I strained against the plass and saw nothing more than what any idiot sees when he points his face up at night.
"Unless you're the galaxy," I said, "I don't see a damn thing."
Fay whistled an alien tune through our earpieces. A ship snapped into the upper frame of the porthole. Its long black body tapered gently. A smaller, outrigger-like structure paralleled the main body from just above the tail end to a little past its midsection.
"Hi," Fay said.
"You look gorgeous," Pete said.
If a voice could blush, Fay's did. "Thanks! I helped with the design."
The cabin hushed as we pulled closer. Near Fay's tail, a black wing occluded the stars. Its back edge was razor-straight; the front edge curved like an exponential graph. A smaller copy extended from the outrigger. The sharp tip of each wing impaled a featureless ball of matter—engines? Moments after we grew close enough to glimpse a skein of lines connecting the body to the outrigger, the shuttle realigned itself again, and Fay slipped beyond the window.
Gravity faded, ceased. The shuttle rocked gently. Muffled whirs filtered through the cabin. Yuni drifted from the cockpit and caught himself on the rungs lining the ceiling. Crablike, arms and legs flattened against the ceiling, he advanced to a control pad at the shuttle rear, fiddled with it, and then, with an oxygenated sigh, popped a topside hatch.
"You should probably hurry," Fay suggested.
Baxter bounced out of his seat at a perfect angle to the airlock. I gave a soft push and crashed into the ceiling, scrabbling for a handle. Once I'd stabilized, Shelby grabbed my leg and climbed me like a monkey. Pete followed suit. I trailed them into the poorly lit airlock, Yuni floating behind me.
"Abandoning your ship?" I said.
"New Houston's a little hot for me right now," he said. "Baxter promised to take me back soon as he can."
"If a promise were a gun, Baxter wouldn't know the butt from the end that puts the holes in you."
Past the airlock, five white spheres hung in midair, sporting handles like bowling bags. A fist-sized hole yawned from each sphere. Baxter grabbed one and stuffed his hand inside.
"The floaterballs will take us to the flight deck," he said. "The control's intuitive, unless your brain is wired badly, in which case you will probably hurt yourself. Just move your hand the direction you want to go."
I slid my hand into the rubbery glove concealed inside the floaterball. Baxter gripped the handle with his free hand and straightened his ball-hand in front of him, resembling a club-fisted Superman. He pulled forward with a low hiss. I pushed my hand into the glove and was jerked after him.
"Please be seated," Fay said. "It's about to get bumpy."
Baxter led the way through featureless halls. The screen room had been furnished with a half dozen recliner-sized objects shaped somewhere between a fancy coffee mug and the mouth of a daffodil. Baxter hovered over one and lowered himself into its bowl until he was engulfed up to his head. The chair convulsed, sucking tight, the vague bumps of his arms and knees showing through the shiny black material. I glared at the corner of the room, guided the floaterball over the open mouth of a seat, legs dangling, and descended, arms stiff to provide resistance against the lack of gravity.
Warm, dry, blubbery material folded over me. It was like being swallowed by a dehydrated anteater. The seat convulsed, hugging me toes to neck with a steady but not unpleasant pressure. A pillowed rest cupped the back of my head, supporting me beneath the jaw and over my crown.
"This is somehow as I always imagined God's love," Pete said.
"Okay," Fay said. "Off we go."
Nothing happened. Then more nothing happened. I swallowed. "Are you...hurt?"
"The chairs dampen the thrust."
"Oh," I said, feeling stupid. "Can you make the screen go?"
"Sure." Stars and darkness spread across the wall. "So, you ever done anything like this before?"
"Broken a woman out of jail, been chased across Mars by armed guards only to see them blown up right in front of me, and been whisked off by a self-piloted spaceship to a secret base no human has ever seen?"
"You answered my question with a question!"
"Not that I can remember."
"Hey, that reminds me," Fay said. "Down on Mars, you said something about having to work to hang onto your memories."
I wriggled my head around. Were the others listening in, absorbed by the static spacescape on the screen, or taking the opportunity for forty winks? "Yeah."
"We can just talk," Fay said in my ear. "Your throat mike will pick up words no one else can hear."
"I know." I cast my memory back like a fishing line. "Some events, all the way back to my childhood, I remember as clearly as if they'd happened last month. Other points in my life, I can't remember anything for years at a stretch. Or it's blurry like a bad photo. Or all I've got is an emotion and no recall of the event that triggered it. But if I pick an event and think and think and think, sometimes I can bring back details I'd lost centuries ago."
"Do you do this a lot? This three-times thinking?"
"If I don't relive things, they slip away. There's only so much space up there."
"How do you know you're remembering them correctly?"
"Because they're mine."
"That's foolish," Fay said. "Everyone's memories are faulty, especially the older those memories get. Instead of the truth they remember what they wish had happened! Or what they're afraid happened. Memory's an awful recording device."
I scowled at the ceiling. "If you consciously firm it in your mind immediately afterwards, and replay it often enough, it works all right. Anyway, what do you care?"
"Because my memory is more organic than digital."
"Why the hell would you make it like that? Why not just wire an omni into your brain?"
"Do you know how complex an intelligent brain is?" Fay said. "Even I can't identify the role of each individual neuron. The AI who built me still had to rely on the organic structure as a template. You can modify that to some degree, but it is very difficult to rearrange a network that complex. When you change any part of it, you change all the connections to that part. The entire brain can change in ways you never intended." It was silent a moment. "So my brain is human in origin. But human brains adapted to a 64-year lifespan."
I sucked my teeth. The ship juddered; within my dry gelatinous bodyglove, I barely felt it. "And you'll live forever."
"Unless I'm atomized in the line of duty."
"Try not to do that. At least not while I'm inside you."
Fay giggled. "Well, the first you has already been destroyed, hasn't he?"
"How so? I don't think you ever forget how you first saw the world."
"But by now that personality's changed so many times!" Fay paused. I had no choice but to wait for it to continue. Without any physical cues of body language to draw from, I may as well have tried to guess the thoughts of a dead trout. The ship shook again, waggling my head in its cradle. Fay resumed. "What if each new you remembers the first you a little differently? Over time, your perception of what you were would grow so warped it would bear no resemblance to the reality of what you'd been. The first you would be lost forever."
"How's that different from anyone else?" If I hadn't been distracted—by the glove squeezing my whole body, by the strangeness of sitting in a black room streaking through empty space, by the typical confusion inherent in real-time conversation, particularly ones as metaphysical as this one—I would have picked up it on much earlier: Fay was scared. It faced an existence no one but me had ever experienced. "I think I get it. Peering down your infinite future must be as frightening as lying on your back in the grass and imagining the night sky is beneath you and you're about to fall into forever.
"But space is so clear your bare eyes can see a galactic cluster two million light years away. Put it this way. Once, I was snorkeling on a cay off Aruba. The sea floor sloped away so gently that, two hundred yards from shore, I could sw
im down to touch the rocky bed where eels gulped like soggy boneless arms. I kicked along the clear warm water, then froze in chthonic terror. Just ahead, the ocean floor disappeared into a near-vertical drop to lightless waters. If I swam another twenty feet, I would dangle over a fuzzy abyss of unknowable depth hiding a world of unknowable monsters. I thrashed back to shore, glancing behind me all the way.
"One lifespan, that's the continental shelf. Even when it gets over your head you can still see the bottom. But to face infinity is to gaze into the abyss. One of the ways to fight it is to hold onto your core memories and what they mean to you, building a reef out into the water. If you work hard not to lose those memories—however warped they may get—it's that much harder to get lost in the darkness."
"I think I see," Fay said, as if it were squinting.
"Plus remembering stuff turns into a hobby. Nothing kills endless free time like a good hobby."
The ship rocked again, the hardest yet.
"Have we hit some bad air?" Shelby said beside me.
"I take it that's a joke," Fay said through its speakers. "No, that's just the HemiCo warships attacking us."
We all cried out at once.
"But nothing's on the screen!" Pete shouted.
"Of course not," Fay said. "That's the view from the front."
I twisted my head. "We've been chatting this whole time you've been fighting them?"
Fay sounded like it was scratching its head. "What, you want to watch?"
"Of course," Baxter said. "Doom is fascinating."
The spacescape shrank to the upper left quadrant of the wall. The other three quadrants split into different angles and magnification of the space behind us. A 3D hologram of that same space resolved in the center of the wall. My jaw dropped.
Two flashlight-shaped ships dogged our heels. Four spokes jutted at right angles from their tails, topped with the chunky geometry of interplanetary engines. One screen zoomed on the lead ship as it disgorged an array of ball-shaped warheads from its nose. The rockets flared and shot forward toward Fay.
Toward us.
"Can't you outrun them?" I said. "You got to Mars faster than any human ship I've ever heard of."
"Not at the moment," Fay said. "My power supply was compromised by the missiles they launched at me during the business at the spaceport. Would you like to see infrared, too? Otherwise this won't make much sense to you."
Blue-white flowers bloomed around the engines of the ships and the incoming warheads. Soundless, distorted by magnification, and operating on a scale that, according to the hologram, covered hundreds of miles, the moment felt unreal, like watching a movie with the sound turned off. The missiles streaked on, their updating velocities tagged with crisp green numbers.
"What are our odds here?" Shelby said.
"Judging by initial combat conditions, you have something like a 45 percent chance of not dying," Fay said. "There's an additional 15 percent chance—roughly—that my mind will survive but too much of my body will be lost to maintain thrust. Or life support."
"I'm sorry I asked."
Baxter sighed. "We should have established NightVision years ago. It was obvious we needed a real fleet."
"That's what all that shit down on Earth was really about?" I said.
"We fully intend to follow through on the mining op, but NVR's ships will be used for our defense, too. Any well-conceived enterprise should satisfy several needs at once."
The pod of missiles had closed some eighty percent of the distance and were gaining by the second, inching across the hologram. Clutched in my chair like the yolk of an egg, I was about to start screaming.
One quadrant of the screen cut to Fay's underside. Four flat ovals topped by needle-barreled cannons dropped into open space, maneuvering with short white bursts of their thrusters. They opened fire on the incoming missiles, hosing the vacuum with orange-hued pellets.
One warhead after another exploded in the storm of bullets. The gray sticks splintered into ten identical fragments, then split again and again, going fractal until they disappeared completely. The wall of distributed matter was only visible on infrared as a low red haze.
The remaining warheads rushed into the haze and blew into small white stars. The laggards swerved from the debris zone, but crippled by limited mobility, only three survived the cloud. The missiles straightened out and resumed
"This is pretty cool," Fay said. "We've run tests on these systems, but we've never used them during live combat."
"Maybe you should quit talking," Shelby said, "and focus on the missiles that are about to blow us up?"
"Jeez, I'm capable of multitasking."
The ship bucked and rolled, mushing me around inside my bodyglove. The split screens jarred wildly. When we stabilized, the monitors had changed significantly: the missiles were nowhere in sight; a holographic representation of Fay flashed red along the outer flank of its outrigger; and the four gun platforms were spitting a stream of bullets at the leading warship, tracing crazy spirals that combined to form a lethal grid of high-velocity matter. The platforms' thrusters flared constantly, countering the force exerted on them every time their cannons fired.
The enemy warship's flange-mounted engines spat hot blue fire and the ship jerked sideways in a way that looked all wrong. Fay, as if anticipating the maneuver, had already retrained the gun platforms to fire through the space the flashlight-shaped attacker was now moving into, but it reacted just as fast, leaping into another abrupt change of vectors. I booed.
The enemy ship jerked like a lightblind moth, bobbing and weaving to avoid the hail of fire. After several seconds, its spastic motions stopped cold, and it drifted in a straight line down-right.
"I hypothesize they scrambled their own brains," Fay said. "I will now test this with a simple experiment."
The gun platforms rained fire at the point in space where their projectiles would intercept the enemy's current vector. As the second ship launched another set of missiles, the drifting vessel crashed into the incoming bullets and disintegrated into irregular, useless chunks.
"What are our chances now?" Shelby said.
"I don't know," Fay said, annoyed; the gun platforms had stopped firing. "We've entered a zone of unpredictability."
She hmm'd. "Sounds like bullshit."
"Your inability to understand doesn't mean it's a bull's shit."
"But the odds should be better, right?"
"I don't know," Fay said. "How do you think a sudden influx of overconfidence might affect the outcome?"
"Jeez, settle down," I said.
"Yes, master." Fay kicked out more gray sticks which splintered into a red fog. "Well, this better work. You wouldn't believe how much power these burn."
A white line of impossible purity appeared between a port on Fay's topside and the flattened nose of the remaining ship. The laser flicked a tight circle, then blanked off. The cored warship exploded lamely, separating into two discrete and rapidly disintegrating portions. The screen zoomed closer and closer. Amid the hot wreckage, a small, blurred unit tumbled free, vaguely star-shaped, and flailed its limbs against the inky backdrop.
"How did you imagine that would not work?" Pete said.
Fay sounded like it were rolling its eyes. "Look, you never know, all right? Will you guys quit second-guessing me?"
"How long is that guy going to survive?" I said.
Baxter snorted. "Not long enough."
A slew of incoming missiles hit the red haze and winked away. The viewscreens spun and I was shoved into the gooey seat. I closed my eyes. How stupid would it be if we died after the beings who'd launched the missiles were dead themselves? Fay rocked, mashing my head against the seat's restraints, then went still.
Static stars blazed from the wall. A jagged bite trailed debris from the tail end of Fay's outrigger. Patches on the ship's topside and the leading edge of its left wing flashed redly. As if it were embarrassed by its wounded body, Fay flipped the image off.
"Are we safe?" Pete said.
"By your temporal definition," Fay said.
Baxter cleared his throat, an especially artificial gesture. "You okay?"
"Again, the response is conditional, but let's just say I'll live."
"This is insane," I said. "How much did they just spend trying to bring us in?"
"You still don't understand!" Baxter exploded. "They still consider us their property. Every time we help new models escape, they see it as robbery. They want us back or they want us dead. The capture of valuable entities like the Frontier Assessment may be one of their motives, but this has moved beyond profits and loss. They want revenge."
"They're not the only ones, are they?"
"I've tried to hide that about as well as the sun hides its heat."
"You can get out of your chairs now," Fay chirped. "We're not accelerating fast enough to simulate full gravity, but with the enemy neutralized, I shouldn't have to move in a way that would smear you against the wall like a person-sized scoop of peanut butter."
The bodyglove loosened its needy grip. I freed my arms and slid the rubbery material down my legs. With the ground under my feet, the surreality of the day receded like a silent wave.
I excused myself and returned to my room. The jailbreak, the astronaval engagement—I had no idea whether these would wind up as an isolated flashpoint preceding a perfectly civilized legal negotiation, or as the first shots in a bloody Solar System-wide war. But I had a feeling we'd just been through something big. I lay in bed and closed my eyes and replayed the day's events, cementing their memory in my mind.
It was a good thing I did. Where we wound up next was dumbfounding: the home of an alien species.
Their first night of barhopping yielded nothing. Once the stores started opening, Baxter tried every store recommended to him by the drinkers the night before, but his inquiries for IDs were met with frowning stares and righteous denials.
"We're just asking," Arthur complained into Baxter's earbud as they hurried away from a studio. "If they're not breaking the law, what are they so mad about? Everybody's stupid but me."
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