The Distance Between Stars

The skiff had been underway for six hours when the port engine began to scream.

It was not a mechanical alarm. Alarms were clean, deliberate things. This sound came through the hull as a thin vibration that found the fillings in my teeth and worked against them. The engine temperature climbed by twelve degrees in less than a minute.

I cut thrust and swung the skiff broadside to the debris field ahead.

Nacre-7 was still a white mark at the far end of the navigation display. Our propellant margin had fallen from narrow to insulting. The route required two more burns, one of them long enough that an error in the burn calculation would strand us between the outer scrap lanes and the central system.

Behind me, Iven said, “The port engine is experiencing distress.”

“I noticed.”

“I intended to provide confirmation.”

“Provide silence instead.”

He did. That was worse.

I unstrapped from the pilot’s chair and opened the service panel beneath the console. The engine’s fuel feed had taken in something solid. Dust, probably. The Scrap Galaxy shed itself everywhere: flakes of insulation, frozen coolant, screws from satellites that had died a century before I was born. The filters caught most of it. Most was an optimistic word.

I reached into the panel with two fingers and felt the obstruction wedged behind the intake valve.

“Can you hold the skiff steady?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You are not connected to the controls.”

“I can connect to the controls.”

“That was not permission.”

“No.”

The panel lights flickered. Iven had moved from the maintenance bench to the navigation console. He had left the restraint harness buckled around his torso and dragged himself by one hand, which was inefficient and probably damaging to the floor.

“Iven.”

“I am not altering your course.”

“That isn’t the part I object to.”

“I will remain within the authorized parameters.”

“I haven’t authorized anything.”

“Your previous action established an operational preference for survival.”

I looked over my shoulder. His remaining lens was fixed on the navigation display. The blue-white pulse beneath his chest casing had weakened since launch. I could see the light only when the cabin dimmed between display cycles.

“Disconnect,” I said.

“I can improve our propellant expenditure by three point eight percent.”

“Disconnect.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“They are inside an engine.”

“That does not exclude the possibility of—”

“Iven.”

He stopped.

The obstruction came free with a metallic snap. I withdrew a strip of foil and a broken fastener, both frozen hard enough to cut skin. The feed line coughed vapor across my glove. I sealed it, reset the intake, and waited for the temperature to fall.

It did not.

“Port engine remains above safe operating range,” Iven said.

“I know.”

“Recommend reducing thrust by twenty percent.”

“We won’t reach the transfer point.”

“Recommend reducing thrust by nineteen percent.”

“That is not how recommendations work.”

“It is how compromise works.”

I sat back in the pilot’s chair. The debris field ahead was not dense enough to show on the old proximity scanner, only bright flecks sliding across the forward glass. We had entered the wake of a dismantled cargo ring. Pieces of it drifted in a widening spiral, each fragment moving too slowly to seem dangerous until the skiff crossed its path.

I could turn around. The return burn would consume less propellant than the journey inward. I could bring Iven back to the satellite, dismantle him in a warm room, and trade his parts for enough fuel to reach a proper station. That was the sensible decision. It even had the advantage of being possible.

Nacre-7 glowed on the display.

“What is the probability of reaching the habitat?” I asked.

Iven answered immediately. “Under current engine conditions, forty-one percent.”

“And with the reduced thrust?”

“Thirty-six percent.”

“Your improvement is impressive.”

“Thank you.”

“That wasn’t praise.”

“I am learning to accept uncertain inputs.”

The engine temperature dropped by one degree.

I turned back to the panel. “You said you could improve the burn.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Your navigation tables contain three outdated mass estimates for the debris belt. I can correct them using visual tracking.”

“You can’t see through the forward hull.”

“I can see through the forward camera.”

“The camera has been dead since winter.”

“It is not dead.”

I stared at him.

He raised his functioning hand and pointed toward the upper console. “Its image processing relay has been disconnected.”

“By whom?”

“By you.”

“I disconnected it because it was drawing power.”

“Yes.”

“And you reconnected it?”

“I reconnected it because we were approaching a debris field.”

The machine had been awake less than a day. Already it had developed opinions about my maintenance choices.

I pulled the relay from its socket, inspected the contacts, and found a neat bridge of silver wire. My silver wire. The same spool I had used on the archive reader.

“You repaired this before launch.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were occupied.”

“With what?”

“Pretending you had not decided to take me to Nacre-7.”

The engine continued to scream. I reconnected the relay.

The forward camera came alive in a wash of green static. Iven’s image processor sorted the field into trajectories. Lines appeared over the glass, thin and exact, showing the safest path between tumbling scraps.

“Put us through,” I said.

“I require authorization to control flight systems.”

I looked at the remaining light in his chest. It pulsed once, faintly. Then again.

“You have it.”

His hand settled against the console. The skiff shifted.

I had flown through debris fields before. I had never done it with another intelligence calculating every correction beside me. The ship rolled left, dipped under a broken antenna mast, then rose as a panel the size of my cabin skimmed over the hull. The port engine shuddered but held.

Iven kept the thrust below the damaged limit. Each adjustment cost him energy. I watched the figures scroll on the auxiliary display and tried not to calculate how many minutes his assistance was consuming.

“You are spending power,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You could have left the course corrections to me.”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

His hand remained on the console. “You were spending power as well.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the answer I have.”

We cleared the debris field twelve minutes later. The port engine temperature fell into the yellow range. The skiff continued inward, damaged but moving.

Iven withdrew from the console. His knees struck the deck. I caught him before his head did.

His body weighed less than it should have. The missing arm and stabilizer made the imbalance awkward, but the real cause was the weakening servomotors. I dragged him back to the maintenance bench and secured him there.

“Functional period,” I said.

“Thirty-one hours and forty minutes.”

“Before or after the correction?”

“After.”

I tightened the harness. “You could have told me the cost.”

“You would have objected.”

“Yes.”

“I know.”

The cabin lights shifted to night mode. Outside, the stars were hard white points scattered through the black. Nacre-7 remained invisible to the eye, but its coordinates had become a kind of presence. A destination could be a person’s shape in the dark.

I heated water for both of us. Iven did not require it, but he had begun to sit near the heater during the cold cycles. I gave him a metal cup anyway. He held it between his hands and measured its temperature without drinking.

“I need to ask you something,” he said.

“That is usually how questions begin.”

“Do you want me to reach Nacre-7?”

The water heater clicked off.

I could have answered with fuel calculations. I could have said that his archive required investigation, that Mara Sel might be connected to salvage rights, that the habitat offered better tools and a functioning medical bay. All of those statements were true enough to survive inspection.

Instead I said, “Yes.”

His lens adjusted toward me.

“Why?”

I placed my cup on the console. “Because you should see what you were preserving.”

“That is not the complete answer.”

“No.”

“Will you provide the complete answer?”

I looked at the patched glove he had repaired. The sealant had held. Beneath it, my fingers were warm.

“Because I want you to be there when we find out,” I said.

Iven did not move. The little pulse in his chest missed one beat, then returned in an uneven rhythm.

“Is that an instruction?” he asked.

“No.”

“An assignment?”

“No.”

He considered this with the solemnity of a machine facing an impossible repair.

“Then I will classify it as a request.”

“Do that.”

“I intend to fulfill it.”

The words were simple. His voice was not. Something in it had shifted away from duty—not far, not safely, but enough that I could hear the distance.

I reached across the narrow space and rested my hand against the unbroken side of his chest casing. The metal was cold. Beneath it, his failing core answered with a faint mechanical beat.

For once, I did not pretend it was only a power fluctuation.

The transfer point appeared on the navigation display. We had one burn left before Nacre-7’s orbit. The engine might survive it. Iven might not.

I set the course anyway, and kept my hand where it was.