See you soon.

COME WITH ME is scratched into the ceiling above my bunk, through layers of industrial grey paint and red rust-proofing.

To the bottom of the sea, says the wall below it, written in a different hand, but cut just as deep. You can see where they made it all the way to the steel; it must’ve been a nail or a chisel.

My compartment is sparse. There’s a single bunk, a locker for my things, and about enough room to swing a jacket over my shoulders, assuming I didn’t mind grazing a knuckle along the way. The walls would be bare, but generations’ worth of jockeys have decided otherwise. There’s a skull and crossbones etched above the door, Abandon all hope, ye who exit here along the top of the frame. All around is the same scuff and crap you’ll find on any company boat: kill tallies and salty one-liners, military-grade philosophy and bad Seymour Decker jokes.

Decker doesn’t cheat death, he wins fair and square.

The prison shuttles had their own versions of the same, etched into grime and rust and whatever else was in reach. NorCol’s monster-ship isn’t any different.

Come with me, to the bottom of the sea.

The walls keep a roll of who has come and who has gone, a century’s history scratched by hand, into paint that covers untold years more. A pair of shackles stands out near my locker, next to the name Sajjan, H, and what looks like a prison term. There are six other jockeys by their names, ranks and units filled in where they had space. Someone etched a tombstone into the paint near the foot of the bunk, inscribed it with a name you can’t read any more, hidden under fresher coats of paint. Others followed suit, counting their losses, never forgetting. There must be thirty of them. A little graveyard where the jockeys have kept their dead.

One of them was an artist, it seems. A little Juno watches me from the other side of the room, probably about as tall as my hand stretched out straight, carved with a knife-tip.

DONT LET THEM TOUCH YOU

It was scratched just the same as my walls were, unsteady and improvised.

Sitting up on the edge of my bunk, legs crossed beneath me, I flex my aching hand in the light. There’s no broken skin, and nothing worth calling a bruise. It feels like I’m nursing a fracture in there somewhere, twinging whenever I try to move it around, but there isn’t any swelling, and nothing to explain the hot throb keeping me awake.

Well, maybe one thing.