"Yes. Which you'd know if you spent more time on the bridge with the rest of us."
I make a face. "You really don't want me there." I'm not good with star maps. One quadrant looks much like another in my eyes, and I'm bad at charting fuel-efficient courses. The last time they let me navigate, I burned through all of our fuel because I wanted to get a good look at a double-ringed planet. I mean, if you can't enjoy the view, what's the point?
Kaspar doesn't answer, mostly because we both know I'm right. "The distress signal has to be from the Buoyant Star. It's the only thing we've picked up on this particular frequency. And it's in this quadrant, too. We're really close." He lifts his hands and cracks his knuckles, like he always does when he's antsy.
"I'm surprised anyone's still on board after three years. What're they saying?"
"Nothing. It's just the signal. There's no voices at all, which I thought was weird." Kaspar shrugs. "It might be that there's no one alive to turn off the signal."
The small hairs on the back of my neck stand up. "So it's haunted."
"It's not haunted."
"It might be. You said it's in this quadrant, right?" I gesture at one of the windows we pass by as we head for Straik's quarters. "Look around you, brother. This quadrant is utterly abandoned. You said yourself the only thing in this particular system is a couple of Class C planets." Class C means low resources and not eligible for colonization at this time.
He nods. "And the only one that supports life is an ice planet with poison air. No one's visiting this system at all. It's totally deserted…which is why it makes sense that the Buoyant Star is out here. Who's gonna look for her near a shitty little binary star on the fringes of a forbidden system? No one, that's who." His eyes light up with enthusiasm. "Except us."
"Still say it's haunted," I grumble, but I leave it at that.
We enter Lord Straik's apartments, and my brother Mathiras is standing next to Lord Straik, both of them regarding the star map up on screen with intent faces. Over the last few weeks, while I've been befriending the crew, Mathiras has had his head down with Lord Straik, insisting on going over every star chart of the Slatra system. He seems to be handling the loss of the Little Sister better than myself and Kaspar, who's still bitter about the fact that our ship was abandoned. "We'll get her back," Mathiras has told us a half-dozen times. "Let's focus on getting the Star and making our fortune, and then we can retrieve the Sister at a later date. No one's going to find her this far out off the beaten path."
I'm not so sure about that. I suspect Zoey is gonna come looking for us after not hearing from us for a while, and she's gonna be super pissed if all she finds is an empty ship. But Mathiras is the smart one, so I don't point this out. Personally, I think he likes working with Straik. They both seem to be cut from the same plas-film. They both take things way too seriously, spend all their time planning for everything, and basically don't enjoy life much at all.
"I'm here," I announce as I approach them. "Let the fun begin."
Both Straik and Mathiras shoot me disgusted looks.
"About time," Straik says.
"Why do I smell soap?" Mathiras asks.
"You don't want to know," Kaspar replies.
I rub my hands, doing my best to look as excited as the others. "So. Where's this distress signal? Can I hear it?"
Lord Straik turns back to the star map and touches a small section of it. The screen sharpens, zooming in on the area he touched. "It's coming from the vicinity of this particular binary star, right at the edge of the ice belt." He touches the screen again, zooming ever closer. "In fact, it might be too close. Perhaps that's why it was never heard from again."
"It iced over?" I ask. "What's an ice cloud doing out here?"
"Sometimes a planet disintegrates," Mathiras tells me as if I'm a child who's never cracked open a vid-lesson. "With the pull of the sun—in this case, twin suns—being too great for it to handle, it falls apart and creates a debris belt. In this case, it's ice." He gestures at the screen. "Nothing but pure ice as far as the eye can see."
"Sounds like Kaspar's last date," I joke, nudging Mathiras.
Both of my brothers—and Straik—glare at me.
"Oh come on. That was a good one."
"Can you be serious for a moment? Just one?" Mathiras puts a hand on the console and taps it. A noise comes out, the particular unique, ear-screeching klaxon used for all distress signals, followed by the ship's registry number and name, read aloud by the ship computers. Normally, though, a distress signal is followed by a statement from the distressed ship, but there's nothing but silence from the Buoyant Star. Mathiras turns to me. "Well?"