by Ramy Vance
“Come on, kid.” Toner waved Occy closer. “Start your stupid movie. What is it we’re watching again? Toy Story?”
Occy’s frown turned into a glare. “Monsters.”
Toner nodded. “All right, all right. But I get to pick the next one. I want you to swear on it.”
Exhausted after a long and exciting day following a long and tedious series of missions, Jaeger kicked back in the recliner, her hand resting comfortably on Baby’s head, as the overhead lights darkened and the Pixar logo appeared on the screen.
As the movie continued, she took delight in Occy’s muffled giggles. They might be facing enemies in unchartered territories with no place to call home, but somehow his laughter made it all worth it.
Two hours later, the others had gone to rest, and Jaeger lay in her darkened bunk, staring at a smaller screen.
The little girl in the holo-journal shone golden and bronze in the light of some long-forgotten Midwestern sunset. The skirts of her gingham dress fluttered as she kicked and rocked on the porch swing, her head thrown back into the embrace of the woman in Jaeger’s mirror.
It was a bad song, they sang together. Atonal, barking staccato, cheesy lyrics.
I would fly five billion miles.
The woman and the little girl on the screen were laughing, and it was a sweet enough song to lull Jaeger to sleep.
Something glowed brightly, casting long shadows over the mess of Jaeger’s quarters. She blinked, roused at some unknown hour.
Her vision cleared and she shot upright with a gasp, clutching her blankets to her chest.
“Virgil! What—what are you doing?”
A young man in a brown tweed suit stood in the center of her small quarters, shining with light and faintly translucent as he studied the disheveled mess of Jaeger’s open cabinets. He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at her.
Jaeger glanced at the speaker-projector combo mounted to her ceiling. She had seen this hologram projection before. It was the visual interface for the ship’s AI, though to her knowledge, Virgil never used it.
“Virgil? Are you all right?”
“We have received your message.” The hologram lifted its chin and stared at Jaeger. The voice coming through the speaker was reedy and thin and not at all familiar. “The council wishes to meet with you immediately.”
Jaeger blinked, then spluttered as realization dawned on her. This wasn’t Virgil. The Overseers had an AI powerful enough to patch into and override Virgil’s system. She had seen them do it once before. “You—you hijacked my AI to tell me that?”
Not-Virgil cocked his head.
Jaeger bit back a few less-than-diplomatic words and forced her voice to calm. “I see. Send us the time and location, and we will be happy to meet with the esteemed council.”
“The destination is already loaded into your shuttle’s navigation computer. You may bring one companion. Please depart immediately.”
Jaeger started rooting around in her sheets for her personal computer. “All right,” she said tightly. “We will do so. Thank you for the prompt response.”
Without so much as a nod of acknowledgment, the projector light flickered, and the hologram vanished, leaving Jaeger blind in the utter darkness.
She scrambled to get dressed.
The speaker blurted. Virgil’s voice, normally mild and bland, returned with an edge. “Captain, when you meet with the Overseer council, could I trouble you to pass along a request from me?”
Jaeger clambered into her flight suit and snapped on her utility belt. She already knew where this was going. “Fire away.”
“Tell their AI that the next time it wishes to override my autonomy circuits and invade my system without permission and forewarning, it should instead download its entire persona into a toaster and have someone throw it into a lake.”
Jaeger winced. She’d have to find a more diplomatic way of making the request, but as captain, it was her duty to protect her crew from violation.
Not to mention, if the Overseer AI could hop in and out of the Osprey on a whim, it did not speak well of their security protocols.
“Will do,” she promised as she threw the hatch to her quarters and climbed up into the lounge. “It’s not okay for them to treat you like that. Send a ship-wide announcement, please. Have everybody meet me in the docking bay immediately.”
The docking bay echoed with the urgent wailing of a wordless alert siren. Toner leaned out of the back of their restored shuttle as Jaeger jogged up the catwalk. “Are you sure about this? Also, God, Virgil, I get it! Turn that thing off.”
The siren continued its reverberating peal as Jaeger hopped into the shuttle cargo bay beside Toner. She caught his eye and shook her head. “Virgil’s pissed. Let it blow off some steam.”
Toner scowled and turned toward the shuttle cockpit.
Occy and Baby lurked in the back of the shuttle cargo bay. Jaeger shook her head, waving them both toward the door. “Absolutely not. This isn’t a family field trip. Just me and Toner were invited.”
“In a minute,” Occy whined. His tentacles flickered over an exposed circuit board in the back of the shuttle. “I’m not done running the updates.”
“You’re stalling,” Jaeger snapped. “We’ll be fine, I promise. We’re only going to talk. Nobody is going to get captured and executed.”
“Or tortured!” Toner called, unhelpfully, from the cockpit.
Jaeger shot him a glare. “Or tortured. Come on, Occy. Baby. It’s time to go.”
With a nudge from Jaeger, Baby ambled easily enough out of the back of the shuttle and zipped off into the cargo bay. Dawdling like only a child can, however, Occy took his sweet time re-attaching the panel. He turned his worried puppy-dog stare on Jaeger.
She grimaced and glanced over her shoulder. Toner was taking the shuttle through the power-up sequence.
She leaned in close to Occy, whispering beneath the blare of sirens. “But. Just in case we don’t come back. What do you do?”
Occy scowled. “Assume authority over the Osprey and AI,” he recited. “Leave the solar system. Activate four of the most pro-social crew members I can find and keep moving, seeking a safe place to settle. I’m not stupid.”
“I know.” She patted him on the head. “It makes me feel better. Now scoot, kid. We have work to do.”
Casting one long, reproachful look back at her, Occy slipped out of the shuttle. The door slid shut behind him, muting the distant blare of sirens.
Jaeger joined Toner in the cockpit.
“I’m not psyched that one of your backup plans outlines what to do if we die,” Toner gritted, working the control console.
Jaeger grimaced. She forgot how keen Toner’s sense of hearing was. “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
Toner grunted. “Docking bay clear,” he said. “Ready to open cargo doors and depart.”
“Take us out.”
An uneasy silence fell as the cargo doors slid open. Toner piloted the shuttle out of the Osprey’s wing and into the cold black of space.
“You’re too eager to trust these people,” Toner said. He made a vague, sweeping gesture to the starfield ahead of them. “I wish I had your faith in the goodness of it all.”
“Faith is important,” Jaeger said quietly. “We have to have faith that doing the right things will pay off. Otherwise, there’s no point.” She hesitated, then admitted: “But we can’t go on faith alone. We do have something more.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“A plan.”
Chapter Five
The Overseer mothership twinkled and glittered, light flashing and dancing off its delicate latticework as it slowly rotated at the outer edge of the solar system.
Toner, for once in his life, was speechless.
“God,” Jaeger whispered. She double-checked the shuttle’s radar. It was no illusion. The ship was mind-bogglingly massive. It was a manufactured, glistening snowflake nearly seven kilometers
across. It dwarfed the handful of smaller saucer-ships hovering in a cloud around it. Jaeger knew from experience that each of those saucers was large and powerful enough to give Osprey a run for her money.
They looked like insects beside the mothership.
“That thing wasn’t in the system a few hours ago,” Toner said weakly.
“Nope,” she said.
“They, um. They brought the big ship to come meet us.”
“Yep.”
“Fuck.”
Ah, there it was. Toner finding his tongue again.
Something flashed on the console before them, and Toner jumped. He leaned back, drawing his hands away from the thruster controls. The shuttle arched up toward the mothership.
“I’m not doing that,” Toner said nervously.
Jaeger checked the navigation computer. “It looks like they’re assuming remote control.”
“You don’t look nearly as upset by that as you should be.”
Jaeger folded her hands behind her head as she drifted in her harness. “Look at it this way,” she reasoned. “They could smear us off the map. No question. But they haven’t.” She shrugged. “They must be peaceful. Or at least willing to give us the benefit of the doubt.”
“Or interested in knowing what sounds we make when they jam screws under our fingernails.”
Jaeger snorted. “Even if that’s the case, there’s nothing we can do about it right now. So relax and enjoy the scenery.” She swept a hand in the direction of the twisting masterwork of steel and alien metals that was the mothership.
Toner gave her a long side-eye. “Have you found the weed? Are you hiding it from me? You’re way too chill.”
Jaeger gave him an enigmatic smile. Not because she had a particular secret to keep, but because, sometimes, she enjoyed watching him twitch.
She reached over to the audio controls and played the Shire theme from The Fellowship of the Ring.
Guided by an alien hand, the shuttle piloted itself through a maze of spires and mysterious outcroppings and into the shadow of one of the glistening central pylons. Jaeger had a brief mental image of flying through a massive cityscape in a one-person helicopter. She had enough time to wonder if it was a true memory trying to bubble through her amnesia or a fantasy before the impression was gone.
Ahead of them, a black crease appeared in the pylon. The shuttle glided directly toward it and passed through a set of cargo doors that could have easily accommodated an aircraft carrier.
A shadow fell over them as they flew into the belly of the mothership, passing through a cavernous docking bay lined with all sorts of mysterious cradles and fixtures. Jaeger caught the faint motion of a distant swarm of bots, or perhaps single-person ships, buzzing around a mid-sized saucer at dock.
Beside her, Toner was sucking in deep breaths. “Toy boat.” He worked the muscles of his jaw. “Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat. She sells seashells by the seashore. She sells—”
“What are you doing?” Jaeger asked as the shuttle approached a smaller docking pylon at the very back of the bay.
“I’m warming up for a performance,” Toner hissed. “Don’t you remember those exercises I taught you?”
“Ah. Right. Toy boat.” She nodded.
Toner had insisted on a full-cast reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with props and vocal warm-ups and everything. Jaeger had gone along with it willingly enough because King Lear got depressing after a while.
There was a barely perceptible bump as the shuttle made contact with one of the docking cradles. A hiss of coolant gas filled the view screens, blinding them to the outside world.
“So what now?” Toner asked after a beat of silence. “Do we wait, or—”
The shuttle trembled, and there was a loud rattling sound from the cargo bay. Toner and Jaeger exchanged puzzled looks.
“I think the cargo bay doors are opening,” Jaeger said. She leaned forward, reaching into the nearest storage compartment as the telltale hiss of depressurization emanated from behind the cockpit doors.
Toner nodded sharply and yanked open the door to his storage compartment. “This cockpit isn’t airtight.”
Now moving urgently, Jaeger found her re-breather thermal hood and fumbled to pull it on over her scalp. “And there’s no way the docking bay is pressurized.”
“I told you these aliens were assholes!” Toner yanked his hood over his chin, exactly as the cockpit doors began to slide open.
For all her talk of faith, Jaeger fully expected to be sucked out of the shuttle and cast into the cold vacuum of the docking bay. The bay was simply too large to have any basic creature comforts, like artificial gravity, or temperatures significantly above absolute zero, or enough canned pressure to keep the moisture from boiling out of Jaeger’s tear ducts. Even Toner, who could indeed survive cold vacuum for at least a few hours, wrapped his long arms around the thruster controls and clung like he expected to get blasted into space.
When the cockpit doors slid open, a wave of cold smoke swirled into the cockpit, but there was no explosive decompression or instant freezing. The smoke faintly tingled where it brushed across Jaeger’s skin. A ripple of gooseflesh ran up her arms.
“What the hell is this?” Toner, less than a meter away from her, floated in a hazy sea of fog, watching it swirl as he moved his arms.
Jaeger shrugged and strode into the empty cargo bay. Toner yelped and hurried to keep up with her.
A soft, blue-white light emanated from the open rear doors, and the fog grew fainter as it swirled into the wider docking bay.
Frowning, Jaeger lifted one leg and checked her boots. Her mag soles were indeed inactive. She set her foot back on the deck and stomped.
It wasn’t magnetism that brought her heel solidly to the surface of the shuttle bay. Nor was it centrifugal force, like what gave the Osprey’s central column the illusion of gravity.
It was true. The Overseers had real, honest-to-God artificial gravity.
A new shiver went up the back of Jaeger’s spine, and this one had nothing to do with the cold mist.
A slender, dark shape moved on the catwalk outside the shuttle. Toner grabbed her arm and squeezed, and she wondered if he was looking to protect or looking for protection.
She brushed his hand aside and stepped onto the catwalk. The mist swirled lazily around her legs. Some type of invisible, silent force-field bubble about thirty meters across contained it, centered on the shuttle. Beyond that invisible barrier, the open canyon of the mothership’s docking bay yawned around them, unimaginably vast and silent. Far overhead, a string of transport trolleys at least a hundred meters long wove its way through the open bay.
“Your ARTificial BREATHing APParatus is UNnecessary.”
It was a grating, mechanical voice, what a robot from an ancient holo-drama might sound like back when computers still used punch cards to operate. The inflection was strained and artificial, punching the beginning of every polysyllabic word with unnatural force.
“This force BUBble CONtains an ATmospheric MIXture APPropriate for your PHYSiology.”
Jaeger turned and squinted up at the stick-thin figure resolving out of the thinning mist.
Stick-thin was an appropriate descriptor. If the general course of sentient life in this particular arm of the galaxy could be said to have a running theme, it was arthropod.
The stick-insect figure towering over Jaeger was at least three meters tall. She could’ve wrapped her hands around any part of its strange body, and her fingers would have touched. He—after much internal debating, Jaeger had decided to refer to this one as a he, though Kwin seemed disinterested in the question of pronouns—stood upright on four hind legs as slender and sharp as bamboo poles. Two more legs, thicker and sturdier and tipped with delicate claws, were tucked up beneath its slender head.
From legs to the tips of its long, gently swaying antennae, the Overseer alien was a flat, gray-brown color, except for its two sets of compounded green eyes and a single blaze of
pale blue discoloration straight down the center of its head.
“Master Kwin. It’s good to meet you face-to-face finally.” Jaeger tugged her thermal hood off in one smooth motion and dipped into a brief and respectful bow. Somewhere behind her, Toner yelped in dismay. Then, when he saw that she did not immediately start gasping and choking on the wrong admixture of atmosphere, he tugged off his hood.
He shook out his long hair, scowling as Jaeger straightened. He threw the Overseer a wave and the timeless chin thrust of a man acknowledging another man. “Hey.”
It was more than Jaeger had expected. The three of them had a single brief conference months ago while carefully negotiating the assistance and repair of Kwin’s ship—after Jaeger had nearly blown it to smithereens. Toner had made seven bug puns before Jaeger kicked him out of the meeting.
She’d decided not to invite him to their subsequent meetings.
The Overseer stood alone on the catwalk, peering down at them. Four finger-long mandibles curled beneath his face. They waggled now, clicking demurely.
The Overseers didn’t appear to have any use for clothes or protective garments, covered in carapace like they were, but two metallic bands wrapped around the base of Kwin’s long antennae. They caught her attention now, faintly glowing as they translated Kwin’s quiet clicking into standard English.
“Thank you for ACCommodating the short NOTice, CAPtain JAEger.”
“Those are nifty translators.” She gestured at the devices. “Much better than the AI translation we’ve been relying on—”
Something small and dark moved in the corner of her vision, streaking through the open air. Toner saw it too and spun, hands rising to protect him from the small, matte gray sphere hurling straight toward his head.
Jaeger had enough time to wonder if this negotiation had already devolved into a battle when the sphere jerked to a halt as if it had hit an invisible wall. It shifted direction in mid-air and swung into a rapid orbit around Kwin, Toner, and Jaeger.
