The Things He Kept

Iven-4 reached my skiff with eleven percent of his remaining charge and one foot that could not be trusted.

The foot failed just as we crossed the gap between the satellite and my outer hatch. His weight pulled against the tether, and for three long seconds we drifted together above the open dark. The Scrap Galaxy turned beneath us in slow, glittering silence.

I had one hand on the hatch rail and the other locked around the strap across his chest. His disconnected arm floated between us, tied against his torso with copper wire. The wire had been my idea. The lack of a left arm had been his.

“Do not release me,” he said.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Your pulse rate has increased.”

“Your observational priorities are poor.”

“I will revise them.”

He tried to kick with his remaining stabilizer. The motion sent us rotating. I swore, caught the hatch rim with my boot, and hauled us both into the airlock. Iven struck the deck on one knee. His head bowed, not from pain—he had no useful pain sensors left in that side—but from what looked like embarrassment.

It was an irritatingly familiar posture.

I sealed the outer door and waited for the pressure gauge to crawl into the green. My skiff was a narrow salvage boat assembled from three different hulls and whatever seals I could afford. The air smelled of warm dust, solder, and the algae block growing in a tank behind the pilot’s chair. Compared to the satellite, it was almost luxurious.

Iven remained on the airlock floor.

“Can you stand?” I asked.

“I can attempt locomotion.”

“That answer is becoming less charming.”

“I was not aware it had become charming.”

I stared at him. The remaining lens brightened by a fraction.

It might have been a power fluctuation. I had begun to understand that the difference between a power fluctuation and an expression was going to cause me trouble.

I dragged him into the main cabin and secured him to the maintenance bench. The bench had a restraint harness intended for volatile fuel canisters. I used it because I valued my skull. Iven watched while I opened the panel beneath his ribs.

The first thing I saw was the external charge lead I had installed in the satellite, already blackened at the connection. The second was the core housing beneath it. Its ceramic casing had fractured along one edge. A blue-white spark crawled inside the crack and disappeared.

I stopped moving.

“Is that bad?” Iven asked.

“It is not decorative.”

“I require a more useful classification.”

I set my scanner against the housing. Numbers assembled across the display, revised themselves, then dropped.

CORE OUTPUT: 0.38 STANDARD. RESERVE CAPACITY: 8.7 PERCENT. ESTIMATED FUNCTIONAL PERIOD: 39 HOURS, 12 MINUTES.

I checked the reading twice. Then I checked the scanner battery, because machines were often less disappointing than numbers.

The estimate remained.

“Your core is failing,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You knew.”

“I had calculated a similar result before you connected the external line.”

“And you neglected to mention it.”

“You did not ask.”

I closed the panel harder than necessary. The metal snapped against its latch.

“Most people consider impending death relevant information.”

“I am not most people.”

“No. You are a damaged appliance that argues.”

“I do not believe appliances argue.”

“You’ve never met a pressure cooker.”

He tilted his head. “Is that an instruction to acquire one?”

The laugh escaped before I could stop it. It was small and rough from disuse, but it filled the cabin strangely. Iven’s lens fixed on me.

“What occurred?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Your mouth changed shape.”

“It does that sometimes.”

“Was it beneficial?”

I looked away and began sorting the tools on my bench. “No conclusions yet.”

The core estimate continued to fall while I pretended not to watch it.

I could have shut him down. Thirty-nine hours was an intolerable amount of energy to spend on conversation, especially when the power cell I had come for did not exist and my propellant reserves were already low. I could strip the valuable components from him while they still held charge. His optical assembly alone might buy eight ration chits. His memory stack, if undamaged, perhaps twelve.

Instead, I took the transparent chip from my inner pocket.

The blue polymer cloth had dried stiff around it. I placed both on the bench between us.

“You said this was an image archive,” I told him. “One file.”

“Yes.”

“Can you access it?”

“Not without an adapter.”

“I have an adapter.”

“You have a damaged adapter.”

“So do you.”

This time, his response took longer. “That is accurate.”

My adapter was an antique universal reader mounted beneath the navigation console. It had been temperamental before the last coolant leak and smelled faintly of burnt plastic. I dismantled it, bridged the cracked contact with a strand of silver wire, and connected the chip.

The reader drew power from the skiff’s main battery. Iven’s core did not object. It simply continued losing its charge at the speed of a thing that had no reason to hurry.

A file appeared.

IMAGE_001.

No date. No location. No owner tag. The compression was severe enough that the first display rendered as a field of gray blocks.

I adjusted the voltage. The image sharpened.

A child sat on the floor of a station observation room, asleep beneath a window crowded with stars. He could not have been more than six. One hand was curled around the hem of a blue uniform jacket. The other rested against Iven-4’s knee.

Iven stood behind him, younger by decades and almost entirely intact. His shell was white. His missing arm was attached. The left-foot stabilizer was visible beneath a polished boot. His head was angled down toward the child.

The expression was not human. It was a set of fixed optical adjustments, a slight tilt of the neck, a hand held open in case the child woke. Yet the arrangement of those pieces made something in my chest contract.

At the bottom of the image, a service label had survived the corruption.

PROTECTIVE UNIT IVEN-4. PRIMARY PRESERVATION OBJECT: VISUAL RECORD. DESTINATION: NACRE-7 ORBITAL HABITAT.

I enlarged the corner. A name flickered in and out beneath the destination field.

MARA SEL.

Then the image broke into static.

Iven had gone very still.

“Is that your owner?” I asked.

“I do not know.”

“The child?”

“I do not know.”

“You were assigned to protect him.”

“Protective unit does not specify ownership.”

His voice remained level, but the pulse inside his chest had changed. It was no longer a steady mechanical tick. Three quick beats, a pause, then two. The pattern repeated.

I touched the edge of the display. “Do you remember Nacre-7?”

“No.”

“Do you remember Mara?”

The green lens dimmed. “I remember preserving the image.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“I know.”

The cabin seemed suddenly too small for the two of us and the dead child inside the screen.

I disconnected the reader. The image vanished, leaving only my reflection in the black display and Iven’s lens beside it.

He looked at the blue cloth.

“Why did you keep it?” I asked.

“Preservation was assigned priority.”

“After everyone left?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I cannot determine.”

“That answer again.”

“It is the correct answer.”

I folded the cloth around the chip, more carefully than I had unfolded it. The polymer was soft where someone had handled it often. A small thing, but evidence of a life that had once included repetition: touch, fold, store; touch, fold, store.

Iven watched my hands.

“You have a cut,” he said.

“I know.”

“Your glove seal is compromised.”

“I know that too.”

He leaned forward against the restraint. The movement made his damaged torso click. With his functioning hand, he reached toward the repair tray and picked up a strip of adhesive sealant.

He could barely balance. His power reserve was collapsing. Still, he held the strip out to me.

“May I repair it?” he asked.

The question was absurd. The sealant was designed for hull fractures. His fingers were shaking from low current. He had no reason to spend energy on my glove.

I extended my hand.

He pressed the seal over the split in careful, overlapping strokes. His touch was cold and precise. When he finished, he did not immediately let go.

“Does this prevent further damage?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then it was beneficial.”

I looked at him. “You spent charge to repair something that wasn’t yours.”

His lens held on mine.

“You said I was not your owner,” he replied. “I have been attempting to understand the difference.”

The words entered the space between us and stayed there.

I secured the image chip in the lockbox beneath my bunk. Then I pulled up the navigation charts and entered Nacre-7. The habitat was three jumps inward, near the central lanes. The route would consume nearly all my propellant and leave me with no margin for engine failure.

Iven watched the destination appear on the screen.

“Are we traveling there?” he asked.

“I haven’t decided.”

That was a lie. I had decided the moment the child appeared beneath the stars.

I started the skiff’s engines.

Behind me, Iven’s damaged core gave its uneven little pulse, counting down toward silence.