Echoes of Mnemosyne

Mira Solace woke to the smell of ozone and metal shavings, the two scents braided together like the twin ropes that held the dock's maintenance cradle to the hull. Outside the viewport, the Earth's limb burned thin and white; beneath it, the city-grid of New Baikonur glittered like a circuit board someone had spilled light across. She sat up, fingers grazing the cool rim of the synapse band at the base of her skull, feeling the familiar thrum as the day's overlays slid into place. Her apartment was two decks of welded scrap and old advertising glass, a place where loose wires were both jewelry and currency.

Her first thought, as it had been every morning for the last two years, went to debts: late invoices on the salvage ledger, the clinic codes for three weeks ago that still hadn’t been paid, the one line item she couldn't ever quite reconcile — a child's voice file in a memory chip labeled only "LIA-#03."

She dressed with mechanical efficiency, her boots whispering along the floor plates. Edda was at the stairwell, already busy with a kettle that sputtered and sang like a ship's engine. The old woman moved with the certainty of a seasoned hullwright; her knuckles were scarred, her braid threaded with copper. "Don't make faces at the morning, Mira. It only lasts the first two minutes," Edda said without looking up.

Mira smiled despite herself. "I sleep light now," she said. "Dreams are dangerous when you live off ghosts."

Edda tilted her head. "Then anchor yourself to something heavy, child. Don't let ghosts be the only company that pays you rent."

Tamsin burst through the door then, hair tucked under a grease-stained cap, hands smelling of hydraulic oil. Her grin showed the wide, reckless kind of hope that got them into salvage runs and, sometimes, out of trouble. "You coming to Gyre Dock today? The Thalassa needs a hand, and I owe Harlan a favor. Plus there’s rumors — something with a blue pulse floating in sector seven. Could be just slag. Or a lead."

Mira's pulse quickened. Blue. The word landed in her chest like a small magnet. She had been following a ghost-signal for months, a fragment of a voice that matched the lullaby she thought she had lost with her mother. The synapse band hummed against her skin as if remembering.

Outside, the dock hummed: cranes sighed, magnet-arms creaked, boots clanged on catwalks. The salvage crews moved in chords, each person a note in an enormous mechanical symphony. Mira caught herself watching a tethered drone as it trimmed its trajectory, wings flashing raw titanium. It reminded her that everything in the orbit was recyclable — lives, promises, data.

At Gyre Dock, the Thalassa waited like a patient animal. Its hull tasted of old seawind, pitted and tolerant. Harlan, the captain, leaned against the frame with a face like a weathered instrument. He greeted them with a nod. "We pull whatever's attached to the ribbon, we sell what's salvageable, and we don't ask contemptible questions," he said. "Rules keep teeth intact."

Mira's hands brushed the rail; the scar on her palm burned cold. She moved through the ship with the easy competence of someone who had sewn herself into the seams of other people's failures. The job would be routine — scan, latch, reel. But when the Thalassa's long arm hooked the dangling mass from sector seven, the thing they hauled up sang with a blue pulse that matched the rhythm behind Mira's left ear.