by Gary Gibson
He and Sam had gone back down to one of the lower decks, leaving Amit to keep working on the command deck under Karl and Angel’s close supervision. Traynor had sent Jess back outside to cool off and explain what they’d learned to everyone else.
‘He’s too scared to do anything but be completely straight with us,’ said Sam. ‘You saw how shit-scared he was.’
Traynor shook his head. ‘I don’t see any way in Hell I’d have signed up for something like this. I never had any interest in living on some other fucking planet. Did you?’
Sam laughed quietly. ‘Not particularly, no.’
‘Why would anyone want one of those damn things in their head in the first place?’ Traynor groused. ‘I thought they were for people with brain damage or Alzheimer’s.’
‘People like Tenenbaum had them installed because they wanted to live forever. They figured they could keep cloning themselves and uploading their mind to each new body.’
Traynor regarded him with surprise. ‘Is something like that even possible?’
‘The fact we’re standing here talking to each other strongly suggests it is, yes,’ said Sam.
Traynor stared off towards a bulkhead, lost in thought. ‘Except that means there’s a long-dead original me, back there on Earth somewhere. Doesn’t seem like a good deal for him.’
Sam shrugged. It felt more than a little odd to be chatting with Traynor like this, given that until less than forty-eight hours before he had been harbouring fantasies of murdering the man in cold blood. ‘Then maybe that other you got a kick out of knowing some other version of him would wake up on an alien planet someday, even if it was long after he was pushing up the daisies.’
‘I don’t know,’ Traynor muttered. ‘I’m not sure we can trust anything Subarash tells us.’
Look who’s talking, thought Sam. ‘As long as he’s working up there trying to repair those computer systems, there’s a chance he might figure out why we’re here—or even if there’s a way to get our lost memories back.’
‘Well, fair enough.’ Traynor thought for a moment. ‘Jess knows her way around computer systems.’
‘Kim said she was an aerospace engineer?’
Traynor nodded. ‘She is. I’m sure she can help him once she’s simmered down.’
Sam wondered how Amit would feel about working with Jess, whose mood in his presence currently ranged from furious to murderous. But then again, maybe it was all the man deserved. All this, when they could have been sleeping indoors instead of freezing their asses off.
‘Jess isn’t the only engineer around here,’ Sam pointed out. ‘I’m sure some of the others would be more than happy to take turns working with Amit. That way we can all keep an eye on him.’
Traynor nodded. ‘All right,’ he said, moving towards the exit, ‘we’ll find ourselves some volunteers. But first, I want to take a look at what else is in this ship.’
* * *
‘What we’ve got here,’ said Kevin Amaro, spreading his arms wide to encompass the whole of the fabrication bay, ‘is technology way beyond anything I’ve seen before.’
‘You’re sure about that?’ asked Sam.
Kevin chuckled and shook his head. ‘This is like something out of a science fiction movie.’ He stepped over to a low pedestal. ‘Look.’
He waved a hand over the pedestal and a wireframe schematic shimmered into existence above it, rotating slowly and clearly visible to all of them and not just Sam. ‘I’m not talking about the display—I’m talking about whatever the hell this schematic is. It’s got technical specifications using some kind of maths I’ve never seen in my whole damn life.’
‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘given what we know now…’
Kevin laughed uneasily. News about Amit’s revelations had spread extraordinarily quickly. ‘It might literally be from the future,’ he agreed. ‘Or at least a future we were part of, but none of us remembers.’
‘Kim told me you worked for an asteroid mining company,’ Sam asked him. ‘Is it possible with time you’ll be able to figure all of this out?’
‘Given time, yeah, sure, I hope so. I used fabricators a lot in my work.’
‘Really?’
Kevin nodded. ‘I was part of a development team creating autonomous mining robots able to print new parts as needed and even make new copies of themselves. Self-sustaining mobile factories, in other words. The idea was once they were built, all we had to do was send them out to suitable asteroids, then sit back and wait for them to mine metals and bolides and fire them back into Earth orbit where we could pick them up.’
‘That doesn’t sound too far from the kind of thing Tenenbaum was working on.’
Kevin nodded. ‘As a matter of fact, Tenenbaum’s a majority shareholder in the company I work for. Well…was, I guess I ought to say. Whenever we developed anything new, Tenenbaum got first access to it.’
Sam lifted his eyebrows. ‘Seems like Amit’s not the only one among us with a connection to Tenenbaum.’
Kevin nodded. ‘It makes sense when you think about it. Why else would we be here, unless some or all of us had worked for the guy in some capacity?’
Sam glanced around at the fabrication equipment filling the bay. ‘So what can you make with all this stuff?’
Kevin shrugged. ‘Not much at the moment,’ he said sadly.
Sam didn’t hide his surprise. ‘You’re saying it’s not working?’
‘Far as I can tell, it’s working fine. It’s the raw ingredients we don’t have.’
Sam felt his spirits sink. Amit had already told them they wouldn’t be able to print food: now it seemed there wasn’t much else they could print, either. ‘Burned up?’ he asked.
Kevin nodded. ‘You saw the state those other bays were in. I’m guessing this ship was carrying powdered metals, alloys, rare earths and the like, all the different materials we’d need to manufacture electronics and machine parts.’
Sam rubbed at his forehead, feeling a stab of pain. Adrenaline had carried him this far, but he wasn’t sure how much longer it could keep him going. ‘How hard would it be to find those ingredients here?’
Kevin regarded him with disbelief. ‘You mean out there in the forest? Short of digging up metal ore with your bare hands, I’d say it’s impossible.’
The pain in Sam’s head spread to his jaw and shoulders, becoming a kind of numbness. He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, an unpleasant burning sensation somewhere deep in his sinuses.
‘All right,’ Sam persisted, ignoring the look of mild concern on Kevin’s face, ‘is there anything salvageable on this damn ship?’
‘Possibly. I found a vehicle bay in the aft section of the second deck, but the stuff inside took a hammering.’ He stepped towards the door and gestured to Sam to follow. ‘I’ll show you, if you’re up to it…?’
Sam nodded brusquely and waved Kevin on. ‘I’m fine. Show me.’
He followed the engineer to a part of the ship he’d barely explored, ducking under a metal strut that had been torn loose at the moment of impact. He soon found himself inside a bay that was easily the single largest interior space inside the lander apart from the command deck, its interior lit by red emergency lights. Much of the floor comprised a second ramp that was much larger than the one in the lower cargo bay.
‘Can we open it?’ asked Sam, pointing at the ramp’s outlines.
Kevin shook his head. ‘Nope. It’s jammed up against those boulders out there.’ He swept his hand around. ‘These make up for it, though.’
Most of the space inside the bay was taken up by two vehicles—an all-terrain, open-top truck with bars curving over and above its chassis, and a tiny two-man helicopter, with folded-down blades. The helicopter lay on its side, its windscreen shattered and several of its blades bent or torn off.
The truck had fared little better: it looked like someone had picked it up and tried to bend it in two. From what Sam could see, both vehicles had been torn loose from wall-mounted clamps.
‘
Can we fix them?’
Kevin shook his head with a sigh. ‘I can tell you just by looking at it that the ‘copter’s a complete write-off. It’s a damn shame—they call this type of helicopter a Mosquito, perfect for short-range reconnoitring.’
‘And the truck?’
Kevin made a face, wobbling his head from side to side as if to say, maybe. ‘Possibly. But with the chassis all bent out of shape like it is, it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of time. Several days, at least. Which leaves one more problem.’
‘Which is?’
‘How the hell to get the truck out of here even if I can fix it, given there’s no way to drop that ramp. And there’s no way it’ll fit through any of the corridors leading back down to the lower cargo bay.’
‘Jesus,’ said Sam, appalled. ‘Got any good news?’
‘Well, I did have the idea I could slice the truck into bits and carry them through the ship one by one and reassemble the whole thing outside. But again, of course, that’s going to take time.’
Sam regarded him with open amazement. ‘How could you even do something like that?’
Kevin rewarded him with a faint smile. ‘You’ll have noticed the construction robots were equipped with acetylene torches to cut away at the damaged parts of the hull. Well, I figure I can detach one of those torches and use it to slice up the truck’s chassis. Otherwise, I got to wondering if there’s a way to reprogram the robots to do the work for me.’
Sam opened his mouth to reply, then felt a sudden rush of nausea. The pain came back to his head, ten times worse than before. He stepped towards the bay entrance and pressed his forehead against the cool metal, listening to the frenetic thud of his heart.
‘You all right?’ asked Kevin.
‘Give me a minute,’ Sam muttered, his voice scratchy.
‘Honestly,’ said Kevin, ‘I’m amazed you’re still standing. Maybe bringing you here was a bad idea.’
Sam took a deep breath and straightened himself. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, turning back to face the other man.
Kevin stared at him with a worried expression. ‘You don’t look so good. I can go fetch Ethan if you want.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Sam insisted. He forced a smile onto his face. ‘I’ll get some rest in a minute. Believe me, I’m nowhere near as bad as I was.’
Kevin sucked at his teeth. ‘Yeah, while we’re on the subject of what you ate…I don’t want to have to say this, but it could be there’s nothing here our stomachs can digest. Even if we could find something here that doesn’t outright poison us, we could stuff ourselves and still wind up starving to death. If the proteins here turn out to be structured differently from what we have back home, we won’t be able to digest or derive energy from them.’
‘Maybe let’s not spread that around right now,’ said Sam. ‘Until we know otherwise, it’s only speculation.’
‘Whether we can eat anything here,’ said Kim, stepping into the bay, ‘depends on how human we actually are.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop—I overheard you talking on my way here.’ He circumnavigated the bay, examining both vehicles with keen interest.
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ said Sam.
‘Technically, Kevin is quite correct,’ said Kim, kneeling next to the Mosquito and peering inside its passenger cabin. ‘There’s no reason to assume we can derive sustenance or energy from the life on this world, because it could be structured in fundamentally different ways from life on Earth.’ He looked back up at them and stood. ‘But say you grew your crew from scratch, like Amit believes we were, at some point after the ship carrying our embryonic tissues arrived in this solar system. What’s the point of sending us across all those light-years if we end up starving to death because we’re not compatible with the local biosphere?’
‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘Amit said we brought food stores with us but lost them in the crash.’
‘But how long would those stores last?’ asked Kim. ‘A few days or weeks?’ He shook his head. ‘Certainly not long enough to sustain the founders of an extrasolar colony. A far better strategy is to find some way to adapt your crew’s cloned bodies to their new home. To give them bodies capable of digesting foodstuffs that would be indigestible to our original selves.’
Sam blinked. ‘Is that possible?’
‘I don’t know how many years of our memories we’ve lost,’ said Kim, ‘but based on what I’ve seen inside this ship, I think Amit’s right in thinking it’s at least several decades. If such a thing wasn’t already possible, I believe it was by the time our mission launched.’
‘Except we already know we can’t eat the food here,’ Kevin reminded him. ‘It nearly killed Sam and DeWitt.’
‘There are plenty of things back on Earth that would kill you if you ate them, too,’ Kim retorted. ‘Perhaps you were unlucky. Something else might turn out to be entirely edible.’
‘And if you’re wrong?’ asked Kevin, looking less than convinced. ‘If we’re not adapted to living here, then what are our chances?’
Kevin’s voice grew more distant, and the edges of Sam’s vision became limned with black. He fell back against the wall, his legs buckling beneath him.
‘Sam!’ he heard Kevin yell, as if from very far away. ‘Sam? Damn it!’
9
THE LOVERS
Her name was Sarah Mulwray, and once upon a time she had been the love of Sam’s life.
But that had been back in university, long before he ran through Amazon jungles or wound up administrating one small corner of post-war North Korea. By the time she came unexpectedly back into his life, twenty years had passed, and Sarah had gone on to become a senior journalist with one of the larger global news agencies. Most recently, she explained, sitting across from him in a wine bar whose broad windows overlooked Seoul’s Gangnam District, she had been assigned to help run that agency’s Asia office from out of Jakarta. It seemed like a good time, she had said in her message to him, to catch up.
If only it had been so simple.
‘His name is Jahaar,’ she told Sam. She was dressed for comfort, in a loose blouse and jeans. Past her shoulder, Sam could see a few buildings that still bore the visible scars of wartime shelling. ‘He’s the Indonesian Minister for the Interior, and he wants out.’
‘Out of what, exactly?’ Sam had asked. He’d assumed, unkindly, that early middle-age would have smoothed out Sarah’s edges. Instead, she was tanned and fit, apparently fresh from an hour in the gym of her hotel. She looked better than she had in her early twenties when they’d still been an item. Seeing her again after so long filled him with a school-boyish intensity he thought he’d left far in the past.
‘He’s as crooked as they come,’ she explained, placing her elbows on either side of her machine-printed steak. ‘Which is pretty much par for the course as far as the Indonesian government goes.’
‘I can think of quite a few politicians you could say the same about pretty much anywhere in the world,’ Sam pointed out.
She shrugged, taking his point. ‘The Asian Bloom Crisis seems to have given Jahaar his conscience back. He thinks I can help him get the word out about what he thinks caused it.’ She sipped her wine and thought for a moment. ‘Or who he thinks caused it, to use his own words.’
Sam put his knife and fork down and regarded her keenly. ‘I’ve heard every kind of conspiracy theory blaming someone or other for deliberately seeding the Indian Ocean with toxic microorganisms. So who is it this time? The Elders of Zion? Lizard-men masquerading as the British Royal Family? I can’t wait to hear.’
‘He says it was an accident started by a gene-tech company, and they’ve been trying to cover it up ever since.’
‘Who?’
She gave him a small half-smile he had once found enormously alluring. He felt an emptiness inside his chest that proved it still was.
‘And you’ve checked this all out?’ he asked, the words coming out a little more thickly than he’d int
ended.
She sighed. ‘That’s where you come in. You’re the expert we need, to help us find out whether he’s telling the truth.’
We need, she had said. ‘And there was me thinking you came looking for me so you could throw yourself back into my arms.’
She gave him a quick, unreadable look past fine pale eyebrows and ignored the comment. ‘He’s agreed to let me interview him in Switzerland,’ she explained. ‘Neutral territory, you see. I’ve got a few contacts there who say they can help make arrangements. He has documented proof, or claims he has, but you can help us verify their authenticity.’
‘You think he’s telling the truth,’ said Sam after a moment, ‘otherwise you wouldn’t have gone to all the effort of meeting me here.’
She cut a small, precise square out of her printed steak. ‘That’s true. So,’ she said, looking at him flatly, ‘will you help me? Us?’
‘Do you know,’ he said, as lightly as he could, ‘I missed you.’
She dropped her gaze again. ‘Sam…’
He reached out, put his hand over hers. ‘You know what they say about unfinished business…’
She looked back up at him, her expression wry. ‘Honestly? I don’t. Where did you get that? It sounds like you stole it from some terrible movie.’
He laughed, knowing somehow, or rather remembering, that they would sleep together later that night. ‘I probably did.’
Her smile became pained. ‘You were always too…’
‘What?’
She sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter. I meant it when I said I need your help, Sam. This is important.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ he said defensively.
‘This isn’t about us,’ she said, as if he hadn’t replied. She carefully removed her hand from his.
‘Of course, but—’
He frowned, seeing a small wisp of smoke rising from a hole that had appeared, somewhat unexpectedly, in the centre of her forehead.
‘What is it?’ she asked, seeing the look on his face.
‘Nothing,’ he replied, his throat suddenly dry. He had forgotten: Sarah was dead—murdered, in fact, within hours of Jahaar’s assassination, on the streets of Geneva.