by Max Barry
Beanfield: “I’m on my way.”
“Anders, help me!” He couldn’t keep the crabs away. He remembered trying to cut his way into Eng-13, unsuccessfully, because when the crabs walled up a door, they did so in a way his tools couldn’t penetrate. “Anders!” Finally he abandoned the doorway, ran to the core bank, and slapped the housing. “We have to leave!”
Anders glanced at him. Gilly pointed at the doorway. Anders’s gaze shifted to it and Gilly had never seen anyone look so shocked. At last, Anders got it. Gilly extended a hand but Anders came down boots first, at speed, and knocked Gilly off balance. He fell to one knee. To his astonishment, Anders left him. He fled for the door and began to wriggle through it. His hips caught and Gilly watched his legs flailing. There was a sizzling, Anders getting too close to the burning metal the crabs were weaving. Then his legs disappeared. A moment later, Anders’s face appeared outside the hole. “Gilly!” He reached back through the hole, as if leaving Gilly behind hadn’t just been an act of monumental assholishness.
Gilly bent and tried to climb through, but then stopped. He took a step back and shook his head. It was too small. If he tried, he would be cut in half. He would be welded to the door.
“Come on, Gilly!” The edges of the hole glowed hotly. He could see the tips of little pincers working, eating away the gap. Anders roared. “We’re losing Gilly!”
The crabs froze. Gilly hadn’t realized how loud they’d been until they fell silent. The burning glow from their pincers began to fade. There was a small hole in the doorway. Enough to squeeze through if he was determined, he thought. He breathed.
“Kill switch is activated,” said Jackson.
He sank to his haunches. His legs were trembling. What Jackson had said was terrible. But he couldn’t find it within himself to object. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Jackson. “Stay put. We’re coming.”
* * *
—
He heard Jackson and Beanfield coming down the corridor, kicking crabs. By this time, he’d been able to run a board and develop a sense of what was working. The kill switch had taken out the AI but left essential systems running, including comms and basically all of Life. Jackson’s face appeared in the hole. Her eyes roved over him. “You okay?”
He nodded.
“You want some help getting out of there?”
“Yes, please.” Anders had disappeared; Gilly didn’t know where to. He was trying not to think about Anders. When he did, anger rushed through him like water slopping over a dam. He had things to do before he gave in to that.
He stowed the board and slid his arms and head through the hole. It was tight and he became stuck and had to ask for help. Jackson and Beanfield seized his wrists and pulled on him like a breech birth and then he flopped to the floor, scattering crabs.
Jackson moved to inspect the door, where crabs dangled, inert but still clinging to the metal. “How long did this take them?”
“Only a few minutes.” He found his feet. “We should reactivate the AI.” They had been dark for twelve minutes. Technically, the exterior scans were working, but they returned too much raw data to parse. Anything could be out there.
Jackson nodded. “Eng-5?” He nodded. They began to wade down the corridor. “Good to know the kill switch works.”
“Before we bring back the ship,” Beanfield said, “can we talk about how it might react?”
Gilly blinked. Jackson said, “Pardon me?”
“The first time we drilled it, it walled up a room. We might want to expect another reaction.”
“I tell you what,” Jackson said. “First we’ll get operational, then we can psychoanalyze the ship.” She resumed walking. When they reached Eng-5, Gilly glanced around the doorway, as if there might be crabs lurking in the crevices. But the room was clean. He moved to a core housing and activated its board.
“I just think—” said Beanfield.
“Life, your stock is not high right now,” said Jackson.
Beanfield closed her mouth. Gilly said, “I’m ready to deactivate the kill switch.”
“Do it.”
He thumbed the board. For a moment, there was nothing, just time to contemplate the empty horror of a ship with a comatose AI, drifting forever. Then he detected stirrings in the core processes. “We have signal.”
“AI is back?”
“Uh . . .” He was seeing something in the readings that he didn’t want to.
“Gilly?”
“It’s online. But it’s performing a cold restart.”
“We’re decelerating,” Beanfield said. “You feel that?”
“Yes,” Jackson said. “What does a cold restart mean?”
“It means it’s initializing every single process from scratch. That could take a while.”
“How long?”
“Hard to estimate.” He switched into diagnostics.
“Do it anyway.”
“An hour.”
Beanfield inhaled. Jackson said, “We have an hour with no AI?”
“Potentially. Engines are resetting. Life is resetting. Armor is online but unmanaged. Weapons is online but unmanaged. Environmental scanning is online but unmanaged.”
“Do we have them or not?”
“They’re functional but the AI isn’t controlling them. Everything we want to make work, we have to do ourselves.”
There was silence. “All right,” Jackson said. “This is a manual alert. Crew to station. Let’s see what we can do.”
He felt reluctant to leave the board, but she was right: He could do more from station. They departed Eng-5 for the corridor. The mass of crabs lay still, an ankle-deep carpet. They began to wade through it. So many crabs, Gilly thought. Apparently the ship hadn’t recycled them after it finished rebuilding Materials Fabrication. It had decided to keep them around.
Ahead, a column of crabs leaped into the air, slapped the ceiling, and fell back down.
They froze. “Uh,” Beanfield said.
The crabs didn’t move again.
Beanfield prodded one with a boot. “Is this how they wake up?”
“No,” Gilly said. He had seen something like this before, though. When he’d watched the previous attack on playback, the time the salamanders got close enough to cause some real damage. You couldn’t see the huks themselves—they were too small and fast—but you could see the destruction that followed them. You could see when one passed through a room, because everything that wasn’t nailed down was tossed into the air like confetti.
“Shit,” Jackson said. “Move!”
Behind, he heard another small explosion. The clattering of crabs hitting the ceiling.
“Anders, attend station! This is not a drill. We’re under attack!” The corridor branched and Jackson headed for Command while he and Beanfield made for the ladder shaft. In Gilly’s ear, Jackson called for Anders, with no response.
“An attack?” Beanfield said. “Now?”
He had to bring up Armor. He would have to do it manually, because the AI wouldn’t complete cold restart in time. If they were already taking fire, salamanders were close. They were way too close.
“Anders!” Beanfield said. “We need you!”
They reached the ladder. He threw open the hatch. Here they had to part ways: Beanfield up, him down. If the movement system was inactive, she was in for a climb. He turned to her to say this and the hatch was pulled out of his hands. The wall burst open like ripe fruit. Huk, he thought. We’ve been hit. There was an excruciating force, like something trying to pull him via his forehead. He reached for something to hold on to but everything was falling to pieces and there was nothing.
8
[Anders]
THE ENEMY
Anders loved guns. If Camp Zero had been nothing but close-combat training, he would have st
ayed there forever. But by the time he got there, Service didn’t do that; instead, it did Providence-class battleships that could kill things from five hundred thousand miles away. He’d asked once, stuck up his hand and said, “Sir, when do we get to the close-combat training, sir!” and the drill sergeant came down the line and eyeballed him and said, “Candidate Paul Anders, you want to know what to do upon close contact with the enemy?” and he said, “Yes, sir! Want to know the best way to kill them, sir!” and the sergeant said, “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Candidate Anders! Now bend down and grab your ankles! Get right down there! Now, Candidate Anders,” said the sergeant, once Anders had complied, “commence kissing your ass good-bye!” This turned out to not be a joke. The sergeant waited until he made smacking sounds. “Candidate Anders is demonstrating correct protocol in the face of a close encounter with the enemy,” said the sergeant, “because, by God, if any of you shit-stains let them anywhere near your personal being, you deserve everything that will happen to you.”
Anders hated the ship more than he could say, but he liked its guns. He’d seen an early concept video while riding the bus, and those laser batteries crawling around the hull, converging into place, locking in, swiveling, lining up, and discharging the collective wrath of the human race in one direction . . . he’d replayed that over and over until a crazy idea took hold in his brain: that he might want to make crew. It was crazy because he could barely stand the bus, with people on all sides who might press close at any moment, with its thin, stale air. But in the video, the Providence had looked big. And it had big guns. So maybe. Maybe.
Of course, Service had tricked him. Service was lies from beginning to end, and one of the lies was that a Providence Weapons Officer got to do anything more intimate with a laser battery than observe its numbers from station. It was incredibly frustrating. Eventually he asked Gilly to open a small-arms locker. He’d been thinking about that for a while, and it would have been glorious, but Gilly wouldn’t play along. “I’m not doing that, Anders,” Gilly had said, like he was talking to a child. Gilly had been hanging out with Beanfield around then and so became serious and not fun. When Gilly and Beanfield spent time together, it was like Gilly’s testicles, small to begin with, climbed right up inside his body, so that anytime Anders wanted to do something interesting, Gilly coughed and got nervous. Anders’s idea was to get a gun, sneak up behind Gilly, and bam, plug him. Not badly. He just wanted Gilly to yell and fall to the deck and remember how to have fun.
It would be even better if Anders could figure out how to open a small-arms locker by himself, because they were alarmed. There would be a tone, and everyone would think, Who the fuck is opening an arms locker? and realize: Anders.
They were family out here, him and Gilly and Beanfield and Jackson. One thing Anders had figured out in life—maybe the only thing—was that family was what you could trust. Even if it was bad, you could trust it like that. The four of them were stuck with each other out here, and that meant none of the other shit mattered, like how Gilly was unlike anyone Anders had ever known, and if you asked him even something stupid and simple, like who had a better ass, Beanfield or Jackson, there would be a half-second pause, the gears in Gilly’s brain turning, and then he would produce a careful, inoffensive response, like: I haven’t thought about it. From how Gilly acted, everything they ever said was recorded by Service for permanent archive. Which he guessed was true, but that wasn’t the point; the point was that Gilly shouldn’t care. Anders couldn’t give two shits what Service thought, but Gilly did; Gilly gave shits about everything. Sometimes Gilly was the alien to Anders. Or the ship, thinking in ways he couldn’t understand. But that was fine. Anders didn’t need to understand Gilly to know they were in this together, and would be until the end, and that he would give his life for Gilly in a heartbeat.
Gilly had once asked him what he was planning to do when they got home. It wasn’t something Anders had thought about; he was out here to kill salamanders and didn’t want to consider what came after. “Because the way our numbers are tracking,” Gilly said, “I think we’re going to be received pretty well back home.”
This had made Anders laugh. “Gilly, no one will care about our numbers.”
Gilly looked puzzled. “Of course they will. That’s why we’re here.”
“What people think about the war has nothing to do with what happens. If Service wants us to be heroes, they’ll make us heroes. If they don’t, they won’t.”
Gilly was silent and Anders realized he’d strayed into forbidden territory. Beanfield would not be pleased. He wasn’t supposed to disillusion Gilly of his fairy tales. But it was amazing to Anders how naive Gilly could be. He was crazy smart in ways Anders could barely appreciate but swallowed everything Service told him like a child.
“I don’t think people can ignore our numbers,” Gilly said.
He could see Gilly getting aggravated, so he let it go. The thing was, Anders wasn’t even going near the other fairy tale Gilly was suggesting, which was that the ship was an impregnable fortress that could never fail. That was the biggest fairy tale of all, in his opinion. In Anders’s experience, everything failed. “If you say so.”
“I do say so,” Gilly said.
* * *
—
After watching Gilly almost get trapped in Eng-5, he turned off his ping, removed his film, and jogged through the corridors to Rig-1. Rig-1 was his favorite place on the ship. It was basically the intersection of three corridors, but weirdly wide, with more room than he’d found anywhere else. He sat on the floor with his back against a wall and could see for fifty yards straight ahead, and the same when he turned his head left and right. He came here a lot, for respite from the feeling that the ship was closing on him like a vise.
He missed hydrexalin. The problem with Rig-1 was the silence, during which his brain strayed to bad places. He had to keep busy or else he would start revisiting the past, and not even the worst places, which by now were so well trodden that they’d developed something of a hard crust, becoming memories of memories, scenes that played out behind filtered glass, but instead smaller things, faces, expressions, little cruelties, none of which most people knew about, of course, because Service had taken him and buffed and polished until those parts were all gone, and the person he saw on the feeds he didn’t even recognize.
He had gone a little crazy in the last months before they shipped out. He had kept expecting someone to say, Wait, we’re sending Paul Anders? That’s a mistake. But no one did. No matter how much of an asshole he was, or how clear he made it that he was unsuited to the role, they remained intent on sending him out on a spacecraft—a spacecraft, for fuck’s sake—which was, it turned out, a hell of a lot smaller on the inside than it appeared from the exterior. The gap between who he was and who he was presented to be in public became a chasm, and he had the idea that if only he pushed enough, it would become untenable, something would have to break, and whichever way it went, for better or worse, things would make sense again. There would be no more gap. There were many girls in those months, and one of them, whose name he couldn’t remember but whose face he would never forget, jumped on his back, just slammed herself on there, and they were in the dark with the curtains drawn and the old terror burst inside him and he threw her off with such force that her head had struck the bedside table. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, but it was the worst; she was bleeding, her eye already swelling, and he tried to help her but she didn’t want him anywhere near, and there was a fear in her eyes that he recognized and understood. She left with only half her clothes. He had sat in the dark and waited for consequences that never came.
The beauty of Rig-1 wasn’t even the sight lines. It was the three doors. The options. A small space could be tolerable if there was a way out. That was the only reason he could bear his cabin—until it was locked.
Tough to explain this to anyone.
&nb
sp; He had spent his entire career waiting for someone to find out. For a corporal to call him in and say, Candidate Anders, this is going to sound crazy, but are you claustrophobic? And then discharge him, because what else would you do with a claustrophobic flight crew candidate? Instead, he passed one psych eval after another. He was practiced at putting up a front, especially about this, so he could possibly believe that he’d managed to fool the human doctors. But the AI was supposed to be some kind of perfect. Passing that one was a surprise. Once he was selected for crew, Service monitored his physical and mental state almost constantly, and during one automated test, a series of Rorschach slides and word association tests, a wild impulse seized him and he said, “Kid in a box” to the first dark mess that appeared on screen, and “Kid in a box” for the second, and in response to evil, “Kid in a box,” to death, to never, all these words and pictures, he came right out with it and told the truth. When he passed that test, too, he knew they didn’t care.
The ship annoyed him. It did more than that, but the thing about it being supersmart, that got under his skin, too. When he tried to discuss this with anybody, they’d only say how much safer it was, and couldn’t see why Anders didn’t care about that. He wanted to escape the person he’d become, and to kill salamanders, and the ship didn’t let him do either. Instead it was driving him around the universe and would deposit him safely back home, and he could see exactly how that would play out. How Service would do a spit and polish on their growth narratives and give the audience the closure they craved. They killed his brothers and he went out there and killed a million of them back. Now, at last, Paul Anders is at peace. He could feel that future closing in on him like a box.
It had felt good to drill it. Real good.
He eyed his film, which lay a foot or so away. Sooner or later he would have to put that back on and face the consequences of his actions. But not just yet. He turned to the left, then the right, then looked straight ahead. Right in this moment, he was okay. He had options.