Page 3 of Life-Debt

Then, to hopefully keep the ghosts at bay, I offered yet another prayer along with an apology I hadn’t arrived in time to do them any good.

Once the data transmitted to my ship, I accessed the ship’s manuals, learning the layout of the place. My eyes widened as I read the labels of the primary rooms, including a stasis chamber. While a foundational piece of generational ships, stasis chambers cost more tokens than I cared to think about, typically required three people to successfully activate, and could turn people into cargo, which explained a great deal about the situation.

My ship lacked a stasis chamber, but I’d invested in a revival system should I happen across any unfortunate soul abandoned in stasis on a derelict. Authorities across the galaxy paid a fortune for the successful retrieval of those locked in stasis, with a bonus for reviving them and aiding with their recovery.

The derelict’s chamber was located not far from the airlock, and after a little work, I managed to send a copy of the blueprints to my suit for reference along with the crew and passenger list. A dead captain did me no good, but if someone had been locked in stasis, the nature of my work would change yet again.

I found the chamber, cracked open the door, and discovered three bodies at their posts, with a man of human descent lying on the stasis slab in the middle of the room, the clear dome still in place over him. His pale skin implied a great deal of time flying throughout the universe with little time on planets.

I made a point of going planetside for a month or two at a time to keep from turning into a living ghost, one of the more annoying nicknames land dwellers gave to those of us who spent more time on ships than with our feet on the ground.

The white shirt contrasted enough with his skin I suspected he came from some planet dwelling stock. I’d gotten a decent hit of melanin pigmentation from genetic manipulation.

My parents defined what it meant to be living ghosts.

I needed to return to their new planet sooner than later to visit, perhaps after I got paid for delivering the freighter and its cargo, living and otherwise. If all went well, the journey wouldn’t take long.

If all went well.

“Display crew list,” I ordered.

The HUD display informed me there had been four members of the crew.

“Display passenger list.”

To my relief, there were no names.

All right. From what I could tell from the situation, the crew had loaded one of their own, who likely would need treatment for oxygen deprivation upon revival. Their presence at the monitoring stations implied they’d stood vigil until they’d passed away, one by one. Two of the bodies had slumped over away from the controls, and I took care not to peek inside their suits.

I would not appreciate beholding multiple weeks of decomposition.

The other had slumped to the floor, requiring me to step around him to access the display. In their haste to put their companion into stasis, they hadn’t input any of his relevant information into the system. I tapped on the keyboard, reviewing the stasis chamber’s log.

In normal circumstances, the process of putting someone into stasis took up to an hour. They’d done the work in under forty minutes, which warned me I might have trouble on my hands reviving him. In good news, the system reported decent general vitals when he’d been put into stasis, which led me to believe he’d been put in before showing symptoms of asphyxiation, an unfortunately long process on a spaceship with some functioning systems.

I questioned if he’d been conscious when he’d been put into stasis, sedated first, or how they’d determined who’d lived and died.

Their system required three people to operate the stasis chamber.

I checked through every file searching for the man’s identity before giving up and debating what to do. He’d been put into the case wearing a long, white shirt and nothing else, a standard procedure.

No matter. It didn’t matter who the man was. The captain’s final message made it clear where he would be going—and I’d do my best to get the ship and the three deceased crew back to their origin planet as well.

The gentleman on the slab would be a problem. First, I’d have to wrangle him into a suit. Stasis worked wonders on keeping people alive, but if I dragged him out of the ship into the vacuum of space, I’d lower his overall chances of survival by at least twenty-five percent. As such, I would need to stuff him into a space-proof body bag or a proper suit.

I eyed his body, which had been in good physical shape at the time he’d been put into stasis.

Bringing up the ship’s blueprint on my HUD, I examined the ship’s layout, identifying several utility closets and the crew quarters, which might have something useful for protecting him from exposure to the harshness of space.

I unclipped Pandora’s leash from her collar and said, “Guard.” To make it clear who I wanted her to defend, I patted the shell of the stasis chamber. With an excited yip, she took a position between the man and the room’s sole doorway.

If anything changed, she would bark until I came.

After coiling her leash into a tight loop and securing it to my utility belt, I began my tour, heading for the utility closets to discover what I had to work with. The first few closets contained a mess of spare parts and tools, and someone had scattered everything, likely fighting to fix the ship without a scrap of good fortune. In one of the proper supply rooms, I found several spare suits and bags meant for the injured or those in stasis, allowing for an all-important oxygen tank and the mandatory heaters required to keep the chill of space at bay, both required to preserve life. I checked the oxygen tanks first, determining that the crew had made use of several but reserved two when it became apparent they wouldn’t be surviving their voyage. Each tank would last for twenty minutes each, sufficient to get my new guest aboard my ship. I grabbed one and the bag in the best condition and hauled them back to the stasis chamber.

Pandora maintained her post, and I promised her yet another treat for doing as told without reminders.

While smart, especially for a fox, she remained an animal running dog hardware and cat software, which tended to create chaos. Some commands she handled better than others. Once I set her loose to find interesting things, I’d have to leash her to put an end to her desire to explore every single nook and cranny in the derelict.