by Max Barry
“I’m at Intel station,” Jackson said. “Contact in two minutes. Life, Weapons, you should have boards when you get back.”
He brought up the board, but, to his dismay, it didn’t offer him any options he hadn’t had at station. He should have known: They were mid-engagement; it had locked down. He stared at the core itself. It was a thin silver brick, gleaming softly under the green housing, two feet away but sealed off from his reach. It looked fine but inside was corruption. He had to teach the ship that, somehow.
“Life, checking in,” said Beanfield.
“Weapons, checking in,” said Anders.
He unclipped his drill from his belt and clambered up the green housing. Once he was in position, he set the drill bit against the housing and squeezed the trigger. The plastic squealed. He forced the drill down, chewing through the material. His film flared with warnings.
“Intel!” said Jackson. “What’s going on?”
“I’m attempting to inflict physical damage on the core to make the ship take it offline.” He pushed the drill down until the head touched the housing. That was as far as it would go. He pressed his face to the plastic and peered through. The end of the drill bit hovered half an inch above the core. “Shit!”
“Problem?”
“I can’t reach it.” He pulled the drill free from the housing. He didn’t have a longer bit. But he did have an extensible screwdriver. He dialed the drill open, jammed in the head of the screwdriver, pulled it out to its full length, and fed it back through the hole he’d made.
“Contact,” Jackson said. “Hostiles are firing. Huks incoming. Impact in forty seconds.”
“Weapons are dark,” Anders said. “We are not firing. Repeat, not firing.”
Gilly pulled the trigger. The drill jumped in his hands. The tip of the screwdriver squealed across metal. He leaned over the drill, forcing it down with his body weight. The housing filled with white smoke and an acrid smell. His film began to bleed alarms.
“Seeing a lot of warnings, Intel.”
“That’s fine.” He paused to lean out and check the board. He saw core bank 996 blink red and then gray. “That’s it! Core is offline!”
“Armor is initializing,” Jackson said. “Weapons are initializing. Good job, Intel. Great job.”
“Gilly fixed it?” said Beanfield.
He scrambled down the board. He would know once Weapons and Armor managed to dial up beyond the point where they’d been resetting. “I think so. We won’t be able to tell for a minute.”
“Until Weapons and Armor are fully deployed, we’re vulnerable,” Jackson said.
He dropped the drill, slid off the housing, and took command of the board. “I can run Intel now.”
“Thank you. Huks still incoming. Impact in twenty seconds. Prepare to brace.”
“Pulse is up!” Anders said. “Charging!”
“Armor impact in thirty seconds.”
“Armor at thirty percent,” Gilly said. “It’s rising, but that’s low. Too low.”
“Understood. Armor may be insufficient to repel current incoming ordnance. Prepare to brace.”
Anders: “Laser battery one online. Laser battery two online. Pulsing!”
Jackson: “Hostiles down. Ten . . . twelve thousand. Debris is obscuring—”
Anders: “Lasers firing. All batteries. Holy shit.”
Jackson: “Debris cascade obscuring sensors. Unknown number of remaining hostiles.”
Beanfield: “We got them?”
Anders: “We got them! We got them!”
Jackson: “Ordnance still incoming. Armor contact in ten seconds.”
On his board, Gilly popped up the Armor display. Forty-two percent and rising. By his reckoning, that was enough to divert hundreds of simultaneous hits. That should be plenty; that was more than any human vessel had needed to repel at once in the history of the war. “How many huks incoming?”
“Two thousand,” Jackson said. “Brace, brace.”
There was a jolt. A noise rolled through the ship like thunder. He felt tremors through his legs. A succession of impacts, until everything was shaking. He lost his grip on the board and fell to the floor. His drill clattered to the ground and spun toward the wall.
“Breach,” Jackson said. “We have depressure.”
6
[Beanfield]
THE DARK
Something tugged at her. There was hair in her mouth. When she pulled it free, it went right back in. There was a breeze. A wind had sprung up, making things difficult. There was always something.
“We’re hit,” Jackson said in her ear. “Major damage across multiple decks, concentrated in decks A through C, aft. Weapons, Intel, Life, call in.”
She opened her mouth to respond. Then she noticed a hole in the wall that hadn’t been there before.
“I’m fine,” Gilly said. “No damage in Eng-13.”
“All good,” Anders said. “Weapons station clear.”
The hole was as big as her head. Its edges curled inward, reaching toward her like a metal flower. Its middle was dark and unknowable. She turned the other way. On the opposite wall, near the floor, a second hole. The edges of this one were smooth. She leaned forward in her harness until she could see into it and found herself staring through thirty feet of insulated armor and then a ladder shaft and then a corridor and her stomach lurched at the perspective and she turned away.
“Life,” Jackson said. “Call in.”
She looked at the first hole again. Her hair flapped into her face. Because that was where the air was going. Toward this hole. It slid past her ears into the dark flower and the heart of the flower wasn’t shadow, she realized. It was space. What she had at first taken for glints of reflected light, those were stars.
She stared. Something inside her turned. As a kid, she had often visited her grandparents’ farm outside Des Moines, and there she had lain on a short grassy hill and fell in love with the night sky. Years later, she had kissed a boy on a beach with his face ringed by stars. At Camp Zero, the sky was a relentless slab of cloud, but occasionally it cleared, allowing her to look up and see them waiting for her, her stars; they had been waiting her whole life and she only had to find a way to reach them. But now that she saw them unfiltered, she felt revolted. They weren’t beautiful. They were the lights of anglerfish, deep-sea monstrosities with glowing lures, calling the small and stupid toward jaws and needle teeth. There was only death out here, only void and fire, and the true beauty in the universe was what she had left behind. She had grown up in a warm, safe bubble of air and failed to realize how miraculous it was. The ship had protected her for a while, but now it had a hole, and was leaking.
Her ears popped. She opened her mouth but her voice was gone. Sound was tinny, as if transmitted from far away, on bad equipment. The ship was groaning. She couldn’t hear this, but she knew it was true. The air was leaving and the ship was groaning. I’m passing out, she thought. It was a bad thought but not an urgent one. She reached for her straps but her hands were tinny and far away, too. She couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do. It was something. She had run drills. She had run disaster simulations for every possible scenario, even though, it was understood, especially by Life candidates, the chances of anything going wrong were effectively zero. There was, perhaps, a certain smugness you unavoidably developed in Life, after learning that a lot of the ship’s safety features existed primarily for psychological reassurance. The jettison pods, for instance. They could shoot you all the way home, if you ever needed to abandon ship, but there were no conceivable circumstances in which anyone would be better off outside the ship, and the real reason the jetpods existed was to make the crew feel better. This was the kind of thing that encouraged Life to think of Weapons and Intel as deluded schmucks. She should have taken the drills more seriously. There were so many safety protocols.
There was something she should be doing, right now, to save her life.
“Life,” Jackson said, from far away. “Respond.”
What had she said in her last feed post? She couldn’t remember. Nothing too trivial, she hoped. Service would fake up something appropriate, of course, splicing together pieces of her clips and outtakes. She wished she had replied to her sister.
She felt an explosive impact across her back. Translucent sheeting slapped across her face. Air filled her lungs, bright and rich. Fabric slid along her limbs, inflating. Her survival core had deployed. Every day for two years she had worn that thing for the sole purpose of making the crew believe it meant something. And look at this.
“Life, come back.”
She found her voice. “I’m here.”
“What’s happening?”
“I’m okay,” she said, but then something moved in the hole.
She stared. The wind had eased, she sensed. It was hard to tell from inside the suit. But yes. Less wind, but more something crawling toward her from the hole.
“Life?”
Was she prepared to die? She had thought so. It was a job prerequisite, after all. Before she left, there was much talk of sacrifice. She had stood before cameras and spoken that word, often, and in great seriousness, with a slight frown, to let her viewers know it was for real. She had been asked straight-out by three different Service psychs whether she was prepared for the possibility that she might not make it home, and she had answered yes. She had made a will. But there was only twenty feet of hull between her and an ocean of anglerfish and had she known that? That she was one small hole away from an actual universe of death? That when the air left, the ship groaned? Nope. Nope. Nope.
“There’s a salamander,” she said. “My station is breached and a salamander’s coming in.”
Gilly: “What?”
Jackson: “Repeat that, Life.” But she couldn’t. She was transfixed by little glinting limbs in the hole. It wasn’t big enough for a salamander to fit through. It must be pushing, squeezing, frustrated. “Life,” Jackson said. “There are no hostiles anywhere near physical contact range. Restate your status.”
A crab crawled from the hole. Its pincers moved over the torn metal. Strand by strand, it began to unweave the metal flower’s petals.
“It’s a crab,” she said. “It’s repairing the breach.”
“There’s no salamander?”
“It’s . . .” she said. “There’s no salamander. I was confused for a second. My survival core has deployed.”
“You sure you’re fine?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Thank you, Life. Can you give me a ship overview?”
The crab had dissolved the metal flower and begun rapidly spinning up dull yellow threads. She looked behind her. In the other hole, another crab moved. As she watched, a third crawled out of the hole to join it.
“Life?”
She ran her board. “Damage everywhere, across all Life systems. But it’s contained. Pressure is stable. Thermals are stable.”
Gilly said, “Did we get them all?”
Jackson: “Awaiting confirmation. Lot of debris out there. We’re sifting. Hold tight.”
Anders: “We got them. I saw it.”
Jackson: “Confirmed. All hostiles are down. Battlefield is clear. Commencing scouring. Good work, everyone.”
“Fucking hell,” Gilly said shakily. “Fucking hell.”
The crabs were disappearing into the holes, filling them from the inside. Her station looked almost the same as before. The only difference now were two round areas where the metal was the dull yellow of bruised skin.
“Sixteen thousand two hundred eleven kills,” Jackson said. “I believe we just set a record.”
“Request to meet for debrief,” said Anders, “and talk through what the fuck just happened.”
“Granted,” said Jackson.
* * *
—
They went through the engagement second by second, analyzing what they could have done better. This was slightly ridiculous, because one of the main things they could have done better was to not lock Anders in his cabin. Talia didn’t say that. She was having trouble concentrating. She felt rattled. Her mind kept returning to the hole in station and what she’d seen beyond.
“We’ve lost Materials Fabrication,” Gilly said, pulling up a schematic. Gilly didn’t appear rattled at all. If anything, he was energized. She was jealous of his ability to see this as a fascinating development. He pointed. “Here.”
“You mean there’s no function?” Jackson said.
“I mean it’s gone. It detached from the ship.”
There was a short silence.
“Well, shit,” Jackson said.
“The ship can rebuild itself,” Gilly said. “But this will test it. Mat Fab was seventy thousand tons. We’ve also lost structures all across here”—he gestured—“and here. Plus there’s a lot of incidental damage. At least five hundred huks penetrated Armor and passed straight through.”
Just when she had learned to love the ship. She had thought they understood each other. There had been a trust. Then her whale had floundered. She was gripping the table as if bracing for the floor to drop away. It wasn’t the ship’s fault, but she felt a little betrayed, to be honest.
Anders said, “So we have holes?”
“Had. All breaches are now repaired.”
“I want you to inspect Life station,” Jackson said. “Make sure it’s up to code.”
Gilly nodded, then eyed Talia. “What was it like?”
“What?” she said.
“The breach. Your core deployed. Must have been scary.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m over it.” She gave them a smile, her resolute one, and they nodded, and Jackson began to talk about subsystem damage. Talia was slightly tempted to raise her hand and say, Excuse me, you know what? I’m actually not over it. I thought maybe someone would notice. But apparently I have to come right out and say it. Do you mind if we talk for a minute about how terrified I am? But she could imagine how that would go. She could roleplay it:
Anders: I don’t follow, since I, personally, seek out near-death experiences and find them to be awesome.
Jackson: This is a debrief, Life. Your feelings aren’t relevant except insofar as they imply personal weakness. There’s a time and place to discuss such things, and it’s when we get back home, with someone else.
Gilly: [stares mutely].
What she needed was herself. She wanted Feed Talia to sit her down and hold her hand and tell her it was okay. Go ahead. What you feel is important. She should go to her cabin and watch some old clips. She could stare at the screen and let Feed Talia comfort her, since Feed Talia was the closest thing to a real person around here.
“What about the damaged core bank?” Jackson said. “Is that repaired?”
Gilly shook his head. “That’s the one part of itself the ship can’t fix. But it’s not a significant loss. There are thousands of cores. No single one in particular matters much.”
“One in particular took down Weapons and Armor.”
“Yes,” Gilly said, “but only because of a really unusual set of circumstances. The concussive wave from the hive bomb caused corruption in a core and also, separately, in the ship’s ability to detect that kind of fault. So it couldn’t tell what was wrong.”
“So the enemy has a Providence killer,” Jackson said.
“No, I don’t think so. I doubt they had much of an idea what the blast would do. I think they got lucky.”
“Justify that,” Jackson said.
“Well, for starters,” Gilly said, “there are thousands of core banks that weren’t affected. So if it was a plan, it’s not a reliable one. But more important, this is what salamanders do. They try something, and
most of the time, it doesn’t work. If it does, they all start doing it. Experiment, learn, adapt. That’s their entire strategy.”
“So we should expect more bombs?”
He scratched his face. “Yes. Some of them escaped, and we didn’t scour the battlefield. But the ship learns, too. If we have another engagement before it’s developed a counter, I’ll be shocked.”
“I don’t want to be shocked. I want to be sure. Will we be prepared for the next bomb? Or whatever they try after that?”
“Uh,” Gilly said. “I mean, you’re asking me to hypothesize about an unknown tactic, which I can’t do.”
“What if we assumed manual control?”
Gilly blinked. “Of what?”
She gestured shortly. “The ship.”
“The ship?” He looked at Talia like he wanted her to jump in. But Talia wasn’t following the conversation closely enough for that. She was not available for dialogue guidance right now. “You’re asking what I think about manually controlling the ship?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s insane.”
“Why?”
“Which part are you even talking about? Piloting?”
Jackson shrugged. “Say next engagement, we take direct control over Weapons, so that if a bomb strike neutralizes the AI again—”
“Can I stop you there?”
“—we retain the ability to fire on the enemy.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Anders said, “Can’t be more ridiculous than sitting at station with no systems and a dead AI.”
“This . . .” he said. “This is not a manual ship. This is an AI ship.”
“I understand your stance,” Jackson said. “Now talk me through why.”
Gilly took a breath. “First of all, the ship is orders of magnitude faster than us at battlefield analysis. So even if we assume that we could arrive at the same decisions—which is absolutely not the case, by the way—we’d do it slower. Much slower.”
