by M. D. Cooper
For a heartbeat, she turned off the safety and let her finger hover over the trigger, enjoying the weight of the weapon in her hand. She remembered the fight in Cruithne, thinking of Karcher crouched behind a pile of rubble as he calmly chose targets and squeezed his rifle’s trigger, the recoil barely moving his shoulder.
Karcher had still died, though. She couldn’t forget that. The weapon wasn’t going to solve her problems; it was just a tool, like one of Lyssa’s drones.
Cara slid the safety back into place and put the pistol back in its hiding spot. She yawned and checked the time, surprised to find it was an hour past their bedtime.
Dad hadn’t called to remind them, which meant he must have been busy with Fran’s new plan. It was easy to lose track of time on the ship, especially if Fran was going to work until a job was done. Before Cruithne, her dad had kept them on a fairly strict sleep cycle. Everything had been out of order since then.
Cara thought about checking on Tim again and then decided against it. Struggling with him to do anything was like fighting with a wet towel. He would go to bed eventually when Em fell asleep, and the puppy slept all the time.
She went into her lavatory and stared at herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth, then pulled her hair back so she could spit in the sink.
Sliding into her bunk, she lay with the headset on, staring at the grey bulkhead stretching above her. She wondered what her mom was doing right then, if she was still on the Cho or had already gone somewhere else.
It hadn’t been that long, after all, and she was still close enough that they could have talked in real time. But Brit probably wouldn’t call, and Cara hadn’t said very nice things to her the last time they had talked. Wasn’t it her mom’s job to worry about her, not the other way around?
Waves of white noise lapped at her ears from the EM spectrum as she imagined her mom on the Cho, lost in a crowd of thousands, remembering the packed streets of the medical district where they had taken Tim. Other tones bleeped and sparked in the background and she imagined small ships dancing across an ocean until she finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER THREE
STELLAR DATE: 10.05.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Resolute Charity
REGION: Departing Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Using a mix of the combat drones from Clinic 46—which Lyssa had come to think of as her Flight—and several heavy EV maintenance drones from the Resolute Charity, she brought Sunny Skies into a matched velocity with the larger ship while using other drones to place the initial connecting struts.
The maneuver was similar to docking but required several simultaneous welding actions between the two hulls. Between Lyssa’s projections and Fran’s experience, the operation should go smoothly, barring any unexpected shifts in balance between the two ships.
With drones holding struts in place while others waited at the weld points, Lyssa adjusted relative motion between the ships one last time.
Four drones made the welds on either foot of the X connecting the two ships. With the first strut in place, Lyssa quickly moved to add more before any cascading failure could affect her work.
She monitored the operation from hundreds of points of view at once, across the drones and internal sensors in both ships. Andy’s heartbeat also registered in the back of her mind, racing when she announced the start of the procedure and then calming down as he watched her work.
Fran gave a short laugh.
Lyssa said.
With the final support struts placed to Fran’s satisfaction, and the two drive systems registering alignment for a mass-balanced thrust, Lyssa ran through the other major systems in each ship, checking for anomalies or failures that the additional mass might have created. Everything seemed to be working to plan.
Lyssa said.
Lyssa shifted her attention back to the sensor arrays throughout both ships, re-checking everything prior to the burn. It was surprising to her how quickly Andy had come to trust her oversight of tasks that he never would have delegated before. So much had changed in just a week. When she checked back on him ten minutes later, she found him checking diagnostics on Sunny Skies via a remote connection.
Lyssa considered telling Andy she had already verified Sunny Skies for pre-burn clearance but found herself watching him instead. Just a few days ago, he had told her she was family now, and she didn’t fully understand what that meant. She didn’t understand how the statement made her feel; if it meant anything, or if he had simply been caught up in the excitement of having survived. Why didn’t he blame her for the danger she’d brought on his real family?
The question surprised Lyssa. Shouldn’t she believe him when he said he cared about her? She hadn’t observed Andy lying to anyone else.
Even now, as he simultaneously checked the star charts and ticked off drive system status, he operated out of an act of love. He care
d about all of them. He demonstrated that every day.
So why couldn’t she believe him? Since they had saved Tim from Clinic 46, the memory of the imaging room—where Tim’s mind had been copied to a Weapon Born seed—had hung in her mind like a threat, taunting her. She’d recognized the place, or a place like it. She knew that, but the information didn’t come to her as clearly as something she definitely remembered or wanted to research.
This was one of the many times she wished she could ask Dr. Hari Jickson how her memory worked precisely. In some cases, her perfect recall suggested the data storage of an NSAI, while the flashes of the imaging room from the perspective of being restrained in the bed floated like smoke.
“Lyssa?” Cara asked. “Are you there?”
Cara’s voice pulled Lyssa from her thoughts. “Yes,” she said, realizing she was reaching Cara through the headset that approximated audio from a Link connection.
“Are you busy?”
“I’m always busy.”
“Are you really?”
Lyssa considered the question. “By your father’s standards, I’m busy.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“We’re going to burn soon. The acceleration will help you sleep.”
“Maybe. My head won’t stop spinning.”
“You mean you can’t stop thinking about something?”
“Sort of.” Cara sighed. “I guess it would make sense if I couldn’t stop wondering about where Mom is. But that’s not it.”
For a second, Lyssa felt like she was playing the high school simulator again. She needed to read between the lines to what Cara was really asking.
“What is it?” she asked, choosing one of the game’s neutral responses.
“Do you sleep?” Cara asked.
“Me? No.”
“You never turn off your mind? How do you deal with that? When do you rest?”
“I was asleep before I woke up with your dad. Since then, there’s been too much to keep me busy.”
“So you never dream, then.”
“I have—daydreams, maybe.”
“Daydreams?” Cara asked, sounding a little more awake. “What do you daydream about?”
From the environmental sensors in Cara’s room, Lyssa could tell she wavered on the edge of sleep. Andy would have wanted her to sleep rather than being kept up with stories, she was certain. She wondered if she should tell Andy that Cara was having a hard time sleeping, but she was also intrigued by the question. So many images flashed through her mind on what seemed a continuous basis that she wasn’t sure what was a daydream and what was processed information.
“I see two things,” Lyssa said. “The first is an ocean.”
“What kind of ocean?”
“It’s big. The waves are the size of mountains at the top and as deep as valleys. It’s dark blue down between the waves and almost transparent at the tips. The sky is grey and extends as far as I can see, and the water reaches each horizon in every direction. The waves rise and fall over and over again, with no pattern I’ve been able to determine.”
“Is it on Earth?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure if it’s a memory. I talked to the AI responsible for the Mars 1 Ring and the first thing he showed me was an ocean. He said it was the network available to everyone on the ring. That was back before I knew how to Link into networks and read things like the ship’s sensors or control drones through the network. I think he was trying to impress me, expecting I would think his network the biggest I had ever seen or something. But I’d never seen one then, so I didn’t know what to think about it. In the daydream, I can’t help but think of it as a real ocean, even if it does represent a network. I don’t know which network it’s supposed to be.”
“Maybe it’s the one you’re building everywhere you go?” Cara asked.
“I’m not building a network.”
“Maybe it’s like the place where we met Xander.”
“An expanse?”
“Sure. Your expanse.”
“I made something like that once, so I could talk to the Weapon Born seeds that Fugia first brought on board. It was easy. I made a creek with tall trees on either side, lots of moss and pine needles. This ocean feels different than that. I can’t control it.”
“But it feels real to you, like you can actually feel the wind and taste the air?”
“Maybe? What I do know about the ocean I see is that it’s full of life. I’m not sure why but I know it. It’s like the images I’ve seen of dead whales drifting down into dark water, collecting organisms as they sink, creating more and more life until they reach the bottom. This ocean is full of those whales. Dead things are sinking in the water and living things are creating life from their bodies, multiplying, growing, new whales, new plants, algae, bacteria, all of it. The ocean doesn’t look like it is static but that’s what’s happening. It’s heavy. It’s overwhelming and it never stops.”
“That’s creepy, Lyssa. You’re not depressed, are you?”
“I don’t know if I could tell.”
“We should visit your ocean.”
“If I knew how Xander pulled you into the meeting back on the Cho, I would make that happen, Cara.”
“Promise?” Cara asked, sounding more sleepy this time.
“I promise.”
“You said there were two daydreams, though,” Cara murmured.
The environmental sensors indicated that Cara’s heartrate had steadied. She was on the verge of sleep.
“I’ll tell you about that later,” she said, keeping her voice calm. She had an urge to smooth back Cara’s hair which caught her off-guard.
The desire could only have come from Andy. Why would she have the urge to do something she had never done? Physically couldn’t do? Was the desire born out of watching him tell Cara goodnight so many times now, or were his thoughts and feelings leaking into her? Dr. Jickson had said that couldn’t happen but how did he know, really? When she truly thought about it, what did he really know about what he had created? She was an experiment.
Even the second daydream she had withheld from Cara was more memory than dream. She wasn’t supposed to have memories. Pure AI might accuse her of having human thoughts and feelings because she had been imaged from a human neural framework, but that wasn’t how it worked in practice. She was only supposed to have the mind, not its life.
As the Weapon Born were designed, Andy shouldn’t have had to worry about a second version of Tim in seed form. The existence of Kylan Carthage proved otherwise. He was an image of a dead boy who remembered everything, who longed for his previous life, an iteration of Jickson’s experiments that only served to remind Lyssa that they truly knew little about the new life they had created. Kylan was alive, even if he had been given his life from the building blocks of another living thing, like the bacteria on the whale.
She remembered the imaging room. She couldn’t deny that. The question that terrified her was if she would remember more.
CHAPTER FOUR
STELLAR DATE: 10.05.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: District F8, Ring 9, Callisto Orbital Habitat (Cho)
REGION: Europa, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The scrap merchant frowned at his screen and then glanced back at Brit. He was a studious looking man with tight collar and retinal implants that flashed when he moved his head.
“You want an evac pod, I’ve got them. In fact, I could cut you a great deal on three right now. Drive systems are still intact. Since that Heartbridge ship dumped its crew, everybody’s got these things.”
“I’m looking for a specific pod,” Brit said. “I’ve got a registry number if you keep them on file.”
The clerk shook his head. “We don’t bother with that. You’re welcome to go out there and take a look if you want to run
the scan yourself.”
Brit scowled, irritated with his obvious lie. “You don’t have a drone that could do that?”
“Low overhead, low prices,” the clerk said, giving her a grin.
Brit rolled her eyes. This was the third scrap yard she’d been to since arriving on the Cho. She didn’t want to waste time searching among the hundreds of escape pods that had dispersed into the Jovian Combine but she’d lost Cal Kraft’s flight path near the Cho and couldn’t think of any other place he might have reached in the last ten hours.
The fuel debacle had grounded most outbound traffic. Even ships that hadn’t needed refueling had become too valuable to risk in open space for fear of pirates attacking them for their fuel stores. This created a window of opportunity for Brit to find Kraft on the Cho, which was like saying she wanted to find someone in Jerhattan with no idea where they might be hiding.
Brit also knew the clerk was lying about the registry numbers. Drumming her black-gloved fingers on the desk counter between them, she flexed her shoulders, a move she knew would make her iridescent armor more apparent. She didn’t have the credit to bribe him, so she would have to use her other resources.
The clerk glanced at her hand, then followed it as she put her palm on the butt of her pistol. His gaze rose to meet her eyes, grin dropping from his sallow face. He would have to assume she was law enforcement or a pirate who just didn’t care, which might have been more accurate. In truth, she’d slipped through standard security protocols in the emergency pod and hadn’t seen any other checkpoints yet.
“It surprises me that you wouldn’t have the registry information,” Brit said. “I’m not an expert on Callistan law but I think that would put you in the territory of selling unverifiable transport craft. When I was in the TSF, I spent a few months busting pirates for just such offenses.”
