by Max Barry
“Ugh,” said Beanfield to Anders. “Is there any chance of you eating like a decent human being?”
“What?” Anders said. There was loaf all over. From clips and pics, Gilly had gotten the impression that Anders was calm and self-assured, but in reality he was kind of manic. He just went still for cameras.
“I don’t want to sit opposite you anymore,” Beanfield said. “It pains me.”
Jackson said, “We’ve reached S-min velocity.”
They looked at her. “When?” Gilly said. “Just now?” He checked the numbers on his film. She was right: The ship was now traveling fast enough to perform a hard skip, which would take them into the fighting zone.
“Yep,” said Jackson.
“When do we skip?” asked Beanfield. “Next twenty-four hours, right?”
“Where is the question,” said Anders. “Sword of Iowa’s bogged down in Orange Zone. They might want a hand.”
Gilly shook his head. “Two Providences in one zone is a waste. We’ll go somewhere new.”
This was speculation. The ship would decide when and where to skip after processing more information than any of them could imagine. That was how the AI worked: It sucked in unimaginable quantities of raw data and produced decisions that were better optimized and more nuanced than any human could manage. They would be notified once it had made up its mind, and have just enough time to scramble to station and strap in.
“If everyone could file clips first, that’d be super,” said Beanfield. “There are a lot of people back home following our feeds, and leaving the solar system is a big moment.”
“Clips,” Anders said. “How long do we have to keep that up?”
“Forever,” Beanfield said. “You know this. Gilly, that means you, too.”
He nodded. He’d been lax with his clips. He’d never enjoyed them in the first place and had instead sunk time into tinkering with the ship, which so far had turned out to require a slightly shocking amount of maintenance. In theory, the ship was self-sufficient, able to diagnose and repair faults via a fleet of small crablike welder robots. But in practice, everything it fixed seemed to break again three days later. There hadn’t been a problem with anything that really mattered, but Gilly had spent a lot of time shooing crabs away from leaking pipes so he could figure out the root cause.
There was a short silence. This time tomorrow, they might be engaging with salamanders. They had spent years imagining it and twelve months intensively training for it and now it was here.
“About time we did something useful,” said Jackson.
“Amen,” said Anders, his mouth full of loaf.
* * *
—
They skipped but there was only empty space. This was to be expected: It would probably take a few skips to locate the enemy at first. After their first engagement, the ship could use the data it had gathered to search more effectively.
A week passed and Gilly began to wonder if the war would be over before they did anything.
“Look at this,” Anders told him over comms. He sent a clip to Gilly’s film: Sword of Iowa deploying a million tiny drones to unpick a salamander hive. Everywhere was debris. “We should have gone there.”
“Don’t question the ship,” Gilly said. “It’s smarter than you are.”
“Then why can’t it find anyone to shoot at?”
Gilly opened his mouth.
“I don’t want a real answer,” Anders said. “I’m venting.”
“Oh,” Gilly said. “Well, I’m sure it will be soon.”
Anders sighed dramatically. “If I don’t get to grill some salamanders, I want a refund.”
* * *
—
The next day, Gilly was on F Deck, clad in a coverall, heavy gloves, and a helmet, wrestling with a pipe that kept wanting to spray the corridor full of steam, when the walls turned orange. A klaxon began to sound. His film displayed:
ALERT ALERT ALERT
ENEMY IN PROXIMITY
PROCEED TO STATION
It was all he’d been thinking about, but still his breath caught. A feather of fear tickled the back of his throat. He pulled off the gloves, ditched the helmet, and began to squeeze through the corridor.
Jackson popped into his ear. “Crew to station. We have hostiles.”
“I see it. On my way.”
Anders and Beanfield chimed in, confirming their locations. They sounded calm and focused, as he hoped he had. The floor was painted with animated arrows, or so it appeared through his film, and he followed them to a transport rail and let it shoot him back through the ship. He then proceeded through two thick doors to Intel station, which was a cramped room with a harness of heavy, flexible straps, a board, and a wraparound wall of screens—real screens, not projections, with cables wired into physical systems. Everything in here was insulated and redundant several times over. He strapped in and felt the harness grip his body. The screens lit up with data.
“Intel checking in,” he said.
Jackson: “Acknowledge. Life?”
Beanfield: “En route. Thirty seconds.”
“Weapons?”
Anders: “Almost there.”
Jackson: “I have eyes on the enemy. We have a single hive, eighty-yard diameter. Contact three minutes.”
Gilly swept his board, just like in the simulations. “Wall-to-wall green here.”
“Thank you, Intel.”
Beanfield: “Life, checking in. All green. There’s a little desat in Engine Two but nothing out of band.”
“Thank you, Life.”
“Weapons, checking in,” said Anders.
“Thank you, Weapons. Hive is expelling hostiles. Counting ten . . . twenty . . . fifty . . .” Gilly could see none of this. His screens were all charts and numbers. When the engagement was over, though, he would be able to play it back with visuals if he wanted. “Intel, you’re green?”
“Confirm green.”
“How’s Armor?”
“Everything’s up.”
“Thank you. We have two hundred hostiles and the hive appears about empty. Weapons, status?”
“Green as grass.”
“I’ll take a full status, please.”
“Pulse is warming up. Mass projectors standing by. Laser batteries two, three, and four relocating fore.” This meant they were crawling along the skin of the ship to reach optimal firing position. The ship itself wasn’t maneuverable at all: It took an hour to turn around, in the sense of arriving at the same location with the opposite bearing. So the guns had to move.
“Thank you. Hostiles are spreading. Contact in thirty seconds, assuming a turn.” Recent engagement data from other ships showed that when first encountered, salamanders would peel off their hive in every direction, as if they were fleeing, then all turn inward together, like a school of fish. “How long until we’re pulse-ready?”
“A few seconds.”
“And there’s the turn. Contact imminent.”
Anders: “Pulsing.”
Jackson: “I see it. Intel?”
“Cores rebalancing.”
“Pulse was ineffective. No targets destroyed.”
“None?” said Beanfield.
“Confirmed. No enemies down. I’m reviewing. Ah. They turned again. Anticipated the pulse. They were outside its maximum effective range at the blip point.”
“Ah,” Gilly said. “That’s . . .”
Beanfield: “Are they supposed to do that?”
“It’s a new tactic.” Gilly had studied every engagement of the war: None had involved a double turn.
Jackson: “Turned again. They’re coming again. Weapons, advise pulse status.”
Anders: “Pulsing now.”
“I see it. Pulse effective. Eighty hostiles down. A hundred or so remaining.”
&n
bsp; Gilly said, “Three turns! They’ve figured out our pulse range.”
“Noted. We’ll discuss in debrief. Weapons, full status, please.”
“Laser batteries one, eight, nine in position. Two, three, four in transit. Pulse ready in five seconds, three, two. Pulsing.”
“Confirmed. A good one. Got just about all of them. Life, update?”
“All green here.”
“Your desat is normal?”
“Yes. We get dips in Engineering after each pulse, but it balances out right after.”
“All right. We’re coming up on the hive.”
“Firing. Laser batteries one and eight, thirty percent.”
“Thank you, Weapons. Hive is destroyed. Ten to fifteen hostiles remaining. We’ve got a lot of debris now. Intel?”
“Engines scaling down. We’re forty points off peak. Those laser batteries are decommissioning, too—correct, Anders?”
“Yep. They’re heading home.” This could happen before the end of an engagement if the ship believed they wouldn’t be needed. “Guess we’ve got this one in the bag.”
“Weapons, please continue to call in activity. We just pulsed, yes?”
“Ah, we did, yeah.”
“Then report it. There’s some kind of bubble hanging around the hive. Three or four workers, maybe. Confirmed. I can see them.” Workers were small, fat, pale salamanders who didn’t fight. Every hive had at least a few. They were harmless, but it was Service policy to destroy them.
“And pow,” said Anders. “Pulsed.”
“All hostiles down. Scanning debris. Please stand by.” They waited. “Confirmed no target. There’s nothing out there bigger than a golf ball.”
“That’s it?” Beanfield said.
“That’s it.”
Anders whooped. “We’re on the board.”
“Fire of Montana has 604,322 kills,” Gilly said. Montana was the first Providence. It had been roaming around space for two years, cleaning out target-rich environments. “We’ve got a ways to go to catch that.”
“But we’ve started,” Beanfield said.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Gilly said.
“What’s that? Poetry?”
“Just a quote.”
“So that’s why they selected Gilly,” Anders said. “Bring a touch of class to the place.”
“Why’d they select you? Because that was some shoddy-ass work on Weapons.”
“Oh-ho-ho,” Anders said.
“Shut it down,” said Jackson. “This is a combat channel. Intel, close engagement, please. We’ll meet for debrief in thirty minutes.”
“Engagement closed,” Gilly said, smiling.
* * *
—
They fell into patterns. Each day, Gilly rose, ate in the mess with whomever he was sharing a duty rotation that day, and performed ship maintenance. Sometimes he wrote reports for Service. He recorded clips. When the klaxon sounded, he attended station. The engagements changed in the details, but the underlying dynamic was always the same, always salamanders dying in the hundreds before they could get anywhere near enough to spit a huk. It became routine, and occasionally he felt his mind drifting, as if he were watching a movie he’d seen before and knew by heart. This was something Service had warned them about, and which Gilly had initially found hard to believe: that the mission would get boring. They were pushing into unexplored space inside the mightiest piece of military technology ever created, fighting an alien species; it was hard to think of anything more interesting he could be doing. But the reality was that the ship’s AI controlled almost everything that mattered and was so good at its job that there wasn’t much for him to do. So he felt restless.
“What about the valve problem?” Beanfield said, in one of their check-in sessions. “You fix that?”
“Not yet,” he admitted. Even now, he was plagued by intermittent pipeline failures. He had developed a dozen painstakingly researched theories that had all turned out to be wrong.
“Because that would be good. To not have pipes bursting all over.”
“I’ll fix it. I’ve been spending time on swarm analysis.” Beanfield’s eyebrows rose. “Figuring out why salamanders move the way they do. Trying to predict their tactics.”
“Did Service ask you to do that?”
“No.” He felt slightly embarrassed. It was unlikely he could figure out anything Service didn’t already know, or that the ship couldn’t deduce in a fraction of the time. Gilly, who had developed sequencing algorithms for Surplex’s AI division in his life as a civilian, knew this better than anyone. Still, it was the part of his day he looked forward to more than anything else. “It’s just kind of fun.”
She smiled. “You’re a puzzler. I bet you do crosswords, the really impossible ones.”
“I do,” he said. “Those are the best.”
“Good,” Beanfield said. “Keep that up.”
* * *
—
They reached a hundred thousand salamander kills in six months, and doubled that only a few months later, when the ship discovered a particularly richly infested part of Firebrick Zone. Gilly kept up his clips, but found himself increasingly disengaged by news from back home, which felt less relevant with each passing day, like a show he used to enjoy but had lost track of.
Two years in, Anders pinged him from L Deck and said he had something to show him.
Gilly was in his cabin, checking his messages. By now they were so far out that they could only communicate with Earth when they came within range of a relay, which had just occurred for the first time in five days. But he headed down to L Deck. It was mostly storage down there, rows of tightly racked crates rotating on a belt system. Inside the crates were raw materials the ship could craft into whatever it needed, including parts of itself. Gilly could toss a boot into a recycler and a day later it would be part of a pipe.
Anders stood by one of the belts, holding something flat and shiny. “Check this out.” In his hand was a shuriken, a throwing disc with vicious points. “Ninja stars.”
“You had the ship make ninja stars?” To keep themselves amused, he and Anders had invented a variety of games to play in their downtime, like stalking each other around the ship, armed with rubber balls. Whoever hit the other person first won. The last time they’d played, Anders had said, You know what this game needs? Ninja stars. Gilly hadn’t thought anything of it.
“They’re super-sharp.” Anders touched the point of a star to his palm and blood welled at the spot. “Yikes. Look at that.” He sucked at it.
“You’re not suggesting we throw these at each other.”
Anders nodded. “I am suggesting that.”
“Uh,” Gilly said.
“You do not want to get hit by one of these bad boys.”
“No, I get that,” he said. “It’s just, it looks genuinely dangerous.”
Anders nodded. “It is. It is genuinely dangerous.” He peered at his hand. “Look at that. Still bleeding.”
“I mean, it’s one thing to get injured.” Medical could fix almost anything. “But I’m thinking, what if somebody takes one in the neck?”
“There are first-aid stations. Apply a patch, take a quick trip to Medical, you’d be fine.”
“Or the eye?”
“Bah,” Anders said. He had let his hair grow longer and his stubble had become a beard. “That’s not going to happen. But I tell you what. No head shots. That can be a rule. What about that?”
“I think you’re assuming a level of control neither of us possesses. What’s wrong with the rubber balls?”
Anders sighed. The crate behind him was full of ninja stars, Gilly saw. There were hundreds. “The balls are boring, Gilly. They’re played out.”
“I don’t think they’re boring.”
“That’s because you’re low-sensate.” This was a reference to a psych metric of sensation-seeking behavior. Gilly’s score was so low that the evaluator had wanted him to re-sit the test. But the officer who had been assigned to steer Gilly through a year of Service assured her that that wasn’t necessary; from his observation, Isiah Gilligan was indeed perfectly content to sit motionless in a darkened environment for four hours with nothing but his thoughts. Gilly hadn’t seen Anders’s scores, but he presumed they were high. Very high. “We’re two years into a four-year tour, Gilly. We can’t use those little pussy balls forever.”
“Isn’t the fun part the stealth? Not the hurting.”
“It can be both,” Anders said.
Gilly’s film said:
□ [01800 HRS / -00020 HRS] ALL-HANDS BRIEFING (REC-1)
“You get that?” Anders said.
Gilly nodded. “I’ll think about the stars.”
Anders grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Gilligan.”
“I said I’ll think about it.” But Anders was right; he would probably do it. He usually did what Anders wanted. They were different people, but Service had good reasons for putting them together. They were complements, making each other better.
“I’ll see you at briefing,” Anders said, clutching his wrist. His hand dripped. “I need to go to Medical.”
* * *
—
Gilly arrived early and took a seat. The ship had five rooms like this, which could be used for meeting or briefing purposes, or as temporary bunkers in the event of an emergency while the ship vented air or suppressed fires or whatever. All were spacious, with room for four people to sit comfortably around a small table. One had a three-person sofa where Gilly could lean right back and stick out his legs. It was luxurious.
Beanfield appeared in the doorway, nursing a steaming coffee. She had spent a lot of time working out over the last two years, becoming long and lean. She smiled at him. “Hey, G. You see we had a sync window?”
