The Ghost Line

by Andrew Neil Gray

  And then she realized where she was heading. The destination she hadn’t consciously selected, but that had been on her mind ever since Michel mentioned it. The main dining room.

  * * *

  She hesitated at the doorway; she could see no obvious handle or opening controls. Through her lenses she had access to her suit computer, which in turn connected to the Queen’s systems. She could probably work out how to get in.

  As she considered whether it was worth the effort, there was a click, and the doors swung open. Inside the room, she saw the glint of candlelight. People in formal dress. The murmuring sound of conversations and the clink of silverware. At one corner a man carved slices of roast beef. The scene looked exactly like the picture from Gregor’s brochure.

  Then the figures flickered and she knew them for what they really were: projections. Still, she walked in cautiously, her heart thudding in her chest. The diners were dressed in clothes whose styles were decades out of date. “Hello?” she said to a woman in a silvery dress who stood at the head of the first table. The woman didn’t respond. This wasn’t like one of her interactives. It must have been a recording of something that had happened on the ship long ago.

  Saga touched a table, expecting her hand to pass through the silverware, but instead felt the cold smoothness of metal. Everything was real. The white linen tablecloth and napkins. The crystal stemware. Stacks of plates on a side table in the Martian Queen’s own china pattern.

  Saga sat down at an empty table set for two. She picked up a silver salt shaker, tipped it cautiously. A sprinkling of grains fell on the table and she touched one with a finger, brought it to her lips. She was mildly surprised to find it was actually salt.

  She found a hallmark on the bottom of the salt shaker. It was the real thing. She remembered polishing her grandmother’s silver as a girl, admiring the way the dark metal had transformed into something gleaming and beautiful. The salt shaker and the cutlery were untarnished, as if they had just received a good polishing.

  A movement drew her gaze; a man was sitting directly across from her. He had very dark skin, several shades darker than Michel’s. Unlike the other projections, he wasn’t in formal wear; he had on something similar to the undergarments she and Michel wore beneath their pressure suits. The man didn’t fit the atmosphere of formality and fun. His face was troubled. She frowned, and he met her eyes. She jumped, dropping the salt shaker.

  He was looking through her, of course, not at her. Even so she averted her gaze, uncomfortable. When she looked back he was gone. An older man in a mustard-colored turban sat in his place, laughing as he put a forkful of meat into his mouth.

  Saga felt a shiver run along her spine.

  She needed her cameras. She was going to capture this. Pin it down. Whatever it was, it would become part of her interactive.

  But when she finally returned with her gear the projections were gone, the room silent. She stood in the entrance for a moment, disappointed. Then there was a clattering noise. It sounded again. It was coming from the far side of the room, behind the bar.

  She quickly interfaced with the expedition case. A flight of cameras emerged, buzzing. “Go,” she whispered.

  They sped across the room in formation, a composite picture of what they saw displayed in a window on her lenses. They hovered above the bar, holding position there.

  In the video feed, she saw a figure crouched beside a cabinet door. The figure turned and a familiar grizzled face looked up at the cameras with surprise. Then a flash and the feed cut out.

  Saga stormed across the room. “What did you do to my cameras?”

  Gregor stood up, red-faced. He pointed a finger at her. “You,” he spluttered. “You scared living fuck out of me.”

  He was in his pressure suit, his helmet off. Her camera bugs lay around him on the bar top and the floor.

  One of them twitched slightly, a dying insect. She picked it up. It was scorched. Saga brandished it in Gregor’s face, furious. “You know how much these cost?”

  Gregor had the courtesy to look sheepish. He gestured at his suit. “Is military surplus,” he said. “Sometimes I forget it has perimeter defense system. It thought your equipment was attack swarm.”

  “Then turn the damn thing off. What if it decides I’m an attack swarm?”

  Gregor muttered to himself, but he tapped at a control pad on his sleeve and assured her the suit was safe. He looked at her then, his gaze traveling from her feet to her face. She glared back at him.

  “You brought this dress with you?” he said.

  “None of your business. What the hell are you doing in here?”

  “Exploring,” he said. “Like yourself.”

  Saga peered at the cabinets behind the bar. She pushed past him and bent over, wishing her dress were less revealing. One of the cabinet handles was battered and scratched. “Fokking fok, Gregor. You were trying to break this open,” she said. She turned and glared at him. “Why?”

  “Perhaps there is treasure inside.”

  Saga frowned. “You could have asked Michel or me. We have low-level system access, you know.”

  Gregor shrugged. He looked pointedly at her dress. Her bare feet. “There is more than one way to open door, and you seemed . . . occupied. So you will help me now?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Gregor picked up a cutting laser from the toolbox beside him and pointed it at the handle.

  Saga looked at the polished wood of the cabinet. The thought of Gregor taking an industrial cutting tool to an antique was abhorrent. “Just hold on a minute. Jesus, Gregor.”

  She moved back and blinked her lenses to life, quickly flicking through the interface until she found her connection to the Queen’s OS. It took only a minute to find the dining-room controls. A moment later, the cabinet clicked.

  Gregor grunted with pleasure and opened the door. Lined up on the shelves were bottles of spirits, all full.

  “That’s what you were looking for? I thought the Sigurd made all you could drink.”

  Gregor chuckled. “Bioreactor alcohol is a drink only in name. But this. This is real thing.” He brought out a triangular amber bottle and cradled it in his arms.

  “Won’t it be too old?”

  Gregor laughed, a deep belly laugh that shook him. “Old is okay. Better than okay. Do you know nothing about good drink?”

  She knew more about bad drink than she had ever wanted to know.

  “Just . . .” She frowned. “Just don’t ruin the place. Put the laser away.”

  “We are changing ship’s orbit, no? Sending it out into the dark. What does it matter what I do?”

  “It matters.” She was going to say something about beauty. About fragile things and how rare they were. But Gregor’s attention was focused on the bottles arrayed in front of him. “Clear out of this room when you’re done. Okay?” She picked up her video bugs and deposited their dead forms on a silver tray on the bar top. A burnt offering. At least she had another set on the Sigurd.

  Gregor watched her, the bottle clutched tight in his hand as if she might snatch it from him. “What were you doing with those?”

  “Nothing,” Saga said. She turned and walked out. “Nothing at all.”

  * * *

  After Saga crept back to the suite, she undressed and slid in beside Michel. Sleep was slow to come: she finally drifted off after rehashing her encounter with Gregor a dozen times.

  She and Michel made love again in the morning, more slowly this time. Satisfied, they indulged in the luxury of a bath. Then hunger and the knowledge that they had work to do drove them back to the Sigurd.

  The air lock was sealed. Saga called Wei on the common band. “Open the door, please.” There was no answer.

  Finally, after her fifth attempt, there was motion on the other side of the lock. Wei came through from the ship. She was wearing her coveralls. “I told you to keep your suits on,” she said. “What else did you do? Did you eat anything?”

&nbs
p; “Come on, Wei.” Saga stuck her helmet up against the glass. “What would we eat? We just spent a night in one of the rooms.” She frowned. “How did you know we took our suits off? Have you been spying on us?”

  Wei’s expression was serious. “I get security alerts. I saw a woman in a dress walking around barefoot in the middle of the night. Why did you meet Gregor in the dining room? What were you plotting?”

  Saga glanced at Michel. She hadn’t yet told him about her nighttime excursion. “Not plotting,” she said. “Exploring. I couldn’t sleep. And I didn’t even know Gregor was on the Queen until I bumped into him.” She turned back to the window. “What business is it of yours? Just let us in. We need to eat before we can get back to work.”

  Wei pushed away and floated back into the Sigurd. The ship’s inner lock closed behind her, then there was a click. The door before them unsealed with a hiss. Inside the air lock there were three cases, as well as a transparent plastic water canister.

  “What’s this?” Michel said.

  “Breakfast.” Wei’s face appeared at the Sigurd’s window. “And lunch. Dinner. Enough for Gregor, too, since he’s joined you in ignoring my rules.”

  Michel swore. “C’est quoi ce bordel?”

  Saga understood. “You’re not letting us back in, are you.”

  “I can’t,” Wei said. “Not yet. I’m still running contamination tests. Until they’re complete, I won’t take the chance. Go and do your job.”

  “Contamination with what?” Michel pushed himself over to the Sigurd and put his faceplate against the window, glaring at Wei.

  “I told you,” Wei said. “I told you to keep your suits on.”

  “And what happens if we finish hacking the ship before you finish your tests?” Saga said.

  “I’ll know by then,” Wei said. “Don’t worry.”

  Michel banged on the window, but Wei was already turning away. She gave them one last disappointed look before disappearing.

  Saga grabbed two of the cases and pushed herself back into the Queen’s service bay. “Come on,” she said.

  “She’s fucking letting us in,” Michel said. He hit the Sigurd’s window again, a futile gesture that pushed him backward.

  Saga felt a surge of frustration. “You must have learned enough about her by now to know when she’s being serious.”

  Michel turned. “So what? We just go?”

  “Yes,” Saga said. “We just go.” She pulled herself toward the exit. She didn’t look back, but she could imagine the look on his face, the last frustrated thump on the lock. The grudging way he would collect the third case and the water canister and follow her.

  * * *

  “We should have stayed,” Michel said. “Wei would have let us in eventually.”

  “Just leave it.” They’d taken their suits off when they returned to the bridge; no need to pretend any longer. Now they were deep into the systems of the Queen. In the center of the room a hologram showed a visual representation of the software that controlled the ship, like a package they’d carefully unwrapped. A grey cloud represented the Queen’s mind, the weak AI that normally served as an interface to the rest of the systems. They’d walled it off, kept it in the computer equivalent of deep sleep. The Queen had been built before the most recent restrictions on AIs, and the possibility of its mind being smart enough to understand what they were up to before they could hack it properly was too great to chance.

  As they dug around in the code, Saga could tell Michel was still distracted from the way he kept glancing at her. At last he sighed. “I can’t let it go.”

  “You’re going to have to. What good will it do?”

  “Why did you let Wei push us around back there?” It came out of him petulantly. “And what the hell was she talking about? You were wandering the ship in a dress? Talking to Gregor in the dining room in the middle of the night?”

  Saga blinked her displays to sleep. “You printed that dress for me. I put it on when I couldn’t sleep.” She was still angry at Gregor. “I caught the moron about to use a cutting laser on a bar cabinet, trying to get at the ship’s booze.”

  Michel looked puzzled. “Print for you? What are you talking about?”

  “The black dress. It was hanging in the closet of our room, with your tuxedo.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  Saga frowned. “The Queen’s mind’s been asleep the whole time. Hasn’t it?”

  Michel hesitated.

  “Hasn’t it?”

  He looked away. “Well . . . I had to wake up part of it to get housekeeping running.”

  Saga thought of the dining room, set for dinner and alive with the projected recordings of some antique party. She’d certainly been dressed to join in. “What did you ask it to do?”

  Michel looked sheepish. “It might have prepared our room.”

  She sighed. “You should have talked to me first. You know we can’t wake up the ship yet.”

  “It was just the housekeeping sections. If it was a person, it would be no more than a weird dream.”

  “But it’s not a person. Neural networks can connect in all sorts of unexpected ways.” She glared at him. “You could have messed everything up—all because you wanted to get laid in a proper bed.”

  Michel glared back at her, his jaw set. “I didn’t, though. Everything’s fine.” He ran his hand through his hair. “What is it about this gig? Everyone’s so bloody tense.”

  “Maybe it’s because some of us actually want to be here.”

  Michel winced. “Not fair.”

  Silence hung between them.

  “Sorry,” she said. She wasn’t, but she’d been married long enough to know that sometimes you had to say it anyway. Saga got up. “I need a break.”

  * * *

  She stood outside the dining room doors. Again she found herself at the one place on the Queen that felt out of the ordinary. The hall lights were at daylight intensity now, their illumination diminishing the dreamlike quality of the night before. She stepped forward and the doors swung open.

  Saga walked into an empty room. The silverware, the plates, all of it gone. Even the tables had vanished. The carpet was impeccably clean. She searched for evidence of the night before, but all she could make out were the faint indentations of table and chair legs.

  The silver tray was still on the bar. She picked it up and her damaged camera bugs rattled against each other. “Russian asshole,” she muttered. She tossed one of the useless spheres across the room. Halfway through its slow arc it stopped, hovered, then darted back to her, waiting for a command. She felt the breeze from its translucent wings.

  “You’re supposed to be dead.” She blinked her lenses to life. When she connected to the bugs every status indicator said the same thing: they were all active, all reporting full charges and no mechanical problems. The prickle she’d felt the night before returned, followed by a grudging realization: she’d have to show this to Michel.

  Back at the bridge, Michel studied one of the bugs.

  “I saw the scorch marks,” Saga said. “They were dead as flies on a windowsill.”

  He looked skeptical. “Obviously not. Otherwise they’d still be dead. Could they have self-repaired?”

  Saga shook her head. “You know better than that. The bugs are too basic to repair themselves. First the leaf, and now this: something strange is happening on this ship.”

  “Res ipsa loquitur.”

  Saga blinked. “You speak Latin now?”

  “Only when it makes me sound smart,” Michel said, a hint of a smile on his lips. “The thing speaks for itself, right? If your drones can’t self-repair then they were never broken in the first place. They probably just overheated and shut down, then came back on when they’d cooled.”

  “Then where’d the scorch marks go?”

  Michel turned the silver bug in his hand. It looked as if it had just come out of the fabricator. “Housekeeping cleaned the room, right? It cleaned
your bugs, too. I know you love your mysteries, and I’m sure your viewers will eat up all that ghost-ship stuff, but let’s face it—the Martian Queen is only haunted by us.”

  Saga snatched the bug from him. “You always have an answer, don’t you.”

  Michel smiled an infuriating smile. “There always is an answer.”

  * * *

  They cracked the nav system soon after dinner. The ship’s AI was loosely modeled on a human brain, and the secret lay in fooling the area most comparable to the fusiform gyrus, the part of a human mind that controls recognition: of faces, objects, landmarks. When Wei interfaced with it, the AI would see her as its old captain, resurrected from the Queen’s memories.

  Michel finished his testing and sat back in the chair, a satisfied look on his face. “Do you know if Gregor found any champagne in that bar of his?”

  “Cocky,” Saga replied. “We still have to actually do it in real life. If we wake the ship up all the way and your hack doesn’t work, it’s going to put a hard lock on everything. Not to mention screaming alarms back to the company.”

  “It will work,” he said.

  “What are you waiting for, then?” Saga said. “Tell Wei the good news.”

  Wei arrived in her pressure suit fifteen minutes after they contacted her. She listened, her expression hard to read behind her visor, as Michel explained what they’d done. Finally she interrupted him, midsentence.

  “Okay,” she said. “Stop telling me you can do it and just do it. Wake up the ship.”

  Michel glanced at Saga and she saw a kernel of doubt. He’d had it before—the moment of triumph when he cracked a difficult system, followed by the fear that he’d been overconfident. He’d messed it up somehow and it was all going to fail. Of course, it rarely did, but that didn’t seem to help. The last of her irritation with him ebbed away when she saw his vulnerability.

  “It’s a good hack, Michel,” she said. “It really is.”

  They worked together, bringing the mind online the way it would have been woken after an official mothballing. Low-level systems first, then increasingly higher-level processing, each part of the mind performing systemwide self-checks as it activated. The dim holographic map of the mind lit up section by section, like a city recovering from a power failure. When it was complete, Saga held her breath. The hologram flickered, then was replaced by a blinking square that floated in the middle of the room: the ancient symbol of a mind ready for input.