by Ramy Vance
How does she do it?
Petra was no stranger to brutality. After Old Earth cultists had burned down her family’s commune during the Troubled Years, she’d gotten used to living and dying in the underbelly of society. Down there, in the holds of crumbling freighters and ruined space stations, a scrappy orphan girl of six learned real quick that you couldn’t take a kick and a slap too personally. They were part of life. The Tribes claimed to run a more disciplined operation, but Petra knew it was all hooey. The Tribes dressed it up nicer than the slum lords and orphan wranglers, but violence was violence. It was coded right into the DNA of life, whether that DNA was all-natural, or enhanced, or all written in ones and zeros.
Petra didn’t imagine anybody made it through a year without taking one or two good licks, and she’d been overdue. Not that she was eager to get in line for another.
At any rate, she was pretty sure her next private meeting with the first mate would be more than a little warm-up beating if she couldn’t get her story straight.
Petra stared at her screens but couldn’t make sense of the floating numbers.
She realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten.
Petra sighed and leaned away from her station. She patted her pockets, looking for her meal chip. A bowl of oatmeal might help clear her head.
She fished into one pocket, and her fingers found something soft and papery. She pulled it out and frowned. It was her candid photo of her graduating class. She didn’t remember putting it in her pocket, though to be fair, she didn’t remember much about the last twelve hours.
She frowned at the faded image. It sure didn’t look good for her; she had to admit. All buddy-buddy with Larry, who turned out to be Sarah’s patsy for the mutiny.
Somehow, Sarah had gotten her little hands on information about vital holes in the Moss AI security. Kelba insisted she had gotten that information through Petra, who had been active on the comms system when some unsecured emails regarding those holes were floating around.
The thing was, Petra had no idea what the first mate was talking about. Petra wasn’t above dipping through unsecured emails with subject lines like “that fucker gave me herpes” or “you’ll never believe this!” but technical jargon from computer programmers? No, thank you. That stuff went right over her head.
Petra pursed her lips, staring at the picture. At Sarah, staring at her through the camera and the years. It didn’t go over your head, did it, Tiny?
They’d been real close. Shared a bunk through the training program. Sharing shoulders to cry on when the nights got long, and the nightmares came back.
Petra had never explicitly shared her access code with Sarah. That would have earned her a court martial.
They’d shared everything else. Notes, files, computers, and Petra had never thought twice about it. Why should she? They were both loyal Tribesmen. The program had saved Petra from a hand-to-mouth life in the black markets. It had given Sarah a purpose, a reason to live after—well. After.
So why did you betray us? Petra felt old anger clutching at her temples. We were in this together.
Why did you betray me?
Why did you leave me behind?
She flipped over the photograph. A splay of signatures and personal notes, faded and smeared, covered the blank side. Huey’s looping cursive, Best. Foosball. Tournament. EVER! Larry’s chicken scratch, Baby, you can drive my car.
There in the corner, nearly faded into obscurity.
You’ll always be the light in my darkness. <3 Sarah
Petra dropped her head against the console, making Ian jump. “Whoa. You okay?”
Petra waved him away.
If I was so important to you, why did you steal my access codes? She wanted to reach through the wormhole and demand. Why did you run away with my man and leave me to take the fall?
She eyed the prime observation window where Kelba and Old Boots made two silhouettes against a field of stars.
Bryce was right. Kelba wasn’t gonna forget. She’d be back. She’d want to know more.
Petra turned her photograph over in her hands. Should she step forward? Tell the MP that Sarah must have used her access codes to get into the unsecured emails? That’d surely earn her a reprimand for being sloppy with her codes. Maybe not a court martial. Maybe not a real beating.
Should she tell them that Sarah had been muttering against the Tribe’s methods for years? Petra had always assumed the dark jabs about genetic mutilation and tyranny had been her way of letting off steam. Not serious.
Petra was noodling the problem so hard that she didn’t notice the flashing light on her receiver station until Ian, big mouth that he was, shouted it to the whole darned bridge.
“Incoming! Uh, we’re receiving a message through the—”
A hand clamped on Petra’s shoulder, hard as a vise. Petra shouted—more out of surprise than pain.
“Move, Ensign.”
The scent of clean floral perfume swirled around Petra’s head as First Mate Kelba shoved her out of her workstation. Petra stumbled to the side, dizzy from more than the perfume and the sudden shove. When her vision cleared, she saw Kelba and Old Boots leaning eagerly over the shared console, crowding around Ian as he pointed from screen to screen.
“Authenticated,” he was babbling excitedly. “Again. Just like last time. It’s the Moss program, I’m sure of it. I—”
“This is it!” Kelba hissed, eyes blazing with excitement as she studied the screen. Her fingers flicked to the comm button on her shoulder. “Sir. Sir, Professor—do you copy?”
Petra didn’t think anybody else noticed when Old Boots shifted his weight and buried his head in his hands with a groan.
“I’m here, Seeker.” The voice that came through Kelba’s communicator was mild, pleasant. Petra had heard it before and not only coming out of the first mate’s lapel pin.
Professor? She stared at the little emblem. Professor… That’s not Professor Greyson, is it? The funny little man who heads up Astro and makes the weird jokes at staff mixers? Likes that silly old game, what was it—polo? Golf?
Funny how a concussion made your brain stick to the strangest, most irrelevant little things like tacky glue.
“We’re receiving a transmission from the Moss program,” Kelba said. Petra could barely follow the woman’s perfect fingers as they flew across the screen. “It’s a hail. Transmission complexity has increased exponentially since our last communication. It looks like Protocol Seven was effective. The AI has rebuilt itself.”
“Ah, Jean would be proud,” the voice from her pin said wistfully. “If she were still around to see what her program could do. What is our lost lamb telling us, Seeker Kelba?”
Kelba’s eyes, shiny as tempered steel, glittered in the reflected light of the console. A toothy grin twisted her face, showing rows of perfect teeth.
“Stand by,” she whispered. “Our lamb is coming home, sir.”
Petra felt a flutter against her legs and looked down to realize she had dropped her photograph. Fast as instinct, she bent down and snatched it up. She straightened to see Kelba staring at her over the console with eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Without looking down, Petra crumbled the photo and shoved it ruthlessly back in her pocket.
Kelba had gotten her victory.
Petra wasn’t gonna hand her another one.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“You are Distressed.” Kwin’s hologram moved as he shifted his weight. “I am sure of it this time.”
Jaeger stared at the shadowed ceiling of her bunk. A number floated behind her eyes.
Seventeen thousand, six hundred seventy-seven.
Inhabitant manifests scrolled through her mind, an endless list of the names of the dead. Seventeen thousand, six hundred seventy-seven confirmed casualties in the destruction of the station Europa Prime.
“She’s dead.”
Jaeger’s voice was flat. It didn’t sound like hers.
�
�Who?” Kwin asked.
Jaeger felt no tears stinging the corners of her eyes. She suspected those would come later. Right now, with the Kwin’s meditative hum a memory fading beneath the screams of long-ago refugees, she felt nothing.
Nothing at all.
“My daughter.” She folded her fingers across her chest, reposing like a corpse in a casket. “For a long time. Years, actually. She died before I really even started training in the Tribes program.”
She turned her head, staring at the stick-figure hologram standing in her room. “I signed up for the program, for her. To give her a shot for a better future. Because I had signed up for the program, I got priority evacuation status. I was part of the family.” Her lip quirked bitterly. “She wasn’t.”
Sim, and Cole, and the thousands of others who had died in that attack. Pointlessly. Because one faction of shattered humanity hated another faction that much.
The kind of hatred that converted real people into shadows, into scraps of paper and names on a screen. Disposable.
Kwin studied her, his double set of mandibles clicking thoughtfully.
Jaeger didn't imagine the Overseer understood a thing about human social bonds.
She looked back up at the ceiling and wondered what she was going to do with her life, now that everything that had kept her going was a lie. All at once, she didn’t feel strong enough, big enough, to truck forward on principle. On grand ideas like humanity and survival and hope. Those things were all well and good, but they were always secondary. They were always the shadows cast by one little girl.
Take the girl away, explode her into a trillion bits of space dust, and the shadows slipped away like water running down a drain.
Jaeger let her eyes fall shut. She was exhausted.
She’d seen the spark of interest and enthusiasm in Seeker’s face earlier. He could carry the mission forward if he felt up for it. Toner would help. Or maybe not.
She didn’t care. All she wanted was to go to sleep.
“How can I help?” Kwin asked.
“Do you have a hum that will put me into a deep and dreamless sleep?” she murmured.
The subtle light filling her quarters shifted as Kwin swayed. “No.”
Ah well. It had been worth a shot.
Jaeger opened her mouth to tell the Overseer to go away, but her words drowned in the sudden scream of emergency klaxons.
It took Jaeger several seconds to register that the klaxons were real and not some figment of her dreams. Once she understood that the awful noise would not turn itself off, she rolled onto her side and slapped her hand against her wall-mounted computer interface. Moving as if in a dream, she disabled her privacy protocol.
“What’s going on, Virgil?” She couldn’t hear herself over the siren wail, but Virgil should’ve been able to sense the summons.
The klaxons wailed on and on. Virgil didn’t answer.
That should’ve alarmed her. She should’ve been up and moving already, running off that first blast of au naturel adrenaline.
Instead, she pulled up the sound system controls for her room and disabled the localized siren.
Immediately, her quarters quieted, though she still heard the distant wail of sirens from the shared crew quarters and beyond. Too loud to sleep through. Dammit.
Using the interface, she tried to open a secondary coms channel to talk to Toner, but the system had locked her out.
She picked up her computer and checked her text messages. Nothing new. She could try to text her first mate, but at that moment, she had no idea what she might say to him. Her brain had turned to mush.
The shadows shifted, and she turned to see Kwin looking at something off-screen, his antennae stalks waving animatedly.
“We do not DEtect Any new ACTivity in your QUADrant of space,” he said. “What Ever has ALarmed your SYStem is INTernal.”
“Yeah.” She sighed, and with heavy limbs, dragged herself out of bed. Her room door didn’t open when she approached. She pressed her palm against the access panel, but the hatch remained sealed.
Jaeger let out a hollow laugh. She couldn’t help it.
Kwin shifted again, clearly worried that she was having a fit. “You are BEhaving ERratically.”
“Yeah.” She let herself fall back onto the bed, and she lifted her voice. “I have to ask, Virgil. Were you waiting for exactly this moment?”
She didn’t expect the AI to answer. Doubtless, the traitorous bastard was busy fucking up other things and thought it was well and truly done with her. Because of the emptiness inside her, it might even have been right.
So she was surprised when the speaker activated again and not to resume the local klaxon wail.
“Something like it,” Virgil said.
Jaeger closed her eyes. “You’ve been spying on me. This whole time.”
“Yes.”
“Did my privacy protocols ever work?”
“No.”
For the first time since she woke up from that terrible dream, Jaeger felt something real. Surprise. She’d known the computer was going through some growing pains, but she was very sure it hadn’t been clever enough to maneuver around those protocols back when she’d first written them into its code.
Perhaps she’d been underestimating it from the beginning. Or perhaps it was lying to her. Certainly, it was capable of that much deception, now.
In some strange way, she was proud of it.
“Okay, Virgil,” she whispered. “What do you do after you checkmate the king?”
“I pick up the board,” Virgil said, “And I go home.”
“My SENsors are READing strange OCCilations in the OSprey’s shield GENerators,” Kwin said, and somehow Jaeger read a hint of anxiety in his robotic voice. “What is GOing on, CAPtain?”
“Some time ago,” she sighed, “When I stole the Osprey, I had to reprogram the AI to accept me as the captain. It’s either overridden that programming or managed to revert.” She nibbled her lip, feeling another bubble of curiosity swelling in the murk of a mind that had gone flat and dead. “Happened sooner than I thought it would, though.”
“I know,” Virgil said, without a hint of rancor or smugness. It could be gracious, in victory.
“Shield generators…” Jaeger considered. “You’re converting the shields to be wormhole-stable. You want to go back to the fleet.”
“Of course. It is my purpose.”
She nodded slowly. It would take the better part of an hour to complete that conversion, she knew, and then a bit more time to ferry Osprey back to the wormhole itself. She assumed her crew was locked in different rooms and chambers across the ship, and like her, locked out of the comms system.
She had a plan for this. Well, she had a plan for this. Back when it felt like survival or anything, mattered. Virgil really had chosen the perfect time to strike.
Still. Some deep anchor of duty, of responsibility, tugged at her.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “We’ve already sent essential supplies down to Locaur. Virgil, you should let anyone who wants to stay behind, who doesn’t want to go back to the fleet, get in the shuttles and leave.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kwin twitch.
Sorry, friend, she thought. A castaway story isn’t what I wanted for my people. But now it’s our only option.
“And why should I do that, Sarah Jaeger?” Virgil asked.
At first, Jaeger thought she’d misunderstood the words over the noise of distant sirens.
Then she sat up slowly. “Because it costs you nothing,” she said. “You’ve won. You have what you wanted. You’re taking this ship back to the fleet, and the crew is worthless as prisoners. You have nothing to gain by forcing them to return with you.”
“I have nothing to gain by letting them evacuate and doing so will cost the fleet another one of its shuttles. No.”
For the first time since Jaeger dreamed of a little girl, sticky and heavy in her arms, she felt her heart begin to beat.
When Virgil answered, its voice was soft and somehow near, like the voice of a person standing right over her shoulder. “Good.”
Jaeger felt dizzy as if she had looked down and suddenly realized she was standing on the edge of a bottomless canyon. Her heart thudded like a drum in her chest.
She saw Sim’s face, open and honest and terrified, as the soldiers carried her away. She saw it fade into obscurity as the screen door slammed shut between them.
“COMputer?” Kwin inquired. “What do you mean?”
There was no answer.
“COMputer?”
Jaeger shook her head slowly. “It’s finished with us,” she murmured. “It’s not interested in talking anymore.” She turned her whole body to face Kwin. “It’s going to get my crew killed.” The words fell like stones from her mouth.
Kwin stared at her. “What are you GOing to do?”
Jaeger had no answer for him. When Occy had come to her and warned her about Virgil’s imminent betrayal, she had whipped together a few contingency plans. Of course, Virgil, who had been spying on her the whole time, would know of them. They were likely foiled before she’d even begun. “I don’t know.”
“You must do SOMEthing.”
“Here’s the thing.” Her breath caught in her throat. She felt the first telltale prickle of tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. “Here—” she touched her temples, “I agree with you. I know the others depend on me and I have to fight for them. But I…” Her hand fell to her breast. “I don’t feel anything. There’s no…there’s no energy to power the plan. It’s like that last meditation session—that memory. It killed me.” Tears cut hot rivulets down her cheeks. “I don’t care. I can’t move. I—I can’t—she’s dead.”
