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miserable comfort.
    The multi-display on the dash flickers as I lose uplink with the beacon for a moment. I slap the side of the unit, and the video returns to normal. I’ve got the beacon’s bio scanner repeating to the display so I can track the blip. I keep waiting for it to disappear. I can feel my beacon operator down in Houston tracking all the telemetry and drumming their fingers on their desk, wishing I’d hurry up and get them more data. At the neighboring desk, an operator is probably dealing with beacon 512 and a pesky blackwater pump with a mind of its own. Next row down, someone is telling beacon 82 that their traffic lane is being diverted, and a tug will be out next week to relocate them. Suddenly, Houston is nothing more than a customer support call center, tending to the small emergencies across a fleet of expensive metal drums that dot the expanse of the cosmos. Heh. Maybe we’re the taskmasters, not them.
    The collision alarm sounds as a large asteroid tumbles and spins my way. It’s a long way off, plenty of time to correct course, but as I do so, I can see why the alarm has given me so much notice: this tin can drives like a unicycle, and the lone wheel is that spinny one on the shopping cart with a mind of its own.
    Around the back side of a small moon of a rock, about thirty klicks from the beacon, I get a lock on the bio source. It’s just five hundred meters ahead, and it’s drifting toward the beacon at a decent clip. Like it was coming for me. I reach to zoom the HUD for a visual and find my gloved hand pawing at empty space. There is no HUD. I’m not in my Falcon. Crazy how long little twinges of habit like this can last. I have to make do with leaning forward against my harness to strain with my eyes.
    There.
    Among the maze and jumble of rocks, an object with neat manmade lines and corners. Looks like a standard cargo container, the kind that gets loaded into the belly of short-hop atmo ships in those busy cargo spaceports above settled planets. She’s painted bright green and has marks of impact across her side, along with writing in a few different languages.
    I slow the lifeboat—little crystals forming from the forward jets of air—and unfold the articulating arm that tucks in under her nose. As I get closer, I see a constellation of objects drifting alongside the container—its contents, no doubt spilled after a collision with one of the many tumbling rocks. A toilet seat spins past. Dozens of them. Splinters of wooden crates. Gossamer moths of ladies’ dresses, many still on hangers, oddly keeping their wrinkled shapes as they drift past.
    I enter an asteroid field within an asteroid field. If the larger assemblage of rocks represents some proto-planet that never quite formed, then this is like a department store that never achieved critical mass.
    Turning the lifeboat toward the container, I flip on the forward spotlights, which barely pierce the dark interior of the metal box. I wonder, briefly, if I’m going to have to go in there. And it occurs to me that until someone licks AI, this is why NASA needs monkeys in space. To make stupid monkey decisions like these.
    I check the multi-display again to see what the bio scanner is telling me. The signature looks different. More faint. I slap the screen and the entire image wavers, but the little red blip in the center remains a shadow of its former self. Whatever was alive out there won’t be for much longer. And now that I’m here, so close to whatever it is, I feel the need to rescue it. I just wanted it to go away before. Now I want it to hold out a little bit longer.
    I turn the ship from side to side and watch the blip. That helps to triangulate it, to make sure the source is coming from inside the container. A large plastic postal service bin tumbles past, spilling envelopes and small packages. There are more of the damn toilet seats. They clunk off the hull, but pose no threat. And the red blip slips to the side of the