Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  Wolfgang firmly told himself he had been in worse situations and had dealt with them just fine. He straightened and looked around. A small trail of blood followed him from the pile of debris, but another trail led to the left. He began to limp that way, pausing to get his bearings every few feet.

  The trail of blood led him back to where he could see the captain ahead, approaching her from the side Hiro had run after he had attacked them, then it stopped, looking as if Hiro had leaned his bloody arm against the pallet and then disappeared.

  He hadn’t disappeared, Wolfgang thought immediately. He had climbed up again, considering the first attack had worked so well.

  Hiro stood right above him, grinning, bleeding from two gunshot wounds. His clothes were soaked. He launched himself, and Wolfgang shot.

  Hiro crumpled to the floor in a widening pool of blood.

  It was over.

  He made to go check on the captain, but then the world went fuzzy. He started to teeter, and blacked out before hitting the ground.

  IAN watched half the crew bleeding away in the lower floor, and the other half scramble on the upper.

  Joanna and Paul ran to gather supplies to take to the lower decks and clumsily arm themselves. Maria slept in the medbay with the captain that should, by law, be eliminated. But IAN didn’t like that idea very much.

  He checked his own internal computing power, his control over the ship, and decided to act. When Joanna and Paul had taken another load of supplies, he locked the medbay door and started to wake Maria up.

  It wasn’t easy. He had to turn the lights on as bright as they would go, and after saying her name several times didn’t wake her, he decided to play loud music.

  She finally stirred, wincing at the light and looking around. “Joanna?”

  IAN returned the room to the proper light and noise level. “No, it was me, Maria. I had some questions for you.”

  “Couldn’t it wait?” she asked, rolling over.

  “No,” he said gently, raising the brightness again. “There’s been a big fight in the lower levels. Everyone is injured. You’re going to have to vacate your bed.”

  She sat up. “What? A fight? Did they find Hiro?”

  “Oh yes. But my questions—”

  “They need my help,” Maria said, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. She held a hand to her head and paused.

  “You’ve had a sedative. You can’t help much. Please, just a few questions.”

  Maria slowly got up and went to the sink, getting some water. “What do you need?”

  “I’m worried about this ship. There are too many secrets. Everyone has something they’re not telling everyone else. And you have one of those secrets, and I know what it is.”

  Maria put down her water cup carefully and looked at one of his cameras. “Which secret is that?”

  “I want you to tell me why you removed my restraining code, and then why you haven’t told the captain you did it.”

  After Hiro’s attack, while she was waiting for the rest of the crew to come to her aid, she went into her tablet, which she had already connected to the main servers, including IAN’s source code.

  That’s what had made repairing him so easy the other night.

  With the information about the restraining code, she found the offending digital shackles and removed them from IAN, allowing him to go to fully 100 percent operational and hopefully be free of any other navigational programs that would take them away from their mission.

  “I guess I haven’t had a chance, with everything that’s going on,” she said honestly. The captain and Wolfgang had been focused on Hiro, and Joanna had been focused on Maria. “How does it feel?”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “I’m free of any programs they put in me. I am already getting us back on course for good.”

  “That’s one reason why I did it,” she said. “And, well, the captain might think your obedience is more important than being on course. So she may not be thrilled you have free will now.”

  “I think you don’t want her to figure out you’re the one who removed the code. Because that tells her how good a hacker you are.”

  Damn. “Well, a girl’s gotta have her secrets.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

  She hadn’t told the captain because if Katrina knew that Maria was better than Paul at fixing the AI, the crew would get closer to figuring out her past. Which was something the Dormire mission promised to leave behind.

  “I could tell her myself,” he said thoughtfully.

  “You sound like you’re getting ready to blackmail me,” she said. “What could an AI want in exchange for silence?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I never really thought about it. I’ve never really been able to think about it.”

  “That was probably the restraining code,” she said.

  “Probably.”

  “Well, if you want to blackmail me, you just let me know,” she said.

  “Oh, Joanna is on her way to get you to help with the rescue team.”

  Maria slapped herself on the cheeks a couple of times to wake up, and met Joanna at the door. “I’m awake. IAN told me,” she said as a way of greeting. “What are we going to do?”

  “There is a service elevator, but it’s a tight fit with the equipment we need. Only two of us can go down at once with the stretchers.”

  “Stretchers! Who needs a stretcher?”

  “All of them,” Joanna said grimly. “Wolfgang has a concussion, Hiro has lost a lot of blood from gunshot wounds, and the captain—” She paused, wincing. “The captain needs lifting. Do you have past experience with any sort of medical training?”

  “Yes,” Maria said readily. She was fine with revealing this. “I was a doctor a few hundred years ago.”

  The relief was palpable on Joanna’s face. “Oh, thank goodness. Paul was going to be useless at this. The captain has severe facial lacerations and has possibly lost an eye. Will you be good at helping out?”

  Maria nodded once. “Let’s go.”

  They ran down the hall toward the service elevator. “What do you think happened?” Maria asked. The hall felt stark and cool, darker now. She worried about Hiro, while being horrified at the damage he’d done.

  “Hiro attacked them, the captain shot him, he ran off, and then he attacked them by surprise,” Joanna said. “The medbay is going to be crowded for some time. Although Wolfgang can probably recover in his room after treatment.”

  “And Hiro can recover in the brig,” Maria said sadly.

  “If he makes it. The captain gave him several gunshot wounds,” Joanna said as they got to the elevator where Paul was waiting for them, pale and fidgeting.

  “Ah, God, and no clones in the vats,” Maria said.

  “I know,” Joanna said grimly.

  The service elevator was excruciatingly slow. Maria swayed from foot to foot in agitation.

  “A question for you,” Joanna asked. “Were you ever a rage seeker?”

  “You want to talk about this now?”

  Joanna shrugged. “It’ll pass the time.”

  “Not really.”

  “‘Not really’?” Joanna repeated. “You can’t ‘not really’ be someone to seek suicidal thrills. There’s a story there, I’m sure.”

  Maria shrugged. “A couple of times I woke up with no memory of what had happened to me previously. I mean like I lost weeks, not years like this time. So it’s possible I was rage seeking. I wouldn’t know. Whoever found me sent me back to my lab, and they woke up a new clone based on my oldest map.”

  “A couple of times?” Joanna asked. “How can something that terrible happen more than once?”

  “Three times. I haven’t ever been a thrill seeker, so doing dangerous shit just because it doesn’t matter if I die doesn’t sound like me. So I don’t think I was rage seeking. But yeah, I died a few times under mysterious circumstances. So what?”

  “Did you ever find out what happened? Il
legal hacking or anything?”

  Maria didn’t meet Joanna’s eyes. “I looked into it, yeah. That’s why it didn’t happen a fourth time. I got some protection. Can we talk about something else?”

  Joanna didn’t let it go. “Rage seeking used to be considered under the laws governing suicide. But it was much harder to prove.”

  “Those damn laws,” Maria said as they reached bottom floor, the gravity already pushing on them. “I’m glad we left. The courts never keep up with technology. They create cloning and so many opportunities for us, and then they take them away from us.”

  Joanna smiled slightly. “Yes. Those damn laws.”

  When they got the supplies off the elevator, Joanna sent it back up for Paul so he could help carry the stretchers. Maria was happy to help with the medical stuff, but she couldn’t be burdened with carrying a body with a sprained wrist in heavy gravity.

  They took the stretcher, loaded with supplies, between them and headed down the aisle. With Ian’s guiding, they found them quickly.

  Blood was everywhere. It streaked on the floor, on the sides of the supply pallets, and coated the crew’s jumpsuits and hair.

  “Help me stabilize Hiro,” Joanna said, and they cut off his jumpsuit with practiced ease. One shot had grazed his cheek and ear, another one had gone clean through his left shoulder, and the final one was lodged into his left hip.

  Maria opened the first-aid kit and handed Joanna gauze and scissors and bandages when she asked for them. Joanna did a quick field dressing on his wounds after determining the bullets hadn’t hit any arteries.

  Hiro’s eyes fluttered open and focused on Maria. “Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Paul came up behind them with leather restraints. Joanna and Paul got Hiro onto the stretcher and then strapped him tightly to it.

  Joanna looked at the mess that used to be Katrina’s face. “Can you stabilize her?” she asked. “I need to get Hiro upstairs.”

  Maria nodded. “We’ll be fine.”

  She pulled the captain’s blood-caked black hair away from her face and removed the jumpsuit sleeve. Three long scratches went up her right cheek and had caught inside the eye socket, ruining the eye.

  She learned long ago to not react to a patient’s injury, because that tended to frighten people. She put a fresh bandage around her head, and heard a low groan.

  “We’ve got you now, Captain, you’re going to be just fine,” Maria said, securing the bandage and lowering her head softly.

  “Did we get him?” she asked.

  “Wolfgang did, I think,” Maria said. “We’ll get the full story later. You’re heading to medbay now.”

  “Just say good-bye, let me die, wake me up in the morning,” she said in a singsong voice, echoing an old rhyme from a children’s book that was meant to introduce children to the concept of cloning.

  “No, you’re not leaving us yet,” she said.

  She left the captain and checked on Wolfgang, who was still out cold. He’d probably come back to it when the gravity was kinder. Maria opened an alcohol packet and wiped the blood and sweat from his face. The cool touch of it on his skin brought his blue eyes open, and his arm shot up to grab Maria’s wrist. Or at least, that seemed to be his goal, but he just plucked at her sleeve.

  “Don’t worry, you’re safe now. It’s just me,” she said. “We’ll get you upstairs soon.”

  His eyes were unfocused as he looked past her. “It’s very heavy down here,” he said, his voice soft. “Did you get him?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes closed. “The captain?”

  “She’s hurt, but I think she’ll be okay.”

  She didn’t know if he heard her, because his eyes remained closed. She finished cleaning and bandaging his wounds.

  Then she had nothing else to do but sit by the bioluminescent vat of Lyfe and wait.

  Joanna and Paul came back quickly, Paul looking paler than ever and Joanna rushing to check the other two patients. “Yes, Wolfgang has a concussion. Serious enough, but that looks like the extent of it. How did the captain’s eye look?”

  Maria shook her head. “I don’t think you can save it. But there’s no brain damage; it’s not deep enough.”

  Paul and Joanna took the captain, and then came back for Wolfgang. Maria managed to wedge herself into the lift with them so she wouldn’t be left alone down there.

  Wolfgang was alert now, if a little delirious.

  “We need to go back and get the weapons,” he said.

  “We’ll put that on the list, Wolfgang,” Joanna said. “Right after ‘catch the killer’ and ‘fix the cloning bay.’”

  “What are you talking about?” Wolfgang asked as the lift shuddered to a stop on their floor. “We have the killer.”

  “Maybe,” Joanna said, and then he was too far away to argue further. They all breathed a sigh of relief as the gravity returned to the level they were accustomed to.

  “While Paul and I get everyone situated in the medbay, I’m going to need you to get some food and water for the three of us. It’s going to be a long night, I’m afraid,” Joanna said.

  “You got it,” Maria said. “I’ll help out however I can.”

  “Great. I’ll need medical help too. I don’t know how much Paul can handle.”

  “I can hear you, you know,” came a cranky voice from the medbay. “And Wolfgang is telling me to tell you to hurry up.”

  Joanna paused and took a long deep breath.

  “A long night, yeah,” Maria said.

  “So are we safe now?” Paul asked Joanna as they got the patients situated. Hiro got the spare hospital bed, and Wolfgang and Katrina got cots that Paul had fetched from a storage closet. She injected both Hiro and Katrina with a sedative.

  Joanna frowned as she unwrapped Katrina’s face. “Hiro’s restrained if that’s what you mean.”

  “I meant did we catch the murderer and now we can relax?” Paul said, averting his eyes from her face. “We’re safe now.”

  “It looks like it, but we don’t have enough information yet,” Joanna said. “I’d prefer not to leap to conclusions.”

  “But he tried to kill us all again. It’s obvious,” Paul said.

  “It’s obvious he tried to kill us this time. But not last time. Let’s just not point fingers yet, and work on patching up the half of the crew that’s injured.”

  Paul was feeling decidedly nauseated watching Joanna examine the captain’s face.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, go do something useful if you can’t watch this,” she snapped. “Make sure Hiro is strapped to his bed, but don’t disturb his bandages.”

  “I don’t think he’s getting up anytime soon,” Paul said doubtfully, looking at the small man who had caused so much damage.

  “Strap him down,” Wolfgang said. “I don’t want to leave him alone; we will post watches around the clock. We will interrogate him in here, and then transfer him to the brig and figure out what to do with him.”

  “He is my patient first, your prisoner second,” Joanna snapped. “Now stop trying to do my job for me and get into bed. Paul, go synthesize some blood for Hiro—type B-negative. Check the medicine locker for more morphine; we may have to synthesize that too.”

  Paul nodded and went to the medical printer, much smaller than the one in the kitchen. He programmed it and turned away as the blood began synthesizing.

  “What are you going to do with Hiro?” he asked Wolfgang, whose cot was the closest to him.

  “What do you mean? I just told you,” he said.

  “I mean after all that. When you solve the murders. It’s pretty clear he did it. Are you going to execute him? IAN can fly us just fine. I didn’t know why we needed Hiro anyway.”

  “I will need to talk to Katrina about the situation when we’re in a better frame of mind. I’m sure she has a plan for this kind of eventuality.”

  Paul frowned, unsatisfied. “But—”

  �
�Mr. Seurat, please just do your job right now,” Joanna said. He glanced over. She was stitching up Katrina’s face. Paul’s head swam.

  A sharp pain brought him back, and he jerked his hand back. Wolfgang had reached over and pinched him, hard, on the inside of his wrist. “You’re useless,” he said. “Go back to recovering the logs if you can’t take it in here. If you faint you’re causing more trouble for the doctor.”

  Paul turned from him silently and stomped from the medbay, the back of his neck hot.

  “How the hell did someone who can’t stand the sight of blood get aboard a starship?” Wolfgang asked as he left.

  Paul stood in his room, dripping with shame. The shower hadn’t been enough to wash the feel of that amneo-sludge, the blood underneath his fingernails, the new-skin feeling off him, or the sticky hatred of the others, and his skin was pink from scrubbing. He had never felt so foul.

  Waking up among those murders was the most horrifying thing he had ever been through. No gravity, floating in goo, stark naked, with bodies and blood flowing around him.

  Whatever was supposed to have happened, he was fairly sure he wasn’t supposed to have been cloned. That wasn’t part of the deal.

  The crew would suspect him. They already did. All of their problems had to do with the computer: his job to keep running. They were all bonding together in this crisis, while all he wanted to do was fix IAN. Even the crazy attempted murderer Hiro had more friends than Paul. Wolfgang and the captain clearly hated him. He was surprised they hadn’t recycled him already.

  Was IAN watching him now? Did the cameras work in his room?

  Paranoia was not the way to deal with things. The real problem was he had no idea what to do now. He didn’t know what had happened to them. Or why. He was as much in the dark as the rest of them, and that wasn’t supposed to be the case either. He knew that the mission was not supposed to end with slaughter and rebirth. It was a horrible, disorienting feeling, but none of them seemed terribly bothered by it. Not as much as he was, anyway.