by Alex Lamb
Ann could think of nothing to say. She hadn’t proposed capitulating, only the careful examination of another course of action. Without meaning to, she appeared to have caught the senator in a moment of imperfect rationality. That disappointed her. She’d always held Parisa Voss in high regard, ever since the senator had recruited her.
‘I appreciate scientific caution, Captain Ludik, but not when it impedes action,’ said the senator. ‘And there is some evidence from your latest outing that you have a skewed notion of where that balance lies.’
Ann stiffened. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am?’
‘I read your interim report and I read Lieutenant Brinsen’s. Because of choices you made, we nearly missed acquiring the Ariel Two. Consequently it was necessary to expose Nelson Aquino’s role, which limits our future capacity to influence Monet. And now that ship is damaged and will take more days to repair than we originally assigned for it. This adds risks to our already burdened plan. What you need to understand, Captain Ludik, is that the events we have set in motion are much larger than we are. Our choice is to see them through or be crushed beneath them.’
‘With respect, I am well aware of the scale of the plan,’ said Ann tersely. ‘But regardless of its scale, it remains inevitably true that sunk costs are irrelevant. What we’ve invested means nothing unless the plan works.’
The senator’s nostrils flared. ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘Clearly you either have a limited grasp of our current risk profile or you’ve become a little too close to your assigned target.’ Her tone suggested that she believed the latter. Jaco must have said something in his report. ‘I recommend you take a well-deserved rest and leave the handling of the situation to us now. Your input has been heard and I will give it due consideration.’
Ann opened her mouth to speak again.
‘Don’t make me ask you twice, Captain,’ said Voss.
Ann blushed. She saluted crisply, turned on her heel and left, her cheeks burning.
13.3: MARK
Mark tested the door with his weight and explored the edges of the room for ports or seals he could rip. Then he looked for air vents. They were all situated at ceiling level, far too high to reach even if they piled the chairs into stacks. He hadn’t managed to reach the processor for the window-wall, either.
He slumped in a meeting-room chair and gazed mournfully out at the desolation beyond the window. The situation, as far as he could see, was his own fault. He was captain of the Gulliver. He’d been assigned responsibility for looking after the diplomatic team. And he’d had all the evidence before him that someone was working against their interests. Except he’d been so focused on the threat outside the hull that he hadn’t noticed the one right in front of him.
What would happen now? In all likelihood, Sam would rejoin Ash and the two of them would leave, committing Zoe, Venetia and himself to the hands of the local FPP, if not the clutches of the Photurian swarm. That path led to humiliation in the best case, and death – or something worse than death – as the alternative. Will’s leaden stories about protecting your shipmates from harm didn’t sound so pointless now.
He hung his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Looking after you was my job. I failed.’
‘A fine sentiment,’ said Venetia. ‘If, perhaps, one that belongs in a previous century. This isn’t your doing, Mark. We’re all volunteers here. And neither Zoe nor I are the kind of women who need looking after.’
Mark looked up, embarrassed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Don’t bait him,’ said Zoe from her place at the wall. ‘He’s taking responsibility. He cares. That’s what you want in a starship captain.’ She paused. ‘Mark, thank you for the efforts you’ve made. Don’t feel too bad – we were all duped. There wasn’t enough data for us to see the big picture and we had plenty of other stuff to think about.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I know I’ve not been the easiest person to get along with.’
‘We appear to have some time on our hands,’ she replied. ‘Until someone lets us out or a miracle happens, we’re stuck here. So why don’t you explain it?’
Mark frowned. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘You just admitted you’re not easy to get along with,’ said Zoe. ‘We know that’s in part down to your history with Will. You get angry every time his name comes up. So fill us in on the details.’
He sighed. ‘You really don’t want to know. It’s not an interesting story.’
‘Could have fooled me,’ she said. ‘The way Ash tells it, you stole a starship.’
‘That he did,’ said Venetia. ‘Among other things.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ said Zoe. ‘Sit there and let us subsist on rumour?’
Mark peered at the horizon. If he couldn’t unburden himself now, when could he? He wondered if his nanny-SAP would complain the moment he opened his mouth and realised he hadn’t heard a peep out of it since Will’s upgrade package. He suspected it’d been shut down.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You asked for it. For starters, I didn’t get my roboteer mods the normal way. I was part of a secret genetic breeding programme run by the Fleet.’
‘No shit!’ said Zoe.
‘My parents were volunteers from Earth who were given a chance to sign up to have a heavily engineered child,’ he went on. ‘This all happened in the years just after the war. Will Monet had this whole idea that he was going to create a new team of high-functioning roboteers using volunteers from every world, but particularly from Earth. We were going to represent the great shared future of humanity – constructive self-editing and all that. The thing was, he signed up the parents and kicked it all off before going to the media. He wanted it to be a fait accompli. Except that everyone went ballistic once he started talking about what he had planned.’
‘I remember that,’ said Venetia. ‘There were all those claims of an alien plot.’
‘That’s right,’ said Mark. ‘Half the sects on Earth were convinced that Will Monet was trying to breed an army of pliant super-warriors for his alien masters to control.’ He snorted in derision. ‘So then he had a problem – a room full of kids and no way to tell anyone what they were. That was the mess I was born into. Of course, when I was little, I barely clocked any of it. Except that I was often told I was special. I went to special classes and had special lessons and ate special food. None of us saw that much of our parents. Will and Rachel were closer to us than any of our families.
‘Then suddenly, out of the blue, we were all split up and shipped off to the colonies. My parents went with me, but by then we barely had anything in common. The fact that they kept moving us about made it worse. They filtered me into ordinary roboteer schools for a while, but that sucked, too. I was already too different. In the end, they set up the bullshit Omega Academy, which was basically a cover for the programme they’d originally started. Except now it was supposed to be training that any roboteer could apply for. Nobody got in but us special kids, of course. Around that time, my parents moved away to New Panama and I didn’t see them at all anymore. Will made sure of that.’
‘Jesus,’ said Zoe. ‘Talk about isolating.’
Mark looked down at his hands. ‘To call the whole experience isolating would be putting it mildly,’ he said. ‘But we had each other again, which was something. And, to a certain extent, we had Will and Rachel. Mostly Rachel, because Will was always off trying to save the world. Then everything began to fall apart. Uncle Gustav – that’s the Great Prophet Ulanu, Father of Transcendism, to the rest of you – got shot. Will started to lose it, and consequently Rachel spent a lot more time in space, pushing the Frontier.
‘She had more insight than most, that woman. She saw that the New Frontier was creating problems, so she put her energy into trying to find new star systems out beyond Galatea on the human shell. Of course, nobody else was interested in human space any
more because there was so much easy money to be made from looting the Fecund. Then her ship flew into that bank of shit I believe they’re now calling the Curvon Depleted Zone. Basically, it’s the edge of our fucking Petri dish, so far as I can tell.’ He balled his hands into fists. ‘Anyway, no one knew what had happened, but the Fleet wasn’t doing shit to rescue her. So I did something.’
‘You took a ship,’ said Zoe.
‘Yeah, I took a ship. Which was a terrible idea. But you have to realise I grew up with all the rules being bent around me. We weren’t supposed to even fucking exist. Everything I did was a special case. Half the time I was treated like a prince, and the other half like some kind of slackwit robot. So I did what we all saw Will doing, which was to push to get what he wanted.’
‘And your ship got trapped, too,’ said Venetia.
‘Yep. And all the poor suckers I dragged along with me. It took us about a month to escape under conventional velocity. By that time we were going a tenth of a conventional light and it took forever to sort out our reference frame.’
Mark sighed. Just recalling the experiences exhausted him.
‘So then there was a tribunal, which was when all kinds of little gems of information started to come out. Like the fact that Will had paid my parents to leave, to get them out of the way.’
‘Ouch,’ said Zoe.
‘And the fact that unlike everyone else on the programme, I also had mods from Rachel, though it was never on the books. So technically, my dorm-mother was at least as much my mother as my actual mother. Which was distressing, because she was by now technically considered dead.’
‘That’s … horrible,’ said Zoe, sounding a little awed.
‘There was a nice little identity crisis in there, too, because Rachel was stuffed full of Galatean genetic mods. She was from one of those born-to-fly families with more genetic tweaks than a slab of vat-pork. So I’d spent my childhood believing I was some kind of roboteer representative of Earth, while in fact I was at least half-Galatean. There’s nothing quite like discovering that all the things you thought made you special were put there by someone else.’
Zoe shook her head. ‘I don’t get it. Why all the secrets?’
‘Supposedly?’ said Mark. ‘Will said they’d acted that way because of assassination threats. He saw sending my folks away as rescuing my parents for me. Convenient, huh? And at no time was I consulted about any of that or treated like an adult in any way. The Fleet regarded me as fucking property throughout, right up until they started trying to take away my interface. That’s when I realised I’d been bred to be a puppet. You all got to choose your careers. I was a starship captain from birth. That’s why I don’t spend too much time being proud of it.
‘My life since then has been about two things. Trying to add value on my own terms, which is why I went off to fly lifters. And reconnecting with my roots to find out whether there’s anything else to me aside from the shit the genetic engineers stuffed in there, which is why I went to Earth. The Fleet hated it, of course. They all thought I was going to start running Flags for some bullshit Truist cult. So far as they were concerned, I was Fleet-owned technology. So, unsurprisingly, when a chance to put all that behind me came along, I signed up.’
He drew a deep breath. ‘Voilà, your captain,’ he said, and rested his head on the table, spent.
‘Holy crap!’ said Zoe. ‘I thought you were going to tell us you were bullied at school or something.’
‘Nope,’ said Mark. ‘A kid tried once. I accidentally broke his spine. He had to spend a month in a gel-tank having his vertebrae reprinted.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I get it. The attitude problem, in context, seems … I don’t know … inevitable?’
‘Thanks,’ said Mark, his forehead still on the table. ‘I guess.’
‘I should apologise,’ said Zoe. ‘I had it tough growing up, too, but not to that extent. Anyway, to me you seemed like a kind of stuck-up-victim sort, so I had you pegged as self-indulgent. My bad. I hope you can forgive me for getting it so wrong.’
Mark felt a surge of warmth toward her, but didn’t speak for fear of ruining it.
‘What happened to you, then?’ said Venetia. ‘Mark’s shared his story. The Fleet could probably have us all locked up now for what we just heard. So let’s hear yours.’
‘It’s nothing like that.’
‘I’d be shocked if it was, dear,’ said Venetia. ‘Come on, out with it.’
Mark raised his head to look at Zoe, still slumped against the wall. She stared at him for a few moments, as if trying to figure something out. Then her eyes drifted off to the middle distance.
‘I was a nerd,’ she said. ‘No bad thing in itself, except that I grew up on New Angeles. My parents were part of the occupying Earther force during the war, and then applied for citizenship afterwards when their sect refused to pay for their flight home. They were just in the Science Division, but we still got treated like dirt. So we had zero money, everybody hated us and we had no access to the surgical tech everyone else did. Which is why I don’t look like an Angeleno. I can tell you, it’s not easy growing up the ugly girl in a world full of perfect Amazonian blondes.’
Mark frowned at her in confusion. Zoe was very far from ugly.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I had one advantage – I was smart. I worked hard in the shitty school we had access to and used all the IPSO-Online educational tools I could reach. I was good enough that when I hit sixteen I qualified for a Vartian Scholarship and got off that awful rock. Anyway, that took me to the Institute on Galatea, where I had a different problem. Suddenly I wasn’t the smartest kid in the class any more. Because everyone there had mods.’
Mark was surprised again. He’d assumed she had mods. He’d never known anyone think so quickly without them.
‘So I pulled the one trick I had over all of them from my childhood, which was to work my ass off. I graduated top of my class in Xenophysics and have been pushing for missions ever since.’
Mark found her story slightly embarrassing. In some ways, she’d had it harder than him. He was born with an embarrassment of genetic riches he didn’t know what to do with. She’d had none but still managed to work her way to the top. Furthermore, she didn’t complain about it.
‘That’s amazing,’ he said. ‘I’m impressed.’
Zoe gave him the warmest smile he’d ever seen grace her features.
‘Your turn,’ said Zoe, pointing at Venetia.
‘Oh no!’ said Venetia, holding up her hands. ‘I’m the psychologist, remember? I get to ask the questions, not answer them.’
‘Come on,’ said Mark, amused. ‘We’re done with secrets. Spit it out.’
‘Well, okay, but I’m nothing like you two,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I grew up on Esalen. I was young when the war happened, so I got to see our pathetic neo-hippy government try to remain neutral in the face of the Truist occupation. In any case, I was always a bit of an introvert and a misanthrope. After the war, I decided Esalen wasn’t a great fit for me, so I moved away and changed my name. Fortunately, I was good enough in school to be able to apply for a scholarship like you did, Zoe. One that came with a starship berth.’
‘You changed your name?’ said Zoe.
Venetia nodded. ‘Venetia Sharp is something I made up that I thought sounded more like the real me. My original name was Sunbeam Moonflower.’
Mark let out a single ragged laugh.
‘You don’t strike me as a Sunbeam,’ said Zoe.
‘No,’ said Venetia. ‘As I said, I was raised neo-hippy and still share a lot of those values, but I see the limitations, too. And besides, I was always more interested in non-human minds than human ones. I also like getting things wrong so that I can do better next time. On Esalen, even now, people are obsessed with staying positive, despite the neuroscientific evidence that things aren’t so si
mple. You’d think, after the things the Earthers did …’
She let that sentence hang, her brow tightening briefly with the sour memory.
Mark missed the next thing she said because a ping came in from Ash. He leapt to his feet and then tried to restrain his excitement in case the room still had operational cameras.
‘Where are you?’ he yelled into his sensorium. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Still in orbit,’ said Ash. ‘I’m going to get you out.’
Mark gritted his teeth to stop himself from grinning. ‘Do we have surveillance in here?’ he said.
‘Mark, what’s happening?’ asked Zoe in the background.
‘No. I deactivated it,’ said Ash. ‘There’s no one else on your level. I have pretty good coverage of their system at this point.’
Mark let out a whoop. ‘We’re getting off this rock,’ he told the others. They jumped up.
‘I’m damned glad you called,’ Mark said to Ash. ‘I’d given up on you.’
‘I almost did, too,’ said Ash. ‘But you have to promise me something.’
‘Sure – you name it,’ said Mark.
‘What I have to share with you is grim. I’ve made some big mistakes, got involved with a secret group trying to head off a war. And Sam … He’s not being reasonable any more. I want you to promise me that if I pull you out of there, you’ll cover my ass when we get home, because otherwise they’re going to have me shot.’
‘The conspirators?’
‘No, Mark. The Fleet. This thing is treason. Are you up for this? Because I’ll be counting on you. You’ll be all I’ve got.’
‘Okay,’ said Mark slowly. ‘You have a deal, I guess. The stakes are high enough.’
‘All right,’ said Ash. ‘In that case, you’d better sit down because I’m sending you a memory dump and you’re not going to like it.’
Mark gingerly returned to his seat.
Zoe jumped up and grabbed his arm. ‘What’s the issue?’ she said expectantly. ‘When are we leaving?’
