Slave Mind

by Rob Dearsley

  He squinted down at the screen through his glasses. “Could it be part of the ship?”

  “No. See here, and here.” She pointed to the edge of the mass. “It’s cutting through, or over, the original geometry. Whatever it is, it was added after the main construction phase.”

  “What do you think it is?” he asked, taking another sip.

  “I’ve got no idea, I’d say meteor, but there’s nothing to indicate entry.”

  The medic stared off into the distance while idly tapping the rim of his cup. “Almost like it grew there.”

  Arland was taken aback by the idea and the implications. “You’re not being serious. This is a ship, it doesn’t get ‘growths’.”

  “Perhaps.” He turned to look out the windows, down the long line of the cruiser’s hull, to the other wrecks beyond. “So few records from back then remain, no one really knows what sort of technology the Imperium had. Can you be so sure they didn’t have organic parts on their ships?”

  She gave him an incredulous look. They wouldn’t, it was horrible, beyond wrong. It was evil.

  “It is so far-fetched? We have biological people implanted with technology, like your nanites. Would technology with organic components be such a stretch?”

  “It’s different.” Arland knew Vaughn’s response to that argument before he spoke.

  “Why? Because society says so? Because people are scared of wetware?”

  Wetware, the slang term for biological computer systems, didn’t quite do the reality justice. She’d been on one of the ground teams when the SDF had closed down the black-market research facility on Diorite VIb. Strings of flesh stretched between capacitors, the electrical signals making the slimy, fibrous masses quiver and writhe as they passed from one end to the other. Tubes plunging into naked, amorphous flesh, pumping some sickly yellow nutrient cocktail that kept it alive. At the centre of the facility was a bio-processor, a cloned brain, wires thrust into the spinal column. Her colleagues, hardened Marines, hadn’t been able to stand the sight and she’d almost joined some of them in losing her lunch over the prisoners.

  “There are laws against growing wetware systems for a reason.” She fought to keep her voice pitched evenly.

  “Okay, what are they?”

  That was the question. The laws had been in place for decades, and before that, there was still the fear and loathing. But more than that, she'd seen the depraved lengths to which people would go to advance wetware. Augite III had proved there was no line they wouldn't cross. But she’d been sworn to secrecy, and even if she hadn't, it wasn't something she ever wanted to revisit. So, she countered with a question of her own.

  “Have you ever seen a wetware lab?”

  “Yes.”

  How? Was he some black-market wetware engineer masquerading as a medic? Maybe not, she remembered the SDF bringing in so-called ‘experts’ to decommission the labs her team had shut down. But those guys had been sketchy as heck.

  Vaughn’s eyes narrowed, catching her train of thought. She shifted her weight. He was slim, not a fighter. She could take him if she had to. And if it came to it, she knew the combination to the weapons locker by the pilot's chair, the one the captain kept his “piece” in. The gun was stupidly oversized and more for show, but it would do in a pinch.

  “It’s not what you think.” Vaughn placed his coffee cup down on the scanner console. “I have some experience with biotech interfaces, from working in the veteran re-arming program. The Systems’ Government used to call me in to help decommission wet-labs. I’ve seen what some of those places are like – charnel houses.”

  “And yet you still condone what they’re doing?”

  “Stars, no. That sort of thing is wrong, I never backed the Slave Mind project. What I’m talking about is a tiny amount of cloned material, just a handful of cells in a sealed unit. But, all biogenic computing research is lumped together and demonised.” His voice rose, filled with passion for his subject. Arland wasn’t sure whether to be angry at him or scared of him.

  She was saved from further argument by a crackle from the com. The ship-to-shore signal had been getting steadily worse as the captain and Luc got further from the Folly and was now almost unintelligible.

  “Say again, sir?” She moved to the communications console, working the controls to try and improve the signal. But, she wasn’t a communications engineer and nothing she tried made any difference.

  “Where- go- here…” The captain’s voice came and went through the snow of white noise.

  “One minute, sir.” She thumbed the comm to engineering open. “Jax, the com-link to the captain keeps getting worse. Is there anything we can do about it?”

  “I could try shunting the signal through the main array. Have you tried undocking and moving closer?”

  Arland let out a short bark of laughter. The simple workaround would have occurred to her, eventually.

  “I’ll try moving the ship. Do you have an ETA on the scanners?”

  “I might be able to get thermographic back up, but I need those parts for the rest.”

  It wasn’t long before Arland had the Folly disconnected from the Heimdall and eased carefully away from the larger ship’s hull.

  “Captain, we’re repositioning the ship to maintain communications.”

  The captain’s voice became clearer as they travelled aft along the hull of the TDF cruiser. “—does everything have to be so hard, I swear I’ll never take on another military officer—”

  Smiling, she unmuted the com pickup. “Sir, static’s cleared. Looks like we’re in optimum position.”

  “Thank you, Arland. Now, where do we go next? Luc is getting jumpy.”

  “I’m getting jumpy, am I?” Luc joined the com channel.

  Arland secured the flight controls, setting the ship to keep station fifty metres off the Heimdall’s outer hull, and went back to the scanner console. Vaughn had slipped out at some point. She was glad. What he had been saying about wetware unnerved her.

  “Right, sir.”

  “There’s a blank wall to our right, Arland.”

  She knew the captain used sarcasm to cover stress, but it was still irritating. “I mean, okay, sir. Okay?”

  “Much as I enjoy watchin’ you two… Which way?” Luc chimed in.

  “There should be a ladder to your left. You’ll need to take that up three levels, then go right and you should be about there.”

  “I see the ladder.”

  ◊◊

  Dannage cut the com, kicking off to float over to the ladder shaft. He grabbed onto the railings and flipped himself over, shining his torch beams up the shaft. The evenly spaced rungs faded from view somewhere above them. Dannage counted ten doorways like the one he was leaning through before his lights petered out. It was the same the other way, with the bottom of the shaft lost to darkness more than ten floors below them.

  He pulled himself into the shaft, thankful for the lack of gravity, and started climbing hand over hand.

  “Feels a bit wonky, doesn’t it?” Luc said from behind/beneath him.

  “How so?” Dannage frowned, stretching for the next rung.

  “Rungs are a bit far apart.”

  He was right, they were farther apart than was comfortable. In fact, thinking back on everything he’d seen, the whole ship felt slightly off scale for him and Luc. Maybe the ancient Terrans were taller than modern humans. Lots of things could have changed over the last half millennium – evolution and such. If that were true, then maybe the large figure they had seen in the medical room might have been an actual Terran. That would have been a find.

  As they passed the first hatch he twisted around. It was just like the deck they’d left. Which he supposed made sense, even the Folly had vertical symmetry. What caught his attention was the red ink scrawled across the wall. At first, he thought it was blood, but then his lights glinted off the chunky pen on the floor.

  “That is not dead which can eternally lie, through strange aeons even
death may die,” he read aloud.

  “What’s that?” Luc asked.

  He squeezed over, allowing Luc to see past him to the graffiti.

  “Any idea what it means?” he asked.

  Luc shook his head, “Ask the others. Arland’s smart.”

  Dannage hadn’t ever seen Arland read and hadn’t pegged her as the bookish sort. What the heck. He thumbed the com open. “Hey Arland, you got any idea what this means.” He read the scrawled message to her.

  “No idea. Sorry.”

  Her confession brought a small smile of satisfaction to his lips.

  “It’s Lovecraft.” Jax's voice had an odd echoey tone, presumably from where it was being relayed through the bridge speakers.

  “Love-who?” Luc asked.

  “A horror writer from ancient earth. The line is whispered into the main character’s dreams over and over, driving him mad.”

  “Fun times.” Luc pushed past Dannage and up the ladder.

  “Okay.” Dannage turned back to his own climb. “Why would someone write that on a wall?”

  “No idea.”

  “Thanks, guys.” Dannage thumbed the com off and followed Luc up. He didn’t turn at the next hatchway, but goosebumps crawled up his spine and over his head. The scrawled quote added to his growing unease with the place. It wasn’t the content of the message so much, he didn’t have the context to understand it. Its meaning and the way it had been hurriedly scrawled made the message clear in his mind, ‘Something here is very screwed up. Run the hells away.’ There was some primal part in the back of his brain that agreed.

  “Here we are.” Luc pushed off the ladder and back into the hallway, his sudden movement kicking up a cloud of dust.

  Dannage moved more carefully out of the passage, thinking. Dust, what was his mind trying to tell him?

  Luc, obviously eager to get to going, steadied himself against the opposite wall before pushing off down the corridor toward an open archway. Dannage followed more cautiously. They hadn’t seen any more of the alien corpses. Perhaps the intruders hadn’t made it this far into the ship.

  The pair went through a high archway into a huge chamber. It rose above them for six decks and stretched off on either side. It must have been nearly half the width of the ship. The chamber was oddly clean compared to the other compartments they’d seen before. There was virtually no dust. And a soft yellow glow illuminated the room, giving it an almost ethereal quality. Dannage steadied himself against the railing.

  “Right, let’s see what we can find.” He looked down at the flex-screen on his wrist, scanning through the list of parts. “I think we should…”

  He trailed off, eyes widening as Luc tumbled over the railing toward the huge, glowing ring in the middle of the room.

  Without thinking, he pulled a tether line from his belt and snapped it around the railing. In a flash, he’d vaulted over and kicked off toward Luc. He shot across the space between them like a missile, the line spooling out behind him. Luc was picking up speed, tumbling toward the ring. Dannage grabbed for Luc’s leg as it spun past him. His fingers grazed the hard, plastic composite of Luc’s boot. He snatched, his fingers closing on air.

  Damn it!

  Luc was still spinning, flailing arms coming into reach.

  The two men locked hands. Dannage pulled Luc toward him with one arm, his other hand hitting the lock on his tether spool. The line snapped tight, jolting the pair and almost tearing Luc from his grasp. Dannage tapped another control on the spool and, with a soft whirring of motors, the mechanism started pulling them back toward the walkway.

  “That was a bit close for comfort, eh Cap’n?”

  Dannage silently agreed. When they were both safely back on the walkway, and holding on, Dannage thumbed open his com-link.

  “Jax, looks like something’s still on here.”

  “Really? What?” The engineer sounded bright and excited.

  “Big ring-shaped thing, glowing yellow, it’s pulling us toward it.”

  “Localised gravity field, maybe an engine module or a power generator. I remember hearing about some sort of prototype FTL drive – from before the highways – that used contained quantum singularities to bend or perhaps even puncture space-time. I would guess the ring is some sort of supercollider arraignment. Which makes sense. It would be a self-sustaining system once it got going, and...”

  The pair exchanged bemused looks while Jax continued speculating as to how the device might work. As her explanation went further, the spaces between the words Dannage actually understood increased to the point where she might as well have been speaking another language.

  “Okay, okay,” he interrupted her, “we get the point. We’re going to look for your spares.” He thumbed the com closed before Arland could interrupt.

  Dannage gave Luc the bottom half of the list, leaving himself with copper coils and optical cable. Arland had even been kind enough to provide them with little pictures. Like the Terran equivalent would even look the same.

  Optical cable was the one with the red ends, right? He checked the photo.

  They had to move carefully, keeping hold of the railings and ladders, or risk being pulled toward the collider ring. Despite this, Dannage made good progress, finding a couple of metres of what appeared to be optical cable in a store cupboard. He had to admit to being surprised at how similar the Terran parts were, the optical cable even had red connectors.

  ◊◊

  Arland leaned back in the pilot’s seat, enjoying the feel of the soft, well-worn leather. After their argument, Vaughn had slunk off to medical, so there was no one to see her less than professional demeanour. She could get used to this. Although, images of some of the overweight pirates she’d seen while in the service flashed into her mind, their pasty complexions and pockmarked skin. No, she wasn’t like them. She’d enjoy the chair for now and exercise later.

  Outside the window, the Heimdall floated, a dark, inert mass. It seemed to have been pulled into a relatively stable orbit following Feldspar II, a small rocky world with no moons of its own. Who knew, with all this debris floating around the system, perhaps it would adopt one in time.

  The com chirped.

  “Shauna.” Jax’s voice came from the overhead speakers.

  “What’s up?” Arland replied, bracing herself for more bad news about the state of the ship. Maybe they only had half an hour of oxygen left, or the power core was leaking fatal radiation.

  “It’s good news,” she said, a brightness to her voice. “I’ve managed to get thermographic scanners back online. They should be accessible from your console.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Arland replied, letting the pleasure and excitement fill her voice. She may be a shut-in, but Jax was an amazing engineer and didn’t get nearly enough praise. “Did you get Vaughn to check out your arm?”

  A clang came through the com before Jax replied. “It’s fine.”

  Before Arland could say more, the young engineer cut the com-link.

  Where had the captain even found Jax? Shaking her head, Arland walked over to the scanner console. Perhaps Jax had always been there, come with the ship. The thought cheered her.

  She flicked through the settings on the console, bringing up the thermal scan results and overlaying them on the density scanner results she had been using before.

  Heat-spots started popping up all over the screen, using the standard blue to red spectrum for denoting heat. There were two sections that went off the end of the scale, going from red to white. The collider ring at the back of the ship. The heat was to be expected if it was still working. And the odd mass in the middle of the cruiser. Did that mean it was organic? She considered calling Vaughn up and asking for his opinion, but decided against it. She’d rather not have to deal with him again so soon.

  More, smaller signatures started popping up. Two in the engineering section—they must be the captain and Luc. Two more signatures appeared, near the captain, several decks up, and by the look
s of it, heading his way.

  ◊◊

  Dannage leaned back, putting his whole body weight into pulling the metal panel away from the wall. “Are you done yet?”

  “Nearly got it.” Luc grunted with effort and withdrew a complicated looking glass tube. “That’s the last one.”

  Dannage was about to thumb open his com and ask Arland where the nearest pickup point was, when it hit him.

  Dust.

  The memory he’d been reaching for that whole time. He’d been eight, still in school, and their teacher was a neat freak. She insisted on cleaning everything. As he’d got older, he’d heard the phrase ‘compulsive cleaner,’ but that was beside the point. She’d once gone off on one about dust, how all that dust was human skin. How they were all little walking dust factories. It was a simple part of being alive. But if that was the case, and everyone on the ship was dead and gone, why was there still so much dust?

  An animalistic scream filled the huge compartment, reverberating from the walls.

  Three

  - Feldspar System -

  Arland watched as more heat signals popped up all over the ship – dozens of them. She bolted back to the main console, flipping the ship-to-shore com open.

  “Captain, I’m picking up other life forms heading your way.”

  “Yeah, we know.” The captain was out of breath. “You can see them on the scanners? Find us a way out of here.”

  She dashed back to the scanner console. Zooming the image in on the engineering compartment, she tagged the captain and Luc’s signatures so she wouldn’t lose track of them. That done, she started scanning for a way out. The two signatures she had seen before were already in the engine room, and there were more converging on the route her friends had taken. Tracking them, maybe?

  The screen updated, showing even more signatures heading for the cruiser’s port side. Almost as though they knew the Folly was there. Stars, she hoped the captain didn’t do anything stupid. If only she was there to protect him.

  There were just so many of them. Her eyes flicked across the screen looking for something, anything.

  There. On the starboard side there weren’t as many. If the captain and Luc went that way, she could fly around and pick them up. There was a fighter bay she’d be able to use. She wouldn’t even need to dock again.