Ends, Means, Laws and an Angry Ship

by Lyn Gala

  Ama stood at the end of the makeshift bed, tilting her head when Tyce reacted. She was in observation mode, which scared him a little. It usually meant she was trying to decide what the universe was telling her to do. “How is he, doctor?” she asked.

  John rested his fingers against Tyce’s shoulder as if afraid Tyce might vanish.

  The Command doctor stood. “I have almost no experience with alien probes, although that means I have more than any other human I know. I can't make any definitive prognosis, but he looks hale and healthy.”

  Tyce felt a niggle of discomfort at that proclamation. Until the changes settled, he was vulnerable. His immune system could overreact, which is why the ship had wanted to protect him during the transition.

  “Tyce?” Ama asked.

  He blinked at her. “What?”

  “Don't what me,” she said with a stern expression. “That’s the look you get on your face when you realize something that the rest of us haven’t. What's wrong?”

  “Is there a problem?” John asked, his voice a little higher than normal. He hovered at Tyce’s bedside. He’d even shoved Yoss to one side, and no one did that to Yoss, particularly not when the man was wounded and cranky. But at least Yoss was on his feet. As long as he could stand, Tyce trusted him to heal.

  “Nothing is wrong, exactly.” Tyce said. Ama raised her eyebrows. Tyce didn’t have all the words to explain the situation because he got fragments, feelings, images—not complete ideas. “Whatever the ship was doing, she isn't finished. It’s dangerous right now.”

  “Finish what? I thought the ship let you go.” John looked ready to grab a gun and go to war against the ship itself. Tyce wasn’t sure if the fond amusement was his own or if the ship liked John’s spunk.

  Tyce got an image of himself running down the corridor, leaping from step to oversized step on a staircase. “She never intended for me to be in the alcove for long,” Tyce said, ninety percent sure he was translating her images correctly. “The alcove is a place for forming a connection. It's not a circuit breaker that needs to have a person plugged in all the time. But the probes have to integrate.”

  “How?” the doctor immediately asked. He grabbed a hand scanner off a rolling cart.

  “No idea. I keep getting an image of probes dissolving into bone, but...” Tyce shrugged. Clearly they did more than dissolve, but the images were not detailed enough to provide more information. “I know she’s worried that she let me out too soon, and if I get sick, she wants me back in the alcove.”

  The doctor looked ready to launch into an indignant defense of his ability to care for his patients, but Ama preempted him. “She wants a symbiotic partner.” She frowned. “I respect her desire to have a relationship with another creature, but she cannot take someone against their will.”

  “What will you do?” Yoss asked, “lecture the ship to death?” He had a point. As long as they lived inside the ship, she had the upper hand.

  “I leapt into the alcove headfirst, which is pretty much the definition of volunteering,” Tyce said.

  John muttered something that sounded a lot like “Suicidal idiot.”

  Tyce patted John’s hip since that was the only body part he could reach. “I knew at the time the plan was a Hail Mary, but we were getting our asses kicked. The Imshee were about to kill us. So, yes, I volunteered, and I would do it again. That doesn’t mean I wanted to die.”

  “You are fond of this lifetime, aren't you?” Ama patted Tyce’s leg, but she watched John. She was as subtle as nuclear ordnance. Tyce rolled his eyes. Maybe he was still confused about his feelings, but he wasn’t stupid enough to deny that he cared for John. The foundations had been built during those years in the academy, but more than that, Tyce respected the man John had become.

  “Up to this point, I've been a little iffy on this incarnation, but it's getting interesting,” Tyce admitted. “I don't want to move on yet.” He didn’t look at John—he couldn’t make any promises yet, even silent ones. But he wanted to see what would happen when they weren’t on opposite sides, and they didn’t have supervising officers monitoring student-student relationships.

  “Are you saying the past few years with us made you wish for death? Yoss demanded in a voice that made it clear he planned to punch Tyce in the arm as soon as Tyce recovered enough to get out of the hospital bed. Hopefully Yoss’s leg wound would slow him down enough for Tyce to make an escape.

  “No,” Tyce said firmly. “It just left me not strenuously avoiding death.”

  “You two,” Ama said with a dramatic sigh. “You’re worse than my boys. I suspect all your parents need a remedial course on how to raise productive children. Can we please focus on the important issue here? What does the ship want out of this relationship?”

  “A Purpose,” Tyce said immediately. “And what that means...” He shrugged.

  “So, do you tell the ship where to go? Are you the pilot?” John asked.

  “If I am, I haven’t found those controls yet. It feels more generalized than that. She can make her own decisions about where to go or what to do now that she’s awake, but I don’t have the words to explain.” Tyce closed his eyes and tried to sort the feelings he got from the ship. “Without a Purpose, she sleeps because she doesn’t know what else to do.” Tyce got a clear image then—giant ships drifting toward a sun, asleep as their skin burned. Waking. Screaming in pain and firing engines toward the danger. Skin hulls peeling back from bone. Sisters. Gone. Lost.

  Tyce’s stomach churned, and he leaned over the bed a half second before he threw up yellow bile all over the doctor’s shoes. “Fuck. Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Instead of getting angry, the doctor pressed a scanner against Tyce’s chest. “What hurts?”

  “The memory of my sisters’ suicides by diving straight into suns as their skin burned away,” Tyce said.

  “Oh.” The doctor fell silent.

  John tugged on Tyce’s arm. He had gotten a glass of water from somewhere and Tyce gratefully took it. “Thank you.”

  “Does she want the rest of us to stay on the ship or leave?” Ama asked.

  “Stay,” Tyce immediately said. She liked the noise. She liked the children. Tyce frowned. “Is someone trying to cut through the skin to get into the shuttles?” Tyce asked.

  “Yes. We need to get to those people,” Ama said slowly. “We regret hurting the ship, but we won’t abandon our people.”

  Tyce nodded as he saw the ship’s final plan. “You’re slowing down the rescue,” Tyce said. “She’s growing doors and absorbing the shuttles so she can make them stronger.” Tyce got an image of empty space. If they were too far away from any habitable planet, they wouldn’t leave her, even if she gave them back their shuttles. She would have children running through her halls, laughter. A fragment of a memory floated to the surface, a little girl with red hair. Then Tyce got a much more X-rated image of two men in an Cy-sized bed. Apparently the ship was a voyeur.

  Ama walked around to the side of the bed next to John, but she didn’t move him. “Would she allow you to leave?”

  “Never.”

  Ama blew out a breath. “Okay. We need to think about this. We still have John’s mutinous crew running around, so let’s focus on that. Can you use sensors to find them?”

  Tyce closed his eyes and tried, but any request for sensors yielded images of the lower ship. However, he did feel the controls for water and protein production. She had shut them off in the upper levels because the soldiers were loud and they hurt her. But if Tyce liked them, she could open those access lines. Tyce opened his eyes. “Cy didn’t spy on other Cy, so there are no cameras or sensors up-ship, but I did turn on water and food production lines.” Tyce looked at John. “She didn’t like your people blowing a hole in her side.”

  He grimaced. “I can’t blame her, but if we don’t have sensors, we have a problem. This ship is larger than most cities. We don’t have enough people to do a grid search, and I don’t think random hunts through th
e ship’s hallways will do much good.”

  “They’ll have to get food and water. If they don’t have synthesizers that can process the raw nutrients, they’ll need to steal either equipment or food from us,” Tyce said. “That’s when they’ll be vulnerable. We only have to guard our perimeter and they’ll have to come to us.”

  John nodded. “Okay, that means keeping our people in a fairly limited area. We need to pull everyone together in one place.”

  Ama put a hand on John’s arm. “Tyce is exhausted. Perhaps we can discuss strategy another time,” she said softly. John blushed and gave Tyce an apologetic look. “But before we leave, I want to ask if the ship has a name.”

  Images scrolled through Tyce’s brain. A lone wolf howling in grief. Wolves running a snowy trail. A wolf playing with pups. A wolf dying, its foot caught in a trap. The image zoomed into the trap for a moment and then Tyce was alone in his head again—or at least she was quiet.

  “Wolf.”

  Ama nodded. “Then remind Wolf that you are tired and need your rest.” She touched Tyce’s tattoo and then glanced at John. “Yoss, Doctor, let’s give him some time to sleep.”

  “Aren’t you going to make the Command guy leave?” Yoss demanded as she pushed him away from the bed.

  “No,” she said. “Doctor, are you coming?”

  “He should be monitored,” the doctor protested, but he edged toward the door. He probably wanted to change his shoes, and Tyce hoped the man had packed two pairs when he’d abandoned the Command attack cruiser.

  “The ship will do that. If I have any trouble, she’ll let everyone know, loud and clear. So if alarms and lights all go mad, you can come check on me then,” Tyce said.

  “Wolf,” Ama corrected him. “The Dragon was appropriately called a ship, but Wolf is her own creature.”

  Tyce saw many lectures in his future. The ship sent an image of a Cy. His two large arms worked feverishly over a holographic control panel and she grieved his loss. He’d been her Purpose, and he had listened to her name, although then it had been something different. Tyce got an image of a creature that looked like a giant centipede and a small lion had a baby. The Cy planet favored creatures with multiple limbs. Ama smiled at him and then dragged a complaining Yoss out of the room. The doctor followed, leaving Tyce and John alone.

  Tyce wasn’t sure where to start. He’d been honest about everything he’d said, but he probably wouldn’t have said half of it if they’d been face-to-face. They stood in silence. The images in Tyce’s head even went conspicuously quiet. Tyce frowned as he realized the doctor had set up his exam room in an alien version of a closet.

  John pulled his hand back . “Take backsies, no judgment.” That had been their deal back when they were roommates. Sometimes they were exhausted and frustrated and they said the shittiest things to each other. Take-backs had let them smooth over some of those early fights.

  Tyce grabbed John’s hand. “Absolutely not. Maybe I wouldn’t have said those things if I knew I was going to be...” He gestured at the room. “But I meant every word.” He sighed. “And I was an asshole, a cowardly one. And I didn’t know how to make a relationship work. When we were cadets, I could point to the regulations as the reason for avoiding complications, but when I was faced with the prospect of us....”

  John leaned his hip against Tyce’s bed. Evidently he didn’t plan on rescuing Tyce from his own verbal flailing.

  Tyce rubbed a hand over his face. “I was terrified I wouldn’t have the self-control to say no. I felt like I was running downhill and I was going faster and faster and I was terrified that if I tried to stop.... Running away from that steep hill was safer.” Tyce shrugged. Sometimes he wished he could track down his younger self and punch him in the throat. He’d thought he could plan everything—schedule his whole life and pencil in a relationship for after his promotion to Commander.

  “You’re an idiot,” John said softly, but he squeezed Tyce’s hand. Tyce took that as a good sign. “And I’m an idiot, too. Maybe you didn’t say that stuff, but I knew it. I could tell you were scared. Sometimes when we collapsed in the same bed, I would wake up, and you’d be looking at me.” A soft smile made John look years younger. “I had my own plans to convince you to stop focusing on that career of yours.”

  Tyce struggled to sit up. “Yes, but why did I care about it so much? Why was getting a promotion more important than our friendship, even if I didn’t want to take it to the next level? I know what I did, but not why I did it. It’s like I was a different person.” Ama had tried to convince him that he had been a different man, that every time a person made new choices, they became a new person. As much as Tyce wanted to believe that, it felt like refusing to take responsibility for fucking up. “I don’t like who I was.”

  “I wasn’t a saint, either,” John said. “The day I finished my paperwork, I planned to come back to the room and seduce the fuck out of you. I knew you didn’t want to register a relationship. We’d talked about how officers got held back when they had official partners. But I wanted more than you were offering.” John shrugged. “You probably suspected.”

  He hadn’t. By that point, he’d been trying hard to avoid thinking too much about John. “No take backs,” Tyce said firmly. “I meant what I said. I wish I hadn’t been a coward. You deserved to know where my head was at, and I was a coward for running.”

  John huffed and sat on the edge of Tyce’s bed, his butt right up against John’s waist. “We’re a pair. We were both selfish.”

  In some ways, Tyce felt like they were right back to that moment right before graduation. “If we start a relationship now, we’re still being selfish because we have to deal with Earth.” Tyce got a flash so strong that he grabbed his head. Earth. Green and blue with abnormally large continents. North America still had that funny finger on the south end of the east coast and the Gulf of Amazon was missing entirely. It was all land. Never. Never. Never. Never.

  “Tyce!” John grabbed his shoulder. “Doctor!! We need help!”

  Despite the images spinning through his head, Tyce squinted his eyes . “I’m fine. It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine,” John snapped, and then the doctor was there, shining a light in Tyce’s eyes.

  “Follow the light,” the doctor ordered. Tyce batted at the light, but John caught his hand.

  “Will you two listen to me?” Tyce demanded. “The ship had a strong reaction to the idea of Earth.” That was an understatement. She’d been angry at the idea of Imshee hunting the children from the Dragon—so angry she’d vented her own hull. However, that fury was a pale imitation of the raw fury she’d felt at the memory of Earth. She was a wolf, a furious one who had found a predator at her den. Tyce couldn’t sort the feelings as quickly as she shoved them through their link.

  “The ship?” The doctor pulled the light away, and Tyce managed to open his eyes.

  “Yes. The ship. Wolf. She had a strong reaction to the idea of Earth and she shoved images and feelings at me a little too fast.” He groaned and rubbed his temple.

  “This can’t be good for the integrity of brain structures,” the doctor muttered. “I’d like to give you a full medical exam, but since I only have emergency supplies, and precious few of those, that’s not an option.”

  “Good,” Tyce said. “I am fine. However, we might have a problem reaching Earth.” Tyce had never planned to go there himself, but he knew they needed to get John’s crew somewhere Earth-aligned so they could go home. Tyce was not into kidnapping, although he wasn’t sure where Ama would come down on the issue. She might talk about the universe putting them on new paths and accepting or she might lecture about allowing others to choose their paths.

  “What problem?” The doctor sounded not just suspicious but angry. He probably assumed the Ribelian terrorists were taking them hostage.

  “The ship remembers Earth,” Tyce said. “But she remembers it as it existed hundreds of years ago, back before the seas rose.” The image of the b
lue ball floating in space returned. It retreated in her memory until she crouched next to Mars.

  John shook his head. “That’s impossible. The first aliens Earth had contact with were the Anla.” Tyce gave John a weary look. Their government had a long and storied history of lying, and if Tyce had to trust someone, he would trust the ship before politicians. “The first aliens the government admitted to knowing about were the Anla,” John corrected himself with a sigh.

  The doctor glanced from one to the other. “Do you think the government would have lied about something that monumental?”

  “Yes,” Tyce and John said at the same time.

  “It makes sense,” Tyce said. “Based on the images I got, it was back before humans had figured out space travel. If you were stuck on one planet, would you want to tell your people that aliens with big-ass ships were running around the universe?” Wolf followed that up with sensations—brushes against her skin where she felt others pass too near. Sisters.

  “To hell with the rest of the universe,” John said. “These Cy were on Earth. Tyce, they were slavers.”

  “I know,” Tyce said softly.

  “They were what?” the doctor demanded.

  “We hadn’t shared that detail yet,” John said with a grimace. “We didn’t want people to blame Wolf for what her crew did.”

  The doctor pressed his lips into a thin line before he took a deep breath. “How certain are you about those facts? Are you sure they were slavers and are you sure they visited pre-space travel Earth?” Tyce nodded, and the doctor continued. “Could they have taken humans off the planet? Could we have humans on other planets, isolated from Earth?”

  “All I know is that Wolf has strong feelings when she thinks about Earth. She will never go there again.” He frowned. “But there’s more. All I get are vague feelings, but there is a lot of ‘never’ swirling around when she remembers Earth.”