“The goldilocks ship made it there, by the way,” Drake said. “They found the place already colonized, and joined in with the work. It was only about fifty years ago? Some of the crew are probably still alive. Did you know them?”

“No, not really,” Elena said. “Though I might look them up, if we live through all this. They might have some pointers on integration.”

“You could just not integrate,” Janice said. “That’s what I did.”

Elena chuckled. “So what were you exploring?”

“Anything we could reach in the system, basically,” Drake said. “Our company set up supply outposts on moons and asteroids, moving progressively away from the Trappist colonies, allowing us to go farther and farther out. When we had our accident, we were on a long-range mission – we’d picked up some strange radio signals, and our captain wanted to see what was what.”

“She fucked it up, really,” Janice said. “She was hoping we’d find some aliens who were easier to talk to than the Liars, and she kept us out a few days past optimal mission parameters. Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem, there’s always wiggle room in the calculations, but the ship was due for servicing.” She sighed. “Something broke. We’re still not sure what. One minute we were easing our way through an asteroid field, and the next, the ship was coming apart all around us. The cockpit sealed itself when the rest of the ship got breached open to vacuum, and emergency life support kicked in, so Drake and I were OK, at least short term. We had no engines, so we couldn’t go anywhere, but we had the comms, so we figured we’d call for help, and maybe a ship would be near enough to save us. We had rations, so, worst case, one of the company ships would come looking for us eventually, starting at our last known location, which wasn’t far away. We just had to survive for a little while. We thought.”

“The rest of the crew died?” Elena said.

“They were all in the galley when it opened up to vacuum,” Drake said. “They went quick. We were sad about it, but we’d been military, like I said. We’d lost people before. It’s never easy, but we weren’t stunned.”

“I lit up a distress beacon,” Janice said. “We sat back to swap stories about the captain and the crew, you know, remembering people, like you do.”

Elena nodded. She’d been remembering her crew, and she wasn’t even sure they were dead.