As soon as the airlock unsealed and yawned open, Ashok launched himself out, snapping a carabiner on to one of the steel lines that now attached the White Raven to the dark wreck a scant thousand meters away. He would have spacewalked without any safety gear at all if Callie had allowed it: he liked spinning to and fro in the void with nothing but puffs of compressed air to get him back home, but Callie insisted on a modicum of safety in her crew, at least in micro terms. On the macro level, she sent them into danger all the time, with herself at the front of the line. Space had a billion ways to kill you, so you prevented the ones you could, and didn’t waste time worrying about the ones you couldn’t. If you got hung up on a little thing like the terror of the unknown, you might as well head down a cozy gravity well and become whatever people were down there. Wind farm technicians? Organ donors? Crime scene cleaners?

She attached her own line behind Ashok’s, following at a suitable distance as he pulled himself along the tether toward the wreck.

They made the journey in near silence, the only sound her own breath in her helmet. They didn’t need to talk. The White Raven did a lot of contract security work for the Trans-Neptunian Authority: skip-tracing, investigation, fugitive recovery, chasing down smugglers. They dabbled in freight and salvage work when other jobs were lacking. She couldn’t count the number of times she and Ashok had crept silently up on a ship, not exactly sure what they’d encounter when they arrived. Neither one of them had died yet, though Ashok had come close a few times. If they ever perfected mind uploads, he’d be even more reckless with his physical wellbeing: he’d doubtless jump at the chance to stop half-assing it as a cyborg and go full robot.

They reached the wreck, the dark curve of its hull smooth and cold before them, the towering spikes all over the stern looming like a misshapen forest. Ashok’s voice spoke in her ear, close as a lover. (What a terrible thought. She wasn’t that hard up for companionship. She had access to useful machines that didn’t come with Ashok’s cheerful obliviousness attached.) He thumped the side of the wreck with his prosthetic fist. “The hull looks intact. I’d like to get a look at that mess they’ve got where their nuclear propulsion system should be. I guess you want to check out the interior first, though?”