When the freighter Coriander goes silent in shipping lane seven-delta, nobody notices. Ships don't stop in seven-delta. They're moving too fast, too far, too committed to wherever they're going to pause for something as inconvenient as a distress call — assuming there was a distress call to hear, which there isn't, because everything that could send one has been destroyed with a thoroughness that suggests whoever did it had a system, and the system worked.Tom Vasik was not supposed to be part of any of this. He's a botanist. He was hitching a ride. He was, at the precise moment the universe decided to rearrange the Coriander's circumstances, asleep in a sleep pod that looks exactly like a Victorian chest of drawers, sealed and silent and invisible to anything that wasn't specifically looking for a grown man sleeping inside a piece of furniture, which nothing was.He wakes up alone on a ship that has been taken apart with surgical precision, adrift in a lane where nobody stops, with no communications, no propulsion, no beacon, and a single damaged pipe on deck three that is losing pressure one drop at a time. He cannot fix it. He is a botanist. He has tried.What he has instead is time, a glitching ship's AI who is intermittently and unexpectedly good company, a Begonia cutting that refuses to acknowledge the situation, and the specific dark humour of a man who has decided that if this is how it ends, it is at least going to end on his own terms, with his wit intact and his fundamental objections to the universe's management of irony clearly on the record.The Drip is a story about being alone in the dark, about the things that keep you company when everything else is gone, and about the extraordinary persistence of small living things that nobody thought to tell about the circumstances.