Chapter 5: Ledger of the Dead
The decrypt bar crawled to one hundred percent and blinked off, leaving a single line of green text on the tiny screen:
AUX-REACTOR "CANDLE" – LOGOUT 17 YEARS 214 DAYS AGO.
Karl's throat tightened. Seventeen years. The hulk had been drifting since before he'd graduated academy, since before the border wars, since before the freight company went bankrupt and started selling its hulls to whoever could pay the scrap price. He touched PLAY. The reader scrolled a list of hourly status packets, each identical: core temp steady, field stable, load zero. Then, halfway down, a human entry.
Chief Engineer T. Rios – Final log, local day 1422.
Main bottle cracked during micrometeor swarm. Crew evacuated to life pods. I remained to secure auxiliary so she'll keep the beacon hot until rescue. If you're reading this, rescue never came. Take what you need. Tell my daughters I was thinking of them. – Rios.
Karl read it twice, then a third time, lips moving silently. He felt the weight of a stranger's last kindness settle on his shoulders like a lead blanket. He whispered to the empty cockpit, "Message received, Chief. I'll spend your candle wisely."
He copied the entire log to the Folly's main computer, then opened the nav packet attached to Rios's entry. A star-map bloomed across the screen—rudimentary, two-dimensional, but dotted with way-points: Meridian fuel depots, emergency caches, a maintenance yard marked "Haven-3" at coordinates 14.4 by -27.8. Distance from current drift: eighteen light-hours. Too far for Folly's crippled engine, but only a month of steady burns at one-gravity if the attitude thrusters could be linked in series. He stared at the tiny icon of Haven-3 until it blurred, seeing in it a door that might still open.
A soft beep pulled him back. The new battery from Hold-1 had reached ninety-two percent charge; the charger automatically throttled to trickle. Power reserves now sat at 118 amp-hours above baseline—enough to run full heaters for four days, enough to charge the portable printer to sixty percent, enough to dare something bigger than mere staying alive. He exhaled, closed the star-map, and opened the maintenance ledger. New line: "Day 43 – Auxiliary logs secured. Destination candidate: Haven-3. Prep long-burn retrofit."
First step was mass audit. He floated aft to the cargo bay and inventoried every kilo aboard: food bricks 38.6 kg, water bladders 47.2 kg, filters 11.4 kg, epoxy and tubing 9.8 kg, tools 15.1 kg, personal gear 4.3 kg. Total non-structure mass: 126.4 kg. He subtracted that from the Folly's listed dry-mass, then ran thrust-to-fuel equations in his head. At continuous low-burn the frigate could manage 0.08 g for twenty-six days before tanks hit reserve. Not enough to reach Haven-3, but enough to close half the gap. The rest would require creative stupidity: venting unnecessary compartments, stripping non-critical bulkhead plating, maybe even jettisoning the portside escape pod whose hatch had warped shut years ago. Every kilo peeled away was velocity gained—velocity bought with sweat and grinder discs.
He marked a second line: "Strip schedule – 400 kg target." Then he pushed to the machine shop. The compartment was really just a closet with a bench, but it held a plasma cutter whose cartridge still read quarter charge and a hand-grinder with two good discs. He pulled both, floated to the crew quarters ring, and stared at the first sacrifice: four bunks bolted to the deck, mattresses long since jettisoned. Each bunk frame massed twenty kilos. He fired the cutter, shield down, and began slicing. Sparks blossomed in slow motion, cooling into bright beads that drifted like fireflies. Metal screamed, then sighed as welds parted. He worked methodically, stacking cut struts into a net bag labeled JUNK. When the first bunk came free he kicked it toward the airlock, momentum carrying it down the corridor like a lazy torpedo. One down, three to go.
By the end of the shift—ship-time noon by his ad-hoc clock—he had amassed seventy-eight kilos of scrap. Muscles inside the suit shook from sustained effort; sweat glued his undersuit to his spine. He cycled the lock and shoved the scrap into space, watching the bundle tumble away, glinting, until it vanished against the star-field. He felt a pang of guilt—each kilo had once been someone's decision, someone's budget line—but survival demanded ruthlessness. He logged the vent: "78 kg jettisoned. Delta-v gain: 2.1 m/s per day of burn. Cumulative target: 12 percent."
Back inside he drank half a liter of water, ate one third of a brick, and ran the numbers again. At current rate he could strip another 250 kg within six days, then reassess. If he removed the damaged port cargo crane and cut away the ruined mess-hall partition he might reach 400 kg total. That would buy an extra four m/s daily, shaving six days off the transit to Haven-3. Six days less food, six days less air, six days less chance for the reactor to change its mind.
He floated to the cockpit, pulled the reader again, and opened Rios's map. Haven-3 hung like a promise in the dark: a maintenance yard orbiting a dwarf star, far from shipping lanes, built to service corporate haulers before the bankruptcy. Maybe it was now a ghost station, maybe it had been claimed by scavengers, maybe it had become a pirate way-station. Maybe it was intact, powered, stocked. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe was still better than nowhere.
Karl set the map on continuous overlay, then patched the auxiliary reactor logs into Folly's nav computer. The course plotted as a shallow arc: two burns—first a ten-day continuous low-thrust to align plane, second a fourteen-day boost to intercept, followed by a four-day braking flip. Total delta-v required: 2120 m/s. Current capability after strip: 1890 m/s. Short by 230 m/s. He stared at the shortfall until the numbers became a wall. Then he smiled—a thin, hard smile that cracked his lip anew. Walls were just inventory waiting to be rearranged.
He opened the strip list and added a new line: "Consider portside thruster pod – 220 kg dry. Use as drop-tank?" The idea was reckless: unbolt the entire pod, fuel it, pressurize it, burn it, then jettison it when tanks ran dry. Risky, complicated, but it would deliver the missing delta-v with margin to spare. He marked the task: "Engineering review required – Day 44."
For now he had done enough. He stowed the cutter, coiled the grinder cable, and floated to the observation blister—a bubble of plexiglass on the dorsal spine that hadn't cracked yet. He pressed his helmet to the glass and looked out. The derelict was a black silhouette now, rim-lit by distant starlight, slowly tumbling. He raised two fingers to the dark shape in salute. "Sleep tight, Chief Rios. Your candle burns in my engine room now."
Behind him the Folly hummed, heaters steady, batteries climbing, reactor whispering. Ahead lay eighteen light-hours of black ocean and a yard that might be salvation or slaughter. Karl felt the grin fade but the resolve remain, hard as hull plate. He whispered into the blister, voice barely louder than the hum, "Course locked. Ledger open. Debts to be paid in velocity." Then he pushed back to the cockpit, strapped in, and began the long count down to burn.