by Emma Newman
I run through the plan one last time, add a solvent to my equipment list so I can unstick the door afterward to check they’re all dead. Then I go back to my slate office. I pick up the star and things above shift into a humanoid shape before taking on the skin of the avatar that Atlas used before. “I’m ready,” I say.
Ze nods. “Are you certain?”
“I’ve been through it enough times. Yes.”
“How do you feel?”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t think that’s really relevant right now. Can you keep me hidden from the cams around the ship? Carl is going to rule Travis out at some point and I bet he’ll look at what I’ve been doing. Just make it look like I’m in my cabin, okay? Asleep.”
“I will.”
There’s so much uncertainty it’s hard to tease out individual strands of worry, but one is hard to ignore. “When this is done . . . the ship isn’t going to be thrown into chaos or anything . . . I mean . . . without the captain and first officer and the founders . . .”
“There is a command structure and I run the ship. There will be instability, but that can be capitalized upon to make the necessary changes.”
I wave a hand, unable to think about that sort of thing right now. “We can talk about it afterward. I’m still not convinced leaving the rest of the CSA alive is the way to go, but I guess we can always deal with them later.”
Ze nods slowly. “Yes, let’s talk when you’ve done everything to your satisfaction. Carl is currently asleep, as are all of the founders and the captain. Only ten percent of passengers are currently awake and none of them live on deck five.”
“Is everything printed?”
“By the time you come up and get to the labs it will be. None of the Circle are working. Fifteen people on your deck are awake but currently immersed. When you wish to check on the location of anyone on this ship, simply tap this icon.”
A new one appears in my field of vision, a simple twinkling star. “Thanks. I . . . I guess I’ll talk to you once this is all done.”
“Yes.”
I wait a beat for some sort of encouragement, or a message of “good luck” or “take care,” but there’s nothing. I feel stupid for hoping for it and come up from immersion.
I give myself five minutes to settle back into my body and mentally gear up for following this through, in meatspace. Once I’m up, have taken the CSA pin from the dress and put it onto the back of my T-shirt collar and headed to the lab, it feels just like it did in the practice runs. Everything is waiting for me in the two labs the print jobs have been split between. It all fits into my bag, the one I came on board with and didn’t think would be needed until planetfall. Now it’s filled with the instruments of murder.
There’s no one in between me and the elevator, no one gets in on the way, no one is on the fifth deck. I use the same password phrase as before, finding the room as I last saw it, and it’s comfortingly close to the mock-up version I used in the practice. I stick the little boxes in the planned positions on the underside of the three tabletops and walk around, double-checking that they can’t be seen unless someone specifically goes looking for them. I set the timers to pierce the boxes at ten minutes past eight. Hopefully they will all be on time. It’s the one critical variable I can’t control, and not knowing the length of the meeting, as none of them have anything else booked in their schedules—that Atlas could find, anyway—I have to err on the side of caution. They may just be checking in on something briefly, and besides, the sooner this is done, the better. Carl isn’t going to hang around once he eliminates Travis.
I double- then triple-check the timers, then leave the room, remembering to switch off the light, and head to the room I was in the night before for the party. There are only thirteen minutes to go before the meeting and I’ve cut this finer than I would have liked. One of them may turn up early to set something up, given there’s no easy way to project a presentation in there. I stare at the star icon and see that Atlas has already short-listed the people whose locations I may worry about. All the founders, the captain, Carl and Travis are listed, along with their current locations and an option to view a map with their location updated in real time. All of them are currently in their cabins. There’s nothing to do but pace.
Then, one by one, the founders start making their way to the fifth deck, as Carl and Travis mercifully stay in their cabins. I press myself against the wall behind the doors into the party room, just in case one of them chooses to come in here before the meeting. But every single dot on the map I call up from Atlas’s app seems to be making a beeline for the meeting room, blinking out of sight as they enter that off-grid space.
All except one. The captain. I stare at her unchanging position, then call up the map for her location and see it remain maddeningly still. There’s only two minutes until the start of the meeting, with the last of the founders in the elevator now. What is she doing? Is it something to do with Brace? With Carl?
I rub at the sweat that prickles on my forehead. I need to seal the doors within the next ten minutes; otherwise one of them could get out and raise the alarm. But if the captain is going to be late . . .
The last of the founders enters the meeting. Fuck. “Atlas,” I say, hoping ze is listening in. “Has the captain sent a message to any of the founders saying she’ll be late?”
“No, the captain has not sent any messages to any meeting attendees about her arrival time within the last twenty-four hours.”
“Any messages to them at all?”
“Yes, all relating to Brace’s death, but nothing regarding her movements this morning.”
I get the glue gun out of the bag, check it’s working for the third time and fish out the eye protection too. “How long will it take for her to get to the meeting room from her cabin?”
“Three point five minutes, plus or minus thirty seconds depending on her pace.”
Surely she’ll be hurrying. That gives me a window of only two and a half minutes if she leaves her cabin after the point I need to seal the door. I’ll give her until seven minutes past and accept that I may just have to shoot her when she arrives late.
The first six minutes of the meeting tick by as I wait in the empty party room. My T-shirt is damp with sweat and all I can do is stare at the little dot representing the captain, filled with anger at her for being late. “Ada, tell me the moment the captain leaves her cabin.”
The glue gun in my right hand, the solvent tucked in my pocket and the handgun in my left hand, I check that there’s no one between me and the meeting room and I sprint down the corridor to it, passing through the two sets of doors as silently as I can, before slowing down near the door I need.
I can hear their voices within. Theodore laughs, and I pause, struck by the magnitude of what I’m about to do. But it’s too late now. I’ve committed to this and I’ll see it through. They can’t be allowed to re-create that hell of Earth on the new planet. I seal the door with the glue gun.
The captain is still in her cabin when there are cries of surprise inside the meeting room, followed swiftly by the sound of people falling, their shouts ending in choked gurgles. There’s one slam against the door and then the sound of someone sliding down against it. Within fifty seconds, there’s silence. I count to thirty, just in case someone is shocked and starts screaming for help, but there’s nothing.
“Captain Ashby has left her cabin,” Ada says to me.
“How long until the toxin degrades?”
“Twenty-one seconds.” Ada provides a helpful timer in the top-left corner of my vision as I grab the solvent, ready to spray it down the center of the doors so I’ll be able to push them open again. I watch the captain’s dot moving toward the elevator on her deck, and the toxin countdown. Each second feels like a fucking hour. As soon as it hits zero I spray the solvent down the seal, bouncing on my toes as I wait for the chemicals to do their work,
feeling a drop of sweat roll down the small of my back. She gets into the lift and I force the door open with a surge of panicky strength, leaving the dregs of the glue to evaporate as I push inward, against a heavy weight.
Theodore’s body is the one making the door hard to open. The stench hits me, of vomit and shit and piss, so strong I turn away, gagging. JeeMuh, none of my simulations prepared me for this. I step outside for a moment, check on the captain and see that she is still in the elevator. She’ll be coming here, and with the room off-grid, there’s no way for her to know that this has happened.
“Atlas, can you do something about the air in there? It’s all part of the same environmental system, isn’t it?”
“I will do what I can.”
I take a deep breath, dash back into the room and close the door as a faint breeze chills the sweat on my skin. Atlas must be forcing more air through or something. It doesn’t get rid of the smell entirely, but between the air being cycled more quickly and the fact that I’m starting to get used to it, I can handle moving Theodore’s body farther away from the door.
Ignoring their faces and what I’m stepping in, I clear the three bodies away from the space between the central table and the door. I just need her to open the door and step in, without seeing something likely to make her run right away. I close the door and carefully step over the other bodies until I am on the other side of the table. I retrieve the handgun from where I tucked it into my trousers and point it at the door.
Wishing I could access the app and watch her position, I can do nothing but try to ignore the smell of the vomit sprayed across the model and control my breathing. The door will open, she’ll probably step through in a hurry before she realizes what’s happened and then . . . I try to steady my hand. Do I leave my finger on the trigger? Off? Which is best?
Then the door opens and everything seems to slow down. I adjust the angle to shoot, and no matter how prepared I am, I still hesitate. Then I realize it isn’t the captain. It’s Carl.
22
IT FEELS LIKE we stare at each other for hours as I slowly lower the gun. He looks shocked by the sight of the weapon but not surprised to see me. His shoulders drop with disappointment and sadness as he comes into the room, the door swinging closed on its weighted hinge. “Dee,” he sighs. “Fuck, I hoped I was wrong.” He takes a step farther in, his nose wrinkling at the smell. He can’t help but glance around him, soon seeing the bodies at the edges of the room. He goes to the nearest one, crouches down, presses his hand against his throat and then straightens up again. “Oh, Dee, what have you done?”
I’m painfully aware of the captain’s imminent arrival. But Carl isn’t going to leave now. I keep the gun in my hand, one eye still on the door as he looks at the model on the table briefly, uninterested. “How did you get in here?” I ask.
He blinks at me. “You’re standing in a room of dead bodies, holding a gun, and that’s what’s on your mind? Dee, JeeMuh . . . what the fuck happened here? You killed them, right?”
I nod. “I had to. How did you get in? You’re not one of them, are you?”
“One of . . . ? The door was unlocked. I thought . . .” He releases a breath. “I thought you’d killed yourself.”
He’s confused by the fact that he couldn’t see me online once I came into this room. But that would mean he’d been tracking my movements, and Atlas was supposed to be hiding them. I swallow down the rising fear. “No. I’m still here.”
“You killed Myerson. And Brace.” He shakes his head. “JeeMuh . . . I so wanted to be wrong.”
There’s no point hiding it now, not in a room full of dead people with me holding a gun. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t shot. “How did you figure it out?”
“I knew it was data fuckery hiding the murderer. It always is these days. So it came down to what it always does: logic, elimination and instinct. It was the absence of data in some ways, but mostly it was you. The way you acted.”
I feel like a child who has just discovered that even if she closes her eyes, other people can still see her. All these years I’ve been convinced that I’m unreadable. Has that ever been true? But then, Carl has been made to do this, crafted into the best lie detector there is. “But . . . Brace died when we were together.”
“No, he didn’t. It looked like he did, from the server data, but the autopsy told a different story.”
“But you can’t pinpoint time of death that accurately!”
He raises an eyebrow. “There is a medical suite here that blows the shit out of anything I saw on Earth, Dee. This is the Pathfinder’s tech. He died twenty minutes before I thought he did. If you’d done it on Earth, you would have got away with it. Not even Travis could see how you covered the data trail. How did you do that, by the way?”
If Brace died twenty minutes earlier . . . that was just after we’d all come up from the game. But Atlas told me that Brace went back in and died then. Did Atlas lie or is Carl bluffing? What does it matter now? All that really matters is seeing the job done before he arrests me. If the captain lives, she’ll continue their vision, and besides, she already has blood on her hands. “I had help.”
“Who?”
I need to keep him talking; I need to keep him focused on me so he doesn’t realize I wasn’t waiting for him. “Isn’t the ‘why’ more important?”
“Well, I’d like to know,” he says, with an odd nonchalance, as if that is secondary to finding out that it was me.
“Because the majority of the people on this ship are slaves, Carl, like we were. They’re being shipped to the new world to be slaves there too, for these fucks.” I kick the nearest dead man, not even knowing which one of those bastards he is. “And they were planning to kill the Circle, probably at planetfall. They were exporting the worst of what we left behind, after killing billions of people. They deserved to die.”
“Travis told me about the three who carried out the order. You think these people”—he waves a hand in the direction of the nearest corpses—“gave the order?”
I nod. “It had to be done, Carl. Now they’re gone, we can put something better in place, we can make sure that what’s built there isn’t this bullshit.” I nod toward the model. “We’ve got time to sort it out before we arrive. It was just . . . cutting out a cancer. That’s all.”
“Cutting out . . .” He drifts off, incredulous. “Fuck . . . Dee, I always knew you could be cold, but . . .” He looks away, at the nearest corpse. “They all died at the same time by the look of it.” His eyes scan the model, taking in the various bodily fluids spattered over it and the floor. “Some sort of poison?” He’s muttering to himself, simply incapable of standing in the middle of a mystery and not solving it. I watch his eyes dart about, gathering in all of the details. Yes, that’s it, you clever bastard, you think about that and not about whom I was waiting for.
He crouches, looks underneath the tables, takes in the boxes. Nods to himself and stands again. “A nerve agent? We’re not dead and they’re still warm . . . Erbraxil?”
I don’t need to answer him. He just looks at me, nods to himself again and then looks at the gun. “You were worried one of them might avoid the spray . . . came in here to make sure they were all dead . . .” He frowns and I tighten my grip on the gun resting at my side. “So why were you just standing there? You were waiting for—”
The moment he realizes why plays across his face, his eyes flicking away as he tries to use his APA, I raise the gun and point it at his chest. “This room is off-grid, Carl. You can’t warn the captain.”
He actually looks hurt when he sees the gun pointing at him, this time held steady. “Dee . . .”
“I’ve got to see this through. She gave the order, Carl. She is just as responsible as the rest. She knew they were going to do it and she didn’t try to stop them.”
“But how is shooting anyone going to make it right? It’s d
one . . . it’s—”
“You think they should just carry on like nothing happened? Be free to go and set up a new world that is built upon injustice? On exploitation?”
“No, Dee, it’s not as simple as that.”
“Why not? Are you going to tell me that they should have been tried? By whom? Under what laws? Who would throw the captain and the most powerful people on this ship in the brig?”
“But it’s the—”
And then the door opens. I swing my arm round, seeing the captain, who is striding in with the urgency of someone late to a meeting, an apology almost formed on her lips.
“Dee!” Carl yells as the captain stops, her mouth dropping open.
I pull the trigger. Her body jolts back, legs staggering with the momentum until she hits the wall. As the door starts to swing shut I fire twice more, hitting both times before the door closes.
A strangled groan is crawling from Carl’s throat, his hands clutching his head, fingers tangled in his hair as he stares at the door. Then he lurches forward before remembering the gun, snapping round sharply to see if I’m pointing it back at him. I toss the thing onto the table and he dashes out to see if he can help her. I follow, more slowly, confident I hit her square in the chest. Atlas won’t let her live, surely, not now, not after all we’ve done. And I don’t know if MyPhys would even be able to do anything for her anyway.
Carl is kneeling next to the captain, who is slumped, staring at some point on the ceiling, her blood smeared down the wall above her head. He looks up at me, eyes shining with unshed tears, and I feel nothing but a quiet sense of completion, like when I’ve found all the treasure chests in an old-fashioned game. It’s done. I can put it aside now. Think about something else.
