Nest Sleepmere

The survey is wrong. There are nine thousand one hundred and four people aboard, asleep in cryogenic pods, running on a trickle of current that has nearly run out. You're the junior pilot of the tug that found them. You have three weeks before a company arrives holding a perfectly legal right to cut the whole thing into numbered sections. Every act of the story hands you a different job, and a different way to sit in the pod. One run is grappling wreckage in zero gravity, learning what a two-tonne hull plate does to your handling when it's swinging on the end of your cable. The next is the same work with no engine at all — vanes out, angling for what light is left. Later it's a helmet lamp in an unlit nesting deck with the capsule lamps receding into the dark, a dead junction box that wants rewiring, a signal that's been repeating every eleven minutes since before you hatched and needs a bearing taken on it from three separate masts. And once, in the hold, with the whole crew standing there: forty-one units of current, and five people who each need all of it. At the end, the thing that's been awake alone in there since the night it went quiet asks you what this place is for. There are three answers. It remembers which one you gave — and so does everyone else.