Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  “Thirteen; back to New Andreas Central.”

  Her instructions given, it was time to report back to her bosses. This wasn’t the kind of report to give them over the channels. Now they had a whole new crime, perpetrated by a new set of suspects, along with an interstellar tangle of flight paths to unravel.

  Captain Dalbraith needed to hear that in person. The stars only knew how many people were already hard at work trying to break into the ALEB's computers, desperate to find out everything they could about the case. There was no safety or security on the mesh, not even for the police.

  So she would go back to the station and report this in person – if only so that the Captain had someone in front of him to blame when everything fell apart.

  Then he could put her on traffic!

  Chapter Five

  “Ship I'm going to get some coffee and take a rest if I can. If you can spare me, that is.”

  Carm was bored. He was exhausted too, his eyes red from rubbing them constantly, and he yawned incessantly. Mostly he was bored. The emergency had been going on for nearly a standard week now, and there was only so much worrying a man could do before he just gave up.

  “Spare you? That would suggest you've been of some use to begin with!” the ship launched immediately into a verbal attack. It had been doing that a lot lately. Now that Carm was no longer on the medical roster it had obviously decided he should be punished for his crimes. And the only punishment it could inflict was verbal.

  “You know ship, you missed your calling. With wit like yours you could have been a comedian on the holos.”

  “Oh such a stellar comeback! My, your parents must be proud! Your education was worth every credit!”

  Carm sighed but held his tongue. He just didn't have the energy to argue; besides there was a very real possibility that the AI was cleverer than he was.

  “Go get your coffee. Maybe it'll return enough life to that anatomical mistake you call a brain to remind you how important I am. How lucky you are to have me keeping you alive. And to maybe think about showing me a little respect.”

  Carm remained silent. He was too tired. In any case the ship was right: he couldn't survive without it. So he got up and headed for the door and the coffee. There weren't any imminent threats. They weren't about to explode. If they died it would be more of a slow, dull, boring death of a thousand cuts, a contest where they desperately struggled to repair the ship before it broke down beyond repair. But if they lost then what followed would be a lonely demise. Of course the ship would continue without him – but it would have nothing to do.

  There was nothing that could be done about that, nothing except to keep working and hope that they were ahead of any breakdowns. There would be plenty to come.

  Systems had been pushed to their limits. Many had failed the test, and many more had only just survived but would eventually fail. The real danger now were those systems whose state remained unknown, the systems which could fail without warning at the worst possible time – they couldn't fix what they didn't know was going to break.

  So far it appeared they were winning the battle. He and the bots were repairing systems faster than they were failing. The hull had been patched and the ship now had an atmospheric seal once more even if he'd cut the air to large parts of the ship to preserve what they had left. There was power running through most of the vital systems. The number of red lights flashing on the bridge consoles had decreased. And some judicious use of the EM drive had brought them within range of a nearby yellow star so that they could finally start charging the power cells.

  But they were only winning by the narrowest of margins so if something big failed, everything could still fall apart. Every time he fell asleep he didn't really know if he’d wake up to hope or doom, or if the ship had fallen apart or his body had failed.

  He was also winning his personal battle. The medbot had done a stellar job in patching him up. The shoulder still hurt but he could use the arm. Psychologically he was still reeling – and his counsellor wouldn’t be of help given she’d attempted to murder him. He felt more balanced than he had. Sleep, what little he'd had, had also helped along with the passage of time and being busy.

  Work was his blessing. It kept his mind from worrying, and it also stopped him from sinking into despair. He felt as if there was an abyss of pain which, if he fell into it, he wouldn’t be able to escape from.

  The hardest thing Carm had to deal with was the thought that he would never see his family again. While used to being away from them for months at a time, he could only do it because he knew he’d return to them. The Spacer's Guild looked for strong family connections as an indicator of mental fitness. It was the loners who were at the greatest risk of not returning.

  Now, though, he couldn't go home. He would have spent every credit he had just to see his family one more time. But he couldn't.

  Knowing that, he kept wondering what they were thinking right now? Did they imagine that he was really a terrorist as the police had claimed? Did they believe he'd murdered Bree? Was that lie now out over all the channels? His face on every holo? He couldn't stand thinking about it, the shame he'd brought them. His family were good people, respectable professionals. His parents were lecturers at New Andreas Tech, experts in synthetic engineering and systems robotics. His brothers and sisters were students and professionals. They weren't mad bombers. He didn't want them to believe he was.

  Instead of dwelling on what he couldn’t control he threw himself into work. He directed the bots and repaired whatever else he could himself. And when he wasn't working he spent maybe an hour or so in the galley recovering before going out again. Just then he was running on fumes. He would get some coffee and food, close his eyes for a few minutes and hope it would be enough to push him through a few more hours and a few more repairs.

  First he had to get to the galley and that was a challenge in itself. The Nightingale had thirty-odd service bots it used to keep the ship running, and all of them were in constant use. Currently they were rewiring the power conduits running the length of the ship. Most of those on the port side had been blown out during the jump.

  The wiring ran everywhere, connecting the entire ship, and it was in bad shape. Every so often, as another conduit channel was opened and a service bot probed to see if it was still functional, it would go bang in a spectacular display of sparks, which were hot enough to melt steel and start fires. He had to be careful not to be near one when that happened. And also not to walk on metal that was still hot. He'd melted several pairs of shoes already.

  It would have helped if the ship hadn’t been constructed as it was. The design was common enough for atmosphere-capable freighters such as the Nightingale. With its shape providing a little lift and the stabilisers guiding it, the ship could fly instead of just float. But with three decks and two full-length corridors on each one, with bots everywhere, it made for some interesting walks. Sometimes he could walk where he wanted to go, and at other times he had to swap corridors or take the stairs.

  Eventually he made it to the galley and then, as always, stopped and stared. It wasn't the galley that caught his eye – it was just a typical galley. An automated kitchen at one end with a massive ten metre wide stainless steel bench. A dining area in the middle where two twenty place tables of polished wood and more stainless steel were anchored to the floor. And at the far end of course the seating area. A dozen white leather couches and another dozen single leather easy chairs all anchored to the floor around the central dais which was where the ship's main holo would be displayed.

  It was a nice galley he thought. Well appointed, even if the leather was cloned leather, the wood a laminate and the carpet synthetic. But it was the glass coffin sitting on its plinth in the middle that grabbed his attention.

  Of course it was neither a coffin nor was it made of glass. It was a packing crate in which he normally stored mineral samples, made of a clear plastic that mimicked glass. It wasn’t
on a central plinth either, sitting on a laminate coffee table in the seating area to one side. Nevertheless the effect was the same when he could see the body lying inside it.

  He hadn't dumped Kendra as he should have done. There was just no way he could simply leave her or jettison her into the depths of space – that would have been beyond disrespectful. No matter how pointless or stupid he felt he had to treat her with respect.

  So he’d straightened her broken arm and covered her shattered fist with a shawl from her wardrobe. He'd laid her to rest. And then he'd had her planted on one of the tables almost as if he was holding a wake.

  That was not only a mistake but also a waste of time and resources. It probably also said something about the state of his mental health, something the counsellors of the Spacer's Guild would want to spend months if not years talking to him about. But really who were they to judge when they were the ones who insisted that every deep spacer vessel with only one occupant had an android companion?

  Carm did have to wonder how many other ship masters had been killed or nearly killed by their companion androids? He couldn't be the only one. Whatever had happened on Aquaria – the bombing, the attack by the police and everything which had followed including her trying to kill him – it was all connected and had be part of something bigger.

  Still, seeing Kendra in her packing crate coffin, lying on the coffee table like a Viking princess in a sequin dress, he knew his mental health was not good.

  Despite the insanity of it though, there was some reasoning in what he'd done. He needed answers and that meant fixing her up a little bit. She also needed to be watched when he wasn't around and the common area was under constant surveillance. The translucent plastic crate would make certain that if so much as a thumb twitched, it would be spotted instantly. He might be a lovesick, grief-stricken emotional wreck, but at least he was being cautious. She had no motor control, no power to her self-repair systems. Power was connected only to her neural cortex, senses and voice, and that was only a trickle. The box was sealed and well beyond her ability to escape from even if she'd been fully functional. Plus the ship had been commanded not to obey her under any circumstances. The only weapons she had left were words. They were dangerous enough though.

  “Carm baby?”

  “Yes?” he answered her tiredly, wondering what tactic she'd use today to destroy him. She had only her words, but she was inventive and determined. Some days she would tempt him into making a mistake and repair her – so she could kill him. Other days she tried to use his sympathy against him, to make him believe she was hurting and that it was all some misunderstanding – or that she was better now. Some days despair and lies were her tactics, in an effort to break his will and make him give up the fight for survival.

  The sensible thing would have been to jettison her, so why had he kept her? She would always pose a danger if she was around.

  He kept telling himself that she still might provide him with some useful information – though deep down he knew that that was a lie. Even if she did tell him what he wanted to know, the information would be useless. He also lied to himself that he would be able to fix her – but he had no knowledge of how to reprogram an android, and no equipment or spare parts.

  The truth was that he simply didn't want to be alone.

  “You look nice.”

  “You can't see me.” She could, but only a little. Stuck in her coffin, the most she would have seen would be a fuzzy image in her peripheral vision. And he didn't want her pretending to be nice. That hurt.

  “I can see enough.”

  “So this time it's going to be lies and temptation as you try to get me to fix you?” He poured himself a cup from the pot and immediately started blowing on it. It was the freeze-dried instant stuff that had been stored away for nearly a decade – all he had left – but at least it was hot.

  Kendra had only a few strategies she could use, broken as she was. Lying to him, pretending she was recovered from her virus as she claimed it was, and then urging him to fix her was one of them.

  “It's not going to work.”

  When the coffee was cool enough he took the first sip of the black nectar, needing the comfort it brought. He thought about getting a sandwich from the food dispenser – until he remembered that there were no sandwiches left. The dispenser was working but the auto-chef was broken. He'd have to settle for a ration bar. Those would remain fresh in their little plastic wrappers until the stars went cold.

  “But we could be together again.”

  He could imagine the seductive look she’d be giving him just then if she’d been able to. He refused to look at her, concentrating instead on his coffee.

  “So you can try to kill me again?”

  “Don't be like that. You know I never wanted to hurt you. And I'm better now. I've run a diagnostic and corrected the problem. It was just a virus.”

  It was probably true about the virus. It would have been the easiest way to be reprogrammed. The rest of it was a lie – her program had to have been completely rewritten if it had overcome the basic inhibition against harming someone. That wasn't fixable. Carm idly wondered if Billingsgate Lucius Scientific would give a refund – but she was probably out of warranty.

  “So then you'll tell me who reprogrammed you to kill me? Who set me up as the mad bomber?”

  “You know I can't do that.” She added a little disappointment to her voice, sorrow that she couldn't do as he’d asked. As if she really wanted to. “I want to but when I purged the virus the knowledge went with it.”

  “Uh huh,” his disbelief was obvious.

  “Don't you want us to be together?”

  “Of course,” he lied, though it was also true. But he didn't want to die. “You’re asking me to put my life in your hands again when you've already tried to kill me. You’ve given me no proof that anything you say is true. How can I trust you?”

  “You can trust me. You can always trust me,” she pleaded, the emotion so real that it almost persuaded Carm. Almost.

  “No I can't. You've given me nothing. If you want me to trust you have to give me something. Something I can verify.”

  “You know I'll tell you anything I can. Anything at all.”

  “Fine, then how did the virus enter your programming? When was it entered? What else did you do to set me up as the bomber? Who is your master?”

  Carm sipped at his coffee, knowing that he wouldn't get an answer. Her programming wouldn't allow her to give away the identity of her master. Not when there was a chance, no matter how unfathomably tiny, that he could find his way home and tell the police. He also knew that she would be thinking about it. Because if she wanted to kill him she had to be fixed, and he was the only one who could. She needed to eliminate the threat he posed to her master.

  Carm finished his coffee and his ration bar and thought about returning to work. He was tired, but the power regulation systems wouldn’t fix themselves and the ship's bots could only do so much. Kendra's silence had held as he'd expected it to.

  “I'm scared Carm… being like this…” Kendra spoke up as he made to leave.

  She'd changed tactics he realised. Tempting him had given way to eliciting sympathy. She’d done that before but Carm was ready for it. She was lying, but he could lie too.

  “And I don't want you to be like this. But you have to give me something. A name. Some facts. Something I can verify. I can never trust you otherwise.”

  “I don't know much,” She did her best to sound frightened and the worst of it was that she was convincing. Even knowing what he did, Carm couldn't shake the nightmarish thought that she was scared. Maybe there really was something wrong with his psyche. Something dark side. But he put that out of his head.

  “Much?” That was new, Carm thought. Normally she would say she didn't know anything. So was she breaking? Or had she simply decided that she had a better chance if she gave him just a little information so he would repair her
? She must know the ship hadn't fallen apart. The odds of him repairing it and finding his way home were slowly swinging in his favour. “But you do know something?”

  “I know I sent information about you, your biometric data and schedule to an unlisted ident address on our last stay on Aquaria. I used the terminal in the solarium.”

  “Thank you,” Carm replied, hopefully sounding grateful, and to make her believe that he could be persuaded. He knew that what she'd given him would be useless. She wouldn’t have given him anything he could actually use. However, this was a game of liars. Kendra would tell him nothing of value if she could avoid it, so he would give her nothing in return. Meanwhile he’d try to find some value in what she did tell him and she would hope that he was falling for her lies. “I'll check it out as soon as I can. But that part of the ship was badly damaged. There may be nothing there.”

  It wasn't damaged at all as far as he knew though he hadn't checked. But the solarium was a low priority for repairs – the last thing he needed at the moment was a tan. But if he could convince her that it was then maybe that would persuade her to give him something more. This was going to be a very tricky game.

  But after he'd drank his coffee, which had returned a little life to his tired brain, and left the galley to head back for the power regulation controller, he realised that that was what it was: a game. Maybe later he'd head to the solarium and see if he could find anything. Then he'd plan his next move.

  If he couldn't have her as a lover and a counsellor, then it might be better if she was his enemy. Of course the ship would probably have something to say about that. It would no doubt suggest counselling.

  “Ship.”

  “Aren't you supposed to be resting?”

  “I can't rest any more. Where's the next fault?”

  “Inside that thing you call a brain! You are in no fit state to be working. Least of all on me!”