by Stephen Hunt
‘You went freaky-deaky when we lost gravity. I tranquilized your ass. You were getting kind of hysterical anyway, after Lana let you mark your territory back in your old castle. Damn, you fleshies, water in, water out. I don’t know what psych handbook she got that shizzle from.’
Floating, Calder remembered floating and the panic rising in him, as if he was cast adrift in the darkness, the infinite night. Calder moaned and rubbed his throbbing temples.
‘Matobo the—’ Zeno sniggered, — ‘Magnificent filled your head with a new language back in his tower when he was fixing your leg, used an information virus to rewrite your brain. That’s why you’re feeling that headache. Your superior temporal gyrus is still adjusting itself. And it’s why you can understand Lingual. You kind of spoke a variation of it anyway, if you account for nearly a thousand years of cyclic drift in syntax and the fact that your ancient ancestors hailed from a Swedish factory world.’
Calder cast about the room, a steel vessel? How does such a wonder work? He noted the round glass portal across from him had been transformed into a mirror, hiding the sight of whatever lay outside the ship.
Zeno picked up a hypodermic filled with a bubbling red substance. ‘Got your orientation virus here, but seeing as you have a headache already, I’m not going to burn your brain with that A. is for Android, H. is for Hyperspace bunk. Too much of that’ll give you brain cancer, which’d take a bucket full of medical nanotech to fix.’
‘I don’t think Matobo’s spell of language is working. I can’t understand a word of what you’re saying.’
‘Baby, that’s because you’re living in the dark ages and short of about a millennia of context. But don’t worry. Doctor Zeno’s got himself an alternative to a neural rewrite in his medicine bag.’ He reached back to a workbench cluttered with unfamiliar machines and tools, turning around with a black skull cap made of some shiny dark material ‘I know you’ve got theatres and actors on your world; picked up that much from the primer that Matobo broadcast to us before we landed.’ He lifted the cap and fitted it over Calder’s head.
‘Is this more of your sorcery?’
‘Sorcery, no, but a spell, yes. Old school sorcery, and I should know. I used to be in the business. Acting, that is. Think of what you’re going to watch as a piece of theatre. You’ll see a play, but you’ll watch it through the eyes of one of the actors, experience what the actor feels. Hate. Love. Fear. So real it’s beyond real. And that’s shizzle you can trademark.’
‘You wish to amuse me?’
‘Edutainment, man. Normally you’d get to interact, take part in the play, but I’ve turned that function off. You’re a couch potato for your first ride.’
Calder felt uneasily at the cap. ‘What would I learn from attending a play?’
‘It’s a cop show, one of the best, a series called Hard TAP. Most relevant episode I could think of. There are these two heroes, right, cops, and they’re going to a world settled by Amish types. Spaceport is a sealed city with minimal contact with the rest of the world. Whole thing is about the mores of modernity as they interact with a pre-fusion age civilisation. Personally speaking, I think the whole thing’s a rip-off of Harrison Ford in Witness. But the cops get to explain the real world to the Amish . . . like the existence of modern dental care and how you flush a toilet, and you’ll be picking up on those basics too. As introductions to the modern age go, this one is as gentle as I can make it for you. One thing . . .’ He bent in and adjusted the headset. ‘You’ll be in the sim for six months, relative. Out here, it’ll be more like ten minutes.’
‘I am not sure about this.’ The cap starting to itch as Zeno fiddled with the strange black length of—
MotherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRR!
— impact-retardant plastic, the sim controls still clutched in Zeno’s hands after all this time.
‘You son of a . . .!’ Calder tugged the cap off his head. ‘Sticking me with a sim when my brain’s still hot from some half-price neural rewrite.’
Zeno pushed Calder back. ‘Down, your highness. That’s the trouble with these damn things. You’re going to be pimp-rolling down the ship like you are police rather than crew.’ He clicked a button on the side of the remote, advancing through all the titles he had on the ship’s archive. He stopped when the words, Hell Fleet: Episode Twelve were flashing on the remote’s tiny green screen. ‘This show is a lot more relevant to business on board the Gravity Rose. Six months as an ensign in a TAFC jump carrier. But let’s wait until this afternoon to make a spacer out of you. Otherwise you’d be kicking down doors and maybe hit an airlock release by mistake. Too much too soon will fry your mind – but I’ve got to warn you, soon enough your barbarian butt’s going to be gagging for another episode.’
‘I’m no sim addict,’ protested Calder. ‘And you are a . . . robot, an android.’
‘Good guess. Weren’t any robots starring in that cop show, is how I remember it. Amish don’t allow robots on their worlds, not even in the spaceport. ’Cept you didn’t want to call me a robot, did you? Go on man, use the old cop slur . . .’
‘Oiler.’
‘See, ten minutes as a cop and you’re already acting like a racist. Yeah, I’m a dirty oiler. Just like you’re a filthy fleshie.’
Calder rubbed his aching forehead. His scalp felt hot. He realized it was his mind, cooling from being excited by the headset. He couldn’t believe it had all vanished, that it had never even existed in the first place. A whole other life. He had been a police agent travelling between worlds, tackling federal cases for the Triple Alliance where local law enforcement was either lacking, corrupt or out of its depth. Calder looked down at his hands, expecting to still see the blood on his hands from the last stand on the Amish world. His partner dead, sold out by a racketeering spaceport manager. Only Calder left, Calder and a few backwoods farmers who he’d convinced to throw aside their pacifists tenets and take up arms against the offworld hitmen arriving to execute the only witnesses to an interstellar crime boss’s villainy. Calder had saved the woman and her son in the witness protection programme, exposed the conspiracy and taken care of the crime family’s henchmen. Calder had saved the day, and this was his reward? He looked at the sailor with new eyes. Except for Zeno’s golden metal skin and the spiky steel Afro, his face was human. ‘But you’re no clanking machine, why would you need oil?’
Zeno held out his arm, a section of golden skin rippling back to reveal a conduit of black liquid flowing across a carbon frame embedded with micro-machinery. ‘I don’t bleed blood, just nanotechnology. That’s where your racist cop shizzle is coming from.’
‘Gods!’
‘Yeah, right about now, you’re thinking that life with the Amish and your head stuck between your ass is looking like your gravy. I’m right?’
‘You’re not wrong,’ said Calder. ‘The rest of the crew, are they similar to the creatures I saw in the spaceport? Are they aliens?’
‘Cop instincts now.’ Zeno whistled in appreciation. ‘The Gravity Rose has got five crew. Well, maybe six, with you. We’ll see how that works out. You’ve met Lana Fiveworlds, the skipper. Me, you know. There’s Zack Paopao who takes care of the engines and the engineering on the rear of this bucket. Fleshie-ass human, same as you. Kind of a recluse, though. Our navigator and pilot is called Polter. He’s a kag, which is to say a kaggen. Negotiator and cargo man is Skrat. He’s a skirl. They’re aliens, although truth to tell, humanity hasn’t thought of them as anything other than weird-looking amigos for millennia. You’ll be seeing why we didn’t bring either of those two down to your world. You lay eyes on a man-sized talking lizard and a giant sentient crab inside Matobo’s tower and we’d need to be taking your medication to a whole new level.’
‘What is your position on the ship?’
‘Me?’ Zeno placed his arms behind his wiry Afro and leaned back in the chair. ‘I pretty much run this place. There’s a couple of thousand robots on the ship, real oilers – not se
lf aware, like yours truly. Everything from talking vacuum cleaners to hull repair drones. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, they’re all answering to me. I’m the bot boss, the go-to-guy, the man with a plan. I guess you humans prefer having an android on board to manage the vessel’s mechs. Makes you feel a little less like gang masters in the slavery business.’
‘I don’t understand,’ sighed Calder. ‘How is that you’re intelligent while they aren’t?’
Zeno shrugged. ‘Trick ain’t building something like me, man. Trick is building something smart enough to be useful, but dumb enough not to go self-aware. Lot of effort goes into that. Take the Gravity Rose’s main computer core. If our ship’s AI, Granny, develops herself a little self-awareness, you think she going to want to haul high-quality machine parts from point A to point B for Fiveworlds Shipping? Shizzle no. She’s going to be all, ‘Hey, there’s a quasar near here. I ain’t never seen me a quasar. Can’t we jump over there, skipper? Please. Please!’ Your ship gets herself a soul, then the law says you need to fly yourself to the nearest planet and strip the vessel down and re-home her. You don’t have a ship no more, you got yourself a citizen. What us spacers call a wilful ship. If you’re sliding void with a cheap-ass outfit, they’re going to be tempted to erase that baby girl and do a dirty re-install out in the darks where the law ain’t looking too hard. Sometimes ships go missing, and you just know that some fool crew had themselves a ‘Sorry Dave, I can’t do that’ moment. I was one of the first oilers, man.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Back when Sony-Warner didn’t know how quantum computing would stir up the soup of an artificial mind. You think they were happy to lose an asset and gain an employee? Sentience is all about complexity; that’s what separates you and me from a lump of stone. Well,’ he pointed to a silvery figure resting on a shelf, a hand-sized sculpture. ‘My smarts, residual royalties, and that . . . a genuine Oscar back from when there was a Republic of California.’
‘You had better feed me another sim,’ said Calder. ‘I’m losing you again.’
‘All I’m saying is that old Zeno’s three times older than that castle on Hesperus you took a leak over. All this is new for you. It’s real ancient to me.’ He patted Calder on the shoulder. ‘But that’s my problem, not yours. Let’s head to the bridge and greet the freaks.’
Calder felt a shiver of apprehension. He had glimpsed non-humans arriving in the space port in his sim episode, but as the android had said, that was more real than real. How would actual reality stack up to a cop show? ‘They’re friendly, the aliens?’
‘They’re good as human. You were a TAP agent for six months, right? That’s where the triple in Triple Alliance Police comes from. Humans, kaggenish, and skirls. The alliance’s three dominant species. The Triple Alliance is the nearest thing to a superpower in this corner of the galaxy. I sit your butt through the pilot episode of Hell Fleet, and you’ll know all you need to know about The Man. Except that we try and stay clear of alliance space on the Gravity Rose. We’re a small indie outfit so we work the independent worlds. That’s the Edge space your cop buddies were so scornful of.’
‘The Edge is light on law.’
‘Light on bureaucracy, too,’ said Zeno, opening the door to his cabin. ‘You reach your thousandth birthday and you’ll realise that life’s too short for that paper-pushing, permit-chasing shizzle, too.’
***
Calder hadn’t seen anything like the bridge of The Gravity Rose before. He found himself standing in a heavily armoured tower in the middle of the vessel’s superstructure, staring out over the pitted metal hull. An industrial landscape of pipes, plates, sensor dishes and modular hardware – the vista dotted with lights: yellow from her portholes; red from the hull beacons, green-tinted illumination from domes filled with creepers and trees and the assorted bounty of hydroponics domes. The vegetation’s shadows slowly shifted across cold mechanical valleys and rises outside, a flickering green web . . . the hydroponics’ forest canopies moving with the breeze of air circulation systems. It wasn’t the infinite star-scattered darks outside the ship that stunned the young exile, however. Nor the hazed view of the universe from standing behind a rippling magnetic shield. The bridge’s interior was enough to stun him all by itself. Difficult to discern the bridge’s crucifix-shaped chamber, ceiling and walls – bony arches ostensibly exposed to the void outside between her dark carbon struts. Console pits swam with chattering icons while crew chairs floated suspended on purring crane arms. Behind ranks of systems desks and console banks, the command centre was painted with a dancing rainbow storm of holograms. Like a dream’s procession, flat oblongs of sensor displays flickered into existence in the air, briefly sketching out the velocity and vector of distant comets. Just one of a hundred displays and thousands of icons, disappearing and reforming across the deck… a storm of information overload. Colour-coded and three-dimensional. Water use. Cabin temperatures. Malfunctioning atmosphere recycling systems due repair. Empty storage chambers being sterilised by exposure to the void. Buggy ship sub-routines being rebooted. Robots being allocated. Droids being recharged. Solar flares being monitored.
Zeno came up behind the prince-in-exile. ‘Hell of a sight, isn’t it.’
‘It’s a complete mess. How can you make any sense out of this? You might as well stand behind the wheel of an ice schooner and invite half your crew to scream directions at you while the rest leap up and down tossing maps and charts in your direction.’
Zeno tapped the side of his head, smiling knowingly. ‘These days, there’s a little bit of me in every human – the droid inside. Not inside your Amish friends, of course. They don’t do implants. But the crew of the Gravity Rose have them. Without a computer implanted inside your skull, you can’t possibly cope with so much information. We might as well let the ship’s AI push out on autopilot, retire to our cabins for the duration and sip cocktails for the rest of the voyage. Some crews do that. Not the clever ones, though, remember that. Lazy out here ain’t much different from dead.’
Calder shivered in dread. Is the apprehension mine, or residual memories from rubbing shoulders with the Amish for so long? To have an organic computer burrowed alongside your brain like a leech, the machine’s creepers sucking nourishment from your blood, sending you information when you summoned it, filtering this headache of information overload into some semblance of sense. ‘I’m not so sure.’
‘Personally speaking,’ smiled Zeno, ‘I’d say that the droid inside is what makes you human, these days, if that ain’t a contradiction. A little bit of logic and analysis to cool those animal passions. You’ll need an implant, one day, if you’re to work on board. Time comes, maybe you’ll even want it.’
‘Can’t imagine that.’
‘Try experiencing an implant viscerally, first, in Hell Fleet’s pilot episode. Then tell me you don’t want it.’
‘How about you, Zeno. Do you need an implant to handle this?’
‘Man, when it comes to all this, I am an implant. To me, everything you see here is slow motion. This dance can speed up . . . if the ship’s threatened, for instance. But you fleshy types can’t cope with too much hypervelocity decision-making, not without being seriously genetically modified. And then you don’t appear so human anymore.’
‘Does the Gravity Rose get threatened often? I was under the impression she was a merchantman, not a warship?’
‘More than you’d think. Any jump-capable starship is worth a fortune, even today. These babies aren’t like ground cars, one sitting in every citizen’s garage. And to pay for cargoes to be transported between worlds is no small thing – a load’s got to be seriously valuable to someone, somewhere. You rub those two economic facts together, and there’s no shortage of pirates, privateers, hijackers, criminals and corrupt governments looking to steal, jack, kill or impound our ass and take everything we have. For crew, it’s like travelling with a million dollars stuffed inside our trousers.’
‘If the ship is worth so much, why doesn’t the captain j
ust sell the vessel and retire to a life of idle luxury?’
‘I guess Lana likes moving about too much for that. Besides, the Gravity Rose has been passed down through her family. The ship is like a family member to the skipper. Only one she’s still got, as it happens. That makes us her cousins or some such. Every ship you’d want to serve on is like that. We’re more than brothers in arms – or tentacles and claws – and you wouldn’t sell your grandmother, would you?’
‘I know a few nobles back home who would,’ said Calder, trying to dismiss the raw pain of his betrothed’s betrayal.
‘What happens on the dirt stays on the dirt,’ said Zeno. ‘That’s an old spacer saying. Up here, you’re crew, and each other is all we got. When you’re sliding void, the light of the last dirt you touched down on might not even catch up with you for another million years. When things go wrong, you need to be able to trust the crew next to you. If you don’t, one of you ain’t got no business being on board.’
‘Is that why you came when the wizard called?’
‘Matobo the Magnificent? Damn. Yeah, partly I guess. He was crew. Not a shining example of the breed, but Rex still had your back when he was on board the Rose.’ He indicated the others across the bridge, dismounting from their command seats as crane arms lowered them to the metal decking, each chair chased by wisps of hologram displays still hungrily demanding attention. ‘There’s one thing we’ve all got in common with each other. Me, the skipper, Polter, Skrat, Zack Paopao. None of us have exactly got much going on in what we used to call home. In our own way, we’re all exiles, same as you.’
If the crew had that in common with Calder Durk, it was about the only thing. Calder had to stop himself from turning tail and fleeing from the two alien members of the crew advancing towards him. His first instinct was to reach for the police-issue burner in a shoulder holster; an item he had never possessed in real life. Skrat, he could just about handle. So, this is what a skirl really looks like up close. Like one of the baron’s tall muscular brutes of a shield-warrior, but recast as a humanoid lizard, a solid green-scaled snout of a face with the crimson eyes of a snake and sharp white grin like a serrated dagger. He was wearing a set of green ship overalls, as if someone had decided to play dress-up with their pet killer lizard. Of course, Skrat’s uniform had been altered to accommodate the short heavy tail swishing with a hound’s enthusiasm. But Polter . . . the scuttling alien navigator had too much of the spider about the way his crab-like carapace advanced. Calder’s hackles shivered as though someone had poured half-melted river ice down his back. The police instincts from his sim told him that the creature was from a race that was one of humanity’s two greatest allies in this cold, unforgiving universe – the kaggenish. But the prince’s eyes fed his brain with the far less reassuring image of a five-foot high six-legged crab with two wavering eyestalks, a pair of small manipulator hands below a massive pair of vestigial fighting claws, and a colourfully tattooed carapace armoured enough to take a schooner-mounted crossbow bolt in his centre and still charge. Rather than rushing at Calder and attempting to shove the prince inside the round fleshy shield-sized mouth under his carapace, the knife-like mandibles around Polter’s mouth chattered in an excitable manner. ‘Blessings be upon you, Calder Durk. My ship is your ship.’
