by Ken MacLeod
The sobbing engineer, Paul, had been the most ashamed clone Maria had ever seen.
The jumpsuit fabric wasn’t as soft as Maria’s purple engineering jumpsuits back in her quarters, but she was at least warmer. She wondered when they would finally be allowed to eat and go back to their quarters for a shower and some sleep. Waking up took a lot out of a clone.
Hiro was already clothed and back over by the captain’s body, peering at her face. Maria maneuvered her way over to him using the wall handles. He looked grim, his usually friendly face now reflecting the seriousness of the situation.
“I don’t suppose we can just hide this body?” he asked. “Recycle it before anyone finds out? Might save us a lot of headache in the future.”
Maria checked the vital-signs readout on the computer. “I don’t think she’s a body yet. Calling her a body and disposing of it is something for the courts, not us.”
“What courts?” he asked as Maria took the wheelchair by the handles and headed for the door. “There are six of us!”
“Seven,” Maria reminded, jerking her head backward to indicate the person in the medbay. “Eight if we can get IAN online. Even so it’s a matter for the captain and IAN to decide, not us.”
“Well, then you get to go spread the latest bad news.”
“I’m not ready to deal with Wolfgang right now,” Maria said. “Or hear the captain tear Paul a new asshole. Besides, we have to check the grav drive.”
“Avoiding Wolfgang sounds like a good number one priority,” said Hiro. “In fact, if I could interview my last clone, he probably avoided Wolfgang a lot too.”
The bridge of the starship Dormire was an impressive affair, with a seat for the captain and one for the pilot at the computer terminals that sat on the floor, but a ladder ran up the wall right beside the room entrance to lead to a few comfortable benches bolted to the wall, making it the perfect place to observe the universe as the ship crept toward light speed. The room itself comprised a dome constructed from diamond, so that you could see in a 270-degree arc. The helm looked like a great glass wart sitting on the end of the ship, but it did allow a lovely view of the universe swinging around you as the grav drive rotated the ship. Now, with the drive off, space seemed static, even though they were moving at a fraction of the speed of light through space.
It could make someone ill, honestly. Deep space all around, even the floor being clear. Maria remembered seeing it on the tour of the ship, but this was the first time she had seen it away from Luna. The first time in this clone’s memory, anyway.
Drawing the eye away from the view, the terminals, and the pilot’s station and benches, Hiro’s old body floated near the top of the dome, tethered by a noose to the bottom of one of the benches. His face was red and his open eyes bulged.
“Oh. There—” He paused to swallow, then continued. “—there I am.” He turned away, looking green.
“I don’t know what I expected, but suicide wasn’t it,” Maria said softly, looking into the swollen, anguished face. “I was actually wondering if you survived too.”
“I didn’t expect hanging,” he said. “I don’t think I expected anything. It’s all real to me now.” He covered his mouth with his hand.
Maria knew too much sympathy could make a person on the edge lose control, so she turned firm. “Do not puke in here. I already have to clean up the cloning bay, and you’ve seen what a nightmare that is. Don’t give me more to clean up.”
He glared at her, but some color returned to his face. He did not look up again.
Something drifted gently into the back of Maria’s head. She grabbed at it and found a brown leather boot. The hanged corpse wore its mate.
“This starts to build a time line,” Maria said. “You had to be hanged when we still had gravity. I guess that’s good.”
Hiro still had his back to the bridge, face toward the hallway. His eyes were closed and he breathed deeply. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Come on. We need to get the drive back on.”
Hiro turned and focused on the terminal, which was blinking red.
“Are you able to turn it on without IAN?” Maria asked.
“I should be. IAN could control everything, but if he goes offline, we’re not dead in the water. Was that my shoe?” The last question was offhand, as if it meant nothing.
“Yes.” Maria drifted toward the top of the helm and took a closer look at the body. It was hard to tell since the face was so distorted by the hanging, but Hiro looked different from the rest of the crew. They all looked as if decades had passed since they had launched from Luna station. But Hiro looked exactly as he did now, as if freshly vatted.
“Hey, Hiro, I think you must have died at least once during the trip. Probably recently. This is a newer clone than the others,” she said. “I think we’re going to have to start writing the weird stuff down.”
Hiro made a sound like an animal caught in a trap. All humor had left him. His eyes were hard as he finally glanced up at her and the clone. “All right. That’s it.”
“That’s what?”
“The last straw. I’m officially scared now.”
“Now? It took you this long to get scared?” Maria asked, pulling herself to the floor. “With everything else we’re dealing with, now you’re scared?”
Hiro punched at the terminal, harder than Maria thought was necessary. Nothing happened. He crossed his arms, and then uncrossed them, looking as if arms were some kind of new limb he wasn’t sure what to do with. He took the boot from Maria and slid it over his own foot.
“I was just managing to cope with the rest,” he said. “That was something happening to all of you. I wasn’t involved. I wasn’t a Saturday Night Gorefest. I was here as a supporting, friendly face. I was here to make you laugh. Hey, Hiro will always cheer us up.”
Maria put her hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “Welcome to the panic room, Hiro. We have to support each other. Take a deep breath. Now we need to get the drive on and then tell the captain and Wolfgang.”
“You gotta be desperate if you want to tell Wolfgang,” he said, looking as if he was trying and failing to force a smile.
“And when you get the drive on, can you find out what year it is, check on the cargo, maybe reach IAN from here?” Maria asked. “With everything else that’s happened, it might be nice to come back with a little bit of good news. Or improved news.”
Hiro nodded, his mouth closed as if trying to hold in something he would regret saying. Or perhaps a scream. He floated over to his pilot’s chair and strapped himself in. The console screen continued to blink bright red at him. “Thanks for that warning, IAN, we hadn’t noticed the drive was gone.”
He typed some commands and poked at the touch screen. A warning siren began to bleat through the ship, telling everyone floating in zero-g that gravity was incoming. Hiro poked at the screen a few more times, and then typed at a terminal, his face growing darker as he did so. He made some calculations and then sighed loudly, sitting back in the chair and putting his hands over his face.
“Well,” he said. “Things just got worse.”
Maria heard the grav drive come online, and the ship shuddered as the engines started rotating the five-hundred-thousand-GRT ship. She took hold of the ladder along the back wall to guide her way to the bench so she wouldn’t fall once the gravity came back.
“What now?” she said. “Are we off course?”
“We’ve apparently been in space for twenty-four years and seven months.” He paused. “And nine days.”
Maria did the math. “So it’s 2493.”
“By now we should be a little more than three light-years away from home. Far outside the event horizon of realistic communication with Earth. And we are. But we’re also twelve degrees off course.”
“That … sorry, I don’t get where the hell that is. Can you say it in maintenance-officer language?”
“We are slowing down and turning. I’m not looking forward to telling the
captain,” he said, unstrapping himself from the seat. He glanced up at his own body drifting at the end of the noose like a grisly kite. “We can cut that down later.”
“What were we thinking? Why would we go off course?” Maria thought aloud as they made their way through the hallway, staying low to prepare for gravity as the ship’s rotation picked up.
“Why murder the crew, why turn off the grav drive, why spare the captain, why did I kill myself, and why did I apparently feel the need to take off one shoe before doing it?” Hiro said. “Just add it to your list, Maria. I’m pretty sure we are officially fucked, no matter what the answers are.”
BY KEN MACLEOD
THE CORPORATION WARS
Dissidence
Insurgence
Emergence
THE FALL REVOLUTION
The Star Fraction
The Stone Canal
The Cassini Division
The Sky Road
ENGINES OF LIGHT
Cosmonaut Keep
Dark Light
Engine City
Newton’s Wake
Learning the World
The Execution Channel
The Night Sessions
The Restoration Game
Intrusion
Descent
Praise for
The Corporation Wars
“He’s hit the main vein of conversation about locks on artificial intelligence and living in simulations and exoplanetary exploitation and drone warfare and wraps it all into a remarkably human, funny, and smartly designed yarn. It is, in fact, a king-hell commercial entertainment.”
—Warren Ellis
“MacLeod does many astonishing things here. He creates viable, believable multiplex interactions among so many different sets of characters, human and robot.… He shows a keen hand with action sequences.”
—Locus
“Dissidence is the novel that’s direct yet still brims with ideas, politics and memorable characters, and … keeps things moving with the pace of an airport thriller.… MacLeod’s most entertaining novel to date.”
—SFX
“[The Corporation Wars] is a tasty broth of ideas taking in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, the philosophy of law and disquisitions on military ethics.”
—The Herald (Glasgow)
“Fantastic fights and deep conspiracies and moral dilemmas and strange new worlds, both virtual and real (maybe). MacLeod’s great skill—as in works like The Execution Chanel, Newton’s Wake, The Night Sessions, and Intrusion—is to marry propulsive plot to philosophical speculation.”—
The Scotsman
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