On the rare occasions Rosalyn picked up, she’d just say, “Soon” and “I miss you” and “No, don’t tell Dad I say hi.” Because I don’t.

Her ankle bumped something hard floating in the water. The extreme heat and time had all but liquefied the victims, but this thing bobbing in the muck was noticeably intact. Rosalyn squinted down at the small, blue tube in the pool of grayish red and crouched, fishing it out and wiping away the staining fluids.

There was a painful flash in her brain, a feeling like the sun searing across her eyes, and an even worse nagging sense that she knew what she was looking at. Sure, the small canister resembled any number of lab substances she had worked with in her previous life, but this bothered her. Her memory had gotten worse, alarmingly worse, since the drinking started. Maybe that was the point, she had thought in the midst of yet another hangover at Merchantia HQ.

Rosalyn stood and studied the tube, then reluctantly raked her eyes across the covered floor of the cargo hold. Together, she and Owen had put together an audio report of everything they found aboard the science vessel, a record that would later be used for company purposes and the inevitable charges against the rogue captain. The forensics team had already been through, though their stay was brief; this would all be settled out of court, the families hushed up with fuck-you money from Merchantia. Outer space lab work was, naturally, dangerous, and the NDAs they had signed were biblical in length. The murders wouldn’t make a blip in the Tokyo Bliss Station or Earth headlines. A small article would be put out in the company newsletter. Just an outlying incident. Nothing to panic over.

During the walk-through, she and Owen had noted that the killer had emptied the cargo hold completely, dragging out the storage and supply crates and piling them in the hall, then sealing his poor murdered crewmates inside. The spare crates had been used to barricade the door, which was nonsense, since the magnetic seal was more than capable of keeping lifeless bodies inside.

She thought again of those heaped boxes. The captain had been alone on the ship with his deeds until the ship neared Tokyo Bliss Station and he could safely jettison in an emergency pod. What must he have felt, left in the cold, dark silence, with nothing but his dead crew and his crimes for company? Even the onboard AI Servitor, a kind of helper robot, had been deactivated and tossed into the hold, as if even lifeless, mechanical eyes were too cruelly accusing.