Missing, Presumed
A ship can be gone without anyone seeing it leave.
Sarah Bishop comes home to empty her father's house and finds evidence of a life that continued while she was somewhere else.
Then the fleet calls her back. Her new lane is wound and topology at fleet scale: working out where the roads through fractured spacetime actually go while a war everyone expects gets closer. The job is measured in references, clocks, formations and the discipline to say exactly what a number does not prove.
When one element of the battle geometry shifts six hundred metres with no visible cause and a ship stops answering, the difference between missing and destroyed becomes more than language. Nobody has enough information. Nobody has enough time. The fleet still has to move.
Sarah has spent years learning not to fill gaps in the evidence with guesses. Now she has to command inside those gaps.
Era
2353
Series
Book Four of Closed Sky
Price
$5.99
Book Four of Closed Sky. Reads best after the earlier books, but stands on its own.
Wondering about order? Where Closed Sky sits, and what to read first →
Chapter 1 — MONTHS LATE
There was a hole in the front-room wall about four inches across, low down and off to the left of the window, and somebody had made good round the edge of it with filler and then stopped, and the filler had gone the colour of old teeth.
Sarah had known about the hole for three years and had never seen it. Her father had told her about it on a circuit with eight minutes in it each way, in the middle of telling her, pleased with himself, that he had built the last three miles of his own feed off his own frame on a spare pair that had been dark since a school outside Reno shut; and the hole was where he had taken the circuit through the wall of his own house, because the alternative was going round under the eaves and up, and he was sixty-six and he was not going up.
The pair had been taken back in October. The circuit was gone. Nobody had filled the hole in.
Sarah stood in front of it with a crate under one arm and worked out that she had been in the house since first light and had emptied two rooms, and that the two rooms were the kitchen and the back bedroom, which were the two rooms with nothing in them.
The rain came on again outside, thin and sideways, the kind that is mostly cold.
Sarah was good at some of it.
The water account took four minutes. A man came to the door in a wet coat with a slate under his arm to say that the account could not be closed at the property and would have to be done at the district office, and Sarah asked him three questions and gave him two figures off the meter in the yard which she had read that morning without knowing why she had read them, and he stopped saying the thing he had come to say and closed it standing in the porch, and went away looking as though somebody had taken something off him.
Then she went upstairs and stood in front of a wardrobe for the better part of an hour.
There were four coats in it. One was the good one, which he had worn perhaps six times in twenty years and which still had a card in the pocket from a shop that had shut. Two were the ones he actually wore. The fourth was a working coat with the cuffs gone and a burn in the left forearm the size of a thumbnail, and she could not decide anything at all about the fourth one, and she stood there long enough for her feet to get cold, and at the end of it she put all four back on the rail in the order she had found them and shut the door and went downstairs and drank a glass of water.
There was a bus at the corner that goes past mid-morning and it did not come. Sarah could hear the woman at the stop through the front window, telling everybody who went by that it had not come yesterday either, and one man stopping to agree with her at some length, and neither of them going anywhere.
The shed at the bottom of the garden had his frame in it and the frame had a job on it.
Sarah had gone down there for a broom and had put the light on and had stood in the doorway with the broom in her hand for some time, because the frame took up the end wall and there were four terminals made off and a fifth one open with the strands fanned and the sleeve already on the wire and pushed back out of the way for after lunch.
There was a mug on the bench with about a third of something in it that had gone to a ring and then to a crust.
Sarah put the broom against the wall and took her coat off and did the fifth terminal, and then, because the fifth one was made off and the tool was in her hand, did the sixth and the seventh, and got about forty minutes into a job that was not hers before she came out of it and understood what she was doing.
Sarah had learned this in that shed, and that was the trouble with it. The theory came later, off people who were paid to give it to her. What came out of that shed was the physical vocabulary: how much of the strand you take back, how you seat a lug, why a joint that looks right and is not will go on looking right for four years. She had been eight the first time and had made off a terminal in about a quarter of an hour with her tongue out, and he had taken it apart in front of her without a word and given it back to her to do again, and she had done it again in six.
The eighth and last one on that frame was somebody else’s work. She could see that from four feet away: a decent job, a bit hurried, made off by a person with bigger hands, and it had been there a while.
Sarah stood in the shed with the tool in her hand and made herself say it, in order, as she had done everything since she was eight.
That she did not know who had done the eighth one. That there was the better part of a year in which somebody could have done it and she had been in none of it. That she had not asked anyone about it because there was nobody in this house to ask.
Then she put the tool down where the tool went, which she also knew, and put her coat back on and went up the garden and left the light on.
The woman from the bus stop came to the door at about two.
“I’m sorry. I know what you’re doing in there.” She had a plastic bag with something in it and did not offer it. “It’s about the cooker. Only my son-in-law said you’d be selling the house and I’ve got a girl going into the flats at the back of the Ferreiro place with nothing in her kitchen at all, and I said I’d ask, and I’ve been standing at that stop for an hour working out whether to.”
“Ask me in April.”
“April,” the woman said. “Right.” She stood there a moment longer. “He used to come out and stand at that stop with me and he wasn’t going anywhere either. Did you know that? He’d come out to the corner in the morning and stand there and then go back in.”
“No.”
“Well,” the woman said. “He did.”
Gloria Aragon came out of the house three doors up at about the top of the afternoon with a wooden crate held against her front, and got as far as Sarah’s gate, and stopped.
There was already somebody on the path.
Marisol Keene had come from the corner on foot, because the car she had come in could not get round the turn at the bottom with the skip outside the Ferreiro place, and she had a coat that was wrong for the weather and no hat and she had been standing on Sarah’s path for about a minute and a half.
“Bishop.”
“Ma’am.”
“Don’t.” Keene put her hands in her pockets. “That’s twice you’ve disappeared on me and come back. I’d rather we had that out of the way in the first ten seconds than have it sitting in the middle of everything.”
“It’s out of the way.”
“Good.”
The rain went on doing what it was doing. Sarah stood in the doorway with the door open behind her and did not move out of it, and did not step back either, and Keene worked that out inside about three seconds and stayed where she was on the wet brick with her shoulders going dark.
“I’ve got a lane and I want you in it,” Keene said. “That’s all I came to say and I could have said it from Geneva.”
“Then why didn’t you.”
“Because I’d have got a yes and I wanted to see what it looked like.”
Sarah put her hand flat on the door frame.
“What’s the lane.”
“Wound and topology, at fleet scale, with a hull under it. There are people who work out where the roads actually go and there are about forty of them left doing it properly, and they are currently attached to a fleet that is going to be attacked in this system inside a year.” Keene said it the way a person says a thing they have said in four rooms that week. “You’ll get the plain version off me. It’s a specialist lane, it’s got a ship on the end of it, and I’m not telling you which one today because it isn’t settled and I won’t hand you a name I might have to take back.”
“All right.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s a yes.”
Keene looked at her for a second longer than the sentence needed.
“You’ve been on the ground eleven days.”
“Twelve.”
“Twelve.” Keene rocked back on her heels once. “Bishop, I’ve got about forty minutes on this planet and I’ve spent nine of them standing in your father’s front garden, and I’d like to be able to say afterwards that I asked you properly.”
“You asked me properly.”
“I asked you on a path in the rain on the day you’re emptying his house.”
“Then ask me again in April and I’ll say yes in April.”
There it was, and both of them could see it, and neither of them did anything about it. Keene took her hands out of her pockets and put them back in.
“Right,” she said.
“Right.”
“You’ll get it in writing from somebody who isn’t me and it’ll take three weeks and it’ll be wrong about your seniority date, and when it’s wrong, don’t fix it, because the person who fixes it is the person who then owns it.” Keene turned to go and then did not go. “The two formations you’ll be working alongside. You didn’t build any of that and you’ll be told you did.”
“I know.”
“You don’t yet. You will.” Keene went a few steps down the path and stopped at the gate, where a woman she had never met was standing in the rain holding a crate, and said, “Sorry. I’m in your way,” and went round her, and down the street toward the corner, and did not look back at the house.
Gloria Aragon stood at the gate for a while after that, because she had planned the afternoon around a doorway with nobody in it.
Then she came up the path.
“Sarah.”
“Mrs Aragon.”
“Gloria. You’ve called me Gloria since you were nine.” She came up the two steps and stopped under the porch with the crate still against her front and the rain off her at last. “This is Leonard’s. It’s been in my back porch since — a while. I didn’t want to bring it while you had people.”
“There haven’t been people.”
“There was somebody just now.”
“That was work.”
“Well,” Gloria said, and stood there.
The crate was tools. Sarah could see that much from the top of it: a canvas roll with the strap gone shiny, three spanners lying loose in a way he would not have left them, a crimper, a coil of wire, and underneath it something square and heavy with a folding handle on the side that she did not recognise, and that had to be where the weight was.
“He was doing my back step,” Gloria said. “The socket by the back step, the outside one, it had gone and I’d had it three years like that and I’d stopped mentioning it, and he came over and got the plate off and then he said he wanted a part and he’d get it, and he put all that down on the porch floor. And then he didn’t come back for it.”
“When was this.”
“October.”
“October.”
“He’d have come back for it,” Gloria said. “He wasn’t a man who left things. He’d have come back for it in a week.”
Sarah put her hands out and took the crate, and took it wrong, because she took it at the sides where the boards were and not underneath, and the weight came onto the ends of her fingers where the knuckles had been split since the wreck and had healed into something that did not close all the way; and she got it up against her chest and stood in her father’s doorway with it and did not put it down.
“There’s a thing I should say,” Gloria said.
“Go on.”
“He’d have wanted you to have it.”
Neither of them moved for about a second.
“That’s not true,” Gloria said. “He never said one word about it, not to me, and I don’t know why I said that. I had it in my head coming down the street and it came out.”
“It’s all right.”
“It isn’t, it’s a stupid thing to say to somebody about a box of spanners.” Gloria wiped rain off the side of her face with the flat of her hand. “I’ll tell you a true one instead. I’ve been going in there at about six in the morning for two years and lighting his stove. Since the winter his hands went. He never asked me and I never said anything about it and neither did he, and I went in this morning out of habit and stood in the kitchen and then came out again. That’s all.”
The rain came off the porch edge in a line and landed on the path.
Sarah stood in the doorway with a crate of tools against her front and about four things arrived in her mouth at once, and she took the one nearest the front, and it was:
“There’s a hole in the front-room wall.”
Gloria looked at her.
“There is,” she said. “He put the wire through it.”
“I know he put the wire through it. He told me about it. He told me about it for twenty minutes.” Sarah heard her own voice doing something and did not stop it. “He never told me it was still there.”
“Well, it’s a hole. There’s nothing to tell.”
“No.”
Gloria waited a moment longer than was comfortable for either of them, and got nothing, because there was nothing coming.
“I’ll let you get on,” she said.
“Thank you for the crate.”
“Yes,” Gloria said, and went down the two steps and up the street with her arms folded.
Sarah stood in the hall with the door open behind her and the cold coming in round her ankles, and set the crate down on the boards, and got the square thing out from underneath.
It was a hand-cranked test set, older than she was, with a bakelite case and a brass terminal at each end and a folding handle that came out of the side on a spring. There was a service label glued inside the lid that had been written over twice in pencil. The handle turned. Whatever was in it turned with it, heavily, the way a thing turns when it is doing work.
Sarah put it back in the crate and put the spanners back in the order he had kept them and pushed it along the boards with her foot until it was against the wall of the hall, out of the line of the door, where a person coming in would not go over it.
Then she went into the front room and stood in front of the hole in the wall and did not empty the third room either.