The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Nothing came after them, though, and then everything went dark as they entered a service tunnel. The sound cut off, too: they weren’t in a part of the station with atmosphere anymore, so sound didn’t carry. That was a blessing.

  “What do we think happened back there?” Callie said.

  “Signals,” Elena said. “Just like Ashok said. I was looking at the spider-thing on Hans, and something about it made me nervous. I thought I was afraid it would come back to life, and Ashok reassured me about that, but–”

  “Ugh,” Ashok said. “Right. There was some kind of transponder in the spider. Something passive, using almost no energy, but when it left the station, the station knew. Those devices are used to recondition rebellious slaves, right? So if one of the spiders leaves the station without authorization, the place goes into lockdown. I’m so sorry, I should have thought–”

  “Did you know?” Callie drew her sidearm and pointed it at Lantern. “You were the one who said we had to take Hans off the station. Was this your intention, to trap us here–”

  To Callie’s surprise, Elena put a hand on her arm and pushed her gun down. Callie didn’t resist, but she looked at Elena curiously.

  “I think Lantern is having a panic attack,” Elena said softly. “That tentacle movement is a signal of distress, and I don’t think she can control it right now.” Elena drifted to the Liar, whose every tentacle undulated and spasmed, and whispered to her soothingly. “This must be horrible for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Trapped – in – locked – my – people –” the Liar’s voice was staccato, and then she made the same organic keening sound of distress My Cousin Paolo had emitted back on Meditreme Station.

  Callie put her gun away. Liars lied, but they weren’t very good liars, as a rule. My Cousin Paolo had seen an artifact he recognized as a trace of the race that had made his people miserable for millennia, and had fled the station along with all of his kind because even a glimpse of the bridge generator was too terrifying for them to bear. And Lantern, brave Lantern, had entered an Axiom station, a place where her kind had been tormented and reconditioned.

  If Lantern was telling the truth about the Axiom, being here, it must be an almost unendurable experience. Callie tried to think of something comparable. A descendant of a water wars survivor getting locked inside one of the old moisture reclamation camps, maybe – only one where the ghosts of the extraction corps still roamed, and the machinery could come back online at any moment.

  Callie holstered her sidearm. “I’m sorry, Lantern. We’re going to get out of here. We just need to find the control room, right? Then we can kill the alarms, open the doors, and take control.”

  Elena kept soothing and stroking until Lantern’s spasms slowed and finally stopped. “Yes, Captain Machedo.” Lantern reached into a pouch on her underside, removed the glowing sphere, and examined its lines and pulsations. “Ashok, there should be a left turn up ahead. Take that, then the next tunnel up, then a right, then up again.”

  “We’re not going to the center of the station?” Callie asked.

  “Humans put important things in the center. Liars do, too. The Axiom didn’t think that way. The control room is off on one side, not too far from our position. Just beyond…”

  The Liar went silent.

  “What is it?” Callie tensed, ready to hear, “Just beyond the automatic murder robot barracks” or something.

  “Past the nursery.” Lantern’s voice was perfectly flat. “It does not say ‘nursery’ on this map. It says something I will not say aloud. But it is the place where my kind were birthed and instructed.”

  Callie tried to picture a Liar nursery school. Little pools to swim in? Jungle gyms with lots of rings, for all those tentacles? Soft stuffed toys shaped like eels or fish?

  Lantern must have intuited the direction of her speculation, because she said, “It wasn’t a nursery like you’re thinking. Not like an orphanage, even. My people mature rapidly. The nursery will include an incubation chamber, and a series of rooms meant to instill certain behaviors. Newborns of my race were instructed in obedience, instilled by natural aversion to pain.”

  “I thought most Liars could shut off their pain responses?” Callie said.

  “That was one of the first changes we made in ourselves, when we became the Free,” Lantern said grimly. “We had good reason.”

  “We should look in on the nursery,” Elena said. “Just in case. So many of the systems in this place are still operational…”

  Lantern’s tentacles fluttered. “I… would like to look in. I feared to ask. I know this is not your mission.”

  Callie nodded. “Of course. We should. Anyway. It’s on the way.”

  Ashok steered the bio-drone down a side tunnel, and they emerged through an irised service opening into a chamber with gravity, but no atmosphere. The guttural alarm wasn’t audible here either, at least.

  The kaiju settled down on a raised pillar shaped a bit like a helipad, and Callie, Elena, and Lantern stepped off.

  “The area around this platform used to be full of fluid.” Lantern gestured at the empty space around them. “For moisture, and hydration, and nutrition.” She pointed with a tentacle to what looked like a wall of smoked glass bricks. “Those are the incubators. When the young were mature, or mature enough, they would be dumped into this pool. Then pumps and currents would channel the young into the… other chambers. The stories say the nursery was tended by machines, because when my people were tasked to instruct the young, they invariably killed themselves rather than fulfill their required duties, no matter how often they were reconditioned.”

  After a moment of silence, Callie said, “Can you cut the gravity?”

  Lantern touched the infosphere to a recessed panel in the floor, and it lit up a pale green. A moment later the gravity vanished, and Callie drifted upward. She pushed off the central pedestal and ducked into one of the chambers that led away from the dry pool.

  She looked at the equipment within, and immediately understood how it would work: the current would bring the baby Liars there, and then…

  Callie ducked into another chamber, saw what it held, recoiled, and then made herself look again, hard and long, until she understood exactly how the mechanism had functioned. Tiny Liars, no bigger than a human hand, delicate and new, pushed into that.

  She forced herself to look into a third chamber. The construction was elegant, the instruments still gleaming, and she almost threw up in her helmet.

  Three chambers was enough. She didn’t force herself to look any farther. She’d worked grisly and premeditated crime scenes in her time, and had believed herself inured to the horror of what one sentient being could do to another, but the clinical, industrialized monstrousness on display here overwhelmed even her iron sensibilities.

  She returned to the central platform and looked down at Lantern. “I believe you. About the Axiom.” This wasn’t a Liar facility. No species would build chambers like those she’d just seen to “instruct” their own offspring. A people that universally sadistic would have never survived more than a generation.

  “Thank you,” Lantern said. “I am glad. Many of the systems here have failed or been shut down, but thirteen of the incubators are still viable.” Lantern’s artificial voice was matter-of-fact, but her tentacles trembled. Smart of Elena to figure out what that meant.

  Lantern punched a button on the panel, and a triple handful of the hundreds of smoked glass panels lit up. Tiny curled creatures no bigger than Callie’s thumbs floated inside the cubes.

  “Can we take the incubators out of that wall without hurting them?” Callie said.

  “Yes. The tanks are portable. Once we deactivate the stasis field, they can remain disconnected for a few hours. At that point we would need to oxygenate the tanks–”

  “We can do that on the White Raven. Let’s get the incubators into the drone.”

  They all worked together, and it went fast, in weightlessness. Ashok
and Lantern figured out how to disconnect the tubing and seal the incubators for transport, and they carried the little tanks like the precious cargo they were onto the kaiju. Callie used her non-lethal anti-personnel epoxy to stick the incubators to the floor and wall, where they would remain in place until someone yanked them out with deliberate force.

  Once they were done, Callie said, “Let’s find the control room and finish this. I don’t want to be here anymore.” Something squeezed Callie’s hand, and she looked down to see Lantern’s tentacle wrapped around her fingers. She squeezed back.

  Ashok piloted the kaiju back up to the service tunnels. They traveled in silence, interrupted only by Lantern giving directions in consultation with the glowing sphere. The drone moved swiftly through weightless areas, following bends and twists in the sprawling organic structure, and then Lantern said, “Stop. There’s an entry to the control room. The bio-drone only has to extend its head to make the aperture open.” She looked at Callie. “How would you like to proceed, captain?”

  “Do we expect to encounter defenses?”

  Lantern shrugged. “The station was on some sort of low-level lockdown when we arrived, cutting off communications from section to section. After Hans and his neural implant went outside, and the alarm sounded, I assume the station is now on even higher alert. The control room would be an obvious place to defend.”

  “I can go in first, Callie.” Ashok thumped his chest. “I’m a whole lot of metal under here. Something shoots at me, there’s a good chance it’ll just bounce off. And good luck to any brain-spiders drilling through the plates in my head.”

  Callie shook her head. “The kind of weapons they have here won’t be slowed down by a little body armor. I appreciate the offer, but I think stealth is the better approach until we know what we’re dealing with. Is there another entrance, one close to the control room, but that doesn’t lead directly inside? An anteroom, a hallway, anything?”

  Lantern consulted the infosphere. “Fifty meters down, I see an entryway into a space designated as surplus storage. Supplies, I think, for the control room. There’s a door from one, leading to the other.”

  “Take me there,” Callie said.

  The kaiju scuttled a short distance, and then Callie checked her weapons, gave Elena’s arm a squeeze, and said, “We’re probably going to lose radio contact, but don’t worry. I’ll come back here within half an hour. If I don’t, burst in and blast away, because that means something killed me, and you’ll need to get off this horror station without me.”

  “She’s terrible at giving inspirational speeches,” Ashok said. “One time, before we broke into this compound on an asteroid to capture an escaped murderer, Callie goes, ‘OK, nobody embarrass me by dying’. She’s just really bad at it.”

  Elena gave her a hug and said, “Come back to me, Callie. I’m not done with you yet.”

  “Now that’s inspiring,” Ashok said.

  Callie slipped out of the side of the kaiju and turned on her active camouflage. Her suit shimmered, tiny projectors mimicking the background behind her with a lag measurable only in picoseconds. If she stood still, she was totally invisible. If she moved, she was mostly invisible, apart from an almost subliminal shimmer. Her suit cooled itself until it matched the ambient temperature, which would hide her from thermal vision. Her transponder stopped transmitting, and her radio shut itself off: no signals were emerging from her anymore. The technology was custom-made and cutting-edge. Callie’s was the only prototype in service, and she’d made a lot of promises and done a lot of unpaid work in exchange for getting to keep it once testing was done. The bureaucrats higher up in the TNA had been opposed, but Chief Warwick had come through in the end. She always did.

  Always had.

  Callie floated out into a round, dim tunnel, just barely big enough for the kaiju to move through. What happened if two of the bio-drones had to pass? Did one just back up until they reached a branching corridor? Or maybe the drones had been so tightly controlled, the problem never came up.

  The kaiju tapped its head against the wall, and a round hole big enough for the bug to fit through opened. Callie sidled past the creature and moved inside, adjusting to the new gravity with a bend of her knees.

  The space was lit dimly by infrequent pale orange panels in the floor, arrayed in no comprehensible pattern. She’d heard the words “storage” and pictured something on a human scale. A closet full of boxes. Maybe a shed stuffed with old tools and crates and spare light bulbs. But this was nothing of the sort: it was more like a warehouse, with shelves and bins and racks rising to the ceiling, but the shelves were only about a quarter filled, like regular resupplies had stopped at some point. Most of what remained was tanks and drums in various colors, covered in markings she couldn’t understand. Food? Chemicals? Not spare light bulbs, anyway.

  She moved forward and to the left, passing between shelves, slow, not stepping on the orange light panels, though she knew they were probably sturdy enough. As a kid she’d always jumped over ventilation grates in the floor and sewer grates in the street, too. Just superstition. But anything that made her less tense right now was beneficial. Every sense she had was on high alert, and her suit hadn’t even pumped her up with combat readiness chemicals.

  A small door, bigger than Liar-sized if not quite large enough to be comfortably human-sized, stood open on the far wall. A bright green drum stood next to the door, its top levered open and shoved half off, like someone had checked the contents.

  Callie eased up toward the door and looked into a roughly round room full of lights, panels, and screens: it looked like any control room anywhere, except the controls were low to the ground, and the screens weren’t rectangles but irregular shapes, blobby, like molten glass had been poured out and allowed to settle on any shape fluid dynamics dictated.

  The floor was a screen, too, and so was the ceiling, though much of it was blocked by trailing wires. An ungainly machine the size of an industrial 3D printer stood at an awkward angle near the center of the room, patched crudely into the walls with cables.

  A human stood next to the machine, filling a beaker with a peach-colored slurry from a nozzle. He wore a dirty white jumpsuit and boots. No environment suit, no gloves, no helmet. He clipped the nozzle into a recess on the machine, took a sip from the contents of the beaker, made a disgusted face, shrugged, and glugged the rest down.

  He was tall and slender, with black stubble on his face. Short black hair, and a face Callie was prepared to admit was pretty. Based on Elena’s description, this was Sebastien, and not Uzoma, which was maybe good, because Sebastien had sent Elena away to safety, and Uzoma had gone full robot-zombie.

  Sebastien pivoted from the machine and squatted down on his heels to tap at one of the screens waiting at Liar height. The back of his head was covered by the silvery disk of a brain-spider, its legs digging into his skull. Callie didn’t make a sound, but it took a force of will. Blood was crusted around the spider, and dried down the back of his neck, staining the collar of his Anjou jumpsuit.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “You can come in,” Sebastien called. “Have a drink. It’s disgusting, like drinking soy yogurt spiked with mold, but the station thinks it will sustain human life. There are tanks and tanks of raw materials back there, biological and industrial and otherwise, and fabrication machines all over the place. I dragged one of the biomass converters here for convenience. Had a bot drag it in, anyway.”

  He rose and turned around, looking toward the open door. Callie didn’t move. Occasionally, when she was sitting alone in a room she knew to be empty, she would have a moment of doubt, and say calmly and clearly: “I know you’re there. Come on out.” Just in case. She thought it was probably a rare personality quirk, but she was prepared to believe Sebastien shared it, and was just taking a shot in the dark.

  “I can’t see you,” he said. His eyes were glowing. “I assume you have some kind of stealth technology? But I see on this panel that a door
opened in the storage warehouse, and there’s no reason that should happen, unless someone was trying to sneak in. I knew someone had breached the station from outside, and I was prepared to ignore it, even though you somehow tripped an annoying security protocol it took me ten minutes to turn off. That alarm was deafening. But now you’re here, and I left the door open all invitingly, so you may as well come inside and reveal yourself. But please don’t try anything violent – I set up a dead-man’s switch. If I don’t hit a certain button every few minutes, the station will blow itself up. Or implode, maybe. My implant helps with the translation, and overall I’m quite fluent in station-speak, but there are a few cognates I stumble over.”

  Callie sighed. Sebastien had a brain-spider, and glowing eyes, but he wasn’t murderous. Maybe he possessed tremendous force of will, or something. She fiddled with her suit’s countermeasures, directing her sound in a tight beam that would bounce off a far wall and disguise her position. Like the ancient proverb said: Trust, but verify. “I’m here on a rescue mission.”

  “Really.” He pivoted toward the source of the sound, presenting his profile to the door. That was less alarming than the back of his head, but less pretty than the front. “Who are you rescuing?”

  “The crew of the Anjou. We’ve already gotten a couple of them off the station safely. Robin and Ibn. We were too late for Hans. We came looking for you, Sebastien, and for Uzoma.”

  He seemed not at all excited by the prospect of deliverance. Maybe slightly amused. “Mmm. Uzoma. They’re around here… somewhere. They aren’t coping very well with our change of circumstances.”

  “You seem like you’re doing all right.”

  “This place doesn’t have all the comforts of home, but really, neither did home, by the time we left. The station is more pleasant than the Anjou was, in many ways. More importantly, the station offers me opportunities beyond my most delirious dreams. When we left Earth, I fully expected to go into cryosleep and never wake. To die in space, unknown and forgotten, on a trip that was basically symbolic. In the best possible outcome we would survive, and find a viable colony world, and I’d have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a new society. To create a nation, more or less, with nothing but a ship full of embryos and a handful of machines and a few good people by my side. Desperate measures and long odds, but those were desperate times. Earth back then… it was a mess. Settle a bet for me? Is Earth gone?”