Ends, Means, Laws and an Angry Ship

by Lyn Gala

  “We are in some difficulty,” she answered. “Can you help us out?”

  “Yes, I need you to get back to engineering and pick up any weapon you could use to damage the creature's hair.”

  “Excuse me?” Her voice was loud, but Tyce still had trouble hearing her over the gunfire.

  “I had this argument with John, and I don't have time to argue with you.”

  “Rather than a full explanation, perhaps you can provide some simple information.” That did seem to be a polite way to demand an explanation. And the only way Tyce could convince her that his idea made sense was to tell her the truth.

  “I went into the alcove and physically joined with the ship.”

  Apparently he had managed to accomplish something he hadn't in all his years on the Dragon: He had left her speechless. However, the sound of gunfire faded, so she must’ve been headed back toward engineering.

  “I haven't told John, and I don't want to until this fight is over because he'll lose focus. The Imshee are a collective species, and each hair is an individual creature. Kill enough of the hairs, and the creatures that are left have to renegotiate a personality.”

  “Oh.” That’s all. She sounded almost small.

  “John should be briefing the soldiers,” Tyce said, “but you need to get back here and get acid throwers, flamethrowers, anything that can do damage to hair. If you see John, tell him you're already on your way to engineering and keep him out of here.”

  She sighed. “I did warn you he was emotionally invested in you.”

  “Now is not the right time.”

  “It is always the right time for truth,” she said, “and I am already headed back toward your position. I have nothing to do but talk until I reach you.” She fell silent, no doubt waiting for Tyce’s nerves to loosen his tongue. In the past, silence had been his nemesis. However, he had no words. She finally asked, “Is all that yelling coming from engineering?”

  “I have no idea. I have access to some cameras in the hall, but apparently the ship thinks that it would be illogical to have cameras in engineering or in any of the side passages.”

  “I'm sure zir logic makes sense to zir.”

  In the background, Tyce heard shouts. “Maybe, but she isn't good at communicating it.”

  “Oh my.” Ama sounded horrified.

  “What happened?” Even though in a very real sense, Tyce no longer had a body because he was plugged into the ship, he still had a sensation of his chest tightening in fear.

  “Nothing. It's fine.” She raised her voice. “Okay, people, I need you to focus. We need weapons that will damage the Imshee's skin, that's the weakness. So what can you get for me?”

  Through her radio, Tyce could hear shouting , but he couldn't distinguish individual words.

  “People, we need to focus on the enemy, everything else can wait,” she shouted . Ama never shouted . Tyce was cursing the ship’s lack of cameras in logical places because he wanted to see what was going on. “If you two can't find me acid in the next ten minutes, I may throw you out an airlock, and that might not be hyperbole. You figure out a delivery system for the acid. You have to be able to rig a sprayer. You, find a delivery method for fire. I know Earth ships are stocked with propellants, and most of those are flammable. So find something that will minimize the chance of us blowing ourselves up, but if a fire-bomb suicide belt is all you can arrange, arrange that.”

  “Ama!” Tyce said loudly.

  “Do not use that tone. You and I know desperate times call for desperate measures. Why the hell aren't you moving?” For half a second, Tyce thought she was yelling at him, but then the engineers complained about her temper. Luckily most of them were off the Dragon. If she threatened Command staff that way, it might turn ugly.

  “Ama, Tyce is stuck inside that console,” someone said in a low and desperate voice. Tyce didn’t recognize the speaker, but he appreciated the concern.

  “I’m fine, tell them that,” Tyce said.

  Instead Ama told them, “I know. We can worry when we don’t have aliens trying to kill us. We’ll worry about it then.” Her voice cracked, and Tyce ached with the knowledge that John was not the only person he’d let down.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “I’M RAISING OXYGEN levels. Warn the teams that fire might be more volatile,” Tyce warned. The ship had told him that Imshee feared oxygen, so he planned to use that to his advantage, although the battle had already turned their direction. The Imshee were in full retreat. Unfortunately, he wasn’t part of it. The battle was at the edge of his camera range, and he hadn’t figured out how to tap into the Command cameras. Soft regret jangled across his nerves. The ship felt guilty, but she didn’t know the technology.

  “Oxygen rising, check,” John said, his voice terse. He was handling the field well. Considering that Command had poisoned these soldiers against John, they were following orders without hesitation. In a battle situation, that spoke of trust. Tyce wasn’t surprised. John always had an ability to connect with people.

  “Do we pursue or let them retreat?” Ama asked on the radio. The line the three of them shared was silent for long seconds. John must have muted his end because Tyce couldn’t even hear the distinctive whooshing of the improvised flame throwers. “Tyce?”

  “I’m not in the field,” Tyce said, but then he realized that if the Imshee retreated, they would tell the others that humans had a Cy ship. They were the mysterious boogie-men of the universe. Even the Rownt mentioned them only as a species they avoided, and Cy technology frightened the Imshee.

  And the ships were a huge part of their power.

  “If they escape, they’ll warn other Imshee to stay away from us,” Tyce said.

  “You assume,” John said. “We don’t have enough evidence to know what they might do.”

  Tyce winced. When John found out the truth, he might kill Tyce. He might even hack through the ship to get to him. But his connection to the ship meant Tyce did know. The Imshee were motivated by fear. They were fragile creatures, so easily broken, and with each individual lost, the whole had to adjust. Lose enough individual hairs, and the whole conglomerate had to renegotiate a personality. In some older Imshee, different clumps of hair would even form subpersonalities, and in those, the fear was even more intense. If one group slipped, the others would grow more aggressive about pushing their objectives. Tyce knew a lot about the Imshee, and very little was positive. The best that could be said of them was that they made horrible slaves, which had saved them from a dark fate as a species.

  Tyce had a harder time understanding the ship’s impression of humans. Whenever he focused on the thought, she would send a weird flurry of images he couldn’t interpret.

  “Tyce is captain. He says we allow them to retreat, so we do,” Ama said firmly.

  John muttered something, but oddly he didn’t argue. Ama’s personality did create a gravity well that was difficult to escape. “Hold!” John yelled. “Everyone hold. Let the Imshee retreat. Follow at weapons distance to make sure they get their mangy asses off our ship.”

  A frisson of joy shot up Tyce’s spine. John had claimed the ship. Tyce groaned as he realized she had no intention of letting John leave now. He claimed her. She was his. She wouldn’t be silent anymore. Horror. Silence. Grief. She wouldn’t have Cy. Never Cy. Never again. He heard cries from down-ship. Ghost cries. What the fuck had gone on in the damn ship?

  The question sent Tyce spinning off into a new camera view, one closer to the narrower and simpler passages where the Dragon had docked. Anla scuttled through the corridors, but these were smaller than the ones Tyce remembered seeing on the vids Earth put out. It took him a second to realize he was seeing the past—a recorded memory from the ship. This was from a time before humans had first discovered Anla in space. Before the excitement of the first alliance turned into the horror of the human-Anla war. Tyce was seeing a much younger version of the species.

  Anla darted around humans dressed in the same fe
atureless clothing. A human child stood in the middle of the corridor crying. A woman stepped out of a passage, and Tyce expected her to pick the girl up, but she walked past, her eyes dead.

  What the hell? The image vanished and a sense of guilt and confusion and anger rolled through Tyce’s nerves. Being so intimately attached to the ship tore through the walls Tyce had put up around his feelings. How could they not when the ship was hardwired into his nervous system?

  “Tyce!” John’s voice broke through his self-pity.

  “What?”

  “I’ve called your name three times,” he said, his voice rich with frustration. He knew something was wrong. “It looks like the Imshee are retreating to their ship.”

  “Excellent.” Tyce felt like he could breathe for the first time since the Cy ship had appeared on the radar. Not Cy. Her Purpose was not Cy. Not her current Purpose or her old one. That Purpose had left her. The ship flooded him with information, but it didn’t make sense. It was like hearing a three-year-old—an excitable and angry one—tell a story.

  “I’m opening my channel to full,” Ama said softly, no doubt warning him that he would now be audible to anyone wearing a radio. “Signal me if you need me. I need to concentrate somewhere else.”

  “Got it,” Tyce said. Then dozens of voices came across the radio. Instead of struggling to pick out a few voices, a few interesting details as team leads reported in, Tyce skated through the words, rewinding where he missed something interesting and planting mental flags that lit up conversations in colors. He felt something shift, and then he could hear all the team bands as soldiers chatted with each other, crass jokes glossing over their fears.

  Soldiers spread out through the corridors, checking for Imshee and finding only bodies—human and alien. Teams called for medics when they located wounded. Someone called for help, and in the background, Tyce heard Yoss cursing at them. Yoss wanted to walk in, and from what Tyce could hear, he had a gaping wound in his calf. That was Yoss. Tyce smiled, but the relief faded as teams called in the names of the dead.

  Some of them Tyce didn’t know: Johnson, Gomez, Franklin, Svoboda, Sampson. Belton, Apodaca. Too many were men and women he knew too well. Ralie, so damn young. Too fucking young. Ight and Ishat and Ter. Fuck. Ter. Tyce had surrendered to Command soldiers to save him and then the idiot had to get himself killed. Tyce’s grief physically hurt. The ship sang softly, adding her grief to his. She was older, so much older. And she had carried so much sadness that Tyce was swallowed by it. Loss was constant. Creatures died. Even ships died.

  But these people—they had survived the war with Earth only to die fighting animated hair. It was obscene. Rage washed through him, and Tyce felt weapons power up. The problem was that if they blasted this Imshee ship out of space, the next one would board with the same goal—to prevent humans from ever getting access to Cy technology.

  Tyce forced his heart to slow. “Ama, could you go private?” Tyce asked.

  The voices quieted before she said, “What do you need?”

  “Someone to walk me through those stupid meditation exercises of yours.”

  She sighed. “Do I need to give you my lecture on not calling the beliefs of others stupid?”

  “Nope. I have that one memorized. However, our shiny new ship is angry about how much damage the Imshee did, and she’s thinking about blasting their ship out of space.”

  “Would that be the best tactical decision?”

  “No, but it would feel good,” Tyce admitted. “It would feel damn good.” Tyce remembered the dark satisfaction of revenge. He’d shot his own team, the one the officers had lauded while they’d warned him in hushed tones that his career would suffer if he didn’t learn to work with others.

  “You would wallow in guilt for the next decade and I don’t need to endure that sort of punishment,” Ama said. “Not now Leishi.” She snapped. Then... “Shit.”

  “Shit?” Tyce asked. His heart rate immediately shot right back up. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. But it’s time to be honest with John.”

  “Shit.” Tyce breathed the word. John was on his way to the engineer’s room. It was the only explanation.

  “Talk to him,” Ama said earnestly. “Now.”

  Tyce would’ve procrastinated forever if he could have, but he didn’t want John throwing a fit in front of the crew. He focused on the radio channel and felt the shift in his mind that meant it was open. “John?”

  “How badly wounded are you?” John asked without preamble. He was out of breath, so either he had just bounded up a set of oversized stairs or he was running for the control room.

  “What?” Tyce had practiced how to break the news, but John’s question had derailed his plan.

  “You don't sound wounded, but I know you. If you could be, you would be at the front line fighting. So something's keeping you in engineering. How bad is the injury?”

  “That's up for debate right now,” Tyce answered wryly. He had forgotten how good John was at putting pieces together. Of course this time he had gotten the picture wrong, but John’s assumption was logical.

  “Debate? I’m on my way to engineering right now.”

  “Wait,” Tyce said. “Find a private room, and let’s talk on the radio first.”

  There was silence for a time, and then a soft, “Fuck.” Silence again until John said, “Give me a minute.”

  Tyce had nothing but time. His nose itched, and he strained against the need to scratch. Damaged forward sensors. He was feeling the damn sensors. As superpowers went, Tyce was unimpressed with this one. He’d trade it in for the ability to scratch his nose.

  “Okay,” John said. “I found a room that has a minimum of stench.”

  “Bathrooms.”

  “What?” John sounded confused.

  “The rooms that stink... the bathrooms are coming online. There are a dozen on the upper levels, and the living walls need to shed the old skin and digest it before they’re ready for use.” Tyce realized he had turned them on. In the infirmary, he’d wanted a bath, so the ship had reactivated biological processors and had chosen an appropriate number of bathing rooms for the current population.

  “Um, okay. Do you have a head injury?” John sounded worried.

  “We need to provide a united front, agreed?”

  “Why? Do you have access to sensors? Are there Command ships coming? Is that why you’re trying to keep me away from engineering?”

  “Seriously?” Tyce demanded. He was then distracted by an awareness of the sensor systems reporting in. The Imshee were retreating. They had an asteroid field on the sensors and recommended navigating away due to the unstable elements in some of the rocks. No Earth ships. “Do you think I’m staging a coup here?”

  “No, but I think you might want to protect my position and the positions of those on the ship by claiming you controlled the ship, and we were prisoners rather than allies.”

  Okay, that was the sort of plan Tyce might have suggested in other circumstances. “There are no Command ships on the sensors, although some micro-meteor damage has left blind spots. However, we still have your mutinous crew members somewhere on this ship and eventually we will have to talk to Earth. So we need to stay united.”

  “What the hell is going on?” John demanded.

  “I went into the alcove,” Tyce blurted. “I joined the ship.”

  Silence answered.

  “I needed to access more information than I could with only a few probes in my head.”

  “So you...” Again, the radio signal was stuffed full of silence.

  “It was our best hope,” Tyce rushed to explain. “The minute the Imshee started a mass attack on our position, we had no hope of winning, not without the ship.” With the ship, the Imshee would stay far, far away. She was huge—the size of a dozen Earth battleships, larger than Imshee or Rownt ships, because she grew and changed. If she encountered a ship bigger than her, she would grow new structures. She would not be beaten in a batt
le. She wouldn’t. But she had no Purpose. Even Tyce could feel the capital letter on that concept. A Purpose. Without one, she wandered through space aimlessly. Lonely.

  “I’m going to kill you.” John sounded weary.

  “The engineers know I’m in here, and I assume Ama has them under control. I’m not sure. But right now we need to focus on the battlefield. Acosta and his crew are virulently anti-Ribelian and we have shuttles full of Ribelian children and techs down-ship. Your people took the brunt of this fight, and we have to set up better medical facilities. We need to think about patrols and food production and water purification. The ship has water and food stores, but they’re thousands of years old and she was not built for humans.”

  The image of the dead-eyed woman passing the child replayed in his mind, but then he had another image—a man in a historic military costume leaning against a wall. He had a crooked smile and fondness filled the ship’s awareness. And loss.

  “So we’re still neck-deep in shit,” John summarized.

  “Chest deep,” Tyce said. “The ship has seen humans before and she believes she can support us, so starvation or dehydration are probably off the table. But we have to get to the rest of the Dragon crew before Acosta’s group can.”

  “Do you know where they are right now?”

  “I have no sensors in the upper part of the ship. I can only tell you that I don’t see them in the corridors around the Dragon shuttles. I may not be fully accessing all systems.”

  Dragon and Wolf. The ship danced through Tyce’s memories of those words—he couldn’t describe it any other way. Images whirled—a Chinese Dragon, a werewolf, an Arthurian legend, a story he’d once read about dog evolution from the wolf, another about coywolves and terraforming. It all spun through his memories with a childlike joy.