The Light Years

by R. W. W. Greene

  “Good evening,” he said. “I believe I may have been taken by pirates or terrorists. Please contact the authorities.”

  “Um.” I was taken aback, but I wasn’t sure if his nudity or his speech had done the work.

  “Ignore him,” said a voice from deeper inside the suite. “That’s just Reg. He’s an android. Reg, this is Hisako Sasaki.”

  I got a better look at Reg as I stepped through the door. It was definitely male, well-formed, and missing the back of his skull. There was a mass of electronics and tell-tale lights where his brain should have been.

  “Good day, Hisako,” it said. “What pronouns do you prefer?”

  “It looks so real.”

  Odessa frowned. “Reg asked you a question. It’s not polite to ignore him.”

  The android’s gray eyes were on mine. If it made her happy. “Good evening, Reg. I prefer she, her, hers. How are you?”

  The android smiled. “I am fine. I believe I may have been taken by pirates or terrorists. Please contact the authorities.” It rattled off a string of numbers.

  Odessa patted its shoulder. “There’s a good boy. You can ignore us until I call on you.”

  Reg powered down, becoming as inanimate as furniture.

  “Seems a little stiff,” I said. “I thought these guys were supposed to have more personality.”

  “I had to write him a new one. It’s just a shell. A lot of his programming is inactive or he wouldn’t be helping us.”

  The android’s skin was cool to the touch and a little less pliable than human flesh.

  “They almost got it, but not quite,” Odessa said. “His mind barely qualifies as a nearsmart – I could change that, of course – but they made the body as human as they could.”

  “Why?”

  “It was made to interact with people. I expect he fits in better like this than if he had tentacles. Besides, humans have needs and fraternization was frowned upon in the UA military.”

  I felt my eyebrows surge upward. “They had sex with him?”

  “He’s fully functional. I left that part of his programming active. He’s just an over-qualified sex toy if you look at it right.”

  I suppressed a shudder. “What happens after he gets us the files? Back in the crate and bound for auction?”

  “He’s all mine,” she said. “It was part of the deal with the captain. I get two of them. There’s another under the bed. I’m going to reverse engineer them and go into business.”

  “Who’s rich enough to buy an android? I’ve seen a few serving robots in La Mur but nothing nearly as fancy as him.”

  “I won’t be making them as fancy. There’s enough platinum in Reg to buy my own planet. But I can make do. My androids won’t be as smart, but they’ll be good enough for most work. Cheaper and way more reliable than those La Mur antiques once I get a factory going.”

  I’d had enough small talk with the technophile. “How soon can I get into the Hadfield’s files?”

  “We cracked the encryption a while ago. We’ve just been waiting for you. The decryption ripped up the nearsmart’s organization structure, but I can show you how to build a new index.”

  With Odessa’s help, I hunted up any files pertaining to the worm-drive. “There’s the manual, and…” I blinked and swiped to the next page. “Did you look at any of this?”

  “No. Once I solved the problem I–”

  “You report to me, right?” I asked Odessa. “I’m in charge.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Of this project.”

  “I want to put all this in secure storage. Passcode protected. My eyes only.”

  ADEM

  One month out of Gaul

  Rakin Sadiq stared at his sister, his mouth gaping. “This is insanity!” He wasn’t the only one around the conference table expressing disbelief, but they were definitely in the minority.

  “You said something had to change, brother. This would be a change.”

  “The Hajj is slowing down, Uncle,” Lucy said. “We’ve lost .03 percent off our best speed. If this works, we’ll be faster than any other ship in the Traders’ Union.”

  “If it works.” Rakin waved his hands. “It won’t work. You’ll kill us all. Who knows if the drive is even intact, let alone if we can adapt it to our systems? I forbid it.”

  “This is a democracy, Uncle,” Adem said. “That means you can’t forbid anything.”

  Dooley smiled. “If you’re afraid, Rakin, I’ll be happy to buy you out right now. We can drop you somewhere, and you’ll miss the whole thing.”

  “Kalinda, dear, are you going to let this happen? I mean, fine, salvage and sell the thing, but install it on the ship?” Rakin switched his focus to the crewman beside her. “Don’t you see she’s going to ruin us?”

  Both women squirmed. Kalinda Maynard, the investors’ representative, worked off a set of priorities provided by her employers, and priority one was profit. The crew’s elected representative, Jolyon Ong, was fidgety in general, but Adem could imagine the messages she was getting via her reader and comm. Everyone who traveled in space had fantasized about a worm-drive at one point or another, but learning one was aboard had been a swift, sharp shock.

  “You’ve seen the evidence. You know my plan,” the captain said.

  “Evidence,” Rakin sputtered. “I’ve seen a transcript of a conversation with a crazy wanderer, who our mother never approved of, and a couple of stills of old junk from a derelict battleship. How do you even know you got the whole drive?”

  “That’s why Adem brought an expert into the family.” The captain smiled at Hisako. “Why don’t we hear what she has to say?”

  “The worm-drive is intact.” Hisako’s hands and shoulders were relaxed, her voice confident. “Moreover, Odessa Romanov has cracked into the Christopher Hadfield’s database and found instructions on installation and operation of the drive. I believe we can do this.”

  Adem believed it, too. Working alongside Hisako for the past month had convinced him of her intelligence and abilities. If anyone could pull it off, she could.

  “What about our safety?” Jolyon said.

  “The danger is minimal,” Hisako said. “The drive will either function normally, or it won’t work at all. We’ll install it and test it. If it doesn’t put us where we want, we won’t go.”

  The captain looked around the table. “Shall we bring this to a vote?”

  “My three percent says no. Hell, no!” Rakin crossed his arms and looked at Kalinda expectantly.

  “With no way to consult with my employers, I also say no to the proposal.”

  “That’s another twenty-nine shares,” Rakin said. “Crew?”

  Jolyon held up her finger. “Tabulating.” All over the ship the crew was voting on the proposal via their readers. “We have ten percent against. Twelve percent for.”

  The captain cleared her throat. “Check my math, Rakin. That’s forty-one shares against, twelve for. I’ll add my twenty-four shares now, so forty-one to thirty-six. Dooley?”

  Rakin snorted. “Of course, he’ll vote with you.”

  “That’s never a given,” Dooley said. “You know that as well as I do, Rakin. I have a lot of beer on this ship to look out for. However, I vote in favor.”

  “Forty-seven percent for installing the worm-drive and testing it on the way to Nov Tero,” the captain said. “Forty-two against. Lucy? Adem? Hisako?”

  “Be reasonable.” Rakin put on his best wise-uncle face. “We could end up adrift or worse. Then where will we be?”

  “Thank you for your concern, Uncle. You seem so sincere.” Lucy grinned. “My five shares are for the plan.”

  Adem’s eyes were tired. “Mine, too. My four shares, I mean.” One of his shares and one of his mother’s had been spun off for Hisako’s wedding present.

  “That leaves you,” Dooley said to Hisako. “Remember, just because they’re family doesn’t mean you can’t yell at them or vote against them.”

  “How can I refuse
?” Her smile was brittle. “This is literally what I was born for. I vote in favor of the captain’s plan.”

  “That’s two more shares in favor, bringing us to fifty-eight shares for and forty-two against. The motion carries.”

  “You sure you don’t want us to buy you out, Rakin?” Dooley said.

  Rakin looked as though he might spit. “You don’t have the money.” He included his sister in his look of distaste. “Neither of you do. You spent too much on useless information and bribes to failing governments. If this doesn’t work, you’re ruined. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “I can buy your shares, Uncle.” Lucy said. “It would be worth it to get you off the ship.”

  Rakin rose from the table. “You’re all so far out on the edge I don’t imagine you know what safety looks like. If you’re lucky I’ll buy your shares out of arrears, and you’ll have enough left for a squat in the swamp zone on Freedom.” He left without looking back.

  Kalinda looked like she was about to chase after Rakin, but Jolyon led her out the opposite door.

  “Are they dating or conspiring?” Adem said.

  “Dating,” Lucy said.

  The captain sighed. “I am going to take that as a motion to adjourn. Any seconds?”

  Dooley raised his hand. “I second, and move that drinks are on the house for anyone who shows up at Terry’s tonight.”

  “Was what Rakin said true?” Adem said. “Are you in that deep?”

  The captain rubbed her eyes. “Let’s just say that if this goes bad, we might need to borrow some money from you for that swamp squat.”

  “Nah,” Dooley said. “I still have family in the swamp zone. We’ll be alright. But Rakin’s not wrong about everything. We’re two years overdue for an overhaul and other maintenance. The way we’re doing things now won’t work much longer.”

  “I’ll run this rig into a star before I let her be a slaver,” the captain said. “And damn the lawsuits.”

  “It’s just a ship,” Adem said. “If Rakin takes over, none of us will stay. It’s not like it will be our home anymore. We’ll just have to find something else to do.”

  The captain smiled. “Maybe the Spaceman needs a manager.”

  Lucy followed her brother out of the conference room. “You were moodier than usual in there.”

  “I’m tired.” Adem rubbed his face. “My quarters are lousy, I’m a shitty guitar player, and my mother traded two years of my life for a worm-drive. I’m lonely. I’m angry. I’m horny.”

  “You didn’t have to give Hisako your room, you know.”

  “Didn’t have to?” His look of outrage faded. “True, but–”

  “But it was the right thing to do, and my little brother always ends up doing the right thing.”

  Adem stopped walking. “The right thing sucks.”

  “It does sometimes.” She put her hand on his waist. “Vee and I had a bet about whether or not your brain was going to explode like this. Hisako had twenty-four years to get pissed off and work through it. You’ve only had eleven months.”

  “I don’t even know if I like her as a person. I’ve been working with her, doing my job, but I feel like she wants me dead. I’m on tiptoes all the damned time.”

  “You don’t have to stay married, either. Once the contract’s up you can cut your losses, start dating again, maybe look up Sarat…”

  Adem sighed. “Do you realize that it’s been more than ten years for him? Even if I wanted to, and I’m not saying I do, he has an entirely different life now, and I’m not part of it.” Adem resumed walking. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “Which of you won the bet?” Adem added.

  Lucy took his hand. “I did.”

  HISAKO

  Bullets twanged off the metal siding above my head. I crouched lower, making myself as small as possible in the lee of an overturned transit capsule. My gun was low on ammo. Another fine mess I’d gotten myself into.

  In wake of the shareholders’ meeting, I met Vee in the forward stim studio for an evening of mayhem with her gaming guild. It was one of Tobey’s games, she said, the revolution thing he’d picked up on Gaul. I stripped down to my underwear and climbed into the stim capsule Vee assigned me. In seconds, I was a EuroD soldier, armed and armored, bent on taking down the guerrillas and turning La Merde to rubble. They weren’t making it easy.

  “I found the mission brief!” Vee announced over our comm gear. “Guerrillas have a big missile they’re going to launch at La Mur. Lots and lots of pretty EuroD corpses!”

  Something exploded overhead, and bits of brick and rusted metal dropped into my hiding place. I felt every piece, thanks to Odessa’s work over the years to soup up the Hajj’s stim interface. It wouldn’t kill me, she said, but it might leave some bruises.

  Vee leaned out from cover to fire her grenade launcher toward the bullets’ origin. The explosion took down an already battered storefront on the other side of the street. The shooting stopped. “Let’s go!” she said. “Double time!”

  I uncurled and ran after her, Odessa close behind me. There was an overturned bus on the road ahead. I ignited my jetpack and leapt over it. In the air I was a better target; bullets sang past me again, but I cleared the bus faster than the rest of my team. I knelt behind a toppled construction drone and began to lay down covering fire. The smoke from the drone helped to hide me.

  “I need ammo!” I shouted into my comm. “I’m behind the big robot, which shouldn’t be here because all the ones that still worked went to La Mur years ago!”

  There were a number of such anachronisms in the game. Lean-tos and shanties were not rugged enough to take a punch, much less a bullet, so the programmers had taken the sort of buildings that were in midtown, roughed them up, and moved them to La Merde. The fighters we’d encountered thus far had been dressed in rags, but underneath they’d been disturbingly fit. Prime specimens, really, with no sign of malnutrition or want. And they were so well-armed!

  “Are you complaining about the game’s accuracy again?” One of Tina’s supply drones buzzed overhead and dropped a case of ammunition for my gun. Tina usually worked in life-support, but at the moment she was our sniper and logistics specialist.

  I slammed a fresh clip into my gun and peeked over the robot. Nothing was coming. “This game was made in Versailles City. You’d have thought they would have done a little research.”

  “Four years have passed down there,” Tina said through the drone. “Maybe it changed.”

  I waved the drone away. The game had already been two years old when Tobey bought it, so I was going to chalk the anachronisms up to plot convenience and lazy writing.

  Vee huffed and puffed to my position and squatted behind the robot with me. “Sniper tower up ahead. We need to take it out before we can advance.” She held out her hand and a hologram of the target, a thirty-story apartment building, floated over it.

  “There’s nothing like that down here.” I pointed over my shoulder with my thumb. “Anything that tall would be back that-a-way.”

  “Play the game, not your memory, Sako,” Vee spoke into her comm. “Odessa will be with us in a minute. She’s clearing out a nest.”

  I checked my ammo and opened up my HUD to peruse the health stats of my teammates. I was the team healer, ready to spring into action with my trusty medkit, but everyone was in the green. A flurry of bootsteps turned into a dramatic slide as Odessa joined us.

  Vee waited for the dust to clear before speaking. “Was it Tobey?”

  “Nah.” Odessa switched her cigar from the right side of her mouth to the left. “Buncha NPCs. Cannon fodder.”

  Vee opened the mission map on her hand hologram thing. “I wonder where they are.”

  I peeked over the robot again. All clear. “We should probably get moving.”

  “Head to the tower on my mark.” Vee put the map away and checked her grenade launcher. She stood. “Mark!”

  I followed her at a fast jog. On my left, Odessa�
��s head exploded.

  “Sniper!” Vee shouted. “Take cover!”

  I bent to grab Odessa’s bullet belt or whatever and dragged her along with me to the side of a crashed shuttle. I readied the revival “nanobot” injection. Depending on the game mechanic, waiting too long would make the injection fail or turn Odessa into a hungry zombie, but only a few seconds had passed. Her head reformed.

  “Sniper?” she said.

  I pulled other tools out of my medkit to rebuild her health and ability stats. My comm crackled, and Vee mumbled a situation report.

  “Where did the shot come from?” Odessa said.

  “Ahead and up. Probably our target. Vee thinks there are two shooters on the roof of the building.” I checked Odessa’s stats. She was as close to brand-new as I could get her. “She’s going to launch a few grenades toward them. When we hear the first one go off, we’re supposed to get up and run toward the tower. Right up close to the building they can’t shoot us.”

  “Vee says that? Okay.”

  I commed Vee to report Odessa was back on her feet. My racing heart wasn’t getting the message that we were only playing a game.

  Odessa put her hand on my shoulder. “Wait for the bang.”

  The whump of Vee’s grenade launcher almost sent me into a sprint, but I held back until I heard the explosion. I heard another whump as Vee provided cover for our run. My skin crawled as I imagined the sniper’s scope crawling across my back.

  “Zigzag!” Odessa yelled. “Don’t make it easy for them.”

  We stopped hard against an apartment building that looked a lot like the one I grew up in. We were met at the door by a heavily bandaged little boy.

  “I’m hungry,” he said, “and my parents are dead. Do you have some food?”

  I had a stash of meal bars I was supposed to use when my stamina levels dropped. “Do you think I should give him something?”

  “Try it and see what happens. Maybe he’ll reward you.”

  I knelt in front of the boy and reached into my pack. The boy smiled. Odessa stitched a red line up his chest and neck with her machine pistol. His blood splashed on my helmet visor as he fell.