Cold Between Stars

by Belinda Crawford

  ‘But not living ones.’ Not that I intend to let Medical study Dude. That particular AI made rucnarts seem warm and fuzzy.

  That shuts Ag up.

  The screen changes.

  I’m not a medic, but the red all over the graph is bad, and the words that start coming out of Hatch’s mouth aren’t making me feel better.

  ‘A high concentration of foreign bodies has compromised the integrity of the unit’s molecular structure, resulting in multiple organ dysfunction.’

  ‘Okay.’ I nod like all of that didn’t sound like Old Terran, familiar enough to know that is was worse than bad, but not enough to understand. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘The…’ Ag pauses for a moment, its nose screwing up like it’s about to say something filthy. ‘The fug is eating it.’

  ‘Oh, Dude.’ Dude kind of wilts on the console, his fur seeming to turn dull and limp under my eyes. ‘That’s bad, and kinda ironic.’ I turn back to Hatch. ‘Fix him,’ I say.

  Hatch flickers a second and the screen changes, showing DNA strands and X-rays, before it freezes.

  I know without checking the logs that Ag has put the kibosh on my command.

  ‘Kuma Darzi, I cannot—‘

  I put my hand up and Ag pauses mid-word. Here’s the really cool thing about being crew. The AI has to do what I say. And since I’m the only crew member actually awake, well, I might as well be Captain.

  ‘I order you to fix him.’

  The Hatchery hums, the screens unfreezing and a box forms out of nowhere, enclosing Dude in a clear plasglas shell.

  Really, I’m not sure why I’m so fixated on fixing a critter. Ag is right, Dude isn’t anything special, in fact from his colouring, I’m pretty sure he’s a generic model, one in a hundred that live and die as quickly as the air cycles through the cleaners. There’ll be another thousand like him scampering out of Hatchery next week, and the week after that and the one after that. Eating and digging and whatever else they do for the next hundred years. I can’t even say what it is that makes my heart clutch at the bright red blood staining his jaw or the thought of the fug eating away at his insides. Except he was on my forehead when I woke, warm and soft and fuzzing like he was chasing away my nightmares.

  It doesn’t really make sense to fix him. I shouldn’t be wasting time. There are more important things I should be doing, other sapients I should be saving. I should be finding some way to get to the Core, or get Jim Engineer out, or Grea. But...

  There was that ‘but’ again, the one that always got me into trouble.

  Somehow, Ag has managed to deepen her glare, even though I’ve put her on pause. It shouldn’t make me nervous, but she was so good at it that I could almost sense her anger shiver in my brain.

  Which is impossible, by the way. Only biological brains can produce the particular energy required to produce a psionic signature. But still…

  I clear my throat and resist the urge to scuff my boot against the deck. ‘So,’ I say.

  Is it my imagination or does Ag glare harder?

  I turn away and concentrate on Dude, pretending like I can’t see the avatar out the corner of my eye. I’m really glad Hatchery isn’t on an outer ring. No airlocks within easy distance.

  My eyes flick up to the little slits in the bulkhead. Although, it’s not like Ag couldn’t seal the room and suck the oxygen out.

  It takes four hours, fifty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds to fix Dude. I know because I asked Hatch.

  With Ag glaring at me from the corner it felt longer. I tried dismissing her at one point, but she flickered for a second and came back. Core must have really been pushing its personality matrix during the last stasis cycle, ‘cause it kinda felt like having my sister over my shoulder the whole time. Ag did just enough to follow my orders before she was back to glare at me.

  It freaked me out.

  When Hatch finally announced Dude was done, I snatched him from the plinth and hot footed it out of there.

  Unfortunately, Ag followed.

  ‘The critter is not fully repaired.’

  I’m striding down the corridor like my arse is on fire, but that stops me in my tracks. ‘What?’

  Ag hasn’t bothered with legs, she’s keeping pace with me at shoulder height and I’m totally ignoring the hint of malice in her gaze. ‘I told you, Kuma. I do not have the resources to repair… fug damage.’ Like before, she said “fug” like it offended her logic circuits.

  Okay. Okay. Take a breath, don’t panic. That brief glimpse of anger and malice, the way Ag’s faced twisted up had to be a figment of my imagination. Five hours in a small room with an AI trying to glare holes in my back has obviously rattled me, ‘cause the thought hovering at the back of my mind is: that’s not possible.

  AIs don’t ignore orders because they’re angry. They don’t have emotions for one thing.

  Still, I can’t stop the words coming out of my mouth. ‘What’d you do?’

  Ag blinked and the confusion that rolls across her face seems so real, like she’s startled by my accusation. If she’d been human, I would feel reassured. But she isn’t and I swear I can sense emotion rolling in the air between us, like some kind of mirage.

  Everything in me is yelling at me to run, but how do you escape from something with a response time of a fraction of a nanosecond?

  You keep it busy.

  I reach up, burying my fingers in Dude’s fur.

  ‘Agricultural sub-AI, I order you to run a diagnostic.’

  Ag pauses, mouth open while static runs through her head.

  I run.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I didn’t stop running until I hit the freight lines. Except to pick up the Franken-thrower.

  It was a little chewed, some of the bio-gel that connected the hard-light generator to the power-paks were broken and there were new holes in the grip, but I grabbed it anyway. Okay, so there was also that side trip to a maintenance locker, and maybe I took a few minutes to grab a bag and raid some of the freight containers piled up in the station. A guy had to eat, and there was no way I was going up against the fug again without something to protect me from the screeching. After all, it was the screeching that got me in the first place. And maybe the soot. But whatever.

  I had food, earmuffs and an enviromask when I went back into the speedway.

  I forgot water though. I realised this two seconds ago, about the same time I stopped running.

  My mouth isn’t dry exactly, but there’s that foul, filmy kinda taste on my tongue, like you get when you’ve been running from a crazy sub-AI and you forgot to grab water while you were stuffing your bag full of supplies.

  A part of me thinks I’m crazy for thinking that Ag is crazy. AIs don’t do crazy. At least, they’re not meant to. I heard this rumour once that one of the reasons the war started was because an old AI lost its shit. Some kind of programming error or something that made it release the Regan virus. You know, the one that turned all the straight, full-humans into hybrids? It was a big deal.

  Of course, it was a rumour. The AI got blown up, its processing core destroyed by the Regan herself. That was an even bigger deal. One no one really wanted to know about. According to everyone who remembers anything about the war, the Regan was scary shit.

  I wonder what she would do if it were her here and not me.

  It’s not like I can blow up the Core, or even Ag’s processing core. For all I know, Core’s fine, holed up behind its energy shield, and I could have imagined the malice in Ag’s gaze, the confusion that coated the air between us. I could have imagined it. The part of me that doesn’t think I’m crazy though? That part of me is shit scared. That part is urging me to get up and keep running, to get away from the Ag decks as fast as I can. It doesn’t care that my mouth is a desert and sweat has stuck my shipsuit to my back, or that there’s a stitch cramping up the whole left side of my ribs, or my legs are mush from running.

  It knows what it saw, what it felt, impossible though it is. AIs ar
en’t meant to feel; not like that, no matter how experimental their programming. But mould isn’t meant to eat a ship either, isn’t meant to chase rucnarts through the Aer, isn’t meant to bite. The fug has done crazy shit to the ship, maybe its infected Ag too. Maybe that’s why Core cut itself off. But if that’s the case, if the rest of the ship is infected and the captain’s dead and Jim Engineer is stuck in his pod...

  My heart’s running like I’m still running; big, heavy thumps in my chest.

  This isn’t good. This is so far from good it’s in another solar system.

  Panic is blooming, spreading over my chest in a hot steady stream of “get up and run”.

  Right now, running’s a good survival strategy.

  I’m on my feet, pushing off the side of the freight tube and stumbling into an uncoordinated jog. My feet aren’t moving like they should, my knees, my thighs, all of it’s jelly, but the steady stream of panic is a steady hand at my back.

  Panic’s an ugly emotion. Take it from an empath. It’s like fear, except fear doesn’t grab hold of your brain and make you do stupid shit. Doesn’t make you forget about the Franken-thrower over your shoulder or ignore the steadily growing hum of the mag-lines.

  Panic gums up your senses until you’re blind, deaf and dumb, too addled to even see the fug before you run into it.

  And as much as I know all that, as much as I’ve fought against it in other minds, as much as I know that I have to stop, have to take a breath and use my brain, I can’t. P’Endr, Grea, and the captain, they’re all jumbled up in my head, dying, yelling, reaching for me with clawed, bloated hands.

  All the fear, all the worry, all the nightmares I’ve been holding back since Onah pushed me out of stasis/sleep... It’s cracked the dam I hid it behind and now I’m drowning in it. In nightmares. In everything I ever feared and a few things I didn’t know I had to fear.

  I’m alone. All alone. In the dark and cold. In the void. And all the things, all the people who promised to keep me safe – Mum, Dad, the captain and Jim Engineer – they’re not here to save me.

  I don’t know what to do.

  It’s Dude that saves me. He keeps the panic back enough that when the first bit of fug gets me, tugs on my arm and spins me around, I recognise the palette rushing toward me, taking up all the space.

  Panic can be useful. Not always, but sometimes. It floods your system with adrenalin, and if you can keep enough of your mind to use it, it makes leaping out the way of speeding death really easy.

  I’m flattened against the bulkhead, belly to the steelcrete, holding on like my palms grew suckers, feeling the whoosh of air like a razor blade against my spine.

  Some part of me can still reason, which is probably why I’m still breathing after the palette zooms past.

  Everyone will tell you that critters aren’t hunters, not intelligent enough, too submissive, bred to obey not think. We’ve been testing them on the wrong things. In that moment where I’m forced to stillness, to concentrate on the death scraping my spine, Dude pounces. Not physically, not like a rucnart or a qwan, not even like Grea on something she thought she could blame on me. Nope, he pounces on my fear, his fuzz swallowing it, pushing out panic and doubt until all that’s left is that soft gold glow.

  A weight’s lifted from my shoulders. It makes me giddy. It’s lucky there are no other palettes following the first or they’d clean me up as I stumble away from the bulkhead.

  Giddiness is almost as bad as panic, or at least that’s what Dude must assume, because the glow retreats a little, enough to see the fug.

  Really see it.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  See, this is why panic is bad. And probably giddiness as well.

  Somewhere along the line, the bulkheads had turned from off-white to a grey-green carpet of moving, growing mould. Tendrils hang from the ceiling, reaching toward me, growing. And I hadn’t noticed.

  Dude fuzzes against my neck again and moves, scuttling after a patch of grey-green wrapped around my arm. I rip it off before he reaches my shoulder, brush off the stuff on my chest, out of my hair. There’s a bit of panic in all those movements, making them rough and quick and almost frenzied. I don’t know whether the panic comes from the thought of the fug eating Dude or Dude eating the fug. Probably both. But I just got Dude fixed, however temporary that might be, and there’s no way I’m losing him.

  No. Way.

  Once it’s let loose, panic never really goes away, but you can mask it, can push it back, use it to keep you moving forward. Inside his bubble of calm, Dude’s given me a moment to reason, to act instead of reacting; to regain a tiny semblance of control. To remember the Franken-thrower, the enviro-mask in my stolen bag and my mission.

  I’m going to save Dude, engineer a new breed of fug-proof critters and lord it over my sister until the end of the universe. I slide the enviro-mask into place, pull on the earmuffs, and heft the Franken.

  But first, I’ve got some burning to do.

  The Franken-thrower is hot, even through the gloves, but I don’t stop burning. Not for a nano-second.

  Dude’s a warm, comforting weight on my shoulder, and as I burn, I imagine the two of us standing in the middle of the freight line like we’re in one of those old vids. Faces protected by dark faceplates, necks covered in soot as I lay waste to the fug. It’d be pretty cool, except for the pink camo, and maybe the gunk in my hair. If Grea were here, she’d have remembered to switch her shipsuit to some kind of sleek black-on-black pattern and found some of those chunky, Old Terra-style boots from somewhere, the kind that went all the way up to her knees. And she’d have saved p’Endr, and the rucnart would be there too, snarling at the fug even as a horde of critters flowed around her feet, attacking the mould.

  Grief wells in my chest, trying to push its way up my throat and blind me with tears. I push the daydream aside and concentrate on the Franken-thrower, on the heat of the barrel and its red path of destruction.

  Smoke pours off the web, the fug curling up and dying, leaving a fine trail of soot on the decking. It’s screaming. The earmuffs muffle the worst of it, but there’s still this insane, high-pitched whine that gets through. I tried blasting some music, something loud and heavy the last user had downloaded from the archives, but not even Old Terran rock can drown fug.

  There’s a hatch up ahead, hidden by the retreating vines. A few more metres and I’ll be there, wherever there is. The fug makes everything appear different, and without a map or AI to guide me, I’m pretty sure I got lost somewhere in the maintenance tubes. With all of the backtracking and climbing, trying to find a clear path between Ag and Med, it’s a wonder I didn’t end up in the ice hull.

  Citlali is not-quite egg-shaped, squashed on top and not so much on the bottom.

  Stasis was in the vertical middle, and somehow, after my first encounter with the fug, Ag had whisked me down three decks to Ag. That meant I had to go up. Way up. Med was above Stasis, along with Command and Operations.

  It was in the middle of the ship, the safest place. Or, you know, so everyone thought. I bet Lyn Captain wouldn’t think that way anymore, if she still could.

  I’d stopped trying to figure out how the fug had known to hit the middle of the ship about three seconds after I’d stopped worrying about how it did anything. Which was half a cycle after I encountered the first blockage in the freight lines. I don’t even know how to describe it. “A mess” didn’t quite cover the chaos of palettes jammed up in the tubes. It looked like one had broken down and others had rammed into the back of it, sending crates and plasteel flying everywhere. Some of the palettes must have been going really fast, launching themselves over the others crashing through the bulkhead, adding biogel and bright sparks of raw power to the mess.

  Some of the crates had split apart, spilling grain and food all over the tube. The fug had covered it all, making its own little eco-system, feeding on the plasform and steelcrete. It was as much like a jungle as I’d ever seen. The carpet of mould was so th
ick it could have been grass, and the tendrils that had assaulted me in the maintenance tube were broad enough they could have been trees. If trees grew from the ceiling and walls, sprouting prehensile branches that wound through the holes the mould had made in crates and palettes alike, ripping steelcrete and plasform apart like it was... I don’t know. Old Terra paper maybe?

  I’d turned the Franken on the creepy jungle, pushing the heat up high.

  Even through the ear muffs the screaming had just about taken me to my knees. Turns out, the thicker the fug, the harder it was to kill. Some of it had broken off and come for me like it had legs.

  I hadn’t thought the stuff could move that fast, but still, I’d stood my ground and hit it with the Franken.

  Only Dude bitting my chin had saved me from becoming fug food.

  That had been the start of my epic journey to everywhere but where I wanted to go. The fug had blocked off everything that lead directly to Med, and the closer I got to the Core, the worse it became.

  I don’t know how long it’s taken me to get here, but the bag full of supplies is lighter than when I started and I’m really starting to wish I had stims to keep me awake. Adrenalin and cold have kept me going until now, but my eyes are getting heavy and not even the daydream of how cool Dude and I would be in an Old Terran vid is enough to stop the desperate need for sleep. That hatch is what’s keeping me going, that and the slowly clearing path to it. I may not know exactly where we are, but I know we’re above Stasis, above the choking jungles of fug and that’s good enough for me.

  Maybe the fug senses the hatch is all that’s keeping me going, because it redoubles its efforts. A huge tendril bursts from a crack in the bulkhead, slapping and whipping around. I duck, not quite fast enough and it smacks me in the head, throwing me against the wall before it comes at me again.

  I roll to my feet and out of the way, right into a thick patch of fug. I try to scramble back, to bring the Franken up and blast it, but the fucking tendril is everywhere, snapping like it wished it had teeth.