by Max Barry
“You with me?” Anders said.
She nodded. She breathed. The air was cooling. The chamber was shedding heat, transforming from a furnace to a room. She was with him.
He laughed again. They were close enough to touch. He was looking at her like he was thinking about doing something but then decided not to. “Glad you came?”
“That was . . .” she said. “Yes.”
He grinned, looking abruptly like the old Anders, the one who’d departed Earth. She’d actually forgotten there was a difference. “Thanks, Beanfield.”
“Sure,” she said. “Anytime.”
* * *
—
Anders attended the next engagement without prompting, and afterward performed a robust, thoughtful debrief. Jackson did her best to remain impassive, but Talia detected amazement in the lift of her eyebrows. As they were leaving, Jackson gave her a brief, barely perceptible nod, which Talia read as: You know what, Life Officer Talia Beanfield, you’re all right.
This would be temporary. Anders had been bated, not solved.
But it meant she could relax for five minutes. She found herself thinking about the hot room. They were dotted all over the ship. She hadn’t paid them attention before; they were just rooms she didn’t go into. But now she couldn’t pass one by without a lingering glance. She’d known the ship was powerful, of course, but she hadn’t physically felt it. It reminded her of a picture book she’d read a long time ago about a little girl who lived on the back of a whale and didn’t know it; the girl thought she was on an island. She battled monkeys and pirates and only at the end did she realize the whale had been protecting her the whole time.
“Hey, Gilly, I have a bone to pick with you,” she said a few days later, when she was finishing on the treadmill and he turned up for a run. “You said the ship isn’t alive, right?”
“Right,” he said cautiously.
“Even though it said hello when we boarded.”
He nodded. “That was probably a default message from a subsystem.”
The treadmill beeped and she dropped to a walk. “And you said we are throwaway survival machines for genes. We think we have free will, but really we’re doing whatever’s best for our DNA. Right?”
He looked slightly impressed that she remembered. “Right.”
“So the ship is our throwaway survival machine.” She looked at him triumphantly.
He blinked.
“We built it,” she said, “to get around in, and keep us safe, and fight to protect us. Just like genes did with us.”
“That’s . . . I mean, that’s true. If you want to think of the ship as a body, then we’re like its genes. Yes. That’s a pretty good analogy.”
She was thrilled, because she’d been thinking about this for a while, and had felt sure Gilly would find a way to poke holes in it. “That means the ship is alive, doesn’t it? Because it’s the same as us. I mean, genes might not consider us to be alive, because we’re so different to them, but we are. We’re just a different kind of life. Isn’t that the same for the ship? It’s life, but at a higher level?”
“I have to think about that,” he said after a minute.
She felt happier than she had for a long time. She began to talk to the ship. Not when anyone could see. And, obviously, with no expectation of a reply. It was just somewhere to direct the kinds of thoughts she might otherwise have put into a feed, or a message home. “I feel bad about not replying to Maddie before we went dark,” she told the ship. Maddie was her sister, pregnant, according to her last message before they entered VZ, which was really amazing. “I’m worried she might think I’m not happy for her.” The ship listened. That was the thing. It was physically there. Wherever she went, it was with her. Like a friend. Her best friend in a million miles. Sometimes she didn’t even need to say anything. She could lie in her bunk, facing the wall, and just reach out and touch it. She could honestly feel something. A connection. A presence.
5
[Gilly]
THE ATTACK
It was not as bad as he’d thought. It was almost better. The first few days after discovering he had no real duties, he had lain in his cabin or wandered the decks, not knowing what to do. Then he realized the answer was simple: He could do whatever he wanted. He could study salamander tactics or review past engagements or figure out how crabs recycled each other—for as long as he wanted, just to satisfy his own curiosity. He began to wear his tool belt again, not because anything needed fixing, but in case he felt like taking something apart.
He also began to play more games, including Gamma Fleet, which they played through their films and mined resources and built ships and tried to conquer the galaxy. This had been popular even back at Camp Zero because it was what they all wished they were doing. Games took a few hours and usually ended in showdowns between Gilly and Beanfield, because Anders and Jackson were terrible. Gilly could now almost predict the winner from initial placements: whoever was close enough to pancake Anders and Jackson and absorb their resources.
“You should teach me how you do that,” Anders said afterward. They were hanging out in Rec-3, which had sofas.
“Sure.” He had tried before, but Anders’s eyes glazed over when Gilly started talking about supply paths.
“You see, Gilly?” Anders said. “You didn’t need those valve puzzles. You’re okay.”
He nodded. “I think I am.”
“You just have to accept that nothing you do matters.”
“Right,” he said, although that wasn’t how he would have put it.
“So, hey, next engagement, I want you to do something.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you when it happens.”
Gilly eyed him. “I don’t think I’m going to do it.”
“It’s fine. Beanfield did it.”
“Did what?”
“The thing.”
“During an engagement?”
Anders nodded.
“Just tell me what it is,” Gilly said.
Anders glanced around, as if Jackson or Beanfield might be about to teleport in from their cabins, where he could see their pings. “We go into a hot room.”
Gilly blinked.
“I can’t tell you why. You have to experience it for yourself.”
“I’m not doing that,” Gilly said.
Anders looked hurt. “Beanfield did it,” he said again.
Gilly didn’t believe this. “You can’t skip engagements. And you need to dial all this shit down. Jackson won’t take it forever.”
“Is that right?” said Anders. “What’s she going to do? Send me home?”
“We’re supposed to be soldiers, Anders.”
“But we’re not,” Anders said, standing. “That’s the fucking problem, Gilly. We’re passengers. It doesn’t matter if we’re at station.”
“It matters to whether Jackson will yell at me.”
“Jackson,” Anders said derisively. “Of us four cheap PR stunts, Jackson is the cheapest.”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“I need to get out of this room,” Anders said, flexing. “There’s no goddamn air.”
Gilly didn’t know what to say to that. In the silence, Anders left.
* * *
—
He considered reporting the conversation to Beanfield. But then he became distracted by an interesting salamander attack pattern from their last engagement, and next thing he knew the walls were orange. He hustled to station, and when he checked in, there was no sign of Anders. At first, no one mentioned it, then Jackson said, almost casually, “Any reason we’re missing Weapons?” and Beanfield said, “I’m dealing with it, Command,” and that was that.
It was a minor engagement, only a single hive. It expelled less than a hundred salamanders and as soon as the shi
p pulsed, they and the hive exploded enthusiastically. Gilly’s screens washed white. “Whoa,” he said.
Afterward, debriefing around the Rec-1 table, they tried to figure out what had happened. Jackson ran the footage, rolling forward and backward around the moment all the salamanders abruptly died.
“This was our regular pulse?” Gilly said. “Because that looks way more effective.”
“Regular pulse,” Jackson said.
He wanted to ask Anders, who was, after all, Weapons Officer. But Anders was still missing. “It’s like they ignited each other,” he said, pointing. “It practically looks like a chain reaction. Starting with the hive.”
“Is that a problem?” Jackson said.
He shook his head. “If they’re dying faster, that’s great. It might be because of our battlefield sanitization. They can’t get feedback on what’s working, so they have to try weirder experiments.”
“Good news, then.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
Anders appeared in the doorway. Jackson and Beanfield didn’t react at all. “What’d I miss?” Anders said.
“You’re confined to quarters,” Jackson said, not turning. Anders looked blank, like he didn’t know what confined meant. “Twenty-four hours.”
“What?” Anders said. “You can’t lock me up.” He looked at Beanfield. “We’re on a fucking ship! Where do you think I’m going to go?”
“It’s not a discussion,” Jackson said. “Leave.”
Anders didn’t move.
She turned to him. “You want forty-eight?”
“Get fucked,” Anders said.
“Five days.”
Gilly could see Anders’s jaw coming out, the look entering his eyes that meant he was about to do something especially stupid, so Gilly moved toward him, his hands out. “Be cool, Anders. Let’s go.” He reached for Anders’s arm.
Anders jerked away. “Do not fucking touch me, Gilly.”
“Anders.” He thought he could force Anders to see reason, so he tried to take his arm again. Anders socked him in the cheek. It was so fast and shocking that Gilly was on the floor before he realized what was happening.
There was a loud bang. His ears rang. Jackson had her little captain’s pistol pointed at Anders’s face. She had fired it, Gilly realized. She had shot Anders in the face. Anders looked dazed and fell and hit the floor. Some kind of air gun, Gilly guessed. Until this moment, he had assumed it was decorative.
Jackson holstered the pistol. “Intel, you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, embarrassed.
“I’m taking Anders to quarters. Please cancel his door access and comms.”
Gilly nodded.
“Take his feet,” Jackson said to Beanfield. Beanfield didn’t move. She looked almost as stunned as Anders. “We’re at war,” Jackson said. “We’re going to start acting like it.”
* * *
—
Two days passed. The ship performed a series of hard skips, taking them deeper into VZ. Then the walls flushed orange and the klaxon howled and they had a single hive with no sign of life. “Abandoned?” Beanfield said.
“Maybe.” In his harness, he was acutely aware of the absence of Anders. No one had talked about it and he didn’t want to be the one to bring it up. “Hive is unusual.”
“Unusual how?” Jackson said.
“Denser. More composite variation.” He skimmed his numbers. “Much denser. It’s small but heavy.”
“But it’s definitely a hive?”
“It has tunneling and an interlocking substrata. It’s a hive. But a strange one.”
“Are we scanning it right?”
“Hmm?”
“Is there a possibility of concealed hostiles?”
“No. It is a little harder to read, because of the density. But there are no salamanders.”
He felt an invisible force tug at him. He recognized it immediately, but hadn’t felt it for a while.
“Ship is decelerating,” Jackson said. “Hard.”
“Roger that. We’re burning at eighty percent.” He didn’t know what that implied. They always entered engagements at high speed, to maximize the ship’s reaction time advantage.
Beanfield said, “Ship wants to check out the weird hive?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Do we want Anders for this?”
“No,” Jackson said.
Data began to pour down Gilly’s board, the results of scans. “I think you’re right, Beanfield. This could be a discovery. Salamanders manipulate gravity fields in ways we can’t replicate. This could be an opportunity to learn about it.”
“Pulse is warming up,” Jackson said. “Looks like learning time is over.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed.
“Pulsing.”
“Maybe it’s just an old, abandoned hive. We should expect to find a few of those this deep in VZ. They could even—” Something lifted him up and threw him to the left. He lost his grip on his board. His harness grabbed him around the hips and shoulders. “Jesus,” he said. His board bounced back into position but it was an empty slate. His film read:
CONNECTION LOST
“I’ve lost my board,” he said.
He checked the connection. At station, everything was wired, so maybe a plug was loose? Although that shouldn’t matter; the wired connection was a redundancy. He tapped his film to cycle through subsystems. One after another came back: NO CONNECTION.
“Hello?” he said.
Systems began to blink back on: Life, Command, Engineering, Comms. Something popped in his ears.
Jackson said: “Intel? Life?”
“I’m here.”
“I temporarily lost comms. Now I’ve got nothing on my board.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Life?”
“I’m here,” Beanfield said. “But no board.”
His board fizzed to life. “Systems are coming back up. I’m running diagnostics.”
“Which systems?” Jackson said. “Tell me what we have.”
“All of Life function. All Engineering. Half of Comms. Weapons coming up now. Armor . . .” He eyed it, in case it was about to change. “Armor is down.”
“Repeat that?”
“Armor at zero percent function.”
“Give me a scan. I want eyes on our surrounds.”
“Roger that. Weapons starting to come online, by the way.”
“What happened?” Beanfield said. “Did they attack us?”
“Hive was a bomb,” Jackson said. “Detonated when we hit it. Some kind of hinky percussive wave.”
He watched the sensing subsystem come online and begin to sift through surrounding space. When numbers began to return, he sucked in his breath. “We have hostiles.”
“How many?”
“It’s reading fourteen thousand.”
There was a short silence. “Could that be a glitch?” said Beanfield.
“Could be. Yes.”
“Verify it, please,” Jackson said. “Because that would be a shitload of hostiles.”
“Yes.”
“I still can’t see anything. How long are you getting until contact?”
“Six minutes. They’re a long way out and we’re slowed down. Verified. Hostiles are real.”
“Fourteen thousand?”
“Sixteen thousand now. More have entered sensor range.”
“We need Armor, Gilly.”
“Understood. I’m investigating.”
“Weapons are functional, though?” Beanfield said. “So we’ll neutralize them before they can reach firing distance, yes?”
“Correct. Ship AI is functional and Weapons are online.” He blinked. “Wait. Weapons are down.”
Beanfield inhaled.
> “You said we had Weapons,” Jackson said.
“We did. I’m sure . . . they’re coming up now.” Earlier, he had seen Weapons scale up into the nineties. Now they were at half that. He kept the readout onscreen and watched its components light up green, one after another. When it reached PLASMA CANNON MAJOR, everything flipped back to red. “We have a problem. Weapons are caught in some kind of loop. They’re coming up and going down again.” He checked sensors. “Five minutes to contact.”
“Am I going to get my board back?” Jackson asked. “If not, I’ll come to you.”
“Uh,” he said. He was tracing the failure path of the plasma cannon back through subsystems to see where it was going wrong. The crazy thing was they didn’t even need the plasma. It was a superweapon that took an hour to charge and was wasted on anything smaller than a planet. They had never used it. But the ship performed diagnostics on each component as it came online, and when it tried this on the plasma, it was causing some kind of error cascade that killed everything. He found a similar effect in Armor and followed it back to a particular core bank: a hunk of computing power that constituted roughly one-thousandth of the ship’s brain.
“Intel?”
“I think I see the problem. Core bank nine-nine-six is corrupt.”
“Can you take it offline?”
That was exactly what he needed to do. The ship could work around a failed core bank. It simply had to know that it needed to. It should have detected the fault itself, but he could force it. “Not from here. I have to go to Engineering.”
“Go. Life, release Anders from confinement. I’m relocating to Intel.”
He unstrapped and hit the door’s tactile panel. The door didn’t move at first and then there was an extremely mechanical whirring of a kind he’d never heard it make before. Just when he thought he was going to have to use his bare hands, it juddered open. He ran through the corridor, leaping housings and ducking beneath bulkheads that he knew by heart, and took two ladders down to E Deck. The door to Eng-13 didn’t respond to tactile at all. He felt for the manual release, popped the side panel, and cranked it. Inside, the cores sat beneath thick green translucent housings, each with a board mounted at eye level, spaced a few feet apart. All were reading green. He found 996 and it was green, too. That was the problem. It had gone bad, but the ship hadn’t realized it.
