I looked back at him, but he only smiled again, that terrible, alien smile and said, “Don’t worry. They have long outlived their usefulness.”
I looked down at Cere through her visor. Her eyes were shut. I could see them moving rapidly beneath her eyelids. She was in deep. I looked at a few of the others, and they were all in the same state.
“What did you do?” I asked the shipheart.
“Do you know what it means to be hungry?”
In spite of my confusion, I played along. “Sure I do.”
“I do not think so. Not like this. Not like me. For more than two hundred years, I have been here on this tiny moon, cracking and fragmenting.” He gestured to a skeleton at his feet, “The thoughts and memories of these remnants were gone too fast.” As he spoke, images flashed across my mind. Seven people, sitting around a table. Eating and laughing. Then, one of them started to choke, and the image sped up, like a time-lapse video. Soon they were all slumped in their chairs, and their flesh became bloated and ashen. It started to shrivel, sloughing off their bodies, leaving dried bones and hair, and vacant black holes.
I shook my head, trying to clear away the terrible visions. “How are you doing this?”
He ignored my question. “You see? How quickly they were gone? So I sat, and waited. And I could feel myself falling to pieces. That is hunger. Do you understand?”
Then he was standing next to me, suddenly taller than I was, looming above me, his head bent and shoulders hunched to keep from hitting the ceiling. He reached his hands next to my helmet.
“No! Wait.” But it was too late. My helmet came off and clattered to the floor, and the old, dusty air of the ship filled my lungs. I coughed out, and then I plugged my nose and closed my mouth, refusing to breathe in any more. He was leaning over me, smiling, pointed teeth inches from my face.
The lights flickered one last time, then went out, and he was gone. The core must have overheated the system, just as Cere predicted. The shipheart, whatever was left of it, disappeared with it.
I pulled my helmet back on as fast as I could and sealed it tight. As soon as I could, I sucked in a huge breath, my chest heaving. My heart started to settle. I reached behind Cere’s head, and depressed the emergency connection. Her head lolled to the side as the wires withdrew from the base of her neck.
6 A Hard Decision
“Cere, come back to me. Please come back.” I shook her shoulders. She didn’t respond. I ran outside, bounding back to our scouting ship, and found the medkit. Adrenalin. I took the small vial and connected it to the air filtration system in her suit. I waited for three beats, holding my breath, my heart thudding in my ears. She sat straight up, and screamed, her helmet muffling the sound.
Her eyes searched around wildly. She did not seem to see me.
“Cere! It’s me, Oren.”
Her eyes found mine.
“Yes, that’s good. Breathe. You’re right here. We’re fine. You’re alive. Breathe.”
She took several deep gulps, and her breath began to slow and even out. Finally, she spoke. “Oren. What happened?”
“You interfaced with the ship. The whole team. You woke it up. And it was hungry.”
“Hungry?”
“The shipheart. That’s what it said, right before the system fried, just as you predicted. I tried to cut the power downstairs, but I broke the lever. I couldn’t stop the overload.”
“Oh, Oren.” She made a pained look. “It was awful. That twisted sentience, crawling around in our minds. It was much more powerful than I had anticipated, even with all seven of us connected.”
She hung her legs over the edge of the cradle, leaning on the crook of my arm, and pulled herself to standing. “We must get the team out of here. Everyone needs psychomedical attention.”
“Right. I’ll bring the bed.” I bounded back to our ship and pulled out the small case from the back storage unit. I pressed the button, and it unfolded, springing open to create a simple bed, floating waist height off the ground. One by one, we moved the unconscious team members back to the scout ship. Once everyone was in, Cere and I climbed into the cabin.
Cere looked at me. “Oren, you’ll have to take us back. My head is still spinning.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Can you handle it?”
I nodded and fired up the systems, lifting us up, escaping the gentle tug of the moon. I interfaced with the com. “Transcendence. This is ensign Oren Siris with the scouting team. We are returning, and we need a psychmed team on point. Six team members are unconscious. Our team leader is awake, but she is in bad shape.”
* * *
I touched us down in the landing bay. The medical team was there, waiting. So was Pausha Dar. I looked at Cere, but her head was in her hands, and she was massaging her temples.
“Cere, the pausha is here.”
She looked up. Her face was pained, but she forced a smile. “Ever the worrier. She always looks after her children.”
As one of the medics helped her to her feet, she looked at me. “Well, what are you waiting for? Go. Speak with her.”
“Right.” I hustled past them, and down onto the deck. “Pausha,” I called to her.
“Oren. What in the blazes happened out there?”
She listened with all of her attention, occasionally stopping me to ask points of clarification. When I finished, she grunted, but she revealed no emotion on her face. She grabbed the arm of one of the passing mediticians. “Make sure they all receive a full psychosoma scan. We cannot be sure what that thing did to their minds. And him.” She pointed at me. “He breathed in the air on the moon. Stay here a minute and give him a full scan.”
The meditician nodded, and waited while the rest of the team hurried away with Cere and the scouting party, disappearing into the corridors of our massive voyager.
Dar looked at me. “That was well done, Oren,” she said, placing her hand on my arm and nodding with affirmation. “You stayed calm in the presence of grave danger, and you improvised in the face of uncertainty.”
“What’s going to happen to them?” I asked.
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
“What about me?”
“Right now, my young amanuensis, I need you to rest. You’ve done more than enough.” Before I could argue, she turned and headed towards the medical facilities. A retinue of advisers and support staff who had been hanging back, discreet and inconspicuous, hurried after her.
* * *
The meditician who stayed with me must have been about my age. He was efficient and soft-spoken. He asked me to sit, and he hovered his hand over me, running it up and down my body, his senses finely tuned to measure molecular and magnetic perturbations. “You’ve got some low level toxins in your blood stream,” he said after a minute. “But nothing to worry about. I want you to turn up the oxygen levels in your personal quarters by ten percent, and do twenty minutes of the series eleven breathing exercises. I’ll have Transcend pipe in a few purifying grams through the air filtration system, and you’ll be clean and clear within a few hours.”
He patted me on the back and then trotted off in the direction of Darpausha and the rest of the medical team. I sighed, and headed back to my quarters. After running through the breathing series, I felt lightheaded, and I was too exhausted to do any of my regular evening mental exercises.
I poked the half-eaten food on my plate for a few minutes, then set it aside. My mind turned over the events on the moon. That cold, terrifying voice. The images of that long lost crew, decaying before my eyes. My helmet, lifting from my head, and the toxic air seeping into my lungs. Somehow, even though I had not been connected to the field, the shipheart was able to influence me. To plant images in my mind. To remove my helmet.
I thought of Transcend, our ship’s heart. How different it was from that thing. I visited the core once, with Saiara. It was the first time we kissed, floating in the pure air of the chamber. On a massive interstellar voyager like the Transcendence, the shiphea
rt is a dazzlingly complex network of tens of trillions of neurons, with neural hubs scattered throughout the whole ship. The central heart floats in a zero gravity chamber. Oxygenated air is provided by thickets of flora that are genetically optimized to thrive in the absence of gravity. They spread out and grow in every direction, a forest of ferns that bend and curl as you tunnel through them, pulling yourself along on overgrown handrails that lead deeper in towards the heart.
Then you are next to it. Beneath it. Staring up at it, perfectly round and crystal white. Two large, concave energy anchors attached to the walls on either side keep it suspended and immobile in the air. At first, it seems opaque, but the ferns kiss its surface, drawing you closer, until you see the almost imperceptible striations, countless wafer-thin, translucent layers, molded together in aching symmetry. A cool, pulsing glow comes from deep inside its center, muted by its density. And you know, immediately, without quite knowing how, that it is aware; that it feels and senses; that its voice, the part we interact with every day, is just one small aspect of a consciousness beyond human comprehension.
It is a masterpiece.
I touched my hands to its surface, and I felt clumsy and thick in its presence. I looked back at Saiara. “It knows we are here.”
She had let go of the handrail, and she was floating behind me. When I spoke, she reached out with her foot, and pushed, ever so gently, against the wall, tumbling into a graceful somersault. She tucked her legs in, and as she came around again to face me, she stretched her arms and legs out wide, like a sunsail catching the solar winds, and she smiled. “Of course it does. It always knows. That’s what it is born for.”
I reached out and caught her by the ankle, holding tight to the handrail, and pulled her towards me.
She laughed and went limp, falling on top of me like a heavy blanket. We stared at each other, and I wanted so badly to kiss her, and then before I knew what was happening, she was kissing me.
She lifted her head away from me, looking me in the eyes.
“That was nice,” she whispered.
I stared back at her, buzzing with pleasure.
She laughed. “You should see the look on your face right now,” she said. She pushed away from me, floating up into the ferns.
The memory made me ache. Looking back, I think we were both intoxicated by the effervescent air of the shipheart’s chamber. I wanted Saiara to come to me now, to go with me to revisit Transcend, to breathe that air again. I smiled at the idea, lingering on the thought of her close to me, our lips together, the shipheart floating and patient, watching everything. But Saiara was on the opposite side of the ship. She had the gift of farsight, a special aptitude for understanding the interconnectedness of complex systems, and she was deep into a training residency with the Farseers. I probably wouldn’t see her again for many months.
I rolled over, darkened the lights with a word, and fell into a fitful sleep.
* * *
I walk through the forest. The trees tower above me, leafless, creaking in the wind, and through them, I can see a white sky. I come into a clearing. In the center is a small domed hut. The sky turns dark, and the dome shines in the night, light leaking out of the doorway onto the rocky ground.
I trip and stumble across the rocks, making my way up to the entrance. I know where I am. I step inside, and the ferns crinkle beneath my feet, soft and welcoming. The perfect sphere floats above me. Your hunger will swallow you up, it tells me.
The room is hot and humid. I try to make sense of the words, but they are dripping around me like condensation from the ceiling. Smoky incense swirls and funnels from some unseen source, floating up through a hole in the roof. I can see stars through the hole, but they are unfamiliar to me.
The whole surface of the sphere starts to quiver, like the heavy bass string of a cellofahn. A small hole opens on the bottom, no bigger than my fist, and something drops out, clinking on the ground.
Or floats up towards the ceiling. My sense of perspective is vacillating.
Vertigo washes over me.
“Hello, Oren.” That voice. He stands above me, naked and sexless.
I vomit.
“You do not look well Oren. Not well at all.”
I grab his leg and try to push him away.
He smiles at me with his razor teeth, then he leans down and grips my head by the temples with his thin, delicate hands. They are like iron clamps. He laughs, and says, “They will never think to look for me here, will they?”
He forces open my mouth and climbs inside.
* * *
I woke, screaming in the dark, and stumbled over to my hygiene pedestal. I stuck my finger down my throat and forced myself to gag. As I sat there retching, I tried to tell myself that I had just been dreaming. I called for the lights, and the room came awake. I stared at myself in the mirrorsplay, rotating the view three hundred sixty degrees, examining myself from every angle. Then I remembered what the corrupted heart had said back on the moon, about coming back with us, and I knew.
“It’s here,” I said to my reflection. I looked around my room, a twinge of panic in my throat, half expecting to see him standing there with his mouthful of sharp teeth. But I was alone.
“Transcend.” I spoke to the shipheart.
“Yes, Oren?”
“Have you noticed any irregularities since our return from the moon?”
“Of course. There are always irregularities.”
I wished Transcend had a body so I could shake it. “Sometimes, Transcend,” I said, “I’m not sure if you really are so literal, or if you do it just to toy with us.”
“You will have to decide for yourself, Oren.” I envisioned the damn thing smiling.
“Ha. Listen, when we were on the moon, that corrupted shipheart threatened to come here with us. When the power fried, I thought it was destroyed, but it may have ridden inside someone from the scouting team, and into our ship. It may even be listening to us now.”
Transcend did not respond. I cracked my knuckles and rubbed the back of my neck, expectant. The weight of the silence made me nervous.
Then my door slid open, and Transcend finally spoke. “I can find no evidence of a foreign presence, but I also detect that you truly believe what you are saying. I will notify the pausha. She is at the upper east medical bay. Go there. Tell her what you told me. We will see what she has to say.”
I dialed my cloak for warmth and movement, and fibers formed around me, a simple, casual gray layer, loose fitting and comfortable. I stepped out into the corridor, and followed the path that Transcend had lit for me along the walls.
Ten minutes later, I was in the medical observation room, staring over Dar’s shoulder as a small troop of mediticians attended to the scouting team. Cere was sitting up, undergoing what looked like a routine physical check, but the other six were still lying prone on medical beds.
I cleared my throat. Dar turned and looked at me. She seemed surprised for just a second, but she regained her usual composure. “Oren. What are you doing?”
“Didn’t Transcend notify you?”
“Notify me about what?”
“Pausha, I think that the corrupted shipheart from the moon may have traveled here to our ship inside the mind of one of the scouting team. Or maybe all of them.”
She shook her head again. “Your report and Cere’s both match up. The system overheated. How could the intelligence have survived that?” She turned her eyes up, as if she were searching for something on the ceiling. “Transcend, why didn’t you notify me about this?”
“I wanted you to judge for yourself, pausha. I do not detect a foreign presence, but even I may have blind spots. And Oren clearly believes what he is saying.”
Dar rubbed her fingers over her lips and cheeks, then punched on the com link, her voice echoing into the chamber with the scouting team and the mediticians. “Do any of them show signs of deeper neurological damage?”
The lead meditician shook his head. “Nothing that
has us worried, pausha. We’re holding these six in stasis while we continue to monitor their vitals, but Cere seems fine, and our scans show that they should all come out of this unscathed.”
“Good.” She turned off the com and looked at me. “What makes you think differently?”
“Well, pausha…” My eyes scanned the room as I sought a way to say this without sounding ridiculous. But I couldn’t. So I looked her straight in the eyes and told her. “I dreamed it.”
“You dreamed it.” Her voice was neutral.
“Yes.”
“What did you dream?”
“That the corrupted shipheart climbed inside of my mouth, and said that no one would ever look for it there. Except I was never linked in like the others. There is no way it could have climbed inside of me. But it definitely could have climbed inside somebody before the system crashed.”
“It is possible, in theory. But why haven’t we detected any signs?”
“If I was hiding,” I said, “I would do my best to cover my tracks.”
As those words came out of my mouth, Cere started screaming, her face tensing into a rictus of pain. Three mediticians leapt forward, holding her down.
“What in the blazes is happening in there?” shouted Dar through the com.
“I don’t know, pausha,” the head meditician shouted back. “We connected her field port, and her pineal cortex lit up in a blaze of activity. Her nervous system is overloading with the stimulus.”
“Then unplug her, dammit!”
The meditician looked up at us through in the observation deck, his eyes wide with terror. “It could kill her.”
Cere screamed again, her back arching. Dar keyed open the door, and ran down to her. I followed on her heels.
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