Tim Pratt - The Wrong Stars

C allie floated , feet hooked over a handrail in the observation deck, and looked through the viewport at the broken ship beyond. The wreck hung motionless, a dark irregular shape a bit of human debris where no such debris should be. Was this a crisis, or an opportunity? Every unexpected event could be one or the other, and sometimes they were both.

The dead ship was long and bullet-shaped, pointlessly aerodynamic, apart from a bizarre eruption of flanges, fins, and spikes at one end that looked like the embellishments of a mad welder. The wrecked craft was far smaller than Callies own ship, the White Raven, a fast cruiser just big enough for her crew of five people (or four, or maybe six, depending on how you defined people) to live comfortably along with whatever freight or prisoners they had to transport. If the White Raven was a family home, the wreck was more like a studio apartment.

Ashok floated into the compartment, orienting himself with tiny puffs of air that burst from his fingertips and heels showy and unnecessary, but he had a gift for turning simple things into engineering problems he could solve in complicated ways. He hovered with his head near hers, sharing her view though it probably looked a lot different to him. Oh captain, my captain.

She glanced at his complex profile and grunted. You got new eyes?

He shook his head. These are wearables, not integrated. Im giving them a test run before I implant them.

Thats almost cautious, by your standards.

He grinned, insofar as he was physically able. One of the lenses on the array attached to his face rotated and lengthened toward the viewport. So do we get to crack the mystery ship open and see whats inside?

She went hmm, pretending she hadnt already decided. Last time I let you clamber into a wreck, you lost an arm.

Ashok held up his current prosthetic. The translucent diamond housing revealed glimpses of the mechanical motion within as he flexed his hand, which was really more like a nest of tiny, versatile manipulator arms. That was just an opportunity for an upgrade, cap. I say we fly over with torches and cut a hole and poke our heads in and look around. No surprise there. Ashok believed in radical self-improvement, and every mystery was a potential upgrade in waiting.

I like the enthusiasm, Ashok, but were still factfinding. This doesnt look like any human ship Ive ever seen, and it doesnt look like a Liar vessel, either, despite all that weird shit on the stern. Didnt the Jovian Imperative try to solve its toxic waste problem by launching tubes full of poison randomly into space? What if this is one of those?

Space is big, so throwing bad stuff into it wasnt such a terrible idea, as far as terrible ideas go. But thats not a waste container our sensors sniffed it thoroughly. No toxins or bad radiation. Besides, your boy Shall just identified the vessel.

Hes not my boy, she said, but she was too interested in the wreck to put much growl into the ritual denial. So what is it?

Once Shall filtered out all the weird stuff welded to the ships ass, the profile matches a model in the historical database. Ashok lifted his chin, which, unlike the rest of his head, still looked like a baseline humans. That, captain, is a goldilocks ship.

Callie frowned. He might as well have told her it was a Viking longboat or an Apollo module. From the bad old days? Before we had bridge generators?

A genuine old timey antique. Its gotta be about five hundred years old. Ashok gave himself a little spin, changing his orientation so she was looking at his feet, because actually being still for any length of time was outside his considerable skillset.

A goldilocks ship. Wow. Werent they propelled by atomic bombs?

Pretty much, yeah, at least the first wave, and this was one of the earliest models launched. Looks like its had some modification since then, though. The goldilocks ships were no-frills. They didnt go in for decorative S&M spikes.

Maybe a pirate crew found it and tried to make it look more badass?

That ship is old, cap. No pirate would want it for anything other than scrap, or to sell to a collector.

So whats it doing here? Goldilocks ships arent supposed to come back. Thats the whole point. They took one-way journeys, way out, trips of desperation and exploration. Now five hundred years later its just floating in trans-Neptunian space? By cosmic terms its practically back where it started.

Ashok nodded. Thats the big juicy mystery. No way that ship came back from anywhere, right? Its not like they had Tanzer drives back then. They werent zipping around the galaxy. Unless they found a bunch of plutonium lying around on their colony planet and built more bombs to stick up the ships butt, there was no coming back.

No mystery at all, then, Ashok. This is just as far as they got. The crew took off on their brave voyage, reached the edge of our solar system, suffered some critical failure, and thats it. Nobody ever expected to hear from the goldilocks ships again, so no one went looking.

You think that ship spent the past five hundred years drifting among the iceballs out here and nobody noticed? With all the surveys and mining vessels tagging everything even halfway interesting?

Callie shrugged. You said it yourself. Space is big. The ship was just overlooked. Whats the alternative? The idea of this enigmatic ship breaking down centuries ago was comforting, in a way, because failure was common, plausible, and non-threatening, unlike most of the other possible explanations.

Ashok wasnt having it. I dont know what the alternative is, but theres something else going on here. Who made all those modifications? Space vandals drifting by with buckets of epoxy and loads of sheet metal? Outsider artists among the asteroids?

Seems unlikely.

And what about the energy readings? Parts of the ship are still warm.

I know. They were made to run a long time, the goldilocks ships. Some of them are still completing their journeys. Could just be some old systems ticking along in the midst of critical failures.

Nah, these readings are weird, cap. The whole thing is weird. Ashok sounded quite chipper about it, as he did about most things. Its a mystery. Mysteries are great. Lets peel it open and see if its wrapped around an enigma.

I hate mysteries, Callie said, not entirely accurately. You always think its going to be a box full of gold, but usually its a box full of spiders.

Ashok made a noise that might have been a snort in a baseline human. And yet you always end up opening the lid, dont you?

What can I say? Callie unhooked her feet and pushed off toward the doorway leading deeper into the ship. I like gold more than I hate spiders.

L aunching magnetic tethers . The voice in Callies headset had the clipped tones of someone whod grown up under Europas domes, which meant it was the navigator Janice, and not the pilot Drake he was from one of the Greater Toronto arcologies, populated mostly by the children of Caribbean immigrants, and his accent was a lot more melodious to the captains ear.

Watching from the window in the airlock, her angle was wrong to see the metal tethers bursting from the side of the