Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  Some other times hadn’t been as gentle, but still were a better experience than this.

  Having her body still hanging around, blood and vomit everywhere, offended her on a level she hadn’t thought possible. Once you were gone, the body meant nothing, had no sentimental value. The future body was all that mattered. The past shouldn’t be there, staring you in the face with dead eyes. She shuddered.

  “When the engines get running again, it’ll warm up,” Hiro said helpfully, mistaking the reason for her shiver.

  They reached a junction, and she led the way left. “Decades, Hiro. We’ve been out here for decades. What happened to our mindmaps?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.

  “We had the cocktail party in Luna station as the final passengers were entering cryo and getting loaded. We came aboard. We were given some hours to move into our quarters. Then we had the tour, which ended in the cloning bay, getting our updated mindmaps.”

  “Same here,” he said.

  “Are you scared?” Maria said, stopping and looking at him.

  She hadn’t scrutinized him since waking up in the cloning bay. She was used to the way that clones with the experience of hundreds of years could look like they had just stepped out of university. Their bodies woke up at peak age, twenty years old, designed to be built with muscle. What the clones did with that muscle once they woke up was their challenge.

  Akihiro Sato was a thin Pan Pacific United man of Japanese descent with short black hair that was drying in stiff cowlicks. He had lean muscles, and high cheekbones. His eyes were black, and they met hers with a level gaze. She didn’t look too closely at the rest of him; she wasn’t rude.

  He pulled at a cowlick, then tried to smooth it down. “I’ve woken up in worse places.”

  “Like where?” she asked, pointing down the hall from where they had come. “What’s worse than that horror movie scene?”

  He raised his hands in supplication. “I don’t mean literally. I mean I’ve lost time before. You have to learn to adapt sometimes. Fast. I wake up. I assess the immediate threat. I try to figure out where I was last time I uploaded a mindmap. This time I woke up in the middle of a bunch of dead bodies, but there was no threat that I could tell.” He cocked his head, curious. “Haven’t you ever lost time before? Not even a week? Surely you’ve died between backups.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But I’ve never woken up in danger, or in the wake of danger.”

  “You’re still not in danger,” he said. “That we know of.”

  She stared at him.

  “Immediate danger,” he amended. “I’m not going to stab you right here in the hall. All of our danger right now consists of problems that we can likely fix. Lost memories, broken computer, finding a murderer. Just a little work and we’ll be back on track.”

  “You are the strangest kind of optimist,” she said. “All the same, I’d like to continue to freak out if you don’t mind.”

  “Try to keep it together. You don’t want to devolve into whatever Paul has become,” he suggested as he continued down the hall.

  Maria followed, glad that he wasn’t behind her. “I’m keeping it together. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “You’ll probably feel better when you’ve had a shower and some food,” he said. “Not to mention clothes.”

  They were both covered only in the tacky, drying synth-amneo fluid. Maria had never wanted a shower more in her life. “Aren’t you a little worried about what we’re going to find when we find your body?” she asked.

  Hiro looked back at her. “I learned a while back not to mourn the old shells. If we did, we’d get more and more dour with each life. In fact, I think that may be Wolfgang’s problem.” He frowned. “Have you ever had to clean up the old body by yourself?”

  Maria shook her head. “No. It was disorienting; she was looking at me, like she was blaming me. It’s still not as bad as not knowing what happened, though.”

  “Or who happened,” said Hiro. “It did have a knife.”

  “And it was violent,” Maria said. “It could be one of us.”

  “Probably was, or else we should get excited about a first-contact situation. Or second contact, if the first one went so poorly …” Hiro said, then sobered. “But truly anything could have gone wrong. Someone could have woken up from cryo and gone mad, even. Computer glitch messed with the mindmap. But it’s probably easily explained, like someone got caught cheating at poker. Heat of the moment, someone hid an ace, the doctor flipped the table—”

  “It’s not funny,” Maria said softly. “It wasn’t madness and it wasn’t an off-the-cuff crime. If that had happened, we wouldn’t have the grav drive offline. We wouldn’t be missing decades of memories. IAN would be able to tell us what’s going on. But someone—one of us—wanted us dead, and they also messed with the personality backups. Why?”

  “Is that rhetorical? Or do you really expect me to know?” he asked.

  “Rhetorical,” grumbled Maria. She shook her head to clear it. A strand of stiff black hair smacked her in the face, and she winced. “It could have been two people. One killed us, one messed with the memories.”

  “True,” he said. “We can probably be sure it was premeditated. Anyway, the captain was right. Let’s be cautious. And let’s make a pact. I’ll promise not to kill you and you promise not to kill me. Deal?”

  Maria smiled in spite of herself. She shook his hand. “I promise. Let’s get going before the captain sends someone after us.”

  The door to medbay was rimmed in red lights, making it easy to find if ill or injured. With the alert, the lights were blinking, alternating between red and yellow. Hiro stopped abruptly at the entrance. Maria smacked into the back of him in a collision that sent them spinning gently like gears in a clock, making him turn to face the hall while she swung around to see what had stopped him so suddenly.

  The contact could have been awkward except for the shock of the scene before them.

  In the medbay, a battered, older version of Captain Katrina de la Cruz lay in a bed. She was unconscious but very much alive, hooked up to life support, complete with IV, breathing tubes, and monitors. Her face was a mess of bruises, and her right arm was in a cast. She was strapped to the bed, which was held to the floor magnetically.

  “I thought we all died,” Hiro said, his voice soft with wonder.

  “For us all to wake up, we should have. I guess I hit the emergency resurrection switch anyway,” Maria said, pushing herself off the doorjamb to float into the room closer to the captain.

  “Too bad you can’t ask yourself,” Hiro said drily.

  Penalties for creating a duplicate clone were stiff, usually resulting in the extermination of the older clone. Although with several murders to investigate, and now an assault, Wolfgang would probably not consider this particular crime a priority to punish.

  “No one is going to be happy about this,” Hiro said, pointing at the unconscious body of the captain. “Least of all Katrina. What are we going to do with two captains?”

  “But this could be good,” Maria said. “If we can wake her up, we might find out what happened.”

  “I can’t see her agreeing with you,” he said.

  A silver sheet covered the body and drifted lazily where the straps weren’t holding it down. The captain’s clone was still, the breathing tube the only sound.

  Maria floated to the closet on the far side of the room. She grabbed a handful of large jumpsuits—they would be too short for Wolfgang, too tight for the doctor, and too voluminous for Maria, but they would do for the time being—and pulled a folded wheelchair from where it drifted in the dim light filtering into the closet.

  She handed a jumpsuit to Hiro and donned hers, unselfconsciously not turning away. When humans reach midlife, they may reach a level of maturity where they cease to give a damn what someone thinks about their bodies. Multiply that a few times and you have the modesty (or lack thereof) of the average clone.
The first time Maria had felt the self-conscious attitude lifting, it had been freeing. The mind-set remained with many clones even as their bodies reverted to youth, knowing that a computer-built body was closer to a strong ideal than they could have ever created with diet and exercise.

  The sobbing engineer, Paul, had been the most ashamed clone Maria had ever seen.

  The jumpsuit fabric wasn’t as soft as Maria’s purple engineering jumpsuits back in her quarters, but she was at least warmer. She wondered when they would finally be allowed to eat and go back to their quarters for a shower and some sleep. Waking up took a lot out of a clone.

  Hiro was already clothed and back over by the captain’s body, peering at her face. Maria maneuvered her way over to him using the wall handles. He looked grim, his usually friendly face now reflecting the seriousness of the situation.

  “I don’t suppose we can just hide this body?” he asked. “Recycle it before anyone finds out? Might save us a lot of headache in the future.”

  Maria checked the vital-signs readout on the computer. “I don’t think she’s a body yet. Calling her a body and disposing of it is something for the courts, not us.”

  “What courts?” he asked as Maria took the wheelchair by the handles and headed for the door. “There are six of us!”

  “Seven,” Maria reminded, jerking her head backward to indicate the person in the medbay. “Eight if we can get IAN online. Even so it’s a matter for the captain and IAN to decide, not us.”

  “Well, then you get to go spread the latest bad news.”

  “I’m not ready to deal with Wolfgang right now,” Maria said. “Or hear the captain tear Paul a new asshole. Besides, we have to check the grav drive.”

  “Avoiding Wolfgang sounds like a good number one priority,” said Hiro. “In fact, if I could interview my last clone, he probably avoided Wolfgang a lot too.”

  The bridge of the starship Dormire was an impressive affair, with a seat for the captain and one for the pilot at the computer terminals that sat on the floor, but a ladder ran up the wall right beside the room entrance to lead to a few comfortable benches bolted to the wall, making it the perfect place to observe the universe as the ship crept toward light speed. The room itself comprised a dome constructed from diamond, so that you could see in a 270-degree arc. The helm looked like a great glass wart sitting on the end of the ship, but it did allow a lovely view of the universe swinging around you as the grav drive rotated the ship. Now, with the drive off, space seemed static, even though they were moving at a fraction of the speed of light through space.

  It could make someone ill, honestly. Deep space all around, even the floor being clear. Maria remembered seeing it on the tour of the ship, but this was the first time she had seen it away from Luna. The first time in this clone’s memory, anyway.

  Drawing the eye away from the view, the terminals, and the pilot’s station and benches, Hiro’s old body floated near the top of the dome, tethered by a noose to the bottom of one of the benches. His face was red and his open eyes bulged.

  “Oh. There—” He paused to swallow, then continued. “—there I am.” He turned away, looking green.

  “I don’t know what I expected, but suicide wasn’t it,” Maria said softly, looking into the swollen, anguished face. “I was actually wondering if you survived too.”

  “I didn’t expect hanging,” he said. “I don’t think I expected anything. It’s all real to me now.” He covered his mouth with his hand.

  Maria knew too much sympathy could make a person on the edge lose control, so she turned firm. “Do not puke in here. I already have to clean up the cloning bay, and you’ve seen what a nightmare that is. Don’t give me more to clean up.”

  He glared at her, but some color returned to his face. He did not look up again.

  Something drifted gently into the back of Maria’s head. She grabbed at it and found a brown leather boot. The hanged corpse wore its mate.

  “This starts to build a time line,” Maria said. “You had to be hanged when we still had gravity. I guess that’s good.”

  Hiro still had his back to the bridge, face toward the hallway. His eyes were closed and he breathed deeply. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Come on. We need to get the drive back on.”

  Hiro turned and focused on the terminal, which was blinking red.

  “Are you able to turn it on without IAN?” Maria asked.

  “I should be. IAN could control everything, but if he goes offline, we’re not dead in the water. Was that my shoe?” The last question was offhand, as if it meant nothing.

  “Yes.” Maria drifted toward the top of the helm and took a closer look at the body. It was hard to tell since the face was so distorted by the hanging, but Hiro looked different from the rest of the crew. They all looked as if decades had passed since they had launched from Luna station. But Hiro looked exactly as he did now, as if freshly vatted.

  “Hey, Hiro, I think you must have died at least once during the trip. Probably recently. This is a newer clone than the others,” she said. “I think we’re going to have to start writing the weird stuff down.”

  Hiro made a sound like an animal caught in a trap. All humor had left him. His eyes were hard as he finally glanced up at her and the clone. “All right. That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “The last straw. I’m officially scared now.”

  “Now? It took you this long to get scared?” Maria asked, pulling herself to the floor. “With everything else we’re dealing with, now you’re scared?”

  Hiro punched at the terminal, harder than Maria thought was necessary. Nothing happened. He crossed his arms, and then uncrossed them, looking as if arms were some kind of new limb he wasn’t sure what to do with. He took the boot from Maria and slid it over his own foot.

  “I was just managing to cope with the rest,” he said. “That was something happening to all of you. I wasn’t involved. I wasn’t a Saturday Night Gorefest. I was here as a supporting, friendly face. I was here to make you laugh. Hey, Hiro will always cheer us up.”

  Maria put her hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “Welcome to the panic room, Hiro. We have to support each other. Take a deep breath. Now we need to get the drive on and then tell the captain and Wolfgang.”

  “You gotta be desperate if you want to tell Wolfgang,” he said, looking as if he was trying and failing to force a smile.

  “And when you get the drive on, can you find out what year it is, check on the cargo, maybe reach IAN from here?” Maria asked. “With everything else that’s happened, it might be nice to come back with a little bit of good news. Or improved news.”

  Hiro nodded, his mouth closed as if trying to hold in something he would regret saying. Or perhaps a scream. He floated over to his pilot’s chair and strapped himself in. The console screen continued to blink bright red at him. “Thanks for that warning, IAN, we hadn’t noticed the drive was gone.”

  He typed some commands and poked at the touch screen. A warning siren began to bleat through the ship, telling everyone floating in zero-g that gravity was incoming. Hiro poked at the screen a few more times, and then typed at a terminal, his face growing darker as he did so. He made some calculations and then sighed loudly, sitting back in the chair and putting his hands over his face.

  “Well,” he said. “Things just got worse.”

  Maria heard the grav drive come online, and the ship shuddered as the engines started rotating the five-hundred-thousand-GRT ship. She took hold of the ladder along the back wall to guide her way to the bench so she wouldn’t fall once the gravity came back.

  “What now?” she said. “Are we off course?”

  “We’ve apparently been in space for twenty-four years and seven months.” He paused. “And nine days.”

  Maria did the math. “So it’s 2493.”

  “By now we should be a little more than three light-years away from home. Far outside the event horizon of realistic communication with
Earth. And we are. But we’re also twelve degrees off course.”

  “That … sorry, I don’t get where the hell that is. Can you say it in maintenance-officer language?”

  “We are slowing down and turning. I’m not looking forward to telling the captain,” he said, unstrapping himself from the seat. He glanced up at his own body drifting at the end of the noose like a grisly kite. “We can cut that down later.”

  “What were we thinking? Why would we go off course?” Maria thought aloud as they made their way through the hallway, staying low to prepare for gravity as the ship’s rotation picked up.

  “Why murder the crew, why turn off the grav drive, why spare the captain, why did I kill myself, and why did I apparently feel the need to take off one shoe before doing it?” Hiro said. “Just add it to your list, Maria. I’m pretty sure we are officially fucked, no matter what the answers are.”

  if you enjoyed

  PLACES IN THE DARKNESS

  look out for

  THE OUTER EARTH TRILOGY

  by

  Rob Boffard

  In space, every second counts.

  Outer Earth is a massive space station that orbits three hundred miles above the Earth, holding the last of humanity. It’s broken, rusted, and falling apart. The world below is dead. Wrecked by climate change and nuclear war, and now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that’s dirty, overcrowded, and inescapable.

  The population reaches one million. Double what it was designed to hold. Food is short, crime is rampant, and the ecosystem nears breaking point.

  What’s more, there’s a madman hiding on the station who is about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there’ll be nowhere left to run.

  1

  Riley

  My name is Riley Hale, and when I run, the world disappears.