by Ramy Vance
“Sure. Over the last six months.” Toner gave him a nasty grin. “I’ve been saving the bottles for a special occasion.”
Occy nodded and pulled himself into a crouch—nearby, but outside arms’ reach of Toner. He watched in silence as Toner destroyed a few more bottles. “I take it the meeting didn’t go so well,” he said softly.
Toner let out a shrill laugh. It was all he could do.
Sim!
Jaeger surged awake with a gasp, heart thudding in her ears. A word, a sound, a name spun in her head.
Sim. The girl’s name was Sim, and she was young, still round with the last clinging bits of baby fat, bright-eyed and caked with old makeup.
It was one memory, singular and real and crystal clear, like light seen and fractured through a crystal.
Sim—the girl, the child, the daughter, bored with painting on paper and ready for a living canvas, sat on the edge of a bathtub. The two of them leaned toward the mirror, cheek-to-cheek, their reflected faces highlighted with bright yellow and gold eyeshadow, cheeks splayed with white dots, lips streaked black and white. Jaeger smelled the baby-soft skin, the dull powdery scent of old costume makeup discovered in some attic trunk, the faint sting of a bathroom scoured with harsh cleaning chemicals.
“It’s bedtime,” said the woman in the mirror—said Jaeger—but that wasn’t true. It had been bedtime two hours ago.
Sim shook her head ferociously, sending her braids bouncing over her cheeks.
“Come on.” Jaeger pulled her close and planted a wet kiss on her forehead. “Time to wash up and go to bed. You don’t want to be cranky in the morning.”
“I don’t want to go,” the girl grumbled into Jaeger’s shoulder. “I hate the program.”
“It’s not forever, honey. It’s just something you have to do for a little while.”
“How long?” The girl whined and wriggled, already overtired from a long evening.
Jaeger hesitated. How long? She remembered thinking. Too long.
Too long and too long and too long.
She held the little girl close and rocked gently, there on the edge of the tub. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “Until we find a new home.”
“What’s wrong with this one?” Sim trembled faintly in her mother’s arms. “I like it here. This is a good place.”
It was a good place, honey. Once upon a time. Then we fucked up the magnetosphere. Now every single day you spend on this planet, your chances of getting terminal cancer before you’re twenty years old go up ten percent. But you won’t live to see twenty because the famines will kill you first—and that’s assuming you survive the riots and earthquakes.
“I’ll find you another good place,” Jaeger whispered into her daughter’s hair. I’ll find a place where I can take care of you, and we can take care of our new home.
Back in her cold and very lonely future, Jaeger finally caught her breath. The memory faded, but not into the opaque pool that was her longstanding amnesia. It joined the background music of her mind, ready to be called up again and replayed on a whim—ready and clear and true.
“Kwin,” she whispered into the shadows. “It’s working. God. It’s working.”
She scrambled to her feet and into her flight suit. Four hours of sleep and she was as awake as she’d ever been. Awake and inspired and ready to fistfight the universe, if she had to.
She had a job to do.
Chapter Eleven
Jaeger pressed a hand to the security panel mounted to the door of the old captain’s quarters. Nothing happened. She frowned and pressed the pad again. The access light blinked green, but the door didn’t slide open.
“Virgil?” She waved her hand across the panel, then in front of one of the security cameras mounted overhead. “What’s going on?”
It took half a heartbeat longer than normal for the AI to answer. Then the nearest speaker crackled to life.
“Ah, I’m sorry, Captain. That’s strange. There must be a bug in the security protocol for that door.”
“Open it,” Jaeger said tersely. She only marginally trusted her prisoner not to make trouble if she left him to his own devices for too long.
“Of course—here we go.”
Jaeger let out a breath as the door unsealed and slid open. “Diagnose and fix the problem ASAP,” she said gruffly.
“Aye, Captain.”
Jaeger stepped through the door.
She’d converted the old captain’s quarters into a long-term holding facility for intractable prisoners. The original Osprey designs had a few designated brig areas, but most were out in the wing structures and intended for brief stints only. Jaeger had decided that it was cruel to make someone live in zero-G when there was plenty of unoccupied space in the central column.
Toner had, predictably, thrown a fit when Jaeger had decided to give the old captain’s quarters to a prisoner, but she’d stood firm. Toner had the entire Osprey to stretch out and explore. Seeker could have the single-room apartment that was Percival LeBlanc’s old haunt.
After they’d stripped it of all access privileges and fitted it with a few security precautions, of course. And after Toner had raided it of all the fancy old booze. Seeker wasn’t much of a drinker, anyway.
A shimmering blue force field separated the foyer from the rest of the quarters, creating a lobby area big enough for a ratty recliner and card table. From here, she could see all four corners of the captain’s quarters, and if she consulted the security monitor mounted to the wall, she could check in on the private bathroom hidden behind the far wall. There was no need for that, however. Seeker was lying stretched across the massive four-poster bed with a tattered and dog-eared book splayed open across his chest.
He stared at her as she slid into the recliner. Seeker—he had stubbornly refused to claim a first name—was a big man, square-jawed and buzz-cut and bulging with muscle in the skin-tight sleeveless undershirt he wore over loose camo pants. He looked wildly out of place, splayed across the delicately embroidered roses of the duvet beneath him. Layers of gossamer chiffon, straight out of a sultry Regency romance, draped from the canopy.
The captain’s quarters had originally been full of ornate furniture. Over the past few months, Seeker had, with her permission, replaced the overworked wooden desk and wet bar with sleek, efficient metal-framed folding pieces. All of it, that was, except for the four-poster.
“I’m surprised you haven’t gotten rid of that thing.” Jaeger thrust out her chin, indicating the entire monstrosity of the previous captain’s bed.
Seeker grunted and picked up his book again. It was some old pulp spy-thriller. “This is an original German Himmelbett.” He thumbed the pages. “It’s a priceless work of art.”
“It doesn’t seem like your style.” She noted the single folding chair stacked against the far wall. Despite her best efforts, Seeker seemed to embrace the prison aesthetic spitefully.
“It’s ugly as fuck,” Seeker agreed. “But I don’t trust your vampire not to chop it into firewood just for shits and giggles. Somebody has to preserve our heritage.”
“Who’s been in recently?” she asked. “There was a glitch in the door. An outdated code might have triggered some security protocol.”
Seeker shrugged. He licked his thumb and with surprising delicacy for such a big man, turned one tissue-thin page of the book. “The kid stopped by this morning.”
“Occy? For what?”
“No idea. I think he wanted someone to talk to while you and Toner were gone. He’s a nervous little twerp.”
“He’s sensitive.” Jaeger instantly felt defensive of the youngest member of her crew. Somebody had to stand up for Occy. He rarely did it himself. When he did—well. Seeker still had a discolored ribbon of skin around his neck.
Seeker grunted noncommittally.
“His security codes should be up to date, though. Anybody else?”
“Not since you came in for our Wednesday night game,” he said. “It’s only me and th
e computer in here, as always.”
On that note, Jaeger reached into a side cabinet and pulled out a cardboard box. She set it on the card table and started setting up the chessboard. Over the last few months, they’d replaced half of the plastic pieces with coarse figurines Seeker had hand-carved from ore scraps. The man was no artisan. They were dark, ugly, mismatched, hulking things that barely balanced upright, but Jaeger liked them. They looked damned intimidating as she arrayed them on the board across from her.
She fiddled with a control panel on the wall, adjusting the configuration of the force field generators. The faintly shimmering wall of light flickered for a split second, then reappeared with a single small window over the center of the card table, just big enough for Seeker to move a hand across the board.
Jaeger pushed the chessboard forward, centering it in that window. The half on her side of the prison wall was old, plastic pieces, discolored and boring. The half on his side held the rough hulking shadows of hand-carved stone.
“Come play me,” she said eagerly. She did some of her best brainstorming in this room.
Seeker set his book to the side and approached the forcefield wall. He picked up his folding chair and slung it beside the card table, facing the wrong way. He sat, straddling the seat.
“Are you going to carve a white set?” Jaeger placed the final pawn in position.
“No. Carve your own damn set. Are you going to move sometime today or should I go take a shit while I wait?”
“Why are you always in such a rush?” Jaeger studied the board—not that there was much to consider before they’d played any moves. She’d already decided what her first move would be. Sometimes she relished an excuse to linger here and talk to someone who wasn’t either a psychopath, an obnoxious inhuman mutation, or Occy. She loved the boy—she loved all of her crew in one form or another—but his idea of high-minded conversation was a starry-eyed analysis of all the exciting plot twists of The Phantom Menace.
“The computer likes to make smartass remarks about how slow a player I am,” Seeker said. “It’s nice to feel like I’m not the stupidest person in the room.”
Jaeger played her opening move. “That’s odd.” Seeker’s jab didn’t fluster her. Living with Toner had given her a hide six miles thick. “I thought Virgil’s been acting very professionally lately.”
“Kicked dog syndrome.” Seeker moved one pawn.
“I’m not familiar.”
“Old-school Americanism. Man goes to work, where his boss rides his ass all day about TPS reports or some bullshit. It’s humiliating. When he gets home, he has to unwind with a beer or six. He bitches at his wife that the roast is a little undercooked, the kid is wearing dirty clothes, and what the fuck does she do all day while he’s getting raped over a barrel to keep bread on the table?
“The wife can’t explain to him that dinner is late because she had to make an extra trip to the grocery store after the kid used all the TP making a mummy costume for the dog, because he wouldn’t understand. So, now feeling like she’s unappreciated, she snaps and shouts at the kid when he spills his juice for the third time.
“The kid doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, except that he’s getting yelled at all the damned time, and he can’t do dick about it. So when Mommy and Daddy go off for their third nightcap, the kid turns around and kicks the dog in the ribs. Fuck, Jaeger, are you going to move, or are you going to stare at the board all day?”
Jaeger snapped out of her contemplation and flicked her bishop two squares. “And in that metaphor, Virgil is…”
“He’s the powerless kid trying to keep Mommy and Daddy happy because he knows which way his bread is buttered.” Seeker scowled at the board, rubbed his jaw, and in one decisive motion, lifted his misshapen knight and moved it. “I’m the dog. Your move.”
Jaeger groaned and pushed herself away from the table. She reached over to the wall interface and activated the privacy protocol, locking Virgil out of the room—just in case it happened to be listening in.
“Virgil is causing trouble?” she asked. Nothing gave her nightmares like the specter of a seditious AI. She thought she and Virgil had worked out their differences months ago.
“It’s a snotty little shit, but only sticks or stones will break these bones. It’s your move.”
“Except it’s not a snotty little shit to anyone else.” Jaeger moved a pawn. “The last thing I need right now is a two-faced AI. I don’t like it. Virgil is a computer. It should behave predictably and reliably.”
Seeker shrugged—an unusually evasive gesture coming from the big man. “I guess it doesn’t like me very much. Your move.”
She blinked. Seeker had slipped his queen forward so quickly she had barely noticed his movement. The queen was now deep into her territory. She moved a pawn into danger, where it could threaten the queen.
“I take it your little meeting with the aliens didn’t go so well,” Seeker said.
“How can you tell?”
“Nobody’s bragging about it. Your move.”
“Ah.” Jaeger studied the board in silence for a long moment. “They’re willing to let us build a small colony on Locaur.”
Seeker eyed her, for once not pressing her to move faster. “How small?”
“Us. And twenty of the embryos. That’s it.”
“That is small.”
“They’re demanding we destroy the rest of the embryos.”
Seeker whistled softly. “Welcome to the neighborhood. Now go fuck yourself.”
Jaeger grimaced, then nodded. She picked up a knight and moved it but didn’t take her finger from the piece. “I’ve been studying our gene-editing equipment and the embryonic profiles,” she said, finally getting to the heart of what had brought her here. Knowing it was a risk, she took her finger off the knight—the play was final.
“As far as I can tell, all of the embryos have a standard human genetic code. The mutations are altered lines spliced into a healthy template. It might be possible to activate the embryos without activating the mutation sequences. They’re like the genetic markers for cancer. Maybe under the right conditions, they can be turned on and off.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Seeker moved his remaining bishop and captured her knight. “So what?”
She’d hoped he would do that. Her rook swooped in from across the board to capture his bold second bishop. “So they don’t have to be monsters,” she said.
Seeker lifted his knight and placed it with such force that the horse figurine snapped off the base. He scowled at the rearing steed in his palm before casting it aside. “Fuck off with your talk about monsters,” he grunted. “Anybody can be a monster. We’re all monsters. Just because your kid has tentacles doesn’t make him any more or less of a monster than the rest of us, and if your aliens are smart, they already know that.”
“The Overseers don’t like it,” Jaeger said. “They don’t like how all the embryos have this built-in mon…have this built-in war mode. Like Sphynx.”
“They’re gonna love reading about this Joseph Megele fellow.”
“I’m trying to save our cargo,” Jaeger said angrily. “Rather than propose your solutions, everybody complains about how wrong I am.”
“Because you are. Check.”
Jaeger scowled at the bishop threatening her king. Perhaps a bit recklessly, she risked a bishop of her own to capture it.
“You’re wrong to sit here whining about how the local aliens are mean to you,” Seeker said. “You’re wrong to waste your time looking for their approval.” He moved a forgotten pawn in the far corner of the board. “Check.”
“What would you do?” she demanded. “I suppose you’d fight the Overseers for the planet, wouldn’t you?”
“Not for all the tea in China.”
“Then what?”
“I’d leave, Jaeger. It’s a nice-looking planet, sure, but it’s occupied space. It’s not worth going to war with the locals. Certainly not with a single ship.”
“And go where?”
“Go home to the family.”
Jaeger gave him a flat stare. “They’ll execute us as traitors.”
“Probably. Unlike your alien friends, they won’t destroy the embryos. Or is your life more valuable than theirs?”
Jaeger forced a long hiss between her teeth. She could argue with Seeker until she was blue in the face. She had, on many occasions. She wasn’t going to convince him that turning the Osprey and the embryos back over to the fleet would represent an utter defeat for her cause.
The Fleet wouldn’t care about what was right or just or moral. They only cared about what worked.
She had to work a different angle with Seeker. “Locaur has an active magnetosphere to deflect harmful solar radiation,” she whispered. “It has stable, predictable tectonic and tidal activity and a perfectly breathable atmosphere. We might never find a better option. A better option might not exist.”
“You trying to convince yourself or me?” Seeker leaned back in his chair. “You throwing this game or what?”
“Throwing it?” she frowned at the board. “Why would I do that?”
“Because I know how you play. You’re pretty good but not good enough to pull off a win here with only four pawns and a bishop.”
Jaeger stared down at the board and wondered how he’d captured so many of her pieces. There needed to be a game mechanic for winning back captured pieces, she decided.
“You don’t have enough ships or crew to win a conflict.” Seeker stood, slinging his chair back against the far wall to make an open space at the center of his cell. He spread out his arms, beginning a pre-workout stretching routine. “You don’t have enough pieces to win the game. You’ve made a good run at things. I’ll give you that, Jaeger, but you’re outmatched.” He crouched and jumped, grabbing a stretcher bar suspended from the ceiling. He hung from the bar, his toes dangling half a meter above the floor.
She stood abruptly, knocking over the last few pieces remaining upright. “That’s it,” she said.
“Huh?” Seeker pulled himself into the first of many, many chin-ups.
