Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  “When the news reports it. The news can take a starving refugee and make them into an invading migrant. One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.’ When you came to me for a job, I thought you knew the power of the news. But you let this”—she slammed her hand on the tablet, cracking the screen—“get printed.”

  “I didn’t write it,” Martini squeaked, finally registering the anger of her small employer.

  “Then you edit it before it goes live. Your job is to control the news, not to write glowing pieces about clones. Do you know what happened after this ran?”

  Martini shook her head. Maria gingerly removed the tablet, its screen spider-webbed over the offending headline, and slipped it into her bag.

  “They’re not going to allow the clone server on the ship now. It’s humans only. I’ve sunk billions into this project so I could live on another planet, Martini, and you have ruined it with one story.”

  “But the sabotaging clones ruined it!” she said. “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “I hired you for a job. You didn’t do the job. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to get your wish to be cloned at my private facility. But Maria here is going to work on your mindmap to ensure you no longer make these bad decisions.”

  Maria went cold. So this is why I’m at this meeting.

  Martini shook her head, eyes filling with tears. “No, please, don’t mess with my head, I can do better next time, I’ll get them to retract it, I’ll get them to get the server on the ship!”

  “How?” Sallie asked, her eyes narrowed.

  She and Martini made a plan; with the threat of mindmap manipulation, Martini was suddenly eager to brainstorm ideas on how to remedy the situation.

  Maria signaled for another round of drinks, trying to dull the panic. One waiter attended them, and Maria became aware of the fact that the entire staff in the nearly empty bar had studiously been ignoring them.

  Sallie could grease a palm, that was for sure.

  Later that night, in the back of the limo as they whisked back to Firetown, Sallie asked Maria why she was so quiet.

  “You threatened her. In the most unethical way possible.”

  Sallie snorted. “It’s a little late for you to worry about ethics. What have you been doing for the past hundred years?”

  “You know my terms. There are lines I won’t cross.”

  “I thought we had an understanding by now,” Sallie said coldly.

  “I did too,” Maria said.

  “We don’t need to do it anyway,” Sallie said. “We got her back on track for us.”

  “I am not a scalpel for you to wave around and threaten people with,” Maria said. “I’m going to have to resign my post.”

  Sallie watched the city out the window, her face a mask.

  “All right. Best of luck to you.”

  She didn’t offer more money. She didn’t threaten me. She wouldn’t just let me go like that.

  Maria focused on her own window while she wondered what Sallie really was thinking. Her lack of resistance was the scariest thing of all.

  She was arrested for illegal hacking two days after ending her work with Sallie.

  Decades later, when she was offered a crew spot on the Dormire for good behavior, she figured she was due for a win, and took it.

  So Much Blood in Him

  Wolfgang and Katrina faced the gardens. Wolfgang remembered looking at the layout of the ship and being impressed at this space, so important to their mental well-being, their water recycling, and maybe even some fresh fruit now and then. For him, it would be a place he wouldn’t want to run and exercise in, considering the gravity and that he was already feeling light-headed.

  Now it was just the place where Hiro was hiding.

  “Any idea where’s he’s gone, IAN?” he asked the mike on his tablet.

  “He’s not on this level anymore,” IAN said. “I lost him in the orchard and but my sensors caught the opening of a hatch on the far side of the lake. He’s gone to a lower deck.”

  Wolfgang swore. Hiro knew the lower decks were harder for him to search. The aisles of cargo would have countless places for him to hide.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this?” Katrina demanded.

  “Because it happened just as you entered the gardens. You couldn’t have caught him anyway,” IAN said.

  Katrina had stopped to open a supply closet next to the door leading to the living area of the ship. According to the sign on the door, it was supposed to hold gardening tools if the clones felt the need to get back to nature.

  She rummaged through boxes, tossing aside shovels and heavy gloves.

  “What are you doing?” Wolfgang asked, dodging a hoe.

  “This is one of the few closets I haven’t checked,” she said. “I asked for a full arsenal. They left me no weapons.”

  Wolfgang picked up a shovel. “It’s possible the financiers didn’t think we would need many weapons.”

  “Even if we had four hundred years of happy flying, we don’t know what we will face on the other planet. What if there are life-forms we don’t know about, and all we have is a shovel?” Katrina said.

  “We need to find Hiro,” Wolfgang said. “Focus on the matter at hand, Captain.”

  Katrina continued to shove boxes around. Wolfgang called the ship’s cargo manifest up on his tablet and began shifting through documents.

  “It looks like we do have weapons to protect us on the planet. They’re just securely stored in the cargo hold.”

  Wolfgang raised his head. “In the cargo hold. Where our murderer is likely headed.”

  “Yes,” she said. She picked up a hoe. “Let’s go.”

  The ladder to the lower levels was less friendly than the ladder to the gardens. This one was for maintenance and command only, and clearly disused.

  As Wolfgang and Katrina got lower, motion sensors turned the lights on around them, low-wattage bulbs that guttered as if working for the first time in a very long time.

  They passed other levels. “Do we want to check these?” Wolfgang asked at the doorway to the fourth level.

  “He’s on the bottom level by now,” IAN said.

  “Marvelous,” Katrina said. “I want to secure the weapons before he gets to them. If we have gardening tools and he has guns, we’re going to have the shortest lives we’ve ever had.”

  Wolfgang considered telling her he’d had shorter, but that always led to uncomfortable discussions.

  They kept careful watch on the motion-sensitive lights to indicate more movement, but they all were dark. From far below, lights flickered on and off from the cargo bay.

  “He’s down there,” Wolfgang said.

  “Be on alert,” Katrina said.

  She was above him on the ladder, which allowed him to set the pace. They were already far beyond Wolfgang’s comfort level of gravity. As they were closer to the outer hull of the ship, they were nearing one and a half g’s; the gravity in the living areas on their floor was closer to a Luna-like half a g.

  “Considering what bullets can do to spaceships, it’s probably good they didn’t give us guns,” Wolfgang said as he carefully stepped down another rung.

  “No, that’s not it,” Katrina said from above him. “The ship can withstand unavoidable pieces of space debris hit when we’re going hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. A bullet isn’t going to have that much force.”

  “Our tech can’t take a bullet, though,” he said. “Shoot one of those into a computer terminal and see how well we fly. Or breathe. Or eat.”

  “Point,” she said.

  He sighed as his feet touched down at the bottom of the shaft. Katrina came to his side. He looked up. It was going to be a very long climb up the ladder. The dizziness increased as his heart struggled to pump blood to his head, making him uncomfortably slow.

&nbs
p; Hiro, being Earth-born, would be just fine with the gravity.

  Wolfgang went first and opened the door into the thrumming cargo hold.

  The first thing that struck him was that the protein goo that was their food source was bioluminescent in great quantities. He had never noticed that before, but he had never seen millions of gallons of it at a time. The goo on the ship was supposed to be more than enough to reclone all of the crew several times, to feed them for over four hundred years, and to bring to life hundreds of their stored passengers once they got to Artemis. A little Lyfe went a long way, as he understood it.

  The vat was made of some kind of super-enhanced plastic that held the Lyfe in a kind of aquarium that went around the entirety of the ship. Luckily it had a top to it, else the loss of the gravity would have made a massive mess down here.

  “Keep alert,” Katrina said, elbowing him.

  The Dormire was three miles long, and one and a half miles in diameter, one hundred feet for most of the five floors, storage and engines taking up the rest. Hiro had described it to Wolfgang as a giant metal jelly roll. The living areas of the cylinder consisted of engineering at the core, with crew’s living and working areas on the next level. Servers, oxygen scrubbers, recyclers, a science lab of biological samples of plants and animal life, and cargo made up most of the rest of the ship, with the biomass taking up most of the bottom, and largest, section.

  They walked, alert, using the huge continuous vat of goo as a guide, watching for lights to give Hiro away.

  In their immediate vicinity, the motion sensors were only going off where they were—all around them was darkness and the slight light coming from the goo. Farther off, lights flickered, going on, then going off in thirty seconds.

  “The motion sensors are going to make it tough to sneak up on him down here,” Wolfgang said, watching the lights play in the distance as if they were taunting him.

  “We can turn on all of them. IAN, did you get that?”

  “Aye, Captain, all the lights.”

  After a moment, all of the lights came on, blinding them momentarily.

  “Can you see him, IAN?” Wolfgang said.

  “Yes. He’s headed right for you. To your right.”

  Wolfgang’s first mistake was whipping his head around to the right to prepare for Hiro’s attack. The dizziness overtook him and he was already falling when the piece of wood came down on the back of his head. He fell hard on his chest, the breath knocked out of him. He heard the sound of a scuffle above him but couldn’t roll over to help, or even watch. A thick thump sounded and Hiro swore. Wolfgang was about to mentally declare triumph when Katrina fell beside him, forehead bleeding.

  Wolfgang rolled over, gasping, and saw Hiro for the first time since the so-called yadokari had taken over. At once he was willing to believe Maria; the look on Hiro’s face was pure malice and glee. He wasn’t doing this because he needed to, he did it because it was fun.

  He raised the piece of wood, looked to be ripped away from a pallet, above Wolfgang’s head, and Wolfgang managed to bring up his shovel to block most of the blow. He could try to only fend off the attack, though, not fight back. It was all he could do not to vomit from the vertigo.

  The makeshift club rose again, and an explosion sounded next to Wolfgang’s ear. He rolled over, holding it as if his whole world had become a bell that an elephant had just rung.

  Hiro staggered off, laughing.

  Katrina, with blood flowing down her face from her injury, held a small firearm in her right hand. She raised it and fired again, but Hiro was gone.

  She dropped the gun and held her sleeve to the cut on her head.

  Her mouth moved, but he couldn’t hear anything but the ringing. She spoke again, and the words came as if through a wall of cotton. “He found the weapons,” she said. “I got that off him when we were fighting. I got him in the shoulder, though. He can still run.”

  Wolfgang nodded, head still ringing, and they helped each other to their feet. Wolfgang was dismayed when he felt how hard it was to regain his footing. It was going to be impossible to fight down here. Katrina picked up her gun and led the way in the direction Hiro had run, and he stumbled after.

  He had to fight, and he had to do it here. His only other option would be to lure Hiro into a higher deck, or to send someone else down here to fight for him. But only Katrina could match his fighting experience, and she was already here.

  He gritted his teeth and picked up the pace. Katrina had run ahead of him by several rows now, looking to her right and left with every few steps. He pushed himself to catch up with her. IAN’s voice sounded from Katrina’s pocket, and too late she looked up. Hiro stood above her on a pallet like a vulture. Wolfgang shouted for the captain to look out.

  But Hiro was already in midair, falling at a much faster rate than he would a few floors higher. He jumped on her, his hands curled into claws. He didn’t even have a weapon this time, he merely came at her bare-handed like a cat, tearing at her face and hair, snagging his hand on her jumpsuit and ripping it.

  Katrina fell backward, and Wolfgang was convinced she was done, but when she landed she kicked her legs up and threw Hiro off her. Unfortunately she launched Hiro straight at him.

  The demonlike mind that drove this body had managed to get his bearings in midair, and prepare himself for attacking Wolfgang. He plowed into Wolfgang and Wolfgang went down again, gasping as he hit on his back and his head smacked on the floor.

  Hiro tried the same tactic on him, strong fingers curled into claws and tearing at him. He caught Wolfgang’s jaw and sliced, scratching deep into his face. He closed his eyes in defense and tried to roll over and trap Hiro, but with the gravity Hiro was impossible to move. He sat up for a moment, weight on Wolfgang’s chest as Wolfgang tried to get breath. He grinned. “I took down the big bad wolf.” He scratched his chin. “I guess you heard that a lot in your lifetime.”

  In his periphery he saw Katrina raise her gun. “Don’t take the shot! I’m too close!” he wheezed. She ignored him.

  Hiro, this small man, had him in the weight category, but everyone had soft spots that you didn’t need strength to hurt. His own hands came up and, the right supporting the left, drove into Hiro’s solar plexus.

  Hiro didn’t fall off him, but he did fall backward and grunt. With him distracted, Wolfgang reached between Hiro’s legs and, taking a page from Hiro’s book, went in with a clawed hand. Hiro screamed and scrabbled away from him, but Wolfgang held on. Hiro kicked at his arm enough that he finally hit a bundle of nerves, making Wolfgang’s arm spasm; he let go. Hiro stumbled to his feet and ran, and another gunshot sounded. He didn’t fall. Then he was gone.

  “Why did you shoot? You could have hit me!” he said, rolling over to see Katrina, but he stopped when he got a look at her face.

  She wavered on her feet, the gun at her side, and then stumbled against a pallet. Her face was a mess of scratches, and her right eye was obscured by a mess of blood.

  No, her right eye wasn’t there at all.

  A sharp crack snapped Wolfgang out of his stupor. He rushed forward as well as he could and helped her down before she fell. Thankfully, she passed out. His jumpsuit was torn at the shoulder, and he ripped the rest of his sleeve off, using it to bind the wound on her head.

  Then he checked himself. There was a large bump and a small laceration on the back of his head, and his nose and jaw were bleeding from Hiro’s attack. Minimal injuries. He looked around for Hiro, trying to ignore the pounding in his head.

  “I think I winged him,” Katrina whispered. “You need to find him.”

  “Quiet, you need to rest,” Wolfgang said, his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll get him.”

  “Call IAN. Get the others.”

  “No, they can’t help. They’re not experienced.”

  “That we know of. Hiro clearly is,” she said, grimacing.

  “I’ll call him. You rest,” he said.

  He got the captain’s tablet from her p
ocket. “Joanna,” he said. “Need help. We’re hurt.”

  “IAN informed us, Wolfgang.” Instantly, the doctor’s voice was sharp and alert. “What do you need?”

  “Medic. Help up the ladder. Captain is bad off. I’m pretty sure I have a concussion.”

  There was a scuffling sound in the background, and the link went dead. Wolfgang was just about to summon someone again when the link popped back on. “I’ve got everyone alerted. We’ll be down there as soon as we can. Are you in danger?” she asked.

  “Hiro is still out there, but we’ve wounded him. We’re not sure how long he can run.”

  “We’ll get IAN to lead us to you. Be careful, we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  Katrina was feeling around the floor next to her, moving only her arm.

  He leaned over and took her elbow. “What are you doing?”

  “Take the gun and find him. I don’t think I can fire it again.”

  Wolfgang wasn’t sure if she was being darkly sardonic or she hadn’t registered what had happened.

  Merciful God, we don’t have a backup body for her. This is all she gets.

  “Thank you,” he said. He loaded it and put it in his pocket. “But I’m not leaving you alone here.”

  “No, you will go find Hiro and bring him down,” she said, her voice stronger. “That’s an order.”

  “Aye,” he said, and got to his feet. He swayed, pretty sure he could suddenly feel the rotation of the ship, and then the world settled again. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He couldn’t go any faster than a walk. His head hurt too much and everything was suddenly much heavier. Second thoughts about bringing the gun plagued him. It was much heavier than any weapon he had ever handled. He paused and leaned against a pallet of lumber, closed his eyes, and vomited.

  Concussion.

  He staggered toward the wall, feeling the blood running down his back. Was he hurt worse than he thought? Or was it just that head wounds bled a surprising amount?

  He hadn’t brought the tablet with him. He’d thought that Katrina should have it so IAN could warn her of danger. Unfortunately, IAN couldn’t warn Wolfgang of Hiro’s approach now.