by Ramy Vance
Jaeger dug the last raisin out of her pocket and fed it to the water bear. Baby took the raisin eagerly enough but kept nudging Jaeger until she stepped aside.
Baby pushed herself into the cathedral. Here in the open, the lack of gravity became impossible to ignore. Baby bobbed across the floor, moving with an incongruous grace as her claws latched delicately into a network of slits spanning the floors and walls.
“You’re a movie buff, right?” Toner and Jaeger stood in the doorway, staring as the water bear bobbed her way jauntily down the length of the cathedral.
“Maybe?” Jaeger cocked her head. “Movie music, at least.”
Toner shook his head, then lifted his voice. “Hey, Virgil?”
Virgil’s voice came from somewhere far overhead and echoed eerily across the arched ceiling.
“I’m here.”
“Do you have that old cartoon movie Fantasia in your banks?”
“The Disney production from the year 2000, yes.”
“Can you play that song from near the end, the one where the hippos put on tutus and dance like ballerinas through an old castle or something?”
There was a moment of whirring silence as Baby danced her graceful way into one of the side wings and vanished between the rows of shelves.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Virgil said finally.
Toner looked immeasurably disappointed.
“I think it was Dance of the Hours,” Jaeger mused. “I don’t think that sequence made it into the 2000 remake, though.”
“Ah,” Virgil said. “Yes, I have that. One moment.”
Toner shot Jaeger a betrayed look.
She flushed, furious at the depth of her useless, useless knowledge. “What?”
“Thought I had one on you, there,” Toner muttered as the trill of a violin echoed around the chamber.
“It was a good try.” She stepped into No-A. There was a faint clunk with each step as her boots stuck to the deck. She followed Baby into the side stacks. “This place has great acoustics, too. Too bad all the stomping around kinda ruins the effect.”
“All of your stomping.” Toner switched to antigrav and swam past her, offering a lazy salute as he executed a graceful spin.
Jaeger felt a spark of competitive spirit and stamped down the urge to switch over to antigrav and get right to work mastering the skill hard enough to put the smug vampire to shame. She busied herself studying the labels on the cabinets and drawers as they followed Baby down the rows. They were narrow and tall, like closely-packed bookshelves in the dustiest of libraries. Most of the labels were strings of numbers, catalog designations, but she had no idea what any of them specified.
“You know what I don’t see?” Toner didn’t even pretend to examine the labels as he rolled through the air.
“What?”
“A whole boatload of people.”
“Boatload…” Jaeger slowed to a halt. The label plaque affixed to the end of the stack was full of old-timey text in fading typewriter font.
Specimen designations: Female, beta-class. Standard augmentation. General colonist template, undifferentiated.
Jaeger turned, taking in the rows and rows of filing drawers stretching around her. She did some quick mental math.
Toner tried to open one of the cabinets. When it didn’t immediately yield, he braced one foot against the wall and tugged. “Huh.” He released the handle and let himself bob to equilibrium. “One hell of a lock on those things.”
Jaeger slipped her hand over the handle and held her breath. She felt a tiny electric tingle as the lock recognized her handprint and disengaged. The cabinet door beeped, then hissed. Liquid nitrogen smoke curled out of the cabinet. The drawer slid smoothly forward.
“I think only command staff can unlock them,” Jaeger said to Toner’s frown.
Bitterly cold air, sour with the tang of stale oxygen and frostbite, spilled out of the faintly glowing compartment. Through the haze, Jaeger saw six capsules arranged in a double row of three. Each was about the size of a soda can, plugged into an adapter along the bottom of the drawer. They were clear and full of a bubbling liquid that was too thick and sluggish to be water.
“You know what they look like?” Toner said after a contemplative pause.
Test tube babies, Jaeger thought.
“Eggs in a carton,” Toner went on.
Jaeger nodded slowly. “That’s…about what I was thinking.” She couldn’t stop herself from reaching into the drawer and pressing one finger against the first tube. She expected the glass to be bitterly cold, but it was only cool beneath her skin.
“There’s some interesting temperature regulation going on in here.” She twisted the tube gently, and it slid easily from its plug. “No wonder No-A is drawing so much power.” She lifted the tube to her face and squinted. A small, pale blob, no bigger than the head of a pin, floated in the center of the clear jelly. “It must take a lot of juice to keep almost four hundred thousand embryos in cold storage.”
“Embryo?” Toner blinked and regarded the tube with new interest. “Really?” He considered this for a moment. “That’s a whole lot of babies to raise at once.”
“It is.” Jaeger gently returned the tube to its socket and pushed the drawer shut. She didn’t know how fragile these little lives were and didn’t want to find out.
She clasped her hands behind her back and studied the rows upon rows of drawers. “It’s a seed ship. I should have guessed they would have packed it with seeds.” Then she laughed, a little breathless as the realization hit her. “Oh, God. Somebody has a bad sense of humor.”
“What?”
“It’s not the No-A sector. It’s the Noah sector. All the little critters crammed onto a life raft and set to sea. Except it’s not two of each, it’s…four hundred thousand.”
Something about the idea troubled Jaeger deeply. Some memory struggling beneath the surface, trying to come up for air. If she could just reach down and pry it out…
“No, seriously.” Toner cocked his head. “That’s…too many babies.”
“Embryos. Not quite the same thing.”
“Whatever. I mean, if you’re going to build a colony on a new planet, it doesn’t make sense to bring a bunch of babies. It would take years and years to raise them past the bed-wetting stage. Then you’d have to train them all to do exactly what you need and….”
He shook his head. “I glanced through the general crew quarters before you blew a hole in them. Pinups and dirty cartoons plastered the place. Those were the bunks of jugheads, not teachers and nannies.”
“Excuse me?” Jaeger lifted an eyebrow. “Before I blew a hole in the general crew lounge?”
“You know what I mean.”
Jaeger hesitated but nodded. “I take your point. It is odd. It’s one mystery solved and a dozen more discovered.” She continued her way deeper down the stacks, in the direction Baby had gone. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
They found Baby in a small alcove at the end of the row of stacks, at the very edge of No-A. It had, Jaeger thought, once been a crew lounge—before Baby tore it to shreds.
“I found the hole on your ship.” Toner pointed helpfully at the car-sized circle ripped out of the bulkhead between the lounge and an outer section of the fighter bay.
“Yes, I see that. Thanks.”
Baby had, as Toner had predicted, ripped through the standard bulkhead like a tin can. Chunks of soft white insulation foam filled the lounge, floating in the air like dandelion puffs on a still day. The sea of drifting foam gently rippled as Baby wriggled through it.
“She made herself a nest.” Jaeger eyed the shredded remains of what had once been cheap lounge furniture bolted to the floor beside the ruins of a small galley. What a stupid affectation, she thought. As if a cheap loveseat held any comfort at all in zero-G.
“She’s a terrible housekeeper.” Toner grunted and swam toward the food cabinet, although what he hoped to find there, Jaeger had no id
ea.
Baby wiggled her massive bulk between two tables, faintly cooing as she riffled through the chunks of drifting foam. She found what she was looking for and with a happy chirruping noise, turned and barreled toward Jaeger.
Jaeger had a brief moment of panic at the sight of that two-ton monster barreling toward her again. She held up her hands, mouth opening in a shout of halt. Baby skidded, her claws screeching against the floor slots as she drifted to a stop centimeters from Jaeger’s comparatively fragile and squishy body.
Baby’s face-flaps fluttered gently. She clutched something in the claws of her front two arms, and with absurd delicacy, held it out to Jaeger.
Jaeger couldn’t help but smile as she reached out to take the offering. “What do you have there, babydoll?”
It was a petri dish the size of a large dinner plate, sealed shut and full of the same thick gel that held the embryos in stasis. Jaeger held it up to the light and squinted into the strange gel as Baby continued her happy chirruping noises.
“I’m sorry…” Jaeger shook her head, puzzled, and passed the plate back to Baby. “I don’t see anything.”
Baby didn’t seem to mind. Still chirruping happily, she took back the plate and tucked it into one of her fleshy folds. Then she returned to wedge herself into her makeshift nest.
Still shaking her head, Jaeger strode through the sea of floating foam to join Toner in the wrecked kitchen. The vampire was fiddling with some knobs and dials mounted to the front of one of the cabinets. “Find anything worth eating?” she asked hopefully. “Preferably with the raisins on the side?”
Toner snapped one of the switches into place and grinned ghoulishly as the word ready blinked over the tiny mounted screen. “You bet your ass I did.” He pulled open the door, which swung down like an oven, and gestured proudly into the dark box. “This is a specialty bio-replicator. Fully functioning. I already checked the raw materials cache: the tank is full of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, ready to be assembled in any combination you desire.” He snapped the door shut and punched a few buttons on the surface. “So long as what you desire is a fat steak, of course. Get in line, tiny. I have dibs.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“What are you staring at?”
“An animal, evidently.” Jaeger shuffled through the cabinets. Undifferentiated protein and fat packs for the food fabricator and squirt bottles full of liquid spice blends crammed them, but if she had hoped to find cutlery, she was sorely disappointed.
Toner drifted in the lounge amid a cloud of floating foam, gripping the rib bone of a tomahawk steak and gnawing at one end. Pink juices dribbled down his pale chin. “This is a zero-G sector,” he told her as she scoured the cabinets with increasing desperation for the hallmarks of civilization: a fork and a god damned steak knife. “Can you imagine trying to cut up a steak when it keeps trying to float away from you?”
“Yes, I can! The problem is that you can’t.”
“Look, I ordered the kind of steak that comes on a stick. That’s civilized, isn’t it?” Toner grinned and waggled the half-eaten steak in front of her face. Jaeger was no stranger to a nice medium-rare ribeye, but the raw tang of hemoglobin and the pink globs of tendon and muscle woven through the meat made her vaguely nauseous.
“That’s not steak,” she grunted. “That is an abomination.”
“I thought about ordering it with some nice grill marks on either side, but…” Toner shrugged and ripped off another chunk of meat. Jaeger watched the raw tendons, still springy, snap under the crush of his jaw. “I dunno. Something about the idea of cooking meat just made my skin crawl.”
He chewed thoughtfully, exactly twice, before swallowing a hunk that would have choked a horse. “Which is weird, right? Because I remember enjoying the smell and taste of grilled meat. The thought of eating it now, though…” He shuddered. Then he gulped down another hunk of synthesized beef. “This still doesn’t have that good grass-fed wholesome taste, but it’s better than the blood packs by a mile.”
Jaeger had to admit that a master had lovingly crafted the micro-lattices that the food fabricator used to arrange the protein and fat molecules into something shockingly like a high-class steak. The effort put into creating the long rib bone, sheer fancy without any nutritional value, was especially opulent.
She just wished she could make herself look away as Toner tore into the thing like a starving hyena.
The fabricator beeped.
“What you got there?” Toner asked.
Grateful for an excuse to look away from Toner’s sins against God and nature, Jaeger busied herself with her meal. The fabricator had contained hundreds of complex menu options. She was downright jealous. Why didn’t the command crew quarters have one of these fancy things?
The one thing it didn’t make was packaging. There was a stack of fresh thermal-insulated food bags in a slot beside the fabricator. She slipped a bag over each hand and opened the oven door.
The warm, buttery scent that curled up her face made her mouth water, her stomach rumble. It wasn’t perfect—she didn’t think fabricated food could ever measure up to those idealized, nostalgic meals lurking beneath the surface of her missing memory. Still, the smell alone was more satisfying than all of the nut butter and granola bar emergency rations in the universe.
Toner watched, head cocked to one side, as Jaeger scooped a dozen pillowy, golden-brown biscuits in the thermal bags. She closed the fabricator and immediately punched in the code for the second, vital component of her meal.
She split apart a biscuit, nearly scorching her fingers, and squirted a generous portion of liquid honey-butter onto the steaming halves.
Then, as if afraid it would drift away and vanish, she pressed the two halves together and crammed it, whole, into her mouth.
“Heaven,” she murmured through full cheeks.
Toner eyed the crumbs that squeezed through her lips. He made a faint tsk sound.
“Thut up.” Jaeger forced herself to chew slowly, savoring every second she had with the biscuit. “You ate your thteak raw.”
Toner sniffed at the air. His nose wrinkled. “I got the better end of that deal.”
Jaeger had found a hot drink station in the kitchenette and filled a drinking bottle with coffee loaded with sugar and non-dairy creamer. She sipped from the nozzle, washing down the last flakes of the first of many, many biscuits. “God,” she said. “My day just got thirty percent better.”
“I hear that. Queue up another steak for me, would you?” Toner deposited his bone, stripped clean, into the recycling chute.
“You’re not going to eat that, too?”
“Eh. I tried. It’s not real bone. Just for show.”
“Okay, well.” Jaeger wiped her mouth and turned back to the fabricator. “Just another minute on my dish, and I want to get something for Baby. Then we’ll get seconds for you.”
“Really?” Toner whined, eying the sleeping water bear wedged in her nest. As if she had heard her name, Baby stirred and slowly tiptoed to the kitchen. “Come on. She’ll eat anything. Don’t hold up the fabricator for her.”
Jaeger shook her head and flickered through the recipe files on the fabricator. “There’s a whole subsection of moss and flower recipes in here. They have to be for her. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”
The fabricator dinged. Toner swam over and opened the door. He frowned. “The fuck is that?”
Jaeger bent over to see what he was staring at. She grinned and grabbed another thermal bag, which she used to gather up the white glob drifting at the center of the fabricator. Flakes of pepper and chunks of juicy sausage dotted it. “That is sawmill gravy.”
“It looks like chunky—”
“Don’t you dare.”
“—paste. Like hot, chunky library paste.”
Jaeger used her second biscuit to scoop a generous heap of gravy out of the bag. “Heathen,” she murmured. She swallowed and selected the recipe for a lichen salad. The fabricator beeped
as it began a new cycle.
“What’s your poison, Virgil?” she asked, raising her voice.
“Pardon?” The speaker asked.
“Yeah. I mean, sure, you don’t eat. If you did, what should we order for you?”
There was a moment of silence as the AI considered the question. “I don’t see the point in this line of questioning.”
Jaeger sighed. “Come on, man. I’m trying to make small talk. Aren’t you curious about the taste of anything?”
“I am.” The AI sounded more than a little defensive. Then, it added, after a reluctant pause, “I have thought about this. If I gained access to a sense of taste, I think I would first like to try a martini.”
Jaeger choked on her biscuit. She coughed and pounded her chest, sending an undignified spray of damp crumbs into the air. “A martini? Good god, why?”
“It’s classy as fuck.” Toner nodded understanding. “The peak of sophisticated style. Makes perfect sense.”
“Precisely,” Virgil conceded.
“I bet I know what movies Virgil is watching in his downtime.” Toner winked and made double finger guns. “The many adventures of Double-Oh-Seven.”
“I have no need for ‘downtime.’”
“Martinis are awful.” Jaeger swallowed another bite. “They’re all affectation. I don’t think anybody actually likes them. They taste like pickled garbage water that hates you.”
Baby had wandered close, and when the fabricator dinged this time, she clawed politely at the door. Jaeger grinned and opened it.
Baby shoved the front of what was probably her head directly into the fabricator. She rippled as she gulped at the offering. Jaeger giggled.
“And you call me the animal.” Toner shook his head.
Baby backed away from the fabricator. A scattering of delicate lichen lace and tiny flower petals decorated the rough skin around her face-hole.
“Come on,” Jaeger said. “That easily falls into so-ugly-it’s-cute territory.”
Baby shifted her weight and rifled at the folds of skin around her abdomen. Gingerly, she withdrew her mysterious petri dish. She gripped it with one leg and delicately pried the lid off the top.
