What the Ship Came Back Without
Session: 2019-02-20
The Acreon came back on its own.
That is the fact that frames everything else in this account: a standard mining vessel arriving at Absalom Station on autopilot, empty of crew, steady as a stone rolling downhill. As though nothing had happened. As though absence had a neutral form and this was it.
There is something the training gives you — the capacity to read silence as signal. An ecosystem too quiet is not peaceful; it has been emptied. Taeon would have understood this. He would have looked at the drifting ship the way you look at a forest floor without insects and known that what was missing was the message.
What was asked of him — of all of them — was to go in and read it.
The Ambassador's offer had been made before this. It crystallized now into contract: six hundred credits to investigate the crew's disappearance, to find out what had happened aboard the Acreon and why the ship had returned without them. Alongside it, a second arrangement — a package to be delivered, clearly marked, for five hundred credits more.
And with the package came a robot.
An Observer. It would accompany the party for the duration of the delivery. It follows them through the subsequent accounts — present in the background of every scene, patient and attentive in the manner of things designed to witness.
— I have spent time thinking about the Observer. A xenodruid learns to distinguish between an animal that has wandered into a territory and one that has been placed there. I will let that thought sit without resolution. Taeon, for his part, noted the robot and kept moving.
Before they got far, a holoscreen delivered a woman named Miss Joss. She represented Astral Extractions. The pitch was confident: the company was interested in hiring freelancers — specifically in connection with the drift rock, specifically at this moment when the shape of its ownership was still undetermined. She named what she was offering without apparent embarrassment.
He listened. He did not commit. The notes are quiet on what he felt about being a target of corporate recruitment; he was, by this point in the investigation, accustomed to being seen.
He held the option open and kept moving.
There was also a dwarf. Unnamed in the records.
A brief transaction: a burner phone, offered and accepted. The phone was a route to someone called Barry — a man whose face, the notes indicate, bore a striking resemblance to a particular battered human actor. The reference would have needed no explanation in that room.
What Barry knew, or wanted, or could offer — that was future business. For now, the phone was a thread laid at Taeon's feet, and he picked it up.
The Hippocampus — a shuttle — carried them to the Armada.
In the Armada they found the Dust Runner: a working tramp freighter, efficient and unsentimental in the way of ships that have earned their wear. Captain O'tell Sariso was aboard. They were shown around. Coffee appeared.
The tour told them something. Sariso told them the rest.
The Collective was not wealthy. The Acreon contract had been good work — the kind you remember when the lean periods come. There were files, prospecting records, sonar readings, core samples: a body of scientific labor accumulated during the drift rock surveys. All of it had value. But Astral Extractions, Sariso made clear, did not care about the ship. Did not care about the files. What they were after was the rock — the claim, the rights, the mineral and spatial significance of whatever the Acreon had found out there.
The crew was incidental to that interest. The ship was incidental. The missing people were, in AE's calculus, a distraction from the asset.
Taeon listened and filed this next to everything else.
He came back to the station with more than he had left with: a contract, a robot escort, a corporation's pitch, a burner phone, and the confirmed shape of at least one faction's priorities.
The drift rock was the point. The Acreon had come home without its crew. These two facts sat side by side in the way that uncomfortable field observations do — patient, adjacent, not yet fully speaking to each other.
He had coffee on a tramp freighter in the Armada. He watched the competing interests arrange themselves around him like a system expressing its logic, and he did not look away.
There is still the lawyer to find, and the question of what salvage law says about rocks that arrive trailing obligations behind them. There is still the Acreon, waiting in dock, empty of people, full of whatever it brought back.
He was not yet done with it. He had barely started.