by Brit Jones
“Hold on,” she yelled through her faceplate. She held up something small and black and pressed a button. An explosion went off in the airlock, rocking us both back, slamming Walkabout against the opposite wall and skidding me sideways with concussive force. My heart started beating again, thundering in my chest, and Walkabout slumped to the deck, on her knees. The airlock door across from us had bulged inward.
The Recovery—
I crawled to the airlock, which, incredibly, was still sealed—and saw the explosion had blown my ship free. She floated away from the lock, vectoring off into the black, tumbling lifelessly with no maneuvering thrusters firing. When she went belly up I saw a rip was blown in the starboard engines. Oxygen-fed flames gushed blue into space, then winked out, fire control taking over to keep the AI safe. She kept spinning, and what looked like a piece of the wave drive detached with some shrapnel. Then she rolled into the starless night, out of control, and out of sight.
“Recovery! Report!”
No answer. I strained forward, willing my ship, my partner, my home, to answer.
A charred hand slapped against the porthole above our heads.
I jumped.
“Don’t worry.” Walkabout got up slowly, like she hurt. “It’s way harder for him to do through metal and glass.” She gathered up the severed hand and bits of arm and stuffed them into a bag. Then she banged on the porthole with the hilt of her knife. “Have a nice walk, fekker,” she yelled, as if it could hear her in vacuum.
The charred hand spread its fingers and pushed, then floated backward. I looked over Walkabout’s head and watched the burnt body crawl out of the lock like a three-limbed monkey. The uniform had been completely scorched in the new explosion, and parts of the corpse’s chest were now blown away.
I kept staring, even after it pulled its charred legs out of sight and scuttled off across the outer hull. The pressure of its evil slowly went away. I looked out the window into empty space, willing some of this to make sense.
“You blew up my ship.” My voice was so high it didn’t sound like my own.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it,” Walkabout said, and patted me on the shoulder. “I didn’t rig anywhere close to her cores. She’ll live. Anyway, we can’t wait here. He’ll climb back in through the breach and find a way to us. He’s been trapped outside before—he always finds a way in. We have to hide before he gets us.”
I folded to the deck and lowered my head—helmet, faceplate and all—into my hands. Recovery was blown to hell, and there was a dead man with three limbs crawling on the outer hull, through the vacuum, hunting us. At the edge of my vision, Walkabout poked the sack holding Quinquilleros’s hand. I swallowed convulsively, trying to keep down that morning’s breakfast.
“Hey, I’m sorry about your ship. It was the best way to make sure he wouldn’t get another AI. Wish I’d blown his head off and scattered his brains everywhere—”
That did it. I gagged into my helmet, opened it, and splattered the contents of my stomach across the floor. She thumped me on the back while I finished retching.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You did a good job distracting him. He didn’t notice me setting the charges at all.” She rattled on through my dry heaves. “It wasn’t easy to crawl up from the other airlock, because everything’s so smooth outside, you know. And I didn’t know if I could get back and help you before he got you. But you did great, closing the door on him like that.” She laughed. “I bet that pissed him off. Now he’s only got one hand left. I think I got all the others. There’s just you and me left, and he doesn’t like girls that much, so probably he’ll keep using that body until we get the other hand off.”
I wiped off my mouth. My chest hurt and my head pounded.
“Why doesn’t he like girls? What the fek was that thing?”
“I don’t know if he has a name. The Hand, I call him. The reverend called him a demon though, and told us we all had to pray, but that didn’t help anyone, not at all. The Hand got us one by one at first, then whole bunches died after he got into the AI.”
I nodded weakly, even though I barely understood what the quiet, rapid voice was saying. “What happened?” Poor Recovery, I’d bought her brand new and she’d never been without me for longer than it took to get a cold one at a bar. Now she was damaged, without propulsion, and reeling from a botched hacking by…what?
“I think he can do over anyone with a brain. The Queen has about the most complicated brains I can think of. It took him a long time, since AIs don’t think quite like us, and Queen said he’s used to people-brains. I’m pretty sure I got to your ship in time though, since he crawled off. I don’t think he’s in yours. When he’s in someone, he lets the other one go. You know, kind of like changing EVA suits, except he doesn’t need a suit ‘cause he’s dead. Anyway, he can’t wear two at the same time.”
“Recovery . . . ” I said. My voice still sounded far away. Scared out of my mind too, and no one bitched at me about my heart rate.
“Come on. We have a hiding place he hasn’t found yet—it’s not on the data grid.” She secured the sack to her belt and opened her faceplate, pushing black corkscrews off her sweaty forehead.
“You blew up my ship.”
“She’s fine! Come on. I’m not gonna leave you here. He almost got you. Trust me, you don’t want him to get you. Let’s go.”
I watched her retreat down the hallway, then I looked out the window into blank space. Nothing but darkness, and nothing else to do but get up and follow the kid through the Queen’s maze of featureless corridors.
“Good. Hurry up,” she said, waiting for me at the next corner. “He can take over a dead person’s brain too, that’s why you have to cut off the hands. With no hands, he can’t really do much—he can’t rewire or hack, like he tried to do with your ship—so when I find more bodies I take the hands. I’m close to having them all now.” She patted a small laser-saw on her belt.
We came to another closed hatch and she bound the wires together to open the door. “Crew manifest says there were fourteen hundred eighty-four on board, and I have two thousand nine hundred-sixty hands. Well, sixty-one now. So, that leaves just seven, I figure. Two for me, one for the demon. Just four left, and I’m pretty sure the missing ones were burned up or sucked into space when the engines blew. You see any bodies floating on your way in, did you?”
“No,” I answered. The way she said it so casually made me think she only hoped the bodies were out there but didn’t really believe they were. An engine explosion explained the rift in the Queen’s hull. A catastrophic wave drive failure had the potential to cause that kind of damage, even though the big colonizer was reinforced to prevent the ship being destroyed when entering a planetary atmosphere.
That thought reminded me of my own damaged ship.
“Recovery, can you hear me?”
Still no answer.
“We tried to get him with the engines, you know? You saw, his favorite host is all burnt up; I think he likes it because it rots slower. He thought he could get me because he can access tracking data just like we can. Trapping him was risky, since I had to hook her back up to do it, but we managed to fool him into that corridor. But then you let him out.”
“Who’s we?” I managed. I was completely lost following Walkabout’s twists and turns through the ship, and didn’t bother pulling out my viewer and map. I hailed Recovery every time we turned a corner and got nothing back but static.
“Me and the Queen. Here we are.” She opened an airlock, and I joined her inside. She closed her own faceplate, then reached up, closed mine, and pushed my fingers against a grab bar. On reflex, my knuckles tightened around it. Then she blew the lock and sent a gust of air into space.
“Hezu Christos!” I grabbed with my other hand and held on, buffeted by the sudden pressure loss. Walkabout looked over the edge and reached for a cable secured to the outside of the colonizer. She pulled herself along it, and I saw that it was clipped to a lifeboat
that looked like an octopus—power cables streamed from it back into the colonizer. There were explosive charges mounted on the outside of the lifeboat; enough, I thought, to blow the little module to bits. I looked behind me into the big, dead Queen full of bodies, and I followed the kid into space. She knocked on the lifeboat’s small airlock with a short-long-short pattern; then it opened.
“Queen,” Walkabout said, when we were both in the airlock and the door was shut. “This is Kira. She’s the captain of the Recovery, which is floating around out there somewhere, kind of damaged. I had to detonate some charges to blow her off the colonizer because the Hand was trying to hack her.”
“Kind of damaged? You blew off the starboard engine and fekked my wave drive!” I said.
“Did you destroy the entity?” a reasonable, clinical voice asked as the inner door opened, revealing a standard, cockpit-only lifeboat. The pod was cluttered with uneven stacks of food boxes, water jugs, and equipment. Dominating most of the interior was a collection of what looked like computer modules, and cables were draped everywhere, connecting together into one big, cobbled-together machine. Twin cameras mounted on the largest core refocused on me, like a pair of eyes.
“No, he got away again,” Walkabout said, and gave the Queen a summary. The machine asked the kid a few questions—she knew just what to say to get Walkabout to clarify what happened, like my primary school principal. Then she turned her attention to me.
“Greetings, Kira. I apologize for your reception aboard the Queen.” She kind of sounded like that long-dead principal too, her educated voice lilted with a clipped and proper accent.
“You apologize? You taught this crazy kid how to use explosives! What the hell are you thinking? What the fek is going on?”
“I’m not crazy. I already knew how to blow things up; she didn’t teach me that,” Walkabout said. Queen and I both ignored her.
“That is a fair question, Captain. Allow me to explain.” The modulated voice of the AI fed in through the lifeboat’s speaker systems. Heat from multiple AI cores throbbed in the small pod. A cold breeze blew out of the vents—the lifeboat’s air smelled clean, so the AI was channeling energy into keeping the oxygen fresh for us. Regulating that much heat had to consume a massive amount of power. The Queen was doing what she could to preserve her remains, and that explained why she and Walkabout hadn’t just left with the lifeboat. It would never supply her power demands.
“This colonizer was on vector to Ceti V when we received a distress call from a deep space explorer,” the machine said. “There was one survivor—the entity Walkabout calls the Hand was waiting on board, inside the one remaining crewmember. We continued our journey, not knowing what we had brought aboard, until it started killing.”
“What does it want?”
“Nothing. My analysis shows it takes pleasure from anguish. The entity has no other purpose than to torment and destroy. It killed each individual of the explorer’s crew, preserving the last as a mobile unit. I imagine it was most pleased to have been brought into our population of fresh prey.”
“You’re talking about the discovery of alien life.” My mind raced—there was no such thing. There were no aliens. Humanity had been looking for signs of other thinking life in the universe since we’d moved off our original dirtball. We’d found absolutely nothing. No communications floating through the black. No visitors coming to our slowly growing and spreading outposts, colonies, and big population centers. There weren’t even traces of lost civilizations on any of the planets we’d terraformed. There was no competition in space except for what we brought out here with us, ourselves, and the big corporations—the only goal of humanity was to spread and expand, to grow and accumulate. We had reached for the stars and found our fears unfounded—there was only peace in space. So we multiplied and spread across many, many worlds.
“No. It is not alien. It thinks like us,” the Queen said, servos in her cameras whining as her voice played from the speakers. “Theorists postulate that, did intelligent alien life exist, we would have made contact many times in our history. The fact that we have not is a convincing argument that they either do not exist or they do not exist in the same way humans do and therefore, do not think the way people do. If they ever existed or sent communications, we do not understand how to interpret the signs. This entity I can interpret.”
“What do you mean? How do you know it thinks like us?” I remembered the pressure, the vastness of that will crushing down on mine. My brush with it lingered in my aching chest.
Walkabout chimed in. “I told her the reverend called it a demon.” She caught the light on the edge of her knife while she talked, as though examining the blade for nicks.
“As I believe it must be. I strove with it, Captain,” the Queen said. “When it realized I possessed a human-like complexity, it attempted to supplant me. However, unlike a human mind, I am multitudinous—I was able to flee through my cores and resist it. I fought it, and, unfortunately, some of my crew and passengers died during the struggle.”
“There was nothing you could have done,” Walkabout comforted the machine, frowning. I imagined choking to death due to an atmospheric failure. Not a good way to go.
“Thank you, Walkabout. You are right, of course, but I wish there had been.” Unlike Recovery, the Queen sounded honestly sorrowful. Colonizers acted as mobile cities for the years it took to terraform a new planet and because of the complexity of managing so many details they approached sentience. I’d heard they could actually feel emotion. I hadn’t believed it before, but the Queen sounded as though she were both suffering and devoted. “The entity thinks like people do, and it knows its prey. It spoke human language, Captain, not machine language, rather the languages of the common worlds. It knows about humanity, and it has been lost in space for a very long time. I do not know how, or why, but it is from people, of people.”
How could the Queen be so sure? Maybe this creature was the alien life we’d been looking for during the last six centuries. In the same breath, I realized it didn’t matter if it were alien or not. It liked killing, that was clear. If we stayed, we were going to die. “Then let’s get out of here.”
“We cannot.”
“Sure we can. There’s got to be a bigger ship in cargo that will support your power needs. Why haven’t you both left? Did that thing sabotage the other ships?” I knew colonizers were equipped with more than just lifeboats. They carried everything necessary to establish new worlds, and that included explorers of their own. Surely Walkabout could have hauled the Queen’s primary cores aboard one of those instead and taken off.
“We are the saboteurs. We have disabled all other ships.”
“What? Why?”
“We cannot allow the entity to be rediscovered. It is evil, Captain. It will kill again. It is not alien, but neither is it truly human. I am a colonizer. It is my duty to protect and nurture human life. All human life, even from itself.”
Damned literal AIs.
Walkabout spoke. “My duty too.”
“You don’t have duties,” I said. “You’re a kid. You should be doing math homework, not learning how to be a junior terrorist. You and I are getting out of here.”
“I’m sorry, Kira. That is not possible. I need her help. And we could use your help as well.” The Queen’s cameras refocused, as though she were zooming in and out to analyze my state of fitness.
“You protect life, Queen. What about this kid’s? You should send her away from here in this lifeboat.” Preservation of humanity, especially humans the machine was responsible for, was one of the inviolable base-codes in every AI. With the number of salvagers combing for the Queen, it was a fair chance the kid would be found before she ran out of life support, especially if she only consumed minimals.
Walkabout stood up and pointed her knife at me. Her sharp, sunken face was flushed. “You listen, stupid. The Hand killed everyone. Everyone’s dead. It is not getting away. I’m going to punish it.”
I
held up my hands again and waited for the Queen to rein Walkabout in with her calm principal’s voice, but she didn’t.
“I don’t need your help. You go get in a pod and get out of here.” Without taking her eyes off me, she spoke to the Queen. “We don’t need her.”
“Yes, we do.” Queen’s voice was calm and reasonable. “You were an efficient team just now, don’t you agree? She could be very useful to you in Cargo A now that the entity has escaped our trap. You have nearly finished our work, Walkabout.”
“I’d probably be done by now.” The kid set her mouth and glared at me. “If she hadn’t let him out.”
“We need her help more than ever, now that he’s free. We must accelerate our plan.”
“Fine.” Her tone was sullen, but she put her knife away. “You can help.” Walkabout crossed her arms.
“Who says I want to? And help with what?”
“We’re going to blow up the ship,” Walkabout said, matter-of-fact.
The lifeboat seemed to dwindle inward, closing in around us, coffin-like. “What?”
“If we make an explosion big enough, Queen thinks it might kill the Hand.”
“What if it doesn’t? And what about us?”
“We must try, Captain. Countless lives depend on our success,” Queen said.
