Starbase Human

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Inform space traffic control to open the exit through the rings, the ship said in its prissiest voice.

  Tears pricked her eyes. Crap. She’d be stuck here because of some goddamn rule that ship couldn’t take off if there was no exit. She’d die if there was another explosion.

  “There’s no space traffic control here,” she said. “Space traffic control is dead. We have to get out. Everyone’s dead.”

  Her voice wobbled just like the ship had as she realized what she had said. Everyone. Everyone she had worked with, her friends, her co-workers, the people she drank with, laughed with, everyone—

  We cannot leave if the exit isn’t open, the ship said slowly and even more prissily, if that were possible.

  “Then ram it,” she said.

  That will destroy us, the ship said, so damn calmly. Like it had no idea they were about to be destroyed anyway.

  Takara ran her fingers over the board, looking for—she couldn’t remember. This thing was supposed to have weapons, but she’d never used them, didn’t know exactly what they were. She’d bought this stupid ship for a song six years ago, and the weapons were only mentioned in passing.

  She couldn’t find anything, so she gambled.

  “Blow a damn hole through the closed exit,” she said, not knowing if she could do that, if the ship even allowed that. Weren’t there supposed to be failsafes so that no one could blow a hole through something on this base?

  That will leave us with only one remaining laser shot, the ship said.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn!” she screamed. “Fire!”

  And it did. Or something happened. Because the ship heated, and rocked and she heard a bang like nothing she’d ever heard before, and the sound of things falling on the ship.

  “Get us out of here!” she shouted.

  And the ship went upwards, fast, faster than ever.

  So fast she could hear the engines screaming—

  Which meant she didn’t have to.

  TWO

  AS THE SHIP screamed its way out of the base, Takara tumbled backwards. The attitude controls were screwed or the gravity or something, but she didn’t care.

  “Visuals,” she said, and floating on the screens that appeared in front of her was the hole that the ship had blown through the exit, and debris heading out with them, and bits of ship—and then she realized that there were bits of more than ship. Bits of the starbase and other ships and son of a bitch, more bodies and—

  “Make sure you don’t hit anything,” she said, not knowing how to give the correct command.

  I will evade large debris, the ship said as if this were an everyday occurrence. However, I do need a destination.

  “Far away from here,” Takara said.

  How far?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Out of danger.”

  She was pressed against what she usually thought of as the side wall, with blankets and smelly sheets and musty pillows against her.

  “And fix the attitude controls and the gravity, would you?” she snapped.

  The interior of the ship seemed to right itself. She flopped on her stomach again, only this time, it didn’t hurt.

  She stood, her mouth wet and tasting of blood. She put a hand to her face, realized her nose was bleeding, and grabbed a sheet, stuffing it against her skin.

  She dragged the sheet with her to the controls. The images had disappeared (had she ordered that? She didn’t remember ordering that) and so she called them up again, saw more body parts, and globules of stuff (blood? Intestines?) and shut it all off—consciously this time.

  God, she was lucky. She had administration codes. She had a sense that things were going bad. She had her ship ready. And, most important of all, she had been close enough to the docking ring to get out of there before anyone knew she even existed.

  She sank into the chair and closed her eyes, wondering what in the bloody hell was going on.

  She’d met those men, the creepy older ones, and asked her boss what they wanted with ships, and he’d said, Better not to ask, hon.

  He always called her hon, and she finally realized it was because he couldn’t remember her name. And now he was dead or would be dead or was dying or something awful like that. He’d been inside the administration area when the twenty clones had come in—or the forty clones—or the sixty clones, God, she had no idea how many.

  It was her boss’s boss who’d answered her, later, when she mentioned that the men looked alike.

  Don’t ask about it, Takara, he’d said quietly. They’re creatures of someone else. Designer criminal clones. They need a ship for nefarious doings.

  They’re not in charge? she’d asked.

  He’d shaken his head. Someone made them for a job.

  Her eyes opened, saw the mess that her cockpit had become. A job. They’d had to find fast ships for a job.

  But if the creepy older ones were made for a job, so were the younger versions.

  She called up the screens, asked for images of the starbase. It was a small base, far away from anything, important only to malcontents and criminals, and those like her, whose ships wouldn’t cross the great distance between human-centered planets without a rest-and-refueling stop.

  The starbase was glowing—fires inside, except where the exterior had been breached. Those sections were dark and ruined. It looked like a volcano that had already exploded—twice. More than twice. Several times.

  Ship, her ship said, and for a minute, she thought it was being recursive.

  “What?” she asked.

  Approaching quickly. Starboard side.

  She swiveled the view, saw a ship twice the size of hers, familiar too. The creepy older men had come back to the starbase in a ship just like that.

  “Can you show me who is inside?” she asked.

  I can show you who the ship is registered to and who disembarked from it earlier today, her ship sent. I cannot show who is inside it now.

  Then, on an inset screen floating near the other screens, images of the two creepy older men and five younger leaving the ship. They went inside the base.

  “Did anyone else who looked like them—”

  The other clones disembarked from a ship that landed an hour later, her ship answered, anticipating her question for once. Did ships think?

  Then she shook her head. She knew better than that. Ships like this one had computers that could deduce based on past performance, nothing more.

  That second ship has been destroyed, the ship sent, along with the docking ring.

  “What?” Takara asked. She moved the imagery again, saw another explosion. The docking ring about five minutes after she left.

  She was trembling. Everyone gone. Except her. And the creepy men, and maybe the five young guys they had brought with them.

  Bastards. Filthy stinking horrible asshole bastards.

  “You said we have one shot left,” she said.

  Yes, but—

  “Target that ship,” she said. “Blow the hell out of it.”

  Our laser shot cannot penetrate their shields.

  Her gaze scanned the area. Other ships whirling, twirling, looping through space, heading her way.

  Their way.

  She ran through the records stored in her links. She’d always made copies of things. She was anal that way, and scared enough to figure she might need blackmail material.

  One thing she did handle as a so-called administrator: requests to dock for ships with unusual fuel sources. She kept them on the far side of the ring.

  Right now, she scanned for them and their unusual size, saw one, realized it had a huge fuel cell, still intact.

  “Can you shoot that ship?” she asked, sending the image across the links, “and push it into the manned ship?”

  What she wanted to say was “the ship with the creepy guys,” but she knew her ship wouldn’t know what she meant.

  Yes, her ship sent. But it won’t do anything to the ship except make them collid
e.

  “Oh, yes it will,” Takara said. “Make sure the fuel cell hits the manned ship directly.”

  That will cause a chain reaction that will be so large it might impact us, her ship sent.

  “Yeah, then get us out of here,” Takara said.

  We have a forty-nine percent chance of survival if we try that, her ship sent.

  “Which is better than what we’ll have if that damn ship catches up with us,” Takara said.

  Are you ordering me to take the shot? Her ship asked.

  “Yes!”

  Her ship shook slightly as the last laser shot emerged from the front. The manned ship didn’t even seem to notice or care that she had firepower. Of course, from their perspective, she had missed them.

  The shot went wide, hit the other ship, and destroyed part of its hull, pushing it into the manned ship.

  And nothing happened. They collided, and then bounced away, the manned ship’s trajectory changed and little else.

  Then the other ship’s fuel cell glowed green, and Takara’s ship sped up, again losing attitude control and sending her flying into the back wall.

  An explosion—green and gold and white—flashed around her.

  She looked up from the pile of blankets at the floating screens, saw only debris, and asked, “Did we do it?”

  Our shot hit the ship. It exploded. Our laser shot ignited the fuel cell—

  “I know,” she snapped. “What about the manned ship?”

  It is destroyed.

  She let out a sigh of relief, then leaned back against the wall, gathering the pillows and blanket against her. The blood had dried on her face, and she hadn’t even noticed until now. Her elbow ached, her knees stung, and her stomach hurt, and she felt—

  Alive.

  She felt alive and giddy and sad and terrified and…

  Curious.

  She scanned through the information on the creepy men. They didn’t have names, at least that they had given to the administration. Just numbers. Numbers that didn’t make sense.

  She saw some imagery: the men talking to her boss, saying something about training missions for their weapons, experimental weapons, and something about soldiers—a promise of a big payout if the experiment worked.

  And if it doesn’t? her boss asked.

  The creepy men smiled. You’ll know if it doesn’t.

  Practice sessions. Soldiers. A failed experiment.

  Had her boss realized that the destruction of everything he had known was a practice session? Had that become clear to him in his last moment of life?

  And the men, heading off to report the failure to someone.

  But they hadn’t gotten there. She had stopped them.

  But not the someone in charge.

  She ran a hand over her face. She would send all of this to the Alliance. There wasn’t much more she could do. She wasn’t even sure what the Alliance could do.

  This was the Frontier. It was lawless by any Alliance definition. Each place governed itself.

  She had liked that when she arrived. She was untraceable, unknown, completely alone.

  Then she’d made friends, realized that every place had a rhythm, every place had good and bad parts, and she had decided to stay. Become someone.

  Until she got that feeling from the creepy men, and had planned to leave.

  “Fix the attitude and gravity controls, would you?” she asked the ship, only this time, she didn’t sound panicked or upset.

  The ship righted itself. Apparently when it sped up, it didn’t have enough power for all of its functions. She was going to need to get repairs.

  Maybe in the Alliance. She had enough fuel to get there.

  She’d been stockpiling. Food, fuel, everything but money.

  She could get back to a place where there were laws she understood, where someone didn’t blow up a starbase as an experiment with creepy matching soldiers.

  She’d let the authorities know that someone—a very scary someone—was planning something. But what she didn’t know. She didn’t even know if it was directed against the Alliance.

  She would guess it wasn’t.

  It would take more than twenty, forty, sixty, one hundred matching soldiers to defeat the Alliance. No one had gone to war against it in centuries. It was too big.

  Something like this had to be Frontier politics. A war against something else, or an invasion or something.

  And it had failed.

  All of the soldiers had died.

  Along with everyone else.

  Except her, of course.

  She hadn’t died.

  She had lived to tell about it.

  And she would tell whoever would listen.

  Once she was safe inside the Alliance.

  A place too big to be attacked. Too big to be defeated.

  Too big to ever allow her to go through anything like this again.

  7.5 YEARS BEFORE ANNIVERSARY DAY

  THREE

  DETECTIVE NOELLE DERICCI opened the top of the waste crate. The stench of rotting produce nearly hid the faint smell of urine and feces. A woman’s body curled on top of the compost pile as if she had fallen asleep.

  She hadn’t, though. Her eyes were open.

  DeRicci couldn’t see any obvious cause of death. The woman’s skin might have been copper colored when she was alive, but death had turned it sallow. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, undisturbed by whatever killed her. She wore a gray-and-tan pantsuit that seemed more practical than flattering.

  DeRicci put the lid down and resisted the urge to remove her thin gloves. They itched. They always itched. Because she used department gloves rather than buying her own, and they never fit properly.

  She rubbed her fingers together, as if something from the crate could have gotten through the gloves, and turned around. Nearly one hundred identical containers lined up behind it. More arrived hourly from all over Armstrong, the largest city on Earth’s moon.

  The entire interior of the warehouse smelled faintly of organic material gone bad. She was only in one section of the warehouse. There were dozens of others, and at the end of each was a conveyer belt that took the waste crate, mulched it, and then sent the material for use in the Growing Pits outside Armstrong’s dome.

  The crates were cleaned in a completely different section of the warehouse and then sent back into the city for reuse.

  Not every business recycled its organic waste for the Growing Pits, but almost all of the restaurants and half of the grocery stores did. DeRicci’s apartment building sent organic food waste into bins that came here as well.

  The owner of the warehouse, Najib Ansel, stood next to the nearest row of crates. He wore a blue smock over matching blue trousers, and blue booties on his feet. Blue gloves stuck out of his pocket, and a blue mask hung around his neck.

  “How did you find her?” DeRicci asked.

  Ansel nodded at the ray of blue light that hovered above the crate, then toed the floor.

  “The weight was off,” he said. “The crate was too heavy.”

  DeRicci looked down.

  “I take it you have sensors in the floor?” she asked.

  “Along the orange line.”

  She didn’t see an orange line. She moved slightly, then saw it. It really wasn’t a line, more like a series of orange rectangles, each long enough to hold a crate and too short to measure anything beside them.

  “So you lifted the lid…” DeRicci started.

  “No, sir,” Ansel said, using the traditional honorific for someone with more authority.

  DeRicci wasn’t sure why she had more authority than he did. She had looked him up on her way here. He owned a multimillion dollar industry, which made its fortune charging for waste removal from the city itself, and then reselling that waste at a low price to the Growing Pits.

  She had known this business existed, but she hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it until an hour ago. She had felt a shock of recognition when she saw the name
of the business in the download that sent her here: Ansel Management was scrawled on the side of every waste container in every recycling room in the city.

  Najib Ansel had a near monopoly in Armstrong, and had warehouses in six other domed communities. According to her admittedly cursory research, he had filed for permits to work in two new communities just this week.

  So the fact that he was in standard worker gear, just like his employees, amazed her. She would have thought a mogul like Ansel would be in a gigantic office somewhere making deals, rather than standing on the floor of the main warehouse just outside Armstrong’s dome.

  Even though he used the honorific, he didn’t say anything more. Clearly, Ansel was going to make her work for information.

  “Okay,” DeRicci said. “The crate was too heavy. Then what?”

  “Then we activated the sensors, to see what was inside the crate.” He looked up at the blue light again. Obviously that was the sensor.

  “Show me how that works,” she said.

  He rubbed his fingers together—probably activating some kind of chip. The light came down and broadened, enveloping the crate. Information flowed above it, mostly in chemical compounds and other numbers. She was amazed she recognized that the symbols were compounds. She wondered where she had picked that up.

  “No visuals?” she asked.

  “Not right away.” Ansel reached up to the holographic display. The numbers kept scrolling. “You see, there’s really nothing out of the ordinary here. Even her clothes must be made of some kind of organic material. So my people couldn’t figure out what was causing the extra weight.”

  “You didn’t find this, then?” she asked.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk with the person who did,” she said.

  “She’s over there.” He nodded toward a small room off to the side of the crates.

  DeRicci suppressed a sigh. Of course he’d cleared the employee off the floor. Anything to make a cop’s job harder.

  “All right,” DeRicci said, not trying to hide her annoyance. “How did your ‘people’ discover the extra weight?”