REBOOTS

by Mercedes Lackey

  Why would a bunch of monsters from ancient fairy tales and B-movies be out roaming the stars, anyways?

  Why else—the ones that had the power and the money made the rules.

  It was because the Norms were the real kings of the universe, or at least, of Earth. They had the lock on the stakes, the silver bullets, the Sun-guns. Oh, poor Norms, who just didn’t have the weaknesses of the Undead. The light of yellow suns didn’t make them fall into a coma at low levels of exposure or burn up at high levels. They weren’t terminally allergic to silver or garlic. And they could run faster than any zombie and they had flamethrowers. Only thing they didn’t have were long life-spans, long enough to do serious space exploration. Fangs, Wolves, and Reboots did, though, and there wasn’t much out here that could kill a Fang or a Wolf if it didn’t already know the weaknesses.

  The pay for a long cruise was excellent, and the Undead didn’t have to worry about dodging religious fanatics, or wolfing out and maybe hurting someone, or worse, or going comatose and vulnerable once the yellow sun came up. So, for the ones out of the broom closet, space exploration was the mainstream place to be. There were more volunteers than there were ships.

  So, things got along pretty smoothly, for the most part, back home, at least for the supernaturals that wanted to just get along with Norm society. Personally, Fred thought that a lot of them were sell-outs. You could still find a measure of freedom on some of the colony worlds, and a lot of the Paras that didn’t get exploration gigs had shipped out for those, or so he’d heard. But back on Earth? Stuck kowtowing to the whims of the Norms, never daring to even stick a toe over the line, always afraid of setting a “bad example” for the rest of your kind? To hell with that noise. The Fangs and Furs (the ones that weren’t Underground and actually had some moxie) all cued up for their shots at a ship as first choice, colony as second. Fangs for crew, a Wolf or two for crew and the fresh blood for the Fangs, and the zombies—the Reboots—for menial labor. Neither Fang nor Fur needed to worry about the Reboots chowing down on their brains. The Reboots ignored them both so far as feeding went. The Norms on Earth got rid of their problems, everything was one humming happy assembly line, and that didn’t matter for crap out here. Because once you got out here you found out what the real pecking order was, and you were looking at 300 years locked up in the same tin can as the creatures that considered you “Lunch That Talks.” And they’d really rather you didn’t talk, but just grovel and do what you were told.

  It was Fred’s job to make sure that the Reboots were sent to the right places and made to do the right jobs. He was a supervisor, for the most part, only taking care of the most sensitive jobs personally. At least he wasn’t just the Fang cafeteria; he’d been an engineer before he got bitten, and he still was an engineer now. Today, he had a sensitive job to take care of. The ship’s main drive was being finicky, so Fred had to eat some rads and fix it. On any vessel that held Norms, and there were a few, mostly Earth-system stuff, there were dozens of safeguards with redundancies and contingencies and so on. Not so for a ship like this. Supernaturals didn’t get hurt the same way that Norms did, so it was more acceptable to cut corners, and thus costs. Ah, the joys of space exploration.

  He’d take some Reboots along to hold lights and pass him tools. A few extra sets of hands never hurt, even if the hands were prone to falling off at the worst possible times. Antonio still hadn’t let him live down the time a Reboot’s finger had snapped off and shorted the grav generator.

  Fred pointed at the three nearest ones. “Command phrase: come with me. You, you, and you.”

  They didn’t bother naming the Reboots; they all were dressed in cheap red coveralls—which he thought was a nice touch—and all responded to “you” so long as they noticed someone was talking to them. One of the ghoulies looked somewhat startled—or at least as startled as a decayed corpse can look—when Fred spoke to him, but Fred shrugged it off and started marching them all to the lift that would take him to the reactor. It was probably nothing more than a nerve twitch. You never knew with the Reboots. Once he thought he’d caught the one that looked like a desiccated surfer dude trying to skateboard. He chalked it up to the Fangs trying to fuck with him.

  Were all the crews this dysfunctional? How could they be? How would anything get done if they were? Then again…paranoia set in. Because it was true that it wasn’t paranoia if “they” actually were out to get you, and there was no doubt that the minute the Norms thought the Paras just might get the upper hand, out would come all the stockpiled weapons, the stake- and Sun-guns, the garlic spray, the silver-coated everything, and lots and lots of flamethrowers. The Norms just preferred things to not be chaotic and messy and dangerous. So…Maybe that was the plan; send our Kinds out in the stars to kill each other. And meanwhile, find some planets the Norms could use; y’know, as a “nice if it happens” bonus. That would just figure. Have the bad luck to get Turned, and as a Were no less, only to get shipped off to the stars to deal with Larry, Curly, and Shithead for however long it took until one of you snapped and you all killed each other. The way these lowest-bidder ships are built, the Norms could probably afford that, and it wouldn’t be nearly as messy as a Norm versus Para war. He shook his head. Thinking in circles like this was sure to drive him mad.

  Or maybe this all was just paranoia, and the other crews all got along just fine, and the Universe had decided to stick Fred with the most petty, vain, and antagonistic bunch of bloodsuckers ever created. Given how his luck usually went…yeah, that would be about par for the course. It made more sense than some enormous Norm plot. Right?

  Not that it mattered to him at this point anyway. Because whether it was part of a huge plot against the Paras, or whether it was just bad luck, he was stuck here with the Divas of the Damned for the foreseeable future. He muttered more curses as he made his way to the engineering section, thinking of all of the different ways he’d like to kill his shipmates. Well, re-kill. Actually, all things considered, he wouldn’t feel unhappy if he got to re-kill all of them three or four times before finishing them off for good. A wolf can dream…

  Man, Fred had it bad. Me, it didn’t matter, the Fangs couldn’t get a kick out of verbally tormenting me, and when they were in a bad mood, I could just make sure I wasn’t the one within reach of their claws. It might get different later, when the numbers of us Reboots started getting a lot lower, but for now, I was just one more tree in the forest. Thing is, the Fangs could get all the reaction their hard little flint-like hearts desired out of Fred. The poor sap was a great big hairy ball of reaction, and the longer the trip went on, the shorter his fuse got. Reboots didn’t have any brains except the ones we were munching on—har har—so we didn’t notice and didn’t react. Fred though, he was the only Fur on the ship, and the only one who acted with resentment when they were looking for someone to verbally abuse that wasn’t one of them.The Fangs loved to make people squirm. I don’t get it. I never had much to do with any of the Paras before I got herded up with the rest, shoved into a red jumpsuit and stuck in the hold, so…were all Fangs like this? I don’t know. But this lot really took the “fun” out of “dysfunctional.” When Fred wasn’t around, they fought with each other. When he was around, they ganged up on him. It was like they weren’t happy unless they were spreading pain to something other than themselves. Maybe it was part of the pecking-order thing that Fangs always seemed to establish, and maybe they figured they each had to be the Alpha, Fearless Leader Supremo, at least over someone, or maybe that sort of thing came with being Turned. Or maybe we just got stuck with the biggest assholes the Fangs ever produced and the powers that be lumped all of them together to keep all the grief in one place.

  We arrived at the section where the malfunction was. Fred started pointing at each of us Reboots, positioning us where he needed us, and then went about the task of fixing what was wrong. I was just supposed to flip a switch whenever he told me to. Looked like something dealing with the ship’s coolant systems. A lot o
f heat got generated by the drives, and it needed some way to safely bleed off into space. I played along, allowing Fred to do his part and treat me like the others. It was boring, but it was better than…well, what? Rehydrating brains, I guess. Waiting to get broken beyond repair, like the others, like just another replaceable component on this ship? Or standing around and thinking. There’s nothing much around here that makes for comfortable thinking.

  Then things got even more “entertaining.” Grigoire decided to make his entrance when we were about halfway through and the ship was running on the APU—which meant no one got to do anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Grigoire took a special pleasure in torturing Fred; he really, really hated werewolves, more than the average Fang. Before Paras were outed to the entire world, Fangs and Furs were already at each other’s throats in some kind of eternal holy war, or something. When us zombies started causing enough trouble for the Norms, both sides came to a truce to try and “save the herd,” as it were. Didn’t seem to do much to quell the resentment and hatred that immortal beings can harbor in the long run though; a grudge seemed to age like fine wine with some of them.

  Grigoire was the vessel’s astrophysicist, which meant on a scale of one to ten on “Uptight Asshole-ness,” he scored a whopping seventy-three. He was probably the same when he was a Norm, if the near-ancient vids we have onboard of “Big Bang Theory” are to be believed.

  “Hey, Fuzzy Wuzzy. How’s it going with the repairs? Try not to get any dog hair in the components. It’s a pain to get out, you know?” He slapped on his best smile, which looked fake and painful stretched across perfect and blemish-free dead skin. “Oh wait, that’s right, you’re going to be the one to clean them out!” He laughed at his own humor. “Nevermind then, carry on.”

  “Grigoire, not now. Think of it like this: if I don’t do my job correctly, then the ship falls apart. If the ship falls apart, you’ll be getting really cozy with a couple of red dwarfs. And I’m not talking the Snow White kind either, sucker.” Fred was pissed. Poor bastard. In another unlife, I would’ve really had my withered heart go out to him. Here, he was just another prisoner that might end up busting me to pieces. “I don’t come tell you dirty jokes while you’re piddling with your equations, so how about you go brood about the unfairness of un-life, pine over the women you aren’t getting to bite, or write Goth poetry or something while I do my job?”

  “That’s really funny, flea-bag. Make sure to comb some insect-killer into that hair.”

  I’m not sure why, because it’s no worse than any of the other shit they call him, but there was something about that name that always got to Fred. He put up with a lot of crap from the Fangs; but what other choice did he have? But whenever they called him that, he got mean. Fred put down his tools with a loud clang and turned to face Grigoire, an ugly smirk on his face.

  “At least I still have all my hair. Must suck—hardy har—that you got bitten so late in life you were stuck with a comb-over. Tony said you were looking lighter around the North, by the way. You been picking at yourself again? You should know better than that. You haven’t got anything to spare up there.” Fred twirled a finger around the very top of his cranium, grinning evilly the entire time. And that was all that Grigoire needed. It’s an interesting thing, to see one of the Fangs really vamp out. It’s not too unlike the Weres, but a little more subtle. Grigoire’s eyes filled with murder and a cold fury that always unsettled me. Something happened that seemed to make the shadows deeper around him; calling on the infernal whatever-the-hell that animated Fangs, I suppose. He bared his terrible canines and leapt for Fred, claws extended. Fred partially transformed; his features became more bestial, with his hair growing longer and his muscles rippling and growing underneath his skin. He can do that half-transformation at will; he just can’t completely wolf out. He still has full control over himself in the half-state, which was good because if the wrong stuff was busted in this room, the ship had a fairly decent chance of exploding. Ah, lowest-bidder contracts…

  There was about sixty seconds of ultra-violence and way-too-fast ruckus, which was fortunately confined to a relatively robust part of the engine room; then Antonio appeared in the door, yelling at the top of his lungs. “Knock it off, morons!”

  They froze. Antonio is the captain. Top of the Fang food chain. I think there’s something in their instincts that makes the other Fangs obey him. Maybe he’s been Undead the longest, or he was born or Turned with a certain whatever that just made the others obey. Didn’t matter, they jumped when he said to. A good thing, too, since otherwise this would have been a hulk floating in space about three months into the mission, inhabited only by us decayed types until the brains ran out. Not so much because they knew how to kill each other without helpful tools like wooden stakes and silver, but because they’d probably have blown something up and gone through a bulkhead, with the end result being the lot of them sucked out into deep space to form a fighting ball until they all froze solid, or Fred ran out of air. The Fangs didn’t need air, but they wore suits to protect themselves from the cold—and to be able to talk to the ship and each other. At near zero Kelvin even a Fang will freeze solid and be unable to move. Fred, however, needed air, though he would last longer than a Norm would.

  “You!” Antonio said to Fred, pointing. “Back to work. I want a hot shower and a movie. And you—” he pointed to Grigoire. “Act like a civilized noble, and not a thug. You can always be demoted if I choose. As far down the chain as I care to put you.” Antonio always tried to play at being sophisticated and a part of “undead royalty.” I always thought it was a heaping pile of bullshit, personally. “So behave as if you deserve your position, or you’ll be second-in-command to Fido.” Tony got a wicked look on his face. “And I’ll let him tell you when you can eat.”

  Grigoire hated being talked down to by Tony, even though it was his place in the chain of command, but that was just a whole new level of insult. I don’t think it was my imagination, what there was left of such a thing, but matters were escalating around here. He shrieked a terrible and piercing wail, and then went to work on us Reboots. I’ve been around when either the Fangs go woolly, or Fred has his moon phases going on. But never in such close quarters. He ripped through us, pulling zombies apart with his hands, tearing at us with teeth. It was horrible to watch, but I couldn’t move. He was working his way towards me, and I didn’t dare run. To run would be to show that I knew what was coming—and that would show I could still think. I was dead either way. Well, dead again. Perma-dead. If I could have closed my eyes, I would have, but my eyelids are sort of glued in the open position.

  “Grigoire!” Tony used a worse voice than before. It was the sort of voice that you used with a dog that just took a dump on the carpet in front of you. The tone…I can’t describe it. If I’d had blood, it would have been frozen. More Fang powers. Even Fred went statue-still. Grigoire stopped with one clawed hand raised to rend me from stem to sternum.

  Tony was really pissed now. “Not in front of the help, fool of a child,” he hissed. “Back to your quarters! Now!” Grigoire fumed, shooting another savage look to Fred before he finally retreated. I tracked my eyes the barest few centimeters to look at Fred, then to Tony, trying to keep my face uninterested in the happenings around me. Kind of hard to be any more deadpan when you’re already dead.

  Fred cocked his head to the side. “That zombie looked at me funny.”

  Tony sighed heavily, squeezing the bridge of his nose with his fingers as if to stave off a migraine. I think that’s just another affectation on his part; I don’t think the Fangs have such human concerns as headaches. “That’s because you’re funny looking, Fred. Go take a flea bath or lick your ass or something. Just get the drives fixed first.” If I could still evacuate my bowels, that would’ve been the moment for me to. That had been…way too close. And dusty wheels had started to turn in my head.

  “Pete, what other choice do we have? We’re coming apart at the seams, here, lite
rally.” I pointed at Pete’s left shoulder; he had been wedged between a mainframe core and its housing while trying to install some new wiring, and one of our less-than-awake Reboot brothers decided to push anyways. I was sewing him back up. “Nobody ever tries to fix us, because we’re disposable!”

  “Dude, what’s the point? We go back home, and we’re just more deadheads. You know what they do to us, especially if they think we can talk and think and feel. Well, feel kinda, at least.” Every conscious Reboot remembered what happened to Xavier, the short-unlived “Lord of Zombies.” It hadn’t been pretty even by Reboot standards, which you had to admit were somewhere in the sub-sub-basement. “Get out of the gutter, so that those of us in the sewer can get some sun”, that sorta thing. Xavier had been the reason why the Fangs and the Furs came out of the broom closet to help the Norms in the first place. Zombies on their own can be dealt with pretty easily, if a Norm has a lick of common sense. But, when you have one that can think and command all of his rotting brethren? One that can plan, make strategy, and has an almost endless army that doesn’t care what parts get blown off while constantly replenishing itself? It was almost the end of the Earth. I wasn’t there to see it; I was turned years and years after. Doesn’t stop me from still getting shivers thinking about it.