by Ramy Vance
“Oh…” Screen Jaeger leaned back in the porch swing. It tilted and swayed under their combined weight. The woman’s expression turned distant and troubled. “Oh, honeyboo. I don’t know.” She tousled the girl’s hair, careful not to disturb the precious dandelions. “But I know that however long it takes, I will always, always come back to you.”
The little girl blinked, turning solemn. “You would fly five billion million?” Her voice lilted up into a staccato tune, the opening to a song.
Screen Jaeger’s face split in a grin. “And I would fly five billion more,” she sang back to the tune of an old song by some band called The Proclaimers. They touched noses, and the little girl giggled.
Then at once, the two of them burst into song: “just to be the one who rolled a billion billion miles to fall down at your door!”
They collapsed into gales of laughter, and the camera shook. For the first time, a man spoke from somewhere near the microphone. “Oh God,” he laughed. “You guys are so corny.”
The Jaeger on screen, the Jaeger from some forgotten life, lifted her gaze and stared into the camera, or the man holding the camera. Was he a husband? Father to the girl? Or only a friend?
“Call it corny if you want—” screen Jaeger cleared her throat, then sang in a new tune “—But baby, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”
The video froze, a curved arrow of a replay button appearing over the center of the screen.
Toner turned slowly. “Uh. Cute kid.”
Jaeger’s eyes stung. She wiped them harshly with the sleeve of her flight suit and sniffed. “I have no idea who she is.”
Toner winced and turned away. He quickly closed the video journal window. She was grateful. There were at least a dozen other video journal files in that list, and the thought of playing a single one broke her heart.
“Ah,” Toner said, opening up a file labeled Welcome to the Tribe. “I think this is what the AI was talking about. Shall we?”
Jaeger nodded, wiped away a tear, and turned to the screen.
A tumbleweed rolls between the buttes of a barren desert landscape. It rattles over an empty beer can, a dusty and discarded needle, startles two buzzards feasting on a rotting skeleton. Overhead, the first stars of twilight twinkle above a brilliant sunset. In the background: flutes.
A deep voice, rusty and thick with some unknown accent spoke.
“Earth is no more. Years of war and calamities have destroyed our fertile home. With its destruction, dusk fell upon all of humankind, threatening its extinction.”
The wind picks up, and the tumbleweed falls into a blur of motion. The trail it leaves smokes, then smolders and sparks into flame.
“But extinction is not an option. Humanity will go on as those left cry out, demanding a hero to save them. Will you answer their call?”
Two boxes appeared: YES and NO. An exaggerated arrow hovered over NO before dramatically moving to YES.
The tumbleweed, now a roaring ball of flame, rockets up a butte face and launches into space. It shrinks into the darkening sky, and to an orchestral swell, becomes another twinkling star.
“Welcome, Explorer,” the voiceover booms, “To the Tribe.”
Cut to a sleek, industrial campus with white spires and domed buildings between swaths of neatly manicured lawns. A line of flags flaps proudly in the breeze. A row of cadets, their uniforms pressed clean, stand at attention before a podium. At a gesture from the sergeant, they salute.
A woman with an ensign’s knot on her shoulder looks into the camera and smiles. The camera zooms in on her brilliant teeth, and the screen becomes a wash of white. A series of officers and cadets file across the video.
A square-jawed sergeant, her short hair plastered to her scalp: “I joined the Tribe to restore my family’s honor.”
A fresh-faced lieutenant with an eye patch, his face a mesh of gangrenous scars: “I joined the Tribe to explore the stars.”
A man in a janitor’s jumpsuit straightens over his broom and grunts: “I joined the Tribe to start again.”
A laughing young woman in a captain’s jacket, grabbing a young ensign in a side-hug: “I joined the Tribe because they’re the only family I’ve got left!”
A man in a silver flight suit, his helmet tucked under one arm, declares: “I joined the Tribe to find a new home for all of humanity.”
More faces, more reasons.
“To find a new home.”
“To start fresh.”
“For three hots and a cot!”
An elderly man, pockmarked and diseased, with his skin sloughing off and his nose a pinhole: “To save my grandchildren.”
A cadet, no more than six, gives two thumbs up and grins. She’s missing her two front teeth. “I joined the Tribe because the food’s real good!” The camera panned out to several other officers chuckling, one of them reaching down to ruffle the kid’s hair.
Cut to a shipyard, drifting in front of an endless field of stars. Within the massive scaffolding, a swarm of tiny workers—droids, suited people, and robotic arms—are constructing a ship. It’s a massive, clean smear across the face of the universe; two wings curved back around a slender central column.
“Banding together, the remnants of humankind developed twelve mighty ships designed for deep space exploration. Built to carry us in the dark unknown where we may find a new home.”
The camera hovers over a platform filled with row after row of cadets, all saluting.
“And you, young Explorers…you are one of the elite, one of the chosen few brought forth to be a part of the Tribes Twelve initiative.”
The camera zooms in closer to the ship under construction. Massive dark letters painted on the side read Tribe Six.
“Chosen to go boldly into the unknown. To take the best and the brightest humankind has to offer and find a new home and a brighter future. You are the trailblazers, the pathfinders. You are the light in the darkness. Your mission: find a new planet for humanity to settle upon. To lay the foundation for a new era of humankind, a new civilization of strength and prosperity. To give all of us a new start. Welcome, Explorer… Welcome to the Tribes Twelve initiative.”
The screen cuts black. New words appear.
Play Next Video? Tribe Six Orientation: Rules and Regulations 1.0: Who’s your boss?
Jaeger stared at the words, dumbstruck.
“What does any of that have to do with vampires?” Toner wondered, finally breaking the silence.
Jaeger shook her head slowly. All those plastered, too-big smiles—it felt wrong. “Are these all the files, Virgil?”
“I’ve located additional videos in this catalog but recovering any of them will take more time and processing power. Would you like me to begin?”
Jaeger nibbled her lip. “I’m really not sure I do,” she admitted. “That’s…the creepiest little propaganda flick I’ve ever seen.”
“I know, right? They should have hired better actors. And a better director. And screenwriter.” Toner turned to her, two thumbs up in a mockery of the toothless cadet. He had too many sharp teeth. One of them was stained pink. “But hey. The food’s real good!”
Jaeger shuddered and made a mental note to grab a fresh battery for her multitool. She wasn’t sure what was creepier—Toner’s mocking, undead grin or the hollow eyes of the fresh-faced girl staring into the camera, confessing that she had joined a military operation simply because she was hungry.
Jaeger did not feel good about upholding that sort of order. “That explains all the terraforming equipment. We’re a seed ship sent out to find new planets to colonize.” That’s what I promised the little girl, she thought. A new home.
Screen Jaeger hadn’t looked noticeably younger than mirror Jaeger. Maybe they hadn’t been on the mission terribly long. Perhaps that little girl was still out there, somewhere—faithfully waiting for her mother to come home.
“That’s what it says on the brochure,” Toner said darkly. “But you know what I didn’t see mentio
ned? Why a colony ship needs a dozen gene-editing tanks, or rail guns, or post-jam ray generators.” He lifted his long, spindly fingers and waved sheepishly. “Or blood-sucking vampires.”
“You think you’re a genetic construct?” she asked.
“I did take a gander at the medical bay manifest while you were napping,” he conceded. “Don’t know much about genetic manipulation but I think there’s probably enough mad science down there to turn a jughead into a bloodhead.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Turn a jughead into the undead?”
“You are most assuredly alive,” Virgil bleated from the speaker, chiming in for the first time since the video ended. “You may have been in some deep hibernation state before, but you’re currently giving off life signs that fall within the range of human standard.”
“Keep working on the catalog, Virgil,” Jaeger said. “But as long as I’m captain, this bird is the Osprey. Not Tribe fucking Six.”
“Very well, Captain. I shall direct my resources away from analyzing the wormhole and to recovering the associated video files. I’m currently defragging 1.0.21.1: Who’s your boss?”
Jaeger and Toner exchanged ponderous looks. Then Toner turned to the speaker, lifting one finger. “Ah, excuse me. Back up. Pause. Stop. Time out.”
When Virgil did not immediately answer, Jaeger stepped up beside Toner, glaring uselessly at the speaker. “Virgil!” she barked.
“Yes, Captain?”
“What’s this about a wormhole?”
“Just a rare celestial anomaly two AU’s from our current location, point-seven stellar mass and decaying at a rate of—”
“Bring it on screen.” To Jaeger’s relief, the AI didn’t argue. Her viewer screen flickered.
Jaeger and Toner stared at the flat white sphere that appeared, suspended in front of an endless starfield.
“That’s a wormhole?” Toner cocked his head.
“Yes,” Virgil said.
“You sure it’s not a giant ping-pong ball?”
Jaeger squinted, walking closer to the screen. She pointed at a blurry black halo circling the strange orb. “That’s an antimatter accretion disk.” She blinked, surprised by the words that had come out of her mouth.
“What’s an accretion disk?” Toner asked.
Jaeger chewed her lip. “You said it was two AU’s away, Virgil?”
“That is correct.”
“What’s an AU?” Toner asked.
Jaeger tipped her head back, running through some mental calculations. “Have you gotten a fix on our location yet?”
“Astrography systems only partially functioning,” Virgil said. “I haven’t been able to map our location against any star map in my database.”
“Is that possibly because we are very far adrift in unmapped territory? As in, flung a million light-years off course by a white hole far?”
“That would appear to be a plausible theory,” the AI conceded.
Toner ran his fingers through his hair. “What’s a white hole?”
“It’s a theoretical celestial structure,” Jaeger muttered, learning the concept as she spoke it. “The math checks out, but we’ve never been able to find one in the wild.” She shook her head, laughing bitterly. The details of astrophysical debates were unfurling like a flower in her brain, but the golden-eyed child in her journal, in her arms, was a mystery. “You know how a black hole sucks in all matter and energy that gets too close?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, all that stuff doesn’t get destroyed. It’s theoretically possible that if the gravity well of a black hole gets massive enough, it can punch a tunnel straight through spacetime. Any subsequent matter that gets sucked in gets spit out again, at the other end of that tunnel.” She let out a profound sigh. “It’s a naturally occurring wormhole.”
“Oh.” Toner looked back at the screen. “Neat. You remember all this how?”
Jaeger paused. “I don’t know. I do know I’m right. I have these, ahh, facts swimming in my head. And right now, one of those facts tells me that wormholes are inherently unstable. That antimatter halo means there’s some matter coming through, but it’s not making the journey intact. The weird forces at work are shredding whatever’s trying to come through.” She slumped against the wall, suddenly aware of the cold sweat against her forehead. “Oh, God. We must have beat a billion to one odds to make it through intact.”
“So you think the Osprey fell into this black hole and was spit out through that thing, at the other side of the galaxy.”
“It’s…not that simple. But basically, yeah. Virgil?”
“That seems to be the most likely explanation,” the AI agreed. “Based on our known trajectory and status, I hypothesize that our systems experienced a massive data-storm trauma precisely when the wormhole would have expelled us. This would account for quite a lot of my injuries.”
“Ours too,” Jaeger grunted. Then she laughed tiredly. “You know, some of the old guard physicists thought black holes destroyed information. Turns out they don’t. They just destroy personal memory.”
“You think this thing scrubbed our memories?”
“Well, something did.” Jaeger sighed and grabbed her utility belt. She strapped it around her waist. “And it was around the same time we lost database access. There were all kinds of strange power spikes late last night. I’m guessing that was our ship trying to deal with an unscheduled trip through a wormhole. Virgil, divert all available resources to observing the wormhole. I need every scrap of data you can get me.”
“Shall I stop trying to determine who’s your boss?” Virgil asked mildly.
“Yeah. I do want you to upload your entire consciousness to one of the maintenance droids and have it go suck on a plasma exhaust for a while,” she snapped. “But that will have to wait too.” She grabbed the ladder and glanced over her shoulder to Toner. “Come on. I don’t want you digging around my room again.”
Toner followed her into the crew quarters without protest. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to the observation deck.” She took a spare multitool battery pack from a charger port in the galley and clipped it to her belt. “I have some thinking to do.”
“You can only think on the observation deck?”
“Nah, I can think just fine anywhere.” She reached for the central shaft and started pulling herself down the tube toward the command center, barely aware of the déjà vu she got from crawling through tunnels with Toner at her heel. Her brain whirred with ideas. “But if I remember the schematics correctly, the observation deck has a fabulous sound system.”
Chapter Eight
When Toner tried to follow Jaeger onto the observation deck just past the control center, she stopped, shook her head, and aggressively ignoring his frantic gestures, sealed the door between them.
“I need time to think,” she called through the comm system.
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. Make yourself useful. Everybody on a ship has a job. Find yours.”
Toner opened his mouth, about to solicit the AI when she added: “Virgil, do not let that man into the computer systems!”
“Aye, Captain,” the speaker muttered.
“You people have a funny way of showing gratitude,” Toner called.
There was no reply, but Toner pressed his ear to the sealed door and felt the distant thrumming vibration of music coming from the observation deck. Something neo-classical, he thought. One of those twenty-first-century holo-drama composers with the aspirations of Mozart and Bach. Com-posers.
Toner shook his head and made his way down the central column, thinking aloud as he went.
“So. Jaeger’s our captain and mechanic and astrophysicist, huh?” He pulled himself out of the access tube and drifted to the floor of the rotating control center. He strode along the curved bottom and opened the brightly marked medical cabinet. It looked like Jaeger had looted it, and recen
tly—the water bottles were gone, the packs of medicine in disarray.
Toner shoved some gauze packs aside and rooted at the bottom of the cabinet until his fingers found something squishy.
“What does that leave for me?” He eyed the wordy label pasted across the pack. Universal emergency blood supply. WARNING: this product is for the…
He flicked the label away and lifted the pouch to his mouth. “Not doctor, that’s for damned sure.” The hollow cavities in his incisor teeth faintly tingled as he bit into the corner of the pouch.
Toner didn’t care for the taste of blood. It was too busy. All gross and full of nutrients, and it made him slightly nauseous. His blood teeth, however, conveniently siphoned the blood straight past his tongue, and it puddled pleasantly into his stomach like a warm hug.
He vaguely remembered attacking Jaeger. That had been some dumb instinctual hunger, curbed—thankfully—by the implant. He didn’t want to hurt her. He was certain about that. She was his only company on this big eerie boat, and she seemed to have some idea of what to do when he, Toner, did not. Pretty cute, too, in a pocket-sized way.
He pulled the empty pouch from his teeth and dropped it into the med cabinet before continuing down the access tunnel. “Hey, Virgil.”
“You have not been authorized to access ships systems.”
“Yeah, I got that much, thanks. She told me to find something useful to do. Got any ideas?”
There was a long moment of silence. Toner started to think the AI was ignoring him when a new speaker, right by his ear, crackled loudly. “You could stop sucking through our emergency medical supplies.”
“What do you care? It’s not like you’re gonna need a transfusion. There are fabricators and medical supplies galore in one of the outer cargo bays. It would take me years to drink through it all. I don’t plan on being stuck here that long.”
“That is a worst-case scenario,” Virgil conceded. “Captain Jaeger seems to be recovering bits of her procedural memory as challenges confront her. Perhaps if you try to solve a problem, you will learn more of your capabilities.”
Toner reached the crew quarters and restlessly paced the length of the module. He passed the exercise bike and weight bench that made up the gym, strode through the galley, and stopped over the hatch labeled S.W Jaeger. He frowned. The captain had locked it behind her.