The Manifest

I woke because the ship was screaming and I could not hear the frame underneath it.

That is a good sentence. It is not what happened.

What happened is that I came out of the bunk sideways, cracked my elbow on the locker hard enough to see it in colour, and said a word my mother would have had opinions about. Then I sat on the deck in the dark holding my arm and feeling sorry for myself for what I am fairly sure was eight or nine seconds.

Then I noticed the frame.

I am going to try to keep this honest, and I can already tell it is going to be harder than building anything.

Here is the thing about a hull. It talks. Ours talked constantly — a long grumble down the spars when we ran her hot, and a tick in the number-three frame that Anna and I had been arguing about for two years and had never fixed, because it was only a tick and there was always something that mattered more. You stop hearing it. Everyone stops hearing it.

I was sitting on a dark deck with a dead arm, listening to nothing, and it took me nine seconds to work out that the nothing was the problem.

The alarm was going. The lights were out. Not low. Out.

I found my boots. It took eleven alarm cycles, four seconds apart, which is a very long time to find two boots, and I would like to say I was being methodical about it. I was not. One of them had gone under Anna's bunk and I still do not know how.

I count things. It is not a virtue and I am not proud of it. Rell once described it as a nervous tic with a good publicist, which got a laugh, and which I have never quite forgiven her for because it is accurate.

Bo was already in the corridor, in his undershirt, holding a slate with nothing on it.

"Power's gone to the spine."

"I know."

"No, Vela. Gone. Not tripped. There's nothing to reset." And then he turned the slate round and held it up so that I could see the nothing for myself, which is the most Bo thing that has ever happened, including everything that happened afterwards.

I put my hand flat on the bulkhead.

Everyone in structures does it. You are feeling for the machinery through the plate — pumps, scrubbers, drives, all of it coming up into your palm as one low grain, the way you feel a road through a boot. I had felt it every day for eleven years and never once thought about it.

The plate was cold and it was still.

I took my hand off the wall. I did not put it back.

I went aft, because aft was where the people were, and because if I had gone forward I would have had to look out of something.

They were in the mess. Nobody had called them there.

Ruben had the burner going. I do not know when he lit it and I have never got a straight answer out of him about it. He makes a hot drink that every single person on this crew complains about and that every single person on this crew drinks. It is not coffee. It has never been coffee. Kosh calls it the bilge, and has never once refused a cup, and once queued for one.

That is not relevant to anything. I am leaving it in.

I counted them from the doorway before I said a word to any of them.

Rell, up on the bench with her boots on the table, which is not permitted. That was the point of it. She was watching the door. Watching who came through it. Counting, same as me, and I knew that even then.

Kosh, wedged into the corner with a metre of hull stock across his knees. Nobody had asked him to bring it. When I asked him afterwards what exactly he had been planning to do with it, he said, "Hit something." I said, "Hit what." He said, "Vela. I had a bar."

Oksa on her heels, crouched, the way she always is, like she is about to check the floor for something. Ilse with her bag already open on the table and her hands already in it. Teo stooped under a beam that clears his head by a good hand's width, which he has never once walked under without stooping.

Sera, nineteen, sitting very straight, who said, "Are we going to die?" — and Ilse said, "Not before breakfast," without looking up, and Sera laughed, and it was a real laugh, and that is the last one I have of her from before.

Nima with a headset round her neck and nothing coming out of it. Anna saying nothing at all, already reading the ceiling seams.

Bo, behind me, still holding the slate.

That was ten.

I got to ten and I stopped, and I have gone over the stop more than once since, and I do not come out of it well. I stopped because I was counting bodies in a room, which is a builder's way to count, and for about four seconds I had entirely forgotten that Jun-ho Park existed.

Then a hand landed on my shoulder and squeezed once.

He had come up the aft ladder in his socks. He is the only man on this crew who could sleep through that alarm, and he did, and he arrived looking like a person who has been woken up on a Sunday.

"You're counting," he said.

"I'm counting."

"Good. Somebody should."

Eleven. And me.

"Marek's on the boat deck," Rell said, to nobody, without being asked. "Corrigan's with him."

Then Corrigan keyed the channel and said, "We heard it. Both of us. We heard the alarm."

We knew. Everybody on the ship had heard the alarm. He does that. He confirms things nobody has asked about, in the voice of a man being useful, and it has irritated me since the day he came aboard, and I have never once said so, because he is the youngest of us after Sera and he means every word of it.

Thirteen. Fourteen.

Now. The number.

There were fourteen names on the manifest. Not thirteen and not fifteen, whatever you have been told, and I know what you have been told, and I will get to it.

The manifest was a real object. It was a slab of ship's plate hung by the mess door with the names cut into it, because she was old and she was beautiful and she came from somewhere that thought a crew list was worth cutting into metal. Sera used to hang her jacket on the corner of it. Rell made her stop.

I stood in that doorway with the alarm going and I counted my way to fourteen, and I got there.

And I remember exactly what I felt, and I have decided to leave that in too.

I was pleased.

Everything was dark. The plate under my hand was dead. Something had hold of the ship and none of us knew it yet. And the number came out right, and some small, stupid, professional part of me was pleased, the way you are pleased when a weld takes.

I have thought about that a great deal since. I am still not finished thinking about it.

Ruben put a cup in my hands without asking whether I wanted one. It was too hot to hold and I held it anyway and passed it palm to palm, and Kosh said something to Bo that I did not catch, and Bo said, "That is not funny," in the voice he uses when a thing is funny.

That. A hot cup, a crowded room, somebody's shoulder against mine, Bo refusing to laugh.

That is the last thing I have from before.

"Nima," Rell said. "Anything on the array?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing, or nothing?"

Nima looked at her for a second. "Nothing, Chief. Not static. There's no noise at all. It's like someone's put a hand over the whole band."