Jack McDevitt: POLARIS

His good humor began to drain. As we fished pieces and bits, knobs and filters and chunks of dishware and broken glass and shoes and timers out of the debris, he took to sighing, and I’m sure inside the helmet he was shaking his head.

I’d seen him like that before. What happens is that he begins to talk about the historical value of the artifacts and what a loss it is to the human race to find them in such terrible condition. He becomes a great humanitarian when things go wrong.

The original plan had been to set up a base inside the station, but Alex wondered whether it was worth the effort. So every evening when we got tired, or bored, wandering around the place, we returned to the Belle-Marie for dinner. And then we looked at whatever we’d salvaged. It was a depressing time, and when I told him that maybe we should just close up shop and head home, he replied that I was giving up too easily.

On the sixth day, when we were getting ready to pack it in, we found a chamber with odd damage. It appeared to be a conference room. It contained a table that could have seated about ten, and gray mottled bulkheads, one of which might once have been a display screen. The screen was smashed. Not smashed because objects were getting rolled around the room, because nothing was moving in there with much force. But smashed the way it would be if someone had taken a hammer to it.

The table and chairs and some gunk that might once have been fabric were working their way across the overhead. The only thing that held us upright was our grip shoes, and I should tell you that standing there watching everything move around the room tended to make your head spin.

“Vandals,” Alex decided, standing in front of the wall screen. He hated vandals.

“Damn their hides.”

“It happened a long time ago,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

The next room might have been a VR chamber. We checked the equipment, which was locked in place, and in fact everything in that room was secured, and the door had been closed, so it was in decent condition. Not that the equipment would work, of course. But it looked good. And I could see Alex brighten, mentally tagging some of the gear for shipment home.

Then we found more signs of vandals, more damage to stationary objects. “They probably came in on a looting expedition,” he said. “Got exasperated at the conditions, and started breaking things up.”

Yeah. Those looters are just terrible.

But maybe they’d gotten discouraged too soon. We eventually wandered into what appeared to be the control room. And that was where we found the jade bracelet.

And the corpse.

The bracelet was on the left wrist. It was black, and engraved with an ivy branch.

The corpse was in pieces, and the pieces were adrift. The torso was moving across the deck when we moved in. At first I didn’t know what it was. It was mummified, and it looked as if it had been either a woman or a child. While we were trying to decide about that, I discovered the bracelet. The arm was the only limb still attached.

It wasn’t readily visible unless you handled the remains. Don’t ask me why I did.

It was just that the corpse shouldn’t have been there, and I wondered what had happened.

And there was the bracelet. “I think she got left behind,” I told Alex. There was no sign of a pressure suit, so she hadn’t been with the vandals.

We had nothing to wrap her in, no way to secure the body. Alex stood staring at her a long time. Then he looked around the room. There were three control positions.

They opened the outer doors remotely, maintained station stability, managed communications, kept an eye on life support, probably controlled the bots that serviced the living quarters.

“I think you’re right,” he said at last.

“Probably didn’t check when they left to be sure they had everybody.”

He looked at me. “Maybe.”

She was shriveled, dry, the face smoothed out, the features missing altogether. I thought how it must have been when she realized she’d been left behind. “If it really happened,” Alex said, “it had to have been deliberate.”

“You mean, because she could have called them? Let them know she was here?”

“That’s one reason.”

“If they were shutting down the station,” I said, “they’d have killed the power before they left. She might not have known how to turn it back on.” He rolled his eyes. “So what other reason is there?”

“They’d have used a team for a project like shutting down the station. There’s no way someone could have been here and not noticed what was going on. No. This was deliberate.”

Three walls had been converted into display screens. There was lots of electronic gear. The rear wall, the one the corpse was climbing, was given over to an engraving of the mountain eagle that for centuries was the world symbol of the Shenji Imperium. Two phrases were inscribed below the eagle.

“What’s it say?” I asked.

Alex had a translator. He poked the characters into it and made a face. “ The Compact. It’s the way the Shenji of that era referred to their nation, which was a polity of individual states. The Compact. ” He hesitated. “The second term is harder to translate. It means something like Night Angel. ”

“Night Angel?”

“Well, maybe Night Guardian. Or Angel of the Dark. I think it’s the name of the station.”

An outstation always had a dozen or so rooms set aside as accommodations for travelers. You want to stay overnight, and maybe even sneak someone into your apartment without the rest of the world finding out, this was the place to do it. The room usually consisted of a real bed, as opposed to the fold-outs on the ships. Maybe a chair or two. A computer link. Possibly a small table and a reader.

The compartments at the Night Angel were located two decks above the control room and about a kilometer away. We were looking to see if any appeared to have been lived in, but the passage of time was too great, and the contents of the rooms too thoroughly scrambled, so it was impossible to determine whether any of them might have been used by the victim.

Eventually, we opened an airlock and, after retrieving the bracelet, gave the body to the void. I wasn’t sure it was the proper thing to do. After all, she’d been dead a long time and had herself become an object of archeological interest. I had no doubt Survey would have liked to have the corpse. But Alex wouldn’t hear of it. “I don’t like mummies,” he said. “Nobody should be put on display after they’re dead. I don’t care how long ago they died.”

Sometimes he got sentimental.

So we watched her drift away, then we went back inside. The best finds came out of one of the dining rooms. Fortunately, everything there had been locked down, and it was in good condition. We spent two hours gathering glasses and plates and chairs, and especially stuff that had the station’s name on it, Night Angel. That’s where the money is. Anything with a seal. We also collected circuit boxes, switches, keyboard panels whose Shenji inscriptions, after a careful cleaning, were still visible.

We removed vents and blowers and the AI (a pair of gray cylinders) and a water nozzle and a temperature gauge and a hundred other items. It was by far our best day at the outstation.

We found a group of seventeen wineglasses, carefully stored, each glass engraved with the image of the mountain eagle. That alone would be worth a small fortune to a collector. We needed two more days to haul everything back to the BelleMarie.

Alex, celebrating our success, gave me a raise and invited me to take a couple of souvenirs. I picked out some settings, dinner dishes, saucers, cups, and silver.

Everything except the silver was made of cheap plastic, but, of course, that didn’t matter.