AfterLife

by BL Craig

  “That’s so bloody sad,” William said, “and weirdly romantic.”

  “Yeah, he’s got a picture of her stashed somewhere. I haven’t seen it but John has,” Sarah said.

  William let that sit a moment.

  “I like to think of her like Petrarch’s Laura, Dante’s Beatrice, Tesla’s white pigeon.” Sarah said.

  “Tesla’s pigeon?” William said confused.

  “Nicola Tesla had a long-term romantic relationship with a pigeon.”

  “That’s not just some urban legend?” William asked skeptically.

  “Oh no, he told people about the pigeon.” She nodded her head and gave him a knowing look.

  “OK, I guess I can see that,” William said. “I mean maybe, but how does killing himself keep them together?”

  “He thought he would come back as a drone and they could work as FTL techs together.” She watched while William’s face ran through a range of confused configurations.

  “Really?” he finally said.

  “Really,” she said.

  “That’s just too sad. He gave up a productive life hoping to be a drone. Then ended up high-functioning. What happened to the drone?” he asked.

  “He won’t say,” she answered.

  “Wow, that is a seriously fucked up chain of events.”

  “Come on, admit it. You feel better about your life after hearing that.”

  “I don’t know. Do I? We are talking about suicide.”

  “Don’t think about the death, think about the amour,” she stretched the last word out with an exaggerated French accent.

  “You are a truly horrible person,” William said shaking his head. “That’s only funny like a video of someone falling down the stairs is funny.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “There’s a word for it. Schadenfreude.”

  “Ugh,” he said.

  “Come on, fess up,” she said pointing a finger at him. “You feel a little better after hearing that.”

  “I mean, I guess so, but also, I feel kind of dirty for feeling that way.” He shook his head again. “You really are a bad influence.”

  “Those are the best secrets,” she said. “The ones that make you feel gross. Admit it, you now have a burning desire to tell someone else.”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any such impulse,” he said affecting an official sounding tone. “But is there anyone on the ship that doesn’t know?” he half whispered.

  “Ha, you’re just as terrible as I am! I win! A dubious victory, I must admit, but the real question is, can you, in fact, sing?”

  * * *

  …

  * * *

  John had been headed to find Sarah. His official errand was to ask her to kindly get her bloody Tesla mess out of his workshop, but really he just wanted to talk. Maybe watch her paint. He was restless, frustrated, angry. The gentle rebuke from Addy stung more than Elva’s dressing down. John knew he was being irrational about the kid, but that knowledge only stoked his anger. Why was everyone so eager to get buddy-buddy with the person who had marched their friends and colleagues off to slaughter? Orders or not, he had done it. He had sent them against those guns and watched them die. Did not that say something about his character? Should he not be called to account instead of reward and coddled?

  John was working himself into a lather when he heard the voices up ahead. Sarah had told him where she was putting her next piece, just around the corner from where he was now. He stopped and listened. Of course, it was Butcher. He had attached himself to her like a leech. What did she see in him? John doubted it was the handsome face and trim body. John had only known Sarah to go for women, and only casually at that. Jasco, on the other hand, would have loved Butcher for exactly those reasons. John snorted thinking how fast Jasco would have maneuvered to get the boy to join them in bed. He had to ruefully acknowledge, if only to himself, that when Jasco was still here John might not have minded. He considered briefly the prospect of hate-fucking the little twit and shook his head in disgust.

  He could hear Sarah around the corner talking about her parents. Surely she would not tell Butcher the whole story. Sarah told almost no one about Emma.

  John had been the only one she had ever let see the rawness of her grief. He remembered well the night, years ago, when Sarah had cried on his shoulder. “The worst part is that Emma doesn’t need me.” Sarah had said, wiping ineffectively at her eyes with a shirt sleeve. “She has what she needs. She has Rachel and all of both our families. I hate it. A part of me wants her to feel that hole like I do, so at least, in some way, I am a part of her life.” Pain, it bound them all.

  Back in the now, John could hear Butcher talking. Telling his tragic backstory. John wanted to shout. To tell him to shut up. Tell him he did not deserve sympathy. But he stayed silent. He listened. And it was pain. It was terrible pain. Fuck, you Butcher. He was not going to feel sorry for the little shit. He turned on his heel and walked away.

  9

  Objective

  Yes, William could sing. It took him a couple of days to master the devilish little song she had sicked on him. No doubt the crew got tired of him constantly humming it as he went about work, reciting the lyrics in his head. Alex whistled along once or twice. He also had fun looking up several of the military references. “Caractacus's uniform” turned out to be little more than a loincloth.

  They were half a day away from the first possible Rannit system when the Captain called a staff meeting to go over each team’s progress and finalize the plan. William was excited to share everything that he and Alex had come up with, but nervous, too—He had been assiduously avoiding Brooks and did not look forward to being stuck in the same room together. Knowing more about the man’s pain just made William feel worse.

  Brooks came in last, while everyone except William watched him. William saw the Captain’s eyes narrow in a warning. Brooks pulled out a chair next to Addy and sat down.

  “Alright folks, let’s keep this focused and on topic. We’ll start with the engineering projects and then move to our strategy.”

  “A moment, Captain,” Sarah said, putting her hand up. “There is an important matter that needs be addressed before we start. Mr. Butcher here lost a bet and he needs to pay up.”

  “Bets are sacred,” the Captain said it like it was a mantra, a slight smile curving her lips. “What has she got you for?”

  “A song,” cut in Sarah, “to be performed before the entire crew.”

  “Alright, Butcher take it away.”

  William pushed his chair out and stood. “As per the bet, I will be performing the Major General song from Pirates of Penzance, by Gilbert and Sullivan.” There was a small collective snicker.

  William actually had a decent baritone, nothing to write home about, but they could not write home anyway. He had decided to embrace the ludicrous and sing lustily without restraint. After the first few bars, everyone was smiling at the ridiculous litany of Major-Generaling. To his great surprise, Brooks joined in with Sarah on the chorus backing him up. He only messed up a little bit on the “crimes of Heliogabalus.” At the end there was enthusiastic applause.

  “On to business,” said the Captain. “You’ll send me a copy of that, yes?” she asked Sarah.

  “Of course.”

  “Wait, you were recording that?” William had not noticed any device, or even considered the possibility of one.

  “Of course.”

  He groaned.

  “Haruna, please report on your upgrades.”

  “The partitioning of the capacitors is going slower than I’d hoped, but the tests look promising. I won’t be able to have it done in time for this first system. We can’t change it over during FLT but we will be ready to do the switch when we stop at the next system. Better news, John has been able to substantially reduce sub-light emissions. There are some efficiency costs, but nothing we can’t absorb. This will, of course, be greatly improved if we can keep the drives pointed away from
any in-system sensors. Emissions pointed away from sensors will be virtually undetectable. The IR profile reduction has been less successful. We’ve been able to block the biggest heat signatures in the engineering compartment. Sarah’s ultra-black paint has been the most effective of our stealth efforts, but short of going planet-side and spraying the entire ship in atmosphere, most of which would burn off on exit anyway, we can’t gin up a stealth ship. Still, they won’t be able to extrapolate much about our drive capacities.”

  “Thanks for the hard work on that. It’s honestly better than I could have expected,” said the Captain. “Clarke, how go the probe modifications?”

  “Tesla is ready to roll. I added some mass spec and analytic modules. That way, the probe will be working the data for us when it’s on its own. That will help offset the information gap while we’re waiting for data. I’ve given it a new paint job that should make it very difficult to detect unless someone is standing by a porthole when it coasts by. I also downloaded some basic evasive maneuvers and set parameters for it to make a run for it in case of detection. The sub-light engines installed on the probes are more than a bit overpowered. They can pull twenty gees of acceleration for a short time, so unless an opponent has a significantly higher velocity to start with, the probes should be able to outrun anything they come across.

  “Complete self-destruct isn’t possible, but the data drives will go nice and crispy in the event of capture. If this first system is as empty as we expect then I’ll get a chance to do some fine tuning based on field data. Edison is getting the same upgrades right now. It’s going to take a little longer. The drilling array removal hasn’t been going well. I’ve got Mead buttoning up my aborted attempt to disassemble it in the tube. I think the best way to proceed will be to send it out and bring it in through the cargo bay.”

  Brooks and Addy groaned.

  “Yeah, sorry guys, I’ll net down the durables and get the loaders on moving the rest of the gear we stowed in there to temporary locations.”

  “You’re killing me Clarke,” Brooks moaned. “We just got all the junk Haruna dumped in there quasi-organized.”

  “Stow it, sailors,” interrupted the Captain. “Ok, Butcher, update us on what you and Nguyen have got on this system.”

  “Oh, one more thing,” Sarah piped in. “You’ll all be pleased to know that Karl Marx has been rehydrated and is currently gobbling up all the nutrient rich substrate I can brew. Hopefully by the time we need it there will be plenty to go around.”

  “Is that your stinky radiation-eating fungus?” asked Addy.

  “Yup. If we find ourselves needing to get up close and personal with a pulsar or some other nasty, we can use Karl Marx to absorb the excess radiation that penetrates our shielding. We may be largely immune to mutations, but radiation burns still suck. The plan is to grow enough to protect the crew in a small space, like this conference room, which is conveniently locate amidship.”

  “So, are we going to have to coat ourselves in that shit like mud yetis?” asked Brooks.

  “You only wish you could pull off mud yeti. No, I’ve built a modular rack we can move into position to act as a shield. We’ll have to all cram together behind it and forego our lovely consoles, but we can make it work. We’re not going to want to stay parked in front of a pulsar for any longer than we have to, anyway.”

  “Why are we worried about a pulsar?” asked the Captain.

  “Alex said there is one in the region past the mapped worlds that looks to be in line with the other gates. It takes a while to grow in quantities. I figured, better safe than sorry. Also, it’s good practice for William to learn how to bootstrap a rapid grow.”

  “That works for me. Is that everything, Clarke?”

  “Yup.”

  “Take it away, Butcher.”

  William cleared his throat and pulled up the projection of the first system on the way to Rannit One. “Alex has made this projection based on imaging and the movement of other nearby stars. The star is a pretty standard red dwarf. We’re looking at three rocky planetoids in the inner system and two gas giants, or maybe one brown dwarf. Nothing in the habitable zone. One eccentric planetoid that is currently near its furthest position from the sun. It’s a system we would certainly consider for resource extraction via FTL, but unless there are some really rare materials it’s not worth building a gate. It’s closer to alien space, so there may be some Cosi beacons or even a station. We don’t know much, or really anything, about how the Cosi operate. If there are artificial structures, we would expect to see them at these estimated Lagrange points”—William highlighted the spots in the projection— “and in orbit around the planets.”

  He flipped through the most likely configurations they had come up with.

  “Given the possible system arrangements, we’ve opted to drop out of FTL about mid system on the Earthwards side of the sun above the stellar disc. If our passive sensing reveals anything we need a closer look at, we can drop Tesla here,” he said, indicating a spot on the map, “and do a quick hop to pick it up on the other side. This will take several days at constant acceleration and weeks of coasting.”

  “As much as I’d like any data we can get, we’ll only launch a probe if we see something that indicates an alien presence,” said the Captain. “We need to be as fast as we reasonably can. People are waiting on this data.”

  William pulled up the specs for the second system and went over the plan, which was very similar.

  “Rannit One is more complicated, but we also know a fair amount about it. The star is K-type with a large system of seven planets and a generous asteroid belt. The Rannit colony is located on the fourth planet from the sun. It has about 1.15 times the mass of Earth with two small moons. The two gates are located here,” he said, pointing on the display, “and here.” We propose to drop in system, again, above the stellar disc and drop Tesla here along this path. It will execute a ten gee burn toward the second moon, cut the drives at this point and swing around, using the moon’s gravity to coast right past the planet and the gates. The drives will be pointed away from the Rannit infrastructure during burn, and once around the moon, it will coast for a minimum of three weeks. The Tilly will continue on to the subsequent gates and pick Tesla up on the return trip. It should have plenty of time to get lots of imaging of Rannit activity in the area, with particular focus on the gates.”

  “Thanks, Butcher, Nguyen.” The Captain nodded at them and they sat. She said, “Now, here is what I’ve been working on.” She flicked a document to everyone. William looked at his nexus to see the mission outline. “Among the data stack we received at Mirada is a fairly robust Rannit translation VI. It comes with a lot of caveats. Rannit communication is reported to be highly context dependent. The relative social positions of the speakers, the time of day, and intent can radically change the meaning of any communication. The research conducted prior to breakdown of relations shows that Rannit social structures are fairly complex. Not hierarchical, per se, but there are intricate social memberships, similar to castes—but evidently there is mobility between groups. Anyway, we need to be careful in how we interpret any communications we come across. We can assume that their important communications will be encrypted, but they might have open comms for short range, as we do in ship. Nguyen will be scooping up everything she can while we’re in system, but most analysis will have to wait for expert review back in Earth Federation space.”

  “One major goal of our mission is to remain undetected, which means not communicating directly with any Rannit. However, just in case, Nguyen will be uploading the translation VI to everyone’s nexuses. We’ll also be activating our auditory implants.”

  There were groans around the table.

  “I know, they suck, but they do work and will be hard to detect on casual examination. So, practice your subvocalization just in case we have a need to communicate covertly. Make sure to keep them muted so we don’t all have to hear the sound of Addy’s gum chewing.” She star
ed pointedly at the engineer. “Yes, Butcher.”

  “Implants?”

  “Really blowing through those orientation materials, aren’t you?” She was smirking as she said it, so William only felt mildly chagrined. She tapped her neck just under the jaw. “The implants allow us to hear and talk to one another when traditional comms are down. Good for when someone accidentally gets spaced. They’ll pick up regular vocalizations and subvocalizations. With practice you can have whole conversations and someone standing next to you won’t know. You can turn it on and fiddle with the settings using your nexus, or in an emergency tap out ‘shave and a haircut’ on this spot to activate.” She rapped a familiar pattern out loud on the tabletop while tapping the spot under her jaw.

  William tensed in his seat. If he had known about the implants on Mirada, he could have easily communicated with all the drones. He could have kept tabs on them when they entered the city and stopped the worst of the killing. He should have asked Hank if the drones had a way of communicating. He felt a throbbing rising up at his temples.

  Nearly drowned out by the rushing in his ears, William heard Addy ask, “Shave and haircut?”

  His breathing was picking up and his chest felt tight. He put his hands on the table, prepared to get up and leave the room, but then he saw the soft glow under his skin from the port. It was throwing some warning he could not parse. He remembered Sarah’s instructions and pulled his hands back under the table, discretely tapping his wrist three times. He glanced at Sarah as the soothing wave of serotonin hit. She was looking at him, an eyebrow slightly cocked in question. He smiled wanly back. He still felt agitated, but the need to flee had passed. As he calmed, the conversation that had continued without him surfaced in his awareness.