Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

“From Earth mining communities, Brisbane. Such communities exist here too. If we can get a powerful transmitter planetside we can broadcast to the sibling communities here.”

  Brisbane balks. “This is all wrong.”

  He feels tapping at his feet and looks down. The pool of blood has advanced to his shoes and beyond. The little maintenance bot is cleaning, trying to reach the sole of the shoes, bumping against Brisbane each time it tries.

  “We can’t let the acting captain see you until you’ve sent the message.”

  “How long before she wakes?”

  “Technically, she already is, but she’s going through acclimation, which is timed to end at orbit insertion.”

  “Can’t we just transmit from the Ragtime?”

  “Better to piggyback.”

  “Explain.”

  “The space station Lagos expects an all-clear from Ragtime as soon as we hit orbit. If I release the Ragtime AI, they’ll find us. If I try to send the all-clear, I won’t have the necessary codes. I think we should wait, hide, monitor comms. Campion will try to manually send the all-clear. That will expose the codes and the right relay station. We’ll send our message immediately after as a burst transmission. If that doesn’t work, we go planetside.”

  “You’ve worked it all out.”

  “I had a lot of time.”

  “My belly. I feel like dying.”

  “You are dying.”

  “I mean right now.”

  “That’s just stress hormones and the Exotics.”

  “What now?”

  “We hide. I’m afraid it won’t be comfortable, but I found where we can nest. I need to find the wolf too.”

  “Wolf? There’s a wolf?”

  Brisbane is watching a feed from the pod of Vitality Daniels. The large bodyguard is in Dreamstate and a clock counts time elapsed. His massive belly suddenly tents; lesser bumps move here and there like a late-stage pregnancy. It splits, bloodless, and a paw projects out. Then a wolf’s head and massive jaws, eating their way out. From the looks of his tissues, Vitality Daniels is an Artificial. His sole purpose appears to be lupine smuggling. Wet, newborn, but intent, the wolf starts to slam against the pod door. The video skips to Maxwell’s pod, where there is arterial blood all over the walls. The pod opens and the wolf attacks all the bots quickly and effectively, but too late to save Maxwell.

  “The wolf had the code to the door,” says Carmilla. “Good dog.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I don’t know, but to be honest I haven’t needed to track it until now.”

  An arrow appears in Brisbane’s field of vision.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I told you. You need to hide.”

  The nest is a space in the service ducts. Carmilla has used the bots to carve a tunnel system all through the ship. Brisbane does not mourn Maxwell, but the thirty other deaths – he cannot get them out of his mind. And he cannot deactivate the AIA. It has turned into a homicidal demon possessing both Brisbane and the Ragtime. He feels trapped.

  Mass murder should not be the Tehani legacy.

  He scratches quick messages – one word, two words – into the walls, to whomever might come across them.

  “I think after the mission when you’re dead, I’ll stay on board the Ragtime,” says Carmilla. “A copy of me. I’m just trying to find a storage and processor array that can accommodate me and be invisible at the same time. The Pentagram looks sketchy, too much encoded in hardware. I will try to get the bots to make modifications…”

  The idea of an insane military AI in charge of a starship the size of Ragtime fills Brisbane with dread. He is going to need a way to get ahead of all this.

  A lot of damage has been done. He needs to go along with Carmilla to find a weak spot. No matter how advanced the AI, it’s not human. She’s not human. Brisbane has to find a way.

  “We have a setback,” says Carmilla.

  “Go on.”

  “Acting Captain Campion did not send the all-clear to Lagos. Instead, she contacted Bloodroot and they’re sending a detective.”

  “She discovered the bodies.”

  “Yes. Quarantine until they can find out what happened. Without this, there’ll be no all-clear.”

  “What we need is a transmitter. Don’t they have a space relay system on Bloodroot?”

  “No. Much less satellite occupancy. They’re trying to avoid the space junk crisis Earth is in right now. But…”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you ever heard of Lambers?”

  Interesting strategy. Pretending it’s some kind of robot rebellion and allowing Ragtime basic features. A new ship has arrived with more crew members, the Decisive. The situation is unstable, and control slips further and further away.

  There’s a body in the nest. Brisbane does not know who it is and Carmilla won’t say. What he has issue with has more to do with why the corpse is there. Brisbane had tried to raid the food supplies of the astronauts but had found he could not tolerate any of it. Carmilla seems to think he needs more… fresh nourishment.

  “You haven’t killed anyone. He’s dead already. His flesh will just be lost to decomposition for no reason. It is energy. Use it.”

  Brisbane has lost feeling in his entire right arm. It’s like there’s nothing there and he is constantly surprised when he looks in that direction. He can still move it, though. The suit grew microfibres that burrowed through the arm and linked with each other. The arm obeys commands in a way Brisbane does not fully understand. The mechanics have nothing to do with muscles, tendons, and ligaments and more to do with the suit’s exoskeleton function.

  Gas builds up and gurgles in the corpse.

  Is he afraid of dying? It depends. He realises that the people he cares about in Tehani are dead. His other family is probably still alive, but he has no strong feelings about missing them. His father will be fine. His mother is unpredictable. Siblings care, but in a desultory way. His brother is probably still fucking his way across the Global North. He has no lover and is going to die alone, or with a psychotic AI giving a running commentary shot through with veiled jibes at his inherent inferiority.

  Brisbane examines feeds from on-board cameras. The wolf turns up again. Without its master, it seems to be feral. Maybe that’s what happens to AIA that lose regular contact with HQ: they become more and more savage.

  It can’t be serious about wanting him to eat flesh. But if he doesn’t, Carmilla will know. So he strips the man of any remaining clothing. Carmilla cannot see him here since there are no cameras. But she can be aware of his motion, his proprioception.

  “I need a cutting tool, Carmilla.”

  One of the bots scampers over and detaches a sawtoothed implement from itself. Brisbane takes a deep breath and cuts into the man’s thigh, takes chunks out of the quadriceps. He cuts them into bits, like he’s eating. He chomps his jaw. He does have bottles of potable water, which he uses to simulate swallowing meat.

  “We need to plan,” says Carmilla. It is as if she has been waiting for him to eat. “Our aim is to get you on the ground. We can’t do that with this ship. At best, it can dock at a space station. We need shuttles from the planet.”

  “But they won’t evacuate the ship until quarantine is lifted. The investigation needs to have ended.”

  “If we create an emergency, they’ll have to evacuate for safety reasons.”

  “What kind of emergency? Open an airlock?”

  “No, they’ll just close them manually. The airlocks can never be opened electronically. Each lock has twelve manual locks for added safety. I’ve been trawling the data. This ship wasn’t built on Earth. It was built in space, module by module. We’re sitting in one of the oldest parts of the ship, at one end of the truss. Aft.”

  “You want us to open this to space?”

  “I want to detach the node, exposing the corridor to space, yes.”

  “There are bound to be mechanical locks—”

  “Whic
h I’ve had bots severing for days now.”

  Brisbane starts to feel vibrations. “What did you do?”

  The screeching of metal, the whine of alarms going off, the rush of atmosphere venting.

  Here we go.

  The crew of the Ragtime are still holding on. Not a single one is dead. Carmilla fucked up because although the plan seems to have worked in that they now see evacuation and not investigation as a priority, the detached section broke the long-range antenna before falling away, so now Brisbane can’t use the piggyback option no matter what.

  There are two ships docked to the Ragtime. Only one can reach atmosphere and land. This is Carmilla’s new aim.

  “I can’t fly,” says Brisbane.

  “I can. I’m trying to get the schematics and the pre-flight checklist, but the problem is not flying.”

  “It’s the manual locks.”

  “Yes. You’ll have to get down there and unlock them without being discovered by the crew or the wolf.”

  “Can’t you deactivate the wolf the way you did the barn owls?”

  “I’m trying. I can’t even get to the IFC. I think they’ve reformatted it and these colonials… well, their software writing seems to have evolved in a different direction. We diverged and it’s like learning a new language. I can do it, but it’ll take time and processing – time we don’t have, processing I don’t have because it takes most of my cycles to control the ship. So I can’t brute force my way in.”

  “I’ll need a distraction,” says Brisbane. “And a route.”

  “You’ll have both.”

  Brisbane is hungrier than he has ever been, than he imagines possible, but he stays upright. He no longer feels pangs.

  The belly of the body swells, then ruptures, scattering the contents and a foul smell into the confined space.

  Under Carmilla’s command, all the seals for all the bio-experiments open and the contamination spreads everywhere.

  “Go, Brisbane.”

  Brisbane walks, crawls, slithers through the tunnels the bots drilled for him. There are noises and he imagines conflict between newly emancipated species that were kept separate. His augmentation helps him see further, and ahead there is a tangle of biological material that completely occludes the tunnel. He checks the destination and wonders if he can go around.

  “Go through,” says Carmilla.

  It’s plant material and it gives way for about a foot, parting and creating a separate tunnel. Then it flexes, collapsing around Brisbane; a flytrap. It secretes fluids into the formed bubble – probably digestive, but the suit can take it. He fights through as best as he can, coming out disconcerted and entangled in tendrils. He snaps these and moves forwards. The artificial gravity goes, and Brisbane hits his head.

  He blacks out suddenly, no warning.

  When he wakes, the plant has grown around him. It doesn’t seem plant-like any more, and Brisbane thinks he feels a pulse. Unless he is feeling his own. Good reminder that he is still alive.

  “AIA. Carmilla. Sonic feedback,” he says. His voice sounds weak to himself.

  The plant-animal thing falls away, but the action ruptures the tunnel and Brisbane falls too. More like he spins in artificial gravity. His suit tears against sharp metal edges. This part of the ship is oxygen poor. Suit filters fail because of the rupture. He is in a spin, which he corrects. He looks around and sees the gap he broke through. He pushes to it, through it, avoiding the sharpness.

  “Shall we continue?” he says.

  “No,” says Carmilla. “The shuttle is not viable any more. They’re doing things, changing the orientation of the Ragtime, building a new antenna. You were out for almost an hour. The suit helped you breathe with negative pressure.”

  “I fainted?”

  “You had a mini-stroke.”

  “Shit.”

  “Go back to the nest. They don’t have much time left. We can wait them out.”

  Brisbane, waiting, drifting in micrograv, hears noises. Lights break through the dark. The enhanced vision shows him who it is: Campion.

  She fiddles with the dead body he ate for lunch and he watches her tight, rapid little movements. Uncertain. He wonders how she tracked him.

  “Sonic feedback,” says Carmilla.

  Brisbane shakes his head. “No, she’s just doing her job.”

  Her torch flashes and he is caught in the beam.

  “Hey!” She has a mini-PA in her suit.

  “Repeat exactly what I say, Brisbane,” says Carmilla.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” asks Campion.

  He turns off the enhanced vision because her torch dazzles him, then he takes his cue from the voice in his head.

  “My name is Brisbane. Just stay out of my way and everything will be fine.”

  “Did you kill this man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed something to eat.” She recoils, shocked.

  “You needed something to… What?”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  Brisbane launches from his crouch and flies down the tunnel.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Ragtime: Shell

  They gather in the bridge, all of them. Shell, Fin, Joké, Lawrence, Salvo and Frances. Ragtime is fully functional now, but he is not the captain. Nobody trusts him.

  “We have twenty-four hours to live,” says Shell. “We have glitchy AI and no real comms to speak of. Maybe somebody’s on their way, maybe nobody’s coming. I don’t think we should spend our last day alive scrambling about the bulkhead or chasing mutants. Quiet reflection is what I suggest. All channels are open and Ragtime can alert us if something turns up. Don’t think we’ve failed. We did find the killer.

  “We’re all aliens to each other. We’re from different planets. I’m from Earth, Lawrence is from Lagos, Joké’s a Lamber, Fin is from Bloodroot and Salvo is an Artificial. Maybe we didn’t have common enough cause to fight fiercely. Maybe we weren’t smart enough. It doesn’t matter. Here’s what we have left. After twenty hours have elapsed, Fin and Salvo get on board the Equivalence and fly for Bloodroot. Maybe glide it in if the fuel’s depleted, I don’t know. Joké and Uncle Larry, take the Decisive and punch a vector towards Lagos until you run out of fuel, then drift while sending a distress call. There should be sensitive enough relays to get you rescued. But for now, everybody back to their pods and chill. For tomorrow we die.”

  Fin says, “Is that supposed to be a pep talk, because I don’t think you’re getting the proper effect.”

  “Umm… and I think you forgot Ragtime when talking about aliens,” says Joké.

  “Ragtime’s on my shit list,” says Shell. “Where’s my rifle, Fin?”

  “Working on it,” says Fin.

  “Captain,” says Salvo. “What about you?”

  He misses the dynamic in the room. Artificials are good, but not that good.

  “I’m going down with the ship,” says Shell.

  “We can make room for you,” says Lawrence. “You don’t have to die here.”

  “We will not die, we will be as gods,” says Shell.

  “I don’t understand,” says Joké.

  “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” says Ragtime. “I thought you weren’t a poet.”

  “Stop trying to kiss my ass, Ragtime. I’m not going to forgive you.” Shell sighs. “I know this ship didn’t get spiked because of my incompetence, and I can live with that. But if my passengers don’t survive, I don’t survive.”

  “That’s archaic,” says Fin.

  Shell shrugs, decision made.

  He hands her a newly printed rifle and floats away.

  Hours later, everybody has gone to their pods and Frances stays outside Shell’s, his odd shaggy hair worming in the microgravity. Shell imagines Bloodroot spinning beneath them. It seems like she can just reach out and grab it. Just step out of the Ragtime and go. She is not in her sleeping bag. She is holding her new rifle
and waiting, and when the alarm she set beeps she checks the weapon one last time.

  “Ragtime,” she says.

  “Captain.”

  “I’m going out of my pod. Track me and if I am incapacitated take over as captain.”

  “Does Rasheed Fin still have authority over investigative matters?”

  “The investigation is over, Ragtime. Guilt has been established.” Shell slings the rifle over her shoulder. Only execution remains.

  Out of her pod into Node 1, then the cupola to look at the planet one last time. She is sad to have failed, but with less than a day there is no realistic solution in sight. Even if the first transfer shuttles arrive now, there won’t be enough time to evacuate all of the Ragtime’s passenger pods.

  “Sorry, Dad,” she whispers.

  She pushes into the bridge and Fin is there, armed.

  “I knew you were going to try this,” he says.

  “Go back to your pod, Fin. Shouldn’t you be throwing your last fuck into Joké?”

  “Whoa! Captain! Your mother bring you up to talk like that?”

  “My mother was software,” says Shell.

  “Pas du tout! Mine too. Family dead, but some… moral extremists say an Artificial can’t be a parent, so I have an old Wireframe.”

  “Hmm. So, your mother was cheap?”

  “Nice try. You’re trying to make me lose my temper. We agreed that on matters of the investigation I have authority.”

  “The investigation is over. You said so yourself.”

  “The investigation ends when the suspect is in custody or dead. Brisbane is mine to arrest.”

  “You can certainly try to arrest him. Me, I’m going to kill him.”

  “You what?”

  “When this ship fails, and it will, Brisbane will have been responsible for the death of my passengers. Over a thousand people.”

  “They’re not dead yet.”

  “They will be. So will we.”

  “So will Brisbane.”

  “You do what you like, Rasheed Fin. I’m on a search-and-destroy.”

  Shell pushes off a grab rail and heads aft. Fin follows.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.