The Ghost Line Read online

  Saga smiled. They might have a paranoid and peculiar employer, not to mention a semi-alcoholic pilot. But when it came down to it, at least they still had each other.

  * * *

  Even with the ship’s manuals and logs, which they’d spent weeks reviewing during the trip to the Queen, it still took almost half a day to bring basic systems back online. She’d been mothballed properly, everything kept nice and cool in a low-humidity, low-oxygen environment. Reactor barely burbling along. A few systems reported minor faults, and some cameras and sensors were unresponsive, but the vast majority of the complex and interdependent ecosystem that kept an interplanetary passenger ship humming along was still functional.

  Finally, Saga started up the spin mechanisms that provided artificial gravity for the passenger sections. Weight returned slowly, the guest suites settling at a hair above Mars-normal gravity, while the bridge, closer to the liner’s center, was less than half that. Saga finished double-checking that the spin systems were all healthy, then looked over at Michel.

  “What the hell?” she said. “Why did you take your helmet off?”

  He grinned and ran his hand through his close-cropped curls. “I’m not an idiot. I checked all the environment logs first: everything’s fine.” He made a show of sniffing the air. “It’s better than fine. Definitely a step up from my suit.”

  “Should we be so quick to trust the life support? It’s been off for twenty years.”

  Michel shrugged. “I trust it.”

  Wei had explained the situation that evening back on her ship after they’d signed her NDA. The Martian Queen wasn’t a derelict—she was a ghost liner. The company that built and operated her went bankrupt when Earth-Mars traffic collapsed a quarter century ago. The new owners bought her cheap and kept her running so they could hold their claim on passenger services on the orbit, waiting until the economy improved. The law was that as long as the company had a ship making regular runs between Earth and Mars—even if it carried no passengers or crew—they had control of one of the most efficient routes between the two planets. Apparently there were still ghost trains in Europe that did the same thing, traveling empty from city to city.

  “That’s not what you told us earlier,” Saga had said, watching the espresso slosh around in her zero-gee cup. “You said it was abandoned.”

  “It is abandoned.” Wei slapped the console in front of her. “Nobody has used it for twenty years. Nor do they plan to. But I’m sure you’ve seen the news: things are looking up on Mars. There’s a market in taking people there.”

  “But not rich tourists.” Michel peered at her, a look of comprehension on his face.

  “Correct. The people I work for want to send colonists. Lots of them. Minimum cost. They’re going to hibernate most of the way; nobody needs a casino and a spa.”

  “They can’t just buy the Queen?” Michel asked.

  Wei shook her head. “It’s cheaper to make a new ship than refit one that was never designed for hundreds of hibernation beds. My employers’ ships will go slow: no need to rush if everyone’s asleep, right?”

  Saga got it before Michel did. “You want us to do something to the Queen, don’t you.”

  They were to hack the ship. Tweak her course at apoapsis to continue on past Mars into a different orbit, leaving the route open for another company to claim. They’d be doing many honest, hardworking people a favor. They had a responsibility. And Saga could create one of her famous interactives at the same time, though she wouldn’t be able to release it until the statute of limitations had passed on their little adventure.

  Now they were here, at the helm of the old liner. Saga surveyed the Martian Queen’s control systems. Layers of interface floated in her contact lenses, rendered in colors that mapped their functions. Michel was right: environmental control and life support were running flawlessly—the ship had a perfectly safe atmosphere.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m just so used to things being ruined. It’s weird to have it all working.”

  “Not all working.” Michel gestured at the display in front of him. “We only have low-level control. We still have to break into the nav system without waking up the ship’s mind.”

  That was going to take time. Saga sighed and started opening display windows.

  Michel looked at her with a small smile. “You should go,” he said. He gestured to her expedition case. “Explore the ship.”

  “Don’t you need me here?”

  “We have time. Take a couple of hours; when you’re back you can help out.”

  Saga touched the case, hesitated.

  “Go!” Michel said.

  * * *

  The cameras buzzed through the air like a swarm of bees. A quick gesture and the eight little spheres spread out in a cloud in front of Saga; then she pulled them back until they circled her head like a halo. Another gesture and they flew in a line back into the case.

  Tempting as it was to record everything right away, she was going to explore without video for now. It always took a while to absorb the feeling of being somewhere that had been empty for years, decades. The echoing spaces of mines, bulk haulers, holed habitats. Dioramas of human existence, frozen in time. Eventually, they would speak to her, these places. They would speak and she would begin to create the narratives her fans paid for.

  She placed the exploration case on the floor of the corridor and blinked its interface to life, then stood back as the mapping bots emerged. They bumbled and bounced in the low gravity, heading off in all directions to create the submillimeter-scale rendition of the ship she’d use to house her narratives.

  “Mapping’s on,” she said over her suit radio. “Open all the doors for them, will you, Michel?”

  She watched as a group of the bots rolled up to the carved wooden doors that led to the ship’s bow. The doors opened silently and the bots passed through.

  Instead of following them, she went aft, to where the passenger area of the ship began. They’d come in through the service entrance, like servants or coal deliveries in the old days of country houses. The main entrance was where the quality would have boarded the Queen.

  Finally, a place that wasn’t bland and forgettable. Even on a luxury liner, space was at a premium, but the designers had done wonders with what they had. Marble tiles on the floor. Real wood in sweeping curves. An actual crystal chandelier, hung with glittering stars around blue-white and red blown-glass orbs at the center, symbolizing the two planets the ship connected.

  She imagined the entrance in her narrative. A user would wander the dark and empty corridors, then suddenly find themselves back in the ship’s heyday. The laughter and chatter, the clink of champagne glasses. Passengers and crew channeling the luxury liners of old. Rockefellers and Astors and oysters on the half shell. Something unusual would happen then; she didn’t know what yet, but it would come to her.

  As she turned, wondering if the chandelier would need enhancement, she caught movement in her peripheral vision. She peered down one of the corridors that led from the entrance area. It felt as if someone had just been there. It felt like she had been observed.

  She called over the open channel. “Wei?”

  Wei’s voice crackled in her ears. “Problems?”

  “That wasn’t you, was it?”

  “What wasn’t me?”

  “Are you at all near the entranceway?”

  “I’m back on the Four—I mean the Sigurd,” Wei said. “Aren’t you and Michel supposed to be hacking the navigation system right now?”

  Saga turned up the magnification and light amplification on her suit visor. No one was there. “Michel has it under control. I’m just getting my bearings for the interactive.”

  “You’re counting chickens is what you’re doing.” Wei sounded sour. “When you should be sitting on eggs. You can play after you hack my ship. Is that clear?”

  “Crystalline,” Saga said. She imagined Michel back in the control room, perched on an ostrich e
gg, and snorted.

  There was a moment of silence on the line, then a click as Wei disconnected.

  “Oops.”

  She examined the corridor before heading back. It was empty, but again she felt as if her presence had interrupted something. She had wandered onto a stage being set for a play. Around her there were nooks in the walls for vases of flowers, art panels to display paintings. If she concentrated, she could almost hear the fading echo of a violin. On the maiden voyage there had been a string quartet to greet passengers. How much money would it have cost to send four musicians to Mars and back, just to provide pleasant background noise?

  She came to a set of doors. More carved wood. Luxury hiding the necessity of pressure doors. She touched them, but they remained closed.

  Saga traced the carving, a bas-relief of battling galleons, clouds of smoke rising from the cannons in their sides. Then she saw something strange: a twig protruded from the wood, its bark a dark grey. A tiny brown oak leaf dangled, no bigger than her thumb.

  She touched the twig and it bent under her gloved finger, the sensors in her suit conveying its pliant feel. When she stroked the leaf, it broke off and spiraled slowly to the floor. “Shit,” she muttered. If there was anything she hated, it was thoughtless vandalism. Finding a derelict site with graffiti sprayed across surfaces, objects destroyed for no good reason. It always made her furious. And now she’d damaged something on the Queen.

  She picked up the leaf to inspect it, using the magnifier in her faceplate. As far as she could tell, it was an actual leaf. An autumn leaf, growing from a real twig.

  * * *

  “Of course it’s not a real leaf,” Michel said, barely looking up from his programming. “One of the carvers probably glued it on. Like an Easter egg in an interactive.”

  “But how could it have lasted so long?” she said. “The Queen was in service for almost thirty years before it was mothballed.”

  “Then the mothball team did it as some sort of joke. You can’t imagine it grew there, on a dead piece of oak.”

  “It isn’t just the leaf; I thought I saw something moving. Like I was being watched.”

  “You always do, though, don’t you?” Michel had a familiar, faraway look. His attention was captured by his work.

  Saga bristled. “This was different. It felt different.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Saga glared at her husband, but he didn’t notice that, either. She slipped the leaf into her pocket. It wasn’t worth talking to him about the uncanny; she didn’t know why she kept it up. To him, if it couldn’t be measured, it didn’t exist.

  * * *

  Saga and Michel worked until hunger forced them to stop and retreat to the Sigurd, where they had a quiet dinner in the galley. Wei had already eaten: the evidence of her half-finished meal lay in the composter. There was no sign of Gregor.

  “You didn’t make it to the dining room, did you?” Michel was eating a sticky green mixture of algae and seaweed. A few grains of rice floated above his plate, and Saga reached over and plucked them from the air. She mashed them to the side of the container that held her own meal, a rehydrated vegetable stew.

  “Just the main entrance hall. Wei ordered me back.” Saga couldn’t help rolling her eyes.

  Michel grinned at her. “Imagine sitting at a table under gravity. Eating off china plates. You think the galley has any food left in it?”

  “If it does, twenty years of storage isn’t going to make it taste any better than that muck you’re eating.”

  “Candlesticks,” Michel said, waving his fork. “Roasted meat. A butler to buttle whenever you need him. Cigars and brandy.”

  “And would the ladies all retire to the drawing room after dinner, leaving the gentlemen to talk about politics?”

  “Something like that.” Another grin. “But since we can’t have a formal dinner, I have another idea.”

  Saga raised an eyebrow, but he wouldn’t say any more. “Later,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  When they were done, she pinged Wei. Somehow, knocking on the door of her room seemed more intrusive than sending her a message. It took a minute to get a response.

  Are you finished? Wei replied.

  We’re here on the Sigurd. Come on out.

  It took another few minutes for Wei to emerge, meeting them on the bridge. She looked tired, dark circles under her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Wei asked. “What happened?”

  Saga blinked, surprised by the wobble in the other woman’s voice. “Nothing’s wrong. We just thought you’d want an update.”

  Wei looked from her to Michel. “Oh,” she said, deflating a little.

  Michel started telling her about the ship’s systems. How just getting basic access hadn’t given them the level of control they needed to change the Queen’s course. It was going to take time.

  Wei interrupted. “You told me you were good at this.”

  “We are good,” Michel said. “We’ll get there.”

  Saga cleared her throat. “Also, I wanted to talk about the money. You said we’d get a milestone payment when we boarded the Queen.” She paused, looking at Wei. “We’re on board, as you’ll have noticed.”

  “It’s not like the casino is open,” Wei finally said. “Where are you going to spend it?”

  “We had a deal.” Michel glanced at Saga. “And some of us have bills to pay.”

  “Fine,” Wei said. “You’ll get your payment. I’ll transfer it now.” She turned and pushed out of the room.

  Saga sighed. “She’s been like this ever since we came near the Queen. What the hell’s her problem?”

  “I don’t know,” Michel said, “and I don’t care.” He put their dishes in the cleaner and sealed it tight. Then he held out his hand.

  “What?”

  “Just trust me. You won’t be disappointed.”

  * * *

  Michel pushed open the doors. “Voilà!”

  The presidential suite lay before them. Carpet the color of Mars, a separate bedroom, what looked like authentic antique furniture. Saga crossed to the bathroom.

  “God, it even has a bathtub.” She stood and stared. Midnight blue with ornate copper fixtures, it was big enough to fit the two of them comfortably.

  She turned around. Michel had shed his suit and was lying across the bed in his one-piece undersuit. He patted the covers beside him.

  Saga hesitated. She told herself Wei was just being overly cautious. Every atmosphere reading had been nominal since they came aboard. She reached up and cracked her helmet seal. Sniffed cautiously. The room smelled fine.

  “Hurry,” Michel said. “There’s a pressure emergency I need your help with.” He glanced down at his groin in mock alarm.

  “I’m sure there is,” she said. She put her helmet down and slowly unbuckled the suit’s torso connectors, wiggling her hips as she did. “Let’s see what we can do about that.”

  Their lovemaking was fast and furious, a release of pent-up tension after two months of awkward and furtive zero-gee coupling. Afterward, they lay tangled in the sheets. She found the lighting controls, and a mock aurora played on the far wall, streams of shimmering colored light.

  It reminded her of Iceland. “I have to bring you home to show you the norðurljós,” Saga said.

  “Hmm?” Michel’s eyes were half-closed.

  “We could take my mother with us. Go out into the countryside.” If the therapy works. She left the thought unsaid. Bad luck to speak it. She’d transferred the money as soon as Wei paid them. It would have been enough to buy her mother a new house. It was going to work.

  “You and your elusive elves.” Michel rolled over, pulling the sheets up to his shoulders.

  “The Huldufólk are part of our culture, you heathen. Lots of us believe in them.” But he was already asleep.

  She lay there for a while, listening to his breathing deepen. She turned off the aurora, put the room in sleep mode, let her mind drift.

  She jerked
awake. It felt like only moments had passed, but she knew she’d probably slept for hours. Her bladder was insistent on this point.

  After the luxury of a gently warmed toilet seat, she walked back toward the bed, then veered away, opening the doors of the closet. It was half the size of their cabin on the Sigurd and contained a room safe, a clothing cleaner/presser, a pair of silk bathrobes in blue and rose. But also, unexpectedly, several sets of clothes. Formal wear: a tuxedo, a black dress. The fabric felt new under her fingers. The dress even looked to be her size.

  Saga smiled. Michel must have ordered it from the ship’s printer. He could still surprise her with small acts of thoughtfulness.

  In the top drawer of the dresser she found a selection of women’s underwear. She put on a black bra and bottoms, then slipped into the dress. She admired herself in a floor-length mirror. “My hair looks like an untrimmed hedge,” she muttered. But the dress was lovely.

  She didn’t feel like sleeping. The ship was out there, unexplored. Her lenses activated, she turned on the map and left the suite. She headed aft, padding down the corridor barefoot. The interior lighting was set to a soft nighttime glow.

  Exploring on her own was what she liked best. Not that doing it with Michel wasn’t a pleasure. They’d met on a group expedition, a trip to one of the first asteroid mines, now a warren of machine-bored tunnels and cavernous empty spaces. But she couldn’t make her art without solitude.

  Although Michel now accepted it as part of her character, he didn’t understand it. He liked company, the hubbub of conversation, banter, and joking. In the early days of their relationship, he’d been hurt when she’d gone off by herself for hours. It was all very well to explore in a group, she had tried to explain to him, but any sense of the sacred, of the mysterious, vanished with other people around.

  Saga yawned.

  The carpeted corridors of the Martian Queen were anything but sacred and mysterious. Perhaps this was why she’d imagined she was being watched the day before. Her mind was restless, playing tricks. She focused her attention on details instead. On the nautical history the Queen evoked.

  She came across a series of display cases, each one housing a model of a famous passenger liner from history. The Olympic, the Queen Mary. Even the ill-fated Titanic had a place of honor, aptly placed near an entrance to the lifeboats.