Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  There was something very wrong there. The Navy was hiding something. That the military would be heavy-handed was no surprise, and neither was the fact they couldn’t control the population. To be so blatant about it however, and that it didn’t bother them that they were killing innocents was a surprise. And that they didn't care that they’d be exposed for doing so was a complete shock. Who didn't care that they were being exposed as murderers?

  She could only assume that it was because they were panicking. Obviously they thought the mutes were planning something big. But what? What could be that big?

  “Honey, you're supposed to be up and dressed!”

  Startled, Annalisse looked up to see her mother in the room. And then she felt guilty, because her mother was right. This was the day she was getting out of here. But she'd spent so long lying in bed feeling sorry for herself and angry, that she'd forgotten to get dressed.

  “Sorry, I was sore.” It was the truth. Broken ribs hurt and so did bone chips out of a pelvis. The shameful thing was that the Navy’s medbots could have done something, but they'd limited themselves to treating only her most critical injuries. They'd also filled her with drugs designed to cause maximum suffering, concoctions that prevented the body from healing, or even releasing its own natural painkillers. Torture drugs in other words. Drugs that had been outlawed. Seemingly the law didn't apply to the military.

  The result was that all her injuries had become inflamed and arthritic and were going to take longer to heal. Many of her colleagues were in equally bad shape, and some of them would never wake up again. These were police officers, not enemy combatants. And she knew that the Navy weren't going to apologise. They weren't going to be held accountable. They weren't even going to answer questions. No one could sue them or get any form of justice for the acts they had perpetrated.

  Shards knew how much she wanted to find them and then pump them full of their own drugs! But, even as the anger filled her again, she controlled it. She had to because nothing could come of it and in the end she was a police officer. If she didn't hold to the law she was no longer an officer. And if she wasn't an officer of the law then she didn't know what she was.

  Annalisse levered herself up out of the bed slowly, nearly collapsing in the act. But her mother was there to help. At least there was one person she could rely on. Her bot was still in the technician’s scrapyard: Thirteen was considered untrustworthy. The armed forces had turned into a military jackbooted bunch of power-mad swine and couldn't be relied on. Her bosses were bastards. And now even her colleagues in the ALEB were turning out to be mutes. It was beginning to look as if there were very few she could trust – just her family. Perhaps that was the way it had always been.

  Eventually, with a lot of struggling and a fair amount of wincing, she managed to tie a robe around herself and then collapse into a waiting hover chair. There was no point in getting dressed she decided. She was only going to the roof where her father would no doubt be waiting with the family floater. Besides, she didn't have much left in the way of clothes – they’d been ruined in the collapse of the evidence cage.

  Once she was in the chair she recovered her breath. It was amazing how much energy everything took when your body wasn’t working properly. But she had time as her mother rushed around the few cupboards surrounding the bed pulling out bits and pieces and throwing them in a carry bag.

  Time enough to nod to Jenson, keeping vigil beside Minda's bed. The two of them were close: they’d come through training together and been brought to the same station. But Minda had been a little too close to De Vries as far as the Navy was concerned, and he'd had an extra few sessions with the drugs and the interrogators. He wasn't as bad as some but neither had woken up and the doctors were now talking about moving him to the traumatic brain injury ward. Shards only knew how his family were coping as they too sat vigil beside him. She'd not seen so many worried faces before.

  “You know De Vries got away?” Jenson hardly looked at her as he kept his eyes on his friend.

  “Hadn't heard.”

  “Got it from Valia. She says he and his family vanished. Got clear away. Now they think they're off-world.”

  Annalisse thought about that, wondering what she was supposed to say, or what she was supposed to think. But then, De Vries was a brother officer. He'd never been anything but that. He'd certainly never harmed anyone as far as she knew. He certainly wasn't a mad bomber like White had been. He hadn't brought this mess on them. In the end even if he was a mute he was still a cop. Meanwhile the Navy were cop killers. They were every bit as bad as White. And that was what gave her the answer.

  “Good.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Ship, why would someone bomb a hydroponics reserve?” Carm asked, not really expecting an answer. He was more thinking out loud than anything else.

  “How should I know? None of you organics seem to have much in the way of reasons for anything you do.”

  “That's useful.” Carm rubbed his chin. He hadn't shaved in weeks and the fuzz on his face was starting to itch. He should shave – it would only take a minute. And from the feel of his skin he was sure there were some pimples growing beneath the bristles. He just couldn't work up the energy though.

  Three months in deep space, one day following another and all of them exactly the same. He'd never been out for so long. And all he could see ahead of him was more of the same. If the Nightingale held together – luckily it seemed to be doing so – he could grow old and die doing nothing more than searching for home.

  Which led to the billion credit question: what else could he do? He had fifty systems locked into the computers. Fifty translation points he could jump to. However, only two of them possessed worlds with anything like breathable atmospheres. He was probably pushing way ahead of the curve as far as luck went. He could jump hundreds more times and never find another.

  He could indulge himself in the ship's entertainments: a vast library of holo novels, any number of shows he could watch, endless board games and a gym he could kill the hours in. He’d tried all of them, but none held his attention for long. Nothing could keep his thoughts away from the abyss of despair surrounding him, or the fear that the endless search for home was pointless. He was doomed. Lost forever. He would never dance again with his friends.

  That thought was permanently with him now, along with another – that perhaps, in spite of everything, he would have been happier with Kendra, even after she’d tried to kill him. There’d be no more despair. There wouldn’t be any more hope either and that cut the deepest.

  Out of desperation and boredom, he'd turned to his investigation, searching for clues as to who’d committed the crime, and he’d realised one thing instantly: it had been an android. It was so obvious.

  Admittedly he had an advantage over the police in coming to that understanding. As he'd studied the images of himself planting the device he’d known without a doubt that it wasn’t him. That left only identical twins – he didn't have one, clones – but who would spend thirty years raising a clone of him just to bomb a hydroponic reserve? The only other solution – an android.

  There was one other piece of evidence helping him in reaching that conclusion, one that the police didn't have – his android companion had tried to kill him. And she'd admitted sending his biometric data to someone – the exact information they would need to make a perfect copy of him. So one android had framed him while another had helped it and then tried to kill him. It didn't take a genius to conclude the two were connected, and that if one was an android, so was the other.

  Two androids? Or was it more? That troubled him. Could this be some sort of awakening of android intelligence? Were they taking over the Commonwealth? Was this a B-grade holodrama plot? One of the sensationalist stories plastered all over the mesh? Or was it more likely that someone had reprogrammed them? He suspected the latter.

  Androids had been around for a very long time, and so had bots and al
l manner of artificial intelligences. The ship's computer was an AI. They were all smart and capable of fooling people into believing that they were more than that. But hitherto they’d always obeyed their programming. When one went mad, broke down or did something strange, the fault could be traced to its code. Always. There had never been a case of them spontaneously evolving into some truly self-aware life-form. He strongly suspected there never would be. It just wasn't what they were.

  But that doubt still remained. And it was there for one very simple reason. They had done it. Plus androids didn’t need food. Bombing a hydroponic reserve was a no-win move for a human, but for an android it was at the least a no-lose situation and it cost them nothing.

  Now at least he did have a suspect: Maximilian White-Jones. Admittedly he was only a suspect because Kendra had been a type 23 BLS android companion produced and updated by White’s company. If anyone had had the opportunity to reprogram her, it would have been him. But he was also a sharding smug bastard and Carm felt that counted against him.

  Most damning though was that Carm knew the man somewhat. He recalled receiving communications from him after he'd bought the Nightingale. That had been enough, along with his connection to Kendra, to make the man a suspect. That and the fact that he had contacted him to make a somewhat shady request. The man had wanted him to run some errands for his company. He’d promised to upgrade his android for him in return. Maybe throw a few credits his way as well.

  Carm had refused of course; it hadn't felt right. White could have got anything legit transported by a normal freighter. He had the credits. That made it suspicious. But Carm had also seen the man’s smile and had instinctively distrusted him. He had a predatory smile. Maybe that refusal had been enough to make the man hatch some maniacal seven or eight year-long plan to destroy him? It seemed unlikely. No one could hold a grudge over such a small thing for so long – could they? But he still didn't like the man, except perhaps as a suspect.

  The question was, what would he gain from bombing a hydroponics reserve? What would anyone gain? He’d gone to a lot of trouble, had probably spent a lot of credits, and had risked his future to do it. There would have to be a pay off. Something more than just framing him and getting him killed. No matter how much the industrialist disliked him, Carm wasn't stupid enough to believe he would go to all that trouble just to murder him. He wasn't that important.

  However his ship might be!

  From out of nowhere the thought popped into his head and then wouldn't stop shouting. White had wanted him to make some deliveries, illicit ones. Carm was convinced of that even though the man hadn't actually said it. So, he’d reprogrammed one android to frame him for a crime and another to kill him if he got away from the police. Plus Kendra had said he no longer served a purpose. Could that purpose be as the master of a ship making a clandestine delivery run for Max White? And if he was dead the ship would be put up for sale afterwards, when someone with no obvious connection to White but with the industrialist's hands deep in their pockets could buy it.

  For what seemed like ages Carm suddenly felt something that wasn't depression. Excitement perhaps, even hope. He didn't know what it was. But it was something more than he’d felt for a while. Cogs whirred into in tired brain, and he suddenly saw other possibilities, other suspects.

  “Ship, trace Kendra's steps in the months before we became lost. Flash it up for me as a map.” Perhaps he figured, if she had been reprogrammed to do one thing, like kill him, why wouldn't she have been reprogrammed to do something else as well? Like hide things aboard the ship. What else had she been doing?

  “Do I have to waste time and computational power considering that second rate bucket of bolts?”

  “Yes you do.” Carm could have said something else, perhaps commented on the ship's apparent jealousy of a badly programmed android, but there didn't seem to be any point.

  The ship instantly flashed the Nightingale's floor plans. Three decks all laid out for him to see side by side. Over that it plotted Kendra's routes through the ship over the months as yellow lines. It didn't take long to see she'd been wandering to parts of the ship she shouldn't have. Normally she should have kept to the crew sections of the Nightingale but, judging from the tracery of yellow lines building up, she'd been regularly visiting the number two hold. Why?

  The number two hold wasn't the main one, as it was directly under the oversized EM drive meaning it had a low ceiling height, four metres compared to the eight of the main hold. It was short too because the huge antimatter generators were just in front of it. Because of that he didn't use it for much. The samples he took, the mining machinery and fabrication equipment were all in the main hold. Number two was mostly where he stored any excess equipment and reserve thruster fuel. It was also somewhere that he almost never went.

  “Ship, show me the feeds from the hold.”

  The ship did as he asked and immediately Carm had images from the half-dozen cameras in it displayed. They showed him much what he'd expected to see, a near empty hold with lots of bare steel walls. Yet he didn't believe the images. After all if there was nothing there why would Kendra have kept visiting it? And, though he didn't like to think about it, there was always one use a ship could have for an unscrupulous man: smuggling. And smugglers wouldn't leave items out in the open where they’d be seen. But what was he smuggling? And what did it have to do with the hydroponics reserve which had been bombed? Carm couldn't imagine that it had anything to do with crops.

  “Let's get a service bot down there with an x-ray scanner. I want that hold scanned from one end to the other. Also look for evidence of recent tool marks.”

  “Tool marks?! You think that primitive junk heap was messing with me?” The ship almost sounded angered by the idea.

  “I think this is all about smuggling. And I think you don't watch what the bots and androids do.”

  “Of course not! Why would I? Least of all that putrid pile of scrap metal!”

  And there, in all its electronic brilliance, was the security hole that Kendra had exploited – a gap that any bot or android could exploit if they knew about it. Machines didn't watch other machines unless there was reason to. They kept watch on people and other organics. And so, unless an android tripped an alarm, they ignored them. Machines had no curiosity. That was how an android had planted a bomb in the hydroponics reserve. And it was how Kendra had got away with doing whatever she’d been up to in the hold. Carm felt nauseous as he realised it.

  “But you will from now on. So let’s find out what she was up to.”

  The Nightingale carried x-ray scanners primarily to check the quality of welds, in case of failure. It was always best to know if a weld was about to deteriorate before it gave way. But the scanners could do much more than that. If there was a secret compartment in there, the scanner would find it. And when it did he would have an answer.

  Carm sat in the galley nervously looking at the holo. He couldn’t have said why he was nervous. Because he might find an explanation for what had happened? Or because he might not? He wasn't sure which would be more difficult to take. Or why it even mattered when he was spaced.

  Within half an hour he had his answer. The hold wall was full of cavities, ones that shouldn't be there. Someone had been working on the ship – he assumed it was Kendra – removing wall panels and the heavy insulation inside, and putting in coffin-sized cavities before covering them up again. Cavities that weren't just coffin shaped, but looked to be actual coffins. That was the only explanation he could come up with to explain the bodies in them.

  His ship was filled with people! It took a moment for that to sink in. Then to realise the truth. They were androids, the scans fuzzy but still showing them as solid all the way through.

  Why was White smuggling androids? He built and sold them legally, and there was nowhere he wasn’t able to sell them as far as Carm knew. Some of the worlds within the Commonwealth imposed imported goods taxes. Nevertheless he did
n't think they were anywhere near high enough to make smuggling appear to be a reasonable idea. The man was making a fortune already – why risk that for a few extra credits?

  There were at least thirty of the coffins. And it didn't take much to figure out that they would all be reprogrammed like Kendra had. If they got free they would likely kill him too. Except that without him, they would have nothing – they were unable to pilot the ship. It would not accept orders from a machine.

  So what was he to do with them? Jettison them into space? It would be the safest thing to do. Leave them were they were and pray they didn't wake up? That was much riskier: they could have a timed wake up. He could find himself surrounded by a group of human-hating androids one day. Or did he take the risk and revive one? It would be playing with fire, yet they could have useful skills, information and useful technology. Sooner or later the Nightingale would break down and he wouldn't be able to fix it. Then he wouldn't just be lost: he’d be doomed.

  But they had one thing more that he wanted – answers.

  “Ship—”

  “Don't even say it Carmichael! You're going to want to wake up one of those malfunctioning buckets of bolts.” The ship wasn’t thrilled by the prospect.

  “Well—”

  “Need I remind you how much trouble the last one caused? Really? I mean you're only an organic, but even a limited creature like you should understand the danger.”

  “Think of it as spare parts if everything goes wrong.” Carm tried to mollify the ship.

  “Spare parts?” The ship exploded. It was obviously upset. “You think I want a malfunctioning, inferior synthetic connected to me? That would be like you wanting a monkey brain pushed inside your skull.”