Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

ANALOG
experienced prospector. I found her supervising
the loading of food and supplies for what
looked to be a long expedition. Pana must
have warned her I was on my way, because
she didn’t look surprised when I came
through the station gate—a small, gray-eyed
woman, soft and plump, with a smile sincere
enough to hide mass murder behind it.
Most people don’t smile when a Commonwealth
cop comes to ask them questions.
“Do you want to inspect us?” she asked me
without preamble.
The cleaning crew had been through. We
both knew there would be nothing to find.
“Did you know Kiel Chaladur?” I asked her.
Her eyes were fixed on me with eerie intensity.
Despite her smile, my DI picked up
hostility, but I didn’t think it was directed at
me. “I knew him. I crewed with him twice,
way back. He had no luck then, so I moved
on.”
“He had luck this last trip.”
“You never know when it’ll hit.”
“What do you know about Shay Antigo?”
She crossed her arms and her smile disappeared.
“It’s hard to believe sometimes, what
goes on out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Some stories are hard to
believe.”
“You’ve been prospecting a long time,
haven’t you?”
“Nineteen years. Six expeditions. Maybe
this time I’ll finally hit gold.”
“You must have seen a lot out there.”
Her smile flashed, fierce and bitter. “I
wouldn’t say that. The Belt’s a big place. But
it’s mostly empty space, and you know what?
There’s nothing much to see out there. There
aren’t any mysteries. Just a few rocks and a
whole lot of silence.”
“No mysteries? No unknowns?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen.”
Pana’s report included a copy of the Gold
Witch’s log file, which had a few entries from
the start of the voyage, but nothing more. As
an owner-operator, Chaladur wasn’t required
to keep a log and I guessed that if he’d kept a
record at all, it was locked up safe inside his
head. I knew that he’d set out with three souls
aboard and returned with four, and that there
was no data gate on the Gold Witch, and no
crèche in which a fresh husk could be grown.
So Shay could not have been regenerated. She
had come from somewhere: either an independent
holding as she’d claimed, or from another
boat.
I sent a DI to look for any discrepancies in
ship crews: a list of the dead and the missing,
all those who had never come back. I set another
DI to assembling a map of radio chatter
recorded over the years, to see if a pattern
could be recovered suggesting a habitation in
the sector where Kiel had found his strike.
Then I went over the DNA evidence collected
by Pana. He’d run a standard assessment
of Shay’s profile and had found no
matches in the Commonwealth central library.
I decided to look deeper.
I ordered the sample pulled from storage
and subjected it to a more detailed profiling.
The new report turned up a fair amount of radiation
damage—nothing that couldn’t be repaired,
but highly indicative of time spent in
the rocks. More suspect were the splices:
well-known segments of artificial DNA with
no actual function. They’d been devised as
copyright marks, but they’d been adapted for
use as placeholders that could throw off a basic
DNA match. It was possible Shay had inherited
the splices, but a smart amateur with
the proper molecular toolkit could easily
achieve the result.
The two reports I’d requested earlier had
come back while I was working. The radio
map failed to show any consistent point
source of chatter in the sector Chaladur had
been prospecting, but the list of the dead was
more interesting. It was longer than I expected:
a hundred ninety-seven who’d had to be
restored from backups. Most had died of injuries
or air loss, with a few suicides in the
mix. Nearly all the bodies had been recovered
and the organics recycled.
A single exception caught my eye. Thirtytwo
years ago a prospecting boat had disappeared
with its crew of three. No one had
ever reported sighting the ghost ship. No
word had ever come of its crew.
The radiation damage in Shay’s DNA sample
had indicated a long time spent in the rocks.
I sent a DI hunting information on the missing
crew—and in seconds it returned an initial
report: only one of them had been female,
her name was Mika Brennan, and the last time
62 LINDA NAGATA