“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life.”

HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick

One: Sal Konstanz

ONE

SAL KONSTANZ

“I hear knocking.” Still crouched, Alva Clay rocked back on her boot heels and lowered her goggles. “I’m guessing at least two people.”

I turned my head away as she fired up her cutting torch.

“Hey, George,” I called, “we’ve found some more. Get over here.”

Back towards the stern of the drifting wreck, George Walker—instantly recognisable in his bright orange medical jumpsuit—glanced up from the stretchered patient he had been tending.

“Yes, Captain.” He lumbered towards me, his old-man gait unsteady as the deck groaned and flexed on the swell.

“We’ve got more survivors,” I told him. We’d already pulled four bodies from another hole Clay had cut in the top of the crashed scout ship, but only one of them had been alive.

Right now, the Hobo wallowed in the sea with only a few dozen square metres of its upper structure still protruding above the waves. A metre from where I stood, sluggish wavelets, tinged pink by the sun, lapped at the edge of the hull. I rubbed my forehead. How had this happened? The Hobo had been surveying the planet for possible colonisation. How had these idiots managed to land in an ocean and flood their entire vessel?

My ship, the Reclamation Vessel Trouble Dog, stood a few hundred metres to the east, hanging in the air like a monstrous bronze bullet. Before she had joined the House of Reclamation, the Trouble Dog had been a Carnivore-class heavy cruiser for one of the more powerful human factions, the Conglomeration. Engines accounted for eighty-five per cent of her mass. Weapon emplacements, sensor blisters, drone hangars and empty missile racks interrupted the otherwise smooth lines of her streamlined hull.

“How are you doing, ship?” I asked her.

Speaking through the bud implanted in my ear, the Trouble Dog said, “I have been unable to recover the Hobo’s primary personality. I have accessed its core, but it appears to have erased its higher functions.”

I frowned. “No black box? Why would it do that?”

“According to its last status update, it blamed itself for the crash.”

Clouds were massing on the horizon, threatening to blot out the low, bloodshot sun. A sea breeze ruffled my hair. I pulled my flight jacket closed and sealed the zip.

“Isn’t that unusual?” I’d never heard of a ship’s personality deliberately committing suicide.

“It’s these scouts,” the Trouble Dog said in a matter-of-fact tone. “They spend too much time out here on their own, and it drives them to peculiarity.”