They weren’t saying anything, either. Like I was alone on this ship. What had I said Hell was, again? Absence?

Nothing except darkness outside the front window. Nothing to see, no walls, no floor, no ceiling. But I could feel it, the space narrowing in on me like the sod walls of some grave, claustrophobia choking me. I was alone—

The drop-out point. I switched engines and space widened out the window, blooming bright and brilliant. I controlled our drop-out, swinging around, adjusting artificial gravity, and when our speed had slowed enough that light had caught up to us, I looked out that cockpit window and saw a marvel.

We had come out not far from the salvage ship, because I was an amazing pilot whose skills were only matched by his good looks and also I’d received very precise coordinates for this salvage. The salvage ship’s ancient, pitted metal revolved before us with slow majesty in the blazing firelight of the bloated nearby star.

A star that was verging on supernova.

It was a shame I was the only one who could see it, due to the aforementioned cramped conditions. I let out my breath and said, “That spaceship really doesn’t have a name?”

Nothing but the creaking of stabilizing straps answered me. I craned my head back until I could see the other three in the little room, Benny with his eyes shut and head tipped back against the wall, Quint with her little hands gone white around her stabilizing strap, and Leah with legs braced and gun disassembled, cleaning the pieces on the bench between her thighs.

“Hey,” I said, “what’s the ship’s name?”

“It doesn’t have one,” Quint said.

“Really?” I turned back to look back out the front window; it was time to accelerate the Viper to match the salvage ship’s revolution so that we wouldn’t crash into spinning metal and be shredded like cheese on a grater. “It must have had a name once. Everything important has a name.”

The Viper jolted and, yeah, I’d changed our theta direction a little too fast, but flying a ship was like speaking a foreign language. There were all these strict rules to follow to get the grammar right, but so long as you had the gist of it intact, you could make it up on the fly and be pretty well understood.

“I knew a girl who adopted a rock once,” I said. “She drew little eyes on it. Do you know what she named it?”

“What did she name it?” Leah asked, her tone anticipating the punchline like a mortar shell.

“Roxanne.”

“Would you please shut up about names and pay attention to landing the ship?” Quint said.

Making contact with a salvage ship was the most dangerous part of getting salvage—if I was going a little too slow, or a little too fast, we wouldn’t latch: we’d bounce, and bounciness in space wasn’t the harmless fun it was in a gravity well. In space, it tended to cause hull fractures, atmospheric loss, and inevitably death. I guessed that was why Quint was so nervous. She shouldn’t have been: this wasn’t like the FTL tunnel. I was flying, so I had control. And I was good at what I did.