REBOOTS

by Mercedes Lackey

  I wasn’t going to give up on my plan, however, because I didn’t see how we had anything to lose. If we did nothing, we were consumables anyway, and eventually they’d be down to just me and Pete. “Do you want to get flushed out of an airlock? Our brothers and sisters can’t tell the difference; they’d just float along, hungry as ever and not knowing the difference. But we’re awake, man. If we’re not insane now, think about what an eternity floating in nothing would do to you. Or if you got ripped apart—there you are, conscious and watching your bits get shoved into the recycler.”

  “Dude, listen.” Pete had been a professional surfer, or so he claimed, before he had become a Reboot. He retained the sometimes annoying habit of reverting back to his former speech patterns when he was perturbed. “I get what you’re saying, man, really I do. But look at us. We’re just a couple of stiffs, man. They’re Fangs and a Fur. What do we got against all five of them, dude? Seriously.”

  Then it hit me. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. Not only did we need to ensure we weren’t in line for the next temper tantrum, we needed an ally. And it wasn’t going to be a Fang. “Fred.”

  “Fred, what?” Sometimes Pete can be so dense. I mean, dense even for a Reboot. It clicked for him a few seconds later, and realization shone through his milky-white eyes. “Dude. You’re fucking insane already. You know that?” But that wasn’t disbelief I heard in his voice. It was cautious admiration.

  “Yeah? Who else gets a shorter, shittier stick than us? Fred. Who’s got as many brains as Grigoire, and gets treated like the third-world hired help? Fred. Who would give anything to see every Fang on this ship turned into corpsicles? Fred.”

  Pete rubbed his stomach woefully. “Man, you know better than to say brains around me. I still got the urges, dude.”

  I smacked him lightly. “Focus, butthead. Fred hates them worse than we do. And—” I paused for effect. “Fred can pilot this boat.”

  “Yeah but…oh, dude. If we come outta the closet…” he shook his head—carefully, to avoid dislodging anything. “Even if he’s okay with it…that can’t be taken back, like, there’s no do-over, and he has that any time he needs to pull something out for the Fangs.”

  I laced my rotten fingers behind the patchy scalp at the back of my head. “Pete, sometimes…you’ve just got to look at the bigger picture.”

  Whenever it was scutwork that had to be done outside, it was Fred that did it. Usually. He was actually getting out of most of it in this star system, with six visible moons at any one time dirtside for the planet they were orbiting, so there was a lot of “full moon” time—during which he was pretty useless. Inside the ship, he could stay human as long as he didn’t get mad and decide to go half-wolf. Outside? All bets were off.

  Though, just before the “drive incident,” Grigoire had locked him out to get back at him for some other petty damn thing, leaving him out for half a day. He’d pounded on the airlock door for an hour, screaming at them.

  “Come on guys, will you let me in already? I’ve had like five minutes of me-time since you—HROOOOOOOOOO!”

  “Someone turn Fred loose again?”

  Yeah. Real funny. Wolfing out wasn’t any fun for Fred, “he” got lost in the animal and he damn well didn’t like it. After it ended, it was mostly a blur of images for him. Back on Earth? Lots of blood and terrible memories. Here, in deep space with nothing but Undead that he hated worse than the Dark Prince? Promises of dreams to come, and as a sort of compensation he could plant the Fang-faces over the vague images of whatever it was he’d ripped into. Still, he didn’t like being out of control like that. Well, now they could tote their own barges and lift their own bales. He got to stay in the ship.

  Which of course meant…he had to stay in the ship. Inside the same walls, breathing the same canned air, watching the Reboots. Reading. Watching the Reboots. Rewatching the vid library. Watching the Reboots. It was getting so he was even considering cracking into the opera collection that only Tony ever watched. The best thing about being able to get outside was the air on the planets that had them—even when he was human, his sense of smell was better than a Norm’s. So even with the CO2 and stink-scrubbers, there was always this faint stench in the back of his nose from the Reboots. The Fangs wouldn’t notice, of course; he didn’t think they actually had a sense of smell anymore; most of them didn’t need to breathe, outside of speech. As far as he could tell, all they could smell was blood; and the only one with the fresh stuff was Fred. But Fred’s sense of smell extended outside the bounds of known science; he could compartmentalize a million different scents, and discriminate among them. Almost all of them were disgusting on this cruise. That made the times of being able to get out on a planet all the more important.

  So he was stuck in here, which only made him think more, about a lot of uncomfortable things. There were only so many new deaths that he could imagine for his shipmates, so even that grew boring eventually. Ugly notions kept intruding. He knew the Reboots were expendable, but what if they all were? What if the Home Service actually expected them to kill each other out here? That might explain the fantastic rate of pay; if they weren’t expected to make it back, it wouldn’t matter how much the pay-rate was because no one would ever collect.

  He shook his head, hoping to banish the ominous implications of his line of thought. There was work to be done, and it seemed like more than usual. The ship was always malfunctioning these days, but now that he was feeling irritable all the time, even the ship seemed to be trying to torment him. Such an idea, of course, was at odds with his logical brain; it was just the nature of such a sophisticated piece of machinery, just like it was in his nature to go berserk with a full moon and for the Fangs to be assholes. More so, really—the ship might be sophisticated in design, but she was still built by the lowest bidder. Still…things had been happening that just were not in the list of “malfunctions.”

  For instance, the lighting. It was never, never, never to have a UV component except in his personal quarters, or for the onboard hydroponics garden; a garden that was for his sole benefit. He had to eat, after all, and though Wolf might live by frozen steak alone, Man did not, and this thing supplied all the needs—veggies, algae, and this fish called tilapia that bred like rabbits and sucked up seasoning so at least it didn’t taste the same all the time. Some of the bulbs had gone missing not long ago. He suspected at the time that one of his crewmates was going to be playing a particularly painful prank on him. So, naturally, as soon as one of the Fangs got a sunburn from a replaced bulb, he was the first one blamed.

  Not a malfunction, and not an “accident.” More like an “on purpose.” But the Fangs all claimed innocence, and he knew that he hadn’t done it—not that he could prove otherwise. It was almost as if there was a third party around here. Which, of course, was impossible. He’d heard of haunted ships before, but this one had been vetted back in dry-dock as spirit free; one of the few things that the Home Service seemed to have done correctly on this flight. Could a ghost have somehow hitched a ride? But how? Ghosts were chained to places or things, and they hadn’t taken on anything new. Not even a spare part, much to his chagrin. And he’d booted all the gremlins out on their shakedown run as he was supposed to do; that’d been three days of nonstop fun, crawling through wiring ducts, Jeffries tubes, and hydraulics.

  Hell, maybe he was sleepwalking and he really had done it.

  Just one more charming item to add to his list of aggravations.

  “He’s dead, Jim.” We were in the engineering section again. Whenever the Fangs or Fred didn’t need us, those of us Reboots left outside of the holding pen were free to roam around, weighed down with tool belts. Kind of like free-floating tool chests with limited maintenance ability; if something minor was wrong, just point at one, give it the command, and have it do a job. If we got busted wandering around it wasn’t as if it mattered.

  One of our brethren had just that happen to him. I stared down at what was left of him. It wasn
’t even remotely pretty, and even as distant as my own emotions now were, I felt sick. “Must’ve been one of those damned Fangs; Fred doesn’t really knock us around, unless he’s wolfed out and can’t tell the difference.”

  He was in pieces, some of which were still squirmy and half-attached. I looked down at him and felt a dim desperation. Pete stared down at the bits too. He made a grunt that sounded uneasy, but before he could voice any objections, I cut him off, so to speak. “Pete, we can’t stop now. Do you remember what happened when you died the first time? Before you came back?”

  Pete shook his head. “Naw, man. I do remember I had caught a killer wave the day I died, and had found some good herb, too, but that’s about it.”

  What I half-remembered woke the one emotion I could really feel well—Fear. “Well, I remember. I didn’t see any pearly gates, or fiery brimstone, or a light at the end of the tunnel. I sure as Hell didn’t get reincarnated, unless someone stole my spot in line. I just remember darkness before waking up again.” I played with a frayed tatter of the broken Reboot’s red jumpsuit. It had been…well, empty, a void, a nothingness that is hard for me to describe now, and I doubt I could have described when I was alive. All I know is it was negation. The absence of life, the absence of me. It’s what I imagined regular Reboots were like, all the time. Blank, empty on the inside, no purpose. “That scares the crap outta me, Pete. I didn’t do much when I was alive, and I don’t want to waste this second chance, such as it is.”

  Sighing out of habit rather than because I actually had breath, I took out a screwdriver from my coveralls, and plunged it through the eye of the ruined Reboot. Destroying what’s left of the brain does destroy us permanently. It’s about the only thing that does, other than incineration. Getting ripped to shreds will leave us helpless, but still “conscious” as long as the brain is mostly intact. Killing the shredded Reboot was a small kindness, all things considered.

  Good old Barny decided to get revenge on Fred and his fellow Fangs.

  Someone reported a landing strut sensor misread. Fred went out to check it, during the twenty or so minutes when there were no moons up. And…tried to get back in, only to discover the airlock door mysteriously sealed, and he spent another forty-eight hours wolfed out and locked out. Barny wasn’t too good at figuring consequences, however, because he’d locked Fred out under the moons with only a day’s worth of stored blood left. Bad timing. Antonio was not happy. Come to think of it, he never was. This had pushed him from “glowering and miserable” to “glowering and furious.”

  The Fangs had been forced to go hungry for almost twenty-four hours, and once they got an exhausted (but well fed!) Fred back on the ship, Tony had ordered them up into orbit to keep it from happening again. Fred was not a happy puppy, and that was not the only reason. Today sucked, and in more ways than one. It seemed that the ship was being extremely touchy; there were a number of subsystem failures that, while not serious, were time-consuming. Not only did he have to deal with the aggravation of having his crewmates bitch and moan to him about all of it and “Why wasn’t this fixed already;” it was also a feeding day. He was due to report to the medical bay in fifteen minutes; and at the last minute, Tony evidently decided that this was enough time for Fred to check out a potential atmosphere leak in the observation deck, so that everyone didn’t suddenly decompress. Not that decompression would bother the Fangs or even the Reboots, but he would die, and that would leave the Fangs without food. At this point, Fred thought that dying quick and easy like that would be better than continuing on this trip. He wouldn’t have to listen to them anymore, and his own last thoughts would be of how nice it was that they would die slowly and painfully of starvation, or much more slowly and not so painfully of starvation while sleeping. Bad things happened to Fangs that don’t feed and stay awake too long, and it wasn’t much better for the ones that went into hibernation when food got scarce.

  Grumbling loudly and cursing his lot in life, he stepped into the anteroom for the observation deck. Something that caught his attention was that the doors leading from the other sections were all locked, for some reason. He mentally shrugged; probably just another bullshit prank by one of the Fangs. Grigoire again, more than likely. Tony had come damn near to demoting Grigoire to “Fred’s helper,” and he’d only been talked down from it by the rest of the Fangs pointing out it would be a bad precedent.

  Fred finally reached the observation deck—and immediately sensed that something was off. Next to one of the doors was a Reboot, and it was looking directly at him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recognized it as the one he’d caught on a skateboard.

  And it talked.

  “Sorry, bro. This’ll only last a couple of minutes.”

  The zombie flicked a switch, and closed the door between the two of them. Before Fred could even register what had happened, the outer shutters for the observation canopy slid open, letting the cold light of three full moons in through the viewport.

  “Goddamnit, Tony. Fred was supposed to be here five minutes ago. I’m hungry!” Hephaestus, the ship’s navigator, was the whiniest of the Fangs. Whining was irritating to everyone, and only aggravated all the worst traits of the inborn jerk in each of the rest of the Fangs.

  Not that any of them were going to win Miss Congeniality. Even Fangs considered all other Fangs jerks.

  Tony scowled, and made a quick revision in the feeding order. “You’ll get your share, Hephaestus, just like the rest of us. Today, you’re going last, though, and if you make another single peep about it I swear to all the dark and sharp things of the Underworld that you’ll be floating home.”

  Hephaestus looked down, cowed by his superior. Grigoire and Barnabas shared a nasty grin. Any suffering was good suffering, as far as they were concerned, and for Barnabas, this meant he got to move up one in the queue.

  The intercom started up with a pop and a crackle. Tony rolled his eyes. Another malfunction. They’d stopped using the intercom on his orders because they were all playing “dueling DJ” on the damn thing for the first six years of the trip. Grigoire was the first to look up and cock his head to the side. “I know this song…”

  “I see the bad moon arising.

  I see trouble on the way…”

  Tony had particularly keen hearing, and he was the first one to hear the main doors for the medical bay open, even past the music. He turned away from Heph towards the door. “About time, Fred. The damn intercom is on the fritz again. Besides, this vampire likes his room service prompt—” Tony didn’t even have to take the milliseconds to sweep his eyes to the door to know what was wrong. He heard it, and smelled it. Fred was a monster, and bigger than ever; the more moonlight he took in, the more powerful he became when he wolfed out. All Weres were that way; luckily, Earth only had one moon to shed its light on all the dark creatures she possessed. Fred had become a nightmare of eight feet of hair, claws and jaws, and had murder in his dark eyes.

  They were running, but not nearly fast enough.

  Fangs and Weres were both blessed with many dark gifts. Strength enough to topple buildings, supernatural senses, and in the Fangs’ case remarkable powers of persuasion. Provided, of course, the individual Fang trying to do the persuading wasn’t a complete douchebag. There are some things not even supernatural manipulation can overcome.

  Like being a douchebag. Or an enraged and moonlight-drunk Werewolf in full form.

  They were also inhumanly fast. Of the two species, though, the Weres were faster, and Tony cursed this racial difference now more than ever. Fred had been on top of the group before anyone could even bare his fangs. They had been in the medical bay for blood, and blood they received; it was splattered messily on every surface. Some of it was Fred’s, but most of it was his vampiric compatriots’.

  Fred regenerated at an incredible rate; they could have, as well, if they were supplied with fresh blood, but the only fresh blood was in Fred’s veins and…he wasn’t exactly cooperating.

  So th
ey had run; Fred’s Change could only last so long, if he didn’t come in contact with moonlight.

  For some reason, though, every single viewport shutter was wide open. Due to the way the ship was positioned above the planet they were supposed to be surveying and evaluating, they had visible moons on almost every side; three completely full ones above them, in relation to the ship’s rotation. Fred kept getting stronger, and they kept running. There was no silver on the entire ship; the Mission Planners from the Home Service reasoned that Fangs or Weres killing each other would be suicide. Without food, the Fangs would wither and sleep and maybe die before they could get back to Earth. So no silver.

  As for the Fangs, the planners counted on “safety in numbers,” or so the brochure said. A single Were couldn’t hope to overpower the rest of the crew by his (or her, though female Weres were much rarer) self. That should have kept the Fangs in control. Obviously, the planners hadn’t counted on a situation like this one—multiple moons, all the viewports wide open, ship in orbit, and no way to get the ports shut without getting torn into tiny pieces. Well, someone might have been able to get the ports shut in one section, if he volunteered to be the one that would end up shredded. Right. That was never going to happen. An altruistic, self-sacrificing vampire? Get real. One of the reasons they made it through getting Turned in the first place, rather than ending up another messy victim on a slab, was the fierce determination to live no matter what it cost. Which was, when you thought about it, more or less the definition of being self-centered.

  So they ran, desperately.

  “He’s right behind us, we’ve got to move!” Grigoire’s voice was a shrill scream; he had lost his left arm in one of the running battles, and it was only now starting to regenerate. Barnabas looked worse, almost as bad as a fresh Reboot; cuts and grievous wounds covered his entire body. He was holding his guts in with both arms and hobbling pitifully on a leg that had been twisted completely around in its socket. They all felt so weak. They were past due for their blood ration from Fred; it didn’t help that he was spilling their claret, expending their life force with each swipe of his claws or flashing of his horrid jaws. They also were looking to each other with hunger; they could drain one of their own, replenish their strength…but Fred was chomping at their heels and they didn’t even have time for that.