Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology

by Amy J. Murphy

  “Why would it be on board? What purpose does it serve on the ship?”

  “None.”

  She waited, but he didn’t offer anything else. “So how do we counter its effects?”

  He glared down at her. One swipe of a claw and she would be bleeding halfway across the room. “They’re probably already too far gone even if we could flush the contaminants. The volatiles from hyrth seed oil don’t just paralyze the body, they damage the central nervous system. And it’s both dose and time dependent. I am alive simply because I got a lighter exposure in the tunnels and you sealed me up in here almost immediately.

  “I wish you had left me. Luan and I cut our egg teeth in the same clutch. Do you understand?” His claws opened and closed within centimeters of Tina’s face. “The broken shell cannot be mended. It’s not just Luan. The entire crew of The Endurance is like a single clutch. It is not our way to live bereft of pod-mate and clutch. It’s too late.”

  “You don’t know for sure. There’s still a chance.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Humor me. Humans, lost causes. You know how ignorant and irrational we are.”

  A deep rumble of something moved through his thorax – amusement, irritation – Tina wasn’t sure. “I offer you my apologies.” There was a pause. “Ernestina.”

  He had never used her name before.

  “It’s not necessary.” Tina tried to look away, embarrassed by his sudden humility, but his dark gaze never left her face.

  “It is. For thinking you incompetent. For believing you capable of this. Even for a moment.” He waved a clawed appendage toward engineering. “Luan was correct to chide me. I wanted this mission to fail. So you would be dropped off at the nearest multi-species outpost and I would be rid of you.” Another hiss of static cracked through the translator. “Now I have gotten what I wanted.”

  He took a step toward the open half of the airlock. Tina crossed her arms and smiled up at the huge lizard, not budging a millimeter. “Not yet, you haven’t.”

  “You don’t understand. This wasn’t an accident or a malfunction.” He paused, glanced away, returned to look her full on. “We were meant to fail.”

  Something Nerua said earlier nagged at her. “But it doesn’t affect Humans.”

  “You are safe. Go. Once you leave, I will join my pod-mate.”

  “Is your brain still frozen or are Quentarians just as stubborn as everyone in the galaxy says?”

  He blinked all three of his lids at once.

  “Look, whoever sabotaged The Endurance didn’t count on me being here.”

  Nerua watched her, his mandible shifting side to side. “No.” His tongue flicked in and out of his wide mouth rapidly. “No, they didn’t.”

  “So, you’re the chief. What’s the plan?”

  The big lizard must not have been as thick-skulled as he seemed because he grabbed his test meter back and pulled up the trace elements report. He highlighted one line with a surprisingly agile claw tip.

  “Okay. We need to bring down these readings to lower than four hundred parts per million. And we don’t have a lot of time left. What do you think?”

  Glancing up at the face she once thought rigidly unreadable, Tina smiled. “I think we have some work to do.”

  ~FIN~

  LJ Cohen is author of the sci-fi Halcyone Space series, and of the fantasy Changeling's Choice series.

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  IRON LAZARUS

  A SHORT STORY IN THE SYMPHONY OF WAR UNIVERSE

  By David Adams

  ABOUT IRON LAZARUS

  Kwame Bahati donated his body to science. Pieces of him were removed for this and that; his kidneys were used to test a new medicine, his torso for training surgeons, and various other organs were designated as transplants for those who refused synthetic body parts for religious reasons.

  But his brain was sent to somewhere else entirely.

  IRON LAZARUS

  Sector 44

  World of Uynov

  February 11th

  2219 AD

  Twenty four years before the events of Symphony of War: The Polema Campaign

  I jerked awake, eyes flying open. I’d never felt so awake so suddenly.

  I was laying on my back, staring up at a bright white light on the roof. All around me was the faint buzz and hum of electronics, the beeping of machines unseen, and the white, bright light shining directly into my eyes, washing out everything else. I tried to raise my head and found I couldn’t.

  I was tied down. Even my head was secured; fixed in place in some kind of vice. My face felt numb, like I’d been brained with a lump of wood, and I was uncomfortably cold.

  “Dammit,” said a woman, her harsh, smoker’s voice like sandpaper on my ears. “It’s waking up. Did you touch something, Spotweld?”

  “It shouldn’t be doing that,” said someone else, a man, almost the opposite of her; voice high pitched and nasally. “And I didn’t, Doctor Titan. It-it just…booted up all on its own. We haven’t finished the process yet. What a beating.”

  Fear took hold of me. I didn’t know where I was. I kicked and struggled. “Let me up!” I shouted, trashing against my restraints. “Hey!”

  “Cut the power,” said Titan, her voice just outside of my vision. “We’ll figure out what went wrong in a moment.” She sighed, completely ignoring my continued kicking. “It’s probably some kind of issue with the primary regulator. The Prophets Wept, the hardware people are just so fucking useless. I’m going to have Tammy’s arse for this. Literally just skewer her, serve it up on a plate. This is unacceptable. Unprofessional. Every fucking time something goes wrong it’s—”

  “Stop!” Flexing my arms, I strained mightily against whatever was keeping me down. “Just shut up and let me go!”

  With a loud snap, my head came free. I lurched into a sitting position, taking in my surroundings as my eyes adjusted.

  My body was covered in a stark white sheet which, presumably, was drawn up right to my neck. I was in a maintenance area with white walls dotted with tools and parts, surrounded by beeping machinery and workbenches. One of the small tables nearby held a metal tray covered in tools.

  The colour in this room was all wrong. Lurid and warped, twisted, as though I was high. Had they drugged me? Was that why I felt so deathly cold?

  Predictably, there were two people in lab coats standing nearby; a dark-skinned, middle aged woman carrying a large multitool that was plugged into an implant on her arm, and a really tanned guy with spiky blue hair and a lit up tablet. Both of them had prominent, visible implants, typical of Uynovians. I didn’t know either of them; Spotweld and Titan, I presumed.

  Spotweld. Titan. Those were Uynovian names. Their people only used mononyms, always nouns or adjectives. Was that where I was? Uynov was a month’s journey away from Scolla.

  I had no memory of how I got here.

  “Where am I?” I asked, trying to make some sense of what was happening. “Why’s it so damn cold in here?”

  “Shut it down,” said Titan, glaring at her companion. “We screwed up. You screwed up.”

  “I already tried!” said Spotweld, shaking the tablet at her. “Look, see? It’s running on internal power. And also, point of interest? This is your fault.”

  “Hey,” I said, and then louder. “Hey! Hey, listen!”

  Both of them looked at me. Looked through me as though I was barely there. Desperate to hold their gaze, I glared at each of them in turn. “Doctor Titan, is it? Listen, my name is Kwame, and—”

  “Shut it off,” she said again.

  They weren’t going to listen. I balled my fists and flexed my arms, straining the restraints underneath the sheet. I felt, rather than heard, the metal give way, and then my fists came free, still covered in the sheet. I shook my hands at the two of them like an angry, boxing g
host.

  Spotweld’s eyes widened. “What the—”

  “Shut up!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “My name is Kwame Bahati from the South Polar Region Six, planet Scolla. I don’t know how I got here, but I want answers. Now. Or I will break out of here and I will end you both.”

  Titan, her face a mixture of frustration and confusion, stepped forward. “Okay, Mister…Bahati.” She took a deep breath. “You’re on Uynov. Sector 44, District 101, Block 2.”

  I’d never been to Uynov in my life. This was bullshit. It was time for me to go. I struggled under the sheet. The clamps holding down my legs cracked and broke, and I rolled of the bench.

  As I did, the thin, white cloth fell away.

  I saw my arms. They had been replaced with prosthetics. Steel and polished chrome, with exposed pistons and wires instead of muscles and tendons. All the way past the elbow, up to the shoulder, and beyond. I stared, bewildered, at my chest. My legs. They, too, were metal.

  My face?

  I reached out to the small table beside the workbench I’d woken up on, taking the tray full of tools. I upended it, sending metal things clattering in every direction, the noise almost painfully loud. I held the metal tray up to the light and studied my reflection.

  My head was a sphere with a four pits at the top, and below that, a slit where my voice came out. I tried to move my face and found I couldn’t; my lips were fixed, my eyebrows frozen. I was seeing the world through cameras, high def stuff. That explained why the light was so warped and twisted, why the room felt so cold to me…I wasn’t seeing with eyes. I wasn’t feeling with flesh.

  Everything. Everything was gone.

  “What did you do to me?” I asked, aghast, trying to move my new face. It wouldn’t.

  Silence.

  “What do you remember before you came here?” asked Titan.

  “Nothing,” I said, searching my memory for answers. “I don’t…”

  And then I remembered something.

  Some time ago

  “Mister Kwame Bahati from the South Polar Region Six, planet Scolla. You have been sentenced to death for crimes against the Scollian people. You have plead guilty for your crimes. Although your sentence has been passed, and the outcome cannot be changed, do you wish to change your plea?”

  “Actually yes,” I said, smirking up at my executioner. “I plead thusly: Oh nooo, missus executioner, pleeeeease don’t kill me! Please!”

  Nobody in the audience laughed. Through the thick pane of glass I could see their faces. Parents of the people I’d killed. Brothers, sisters, children. They were so sad…their faces red and puffy, separated from me by two thick layers of glass. Just to stop the gas from getting out.

  Yeah, yeah, cry as much as you want, shit-breathers. None of those motherfuckers I carved up for laughs are coming back.

  I wasn’t looking for sympathy. Not now, not ever. I know what I did and I really liked it.

  The executioner scowled. “The state will record this as a guilty plea,” she said, adjusting the black collar on her Scollian Planetary Police uniform. “Do you have a final statement?”

  Did I?

  “Not really,” I said, completely unable to keep a massive grin off my face. “You bought me here to be executed, not to make a speech, but…I guess here’s what I got: life’s a bitch, fuck every single one of you. You’re meat waiting to die. The only difference between me and you is I know when my time is up; the rest of you will just have to wait and find out.” I matched as many angry glares as I could. “Trust me, you’re going to have a much worse, much more painful death than I, as age rots you down to the core, slowly breaking you over the years.” I stifled a playful laugh. “Me, I get to drift off to Neverland.”

  Silence. “That’s it?”

  What else was there to say? “Sure.”

  “Do you want us to bring in the priest?”

  Of this I was certain. “Hell no. Fuck religion.”

  “As you wish.” The executioner tapped on a tablet, no doubt recording my responses as the law required. “By the power of the Scollian Planetary Police Force, the lawfully appointed authority binding all on this world, I hereby proclaim my intention to legally and lawfully execute this man, carrying out the will of the state. Does any person in the audience wish to make a final plea for this man’s life?”

  Nobody did. Not even my parents, who were just there. Which was fine.

  “Let the record state that there were no appeals.” She tapped her tablet again. “Mister Kwame Bahati, as you have indicated no preference for your method of execution, the state has determined that you will be asphyxiated by exposure to a pure nitrogen atmosphere. Your implants will be removed and sold to cover the cost of your execution. Your body, including all of your organs, will be donated to the scientific and medical community, for use of the betterment of all mankind.”

  Whatever. I turned to look at my executioner. “Adios, amigos. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  She turned and left my sight, moving behind me. I heard the thick metal door open, groaning softly, and then close.

  Click. Click. Click. Three locks, then the faint hiss of an environmental seal. I was locked in the last room I’d ever be in.

  A brief moment of silence. I had been looking forward to this moment for some time.

  I expected it to be grand and exciting. The people I’d killed always struggled so engagingly; they would kick and fight and wiggle and bite, a process which would fade as their strength left them. I anticipated death to be an extremely exciting event indeed.

  Slowly, with the faint hum of machinery, the atmosphere in the room was drained out, replaced by inert nitrogen. My breathing came slow and easy, and I felt so calm. So relaxed.

  Nitrogen asphyxiation was the most peaceful, non-violent way to execute a guy, which was far more kind than I’d ever been to anyone in my life. I breathed it in, let the inert gas fill my lungs, and in short order, I drifted off to a calm, relaxing, easy sleep.

  Anti-climatic and serene and actually really kind of cool.

  “I…remember being a jackarse,” I said, the memory of my own execution flashing through my mind in an instant.

  Spotweld frowned and glanced down at his tablet. “Our records seem to confirm this,” he said. “Apparently you quite openly mocked the families of your victims before you died and, the night you were incarcerated, smeared your own faecal matter on the walls of your cell.”

  That matched with what I’d dragged out of my cloudy brain. I didn’t remember the poop thing but it sounded like me. “So wait,” I said, trying to figure it out. I flexed my steel hands in front of my face. They were thick and strong, each finger flat and blockish. “I died, and then…you put my brain into a robot?”

  “Not exactly,” said Titan. “We never even got your physical brain. We just had a copy of your mind taken from it. We put in a neural block on your memories so we could, in a sense, re-program you to be an AI.” She glared at Spotweld. “Obviously that didn’t work.”

  “It’s not my fault,” whined Spotweld like a squeaky rat with its tail stuck in a trap. “I followed the procedure. The neutral block should be denying access to those memories. There’s obviously something wrong with the hardware.”

  “Well,” I said, “be that as it may, I don’t…really care. I paid the price for my crimes. I died. I’m a free man. Let me go.”

  Titan groaned and pinched the bridge of her forehead. “You don’t get it.” She waved her hand dismissively. “You aren’t a free man because you’re not a man. You’re not a person. Not ethnically, not legally, not in any way that matters. You sound like Kwame, you act like him, but so does a holorecording. All you are is software. You’re the equivalent of a photograph of a person. You might look like it, feel like it, but you’re just a snapshot of a dead man’s memories.”

  Maybe. But I wasn’t about to give up yet. “Okay, so, why don’t you just…you know. Track down the ole’ meatsack and stick me back in it. Righ
t as rain.” The government would probably execute me again, but at least these two maniacs wouldn’t try to kill me. Or deactivate me. Or whatever.

  Spotweld stared at me, wide eyed. “Um. My apologies, I don’t really know how to tell you, but your body is gone. It was incinerated, like, ages ago.”

  “Nine years,” said Titan, a pedantic edge to her voice. “And two months.”

  Nine years.

  I’d been thrust into the future. That was as long as I’d spent in school, basically all of it, and that had seemed an eternity to me. To have it just skip by in an instant…what a beating.

  Somehow this was actually worse than dying. I was okay with the nothingness, the end of my existence, with the punishment for what I’d done. But, strangely, not this. I’d spent almost two years in prison since my arrest, exhausting various appeals, having my shitty lawyer argue stupid points to try and save my life, and generally pissing and moaning about. I’d been looking forward to my execution almost the whole time.

  But the idea that I might be bought back to life in a steel body was just…wrong. I hadn’t signed up for that. There was no part of my punishment that said I had to wake up after it was done, strapped to a lump of steel on a foreign world. It was demeaning in a very real way. As though the state had lied to me, lied to everyone it had put down.

  I’d lost my freedom. I’d lost my mind. I’d lost my appeals. But I hadn’t lost my dignity. Or, you know, so I told myself.

  Death with dignity was better than life with humiliation.

  “I died in 2210, so… so it’s…like, 2219?” I asked, not sure what else to say.

  “Yeah,” said Spotweld. “Sorry.” He tapped on his tablet. “Basically, what happened is, after you were executed they copied your mind to a computer so the various science teams working on AI tech could copy and tinker with it. The process destroyed the brain, so…you know. That’s why they took it from you.” Made sense to me. “Lot of their previous attempts failed or were imperfect, but yours was nice and strong. The data was passed to various research teams, including ours, so we could create neural nets from them.” His tone turned frustrated. “In the beginning, we tried to delete as much as we could. Memories, personality, everything…but the more we cut out, the more likely the prototypes failed. So we tried something else. Just, you know, blocking direct access to them. Obviously that didn’t work. Not even a little bit.”