AfterLife

by BL Craig

  The Captain spoke. “Haruna and Brooks, I need you to do everything you can to make us silent and invisible to the usual array of sensors, plus any other types you can think of. Clarke, set up Tesla and Edison to collect data on the Rannit, and set them to return data in tight beam bursts instead of a steady stream, to reduce the risk of detection. Nguyen and Butcher, I want you to make yourselves as familiar with the systems on the drive as you can. Predict where you would put installations and listening posts and identify any and all potential hazards. Butcher, I’m going to be counting on you to plot routes to these new systems. Any questions?”

  There were many questions, and very few answers.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  John wondered at the wisdom of letting Addy loose in the Mirada Gateway Station stores with carte blanche. The little engineer was grinning like a maniac, piling boxes and loose items in the big cart and simultaneously directing the station supply bots to retrieve items from his list and deliver them to the Tilly. John had his own list of items to secure, but he still felt obligated to rein in the other man, if for no other reason than the Tilly could not possibly hold the entirety of Mirada Station stores. There was no one in the stores to watch them either—most likely a result of the loss of the Yan Luo crew.

  Sarah strolled by, flanked by a small pack of bots from the Tilly. “I’m going to bio stores and electronics to get the stuff I need. Give me a shout if you think of goodies you want me to ‘appropriate’ for the good of humanity.”

  “Do you need any help?” asked John.

  “No, I’ve got it. Good luck keeping Addy from stripping the station.” She smirked over her shoulder and disappeared around a corner.

  John commandeered one of the nearly dozen bots Addy had zipping around. “Hey, shunt Haruna’s requests to the others. I need you to get some stuff for me.” He flicked the list from his nexus to the little supply bot. It beeped recognition and set off.

  He looked in the already overfull cart pulling a box of tiny non-drive capacitors out of the pile. “What do you need these for? Our bots don’t use these kind.” There were fuel cells and batteries, also not the kind used by anything on the Tilly.

  “I need them.”

  “I’m putting these back,” John said, exhaling at the mess in the cart. A bot entered the cramped space with another empty cart ready to be filled.

  “Don’t put those back. I told you, I need them.”

  “If you can’t say why you need them then you don’t need them. Don’t forget, I am the one who has to track all the inventory.”

  “They’re for a special project. Don’t put them back.”

  “Lavy heided dobber. Yer doin’ my nut in,” John muttered. No good was going to come of this. Well, plenty of good would probably come of it, but not enough, in John’s estimation to outweigh the bad that usually came from Addy’s special projects.

  “Wait, is this for more stun guns?” John said a tinge of suspicious distrust in his voice.

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  “This is my first time. Be gentle,” William tried to be quippy, but it came out flat.

  “I bet you say that to all the girls. You just bat those blue eyes, and they swoon.” Sarah batted her lids up and down dramatically. She actually had lovely, velvety brown eyes. “Now give me your arm.”

  Once the Tilly was back on its way, Sarah brought William down to the Med bay for his Elixir change out.

  He held out his arm and she plugged the double tube into the port on his wrist. The grey Elixir flowed in the top and back out the bottom. Once the line was full, he could not tell if it was still moving.

  “How long does it take?”

  “Not long. Twenty minutes. I’m going to look at your NCM and check the settings.”

  “The orientation said something about the NCM regulating Elixir, but the materials are really vague. It seems to imply that it keeps us from going crazy. Is that what you did with that pill, got around the control?”

  “Sort of. Not exactly. The Elixir keeps us alive and does all sorts of cool things, like repairing telomeres and knocking out cells with mutations. We don’t get cancer and we’re resistant to most radiation. But there’s always some brain damage when we die. The NCM regulator helps balance us out and keep the ship right while the Elixir repairs the damage. When you first wake up on Elysium they’ve filled you with a special buffered Elixir. The NCM is in calibration mode while it figures out your particular biology. After the ease in period, you switch to the standard Elixir mix and the NCM is set on maintenance mode. That’s what I’m going to do: change out your Elixir and put the NCM on maintenance. It might help with your anxiety. The NCM will stop clamping down so hard on any overstimulation and let you ride it out instead. That sounds bad, but, given the response you were having I think it’s better to let things progress naturally.”

  “So, I’ll stop feeling the soul crushing wave of apathy every time I get upset or excited?”

  “I hope so. Soul crushing apathy sounds pretty awful.” She continued tapping the nexus and scrolling.

  “Will I be normal? Whatever that means?”

  “No, not normal. Never normal. But better.”

  Sarah tapped away at the nexus, moving sliders around and changing settings. William thought about the rest of the crew. They seemed pretty normal to him, which was to say, nothing at all like he would ever have expected reanimates to behave. He wondered why he was so mixed up. The rest of them seemed to have regular ranges of emotion, except Alex but he was not entirely sure that her eerie calm was not simply her natural affect. Brooks had certainly been angry when he confronted William on the bridge. Had they just acclimated over time, or was William broken?

  Sarah interrupted his reverie. “I’ve also enabled a feature that’s typically used on drones. If you feel the anxiety spinning out of control, you can tap on your port”—she pointed to where the fluid was pumping in and out of his arm— “three times, and the NCM will release a dose of serotonin. Instead of making you feel numb, it should give you a temporary sense of well-being to help you balance out. Don’t go crazy with that, though. You can really mess up your brain if you start bathing it in serotonin all the time.”

  “You said the Elixir repairs brain damage. Does that mean my senses of smell and touch will come back to normal in operation mode? Will I get any color back?”

  “No, your repairs have been complete for a while. You will notice increased strength, and speed as your body converts fat stores to muscle. You’ve probably noticed that there are no fat reanimates. Elixir is pretty relentless that way. It can be a shock for busty women who go down a couple of cup sizes,” she said, poking her own right breast. “But the ligaments tighten up so they’re perky small breasts.”

  William poked his own breast. “Uh oh. I was really hoping I could still pull off a two piece.”

  Sarah snorted. “Well probably no bouncing bikini tops for you, but after the change-over you can be free to enjoy utterly tasteless water and tea. No coffee. It doesn’t mix well with Elixir. I’m told it sends you on a really bad trip. Oh and no carbonated beverages. They’re corrosive. Of course, if you do drink anything, you get the joy of peeing again . . . only it’s kind of like peeing pudding. So, we mostly skip it. Unless you have really fond memories of past bouts with gonorrhea.”

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  “Good choice. Hey, do me a favor. Don’t mention the pill to anyone. It’s not exactly company-approved, and it isn’t safe to do a lot. I wouldn’t have, except, well, it seemed like not doing it would have been worse. Someone should be spaced for sending you out here without the proper time to adjust. It’s not healthy to keep all that pain unexpressed.”

  “No, it’s not. Thank you. I really do feel a lot better. I’m sorry, I think I dribbled all over you.”

  “What’s a little dribble between friends?” She smiled. “Look, grieving takes time. One big cry out is
n’t going to make everything ok. Please, talk to me if you need someone. The counselors are . . . well, they’re pretty good, but just knowing someone real is listening, it can make a difference. Oh, and don’t tell the counselor anything you don’t want the company to know.”

  “Like how my friend gave me a cry pill?”

  “Among other things.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  In the engine room, Addy was enjoying himself. It had been some time since he had encountered a real challenge. After death, he had picked up right where he left off, developing newer, better FTL drives for Hades Fleet. For a dozen years or so it had been just like before. The company gave him plenty of resources and nearly the same amount of free rein he had experienced as CEO of HarunTech. Then, it all fell apart. When he refused categorically to resume his R&D work, the company sent him to the shipyards at Styx. He liked the hands-on building work, but he clashed badly with the supervisors. He was too used to running his own shop, with his own hours and choice of projects, and did not take to the regimented life of a scheduled dock worker. They had put him on the Yan Luo building the secondary gates between Eden and Arcadia, with the same result. His assignment to the Tilly had been intended as a punishment. A few years on a boring survey vessel would cure him of his willfulness, they thought. It had been 20 years and he had no intention of asking for his old job back. He liked the rough and tumble nature of field work and the opportunity to dabble in other areas. He liked that the engines were his to care for. Except for watches, and special assignments, he set his own hours. As long as the ship performed, the Captain did not much care what schedule Addy kept.

  He even liked that cussed bastard John Brooks who was currently bullying the sub-light engines into submission on the other side of the engine control room. Most of the time. John was still pretty steamed about Addy stunning him on the bridge. John was big and strong, and Addy was small, but that meant nothing when the little pocket stunner discharged into the big Scot. John shouldn’t have gone off on the kid like that. Addy understood John’s anger. He’d had more friends on the Yan Luo than anyone on board, including John.

  Addy had done a postgrad fellowship with Zaara Udo in Lagos back on earth when she had been a tenured professor. She died a happy great-grandmother, long after Addy. He’d enjoyed catching up with her on the gate at Mirada whenever they visited. She was gone now because of stupidity and ignorance and that made Addy sad, but he didn’t blame the young pilot. It was foolish of Brooks to blame William for the choices of the company, but the company was not nearly so convenient a target for his anger as the clean-cut naval officer. Addy suspected that it did not help that William was exactly John’s type.

  “John, hand me that attenuator, will you?”

  Brooks grunted and passed over the module. “If you squeeze those damned capacitors any more, they’re going to explode.”

  “I’m not squeezing the capacitors. I’m partitioning them. We’re going to be jumping blind into systems that may very well have hostile enemies. We can’t afford to wait around while the capacitors charge. This way, we can take a short jump into the system and hold back just enough power to jump away in a hurry. We won’t get far, but it won’t matter since they don’t have FTL and they won’t know where we’ve gone.”

  “Partition? That sounds like absolute nonsense. I mean really, Addy. Do you just make this shit up to see if I’m paying attention?”

  “Just because no one’s done it before doesn’t mean it’s not a real thing. You just focus on damping the sub-light emissions so we can be sneaky.”

  “There’s only so much one can dampen,” John said stabbing his meaty fingers at the console. Addy thought about William’s visit to his little cave. He remembered the way the younger man’s face had fallen when Addy told him not to come back. Addy felt bad about that. He sighed. So much for keeping the kid from disrupting the peace of their usually amiable engine room.

  “You know, it might worthwhile to consult William on some of these drive modifications we’re making. He is the pilot after all.”

  “I’m a pilot,” John huffed. “We don’t need his fucking fleet snobbery in our engine room. We don’t need him at all. The Captain and I can manage the piloting just fine.”

  Addy overlooked “our engine room” choosing to focus on the topic at hand. “You and the Captain are fine survey pilots, but what we’re going into is not puttering around a system looking at rocks. We may be fighting for our lives. Like him or not, William has the training and experience to save our bacon in a fire fight.”

  John huffed again but did not argue the point.

  “If Jasco were here, you’d be consulting him on all the changes we are making.” Addy knew that was a rough thing for John to hear, but it was true and John knew it. “Jasco was a good pilot, and he would tell you that we need William.”

  The room remained conspicuously quiet. Addy let the silence sit until he heard John return to mucking with the dampers.

  “So,” Addy said keeping his gaze on the capacitor control interface, “when are you going to get your head out of your ass and ease up off the kid?”

  “Ease off?” John sneered. “He’s a fucking murderer.”

  “No, he was an unqualified junior naval officer under orders to lead an untrained reanimate army against an alien civilian ground force. The only thing he was more ignorant about than his job was his troops. He had no idea what was really going on. Were you not looking at him while you were foaming at the mouth? He wasn’t lying. He believed the Yan Luo workers were all drones.”

  “So what! Are drones not people?” John barked. “Do drones deserve to be slaughtered?”

  “To us, they are people,” Addy said. “To the living they are just useful leftovers. The company works very hard to keep the living in the dark.”

  John snorted, “you don’t have to work hard when you’re trying to keep fucking mushrooms in the dark. They don’t know because they don’t want to know.”

  “You were a mushroom once.” Addy said pointing a finger at John. “Don’t tell me you were any different. Did you really miss the bit where William said that half the workers survived?”

  “He’s a liar.”

  “I don’t think so.” Addy said shaking his head. “Neither does the Captain. You’re the conspiracy theorist. What sounds more likely: that the kid is lying, or that the company is?”

  “Then where are they?” John said staring right at him. Addy resisted his normal urge to avoid direct eye contact and stared back at his friend.

  “Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?” Addy said a note of sadness entering his voice. He shook his head again, “regardless of what you think he did, we all need to work together. This is some dangerous shit we’re doing. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re going to need him. You’re a fine survey pilot, but he’s got the training for this job. We’re all going to have to be on the top of our game to get out of this one alive. And it’s not just about us. Humanity is on the verge of a war, and I’m guessing we might be way outgunned.”

  “This is the same shit the Captain shoveled at me.”

  “Well then, when the smartest person on the ship and the Captain both give you the same advice, maybe you should listen.”

  “Fuck you, Addy.”

  “I told you, man, just the one time. That’s never really been my thing.”

  “Double fuck you, Addy.”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  Alex Nguyen had clearly forgotten more about stellar formation and arrangements than William would ever know. She was well preserved, for a multiple centenarian. She had large expressive eyes and symmetrical features. The laugh lines and crow’s feet merely softened her high cheekbones, taking nothing away from pleasing contours of her face. William tried to put a finger on what was bothering him. Of all the crew, Alex was the closest to what he thought of as a proper undead. She did not smile or give off any of
the subtle emotions and expressions he normally took for granted in regular conversation. All things the rest of the crew managed as easily as the living. Were they the odd ones, or was she? Was he?

  Alex was able to extrapolate a surprising amount of data about the systems they were to visit just from the spectral signatures of their stars. The Captain had been smart to pair them. William’s naval training, and avocation in military history had actually proven useful. He had been able to take Alex’s analyses and overlay possible configurations of military assets and infrastructure for each of the three systems on their course. The inhabited world at Rannit One orbited a rare, K-type star. This fact had Alex the closest to excited that William had seen her since he had met her.

  He pushed back from the bridge console, trying to think of what he was missing. William had suggested working on the bridge. They could have worked in the conference room or the mess, but social interactions were much more likely in those spaces. Alex’s tiny office behind the carbon filtration system did not really fit two grown humans. The bridge had everything they needed and was less likely to result in a run-in with Brooks, who spent most of his time in the drive room. William had no idea what he was going to do about the man. He understood why Brooks hated him. He thought William had callously killed off fellow reanimates. William would hate himself, too, in Brooks’ position. But William could not think of any way to convince the other man that he had tried, really tried to keep the Yan Luo workers alive–well, undead. Besides, William knew he was guilty of much worse. What had happened to the Rannit on Mirada was his fault.