by Max Barry
“We just talked about this.”
“Gilly?”
“Yes, Gilly.”
He rubbed his face. “Beanfield, I feel like dirt. It slipped out. Can you give me a break?”
“You are not to tell Gilly. I’m very serious about this. Why do you feel like dirt?”
“Gilly hit me in the head with a ninja star.”
She stared.
“It’s fine. It won’t happen again. I just want to get some sleep.”
“I’m pulling your medical records, FYI.”
“Aw,” he said. “Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
He rolled his tongue around his gums. “You’re going to see some hydrexalin usage.”
“Shit, Paul,” she said.
“We get serious wounds. The ship suggests it.”
“I’m banning that game.”
“Beanfield. It’s all I have. We’re in VZ, what do you want me to do?”
He had her there. The reality was, Anders needed something. He couldn’t be left to his own devices. All his devices had built-in self-destructs.
“No more hydrexalin, though,” she said. “I’m cutting that off. You need anything serious, you ask me or Jackson for authorization.”
“What am I supposed to do when I get hit? Grin and bear it?”
“Figure it out,” she said. “You need a challenge.”
* * *
—
Anders was getting hydrexalin, a lot of it. After reviewing the records, she became sure he’d constructed this new game for the primary purpose of going to Medical and getting drugged up. She went back through the timestamps of his visits and found they lined up neatly with other Anders behavioral incidents, including the time he’d dropped his pants in briefing. It was good that she’d caught this.
She tweaked her VZ plan. “Stop me if this is crazy,” she told Jackson in Con-1, a tiny conference room on A Deck, during a briefing. Captain and Life Officer only; these were for discussing crew behavior. “I’m thinking of instituting a hug program.”
Jackson said nothing for long seconds. Jackson was not completely convinced of the need for a Life Officer in the first place, Talia had picked up. She gave off an unmistakable everything-about-you-is-useless vibe. But, you know, Service disagreed, so.
“We could do it a few different ways,” Talia said. “A special event, if we wanted to make a thing of it, or a new informal routine to end regular social meetings. I’m leaning toward the latter, even though it means blurring the lines of authority. To, you know, slip it under the radar. So it’s not so artificial.”
“A hug program,” Jackson said.
“Yes.” She tried to wait Jackson out and failed. “I think we need it.”
“Why?”
Because I’m a little worried that we’re losing Anders, Jolene. That we’re going to have an engagement and only three people will call in. Some things about the crew, like Anders’s hydrexalin usage, Jackson couldn’t be told, because it would only undermine her relationship with them. Jackson was intelligent and determined and an inspiring role model for girls around the world, but honestly, there were holes in that woman’s brain. Pieces that had been left behind six years before in Fornina Sirius, where thousands of people had died and the survivors took three months to crawl home and then never talked about it except in Service-polished platitudes. Jackson was incapable of sympathy, for example. If Talia said, I think we need to work around Anders’s psychological fragility, Jackson would nod and ask her to explain, but inside she would be clutching at the table and dry-heaving, because they were soldiers on a warship and if you didn’t like it, you could step out the fucking door and wait for them to swing by on the way back.
A roleplay that might have been useful to Talia, back at Camp Zero:
Good morning, Captain Jackson! I’ve been thinking that rather than follow the exact same routine for every day of our four-year tour, perhaps we could mix things up by—
Stop right there, Life. Do you think this is a game?
No, Captain.
Does this look like a vacation to you?
No, Captain.
Do you think the salamanders swap around their attack formations for fun every once in a while? Do you think they like to “mix things up”?
I just mean that repeating the same actions over and over can become psychologically numbing for—
Hold up, Life. Do you think I’m about to reverse my position based on something you just said?
Well—
Do you think I got where I am by admitting fault? Let me educate you, Life Officer Beanfield: I did it by sticking to my opinions in the face of prevailing counterevidence. I stopped evolving as a human being six years ago, Lieutenant. I found that I quite liked it when people called me a war hero and decided it meant I didn’t need to change a goddamn thing thereafter. Allow me to ask you a question, Life: Have you seen close combat? Because I was in the general vicinity when some other people did and to my way of thinking that makes me an authority. Do you see this sidearm I’m wearing?
Yes, I was wondering why you needed—
Do you think I understand it’s purely ceremonial? Because I don’t. I sleep with it underneath my pillow. All I am is symbols and talismans and empty heroism, Life, and let me ask you: Do you really believe I’m capable of hearing other people’s ideas as anything other than a personal attack?
Noooooo.
Talia shrugged and said, “Call it a Beanfield thing. I like to touch. I’m a hugger.”
Jackson’s eyebrows rose. “Do you want a hug?”
“Nah,” Talia said. “Get out of here.”
Jackson smirked. They moved on to other business.
When they concluded, with nothing actually concluded, Talia climbed down to her deck, sat on her bed, and turned off ping. Then she sobbed for a while. That was a good thing, by the way. No one should get the wrong idea. When you were this far from home, you had to cry every now and again. She hid it, of course, because, not a good look, your Life Officer in tears. The others might fail to realize it was an outlet, not a breakdown. That she was simply acknowledging the reality that what she was doing out here was incredibly lonely and left you vulnerable to the most surprising things, like Jackson offering a hug. Because goddamn. She would actually love that.
She cried and then was done. She wiped her face and checked herself in the mirror. Not ideal. The truth was written plainly on her face; it would be apparent to a close observer. But there weren’t any of those on the ship. Once Gilly had surprised her when they crossed paths on the way to an engagement, her face literally red, wet, her eyes bloodshot, and Gilly’s eyebrows had shot up, and she had panted and said, “I just smashed the elliptical,” and he relaxed and nodded like: Oh, right, of course.
She set down the cloth. Enough. A planet relied on her. She was here to do a job. She hit the tactile panel and went to do it.
3
[Gilly]
THE PUZZLE
The same valve in the SPT-1 hydrate filters blew twice more in the next five days. After Gilly patched it and traced the fault back to a pressure imbalance at a junction, a different pipe two decks down that had nothing to do with any of that exploded, sending water cascading down a corridor, sloshing into chutes and falling like rain in the ladder shaft.
“I thought you fixed that,” Anders said. They had met to play ninja stars, but now this had happened.
“So did I.” He shook his head in frustration.
“Anyway,” Anders said. “We playing?”
“This invalidates my whole theory of the problem. I have to figure it out all over again.”
“It’s just water.”
“The symptom is water,” he said. “The cause is unknown.”
Anders just stared at him. “So we playing?”
“What?”
“Mysterious water. Shit going wrong for no reason.”
“You’re describing my life,” Anders said.
He had to fetch his tools. “We’ll play later.”
“Come on, Gilly. The crabs can fix it.”
“If they could fix it, it wouldn’t keep happening.”
“Unnh,” Anders said.
Gilly didn’t answer.
“So, later?” Anders said.
“Later,” he said.
* * *
—
But later he went to his cabin to study the latest attack pattern. He pulled up old footage of an early encounter at Moniris Outer, where Silver Bark, a destroyer, had come upon a salamander hive and begun hitting it with fusion missiles, which were what they used back then, before Providences. He watched the hive break apart and spill salamanders. At first, their movements were chaotic and random, all anger and no direction, like ants boiling from a disturbed nest. Some moved toward Silver Bark but most didn’t, and the destroyer picked them off leisurely with drones. That was their mistake: taking too long. Because one of the salamanders came close enough to huk a quark-gluon slug at the ship, and the instant that slug punctured the hull, the entire swarm turned and plunged toward it.
This was swarm behavior, Gilly knew: a bunch of relatively dumb creatures acting in ways that could appear coordinated. But there was no battlefield commander steering seven hundred salamanders into Silver Bark’s heart, just many individuals responding to the same environmental cues.
He paused the playback on Silver Bark taking fire. He’d seen the rest: the desperate retreat and escape. Their survival had been celebrated at the time, but the next encounter after this was Fornina Sirius, the greatest defeat of the war, where salamanders displayed none of this milling around but rather attacked with coordination and precision from the beginning. Ever since, it had been clear that they learned quickly and couldn’t be taken for an unintelligent enemy. It was just a different kind of intelligence. Service had a hard policy of total extermination in order to prevent the dissemination of any tactical feedback to the rest of the species.
He pulled up Fire of Montana’s combat log and paged through engagements. Montana had been out a long time, and Gilly had the idea that maybe they weren’t sticking strictly to policy. This was a silly idea—it was two silly ideas, actually: that Montana would be so careless, and that if they were, Gilly could detect it first. Service liked to promote the idea that the war was being won by human pluck and determination, but the truth was that every part of it was guided or directly driven by AI systems so effective that Gilly sometimes wondered if he needed to be here. Random pipe failures notwithstanding, the ship had performed well above his expectations, to the point where it seemed capable of going ahead and hunting down salamander hives without any human input.
But he liked a challenge. Beanfield was right about that: He was a puzzler. He had come out here partly because it was the most challenging thing you could do and partly because of the allure of discovery: of exploring places no one had ever been and answering questions about what they found there. Maybe that required a kind of creativity the AI didn’t possess. Maybe he could beat it to an answer just once. Maybe not. But it was fun to test himself.
* * *
—
They had no engagements for five days, then three in a row. Each time, the salamanders performed a new variation of turns and the ship’s pulse fried them slightly later. Nine days after that, they were called to station and there were no enemies, only a wide field of debris, which seemed to be composed of dead salamanders.
“Battlefield,” Gilly said. “Maybe Montana went through here.”
“There’s nothing to kill,” Anders said.
“No, doesn’t look like it.”
“Then why call us to station?”
“I’m sorry,” Jackson said, “do you have somewhere to be?”
“It’s annoying,” Anders said. “Getting here and finding there’s nothing to do.”
“We’re over half a million kills,” Beanfield said. “Not enough for you?”
“Not even close.” He sounded irritable. “This is bullshit.”
“Hive debris at one fifty-niner,” Gilly said.
“I see it,” said Jackson. “Weapons, this battleship was not designed for your convenience. It was designed to blow the ever-loving crap out of an alien species.”
“So call me if you see any.”
“Command, I’m getting something in that hive debris,” Gilly said, before Jackson could start tearing strips off Anders.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
“I’m not seeing any movement larger than our minimums.”
“Yeah. But there’s something that’s not spin.” He brought up a visual and filtered out the wrecked hive. Some part of a salamander was in there, encased in resin. Beneath the resin, something twitched.
“I see it,” Jackson said.
“What is that?” said Beanfield.
“Wriggler,” Gilly said.
“What’s a wriggler?”
“I don’t know. Something that’s wriggling. Can we hold here?”
“Requesting,” Jackson said. The ship would either comply or not, depending on its threat assessment. After a moment, the engines began to rotate on his board. “Green-lit. Prepping for deceleration burn.”
“Thanks.” He queued up probes. “I’m seeing more of them.”
“More wrigglers?” Beanfield said.
“Yeah.”
“Where?” Jackson said. “I’m not seeing that.”
“They’re not moving, but they match composition. All over.”
“You’re referring to the body parts?”
“Yeah.”
“What?” said Beanfield.
“After an engagement, we leave a lot of salamander pieces behind,” Gilly said. “Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.”
“And one of them is wriggling?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Ship wants to move,” Jackson said.
“That’s an advisory?”
“Yes.”
If the ship really wanted to move, it would go ahead and move. “I want to wait a minute and run a few more scans, if that’s okay.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Well,” he said.
“Say it.”
“Pregnant salamander,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Beanfield said. No one answered. “They can be pregnant?”
“No,” Gilly said. “Not that we know. Soldiers and workers are sexless. We’ve never encountered a breeder type.”
“So what’s this?”
“It’s a dead salamander body part that’s wriggling. If you have any more ideas for what that could be, go ahead.”
“Well, heck,” Beanfield said, after a moment.
“Ship has upgraded advisory to recommendation,” Jackson said. “It wants to move.”
“It always wants to move,” Gilly said. “It’s probably calculating how many more salamanders it could kill if we weren’t sitting here.”
“I’m doing a similar calculation myself.”
“I don’t understand how they are at all,” Beanfield said suddenly. “How they come from nowhere and throw themselves at us like they don’t care if they live or die.”
“That part is simple enough,” Gilly said. “Salamanders are clones. Genetically identical.”
“So?”
“So life is really about gene propagation. It’s common for animals to act in ways that protect their wider gene pool, even when that risks their own lives.”
“Which animals?” Beanfield said. “Beca
use that definitely doesn’t describe me.”
“You’re literally on a warship,” Gilly said. “It’s what we’re doing right now.”
“Hold on,” she said. “I didn’t go to war to protect a gene pool. I did it for the health plan.”
“Well, it’s cute that you think that,” Gilly said. “But you don’t have as much free will as you think. Every time we think we’re choosing to be selfless, or noble, or doing our patriotic duty, or sacrificing ourselves for our kids, we’re really obeying a hardwired genetic instinct. We wrap it up in a nice story, but it’s just biology. The closer any two people are genetically, the more likely one is to make sacrifices for the other. The same goes for animals. And salamanders.” Results from the scans began to fill his board. “I mean, fundamentally, the war isn’t even between people and salamanders. It’s between human genes and salamander genes. They’re just using us to fight it, as their throwaway survival machines.”
“Let’s put a pin in this fascinating philosophical discussion,” Jackson said. “We’re mid-engagement.”
“Body part appears to be part of the hind quarters of a standard soldier class,” Gilly said. He couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice. “Doesn’t appear to be anything new.”
“Then what’s moving?”
“There’s a puncture in the surrounding resin. The material inside is escaping chaotically under pressure.”
“All right,” Jackson said. “So it’s a leaking body part. Let’s get this bus moving.”
“Not pregnant?” said Beanfield. “No baby salamanders?”
“No.” He hesitated. “Although . . . this could be how they do it.”
“Do what?”
“Learn. They could create a store and recover it later.”
“A store of what?”
“Knowledge. Memories. Other species use pheromones for communication. Hive species, like ants. They excrete a chemical composition that encodes information about what they’ve experienced, which others can read later. It could be like that.”