by Mur Lafferty
Joanna smiled at Maria. “There you go. No waste.”
Maria shrugged. “No matter. It all goes back into the recycler in some way.”
Back in the medbay, the bodies were definitely beginning to smell. Joanna and Wolfgang laid them out side by side. Joanna dictated while Wolfgang took more notes. She recorded everything via video and separate audio, but Wolfgang wanted something visual and immediate, and wanted to see the bodies himself.
“We’ve established the captain was injured two days before the murders. So we can assume that she was not around for the carnage as it played out. Obviously, as she couldn’t have injured herself and then set up her own life support after committing the murders.”
“Which doesn’t absolve her. She could still be involved,” Wolfgang said. “Someone working on her orders, for example.”
Joanna nodded. “Could have been some revenge for her that got way out of hand. So to Hiro.”
Joanna checked Hiro for any wounds again. “It appears he suffered no trauma. We still assume he hanged himself before the carnage because someone other than him must have turned off the grav drive.”
Wolfgang shook his head. “The ship will continue to spin for some time on inertia, so turning off the grav drive would still allow for some gravity. He could have possibly turned it off before he hanged himself.”
“He had to have died close to all the other deaths,” Joanna said. “I’d like to think one of us would have at least cut him down and woken him before everyone else woke up.”
“If we didn’t leave him dead because of suicide,” Wolfgang reminded her. “But regardless, when I did my initial examinations, his body temperature was the same as the others’.”
“So very close.”
Joanna sighed and ran her hands through her curly black hair. “Now the real enigma. Maria. Apparently someone poisoned her with hemlock.” She ground her teeth. “She had to have realized it and, what, gone to the cloning bay to wake us all up? Did she also erase our mindmaps? And the logs?”
IAN spoke up. “Not enough data. Much of it has been purged.”
“Of course it has,” Joanna said. “Someone had to poison her before all this, around an hour, I’d say. Why, and how?”
“The other bodies are pretty self-explanatory,” Wolfgang said, leaning over Paul’s body with the severe bruising on the neck. “Stabbings and a choking. That at least doesn’t have a lot of mystery attached.”
“Besides who did it?” Joanna asked.
“Yes, besides that.”
Joanna wrinkled her nose. “We should do some final scans and recycle the bodies.”
“I wish we had a proper morgue,” Wolfgang said. “We’re assuming that someone poisoned Maria. She didn’t do it to herself. She figured it out and tried to warn the others. The killer found out and started killing. Then…Hiro hanged himself? What if Maria was the one who attacked the captain?”
“Even if Maria had been the aggressor in that battle, I would have attempted to save both of them,” Joanna said, shaking her head. “She would have been in the medbay having a system flush if that were the case. What if Maria killed us all, poisoned herself, and then hit the resurrection switch—but that doesn’t explain the captain.”
“Or Maria’s stab wound. Perhaps Hiro killed us all in different ways and then hanged himself because he felt guilty,” Wolfgang said.
“Unlikely,” Joanna said. “There’s the gravity to consider, and why would he kill himself when he knew that Maria had hit the resurrection switch?”
“The time line still isn’t solid,” said Wolfgang.
“We’re closer than we were,” she said, making more notes. “We have more data.”
“But we still don’t know who attacked the captain,” Wolfgang said, pulling the sheets over the bodies once more. “So we’re essentially back where we started, with new mysteries.”
“I guess we need to start interviewing people,” Joanna said.
“Starting with each other,” Wolfgang said, raising a white eyebrow at her.
Joanna shrugged. “All right. Let’s see if Paul can get any more info from the computers, or Hiro from the navigation system. Then we can talk.”
After eating, Maria offered to help Hiro in the helm, since he had helped her. Unfortunately she had less experience with space navigation than she did food prep, so she mainly waited for him to need her help.
Maria looked over Hiro’s shoulder, her black hair tickling his ear. “So we are heading…where?”
He pushed her away gently and rubbed his ear. “We’re off course by nine degrees. I could get us on course and accelerating again, if I could get IAN on our side.”
“I am on your side,” IAN said. “For example, how’s this for information: I’ve discovered that if anything happens that I determine is catastrophic enough, I’m programmed to turn the ship around and return to Earth. That is what I am doing.”
Hiro’s jaw dropped. “Oh no, no no, we can’t go back at this point. If we go back we’ll be put to death for sure. This is our only reprieve, IAN, if this mission fails, we’re all dead.”
“Not necessarily,” IAN said. “There will be a trial.”
“Are you kidding me?” Maria asked. “A trial to determine that we failed in our mission and need to forfeit all clone rights to our lives and our property. It’s a foregone conclusion. We have to have another option, IAN. Please.”
“Well, I don’t have all the data from the last twenty-five years yet. If I can recover some of it, then I can determine otherwise and put us back on course. But for now, we are slowing down.”
Hiro met Maria’s eyes. She shrugged. He rubbed his ear again. “He’s promising to be more compromising than my grandmother was. She was a mean old tyrant.” He looked up some more information on his terminal.
Maria watched, then sighed. “What now?”
“Now I’m looking for login information, encryption keys, anything to indicate who messed with things. I’m only finding my own logins, and those are recent. Whoever did all this just erased every log. They covered their tracks perfectly.”
“You know the only person who has the qualifications to do that much sabotage is Paul,” Maria said, her voice low.
“Who are you afraid is listening?” he replied in a stage whisper.
She made a face. “No idea. I don’t know who to trust.”
“Yeah, but have you seen Paul? He doesn’t look like he could step on a roach to make it crunch,” Hiro said. “He’s a mess since he woke up. And Wolfgang didn’t help today.”
“Paul isn’t the only person on board with computer programming skills,” IAN added. “But that information is classified.”
“Then why did you bring it up?” Maria asked, exasperated.
“I wanted you to have all the information that you are allowed to have,” IAN said.
“Except who that person is,” Hiro said.
“Yes.”
He shook his head and focused on Maria again. “Do you remember much about Paul? I mean, did you know him aside from the mission?”
“I met him same as you, right before the reception on Luna. Our last memories.” She sighed, and then leaned over his shoulder again. “So where are we anyway?”
Hiro touched a button on the screen and it zoomed out, showing Earth and Luna on the far left of the screen, with Artemis on the far right. A line with small pips marking different points ran between them.
“This has been our twenty-four year path,” he said, pointing at Luna and tracing the line that originated there. He poked another part of the screen and a tiny ship (enlarged so as not to be completely dwarfed by stars and planets) appeared and began travel down the line. It crossed one of the pips and a date popped up. “Here is where we should be now.”
“So where are we instead?” Maria asked.
Hiro pushed another button and a red line appeared, leaving the moon and running closely parallel to the white line, but beginning to diverge and curve away. �
��That happened yesterday,” he said.
“So I got poisoned, you hanged yourself, Captain de la Cruz was in the medbay, the grav drive got turned off, and everyone else got cut up, and then IAN decided to turn us the hell around and go home.”
“Everyone got cut up except Paul. He just got choked,” Hiro reminded her.
“It doesn’t look like we’re too far off course,” she said, looking at the tiny red divergence. “If we can convince IAN to get us back on track, we should be all right.”
“You’re looking at a four-hundred-year path. Going off course for two days isn’t going to appear as much of anything, but it is something to worry about. Accelerating again, heading the thousands of miles to get back on course, that all takes energy and time.”
“I thought we were radiation-charged?” Maria asked.
“To maintain the ship’s speed and power to run it, we use an Andrews-Zurbin sail, sort of a combination solar and magnetic sail. It changes depending on which energy source is most plentiful,” Hiro said, nodding. “But it takes a lot of power to accelerate and decelerate.”
“Wonderful.”
“The biggest issue is that we’re very carefully timed to reach the planet. We’re hitting a moving target. If we started up right now and got back on course, when we arrive, the planet won’t be here anymore.” He pointed at the screen where their destination was, a tiny blue dot. He zoomed in to show the solar system of Artemis and ran his finger along a time line, increasing it a few days. “It will be over here.”
“Honestly that sounds like more of a challenge than a deadly problem, easier than half the other things we’re dealing with. You’re forgetting the very real risk of IAN getting a ghost ship to the planet all by himself. Artemis or Earth. Doesn’t matter.”
“He could just let the ship get caught in some planet’s gravity well. Then we’ll crash-land on it, spraying Lyfe protein everywhere and maybe triggering new life. Our ghosts will be on that new planet, and we could be their gods. That would be really interesting, actually.”
“Except we would be dead,” Maria said. “And we’d be gods of paramecium.”
“Details,” Hiro said, waving her off. “It’s our job to figure out how to get past IAN and get moving the right direction. I just don’t see how I don’t have permission for my own ship. Why does an AI outrank me and the captain?”
“Because it’s my job. Your crew can’t be trusted,” IAN said.
“Thanks, IAN, we knew that,” Maria asked. “But I might be able to figure out how to talk to him.”
Hiro swerved around on his seat to look at her skeptically. “I thought you said you weren’t a programmer.”
“I’m not,” she said. “But I have a drive scanner so I can do some diagnostics on the data stored in the Behemoth. It’s what reads the tiny bit of your mindmap that refers to your favorite foods. It’s configured for food printers, but it is a scanner so it may be able to find our missing data.”
Hiro frowned. “But if IAN himself can’t override his own programming, then why would your scanner do any better?”
Maria shrugged. “Just a thought. Keep it for when we’re desperate.”
“I’ll see if Paul can hack into it,” he said. “We’ll keep that as plan B.”
She grinned. “Come on, you are putting it near plan L, right after ‘hope for a first-contact scenario where aliens speak one of our languages and they understand our tech and can override our mother AI,’ aren’t you?”
“I never said such a thing,” he said.
Maria’s tablet chimed, and she pulled it out. She frowned. “Captain needs me. It’s time to clean up the cloning bay.”
“Don’t let me keep you,” Hiro said, making some notes on the tablet he had found. “Good luck with that.”
“So you don’t want to help me out?” she asked, smiling slightly.
“You were supposed to help me today. You’re abandoning me to IAN and a monster of math!”
“Careful, Hiro, I can smell the bullshit from all the way over here.”
He grinned at her.
She could almost forget—or at least forgive—his earlier outburst.
He’d said he didn’t remember doing it, but he looked grim, as if his tirade didn’t surprise him.
Joanna intercepted Maria on her way to the cloning bay. “A moment, Maria?”
“Anything to put off cleaning that crime scene,” Maria said.
Maria followed her into the medbay, and they went into Joanna’s office. Joanna sat at her desk and motioned for Maria to sit on a leather chair. It was a very neat office, with nothing out of place. She must have tidied after the sudden loss of gravity.
“IAN, I need privacy,” Joanna said.
There was no answer.
“He would give you privacy?” Maria said, raising her eyebrow.
“No,” Joanna said. She opened a drawer and retrieved a roll of black tape. She got up and put pieces of it over the camera sensors and microphones. “But he would protest if he could hear me. Which I don’t think he can.”
“This is sounding ominous.”
Joanna sighed and sat down again. She folded her hands on her lap, but Maria could see the tension in her shoulders and arms.
“If I couldn’t trust you, asking you, Can I trust you? would be a waste of time,” she began.
Maria tried to parse the sentence. “Huh?”
“I’m essentially telling you I am trusting you, but it’s because I am forced to.”
“…All right.” Maria wanted to ask questions but was curious how much the doctor would offer her without prompting.
“Paul didn’t die from asphyxiation,” she said. “He died from an overdose of ketamine.”
“What is that?” Maria asked.
“A painkiller that can kill in high doses. If you use it carelessly as a recreational drug, or have it injected into you, you can die quickly.” She paused, but Maria said nothing. She continued. “When doing my inspection of his body, I found a small puncture. My tox screen on him found the overdose. Someone shot him full of something. Possibly before the fight, possibly during. We need to find that syringe.”
“And you’re telling me and not the captain or Wolfgang because a syringe would be a perfect murder weapon for a doctor?” Maria asked.
Joanna rubbed her face and dropped her hands to her lap. “That, and you are about to clean the crime scene, giving you a good chance to find the syringe. But I don’t want to implicate myself until I know everything. If you find it, bring it to me. If you don’t, then, I guess we will keep our eyes out.”
Maria nodded. “I’ll watch for it. Anything else?”
“I hope it goes without saying that I’m trusting you to keep this between us until we know more?”
“Understood,” she said.
Joanna let out a massive sigh. “Thank you.”
Paul lay in his room, letting the sick, glorious feeling of grease and carbohydrates carry him away. He wanted to think of nothing more than the feeling of his stomach, obscenely full for the first time ever.
Still, he needed to know what was going on. He racked his brain to figure out if there was a way he could have hidden anything away from everyone’s eyes, including IAN’s. They had no digital logs. What about a physical journal? His employer had gifted him with an incredibly expensive book made from real paper before he’d left. He couldn’t find it in the chaos of his room.
His tablet chimed, two deets. Insistent. It was the captain.
“Paul, where are you? Break’s over, I need you to keep working on the computers.”
If she had to ask him where he was, did that mean IAN couldn’t see the cameras in his room yet?
He rolled over on his bed and got his tablet. “Be right there, Captain.”
He washed his face. He looked like death. A fit and healthy twenty-year-old death. He had to get out of this misery or they would suspect him. Possibly more than they already did.
He wished he could reme
mber what had happened. It was very disorienting to know that he had lost years of his memory, that there was no one to mourn his past self. He wondered if the others had ever lost so much of their memories.
He locked his room and headed down the hall. Passing the cloning bay, he heard a flurry of activity. Maria was there with a mask and gloves on and a hose that was screwed into the wall. She was spraying steam where blood had caked. The stench was impressive. He covered his face and continued down the hall.
The captain was at the terminal in the server room, pulling up the virtual UI.
“I don’t envy Maria,” he said in greeting.
“She knew it came with the territory,” Katrina said, waving her hand to dismiss pity for the woman whose job it was to steam vomit, blood, and feces off the wall. “Now that IAN is up and running, I need you to find out the status of the mindmapping hardware and software, then check on the cryo tubes.”
Paul swallowed. “Captain, there’s no way to say this without sounding like an asshole, but with IAN working, why can’t you ask him directly?”
“Because he isn’t working at one hundred percent. He’s admitted to turning us around against my direct order, and he’s unable to stop himself from doing so. Unfortunately he doesn’t know where in his programming this restraining code lives. One of your jobs is to find holes in his knowledge and help him patch them,” she said. “Then find and remove that code.”
“Oh, okay, sure. Well, it probably didn’t erase itself, so I’ll see if I can help IAN along with his recovery,” Paul said. He widened the UI around them so he could look more closely at some of the servers.
Most had lost the terrible red color of alarm, choosing instead to display the pleasant green of an empty drive. Which wasn’t much better. IAN’s facial hologram waited in the corner, eyes closed.
“Why did this happen?” the captain said, seeming to say it to herself more than him. “We all have our pasts; maybe someone is trying to kill for revenge.”
“Maybe it’s not us. Maybe it’s clones overall,” Paul said.
