Six months on rust rock taught Hayes the sound of his own footsteps in an empty base, the taste of the same clear ration, and the exact give of a magnet when it decided to keep him on a wall.
The brace and the palm plate had stopped being attachments. They were just the arm. He loaded a rifle and the kick went into the graft instead of his shoulder. He dropped a tool and the disk caught it before the floor did. He no longer checked the seam in the morning. The hand was his. The dreams still came, but they came less often, and when Ronos bit down the teeth found metal and sparked.
Smith gave him the brief in the hangar, not the sandbox.
"System 626. Mining vessel went dark. Distress, then nothing. Your job is to find out why. Investigation. Not a war."
Hayes nodded. The number had been sitting in him since the first week.
"When?"
"Soon. Suit first. Then the ride."
Lilith had stopped being the Earth girl in the back row.
Officer track. Yellow. The boards in front of her were not Odis's shed and they were not simple. That was the pleasure of them. New housings, new alloys, systems that failed in ways that made sense if you listened. She took a transceiver apart the way her father had taught her to take a radio apart: patiently, then all at once.
Tell them you are an engineer.
She did. Every day. The longing for Hayes lived under that sentence like a second pulse. She put a lid on it. Work first. Find him later, when the work had made her someone the fleet could not misplace.
Her band buzzed once during a lab and she flicked it away without reading. The housing on her bench had her. The thing she was building did not have a name yet. It sat under a cloth when instructors walked past. When they did not, it took the whole table.
A professor stopped behind her chair, looked, and did not speak for a long time.
"Bazzel."
"Sir."
"Who showed you that configuration?"
"Nobody."
He left without telling her she was wrong. That was how she knew she wasn't.
The unread message waited on her wrist like a stone she had decided not to pick up.
The suit was not the museum kind.
Hayes had grown up on pictures of men in barrels of armor, goldfish helmets, boots that could kick a crater. What Smith handed him was black, thin, and insultingly light. He pulled it on over his clothes and it sealed at the throat with a sound like a mouth closing. No bulk. No hissing tanks on the back. It sat on him like a second set of layers and then forgot to announce itself.
He flexed the left hand. The magnet still answered through the fabric. The brace still sat against the rifle when he dry-mounted one.
"Investigation," Smith said, watching him hunt for a helmet that was not there. "Mobility. You are not kicking in a hull today. You are walking one. A hard shell makes you loud and slow. Loud and slow on a dark ship is how files end."
A slim mask dropped from the collar when Hayes touched a tab at his jaw. Recycled air. A thin HUD, almost nothing. He hated how little it felt like protection. He understood why Smith wanted it.
Boots in the docking collar. Five figures in green already waiting, same thin black suits. No names on the chests. The HUDs painted them as they stood: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Smith did not introduce them.
"Guard detachment. Five units. The roster calls them volunteers. You will call them by the number on the glass. That is all the expedition requires."
One of them—Four, by the tag—shifted his weight. Smith did not look at him.
"What they do not print on the green offer is this: Guard is the reserve. You stand a door until the fleet needs a body somewhere else. Then you are a body somewhere else. No appeal. No color change. They needed five uses for a dark hull. They sent five numbers."
Hayes looked down the line. One through Five stared at a point on the bulkhead the way men stare when their names have been taken off the board. He felt the old choice in his wristband like a bruise that had healed right.
Red would have made him a rifle with a rank. Green would have put a digit on his visor and handed him to the next brief. Blue had put him on a dead planet with an old man and a doctor and a number that was a star system, not a man.
He was glad of that kind of number.
"They follow you on the hull," Smith said. "You follow the brief. One takes point when you say point. Five holds the lock when you say lock. Nobody plays hero in a dark corridor because they miss Earth. Find what happened. Bring it back. If the ship is a tomb, we label it a tomb and we leave."
Hayes sealed the mask. The HUD painted 626 as a cold point on a colder map, and under it a short stack:
GREEN-1
GREEN-2
GREEN-3
GREEN-4
GREEN-5
Tools. Reserve. Already spent on paper.
On a yellow vessel inside the fleet, Lilith tightened a last fastener on the thing under the cloth and finally glanced at her band.
Hayes.
She opened it a breath too late.
Leaving for 626. Investigation. I'll find you after.
The lab lights hummed. The invention on the bench did not care that he was already gone.
She put the band face-down and went back to work, because that was the only way the sentence held.
Hayes stepped into the shuttle with One through Five at his back and Smith in the forward couch, and the red planet fell away under them like a secret they were done keeping.