Will Save the Galaxy for Food

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  And then the chain snapped and the wreck crashed heavily back into the waves as the first pain in my head exploded. I don’t know what they were making that homebrew wine out of, but the last time I’d had a headache this bad was after getting trapped in a fuel compartment for an hour without a breathing mask. My throat made a noise like the rumbling death throes of a trapped cow.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” said Warden.

  I lifted my head, which was a fairly weighty salvage operation in itself, and saw Warden sitting primly next to a fire.

  That helped flood some emergency activity into my limbs. I sat bolt upright. “FIRE!”

  “Yes, that is a fire.”

  “Put it out! You can’t have fires on space stations!”

  “Good advice, but if you take a moment, you will notice that we are not currently on a space station.”

  My sudden movement had summoned a swarm of spots before my eyes, but once they faded, I saw that she was right. I was lying on coarse sand, and the fire was in a ring of red stones in the center of a jungle clearing. The trees were a deep burgundy, and had grown into tentacle-like curves entirely uncharacteristic of trees of terrestrial origin. Through the gaps between the black leaves overhead I saw a fire-orange sky, lit by two small rising suns.

  The next thing I noticed—for there was quite a long queue of things to get through—was Jemima, sitting on the third point of a triangle formed by me, her, and Warden around the fire. Both the women were giving me faintly accusatory looks.

  Next on the queue was a painful throbbing in my hand, which was readily explained by the bloody bandage wrapped around it. The question of where I was was suddenly elbowed out of my head by the persistent ache. “What happened to my hand?”

  “Robert Blaze cut your ID chip out while you were unconscious,” said Warden.

  “What?” I cradled my hand as if it were Robert Blaze’s feelings, wounded by the accusation. “He wouldn’t do that!”

  “He kinda did,” said Jemima. “Sorry.”

  “But . . .” I poked at the reddest part of the bandage, and felt pain, but not the reassuring bump of a subdermal chip. “He’s . . . a good guy.”

  “He was apologizing a lot,” said Jemima.

  “Yes, it took quite a lot of rationalization on his part,” said Warden. “It was quite instructive to watch him going through the thought processes.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him?!” I yelled.

  “Jemima tried,” said Warden.

  Jemima glanced at her. “We both did, didn’t we? That’s why he put us down here. He said we needed to cool off. And he said to tell you when you woke up that he did say that he has to take every opportunity for funding he can get.” She rolled her eyes upward as she remembered his words. “And that you’d probably have been totally persuaded to let him have all the money if you’d given him time, so he was just, you know, cutting that whole part out.”

  I inspected my hand mournfully. “He’s got my chip. He’s got access to my bank account. Trac.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t, would he?” said Jemima, frowning. “ID chips record your DNA and physical details and check they’re still correct before they can be scanned. Don’t they?”

  “Not off-world, Jemima,” said Warden, like a middle-school teacher correcting an oral presentation. “Once a Lunarian chip is extracted, a dedicated hacker could copy its information and paste it into a different one, and it would work perfectly well. Off-world chip IDs only record basic identification and do not make biometric security checks.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe because our government isn’t run by paranoid fascists?” I suggested. Then I remembered what company I was in. “No offense.”

  “For what? Oh. Right. Mum’s thing.” She talked about the government of the UR like it was a Tupperware party that she was afraid to walk through, in case several middle-aged women pinched her cheek and asked if she had a boyfriend yet.

  “Hang on a sec,” I said, looking around the clearing. “Where’s Daniel?”

  “Still with Blaze,” said Warden, staring at the fire and allowing the slightest quantum of shame to drift into her voice. “Henderson had been broadcasting an offer of reward. I think Blaze worked out Daniel’s identity fairly quickly.”

  “That’s it,” I said, snapping the fingers on my wounded hand and immediately regretting it. “That’s what Blaze is doing. He’s protecting us. He’s hiding us on this planet until Henderson’s men have come and taken Daniel back.”

  “Well, if that was his plan, he could’ve just told us,” said Jemima. “Without waving guns around and forcing us onto a shuttle.”

  “Or stealing your ID chip,” pointed out Warden.

  “He had to have a good reason,” I insisted. “He’s the original star pilot. He’s a hero a million times over. He—” I realized something as I was looking at Jemima, and my sentence screeched to a halt.

  “He . . . cut out your ID chip?” finished Warden in very nearly a sing-song voice. “He . . . exiled us to an alien planet?”

  “He doesn’t know about Jemima,” I said, the words marching from my mouth in an ominous monotone. “Henderson said he was going to tell Jemima’s mum that we’d taken her hostage.”

  “If it were known that the daughter of the United Republic president had been kidnapped and taken to the Black by off-worlders,” thought Warden aloud, “then the president would undoubtedly call for a large-scale naval operation.”

  “No she wouldn’t,” said Jemima, with bitter conviction.

  “I rather think she would,” said Warden.

  Jemima hugged her knees and fiddled with the flaps on her sneakers. “Well, you don’t know her.”

  “How about we just assume she will?” I suggested. “Because if she does, a fleet of UR face stompers are going to show up at Salvation Station looking for you, and when you’re not there they’re going to tear it apart!” I was on my feet and pacing now. “Did Rob say when he was going to pick us back up?”

  Warden made a contemptuous sound. “I, personally, am not holding out hope for that. And I don’t see what you think you possibly owe him at this point.”

  I stood over her, and she remained seated, politely looking up at me as if I were merely taking her order. “It’s about not grouping everyone into either assets or obstacles, all right? I don’t care what Blaze did or why he did it; Salvation Station is bigger than just him and I don’t want to see it getting stomped.”

  “It’s rare to see you so passionate,” muttered Warden, almost without moving her lips.

  “Right!” I backed off, quivering with adrenaline. “Now. There’s got to be something on this planet that can get Jemima back in the Black.”

  Jemima, who had spent the entire discourse since her last contribution staring at the fire with her knees drawn up to her chest, suddenly unfolded like a trapdoor spider striking. “Now you’re doing it!” she yelled.

  “What?”

  “Talking about me like I’m . . . an asset!” She dropped into a silent huff for a second before changing her mind and jumping out of it again. “I mean, this always happens to me. I wanna do things, you know? I wanna see things and hang out with people. But Mum only ever takes me out of the house so I can, you know, stand next to her while people take pictures.”

  My hand was aching and I had decided I wasn’t having any more of this Terran trac. “Jemima, forgive me if the lives of the people on Salvation Station are more important to me than your desire for a proper holiday.”

  She backed down, cowed. “I know, I just . . . You could ask how I feel about all this. I’m not just some thing that has to be moved around and rescued, you know?”

  And then the undergrowth behind her burst outward and she was grabbed by a furious cyborg warrior.

  It had been human, or at least humanoid, but most of its flesh was covered (or replaced) by a mixture of metal and plastic. Except for a pair of red-tinted cybernetic goggles, its head was unaugmented, and its gra
y lips were pulled back into a grimace of hatred as it clutched Jemima around the waist.

  She yelled and struggled, her elbows bouncing off the cyborg’s head and neck with no apparent effect. The intention seemed to have been to pick her up and drag her away, but it had underestimated either her weight or her unwillingness to keep still.

  I was already on my feet and had drawn and pointed my blaster before I’d fully digested the discovery that I was still carrying it. “Jemima!” I called. “Head down!”

  She got the idea, and with the cyborg’s arms still fastened around her chest, she curled into the fetal position. The sudden concentration of weight bent the cyborg at the waist, and at the same moment, I fired the gun.

  The ball of energy struck the cyborg on the top of its bald scalp and tunneled through to its pelvis, leaving a ruined furrow of white-hot metal and melted skin. It dropped instantly, and Warden helped Jemima struggle out from under the dead weight.

  “What the hell is it?!” cried Jemima, clutching at Warden fruitlessly for comfort.

  I kicked the body onto its back, and the two darkened red circles in its implanted eyes gazed blankly up at me. On closer inspection, it seemed like the head and a sizable chunk of the upper chest were all that remained of the original life form, and everything else was artificial. The limbs were titanium skeleton held together with pistons that looked powerful enough to crush diamond. The power unit was located in the belly area, with a coolant feed pipe leading from just underneath to between the legs. And then I was certain of what I had only suspected up to then. There were very few organizations of cyborgs designed with such a puerile sense of humor.

  “This trac just got calculus,” I breathed, poking at the ruined body.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Warden, who had been standing around stunned and useless for the whole encounter, but was now standing over the corpse with me trying to seem important.

  “It’s a Malmind cyberserker,” I said.

  “The Malmind? The augmentation collective?”

  “Yeah. They take over planets. It’s kind of all they do, actually. This is one of their infantry units.”

  “Why would an infantry unit for a hive mind be out here by itself?”

  I glanced fearfully around at the surrounding jungle. I didn’t see anything, but the background hum of animal noise could have been masking the movements of any number of stalking cyber-Frankensteins eager to evangelize their collective in a way that did not involve pamphlets. “It wouldn’t.” I kept my gun ready. “We should move. And put the fire out. It could draw attention.”

  “Hey. Erm.” Jemima, more excited than traumatized, was crouching by the body. “It, you know, it died kinda easy, didn’t it?”

  “It’s a powerful gun,” I said, still holding it as I stamped at the burning sticks. Although I did notice that it wasn’t on the highest setting, and I’d seen cyberserkers shrug off worse in the past. I nudged one of the body’s fleshy parts with my toe, and found it rather soft and yielding. Maybe this one had been assimilated more ineptly than usual?

  “Yes, and with limited charge, as I recall,” said Warden huffily. “Perhaps you should put it away for now. In fact, perhaps I should . . .”

  “Yeah, no, never again,” I said, shoving the blaster deep into my armpit region. She was right, though—there couldn’t have been more than a couple of full-strength shots in the cell, which amounted to about nine or ten of the piddly little stun blasts. “Come on.”

  “It was . . . weird, though,” said Jemima, frowning, once we were crushing our way through overgrown vegetation with no particular preference for direction, as long as it moved us away from all traces of murder cyborg. “I mean, it wasn’t pulling or trying to hurt me. It was just sort of holding on.”

  “Perhaps it was malfunctioning,” suggested Warden, wearing a fixed grimace as she negotiated thick foliage and low-hanging branches in desperately inappropriate clothing.

  “It’s possible,” I said, taking point and keeping a close watch on the upcoming jungle, which thus far had been lifeless in a simultaneously reassuring and worrying way. “That might be a good sign, actually. Maybe it got separated from the rest of its unit? If it got far enough away, it would get some serious lag.”

  “How do you know so much about them?” asked Jemima.

  “Fought against them in planetary wars, back in the day,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Kicked them off Cantrabargid. That’s the routine—they try to take over a primitive planet; the nearest star pilot helps the locals fight them off. No big . . .”

  We suddenly reached the edge of the jungle and emerged into the bottom of a wide orange valley that snaked away into the distance. A narrow stream of water ran through the center of a wide riverbed. This must have been the dry season of a flood calendar not dissimilar to the one on . . .

  “Oh, trac,” I said, taking in the view. “We’re on Cantrabargid, aren’t we.”

  “Yeah, I think Blaze said something about leaving us somewhere appropriate,” said Jemima. “Wow. It’s actually really, you know, beautiful here, isn’t it.”

  I didn’t join her on that particular reverie, but locked eyes with Warden, who was wearing another of her neutral expressions. This was the one I’d come to associate with smug derision. “Go on then, say it,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You were going to say something like ‘Oh, clearly you did an extremely thorough job of kicking the Malmind off Cantrabargid.’ And it wouldn’t have been the least bit constructive.”

  “I can’t imagine why you would assume I wanted to say such a thing,” said Warden, with a subtly different neutral expression. “I think that indicates your feelings more than mine.”

  “It must have been alone,” I insisted. “Yeah. Now I know we’re on Cantrabargid, it’s all making sense. It was a straggler from back in the war. Been wandering alone without instructions since the retreat—what’s that noise?”

  I’d become aware of a rumble rising from the background wind, which was now separating into a thousand thuds of feet upon rough ground. I saw dust rising in the distance, where the valley snaked around and curved out of sight.

  A vast, broiling mass of life poured into view like a flash flood. A giant quilted bedspread of a thousand shades of nutty brown bore down the valley toward us, following the stream.

  We sheltered behind a convenient boulder as the stampede passed. It was a mass of furry creatures, bipedal and equipped with the usual accoutrements of a primitive race: tatty loincloths and spears, some of them riding large, bull-like domestic animals that had hair hanging over their eyes. They were all about three feet tall and bore a slight resemblance to upright sloths. They sped past us without even a glance, in a state of crazy-eyed, panicked mass exodus.

  The rumbling continued. I peered around our convenient boulder and saw what they were running from.

  No doubt about it now. It was the Malmind, out in force. A whole plying invasion unit, the kind that only has to position itself next to a village, march from one side to the other—and then there isn’t a village anymore. There was a rectangular cohort of cyberserkers like the one we’d just encountered, augmented humanoids, and in front of that was an advance unit of converted sloth creatures with controllers bolted to their grimacing faces.

  They were marching after the fleeing natives in the kind of perfect step unique to cybernetic hive minds, with no regard for terrain or obstacle. This boulder we were hiding behind wouldn’t even slow them down.

  “What do we do?!” asked Jemima.

  “Perhaps you should kick them off the planet again,” said Warden.

  “How about you go out there and see if your standup set gets any laughs?!” I snarled.

  She didn’t have a chance to deliver a no-doubt-unhelpful retort before we were interrupted by an urgent mooing sound and a spray of gravel. Some kind of vehicle had pulled up next to us—a sort of four-wheeled chariot pulled by a pair of the buffalo-like creatures I’
d seen a couple of the sloths riding.

  The driver was, of all things, a human woman. A young one, early twenties or even late teens, but it was hard to tell through all the war paint on her face. She was Caucasian, but tanned to a shade about halfway between latte and espresso, with blond hair tied into rough dreadlocks. She was wearing garments not dissimilar to the ones that the sloths had on, by which I mean she was wearing two of them, one around the chest and one around the hips. Neither of which were covering as much as they did on the sloths.

  “Get in,” she commanded.

  We did so, the Malmind horde barely fifty yards away and closing, and the chariot jerkily took off. I’d gotten on last, old habits dying hard, and now found myself directly behind some kind of ballista mounted to the back of the chariot.

  “Use it,” instructed the driver, not looking away from the reins.

  I considered the Malmind horde. A hundred lurching tech zombies ­loaded with enough augments to stop a bullet and absorb moderate blaster fire. Then I looked at what I was expected to slow them down with. The ballista’s bolts were blunt, wooden, and each about a foot long and two inches wide. I might as well be throwing my shoes at them.

  “This isn’t going to do trac,” I said.

  “Above,” said the girl at the reins irritably. She evidently wasn’t the most erudite conversationalist.

  But I could see what she was drawing my attention to. Above, on top of one of the valley walls, a number of sturdy-looking red boulders had been arranged precariously on the edge. The one in front was held in place with a wedge attached to a mechanism with a prominent red and white target painted on it.

  I immediately swung the ballista around and let a bolt fly. It sailed under the target and shattered against the rock wall.

  “You need to aim higher,” shouted Warden over the noise of the chariot, clinging to both sides for stability.