the void, and saw a golden pulse of light above the far airlock. No sound came through the tunnel. The rangers had stationed just two guard-thieves. Quark plugged his tablet into the ship’s AI station. The holograph of Polymath vanished. Her face appeared on his screen.
“We bring them back.”
The Horntail connected from airlock to hangar. Quark entered first. A red bathed his face as he entered like a sunset fading across parched Martian fields. Andromeda shivered. The vision looked to her like a warning writ in blood: abandon hope. The law will punish transgressors with impunity. “He is alive,” Quark said. “They all are.”
Unpacked crates rested beside stripped and emptied cargo both piled like hazardous materials in a disposal bin that had not seen an incinerator in weeks. Quark shuffled through the detritus towards a computer terminus with a light blinking a scarlet color even deeper than the overhead lamps. An electric hum radiated from the panel. The screen seemed cleaner than the surroundings would indicate. Quark reasoned the ship must be in use.
“Poly, I’m going to insert you into the ship.”
“Terran Union AI’s fight intruders. I may not be able to control the entire ship. Perhaps I will not have access to anything beyond the cargo bay. Frigates often have complementary AIs acting semi-autonomously for redundancy purposes.”
“I don’t know where to look for Brine,” he said. Andromeda approached the console and thumbed the pad. The hum became a drone and the screen opened to a faded blue with a touchscreen panel.
“Do you require assistance?” said the AI.
“It doesn’t recognize us as intruders,” she said tying her hair back with a smile and hope. “Load her.”
“Do your worst,” Quark extended the transfer cable.
“I protest this,” Poly said.
“Why?”
“I am afraid,” she replied.
“Please do not ask me to trade one friend for another.”
“There is only one me. You can’t make a copy.”
“I know that better than you do. But this is what you were created for. You are not a choice machine calculating what the best option is. You were made to be more than an AI. This is why you were made intelligent. I made you like us.”
“You made me like you.”
“Do you believe me?”
Poly did not answer, she never expected Quark to affirm what she felt since her first ‘Hello World.’
“I won’t leave without either of you.”
“Promise?”
Quark nodded and connected the cable.
“We don’t have much time,” Poly said.
Moments after the upload the cargo hold’s lanterns shifted from red to white light. A metallic grunge coated the walls as if the ship had not been in station for more than a Martian year. Bacteria grew in the crevices eating away at the hull as if the rangers were too blind to see their ship was being cannibalized by their greed.
“There is the ore,” Nugget said pointing to a crate behind them. “Why didn’t they accept it?”
“They did,” said Andromeda.
A transportation pad floated from the upper deck to the cargo hold.
“Was that Poly?” Nugget said pointing at the console.
“I believe it was,” Andromeda said with a new hope.
“That’s my girl.”
Two doors met the rescue team upon reaching the neck of the ship. They waited for Poly to guide them through the correct corridor. They waited. And they waited. Finally air hissed as both doors opened before them.
“They both lead to the same place?” said Nugget.
“Or the rangers divided the others and we have to follow one.”
“We could split up,” said Quark.
“One of us may not come back,” said Andromeda shaking her head at the idea.
“Which one do we choose?”
“There is another possibility,” Quark said as he turned to face the others. “It may be that the ship’s AI is fighting back.”
A soft pulse echoed towards the team, but they could not tell whether it came from the left or the right. Illuminated arrows ran from the cargo hold deep into the heart of the ship. It was impossible to see where either ran after the first turns.
“If they’ve been separated we will have to choose which to save,” Nugget said. “I can’t make the decision. I won’t.”
“We don’t have to,” she walked towards the right. “No matter who we free we will achieve force addition. Right.”
Guided only by a faith in Poly, the three drew their pulse guns and crept towards where, they did not know.
Being a vessel of the Terran Union authorized to capture and deliver pirates to justice the Horntail was built with a prison in its underbelly. The prison was segregated from the operational units, just as a dungeon would be separated from a throne room. A maze of unmarked corridors led from the holding cells to the communications room. The communications room opened in cardinal directions: the cells, the cockpit, the living quarters, the core and the cargo hold.
One man stood before the holographic projection. He examined the map with blurry eyes that had become acclimated to a void the way a cave spider’s eyes were adapted to the dark. The ranger could listen to orders, but his mind had lost awareness of the world around him. He did not notice movement on the projection until a warning like rain falling into a tin coffee can woke him.
The projection showed Jupiter in the distance, the storm swirling in real time and storm fishers floated past the eye. Io and Ganymede were close enough to reach into the projection. They eclipsed small portions of the gas giant. The ship’s AI had been programmed to ignore objects without a heat signature. The warning finally woke the ranger. A dozen orange dots twinkling like distant novas approached the ship from a dozen angles. He reached the com button like he had never used it before, “Sirs I-uh-there are-what do we do? I think we’re being approached by the armada.”
“Have they hailed us?” said a voice ringing like thunder.
“No. I think-maybe-wouldn’t the armada know-um, know we have 4D radar?”
“That’s not the armada. It’s an ambush.”
The soft alarm stopped and seconds later the ship went dark and the halls were bathed in the furious red of the lights in the cargo hold. The thunder across the PA, “Battle stations!”
The ranger turned and as he turned he blinked and as his eyelids rose a rusted monkey wrench cracked his temple. His body kept turning, falling to the ground. He rolled onto his back. The wrench struck him in the head. Andromeda stood over him. Nugget held his legs. Quark held his hands. Andromeda let the wrench fall until the gray titanium floor became coated in a small pool of blood.
Nugget and Quark lifted his body above the railing and - ‘one…two…three’ - heaved the man into the core shaft.
In the holding cells Ibrahimzade looked at the red and yellow lights alternating in turn. Then came a smell of sulfur and carbon reminiscent of the one time he had fired a weapon. Footsteps of rangers rushing past caught his attention. He turned to Maria. She held Volt’s hand, who in turn held hers.
“Do you think-” he said.
“I do, I think he would,” said Brine. “The question is: how foolish would they be?”
Two rangers entered the cell. They sat beside the bars slightly out of reach of desperate hands. The plasma screen came on with a buzz. The ship rocked as if it had hit been struck by a meteor.
“That came from outside,” one ranger said to the other.
The second ranger turned to the prisoners, “We’re supposed to kill you. We’ll be doing you a favor. Pirates-they don’t leave anyone alive to identify them or their ship. The Horntail rocked again. Twice as hard. Twice as fast. Paneling shook loose from the walls.
“See what we can get on the AI.”
“We don’t have visuals of anything,” the second ranger continued refreshing the screen. Nothing. He tried rebooting. The system failed to restart.
Ibra
himzade interrupted, “You don’t have control of your own ship’s AI?”
“There is no AI.”
Another thunder. The Horntail shook.
“It is them,” Brine whispered to Ibrahimzade.
The doors to the cells shook with the next impact. Maria jostled the magnetic lock and quietly the door swung open. Neither man saw her approach. Volt followed her with reluctant footsteps. He looked at the exit. Footsteps fell in the distance. He would face eternity and stare into the void. The only choice was when. Ibrahimzade followed quickly. Finally Brine stood and joined his brothers and sister. In the ranger’s last moment four faint shadows grew dark from behind, eclipsing the heart-like pulsing of the crimson light.
Quark looked into the holograph and without a touch the stars aligned like a constellation spelling out: truth is often dependent upon one’s point of view. And in the blink of an eye, the view accelerated from that of a camera watching the Horntail from space to a schematic of the ship itself. The view shrunk further until Quark, Andromeda and Nugget saw themselves watching the representation of themselves. The room’s lighting shifted from red to white, a door to their left slid open. The hallway before was red and twisted, like looking through an artery pulsing in an unknown but inevitable direction.
“Thank you,” Quark said looking at the hologram.
The titanium doors slammed behind the team. A resistance stopped the doors from shutting entirely. Then came a push back, finally the doors slid closed. The room was empty and the white lights snapped to red, then back to white, and red again like two dreadnoughts trading shells at Jutland.
The Storm Fishers and Other Stories Page 18
