Slow Bullets

by Alastair Reynolds

  “On a practical level,” he began, “I am pleased to report that there is no reason not to trust the auto-surgeon.”

  This was met with a chorus of black laughter and swearing.

  “The machine did not set out to kill Crowl,” Prad persisted. “Its programming was damaged.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Spry murmured, not far to my left. Then, in a more constructive tone: “It seemed to be trying to rip him apart. How are any of us expected to trust that thing now?”

  “I have rebuilt the architecture. It had not assembled properly, when we tried using the surgery bay so quickly after revival. Some earlier instruction fragments were still lodged in its memory. The machine became . . . confused. Schizophrenic. It was trying to do its best.”

  More black laughter.

  “That doesn’t really answer my question,” Spry said. He was next to Yesli, and next to Yesli was Sacer, the replacement for Crowl. Sacer was another woman, a command-level officer about ten years older than me.

  The floating Prad gave a pragmatic shrug. “The choice will always be ours, whether or not we place our faith in the auto-surgeon. It is the only such facility we have. In a matter of dire medical emergency, what other choice would we have?”

  “Would you put yourself in that thing?” I asked.

  “Of course. It’s just a machine. It was broken before, so it did not work properly. Now I have made it better. The auto-surgeon, at least. The sterile field is still broken, and we do not have the means to repair that. We will need to be very careful about infection, when next we operate. Although I fear that infection will, over the course of time, prove to be the least of our worries.”

  “Meaning what?” Sacer asked.

  “I had hoped that the auto-surgeon’s damaged architecture would be an isolated problem.” Some air current was making Prad tilt head over heels, very slowly, like a tumbling asteroid. “It is not. The malaise is much more widespread. Every system in this ship that depends on an instruction set or a database is affected, to one degree or another. Records and files are widely unreadable. The ship has been moving information around inside itself, trying to preserve the most vital parts—those that it needs to keep basic operational systems running. In the process, it has had to make certain sacrifices.”

  “Explain,” I said.

  “If I may simplify . . .”

  “Please do.”

  “The ship has two types of memory. Like the human brain, it has both long- and short-term storage registers. The long-term registers are normally very stable, but slower to access and update. Into these areas the ship would normally consign information that does not need to be consulted or updated very frequently.”

  “Such as?” Spry asked.

  “Historical data. Cultural knowledge. Maps of planetary surfaces. Astrogation files. Medical data—how to operate on a patient. That sort of thing.”

  “And now?” I pushed.

  “There is a fault with the volatile memory, the kind that the ship uses for short-term, immediate recall—its working memory, so to speak. As a result, the ship has been forced to commandeer portions of its long-term memory for routine functions that would normally only ever trouble the volatile part—basic housekeeping, really. It has been doing its best not to overwrite critical data, but since it has been in this difficult condition for rather a long time . . .”

  “How bad is it?” Sacer asked.

  The upside down Prad swallowed. “My investigations have only been preliminary. But already I have found huge areas of memory scrambled beyond recall. I was lucky with the auto-surgeon’s architecture—I think it is repaired—but in many instances there is no backup, no recoverable copy. The data that is gone, is gone. Worse, the process is continuing. Now that we are awake, the demands on the ship have only increased. The rate of data attrition has definitely quickened. The ship is forgetting itself more rapidly than before.”

  “Wait,” Spry said slowly. “This isn’t fatal, is it? The data that’s being lost . . . scrambled . . . whatever? It’s not vital to the ship?”

  “Not vital to the ship, but possibly vital to us,” said Yesli.

  “On a basic level,” Prad said, “the ship can still keep functioning for quite some time. There are questions of supplies, of fuel, of closed-cycle systems that are not working as efficiently as they should, of things for which we do not have spare parts. But if all else fails, we can all of us return to hibo and instruct the ship to return to a powered-down configuration. Long before that happens, though, large swathes of the memory will have been lost forever. At the present rate, we are losing about one-third of one percent of the total stored memory for every day that we are awake.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

  “On a day to day basis,” Prad answered, “we’d hardly notice the difference. The sectors are being overwritten in a random fashion, depending only on the ship’s immediate requirements. But in a thousand days, give or take, we will have lost everything. Every single piece of information not absolutely vital to the continued functioning of the ship will have been overwritten. Our history. Our art. Our science and medicine. Our music. Images of your homeworlds—people we knew and loved. Anything that isn’t in our heads, it’s gone for good. A great deal has already been lost.”

  “Then we’ll just have to manage without it,” I said, with an icy resolve that surprised even me. “It’s a luxury, that’s all. What matters is keeping alive, keeping the ship functioning. The universe hasn’t ended. The information’s all still out there somewhere.”

  “We hope,” Prad answered.

  “What about the skip systems?” Spry asked. “If we need help, we need to get somewhere where we’ll have a chance of finding it. Another system, where they can patch us up.”

  “To attempt a skip without NavNet referencing would be very unusual,” Prad said.

  “If it’s a choice between that and dying here, I’ll take that chance,” Yesli replied.

  “I will need to look carefully at the condition of the hypercore,” Prad said. “There may have been damage. There may be damage that we cannot even detect until the moment of skip.”

  “And then what?” Sacer asked.

  “It would be quick and painless,” Prad answered.

  ______________

  It was never a question of our not finding Orvin.

  The ship was big, but it was not infinite. There were many of us and only one of him. He had gone into hiding with only a makeshift weapon and the clothes on his back. He had no ready access to food or water, and if he had need of medicine (it was hard to say if he had been injured or not) he had no access to that either. If he tried to escape down to the planet’s surface, he would need to get past the armed teams we stationed at the lifeboats and pods.

  We had no reason to assume that Orvin had any better knowledge of the ship’s secrets than the rest of us. What he did have was guile, ruthlessness and determination. On the other hand, we had force of numbers and the slates.

  The slates became our salvation, although we did not know that at the time. We had located about a hundred that were still in a functioning order, along with many more that were dead or in some way damaged. They were not complicated devices and there was a limit to what could be done with them, even when they were working properly. But they were also sturdy and easy to use, even for grunts like me. Prad and the other crew took turns instructing the rest of us how to display a visualisation of the ship’s layout, a schematic that could be as detailed or as simple as we needed.

  They had their limitations, too. I had thought, cleverly, that we might be able to solve the memory leak by copying everything onto the slates, but Prad had already ruled out that option. The slates could search and display any information held in the ship’s memory, but they had no long-term storage capacity of their own.

  “They are windows, that’s all,” Prad explained sadly. “They can display, but they cannot retain.”

  For now,
in our search for Orvin, windows were all that we required. It was not that we had any pressing need to find him. There was a limit to the harm he could do, hidden away in the shadows. But the thought of him being at large was intolerable. More than anything, as the fear spread, we needed the focus that Orvin provided.

  My dreams in this period were almost always nightmares. I took to sleeping in a hibo capsule, the way many of us did. I snuggled into a nest of prison clothing and tried not to think of better times.

  ______________

  Prad was the first to notice the anomaly. He had been working hard to bring as many of the ship’s cameras back into action. This would help with the search effort, but it would also enable us to get a better impression of Caprice’s overall spaceworthiness. If there was something wrong with the outside of the ship—some damage that was not registering on the internal displays—Prad felt we ought to know about it sooner rather than later.

  We found damage and plenty of it, although nothing as serious as we might have feared. The hull had suffered a constant bombardment of micrometeorite strikes and cosmic ray impacts, leaving it peppered with craters and burns. Markings and lettering had been scoured away to bare plating, and the plating in turn had been pricked and hammered like worn-out battle armour. It looked terrible, but Prad assured me that there was very little that was of immediate concern. As scarred as the ship now was, it had been engineered to take much worse.

  “We can fix the problem areas,” he said, with a breezy confidence that I did not quite share. “Go out in suits, with basic repair equipment. That is not a priority, at least for the moment.” And now Prad jabbed his thumb at a part of the ship captured by one of the external cameras. “This is.”

  “You’re going to have to help me out. One lumpy mechanical thing looks much like another lumpy mechanical thing.”

  “It is a vehicle,” Prad answered. “It is not one of ours. And it was mostly definitely not docked with Caprice when we prepared for our last skip.”

  “You can be sure of that?”

  “Nothing would have been allowed to remain docked—it upsets the skip equilibrium. But I would have remembered in any case. That is a very odd looking ship. If I did not know better, I would say it belongs in a museum.”

  “If it wasn’t docked with us when we skipped . . . then how did it get here?”

  “If I might be permitted to venture a theory . . .” But Prad was going to venture his theory whether I wanted it or not. “From here, there does not seem to be very much to that ship. Just a capsule, with some steering and docking capability. I do not believe it could have travelled very far.”

  “Then it’s come up from Tottori?”

  “One imagines. I should like to get a closer look at it, to get a better idea of how long it has been docked.”

  I squinted through sleep-deprived eyes at the image Prad was showing me. It was still just a lump to my eyes, a grey thing barnacled to a bigger, more complicated grey thing. I could barely see where one ship began and the other ended.

  But I trusted Prad.

  “You’re right, we have to get to it. But I have no idea what part of the ship you’re showing me.”

  Prad snatched one of the functioning slates and produced a schematic. “This is where it is docked—forward six. That’s a whole section we’ve yet to enter. There is certainly no power there, and there may or may not be air.”

  “Based on what we know, could Orvin have made it into that area?”

  “I think it doubtful. In any event, there are other lifeboats that would be closer to him, if escape was his intention. We have protected those that we can reach, and I have tried to disable all escape systems from central control. That is not infallible, of course—you are not supposed to be able to disable them in that manner, and there are loopholes that a resourceful man could find, given . . .” A sudden focus returned to him. “What I am saying is, we have done what we can. More than likely Orvin can’t reach this thing—and he certainly won’t know of its existence while he remains in hiding. But at any cost, we must reach it.”

  “I agree. Even if we have to step down the number of search parties, it’s worth the delay in capturing Orvin. You think we’ll find answers, don’t you?”

  “I am certain of it,” Prad said. “Whether they are the answers we will care for, that is something else entirely. Anyway, I do not care to have something attached to my ship.”

  “Our ship,” I corrected under my breath.

  ______________

  Three of us went: Prad, Yesli and I.

  Under other circumstances, it would have taken only a few minutes to reach the docking bay where the mysterious object had clamped on. In fact it took nearly ten hours, trying one route and then another, hoping that we would not open a door and find vacuum beyond it, and not always being able to say for certain until Prad forced the door to operate. Where the ship was pressurised, it was often unbearably cold. Even if air did lie beyond a particular bulkhead or lock, it was not always possible to find our way through into that section. Some doors simply would not open, no matter the persuasion Prad brought to the matter. Others, when they were finally made to work, showed signs of vandalism or force applied to the other side. One entire section of the ship between us and the capsule, remained depressurised, so rather than make a time-consuming detour we broke a set of spacesuits out of storage and used them instead. It was my first time in vacuum gear and I found the experience bruising and uncomfortable, although no worse in its way than combat armour. Prad was philosophical. The more of us that had some experience of suits, the quicker we could fix the areas of the hull that needed attention. It was a bigger job than the crew could fix on their own, and we would all need to work together to get it done.

  Work together, I thought? Dregs like us?

  But I did not want Prad to know how hopeless I thought that was. If he still had faith in human nature, I would not be the one to prick his bubble.

  From a window near the lock, Prad was able to get a better look at our foreign visitor. He studied it wordlessly for at least a minute.

  “Well?” Yesli asked.

  “It’s as I thought,” he said. “A simple capsule, with a docking attachment. You see how complicated it is?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “The capsule is stone age. But the docking attachment is really quite sophisticated. See all those moving parts? I think there is a reason for that. Whoever came up here did not know quite what to expect when they arrived. They couldn’t have been sure what design of lock they would have to allow for!” Prad was smiling despite himself, in pure academic delight at an engineering conundrum. “That docking attachment of theirs is a sort of universal key, able to fit around almost any configuration of lock. Within reason. That tells you something, doesn’t it? We have been using a standard lock for centuries! How could anyone have forgotten that?”

  “Not easily,” I said.

  “I’ll offer another observation. That capsule must have been brought here by another ship—a booster rocket, perhaps, to lift it from Tottori. I doubt that they had much weight to spare, and yet they went to all that trouble to provide a universal docking system. That meant they were very, very keen to get aboard our ship.”

  “They succeeded,” Yesli said.

  “Their idea of success,” Prad said, “may have involved going home as well. In that respect they do not seem to have been quite as fortunate.”

  “So someone knew we were here, and tried to get aboard,” I mused. “But they know so little about us they couldn’t even be sure what type of lock we use.”

  In hindsight we were in far too much haste to look inside the capsule, given that it could have contained anything from a booby-trap to contagion. We were lucky: when we opened the lock, and climbed into the little vehicle (it was large enough for only one of us at a time) there was nothing inside to harm us. The capsule held a sort of couch, which seemed designed to force a person into the least comfortable
posture imaginable, and packed around this couch, in addition to padding and restraints, was an assortment of primitive controls. It was all clean and new, but that meant nothing given how long our own ship had been powered down and cold.

  Prad examined it all methodically.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked, as he fingered his way around cables and straps and metal boxes.

  “Something with a memory,” he answered. “Something we might be able to use.”

  But there was nothing that would have made the slightest difference to our own plight. The capsule had some electrical storage cells which had now run out of power, and these in turn would have operated mechanical navigation equipment and life-support devices. But there was nothing that could store an image, or hold so much as a page of text.

  There was also no sign of an occupant.

  But someone had flown this thing here—it could not possibly have docked on its own, given the simplicity of its automatic systems. They had docked, opened our airlock, entered our ship.

  And then not left.

  “Now there are two of them,” Yesli said. “One man we would like to catch. And someone else we didn’t know was aboard. Our problem has become twice as difficult.”

  “There’ll be a body somewhere,” I said. “That’s what we look for. The body of whoever brought this thing here. They came, found a dead ship, couldn’t leave again.”

  “You don’t think the newcomer could still be alive?” Prad asked.

  “Do you see any sign that Tottori could have launched this thing recently? A city, an industrial capacity?”

  “We haven’t really been looking that hard,” Yesli pointed out.

  “Not too hard to miss a fucking spaceport, a rocket pad. Much more likely that this thing came up years ago, before the ice closed in. Centuries, maybe.”

  “Then yes, we are probably looking at a body,” Yesli said.

  “Or not,” Prad added.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “There are hibo caskets, Scur. Whoever flew this thing would not have been a fool. Maybe they couldn’t leave, for whatever reason. But they might have been able to make it to the caskets. Find one that was empty, or open one that was already occupied. Take the place of whoever was inside it.”