The Child In The Seedbay
The service airlock on deck eleven was a two-stage affair, a small pressure box for the cargo runs and a larger one for personnel, and neither had been cycled in the log for eleven years, which was the last time Mihkel himself had been in there for an inspection. They went in through the small one, because it was faster and because it was off the main pattern, and the lock cycled up to pressure with the slow breathy hiss that always sounded, in a suit, like a person you could not see.
They unsealed each other in the dark of the far side. Mihkel went first with the lamp and the key and his old patient habit of walking as though he owned the thing he was walking through. Anneli came second with her hands free. They did not talk. Deck eleven was not the archive they had been remembering, or it was, but it had been rearranged.
Deck eleven was not supposed to be rearranged.
The primary racks of the deep lockers were where they had always been, the long rows of cryonic stock for the arrival and the cold-stored seeds and the redundant data cores stacked in their six-high towers. Those they walked past. What had been rearranged was the small cluster of general storage at the aft end, the hundred or so lockers that held nothing important and therefore were used by the crew over the decades as a kind of junk drawer. That cluster had been pushed back and opened out, and in the space