Shell has a two-hour sleep deficit. She scheduled it, but cannot relax because of the investigators and her fury at them trying to arrest her. She cannot decide if they are incompetent or hyper efficient. She checks the systems, forcing back the emotional detritus of the day. Orbit stable, atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide acceptable, bioreactor in balance. Microbial counts are somewhat high, but the breakdown shows the cluster is around the bodies, so this does not alarm Shell. Some microbes can cause corrosion, and it’s theoretically possible for food contamination to occur, but it’s low probability and Shell has some higher-order problems. There are displays that are faulty, and since the bots are glitchy Shell has to fix them herself. Boring work, but lifesaving. She completes worksheets for Salvo and Rasheed Fin. She does not know if Salvo needs rest, but she treats them as a human and schedules in breaks. She misses the damn AI captain.

“Ragtime.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“In seed time learn…”

“I don’t understand the command, Captain.”

Still not working.

Shell emerges from her sleeping pod and heads to the gym, starting her workout with running, planning to move to the weight machine, but Fin calls to tell her there aren’t enough bodies.

“What does that mean?” says Shell. That sinking feeling of dread.

“You have thirty-one passengers missing. We don’t have thirty-one bodies.”

“I’m coming.”

“We were expecting a hundred and twenty-four limbs,” says Salvo. “Sixty-two arms, sixty-two legs, thirty-one heads, thirty-one torsos.’

“We estimate that you’re missing two and a half people,” says Fin.

“‘And a half’?” says Shell.

“There are ten missing limbs, two missing heads. We are two legs short of a third full body. Two and a half people unaccounted for.”

What the hell? She looks at the laid-out bodies and wishes she could get in a shuttle and run away, or at least sleep. Her throat goes dry again and she keeps flashing back to the tangled mess when she found them, but she is the captain and she will comport herself as such. She has a distinct sensation of being watched by her father and feels the urge to turn around, but she does not. If there are missing parts, they have to be somewhere. The robots must have taken them and dropped them by mistake. There will be microbe spikes in the locations as the meat rots. Meat. I’m calling human remains meat now.

They sit together on the floor like errant schoolboys, and the Artificial is matching Fin’s body language. It’s subtle, but Shell never misses that kind of thing, designed to build trust and rapport between them. She wonders if it is software coded or a trait that emerged in the whole soup of machine quasi-autonomy that characterises the constructs.

“What do you think?” asks Shell.