occupant, and she did not notice she had done it until Cabral pointed it out eleven months later in an arbitration hall.

What they did instead, on Yusra's instruction and against every instinct of every professional aboard, was to photograph the manifest plate at the head of the bay, which is a brass plate, because Anholt Yards put a brass plate on everything, and which lists the hundred and forty names of the people in that bay in the order of their berths.

Yusra read the plate through her visor for a long time and then said, on the open link, so that it went into the log: "Captain. Come and look at the heading on this."

The names are in four columns. Above them, cast into the brass in letters a centimetre high, is a heading, and the heading does not say passengers, and it does not say complement, and it does not say manifest.

It says: SHIP'S COMPANY — BAY NINE — WATCH ORDER AS BELOW.

And beside each of the hundred and forty names, in a narrow fifth column that Marchetti's photographs had cropped, is a number, and the numbers run from one to a hundred and forty, and they are not berth numbers, because the berth numbers are on the berths.

Halloran-Voss came down the walkway and looked at it for about thirty seconds and said, "That is a watch bill." Then, after a moment: "That is a duty roster. Every one of these people has a number on a roster."

Yusra said, "Every one of these people is crew."

Not passengers. Not colonists. Not, on any reading of a document cast into brass by the yard that built her, inventory. A hundred and forty names in four columns with a duty number beside each, in the standard form of a watch bill, on a plate bolted to the head of a sleep bay, aboard a ship whose own operating manual defines a watch as the portion of the company that is awake.

She has said since that she does not remember deciding to sit down and that she sat down anyway, on a walkway in a tenth of a gravity in the middle of a hexagonal well with four hundred sleeping people visible from where she sat, and that Kofi came and stood beside her and put a hand on the top of her helmet, which is the only thing you can do for somebody in a suit.

They went forward after that, all the way to command, which was not the plan and which Halloran-Voss authorised in about four seconds when Yusra asked.

The Tessellate's bridge is a wide low room with eleven stations in it and it is empty and it is tidy. The last watch stood down properly. There are no personal effects, no cups, no evidence of anybody leaving in a hurry, because nobody left in a hurry: the log, which is mechanical and which is a paper roll in a brass housing because Anholt Yards put brass on everything, ends in a clean hand forty-one years into the crossing with an entry about a drive fault, a decision to shut down, and a wake schedule.

The wake schedule is the whole case. Yusra photographed it eleven times from four angles before she let herself read it properly. She has said since that she knew what it was going to say before she read it, in the way you know a thing you have already assembled out of eleven separate pieces and have refused to look at, and that she took the photographs first because a document that has not been photographed can be lost, and because she wanted four more minutes of not being certain.

The Tessellate's master, faced with a dead main drive and a crossing that had become a drift of unknown length, did the only thing a second-wave master could do, which was to put the entire ship's company down and set the automation to wake a watch of eleven at intervals — and, because power was now the binding constraint and would be for centuries, to stretch those intervals as far as the plant could bear.

The interval is eighteen years. Every eighteen years, a watch of eleven is woken, and they check the ship, and they transmit, and they go back down.

Yusra found the transmission log four minutes later in the same housing and it is a strip of paper eleven centimetres wide with nine entries on it, one for each watch since the shutdown, and each entry is the same six words, sent at full power on the standard distress band, dated in the ship's own reckoning: TESSELLATE UNDER WAY COMPANY ASLEEP REQUESTING ASSISTANCE.

The most recent entry is dated eleven years and some months ago, four months before Marchetti boarded. The next watch is due in seven years. And the reason nobody in two centuries has ever heard the Tessellate answer a hail is that she has answered nine times, at intervals of eighteen years, into an empty lane, on a band that has not been monitored continuously by anybody since about the time the Kessel definitions were written.