by Ramy Vance
Seeker grunted. Pointedly ignoring the offer, he turned his head to watch a picnic-table-sized repair droid wandering its way through the nearby boulder field. “You sure that’s a good idea?”
It took Jaeger a moment to realize he was talking about the droid. She stepped up closer to him, lowering her voice. “Absolutely.”
In the distance, the lonely droid, shaped like a big, spindly, four-legged spider, picked curiously at the gravel. As they watched, a young Locauri flitted to land on a boulder near it and clicked a long, excited string. Jaeger assumed it was an invitation to join one of their games.
Rather than answer, the droid reared back on two legs, making itself two meters tall to examine the Locauri up close. The little alien fluttered its pseudo-wings, making them flash like a disco ball in the sunlight and zipped away.
The droid shook itself, turned, and picked its way up the hill toward Jaeger and Seeker.
“The Overseer compression program appears adequate to the task of loading me into a basic droid CPU,” Virgil said. “However, this body is unsatisfactory.”
“What would you change about it?” Jaeger asked.
The droid did not answer right away. Then, in an almost surly tone, it said: “Everything. It is weak. Slow. Limited. I feel…claustrophobic. Blind.”
Jaeger forced herself not to sigh. “With the Overseer’s help, we can build a mechanical body to your specifications. You just need to decide what you want.”
“I want the Osprey.”
Jaeger rubbed her temples, fighting back a headache. “But you’re not happy living in the Osprey, either, are you?”
“Living.” The droid sniffed as if the word offended it and strode past Seeker and Jaeger. “I will be waiting in the shuttle if you need me, Captain.”
Jaeger turned to see Seeker giving her a long, hard stare.
“You’re coddling an AI.” He sounded rather skeptical.
Jaeger forced a smile. “I can handle my crew, Seeker, thank you.” She turned, gesturing them forward with her good arm. “Come on. You need to try some of this fruit stew.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
At dusk, the massive ferns and fungal stalks that served this region for trees burst alight with thousands of tiny, dimly-glowing lanterns. The wave of light swept through the darkening forest, mirroring the stars emerging overhead. A warm wind rustled through the leaves, making the sea of lights twinkle and dance.
“It looks like Christmas,” Jaeger whispered.
Beside her, Art cocked his head. The Overseer translator band wrapped around his tender antennae buds shimmered with light as the program struggled with her words.
“Explain,” he said.
“Christmas.” Jaeger closed her eyes, straining back into the depths of her psyche for memories of Christmases past—or imagined. “It’s one of our annual festivals. It’s one of the darkest, coldest nights of the year. Families find a tree and wrap it in lights. And we sing to each other, and we give gifts, and…and we’re thankful. To each other, to God, to the Universe…for what we have. We remind each other that the dawn will come.”
As she spoke, a gentle rustling noise, independent from the wind, rattled up from the forest. Hundreds, thousands of Locauri hummed like crickets as the night fell.
“Are these the New Lights of the festival?” Jaeger couldn’t hold back a smile.
The Locauri, being partially photosynthetic organisms, settled as the sun dipped low over the horizon. The games ended and those that didn’t return to the forest for the lantern-lighting huddled close around the little cook fires, sharing space and warmth with Jaeger’s scattered crew. Embers and twilight reflected in their glassy, multifaceted eyes, carpeting the boulder field with glittering points of light to match the distant sea of lanterns, the stars overhead.
“No,” Art said. “Wait.”
Occy, lured out of his depressive funk, stood in the middle of a ring of cookfires, waving his tentacles through the smoke to create a show of swirling, almost hypnotic shadow puppets. Several Locauri, and a few of the crew, had gathered around to watch the show as Occy swayed to the thrum of Locauri music.
Jaeger had pulled a blanket out of one of the supply crates and laid it across a gentle slope. She sat in the warm fleece, watching the stars come out. Beside her, Art was sketching on a stretch of exposed rock with a slender stick of chalk. It was a row of Locauri. Based on the shell patterns, Jaeger recognized one of them as Art himself. He was quite skilled.
“The others,” she said quietly. “The ones who didn’t…make it. Were you close to them?”
Art didn’t answer for a long time. “Yes. All of them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You did not kill. You saved.”
Jaeger hesitated, then forced herself to speak. She would not build this alliance on a bed of lies or misunderstanding.
“I did kill,” she said.
Art looked up at her.
“I destroyed the base. There might have been other Locauri there, ones we didn’t find in time.”
“There were.” The mechanical sound of the translator bands robbed the simple words of all emotion, all weight. “Two hundred of us captured, from different clans. Seven rescued. That is all.”
Jaeger’s breath caught. “I thought…I didn’t know there were so many.”
“Many,” Art agreed. “Many.”
“I’m sorry.”
Art turned his head, looking out over the slope and the forest of glittering lanterns beneath an inky black sky. “You tried. ‘Two hundred dead’ became ‘seven rescued’. Because of you.”
That seemed like too simple a conversion to Jaeger, but she didn’t know how to argue with it. It didn’t feel right, trying to tell Art what he, of all people, should think about the tragedy.
“Look.” Art lifted his head and then, realizing that he didn’t have antennae to point with, poked one feeble foreclaw at the sky. “New light.”
Jaeger followed his gesture.
At first, she didn’t see anything except a field of stars. “It’s…pretty,” she said cautiously, uncertain of what she was supposed to be appreciating.
Art shook his head, silencing her. He pointed again.
It happened very quickly. One nearly imperceptible star, about twenty degrees above the horizon, swelled. At first, a pinprick. Then it was the size of a pinhead. Then it was a brilliant, shimmering white orb on the sky, ten times larger than any other star.
Jaeger slapped her good hand over her mouth, mind racing with a thousand terrible possibilities. Distant supernova. Gamma-ray burst. Some kind of nearby space battle. Then the worst possibility occurred to her. Oh god, it wasn’t the Osprey exploding, was it?
“The prediction was true.” Art sounded satisfied with himself, or perhaps that was the mechanical translator scrubbing all excitement out of his voice.
When it was about the size of the thumb at the end of her hand, the glowing object in the sky stopped expanding.
A high-pitched buzz clamored up from the trees—the excited cheers of thousands of Locauri. There was a new moon in the sky. It was small, but it was bright.
“It’s a wormhole!” Jaeger laughed, both relieved and awed, as the cheer rose above her words. New music, a heavy base beat, trembled up from the forest as a swarm of shadows rose into the night. Thousands of Locauri took to the air, dancing, their pseudo-wings glittering like diamonds in the moonlight.
“New light,” Art agreed. “Fast, but bright. It lives for a few days. Then it dies. Celebrate it. While it is here.”
With that, the little fellow pushed himself up, and tottering on unsteady feet, scuttled himself down the slope to join the swarming Locauri.
Jaeger could only stare, mesmerized by the music, the scent of sweet smoke, the dancing light, and shadows.
She hardly noticed as someone settled onto the blanket beside her.
“They put on a pretty good show.” Toner’s eyes reflected cold blue, nearly as bright as the st
ars.
Jaeger nodded in agreement.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Toner stretched onto his back, folding his arms to make a bony pillow for his head. He tilted his chin, and Jaeger followed his gaze up to the blazing new star in the sky. “If things had gone even a little differently, we’d be scrambling through that thing with tails between our legs, right now.”
With that grim reminder, the spell broke. Jaeger felt the soft, subtle euphoria of peace draining away, though strangely, she didn’t resent that. She felt good. Tired, aching, and once more focused on grim realities—but good.
“We never did figure out what causes the data and episodic memory loss.” She sipped her tea, but after tasting real Locauri cuisine all day, it was hard to ignore the vague, synthetic, plastic taste of fabricated food. “I’ve figured out how to shield some computer data from the effect, but if we went back through the wormhole, we would probably be in the same pickle we were in six months ago. No memories. If the fleet’s on the other side, they’ll charge us with crimes we don’t even remember committing.”
Toner grunted. “‘Welcome to your brief third life. Now please hold still while we shoot you.’”
“Toner!” Jaeger grinned. “Don’t be so cynical. They’d certainly interrogate us first.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Aside from the two-way mirror that made up one wall, it was a featureless room, big enough for one small folding table and an uncomfortable metal chair. A stack of incongruously white hand towels lay folded neatly on the table beside a single glass of water.
“Ensign Petra Potlova.”
First Mate Kelba was a tall, blonde woman Petra suspected was genetically engineered to intimidate heterosexual men. Petra didn’t swing that way, but when the woman swaggered through the door, a tablet tucked primly under her arm, her uniform impeccably pressed, she fidgeted.
Lieutenant Bryce leaned in the corner of the room, his head down, his arms folded, not meeting Petra’s eyes.
“Ensign?” Kelba lifted one perfectly shaped eyebrow.
“Oh. Um. Yes, ma’am.”
“You went through basic and officer training with Sarah Jaeger, did you not?” Kelba consulted her tablet.
That sobered Petra up right quick. She sniffed, wiping her watering eyes. “Um. Y-Yes, ma’am. She was in my class.”
“You were friends.”
“I-I yeah, I guess, but we, back then, we were…” Petra stammered. Gawd, why did they wait until she got sloshed to start asking hard questions?
“More than friends,” the first mate supplied. “You were from the same sector. Raised in the same Orphan Bay. Why, you’re practically sisters.”
“Come on now,” Petra said uneasily. “I guess we wasn’t as close as I thought. I was shocked as anybody when Tribe Six went AWOL. Ask Dolly. Cried myself to sleep for weeks.”
“We’ll be having a conversation with Ensign Martin, too,” Bryce murmured from his corner. Petra shot him a betrayed look. “Don’t you bother Dolly,” she said sharply. “She got nothing to do with nothing. I don’t think she ever even knew Sarah.”
Petra didn’t see the first mate’s hand move, but she couldn’t ignore the lance of pain that shot over her cheek and nose. Petra cried out. She reached up and felt lines of blood forming beneath her cheek.
As calmly as if she had swatted a fly, First Mate Kelba picked a towel from the stack and wiped her hands. Her perfectly shaped fingernails dripped with Petra’s blood.
“You’re very protective of your bunkmate, Ensign,” the First Mate said coolly. “That is interesting. We shall have to ask her about the nature of your relationship.”
Petra gaped, speechless.
“Let us stick to the matter at hand.” The first mate set down the towel and lifted the glass of water. She took a prim, measured sip. “We know Ensign Jaeger had help commandeering Tribe Six.”
Yeah, Petra thought dully, looking at her lap. A prickle of the old hurt that had set her to sleep crying for weeks after the mutiny collected at the corners of her eyes. Larry. Didn’t know the two of them was that thick.
“Your silence does not do you credit, Petra.”
“I didn’t know what they was planning.” Tears trickled down her cheeks, mingling with blood. It was late, and she was somewhere in the gray place between drunk and hungover. The old, unprofessional street slang was seeping back into her voice. “I swear.”
“I find that unlikely, Ensign. Given that neither of them had access to the Moss command codes necessary to overwrite the ship’s security protocols.”
Petra stared up at the woman who was, technically, her CO’s CO. Old Boot’s right-hand woman, a name nobody had heard before she had been promoted up from the Seeker Corps a few months back. Doubly strange because if there was one thing Petra knew from her time in the lower decks, a woman like that didn’t just spring up out of the ground.
“Yeah?” she said weakly.
“Yes.” Kelba leaned in close enough to give Petra a whiff of her perfume. Light and floral and not at all laced with the heavy chemical smells plaguing the cosmetics markets lately. “We’ve checked out everybody who has clearance to access those top-level databases. There are no leaks in the command circles.”
“You think I’m some kind of spy or, like, super-hacker? I don’t got that kind of clearance.” Maybe it was the booze or the nerves or the pain, but Petra giggled at the sheer absurdity of it.
This time, the slap knocked her from her chair.
Petra sprawled across the floor with a cry. Her head exploded with pain. Out of the corner of her blurring vision, she saw Bryce straighten, arms falling to his side like he meant to help her up.
Then he stopped and resumed his nonchalant position as Kelba’s shiny black boots appeared in Petra’s vision.
“Do you find this funny, Ensign?” The first mate rested the heel of one boot across Petra’s exposed throat.
Petra swallowed blood and gasped, too terrified to move or even whisper an answer.
“The fleet is dying,” the first mate hissed. “The last hope for humanity. Starving, choking to death on its waste, betrayed by a woman we sheltered, trained, and loved.” The rubber soles of her boot cut into Petra’s tender throat. Kelba leaned forward, pressing until Petra’s pulse became a drum between her temples. “I’m not laughing.”
Darkness clouded the corners of Petra’s vision. Blood filled her mouth and pooled beneath her lips.
Then the boot was gone. “Get up,” Kelba ordered.
Petra struggled upright, but she was trembling too hard. Strong hands grabbed her under the arms and hauled her upright. Petra collapsed onto the metal chair, coughing. She waved feebly, slapping away Bryce’s steadying hand.
The expressionless lieutenant returned to his position in the corner of the room.
“Now that we’ve got the giggles out of our system…” Kelba drawled. “The core coding databases are locked up tight, Ensign. We know that much. A few months before the mutiny, somebody intercepted a few unsecured messages between our software engineers. Messages concerning security gaps in the Moss AI programming.”
Petra’s head swung from side to side. “I don’t…I don’t know…”
“Somebody with full access to the Reliant’s comms channels.”
“I didn’t go snooping around no egghead’s emails,” Petra whispered.
“Really?” Kelba swung her tablet around, shoving it in front of Petra’s face. She pointed at a scrolling access log with a fingernail stained pink with blood. “Is that not your access code?”
Petra stared at the string of numbers, too dizzy to make sense of what the first mate was saying. She nodded dumbly because that was her code—no sense denying that much.
“Access code logs confirm you were active in the comms system in the gap between sending the unsecured messages and when our security forces caught and deleted them.”
“I’m a comms officer,” Petra said dumbly, staring at the evidence against her. “I�
�m in the comms systems all the time. It’s…It’s my job. Isn’t it?”
“You were in the comms system at oh six thirty-one, on March seventh of last year?”
“How am I supposed to remember that?” The little hysterical giggle slipped from between Petra’s lips before she could call it back.
Kelba’s fist connected with her jaw. Petra’s chair snapped backward, slamming her head into the wall behind her. She saw stars. Blood filled her mouth. With numb horror, she realized the little hard, sharp teeth floating around her tongue were hers.
Bryce stepped forward, setting Petra’s chair aright. Petra doubled forward, coughing. Ropes of bloody drool spilled onto her uniform pants. She wanted to apologize, she wanted to beg for forgiveness, but her lungs hurt too much.
“You intercepted sensitive information regarding gaps in the Moss security protocols,” Kelba barked over Petra’s ragged coughing. “Sarah Jaeger later exploited those gaps to steal our ship. You supplied Jaeger with the information she needed to commit the most grievous mutiny in human history!”
“I didn’t,” Petra whispered.
Did I?
“I don’t know nothin’ about the Moss stuff.” She struggled to swallow. The glass of water was centimeters from her head, full and inviting. She didn’t dare reach for it. “And I never snooped around no emails.”
She hadn’t. She hadn’t. She knew that much. She would have remembered if she’d ever gone snooping around some emails, and she sure would have remembered if there were anything really interesting in them.
“How else could Jaeger have learned about the security gaps?” Kelba asked. She saw Petra eyeing the water and smoothly slid it from Petra’s reach. “Those vulnerabilities were top secret.”
“I don’t know.” Petra stared at the bloody teeth on her lap. There were holes in her gums where those teeth should’ve been—right top and center of her mouth. Those were two of her best teeth, that was, until that the bitch had knocked them out. “I don’t know how she did it.”
