FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Got one!" announced Haz without looking up from the display. He studied the telemetry superimposed on the telescopic view of the nearby asteroids for another minute or two before repeating himself, louder this time.

"Mel, I got one! Wake up!" he said to the ball of grey fur strapped to the wall a few meters above. Black polymer straps dug into the fur, showing whitish soft undercoat where it poked through the crash webbing. Haz trilled in annoyance and reached over to the control board to flip a rocker switch, which immediately lit up red. At the same time, a warbling klaxon sound filled the crew cabin.

The ball of fur stirred and uncurled, revealing black feet and hands, as well as a snarling black and white striped head. Gripping the crash webbing, the badger poked her head over the edge and growled down at the grinning raccoon, "Chag it, Haz! I'm awake! Turn that thing off!"

Haz lazily reached over and rocked the switch back off.

The resultant silence left a ringing after-echo, which Mel filled with seething fury. "That is the emergency alarm, not a chagging sleep timer! Are we having an actual emergency?"

"I got one," Haz said, pointing at the display. "That's sort of like an emergency, except it's good. Like a negative emergency. Why don't you have an alarm for that? It could let out a happy trill." He demonstrated.

Mel growled a low, threatening buzz in contrast. She realized she wasn't going to get the remainder of her sleep cycle. She undid the corner that held her crash webbing to her nest and began climbing down the wall to join Haz in the cockpit without bothering with her tunic. She free-floated the last few meters to her captain's seat.

Haz waited for her to strap herself in but not for her to speak; he could tell she wasn't in the mood. "You said to wake you if I spotted metal."

"Good metal," she grunted. "At this point we need better than just tungsten to cover costs on this run. We've been out too long."

"I know," he agreed, losing his grin. He touched his display and sent the composite image to hers.

Mel leaned forward, reading. "Huh," she said.

"All I get is 'Huh'? That's 5 percent lanthanides! And that's just the surface scan! Under the regolith I bet it's closer to 10."

Mel yawned wide and clicked her teeth upon closing her maw. "No. No, I see that, and yeah, that's good. Actually really good. But I'm looking at the surface albedo. It's-- hrrmmm. Sweep it again."

"Aye, captain," Haz said in a borderline mocking tone before restarting the scan.

Mel ignored the raccoon's casual insubordination and watched as the laser swept across the slowly tumbling rock's ancient pockmarked surface. The distant orange lights of 61 Cygni A and B reflected off it as it turned, highlighting small craters and ridges. It was only a kilometer or so long, somewhat more than half that wide, and thicker near the center of mass than at the rounded ends. When the scan was almost finished she said, "There."

"Hmm?"

She pointed at her display, almost touching it with her blunted finger-claw. "It's got a few darker patches, close to the center of spin."

"Yeah, I think those are the lanthanide deposits."

Mel nodded. "Might be real jumbled up. Rubble rock maybe."

"Such a pessimist. I think we should get a close look and send a sonodrone."

Mel took a moment, staring at the numbers, running other numbers in her head, then shrugged. "All right. Hope it's worth the drone."

"Trust me, Mel, this one's going to be cash. Check the marketcast from Drobo Station."

Mel opened her mouth to remind him not to count his creds before he earned them, but stopped herself. He had proven to be insufferably optimistic, but she suspected he must owe someone a lot of money, so she was willing to let him have his fantasies. She had picked him up in Pel's, her favorite dock-level bar at Drobo Station, out of the crowd of hopeful space jacks that were always hungry for a commission. Or rather, he had somehow picked her. She had just told Pel she needed a good tech for a mining run, 70-30 profit split and Haz was suddenly perched in the seat next to her before Pel had even finished pouring her drink. Must have been listening with those augments of his.

If his sudden appearance hadn't surprised her, his gear would have. Rather than the typical spacer tunic, he wore a full body nanofiber suit, the kind that covered him completely up to his neck, where there was a circular fitting for a matching helmet. She'd heard of the things, but never seen one. Raccoon tech was rare outside their system. Rare and expensive. You couldn't get a suit like that anywhere but Procyon, and each one was custom made for its wearer.

That's all she had known about it at the time, but that was enough to make her wonder who had paid for the suit, and what he was doing so far from home. Running from somewhere? Someone? Solid badger sense said to pass. She was actually looking for a brock who would be good for more than just crew work, but raccoons were known for being mechanical savants. Adding in the additional bonus of his being able to stand hard vacuum without a bulky EVA suit, she ignored the grumbling voice in her head that warned her he was probably as much trouble as stolen cargo.

Haz still wore the suit as he sat in the co-pilot seat, and Mel had learned over the past hundred or so daycycles that he never took it off. Couldn't, without some kind of special medlab. It was more than just a fancy EVA suit, it turned out. It and the matching helmet were directly linked to implants inside the raccoon's skull, through a multifiber neural connection at the root of what had once been his tail. When she found out his had been amputated to provide the link she hadn't been able to suppress the full-body shudder. She had stopped asking questions about it after that.

He hadn't waited on her to check the marketcast. He announced, "Oho, dysprosium is over 5000 per kilogram."

"Let's hope there's some we can get," gruffed Mel. "I'll take us in," she said in a doubtful tone. She leaned forward, reaching for the piloting controls while Haz continued tallying the creds he hadn't dug up yet.

#

Mel stared at her display, which showed asteroid's primordial surface about a hundred meters below them. It appeared stationary and solid, like an actual world. She knew it was an illusion. Dull orange light from the distant binary suns slowly shifted across, betraying the fact that they were matching the rock's rotation over the "south" spin axis. It had enough gravity to detect with instruments, but it would take days for them to "fall" to the surface.

"I don't like it," said Mel, though her tone suggested she was willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Haz was all for trying. "It rang solid, at least through the center of mass. And I think those dark bits over there are actual metal nodules."

Mel snorted. The dark patches were probably some kind of carbon deposit. Or at best iron, and iron was garbage metal in her business. Instead of arguing with the optimistic raccoon she said, "I'm more worried about these voids." She brought up the sonodrone report, which showed a jumble of wavy criss-crossing lines.

"I still can't read those, Mel."

"Hmmph. I've showed you at least four times now. I thought you raccoons were supposed to be smart?"

"Hey, there's different kinds of smart, digger. Let's review. I recompiled the corrupted kernel in the secondary comp. I went outside and completely reworked the mis-wired photopanel; incidentally you need to find out who installed those and demand a refund. Then there was the leaking water pump in the lavatory. Oh! and..."

Mel held up a hand before he rattled off more of the fixes and improvements he had made to her ship on the run thus far. "All right! Kahh, Sorry. You're a sharp techie. But trust me when I say these--" she indicated some of the incomprehensible lines in the report, "are voids. Empty spaces. Usually means smaller asteroids came together to form a larger one and didn't fit together perfect. And if the join was slow and gentle, it might come apart just as easy."

"We'd be able to do a quick liftoff, though, if that happened?"

"Risky. Depending on how it might separate we could get pinched or lose the landing struts and the augur, and that's the end of the run, never mind my ship."

"If it comes apart at all."

Mel nodded, still studying the report.

"It didn't show any rubble, though, right?"

"Only the pockets of surface trash and ice," she admitted.

"Let's go down," said Haz, giving her what appeared to be a winning smile.

Mel still wasn't looking at him. She stared at the display, trying to imagine how this old rock was formed, and how it might actually be structured under the skin. She made a resigned vhrrrm and said, "If we end up chagged and have to go back to Drobo with only the drek we got in the hopper, your 30 percent is going to be 30 percent of zero."

Haz continued grinning, his whiskers flexed out on either side of his black nose. "I'm all in for this one, Mel."

Mel sighed and said, "Set us down." Her badger intuition had served her well over the five standard years she had spent as a belt miner. This time she didn't have a strong feeling either way, which was enough to disturb her. Maybe Haz was right, and they'd actually found one of those rocks the grey-muzzles always told stories about, full of platinum or iridium or...

She blinked and rubbed her eyes with both hands and stopped that cart before it got too far down the track. The raccoon's optimism was dangerously infectious. Haz was already firing the jets and they were descending. She watched the surface slowly come up to meet them, resolving into random patterns of ever-smaller circular impact sites. She could see the dark patches Haz had been obsessing over clearer now. They were craters for the most part, where the lighter regolith had been blasted away. One such crater was close enough to where they were headed that she could see the hackly jagged edge of the material. It did, in fact, look metallic. She hoped that was a good sign.

The landing struts came into view as they extended from the massive business end of the Red Beryl's Twin. Haz slowed the descent and then nearly stopped as the struts thrust their spinning drill ends into the regolith, seeking rock to burrow into. The comp negotiated the uneven surface and once the anchors were set, pulled them into position mechanically, cutting the jets entirely.

Haz was already unfastening his harness. "I'll go down and get the augur calibrated."

Mel nodded, remaining strapped into her seat. They were "landed", but she couldn't feel the pull of the asteroid's gravity. It was far too weak. She was used to the unnatural sensation, but she didn't enjoy weightlessness. Badgers were meant to be stout and strong and after long runs out in the belt she would always spend as long as she could station-side, where they had the luxury of spin-gravity. Fighting the atrophy. Regaining her muscle. Until she would almost run out of credits again and need to go back out. Several times she had almost sold the Red Beryl's Twin and quit. Sold it and booked passage back to Iblis, back to her family. To work on a proper world with proper rocks.

Mel snorted, to no one, as Haz had already gone below. She wasn't proper; that had been the problem. Weightlessness was a minor discomfort compared to going back to that mess. She unfastened her harness and went up to fetch her tunic. Time to go to work.

Haz never seemed to even notice when the badger didn't bother with clothing. She wondered, despite knowing she would never ask and didn't truly want to know, what else he might have sacrificed for that suit. At least his scent was barely perceptible. The crew cabin mostly smelled of her badger musk on this run-- a warm spicy sandy scent.

She heard the machinery start up, vibrating through the structure of the ship, and Haz's voice came over the comm, "Lowering the augur housing."

Mel returned to her seat and pressed a button on her armrest and said, "Check." She watched the scarred metal tube as it extended into view, all the way to the powdery regolith and about half a meter into it before it stopped, tossing up a cloud of dust. Haz would be making adjustments to get it as tight against the actual rock as he could. He was a good jack, she had to admit. Knew his way around a miner. Why was he so quick to sign on with her, she wondered? There were bigger miners at dock. Everyone's got reasons, the badger decided, herself included. Mel didn't really want to know his-- she had avoided asking, almost afraid he'd tell her. There was no one to bother either of them out here, at least. Serenity for gravity, Mel thought, always trading one for the other.

#

"Assay's looking good!" came Haz's voice over the comm. The augur was only about four meters into solid strata, and already the stuff coming up was full of metal. Lots of nickel and iron, of course, but a good percentage of lanthanides, just like Haz had promised. Still no platinum group surprises, but Mel decided she could allow herself to finally feel good about this rock. They could easily fill up the hopper here and make a better-than-average profit even if the lanthanides were only maybe four percent. She almost wished she had a larger miner, but anything larger than the Red Beryl's Twin needed more than two crew to operate safely. Two was enough for her. She planned on setting a beacon here so she could find it on her next run, even if it meant basically inviting every miner in the system to the find. At least she'd sell before the market dipped from any sudden glut.

She had just started doing a little indulgent accounting in her head when a grinding wrench shook the ship, followed by a split second of alarm warbles before they were cut off as all the lights and the systems went dead.

Mel swore into the dark silence. "Chagging typical! Soon as I start thinking things might actually... Rraaaugh!" She hit the comm button on her armrest but of course it didn't do anything. She called out, "Haz!"

There was no response, but that didn't mean much. He was probably at the display station all the way down in the mining control room. She felt around to her left, searching for the supply cabinet in the almost complete darkness. She found the door release and pawed through the contents, finding the torch she sought while still muttering and cursing in low buzzing growls. She clicked it on and gripped it in her teeth, then made her way to the open hatch that led below.

She pulled herself down the ladder head-first as fast as she dared. She needed to get the power back up-- the lights were the least of her worries. The oppressive silence told her the atmosphere recyclers were offline as well. While there was enough oxygen in the crew sections to last at least a couple of daycycles, without power things would begin to get dangerously cold before that.

She called out to Haz again with the torch in her teeth, managing just the vowel sound, while she recklessly shot down the shaft like an angry furry missile. Still he didn't answer. Maybe he had his suit helmet on? She hoped he would already be working on the power plant. Tucking into a ball and rolling a 180 before she got to the bottom, she landed and pushed off in a lateral direction, toward the power plant. As she rounded the corner she saw indicator lights aglow on the side of the main reactor. At least something was working. Though if it hadn't been, she thought, she wouldn't be down here scratching her head. She'd be part of a spectacular matter-antimatter explosion.

Drifting up to the display mounted on the side of the brushed-titanium toroid shell, she took the torch from her mouth. The display revealed the reactor was running at normal power, but something was draining every watt it produced. She didn't understand-- a short someplace would have tripped a safety instantly. This was more like someone had connected something big to the system, with a steady significant load. She changed displays, and isolated the circuit with the load. The augur. Well, at least that made sense. That sound. That shudder. It must have hit something really hard down there. But no, there were safeties for that too. It should have just shut down. Obviously it hadn't. She worried that the torque on the augur shaft might actually tear the struts out of the rock and set them spinning out of control. Where was Haz?

"Chag it Haz! Where are you?" roared Mel over her shoulder. Getting only silence she growled and stabbed at the display, telling the grid to cut off power to the augur circuit. The display changed for a split second to show the circuit open, but then it toggled back. "What in the shit?" the exasperated badger gruffed, before hitting it again. She let out a strangled bellow as it failed again. Mel set the torch in her muzzle and sailed back to the ladder, grabbing a rung and wrenching her shoulder as she took the turn too fast. Mel grunted, then over-corrected and bounced into the wall on the way down to the mine control room.

Haz was lying against the bulkhead next to the control display, motionless. His eyes were open but he didn't move or say anything when Mel appeared with her torch lighting the way before her. She said, "Haz? Haz!" but he didn't respond. The display he must have been using was dead, and she worried that he was as well. Mel put out a hand to stop her forward momentum, right next to the raccoon's head. She shined the bright torch in his wide-open eyes. The brown irises contracted, but other than that, no reaction.

"Something still going on in there," Said Mel. "Don't die on me, Haz. Need your help."

Mel tried to pull him away from the bulkhead, to see if he had any injuries to his head, and discovered that he was stuck. Or rather, his fancy nanofiber suit was. It clung to the bulkhead like a magnet, pinning him there. She pushed away from him wide-eyed, sniffing the air and suddenly fearful of touching anything metal, which included everything within sight. She didn't smell ozone or burning flesh or fur, and she hadn't been electrocuted yet herself. If she could pull the manual safety for the augur maybe Haz would be all right. Mel shuddered to think what might have happened inside his head, with those implants...

She had never pulled one of the manual safeties before, but it wasn't hard to find with the torch, outlined in chipped red paint with warning signs around it. She reached into the recess and gripped the insulated handle and pulled- but it barely moved. The amount of juice flowing through the line had it stuck in place as tight as Haz's suit was to the wall. She changed positions, setting both feet on either side of the recess and grabbing the handle with both hands. Straining, she pulled and could feel it scrape and wiggle in its socket. The badger let go of the torch from her muzzle so she could bellow properly, and gave another great pull with her arms and a push with her thick legs. It came free suddenly with a blinding arc flash and she ended up striking herself in the chest. Mel was sent sailing across the small space, slamming into the opposite wall with her already sore back.

It had worked, though, she was sure of it. Mel could hear the recyclers start up again, and feel air move across her fur. She looked over to Haz.

He was no longer stuck to the bulkhead, but was free-floating, like her torch. He stared glassy-eyed at nothing. Mel let go of the breaker plate and pushed off in Haz's direction.

Mel said, "Haz?" and tried to look into his eyes, but her torch was slowly rotating in the air where she had left it. The light became dim and indirect as it turned. She cursed and slipped her hands under his armpits and pulled him closer. Mel pressed ear against his chest. She had to cover her free ear with one hand, but she could hear a heartbeat. She looked back up at the raccoon's masked face. Froth was forming at the corners of his slightly-open muzzle. She growled a curse.

Mel realized she didn't know what to do. The raccoon was clearly alive, but he was in some kind of coma. She worried that he might vomit or choke on his own saliva, or a half dozen other possible and horrible ways to die. She looked around. The breaker and her torch still floated free in the mining control room, but she would have to leave them, against all good shipboard sense. She was beyond such things now.

She had to get Haz up to the medbay. She held Haz firmly with one arm around his back and pushed off towards the ladder, cradling the back of his head with one hand until she had to use it to negotiate the rungs. Looking up, she could see the main cabin far above, lit up and functional. She could at least be thankful there was a working medbay up there.

She had to ascend much more slowly than her trip down, as the shaft was not made for two individuals using it in tandem. Once in the main cabin the badger recklessly pushed off from the top of the ladder and free-floated all the way to the top where the medbay was set against the wall. She pushed Haz into the pad and strapped him to it securely. Normally (though she had only had to use the thing once before, and that was for a broken arm) she would attach a monitor to the wrist and an oxygen mask for the muzzle. Mel found she couldn't really access his wrist with that suit covering every bit of him. So she just fit the mask over his face and turned on the medbay comp.

It complained about the lack of the wrist monitor but she jabbed the acknowledge button several times to shut it up. Mel realized Haz's eyes were probably drying out at this point and gently tried to squeeze them shut with both hands. He looked much less dead with his eyes closed, somehow.

She patted his cheek with the back of her hand and said, "Haz. Haz wake up. Come on."

Haz's eyes popped open again suddenly. Mel drew back in surprise, but it was that same glassy vacant stare as before. She didn't know what that meant, so she considered her options. She could leave him be with the oxygen and wait to see if he improved. She could try to strip off his suit and check for burns or other injuries. She could give him a stimulant, possibly lift him out of the fugue state he seemed to be in.

Mel opted for the stimulant. She reasoned only Haz would know how to fix himself, and if she could get him conscious there was a chance he could tell her what to do. Mel opened an adjoining cabinet next to the medbay and detached a hypo. She found the right set of cartridges and loaded one, then shot the raccoon full of go juice.

A few moments later Haz suddenly arched his back and seethed, hissing and thrashing against the straps that held him to the bay. This shifted into a full body jittering seizure which Mel could only watch, fearful and horrified. She had little medical training besides first aid and setting breaks. Most accidents in space that didn't simply kill you (which was the majority of them) resulted in those sorts of relatively minor injuries. What was happening to Haz was far from her experience. She clung to a nearby handhold and waited for the seizure to abate.

It did, all at once, just like it had started. Haz was left panting hoarsely, sounding like a sick, dying thing.

Mel said, "Haz, can you hear me? Can you tell me what to do?"

Haz, still panting, slowly turned his head to look at the badger. His eyes were still wide and wild, unblinking, but no longer vacant. His muzzle, under the transparent oxygen mask, was open slightly, his lips pulled back in a feral snarl. He tried to shout, "What did you do to me?" but it came out rasping and muffled by the mask, which was now covered by flecks of froth.

Mel held up the hypo. "Stim. You were out, in a coma or something! I had to bring you around. I think your suit took a sudden shock."

Haz looked away from her, around the cabin, searching and never finding whatever he sought. He closed his eyes and grated, "I didn't want this! Don't make me go. Get someone else. I can't... I can't. Just get it off!" he pleaded, whimpering, then lapsing into silence. His panting respiration gradually grew less labored until he seemed to be simply sleeping, eyes closed this time.

Mel was the wide-eyed one now, staring at the black-suited form of her hired jack. Don't make me go? Get it off? Did he want his suit off? Maybe there was something wrong with it after that overload. She leaned closer, trying to get a better look at the only edge she ever saw on the thing-- the perfect circle around his neck. Maybe there was some kind of special catch or seam she just couldn't see.

Mel hooked a fingertip onto the edge of the circle and pulled it towards herself, trying to expose more of what was underneath. She could see the fur on his neck ended abruptly just under the edge. Another wave of prickly revulsion washed over her. He's furless under there, she realized. Of course he is, her logical mind shot back. Would be a terrible design with fur trapped under it forever. Well, we're not taking it off, then, she thought. Not even an option. Mel released her finger and watched him sleep, eventually leaving him to go run the system diagnostics she should have run as soon as the power was restored.

The power failure had caused multiple small disasters, mostly in systems that were really only meant to go into full shutdown while at dock. Individually they were easy fixes, most of which the badger had had to perform at one time or another, but en masse they had a cascading effect, resisting her attempts to get everything working together again. Mel really needed Haz's help. In her mounting frustration she muttered aloud that she would be docking his percentage for every hour he napped, even though she knew it wasn't his fault. Haz never responded.

By the time Mel's next scheduled sleep cycle came around, she felt light-headed and weak in her fingers and wrists. Her back ached from multiple abuses. Most of the ship was talking to itself again, though, so she felt like she could begin to relax. She wanted to go down and see about the augur, but it would have to wait until she had help, or at least more energy herself. Mel knew that it would have to be manually cranked back up. She'd done it before on previous runs when it had seized up, but only with help. She regretted not bringing along another badger, for an expanding variety of reasons.

Looking up to the medbay she clucked her tongue and decided with a rumbling sigh to get some rest, hoping that in a few hours maybe Haz would reboot his neural implants or whatever he needed to do.

#

Mel awoke to screaming. Her sleep had been fitful to begin with, and she had the oddest sensation of waking up moments before Haz began his hoarse fearful cries, as if she had been expecting it. The badger thrashed at her crash webbing and unfastened a corner so she could get out and up to the medbay. Haz was straining against the straps and rocking from side to side, acting like something she couldn't see was attacking him.

She came up on one side of the medbay and into his field of vision. His eyes were open as wide as she had ever seen them, showing shocked whites all around his brown irises. She pulled the oxygen mask off his muzzle and the screaming grew that much louder.

"Haz!" She tried to shout over him. His eyes fixed on her and his black nanofiber-encased fingers flexed and strained at the ends of his imprisoned arms. Mel placed one of her own furry black hands over his chest with her fingers spread. "Haz," she tried again. "Stop. Stop! Please. It's okay. There's nothing. Nothing here. Just me."

His cry trailed off into a spent whimpering wheeze and he began to hyperventilate. She quickly moved the oxygen mask back and tried to fit it over his muzzle again but the raccoon turned his head violently to the side, rejecting it. Mel decided not to force the issue.

While he was momentarily quiet, she said, "Haz, it's me. Mel. You're aboard my miner, the Red Beryl's Twin. I picked you up on Drobo Station. Remember? We were mining out a shaft and something overloaded the whole ship. Your suit took a surge or something. I think it scrambled your crazy raccoon tech."

Haz appeared to be digesting her narrative. He turned back to look at Mel with eyes not quite as manic. Mel wiggled her small round ears and he strained against the straps again. He finally asked, "Why did you tie me down?"

Mel snorted. "Well, first you were half-dead, then you were talking crazy, then you were sleeping, then you were screaming. The straps seemed like a good idea for most of those."

"Let me out?" he asked.

"Are you done being crazy? I don't need you tearing my ship apart. I just got it working again."

Haz swallowed and said, "I'm okay. I just... what did I say, before?"

"Something about not wanting to go somewhere. And I thought you might have asked me to get your suit off, but I wasn't sure and I don't..."

Haz interrupted, "No. I would not ask that." He clenched his fists and shuddered.

"You said 'Just get it off', so how do I know what you meant, yeah? You seem more lucid now, at least. What do you think?"

"I don't know," he said.

"What are you going to do if I release the straps?" Mel asked in a subdued voice.

"Lavatory," he answered right away.

Mel blinked. That was not what she expected him to say, but it made perfect solid sense. She had never asked about how his suit dealt with elimination, but she had a pretty good idea. Clearly it didn't have unlimited capacity. She hit the releases for the restraints and he brushed them away, then pushed off across the cabin to the small lavatory chamber and shut himself inside. She heard the pump cycle on, as well as some muffled whimpering. She didn't want to listen, but she couldn't leave. She still wasn't certain he was himself.

Whoever that was, she thought, chewing at one of her claws. She thought back to Pel's, to that first encounter with the raccoon. He had been so, so eager to contract with her. Mel had been wary but also amused by this oblivious castaway, every eye in the place probably on him. If he had noticed all the stares he didn't seem to mind. She had assumed he was used to it in that black contoured thing.

Haz had asked about her ship, a perfectly normal question. Pulled out his datapad and looked it up. The station net didn't list the exact model, just the make and registered home port, but he had known it anyway. He had asked her about specific systems that he said were typically needing repair on her type of ship. Said he could fix them on the journey to the belt, no extra percentage needed. Claimed he enjoyed using his skills.

He certainly had them. Mel had checked his record, such as it was, but there was nothing to raise a red flag, except maybe the complete lack of a red flag. But that was paranoid thinking, she had told herself. Now having heard his addled raving, though, she wondered about what wasn't part of his record. Anything before about two standard years ago. Not really that unusual for a place like Drobo, where if someone didn't want to talk about their past, you learned not to ask.

The badger couldn't get his terrified pleading out of her memory, though. Don't make me go, he had said. Send someone else. She huffed and shook her head. It could mean anything.

The lavatory door opened and Haz came out.

Mel looked at him, and he looked back. He made an expansive gesture with both hands. "I'm okay."

She gruffed, "Really? I found you stuck to the wall like a pair of mag-boots down in the MCR. I thought you were dead at first. Eyes open. Gone. Now you're okay? How are those things in your head? I can't imagine they like getting zorched."

Haz broke her gaze and looked down, towards the main control board. "I don't think it was a surge. That would have been... bad. Suit power cells got drained down to nothing. Took a while for the biochargers to get everything back online. Erm, speaking of which, I'm famished."

Mel tilted her head. "Just like the rest of the ship. Something was sucking watts like... I can't explain it. Go grab some food, then. If you're really all right, we can try to crank the augur up and get out of here when you're ready."

"What? We're leaving? Why?"

"You almost died. Don't you want to go back to Drobo and get checked out?"

"I told you, I'm okay," Haz insisted.

"How can you know that?"

"Trust me, I know. And this is the best prospect we've found. You don't want to just abandon it, do you?"

Mel said, "Augur might be chagged. Haven't powered up that entire section. I'm afraid it'll just start draining again if I shove that breaker back in."

"I can fix it."

"You don't even know what's wrong!"

"I got some ideas."

"You want to share some of them?" Mel demanded.

"Just umm, ideas right now. Probably... the augur bit maybe fractured. Exposed the shaft, made contact with some metal, shorted the power--"

Mel shook her head. "No. This was not a short. A short would have tripped the mains. You of all jacks would know that. It was like all of a sudden the ship was running another, bigger ship, that needed exactly all our power. Have you ever seen something like this?"

Haz shrugged, "We'll find out when we crank it up, I guess. Hungry now. Excuse me," he said, and climbed down the wall towards the pantry locker. Mel watched him while she buttoned up the medbay. Watched how he moved. A little slower, maybe? A twitch when he flexed his shoulders? She thought his skin might be burned under the suit. She guessed he wouldn't tell her if it was. And, she noted, he hadn't answered her question.

#

The augur was seized pretty well, but they managed to back it up a half turn with their combined effort plus some extra torque. Mel savored the exertion and knew she would be sore after her next sleep cycle, but it was an honest kind of ache that reminded her of her station-side workouts. There were zero-g exercises she did, but they always felt contrived and unsatisfying. Haz didn't share her enjoyment of the effort, and clung weakly to the torque rod they were using.

He panted, "All right. Good. Yeah."

"Ready to crank it up?"

He held up one finger. "In a minute. Kind of... dizzy."

Mel nodded, and pulled the rod out of the socket in the shaft head coupling. She asked, "What do you think it got hung up on?"

Haz licked his muzzle and then said, "Maybe one of those voids you saw. Hard metal edge on one side and nothing on the other might do it."

"That's sort of what I was thinking too," agreed Mel. "You feel up to this?" She pointed at the manual crank.

Haz rubbed his muzzle and flexed his fingers.

Mel shook her head, grunted and left him to rest for now, grabbing the handle and bracing her feet in a pair of straps on what would have been the floor, had there been enough gravity. She turned the wheel until it engaged with the hidden set of gears inside the shaft driver housing. Then she took a deep breath and pushed against the resistance of the entire augur assembly. There was no weight to fight without gravity, but there was the tendency of objects at rest (especially big heavy objects) to remain at rest, as well as friction from all the crushed rock debris.

Haz watched in partial awe as Mel's arm and leg muscles shook and flexed under her fur. She changed her angle slightly and bellowed. The wheel suddenly moved, then hung up again. She rested a moment, then resumed the labor. After a full turn and a half, she let go, panting and shaky. She pulled her feet from the straps and said, "I think-- I think it's far enough out that we could restore the circuit. Maybe. You want to go up top, just in case?"

Haz said, "Only to get my headgear," before turning to leave.

Mel huffed at his back, "You like trouble, raccoon?"

"I want to see what's down there. And so do you."

Mel cocked her head. "What do you think is down in that hole?"

"Something valuable."

"Huh," she said. "Well, let me put the breaker back in while you're up there, just in case."

He pushed off the wall, headed for the ladder.

She followed and said, "If the ship goes dark again, don't come down here." She only followed him up one level to the MCR where she had tied the breaker to a handhold near the socket. She untied it and reached for the nearest intercom button.

"You up top yet?"

"Yes," came Haz's voice over the comm.

"All right. Re-engaging."

Mel looked at the scratched metal surface of the breaker, then shrugged and lined it up with the socket and slid it in. The mining control interface came back online and the display showed a schematic of the augur. Several flashing red alarms punctuated the screen. For once the alarms were reassuring-- they gave her real information instead of more guesses. She tapped through the displays, clearing old alarms and studying the persistent ones. Then she turned to hit the intercom again.

Haz was right behind her and she let out a surprised shout.

"Aaaugh! Chag it, Haz, how did you get back down here so fast?"

Haz's helmet was black with some white accents much like his suit, and it didn't have a transparent face-shield like a normal EVA helmet. It appeared to be all of once piece, and she imagined it had some kind of display projected on the inside for him. Mel didn't see any obvious cameras- the surface was unmarked. She felt like he could be laughing under there at her surprise.

"I'm ready. Let's pull it up, " his voice came, but not from his helmet. Instead she heard it from the ship's comm speakers, giving the disconcerting impression that he had somehow transferred his mind to inhabit the ship's comp and this body in front of her was simply a simulacrum.

"Hmmph," she frowned, before turning around and issuing the commands on the control display. The augur driver motor came to noisy mechanical life and she could hear the load of rocks and debris being dragged up the tube to the hopper above.

Haz nodded and headed for the ladder down to the aft airlock.

She clicked the comm and said, "Haz, we could lower a camera down the tube. You'll die if something down there sucks all your power again."

"I'll be careful."

"Yeah? Where should I send your percentage and your body?"

Haz actually laughed and said, "Keep 'em both. Procyon Tech Council might give you a nice bounty on the suit."

Mel couldn't tell if he was joking or not. He sounded different than she had grown used to, but she couldn't say exactly how. Perhaps it was some feature of his helmet, flattening his voice. She heard the airlock cycle and switched her display to camera view.

Haz said, "Raise the tube."

She gave the command and the augur housing tube retracted back up into the miner, leaving a perfectly round black hole in the asteroid.

Haz moved to peer down. He had a toolbelt secured tight around his narrow waist, and a tether attached to it kept him secured to the airlock. Two bright lights came to life from his otherwise black headpiece, almost resembling eyes that shone down into the shaft. He slipped over the dusty edge of the bore hole and began to crawl down using cracks in the exposed rock as handholds. He disappeared from the camera view, and she could only see reflected impressions wherever his 'headlights' illuminated something.

"Haz, patch your camera into the ship's net so I can see."

"Oh, yeah, sorry. Umm... should be a feed on channel 18 now."

She switched to the channel and saw the bottom of the shaft coming into view.

Haz's guess had been accurate, it seemed. Instead of a flat chewed out rock bottom, about half of the end of the round bore hole looked like twisted shining metal and the rest was a jagged hole of complete darkness. Haz approached the latter, avoiding the odd metallic edge. He kept a respectable distance, for which Mel was grateful. The lights didn't reveal much in the chasm beyond-- some impressions of metallic or possibly crystalline surfaces, and that was all.

"I think I can get through without touching the metal," said Haz.

"Any idea what it is?"

"Greenish color to it, even where the augur tore it up. I wish I could take a sample for the spectrometer. Probably some in the augur hold I guess," said Haz, moving closer to the rift.

"Haz, pull back out. We can check the stuff that we pulled in and see what it's made of first."

"This is bigger than it looks. I think I can get through on this side."

"Haz..." cautioned the badger.

"You want to know what's in there, don't you?"

"Yeah, but I could go in a normal EVA suit. Don't risk it!"

"How do you know a normal EVA suit won't get drained just as easy? At least mine's got almost no bulk."

Mel grated, "I don't! But whatever this stuff is, I don't think it's worth dying over."

The crazy raccoon did not seem to be listening. He mused, "The real problem is this steel tether cable. It'll make a perfect conductive connection with the ship and we'll be in the dark again."

"Haz, don't." Mel ordered.

Haz stopped talking. The view from his camera moved closer to the ragged hole, and then through it into the space beyond. He had poked his head through. He looked around rapidly, making Mel a little dizzy trying to get her bearings on what she was seeing.

The augur had broken through to what looked like a crystalline shaft, on an oblique angle from the direction they had drilled. The tunnel was triangular in cross-section, appearing to be perfectly equilateral and stretching off into dusty darkness in one direction. The other direction was raggedly terminated near Haz by fractured crystalline metal and rock rubble. It was as if that end had been crushed at some point in the asteroid's unfathomable lifetime.

Mel had never seen anything like it. There were occasionally pockets of crystals inside asteroids, and they often fetched a nice price if they came up intact and gem-quality, but it was a very rare surprise. Wearing cut gems that were possibly a billion or more standard years old was quite a status symbol for wealthy folk on Iblis. If this was an intact deposit of something along those lines it could be the strike of a lifetime.

Forgetting the risks Haz was taking, she asked, "Is it crystal or metal? Your cam doesn't really make it clear. Try to get a sample from the talus to your left."

Haz didn't acknowledge. Mel saw one of his hands come into view as he climbed into the triangular shaft. He turned his head to look down the axis and his headlights illuminated the greenish-reflective walls, bouncing off in odd directions, muted by the dust the augur had stirred up. There were striations and indistinct patterns in certain spots, and something glinted far ahead-- something small that seemed to occupy one corner of the triangle and protrude towards the center. Haz pushed off and floated along the shaft towards it. Mel didn't bother to tell him to stop, he clearly wasn't listening. Instead she watched as the object grew closer. It looked like all the rest of the material, but it was weirdly faceted, and seemed to reflect other colors besides the metallic green. Before any more details resolved, though, the camera feed fritzed and then cut out.

"Haz!" she shouted into the comm, but didn't really expect an answer.

#

Mel sat strapped into her captain's seat, chewing at an already ragged finger-claw. She had her main display set to channel 18, but there was still no signal, after more than an hour.

"Seal the shaft. Move on," said a voice in her head. Her sire's voice. Would he have left a miner to die in a collapsed shaft? Mel didn't want to think so. "He's already dead," the voice said convincingly. Was it really his voice, or was it hers, trying to convince herself to cut her losses and get out? She didn't normally consult with phantasmal versions of her sire. The real one would probably have told her that Haz was a reckless fool and deserved to die for it. And then added that she deserved anything she got out here. He had, in fact, on the day she had left.

What did Haz deserve, though? Another hour? She had considered going down into the rock herself to try to find him, but that was crazy. She imagined him floating in that crystal void, or whatever it was. Maybe stuck to one of the walls, drained of every last bit of energy. Probably frozen solid at this point. Maybe that's what that thing in the corner was. Some other hapless miner or ancient explorer, frozen there for eons. Was this entire asteroid some kind of bizarre natural crystalline energy sink? She couldn't even imagine how it possibly worked, never mind why. Space and time may as well be infinite to a lone badger clinging to a tumbling rock out in the black. Anything seemed possible. Up until this run, though, the universe had managed to stay within some very predictable boundaries.

Bereft of something solid to plan her next move around, she began to wonder if the formation was entirely natural. Aliens were strictly the subject of entertainment vids. She had never heard of any credible contact with anything from outside the known colonies. Haz had found this rock while she had been asleep. He had been so intent on coming down. And then to go down into the hole, with so little disregard for good sense. The raccoon just didn't make very much sense at all, good or bad. She had just ignored it because of the lure of a profitable run. Had he known what was here to find? In his delirious gibbering he had begged for someone else to go. Go where?

She shut her eyes and rubbed them with both palms. If nothing else she should place a beacon here to warn others away. It was clearly a hazard to all miners, though she knew some would be drawn to it despite the warning. Maybe whoever had sent Haz would come and collect him and whatever lay buried below. Maybe it would be better to leave it unmarked.

She turned off channel 18 and switched back to control display. Time to ditch, take the loss and the lesson. Before she was able to start releasing the anchors, however, the alarms came alive for a moment, then died with the lights. Again.

Mel swore and growled for an entire minute, until she burned through her frustration and rage and realized that Haz's abandoned and unsecured tether must have contacted the exposed metal-crystal. She found her torch once again and headed down the ladder. Before she reached the bottom, the lights and the air came flickering and sputtering back on. The tether must be swinging free, she thought. She needed to reel it in while she had the chance or else she'd never get free of this chag-blasted rock.

She went all the way to the bottom, to the aft airlock where one of her badger-sized EVA suits waited on its wall mount. She climbed in and sealed the clear bowl-like helmet to the neck. Mel hated these things. They made her feel clumsy and slow and weak. She would generally insist that her hired jacks did the majority of the EVA work. Her ship, after all. As much as the badger disliked being inside the suit, though, she wasn't taking chances with the unreliable power.

Mel tested the suit seals and ran her diagnostics impatiently. When everything showed green on her HUD she got into the airlock and shut the inner hatch behind herself. She pressed a control on the wall with her huge gloved finger and the air pumped out along with external sounds. So far the power had held, but she wasn't sure how long that would last. She hit the outer hatch release and pushed the door open and to the side on its short track.

Mel looked out across the ancient surface of the asteroid, seeing it clearly with her own two eyes for the first time. The rock ended abruptly at the very close horizon where the diamond points of the stars wheeled in the inky black. Watching it fooled her brain, made her feel dizzy. She looked down to find the tether spool and blinked to make sure she wasn't hallucinating.

Haz was climbing towards her, slowly pulling himself along hand-over-hand on the tether. She gasped and knelt down to trigger the retraction spring to reel it in. She said on the open comm channel, "Haz! What happened? I almost... I didn't think you were still alive!"

Haz maintained his silence. Was his suit fritzed? He was still climbing up and she could only watch impatiently. Then she noticed he was holding something tightly between his trailing feet. Something faceted and shining. In the dull orange light of the twin suns it looked like polished bronze, but she knew it must be green. An enormous jewel? He had risked his life for over an hour to free it and bring it up? Her paranoid musings on raccoon conspiracies embarrassed her now. Simple greed was a solid, believable motivation.

He reached the lip of the airlock and pushed her roughly aside as he climbed in.

"Hey! I know you want to get back inside but watch the suit!"

He abandoned the tether and she worked on stowing it. Haz was already trying to work the inner airlock control, which was ignoring him.

"Idiot, you know it won't open to vacuum. Just give me a moment!"

She slid the outer door closed and reversed the pumps. Haz was still repeatedly smacking the inner door control, and it opened as soon as the pressure equalized. He clutched his prize to his chest and passed through, then disappeared up the ladder. Mel growled, increasingly annoyed with him. She followed him out and pressed her suit back to the wall mount, unsealing and climbing out as fast as she could.

"Haz, stop! Where are you going? I want to see that thing." She called up the empty ladder tube.

She launched herself up, passing the empty MCR deck and stopping her ascent at the engineering deck. She could hear something towards the power plant, so she changed heading and followed her perked ears.

She found Haz by the reactor shell, curled around his jewel like a child with a ball. She finally could get a good look at it. She thought it was the same thing she had seen in the distance on Haz's camera, stuck in the corner of the crystal tunnel. It was the same greenish metallic material, roughly spherical, but there wasn't a curved surface on it that she could see. It was all triangular facets of wildly varying sizes and angles, and no two appeared to be the same. Some of the facets were a different color than the majority green. Bluish-green, yellowish-green, and even a couple of red ones which stood out thanks to the contrast.

She thought it looked like a piece of artwork more than anything else she had ever seen. She moved closer. Haz didn't seem to even see her or realize she was there. "Haz? It's... it's very hrmm... shiny. Are you all right? You were down there a long time," she said in a soft growl.

When Haz still refused to speak Mel touched his shoulder.

The icy nanofiber material stung her fingers from being exposed to space. She gasped and yanked her hand away, hissing, "Haz! Your suit..."

Mel's voice trailed off as her eyes fell on the back of his neck.

The helmet seat was broken, exposing frost-covered fur.

She circled around him and looked into his blank curved face shield. She reached out and grabbed hold of the helmet and pulled it off.

She wanted to scream, but the shock only allowed a weak whining hiss through her gaping muzzle.

Haz was dead. She had no doubts this time. His eyes had obviously ruptured from decompression and were now frozen bloody sockets. More of his frozen blood coated the interior of his helmet, which she reflexively jettisoned to her right as if it were infected. His muzzle was shut in a silent snarl, lips pulled back and dessicated, exposing his teeth in a menacing rictus.

Mel scrambled against the decking to get away from him. She pushed him away and he floated back until he struck a wall. His arms and legs came to gruesome life again. He pushed off with his feet and came towards her. This time she found her scream. Moving quickly in zero-g was difficult and risky at best. She felt like she was in the sort of night terror where something was chasing her and her limbs would not respond to her desperate need to get away. She used the reactor display to pull herself to the side, panting and wide-eyed. Haz stayed on his initial trajectory and stopped at the reactor, still clutching the weird jewel.

Mel found a handhold and clung to it, petrified beyond reason now. She watched Haz as he blindly pushed the jewel against the reactor housing, but seemed to ignore her.

She shook her head slowly, saying, "No. No, no, no. Need to go."

The panicking badger launched herself back towards the ladder, away from the animated corpse that used to be Haz.

She had to get away from here. Away from this asteroid. And she had to get that thing off her ship. To do that she'd have to go back in there and get close to it. She hugged herself and shuddered. First things first.

Once Mel reached the cabin she shoved herself into the captain's seat and initiated the disengage sequence. "Come on, come on..." she muttered at the unhurried pace of the machinery.

The anchors reversed and withdrew from the surface and Mel fired the jets to move the ship away. No safety checklist this time. Chag it, she thought. She let the jets fire for longer than she needed, and watched as the rock receded, the dark circular bore hole shrinking to a pinpoint before she cut them. She laid in a course for Drobo and let the comp handle the details. The stars wheeled as the ship re-oriented and she switched her display to a camera in the power plant. Haz was still crawling around the reactor aimlessly.

Why was he... no, not he anymore. Why was it in there? It had made straight for the reactor once inside. She had no choice but to assume it had some kind of intelligence, either on its own or in some strange combination with Haz or what was left of Haz's brain and implants. If that jewel was responsible for the energy sink, then maybe it was after more direct from the source. All the more reason to get it out of there before it damaged the reactor.

She spent some time feverishly hunting through most of the lockers in the cabin, but found no suitably long tools. Then she remembered cranking back the augur with Haz.

After retrieving the torque bar, she found herself staring at what was left of Haz from across the power plant room. His head was now lolling sickly as he moved, fur matted and wet as he thawed in the warm air. She wished she hadn't pulled his helmet off. There were free-floating droplets of raccoon blood in the air, along with a growing unpleasantly biological odor. She clenched her muzzle and moved in slowly, but the thing appeared to have no interest in her at all.

Mel crept along the wall, holding her stout metal rod in one hand like a primitive weapon, flanking the questing horror until it was between her and the exit. She pointed the blunt end of the bar at Haz's stomach, right under where he clutched the crystal, then pushed off from the wall with her legs with a grunt.

She struck Haz square in the belly and he was pushed back, hands and feet sprawling open in her direction. He lost his grip on the crystal. Mel pushed the bar forward a little more to give Haz another shove to separate them further, and he floated limp, then struck a wall and bounced off, lifeless. The crystal's momentum was carrying it right back to him, though, and she pulled the bar up, striking it to try to deflect its trajectory.

The moment the torque bar touched the surface of the object, Mel's world went black as starless space.

#

When Mel regained consciousness, she was no longer in the power plant. She was half-strapped into the medbay and alarms were warbling through the cabin. She looked down, half-dazed, wondering where Haz was, and what all the noise was about. Was he trying to wake her up again with the chag-blasted alarms? Why was she in the medbay? She unstrapped herself and cried out in pain. Her hands were burned raw, the fur singed and the black skin blistered. Out of her shoulder stuck a spent hypo. She had no idea what had been in the cartridge, but guessed it probably had been a painkiller or maybe a sedative.

She gingerly climbed down to her seat and silenced the noise. Then she used her elbow to click the comm button. "Haz? Whass going on?" she slurred. Her tongue felt swollen and clumsy.

When no one responded she used her toes to page through the ship's internal cameras. When she got to the power plant Mel finally remembered.

Haz was dead. Her ship had been invaded by something hostile. Something that he had brought up from that asteroid. She looked at her burned hands. The metal bar. She had tried to swat the thing away from his body with the bar and it must have tried to use her like it had used the poor raccoon. Hadn't worked out for either of them, she guessed. Mel peered at the camera view. Haz was still there. The bar was still there. The shining thing looked like it was stuck to the reactor housing, unmoving.

She could not explain how she had got to the medbay. Maybe she had gone crazy for a little while like Haz had done. She didn't know how much time had passed. She was on her way to Drobo, though, according to the nav comp. Fine, she thought. They could deal with it. She was done.

A wave of dizziness passed over her. A little more nap sounded good. Hadn't she had been robbed of a lot of sleep lately? She closed her eyes.

When Mel opened them again, everything was dark and she was shivering. The drug was gone from her system now, and she knew with a sick twinge deep in her belly that she was in trouble. The torch was gone from the nearby locker, and she couldn't remember where she had left it, so she groped her way blindly and painfully to the ladder tube. The badger worked her way down to the power plant, remembering that Haz's corpse was somewhere near. She hoped she could avoid touching it as she headed towards the unsettling greenish light that lit up the reactor torus.

The crystal had somehow rolled along the surface to the underside where the main power conduits emerged. It had attached itself there like a glittering parasite. Light that filled the space, emanating from several of its facets. Mel could see that it had spread; needle-like crystal tendrils crept out over the housing and the conduits. She stared at it for a good while, shivering in the cold green light.

It still looked like a beautiful piece of artwork. A study in almost hypnotic asymmetry. But it was alive. Alive and uncaring or possibly just unaware of her kind of life. How long had it waited in that asteroid? Was that its home? Or was there an entire wrecked crystalline ship in there? It could be millions, billions of years old.

She couldn't touch it. Couldn't imagine how she could get it off the reactor. Without life support Mel would never make it to Drobo. And without the main engines she assumed the ship wouldn't either. But it would certainly sail by close enough on its current course to attract attention. It would be chased down. Boarded. She couldn't let that happen. That felt like a solid certainly. The thing might change on the way, grow more powerful. Or more hungry. And even if it didn't, whoever boarded the ship would find it. It would lure someone else to disaster. Already the air felt cold enough to freeze water. She didn't know how much time she had left.

She turned to look at Haz's crumpled body. She demanded, "Did you know? Were you looking for this? Chag it why did you have to pick me?" She choked back tears and looked around at the walls of her ship. Her own ship, lost to her now. Regret flooded her. This was her own fault. Careless. Foolish. She'd never be able to go back to Iblis and show her sire that she had dared and won. No. No, they'd find out that she had lost when the ship was found.

She would end it, here. No one would know, and no one else would be cursed. She moved to the reactor control panel and opened the access panel underneath the dead display. She lifted each yellow and black striped cover and turned each red-painted valve within. The alarms that would normally be wailing were silent. The crystal below maintained its apparently mindless glow, oblivious to the badger and what she intended.

Before she turned the last valve, she addressed it with a low, vicious growl, "Hungry, hrrnn? Well open wide!"