The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

Callie looked down. They were hanging over the void. The open hangar door was now directly below them, since the exterior wall had switched places with the floor. “Lantern, if you’re trying to dump us into space, you failed, and I am going to rip your tentacles off.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’ve only read about these controls, I’ve never used them, I’m working on it.”

  Gravity shifted again, hard: the exterior wall spun all the way around them and became the ceiling, but Callie managed to get her arms and legs wrapped around the strut, so she dangled like that tree sloth. Elena and Ashok were still holding on, too.

  “Sorry!” Lantern shouted again.

  “Maybe figure out what you’re doing before you push the button this time?” Callie looked along the strut. Ashok was still holding onto Elena, and neither of them looked happy about it. “Don’t drop her, Ashok.”

  “I’m just glad it’s Elena and not Stephen. I would have dislocated my shoulder.”

  “I am thinking lightweight thoughts,” Elena said.

  “I think I have it, but hold on tight, just in case,” Lantern said.

  A moment later the gravity vanished, and Callie took a deep breath, filling her lungs. No pressure, no weight. She still held on to the gantry, but to keep from floating away now, instead of to avoid falling to her doom. Her sense of “up” and “down” was all muddled, but it only took her a moment to reorient herself: the opening to space was the side wall, and they needed to move up into the darkness, away from the floor. “Everyone OK? Start climbing.”

  They pulled themselves hand over hand up the gantry: long pulls, sailing up for a few meters, then reaching out for another boost. Progress wasn’t as easy as grabbing onto the endless pulley system in the central spire of Meditreme Station, but it wasn’t too taxing. Before long they saw the gleam of Shall’s lights, and they launched themselves through a few dozen meters of empty space toward him. Callie arrived first, grabbing on to one of Shall’s extended manipulators. She locked her magnetic boots to the platform – fortunately the material was ferrous – and rapped on the goldfish bowl pod with her knuckles. “You are not inspiring me with confidence, Lantern. Was all that spinning around you put us through malice or incompetence?”

  “Call it inexperience,” the Liar said. “I’m sorry. Sincerely. I desire an outcome in which we all survive this.”

  “We have common ground there, at least. So where’s the door?”

  “At the top of this segment, there should be an access point to a tunnel, which will provide entry to the rest of the station.”

  The Liar lifted something from the panel: a sphere the size of a tennis ball, seemingly made of a glowing tracery of blue light. “This is an infosphere – a remote access node. It contains a map, and acts as a key to open most areas of the station.”

  “Most?”

  “Some areas are likely to be restricted, especially if advanced security protocols are in place.”

  “The security protocols aren’t too secure. Nobody’s tried to stop us yet.”

  The space suddenly flooded with blinding white light.

  “Captain, you shouldn’t say stuff like that,” Ashok wailed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “What’s happening?” Callie didn’t sound panicked, which Elena found comforting: mostly, she just sounded annoyed. Elena felt pinned and exposed and not at all safe under the lights. She wondered if this was the platform where the Anjou had been torn apart and remade; where Uzoma and Sebastien had been remade, too.

  “Something noticed us,” Lantern said. “Probably because I manipulated the gravity. I can’t access any security controls from here – they’re operated from a central control room.”

  “So what’s coming for us?” Callie said.

  “Those.” Ashok pointed, and Elena whipped her head around and whimpered involuntarily.

  Two of the scuttling mechanical spiders had emerged from small holes in the far wall, and were now scurrying toward them along a cable.

  “Shall?” Callie said. “I want one of those things intact.”

  “Of course.” The repair drone, looking like a vastly larger and more unpleasant cousin to the brain-spiders, launched forward. A blobby black sphere the size of a bowling ball flew from some concealed cannon in Shall’s body and struck one of the spiders, pinning it in a puddle of epoxy, stuck to the cable. The other kept coming, and Shall lashed out with a number of small multi-jointed manipulators to grab it. The brain-spider wriggled free from Shall’s grasp and scuttled up onto the repair drone’s back, where it crouched, making atonal humming sounds.

  “No you don’t.” Shall reached onto his own back, grabbing the wriggling brain-spider by its many legs and wrenching it free, holding it aloft while it struggled. “This thing tried to splice its way into my systems! Very impolite.”

  “Rip its legs off for me?” Ashok said.

  Shall complied, tearing the limbs off deftly and sending them spinning across the empty space.

  “Cool, let me have it?”

  Shall passed over the body, which was just an irregular ellipsoid that whirred and chirped, and Ashok took it and stuffed it into a thick-walled mesh bag at his waist. “Question,” he said. “Why did the lights come on? Do the brain-spiders really need lights to see?”

  “No,” Lantern said. “But the bio-drone responds to light.” She clambered out of the goldfish bowl and pointed.

  An iridescent, many-limbed bug the size of a tram car crawled out of a hole on the ceiling, which irised closed after it.

  “Do we shoot it?” Callie said.

  Elena tried to stay calm, watching the closed-bud at the end of the thing’s neck sway back and forth, as if searching for something. “Hans and Ibn tried that. It didn’t help.”

  “We have better guns than they did,” Callie said.

  “Wait,” Lantern said. “I’m trying to see if I can take control of it.” The infosphere spun around in her tentacles, the traceries of blue light twisting and writhing and turning red in places. “No, no good, the bio-drone is fully autonomous, but I can see its protocols… It’s coming to collect us and take us for reconditioning.”

  “How can it not see us as hostiles who need to be killed?” Callie said.

  “The Axiom didn’t have enemies. They had slaves, who served them, and malfunctioning slaves, who needed to be repaired or recycled. They’ll try to fix us before they destroy us.”

  “If it collects us,” Elena said, “will it take us to the same place it took Ibn and Hans?”

  “I think so,” Lantern said. “I doubt a station this size has more than one area set aside for reconditioning.”

  Elena nodded. “Callie. We should let it eat us.”

  “Ha. Right.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know you are, but my sense of self-preservation is really intense right now.”

  “Hans and Ibn kept transmitting, even once they were devoured.”

  “Maybe that was a different model of mini-kaiju,” Callie said. “Maybe this one has a tank of dissolving acids where its stomach should be, and Lantern is lying, or the system is lying to her. With that in mind… Shall?”

  “Yes, Callie?”

  “Go feed yourself to that giant bug and report back.”

  “The things I do for love.” The hull repair drone raced along a gantry, then leapt into the open air. The bio-drone extended a long neck on a vine-like stalk, and the “head” opened up like a blossoming lily. Elena shuddered at the memory of Hans and Ibn falling into that bloom, but Shall maneuvered himself with thrusters to plunge straight into the open maw. The blossoms folded in after him, shoving the drone into the hollow stalk of the drone’s neck.

  Shall spoke almost immediately. “I’m in a sort of fibrous canal. The sides are quite yielding but also tough, a kind of organic mesh. Now it’s pushing me downward, using peristaltic action. My sensors aren’t detecting any corrosive chemicals wafting up the shaft from below, but there could be some kin
d of flap or barrier. If I dissolve, remember me fondly.”

  “If you encounter something deadly, do try to blast your way out,” Callie said.

  The bug didn’t wait to digest its food. It flew toward them through the zero-gravity, and unfolded great iridescent wings. Weightlessness, plus atmosphere, and wings for maneuvering: the miracle of flight made simple, even for something the size of a bus.

  “I’m at the bottom,” Shall said. “I was just expelled straight into a dark space with the same kind of fibrous walls on all sides. It’s roomier than the inside of the canoe. If I had to guess I’d say, yes, it’s meant as transport.”

  Callie sighed. “We can always try to shoot our way out. All right. Into the belly of the beast. I liked that phrase better when it was metaphorical.” She reached out for Elena’s hand, squeezed it, then launched herself into space toward the approaching bio-drone. The kaiju unfurled its blossom and snatched her out of the air like a bird snapping up a bug, and Callie made a long, loud, disgusted noise over the comms. “Now I know how my oatmeal feels.”

  Lantern leapt off next, followed by Ashok. Elena couldn’t bring herself to jump toward the monster. She remembered Ibn and Hans too vividly, screaming and afraid. But she straightened her spine and walked, one magnetized step at a time, to the edge of the platform. The bio-drone swooped lazily around her, then reached down, almost in passing, and swallowed her. The petals were powerful tentacles, grabbing her body and pushing her down the gullet, which pulsed and rippled and moved her relentlessly downward, feet first. The sensation was viscerally repulsive, and when she dropped into the cargo hold or prisoner cell or garbage receptacle at the bio-drone’s center, it was a profound relief, though it would have felt claustrophobic under most other circumstances.

  Suit lights shone all around her, revealing dark red, fleshy walls and a “ceiling” just two and a half meters above the spongy floor. They jostled in the lack of gravity, brushing against the walls, which felt disturbingly organic, twitching and contracting like muscle away from their touch.

  “Everyone present and accounted for?” Callie scanned around with a light on her wrist as everyone counted off. “Lantern, is that little ball of information telling you anything useful?”

  The Liar floated with neutral buoyancy halfway between the ceiling and the floor, two of its tentacles holding the glowing sphere to its faceplate. “I have location data on the map, so I can watch our progress. We’re moving toward the access hatch the bio-drone emerged from. I think it will proceed through special service tunnels to the reconditioning center.”

  “Stephen, can you still read us?” Callie said.

  “He’s busy with Robin,” Drake said. “But we still hear you. We’ve been monitoring all the excitement. Did you really let yourself get eaten?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Send the lifeboat back to the hangar door. If we can get Ibn and Hans out, we may need to ship them back to the White Raven for medical treatment right away.”

  Elena smiled in the dimness. Callie’s voice was so confident and self-assured that Elena dared to hope her crewmates really could be saved.

  “Will do, cap–” The transmission abruptly cut off.

  “Drake?” Callie said. “Are you there?”

  “Connection lost,” Shall said in a curiously neutral voice. “Accessing local copy.” A pause. “Ugh. All right, my consciousness is up and running. This drone is pretty cramped compared to the White Raven. I feel blind and paralyzed and drunk and forgetful. I might as well be a human.”

  “Why did we lose our connection to the ship?” Callie said.

  “We left the hangar.” Lantern held up the sphere, where a luminous green line snaked along through a maze drawn in red, all against a pale blue background. “We’re in the walls now, moving through the service tunnels. We don’t have that open hangar door allowing our radio signals to pass through anymore. We’re behind new walls, and cut off.”

  “I hope you’re keeping track of where we’re going and where we’ve been,” Callie said. “Once we find Hans and Ibn we’re going to need to bring them back this way. It’s the only exit we know about.”

  “Mmm. We won’t be able to come back exactly this way, through these service tunnels, unless we can commandeer a bio-drone. Which might be possible.”

  “We’ll worry about that part later. Focus on the job at hand. What’s this reeducation camp like?”

  “Reconditioning. I am unsure. Those who returned from the centers were usually quiet, and obedient, and did not record their experiences. According to the information in the museum of subjugation, those who were sent for reconditioning sometimes seemed to possess… diminished capacity afterward.”

  “What, like, lobotomies?” Elena said.

  “Is that the thing with the leeches?” Ashok said.

  “No,” Callie said. “You’re thinking of phlebotomies. Lobotomies are the ones where they hit your skull with a chisel to let the bad spirits out.”

  “That’s trepanation,” Elena said. “I mean, it’s not exactly, and phlebotomy doesn’t involve leeches either, but – no. Lobotomies were considered crude even in my time. It was used on people with violent mental disorders, and on anyone else the doctors wanted to use it on, honestly. You slide a long spike into a particular portion of the frontal lobe. It was essentially directed brain damage, and it made people placid and easily led.”

  “Then yes, it was something like that.” Lantern did the shuddering thing with her tentacles. “There was always a struggle for balance. Intelligent slaves were useful, but intelligent slaves were also prone to rebellion, so the Axiom… adjusted things as needed.”

  “Anybody who tries to put a spike up my nose is going to hit metal before they get too far,” Ashok said.

  “They went in through the corner of the eye, I think,” Elena said. “You could do it with an icepick. But that wouldn’t work with the biology of the Free, I don’t think.”

  “It may not be so invasive,” Lantern said. “They might have used magnetic stimulation, or direct implants. My people do have a large nerve cluster in our central bulge, but it’s not quite analogous to the human brain – most of us have distributed nervous systems, with clusters of nerve cells strung throughout our bodies and limbs, allowing for multiple redundancies in case of injury.”

  “So, wait,” Callie said. “If they tried to ‘recondition’ Hans and Ibn, who have entirely different physiology, what would the process do to them?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Lantern said. “Or maybe it would injure them, or kill them. I have no idea whether the procedure is invasive or traumatic or not.”

  “Neither of them would go down without a struggle,” Elena said. “Especially not Hans. He’d fight about anything – what to have for dinner, whether to use the Oxford comma, if beer was better than wine. If his life were in danger, he would fight, hard. Ibn wasn’t as pugnacious, but he was once a soldier. They had their weapons when they were swallowed, too. Maybe they were able to defend themselves.”

  “The station doesn’t seem too concerned about disarming us,” Callie said. “That makes me worry we’re not as terrifying as I thought.”

  “When my people were enslaved, they did not have weapons,” Lantern said. “At least, nothing that could hurt their masters. I doubt the bio-drones are programmed to disarm their captives. Remember, the thing that swallowed us, it doesn’t have a mind – nothing like a consciousness. Drone behavior is just a series of tropisms, responses to stimuli, like a plant turning toward the sun or roots reaching out to water. The drones are deployed, they pick up anything organic that moves, and they bring them back to a set location, then go dormant until they’re activated again.”

  “Systems like that should be pretty easy to hack,” Ashok said. “Maybe not if they use pheromones or something, but if they’re activated by sound, or light flashes, or some other kind of physical stimulus…”

  “You may be right,” Lantern said. “Let me see if I can
find any diagnostic data in the records. If there are procedures for dealing with malfunctioning bio-drones, that might reveal–”

  They all dropped to the spongy floor with a series of muted thuds.

  “The gravity came back.”

  “Good observation, Ashok. Thanks for the update. Where are we, Lantern?”

  “It appears we have departed the service tunnels, captain, and arrived at our destination.”

  The bio-drone scurried along over bumps, and they lurched around inside its belly for a while, until the motion abruptly halted.

  Elena said, “Lantern, this thing swallowed us to get us in here. How do we get out? Speaking as a biologist, if this is the equivalent of a stomach, or, say, a bowel, there are only a couple of possible points of egress.”

  “We’re not getting out where it wants us to, anyway,” Callie said. “Whether it wants to puke us up or shit us out, we’ll probably end up in a bucket full of brain-spiders, or an electroshock pit, or some kind of lobotomy factory. I say we take the side door instead.”

  “What side door?” Lantern said.

  “Ashok? Shall?”

  The repair drone moved around Ashok, and the rest of them huddled behind the comforting bulk of Shall’s temporary body. “In case there’s ricochet,” Callie said. “Who knows how tough this thing’s skin is?”

  Ashok pressed the barrel of his shotgun up against the side of the drone and depressed the trigger. There was a great boom, shatteringly loud even through their helmets, and a long pause, and then another boom.

  Then light streamed in to the dimness. Ashok had blown a ragged hole about a foot across into the fibrous hide of the bio-drone. The beast didn’t make a sound – maybe it couldn’t – but it did stumble away in the direction opposite its wound, as if trying to shy away from the injury, and they all wobbled and stumbled against each other.

  Ashok kept his footing, pistons in his legs adjusting gyroscopically. He lifted the barrel of the gun high, stepped aside, and made an “after you” gesture.

  Shall scuttled past him, grabbed the edges of the tear with his vicious manipulator arms, and began to rip the hole into a fissure two meters high and one meter wide. Ashok went through the opening first, then shouted “It’s safe!” a moment later. Lantern went through, and then Callie, and Elena, followed by Shall, who tore an even bigger opening in the course of his emergence.