Chapter 10: Gollim in the Cargo Hold

Three days out of Ironveil, Samwell found him by smell.

Not a bad smell, precisely — more the particular funk of a man who had been breathing recycled air in a sealed compartment for seventy-two hours and had eaten whatever he'd brought with him and had not moved enough to dispel the accumulated evidence of his own existence. Samwell had gone down to the lower hold to check the coolant exchange on the secondary heat manifold, which had been cycling three degrees hotter than specification since the hard burn out of Kett Station and which Farro had asked him to look at twice before he'd actually gotten around to it. He found the manifold running fine. He found something else running adjacent to it, tucked behind the port-side equipment locker in the gap between the locker's back panel and the ship's outer hull — a gap approximately sixty centimeters wide, dark, and accessed through a maintenance crawlway that Samwell himself sometimes forgot existed.

The man was sitting with his knees drawn up and his back against the hull and a bundle of something pressed flat against his chest, holding it with both arms the way a person holds things they expect to have taken from them. His eyes were open. He appeared to have been waiting.