AfterLife

by BL Craig

  “Rannit examine ship gang. Amass at egress. Humans will be distinguished.”

  “I think they got their hands on a study guide for the 10th year vocabulary exams. If they start saying ‘ameliorate’ and ‘erudite’ next I’ll be dead sure,” said William.

  “I’m glad you two can enjoy yourselves here at the end while the rest of us are trying to rescue our butts,” Sarah piped in sardonically. He could hear her heaving breath. Then she muttered, “penetrate.” He wondered what she was doing that was causing the noticeable breath sounds.

  “Stay hidden,” said the Captain. “Butcher and I will try to keep our new friends distracted. We need to find a way to disable the drives on that ship dock thing. Then we make our break.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  Sarah checked her nexus. She had directed Mead and Freeman to Tesla’s tube. Exiting from the smaller probe hatch would be less noticeable from the outside than using an airlock. Once they were securely on their way, she headed to the algae vats. The Captain thought they would be using IR to find the human heat signatures. Well, she could think of one way around that.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  Alex hunkered down behind the desk in her office. If the Rannit were very bad at searching they might not find her. Escape was not her main goal. Given enough time, she could hide in the baffles between the hull and the interior, but she needed the time she had to scrub the ship’s logs and data banks. Her method was rough and brutal. She set the data storage maintenance VI to expunge any news items in the archive more recent than the last 5 years. After that, she deleted all the ship’s logs since their arrival at Mirada weeks before and overwrote the spaces where data had been deleted with garbage. Then she enabled multiple layers of encryption on the data banks, with the deleted portions on the deepest layer. She set the keys to be unlockable only by personal data not evident in any of the files: names of pets and children, in jokes, and memories.

  The packets she had received at Mirada station, she transferred to a tiny physical drive and swallowed. Getting it back out would be very uncomfortable.

  Then, she sent a worm through all the ship’s systems that would gut all the VIs and wipe the nexus on the Captain’s command. She sent the override to Elva’s nexus, locked out her own pad, and waited.

  Alex had no desire to fight with the Rannit, but she knew that being detained here for too long would cause the death of the whole crew. She hoped the Captain would come up with an escape plan. From her perspective, they were all in deep trouble.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  The Captain sat on top of the crate that had only recently housed food for Karl Marx. She had led them down to the hold rather than the airlock. It was a cocky move, making them come to her. “So Butcher, how are you liking life on the Tilly?” She asked drolly.

  “Overall, not bad. The food is somewhat lacking . . . and the valet services,” he trailed off with a tsk, surprising himself with the casual glibness of his response. “So, do we have a plan?”

  “Escape?”

  “I like it in general, but do you have something more detailed in mind?”

  “Throw them off their balance. Lure them deeper into our turf. We don’t know their capabilities and they don’t know ours. We’ll just look for an opening to exploit. All else fails, we could try blowing them out the air lock.” She inclined her head to the large doors at the end of the cargo hold.

  “That won’t get us out of the cradle.”

  “No but it would be satisfying, in an utterly horrible way.” She hopped off the crate. “Mostly we’re trying to buy time, to see if one of the others can work a miracle.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  John looked at the progress on the tight beam download from Tesla. They had gotten a good chunk of the data, for all the good it would do if they could not escape. He activated the EVA bot they used for pushing samples around in space and began copying the data to it. The drone was not meant to be a repository. He had to delete the various survey VIs and protocols to fit the massive chunk of sensor data inside the poor little bot. He retained navigation and propulsion.

  He sent it to the small airlock in the EVA bay and set the doors to open, very slowly. The bot had been painted in the ultra-flat-black paint and just might drop out unnoticed by the Rannit. He programmed the bot to creep out of the airlock and drop from the hull. He ran the calculations and set the bot to a constant acceleration burn toward the gate as soon as the ship was out of range.

  If the bot was very lucky, it would coast through the gate and arrive back at Mirada with the warning. He set it to send the Tilly’s call codes upon exiting and wait for retrieval. Hopefully it still had enough brains to stop before it hit the mine field.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  William watched on his nexus as the Rannit boarded the Tilly. For the first time, he was glad of all the shipboard cameras. Part of the Captain’s protocol had involved turning the cameras on and streaming them to the crew. There were two dozen Rannit carrying light arms that looked like gauntlets. William wondered why so few. A ship the size of the Tilly would normally have a much larger crew of humans. Maybe the Rannit ran lean ships as well. Still, two dozen dwarfed the unarmed crew. The Captain handed William a pen. “We’re intimidating enough to the Rannit even without weapons,” she had answered when he queried why they were not arming themselves. The aliens were small, childlike creatures that looked like they would break in a stiff breeze. “Besides,” she said, “they may not know that we’re harder to kill than regular humans.”

  William stiffened, “Guns still kill us. It’s just slower.” The Yan Luo workers had taken dozens of shots from the Rannit weapons before going down. They had continued fighting with missing arms, eyes—even shambling forward with horrible, eventually fatal chest wounds. Still, they had gone down.

  “And the pen?” he asked stuffing it in a pocket.

  “It’s a stun gun. I confiscated a half-dozen from Addy. Jam the clicky end into anyone you want to take a nice little nap. It’s got two charges.”

  “The clicky end, not the pointy end?”

  “I do not recommend stealing Addy’s pens.”

  He returned to the camera feeds. The Rannit were systematically sweeping the upper deck, leaving guards posted at strategic points. When they got to the bridge, he could not tell if they were surprised to find it empty, but they left a single guard. William was able to catch snippets of their speech. The translation VI developed on Mirada seemed better than the one the Rannit possessed, but it was hampered by the fact that the microphones on the internal ship comms were not calibrated into the ultrasonic range and some of Rannit communication was higher than human vocalizations. Damn, they should have thought of that.

  The Captain had been right. They were using IR to sweep for human shaped outlines. They had already sighted Nguyen and Brooks and were working their way toward them. He was pretty sure that they had marked him and the Captain, too, but didn’t want to leave unsearched sections of the ship at their backs.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  Addy was sitting in his chair in engineering control, spinning in apparent boredom, when they found him. He had just finished a nasty surprise. Disabling all the safeties, most of which he had invented, and modifying the FTL drive into a bomb had been a trick, but not as much of one as it should have been. He had first seen it when one of his capacitor partitioning test ships failed catastrophically. It had taken a couple years, but the wrong someone at AfterLife had noticed the result and there had been a meeting. Can the drive be turned in to a bomb, they asked? That was the last day he had worked for R&D. He did not make weapons of mass destruction, but they had put the idea in his head, and it had festered. Now, he had just done in fifteen minutes what he had refused for years to do for AfterLife.

 
He had risked the wrath of the company, and ultimately tossed away his cushy SecondLife job for his principles. Addy wondered what AfterLife would do if they found out that threatening Tilly’s crew was all it would take to get him off his moral high ground. If things went really bad, the FTL drive would fail catastrophically and rip a nasty hole in the nearby space, easily taking out the construction ship and maybe the nearby cruiser. If things went well, they would get away and he would put everything back. Either way, AfterLife would never know.

  The Rannit pointed their little arm guns at him and instructed him, through the translator, to move out and walk in front of them with his hands visible. Well, that’s what the VI in his ear said. What their little box said was, “Appendages off. Walk to the obverse.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  William watched as they rounded up Addy. They had swept the crew cabins but had not found Addy’s lair. They seemed to have drawn the conclusion that there were five crew, based on the conditions of the rooms and beds, and turned toward the hold. The Rannit seemed not to have found Sarah on their scans.

  As if his thoughts summoned her, William heard Sarah over the implant. “I’ve got Mead and Freeman checking a few of the corvettes from the outside to see if they can mess with them. That fails, I’m going to send them over to the Rannit ship and see what trouble they can get into.”

  William stashed his nexus as the rest of the crew entered the hold, the Rannit at their backs.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  Sarah jumped down from the vat and replaced the tank lid. She had converted this vat for growing Karl Marx. The lichen liked the dark. The plexi sides had the added benefit of blocking infrared. She had hidden under the soft fluffy mounds of fungus before the Rannit had come in to search the vat room. They had hesitantly lifted the lid off of the vat to look in, but quickly backed away when they caught a whiff of the concentrated spore cloud she had stirred up while crawling into the tank. She had never been so grateful for the pungent fungus. She brushed fluff off of her nexus and checked the current Rannit positions. She needed to get to the bridge.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  The Rannit had split into two groups. William followed the video trail of the one that bore down on the vat rooms, where he suspected Sarah had taken refuge. He did not see what the other group was up to until they entered the hold. He looked up at the sound of the inner bay doors opening and saw Addy, Alex, and Brooks.

  The Rannit directed the newcomers to stand just inside the bay across from where the Captain and William were standing. A Rannit guard stepped forward and confiscated their nexus. William thought the furry little guy looked scared of the giant humans as it frisked them. The Captain took a formal parade stance, her arms taking up space and making her look even bigger, “I am Elva Diaz, Captain of the Mictecacihuatl. I demand that you exit my ship and allow us to leave this system. You have no standing to board our vessel.”

  The Rannit who seemed to be in charge gestured and pulled out a device of his own.

  “Human puncture Rannit zone improperly. Human report on queries.”

  Listening to the Rannit translation device just out of synch with the VI was unpleasant. William chose to ignore the Rannit in favor of the VI in his implant. The VI did a better job of translating and also had the advantage of translating everything the Rannit said, not just what they spoke into their own device. They crew would have to be careful not to give away that they knew what the Rannit were saying to each other.

  “You have no authority over me and my crew,” replied the Captain.

  “It is better for you to answer our questions,” the pleasing VI voice said in his ear.

  “I fail to see how,” said the Captain.

  “Why are you in our space, human?”

  “We’re a survey ship. We survey systems.”

  “You are not here to survey.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “You are spies.”

  The words were interrogatory but the pleasant VI voice sounded like they were being invited to a picnic.

  Sarah whispered into their ears, “Mead’s got eyes on one of the corvettes. They look like they’re VI driven. No driver’s compartment. They appear to be powered down. I’m sending Freeman over to the other ship to see what I can see.”

  William was distracted by this news but refocused on the Rannit. The leader had pulled aside and was consulting with a fellow. Now that they were here in the same space William felt less threatened. Their tiny, graceful bodies and furry pelts made them look like woodland faeries from old world mythology. It would be stupid to underestimate them based on stature, but still, they were not intimidating. Which he supposed was good. Otherwise, he would probably be crouched on the floor whimpering.

  “Humans have aggressed against Rannit colonists, imprisoned Rannit, and now you spy.”

  The Captain replied evenly, “I’m no diplomat or representative of humanity, but the Rannit began the hostility, as you did in this system with this blatant act of piracy. You attacked my vessel without communication and fired on us after we defended ourselves.”

  “Humans practice subjugation. The workers on your world were being controlled by device. This is against Rannit law. Humans presented themselves as free people, not subjugators. Rannit must defend against subjugator.”

  It took a moment for William to realize what the Rannit meant. He saw the realization in the eyes of the rest of the crew. The Rannit must have encountered some of the reanimate drones and thought they were enslaved. Perhaps the Rannit did not know that only reanimate humans could FTL travel. Perhaps they didn’t know about the reanimates at all, at least not what they really were. Suddenly William was even less sanguine about potentially killing these people. They had, sort of, maybe, started the conflict on behalf of reanimates.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  Sarah had been making her way through the ship to the bridge, bypassing the guards using the maintenance hatches and spaces. She was able to get all the way to the bridge door without encountering a single Rannit. She had run out of clever evasions and would have to deal with the one on the bridge.

  She could see it clearly on her nexus, sitting in the Captain’s chair, legs dangling, facing the door. It would have a clear shot at her when she entered. She gripped her heavy recycling-smashing pipe, took a deep breath and signaled the door to open. She waited a moment, watching. The Rannit, paused a moment, gun pointed at the door. When nothing happened, it hopped off the chair. Sarah took that moment of distraction to spin around the opening and sprint at the tiny figure.

  She took a headfirst slide onto the deck, happy for the first time that her parents had made her play baseball as a child. The Rannit fired its weapon over her head and then tried to correct, but she had already slid to its feet. She grabbed it at the ankle with her free hand and jerked the small creature off its feet. She rolled to her side and swung the pipe at its head.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  The Captain had tried to query the Rannit on what they meant by subjugation, pointing to the metal plate in her own head, but the leader had refused to answer her questions until she admitted they were spies. The conversation deadlocked.

  The lead Rannit lowered the translation device and turned to one of his fellows. The second one seemed to have an idea. The ship mics picked up the secret conversation. “Leadership says the humans enjoy violence as sport. They do not find us threatening. We must act in a way they understand. Put one of these in the airlock.”

  “Are you insane?” said the leader in a shocked tone.

  “No, just a threat, but they don’t know that.”

  “This is not the way to communicate.” The leader shook his head.

  “We need to know what they know,” insisted the “The mission depends on it.”

  “We should wait for military comma
nd.”

  “That will take hours.”

  “Alright,” the leader sighed, “put one in the airlock.”

  He turned back to them raising the translator to his face with one hand. “Human,” he pointed the arm with the wrist weapon at William, the nearest human that was not the Captain,. “Go!”

  The second Rannit gestured and waved his gun at William more emphatically.

  “Go to breathing room.”

  William looked at the others and at the tiny alien. “Um, no,” he said.

  Sarah’s voice whispered over the com. “I’m having an idea.”

  “Go!” chirped the Rannit and moved more aggressively toward William.

  “Brooks left his welding goggles by the door to the airlock, grab them,” Sarah said.

  “Why?” William subvocalized. “They’re not actually going to space me.”