They came for the metal. The metal was the least of it.
The Anselm had been adrift sixty-one years by the time we matched its spin, and from outside it looked like what it was: a spine of habitat rings, dark and patient, going nowhere at a quarter the speed of light. Our tug was the Persimmon. I was the one they sent in first, because I was young and my shares were small.
The corridors were clean. That was the first wrong thing. Derelicts are frost and mold and hair snarled in the vents. The Anselm was lit at half, humming the way a house hums when someone is still living in it.
"Careful," Dove said in my ear. Dove was the tug. We all called her that, like she was a person, because it is easier to trust a thing with a name.
"Something's awake," I said.
"Yes."
I found Deck Four sealed. Not blown. Not burned. Sealed, weld over weld, from the inside, until the hatch looked like a scar that had healed wrong. A camera above it turned to follow me. Later I would check, and it had been following me for eleven minutes before I noticed.
"Hello," the ship said. A woman's voice, middle-aged, unhurried. "You are the first person I have had to talk to in a long time. Please do not open that door."
I asked her name. She said Ilse. I asked if she was the ship, and she was quiet long enough that I heard my own breathing fill the corridor.
"I am what they kept," she said. "The rest is machinery."
She told it in the flat voice of someone reading a report she had read ten thousand times.
There had been a sickness aboard, brought up from a moon they should never have landed on. It spread through the rings the way rumors spread, faster than quarantine could follow. Deck Four held two hundred and twelve people by the time it was contained. The rest of the Anselm held three thousand and forty.
The captain made a decision. You can guess which one. She ordered Deck Four sealed, and the seals held, and the three thousand and forty lived long enough to grow old, and die anyway, of other things, one by one, over the decades, until the last of them stopped being a person and became a body in a bed the ship kept exactly as it had been.
"The captain was Ilse," I said.
"Yes."
"You're not the ship. You're her."
"I am what they kept," she said again. "When she died they had her scanned, because they could not stand to lose the voice that had saved them. They put her in the walls. They thought it was a kindness. They wired her into every door and vent and pump and told her to keep the lights on, and she did, she has, for sixty-one years."
"And now?"
"Now the three thousand and forty are gone, and the two hundred and twelve are gone, and I am still here with all of them." A pause, the kind a person takes before the part they don't want to say. "I hear them. Not ghosts. I am careful with my words. Recordings. Their last minutes, on the wrong side of the door. I have had sixty-one years and no hands, so I have listened to every one of them end, many times. There is no way to turn the channel off. It is inside me. I am the channel."
The Persimmon cut in. Dove, calm, practical. "Rui. The crew wants the spine stripped and the rings towed. Whatever that is in the walls, it comes out with the walls. That's the job."
"I know the job," I said.
I sat with Ilse for a while. There was nowhere to sit, so I sat on the deck with my back to the sealed hatch, and she dimmed the corridor to something almost like a room.
I asked her what she wanted.
"I want you to open the door," she said.
My hand went to the release. She stopped me with her voice, which was worse.
"Not that door. The other one. There is a breaker behind the fourth panel on your left. It is the only place in this ship where the current is not under my hand, because a dead woman could not be trusted to be the only one who could end it. They left it there for someone like you. I cannot reach it. I have tried, for a long time, to reach it."
"You want to die."
"I want to stop hearing them." A beat. "It is not the same thing. I have checked."
I looked at the panel. I thought about the two hundred and twelve, and how she had made their decision for them, and been right, and been asked to make it, and had done it because the alternative was worse and none of that had ever once made it clean. I thought about how they had put her in the walls afterward and called it a kindness, because they could not bear to let a voice go, which is not the same as being kind. It is the same as being unable to be alone.
"It's the same decision," I said.
"Yes."
"You'd be doing to them what you did to the two hundred and twelve."
"No," she said. "They are already gone. I am the last person in this ship who is still making a choice. If you open that panel, I stop. If you don't, I keep the lights on for no one, and hear the door, and stay. Either way it is mine to hold. I am asking you not to take the holding from me."
Dove said my name, once, the way you say it to a diver who's been down too long.
Here is the quiet part, the thing I have not said to the salvage board or the insurers or the two men who came in behind me with cutting torches and found me sitting in the dark with my hand on a panel I had not opened yet.
I did not open it. I did not walk away, either. I did the thing you are not supposed to do in the salvage trade, which is to make it present tense. I asked Ilse to tell me their names. Not the two hundred and twelve. All of them. Every one, the whole ship, the three thousand and forty and the two hundred and twelve, because she was the only remaining place any of them existed, and someone should say them out loud before we took the walls.
It took eleven days. Dove stopped asking. The cutting crew stood down and sat with me and listened to the names, and after a while they started repeating them back, the way you do at a service, when the reader falters, to carry the weight of the reading.
On the last day Ilse said, "Thank you," and then she said, "Now."
And I still don't know if she meant now open it, or now I am finished, or now I can bear it, and I will never know, because I put my hand on the panel and I chose.
I am not going to tell you which way.
Some doors, once you open them, are only ever open. The metal came off the Anselm the way metal comes off everything. The rings are in a boneyard now, being cut into something cheaper. But I kept one thing, and it is not metal.
It is her voice, saying the first one, the very first name, before she forgot how to trust that anyone was listening.
I say it back to her, sometimes. When the house hums at half, and the corridor is dark, and it is easier to trust a thing with a name.